Humor4u

This year sees the 20th anniversary of the publication of Michael Lewis's "The Lexical Approach", the book that has changed the way many – but unfortunately not enough - teachers teach and see language. I just wanted to share with you my plans  for this anniversary year. Article The Education section of the Guardian has just run my "accessible" article about why Lewis's lexical approach hasn't gained widespread currency. Judging by the comments it has reignited the debate about traditional grammar versus chunks and whether it is the publishers' reluctance or "consumers"' conservatism that hinders the spread of new ideas in ELT. Click here to read it. Special publications I am currently guest-editing a special issue of the ETAI (English Teachers Association of Israel) Forum dedicated to the lexical approach with contributions from Hugh Dellar , Luiz Otavio Barros , Hannah Kryszewska ,  KenLackman and many others. The publication is on...

This article is for API developers only. If you're writing an application, you may not care about APIs, because you probably don't have any. But if you're writing a library that others will use, public API comes into play. API is like a pile of laundry: you can either spread the huge, reeking mess out all over your floor, or you can stuff it into a nice, clean hamper. While the first approach provides the convenience of being able to select each day's pre-soiled attire quickly, since it is arrayed out in front of you when you get out of bed, the second solution presents a clean interface to people that make the mistake of walking into your pathetic, slovenly life. Good APIs prefer hampers. I was implementing a new piece of API and functionality and wondered the following: Is there any reason to not put my implementation (which I did not want in the public API, and which would be the only implementation of said interface) inside the interface itself? It seems odd, perhap...

Monitoring....There's something about getting something into numbers and targets that just makes it seem to be so controllable, isn't there? And many people - including many doctors - just love gadgets and measuring things. No wonder there is so much monitoring in health and fitness. Actually, there's too much monitoring in some health matters. Some monitoring could cause anxiety without benefit, or lead to actions that do more harm than good. Professor Paul Glasziou, author of Evidence-Based Monitoring , talked about this on Monday at Evidence Live . For monitoring to be effective there has to be: valid and accurate measurement, informed interpretation, and effective action that can be taken on the results.    Then there has to be an effective monitoring regimen. None of that is simple. Frequent testing can mean you end up acting on random variations, not real changes in health. There's more at Statistically Funny about when statistical significance ...

Sinclair's seminal work - the bible of corpus linguistics In this post I would like to defend linguistic corpora and their relevance to the ELT field which Hugh Dellar raises doubts about. Years ago before I became familiar with corpus tools (corpus as in linguistic corpus = "collection of samples of real-world texts stored on computer"; plural = corpora) we had a fierce debate with my colleagues whether to use the preposition to or for after the noun hint . We wanted to produce posters for English learning centres we had set up for a number of high schools and each poster was meant to provide "Hints for/to speaking / listening etc". Emails were sent back and forth about what preposition should be used and the argument inevitably turned to the British/American distinction until somebody used Google Fight to compare hints to and hints for . Google Fight provided us with pseudo-scientific evidence that hints for is slightly more common than hints to – it was ba...

The LayoutTransition class (added in Android 3.0) enables easy fade/move/resize animations when items are added to or removed from a ViewGroup, usually with just one line of code. This video shows how this works and also shows the new ability added in JellyBean (Android 4.1) to animate other changes to the layout as well, not limited to items being added or removed. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55wLsaWpQ4g Code: http://developer.android.com/shareables/devbytes/LayoutTransChanging.zip

I seldom lead with a video presentation, this is an exception. Please review the video and provide your issues, concerns or comments. This is not a conspiracy theory topic--it is an easily observed phenomena which by its nature has to be an intentional act of environmental sabotage. By whom and for what reason is the only unknown at present. I encourage everyone to share this presentation far and wide. I have written about this in the past... please review the information provided. Congress Addresses Chemtrails Thank you for your consideration Stay tuned....

PictureViewer: How to use ViewPropertyAnimator to get a cross-fade effect as new bitmaps get installed in an ImageView. TransitionDrawable is a handy and easy facility for cross-fading between two drawables. But if you want to cross-fade between an arbitrary set of images, you might want something more general-purpose. Here's one approach. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XbKMUtVnJA Code: http://developer.android.com/shareables/devbytes/PictureViewer.zip

Quite often observations about changing environment are regarded as purely anecdotal by many who will often deny or object to the notion that indeed our living circumstances are in flux. Somehow, many seem to adopt a position of denial in the matter of extreme earth change, be it socioeconomic or ecological, often saying reports of change are insignificant, overstated or do not apply to their circumstance.  I suppose if one has not been directly affected or impacted YET, then reports of said change may seem distant or surreal. Throughout the known history of our planet--environmental, geographical and ecological change has been the norm rather than the exception, this is with or without human contribution.   Even so, there are many who appear shocked or surprised that the universe cannot or will not suddenly accommodate their preferences by somehow locking into a state of stability to accommodate their personal liking.  Some even labor under the d...

We're deluged with claims that we should do this, that or the other thing because some study has a "statistically significant" result. But don't let this particular use of the word "significant" trip you up: when it's paired with "statistically", it doesn't mean it's necessarily important. Nor is it a magic number that means that something has been proven to work (or not to work). The p-value on its own really tells you very little. It is one way of trying to tell whether the result is more or less likely to be "signal" than "noise".  If a study sample is very small, only a big difference might reach that level, while it is far easier in a bigger study. But statistical significance is not a way to prove the "truth" of a claim or hypothesis. What's more, you don't even need the p-value, because other measures tell you everything the p-value can tell you, and more useful things besides. This is roughl...

Photo by @aclil2climb via eltpics Binomials are two word expressions (strong collocations) such as "dead or alive", "give and take", "law and order" .  In this activity inspired by a short film activity on FilmEnglish , students become more aware of binomial pairs in English. Binomials (also known as Siamese twins ) consist of two words joined by conjunctions and , or and sometimes but , and are very common in English. The activity below is suitable for upper-intermediate and advanced students. Step 1 - Video A split-screen short called Symmetry  was a jumping-off point for the ensuing language focus. We watched the film and followed stages 1- 4 in the lesson plan outlined on Film English. Step 2 - Post-watching After watching, draw students attention to the following expressions cops and robbers fish and chips salt and pepper Ask students if they can think of other, similar expressions in English (you don't have to introduce the word binomial ) St...

Horrible things can result from calling requestLayout() during a layout pass. DON'T DO THIS . The demo that I wrote to show why this is bad seems very contrived, but I have since run across application code that did nearly the exact same thing, explicitly calling requestLayout() during onLayout(). Ugh. Typically, the cases where this problem occurs are a tad more subtle than that. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbAeTGoKG6k Code: http://developer.android.com/shareables/devbytes/RequestDuringLayout.zip

Most people that know me know that I can't say enough about process. In this presentation at Devoxx 2012, I tried to change that. If the embed below isn't working for you, you can watch the talk on the parleys.com site .

Government used to equate to civil servant--elected officials duty bound to serve the better interests of their constituents.  That, at least has been the theory, how successful this quaint notion has been through history is open to debate if one considers "result.". When working correctly--tax payers are rewarded with superior life style conditions, stellar infrastructure supplemented with superior social services in an environment of healthy and vibrant economy--. As time goes by taxes increase and the better interest of constituents seems to become usurped by other interests. The better interests of the paying citizen invariably buckle then bend to the better interests of influential special interest and corporate lobby groups... at this point the concept of democracy is failed. Things the folk deem pertinent are ignored while things never desired or requested replace them. Eventually the population experiences a state of very ex...

How animating ListView views can lead to artifacts if those views are recycled before you animate them. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NewCSg2JKLk Code: http://developer.android.com/shareables/devbytes/ListViewDeletion.zip

Yeesh, I'm seriously terrible about updating this blog.  Lately I've just had a lot to do, which means not much time for drawing personal stuff.  Hopefully that'll change soon.  Also, if you want to see new art more often, you can check my tumblr out- I post on there fairly regularly, although a lot of it is dumb stuff like post-it doodles and things like that.  Sometimes I post comics and fun stuff too, though. Here's some of the stuff I've posted to my tumblr lately...also I've got a cool announcement at the bottom of this post, so don't miss it!  :] From Game of Thrones, Catelyn Stark. Robb Stark Joffrey "Little Shit" Baratheon ...and the lovely Khaleesi! Here's Arya... ...and here are some doodles of how I see Arya from the books, rather than the show. Here's how Ygritte looks in my head. These next ones are characters from Downton Abbey...a few of these were drawn without reference and I think they turned out to be the funnier ones. H...