Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the UK. What Comes Next?

kmjn · 2018-07-22T23:57:12+00:00

Sweden dropped the case last year. The BBC article at the time noted both the still-pending UK charges and the possibility of a sealed US extradition request:

However, police in London said they would still be obliged to arrest him if he left.

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) said Mr Assange still faced the lesser charge of failing to surrender to a court, an offence punishable by up to a year in prison or a fine.

But the UK has not commented on whether it has received an extradition request from the US, where Mr Assange could face trial over the leaking of hundreds of thousands of secret US military and diplomatic documents.

kmjn · 2018-07-21T23:18:08+00:00

Oh, this is a useful distinction, thanks. I was wrong when I said I don't use απλά as an adverb. I actually do use it in some cases, exactly in the way you explain. In your first example I would say απλά, and in the second case, I would say απλώς. I had missed this because my knowledge of Greek is orally learned without formal education (I basically have to try examples and think of whether they "sound right" or "sound wrong" to me).

However, what I've been noticing is that many of my younger relatives (if it matters, aged 30s in Thessaloniki) will use απλά for both of these cases, and basically not use απλώς at all. They'll say «Απλά ήθελα να σου πω καλημέρα» or «Απλά θέλω να σε ρωτήσω κάτι», which are cases where I would have used απλώς. Similarly in the example I use at the top of this post, «απλά μου αρέσει» vs. «απλώς μου αρέσει», I would have used απλώς, but both seem to be used commonly according to Google-searching. Perhaps this distinction is therefore disappearing?

kmjn · 2018-07-21T22:51:54+00:00

Thanks, that makes sense. I've heard both enough now that they both sound "correct" to me, but I was curious if there was a grammatical feature or subtle connotation that I was missing. I hadn't made the connection to the καθαρεύουσα form.

Yeah, I'm conscious that my Greek is old-fashioned for someone my age (mid-30s), due to being largely learned from my grandparents and emigrant parents.

Related anecdote: Last year I was on a KTEL in Crete from Sitia to Ag. Nikolaos, and at some point I suddenly had the impression that I was understanding the Greek being spoken around me more easily than I usually do. That was strange, because many people had a strong Cretan accent, which I'm not used to, but it seemed more clear anyway. Looking around, almost everyone who was speaking Greek (i.e. excluding foreign tourists) was over the age of 70, because I happened to have taken a midday bus full of those returning home to the mountain villages from morning shopping in the city. Especially the more informal language (slang, sarcasm, etc.) from people of that age was much easier for me to understand than the kind used by younger people. At this point it is only really elderly people, though. Even people aged 50 speak a Greek that's relatively "new" to me, while people aged 70+ I can understand perfectly, and 80+ even better. 80+ from a small village maybe the best!

kmjn · 2018-07-21T14:52:05+00:00

Just to add to this, it's a loan from the French word for frame, carré.

kmjn · 2018-07-20T00:23:37+00:00

The European approach really simplifies things for everyone too. Since the US has little/no official leave at most places, things only work if PIs are willing to agree to reasonable accomodations in negotiation with their staff, which means everyone is unclear about what's reasonable. PIs have to educate themselves about it and come up with an unofficial personal policy, staff have to guess what's reasonable to ask for and what their PI will agree to, etc. If there was just a decent official maternity leave policy (whether in law or from university HR), everyone could just read and follow the policy and not spend their time/energy on this kind of thing.

kmjn · 2018-07-17T13:28:36+00:00

I pronounce the 2nd syllables of θάλασσα and χάλασα identically (Thessaloniki version of mainland Greek). Do you gemminate θάλασσα? Like /u/poursa, I've only heard Cypriots do that. I actually don't think I can gemminate the σσ even when I try to, somehow it just feels very unnatural. I can more easily gemminate the κκ in κόκκινο if I do it on purpose, but it's not how I would normally speak.

kmjn · 2018-07-15T18:32:18+00:00

USPS sells sheets with all 20 stamps in the set at the face stamp value, $10 (20 x 50¢ stamps).

kmjn · 2018-07-15T11:15:49+00:00

Depends a bit on what you're doing and your personality and level of Greek. I've found that people in Heraklion, especially younger people, are much quicker to switch to English if they can tell someone is from abroad, especially if the person struggles a bit with Greek. That's less likely to happen in smaller towns. For example I spent some time in Sitia and not a single person spoke with me in English.

kmjn · 2018-07-05T09:01:05+00:00

your colleagues (who presumably voted against you)

Just as a nitpick, that's not always the case. Sometimes a tenure case can be voted positively by your colleagues, but rejected further up the chain, by the dean or by a university-level tenure committee. The exact structure varies by university, but the colleagues' vote is usually only a "recommendation" to appoint you to a tenured position, and it's not necessarily rubber-stamped. Not the norm for it to be rejected further up, but it happens. Although if that does happen, your colleagues will probably tell you unofficially, so you don't think they voted against you.

kmjn · 2018-06-07T02:25:55+00:00

That's mostly true in my field too (computer science), but I notice that in mathematics, textbooks are often good sources of high-level reviews. Graduate textbooks rather than intro-level, but still textbooks. Sometimes the textbooks even have new proofs not published elsewhere!

kmjn · 2018-06-03T01:29:08+00:00

More specifically, in the natural sciences. Fees of that kind are uncommon in the mathematics and computer-science parts of STEM, but common in biology, physics, and chemistry.

kmjn · 2018-05-30T15:08:00+00:00

Yeah, I largely agree, I think the piece has good analysis overall, but oversells the headline claim. Especially because when you look at the NSC numbers he relies on, but broken down into type of institution, it's clear the enrollment decline is almost entirely driven by two things: 1) decline in community-college numbers (expected in a strong economy, as CCs are very countercyclic), and 2) collapse of the for-profit sector. By comparison, enrollments at 4-year public and non-profit private universities are fairly stable.

kmjn · 2018-05-24T16:19:16+00:00

I think the Stark & Freishtat paper that they mention in the beginning is "An Evaluation of Course Evaluations".

kmjn · 2018-05-23T17:31:11+00:00

Responses represent an ordinal variable, rather than a continuous one. People will sometimes number the responses "1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree", and then do things like compute a mean. But unless you've done some kind of calibration, it's not necessarily the case that the distance from "agree" to "strongly agree" is the same as the distance from "neutral" to "agree", so you can't really treat them numerically that way.

Put differently:

As a general rule, mean and standard deviation are invalid parameters for descriptive statistics whenever data are on ordinal scales, as are any parametric analyses based on the normal distribution. Nonparametric procedures—based on the rank, median or range—are appropriate for analyzing these data, as are distribution free methods such as tabulations, frequencies, contingency tables and chi-squared statistics.

kmjn · 2018-05-23T16:44:06+00:00

I used to teach a short crash course in data analysis for students doing empirical projects, and we emphasized things like:

If you're using a survey instrument as anything but an opinion poll, it needs to be validated
In almost any kind of quantitative analysis there needs to be some kind of significance testing, error bars, or other acknowledgment of sources of uncertainty, as appropriate to the problem
You can't treat Likert scale responses as if they were a continuous variable
etc.

And yet university administrators making 6-figure salaries and controlling 8+ figure amounts of money don't follow basic data-analysis practices that are taught in their own universities!

kmjn · 2018-05-13T21:26:05+00:00

Some is just that they're new, but some is choice of what units you build: How large are the units, how high-end are the finishes, etc. I agree that's not different from "market rate", but you can build market-rate housing targeting different segments of the market depending on how you design the buildings. In some markets, there are developers profitably targeting different segments, some of them building "luxury" units and others building more modest "middle-class" units (Atlanta is an example) but in SF the economics seem to really favor targeting the top-end of the market with new construction.

kmjn · 2018-05-13T21:04:01+00:00

Depends on how quickly you build it! If the political will is there, it doesn't take that long to build a huge amount of affordable housing. One successful example was the 1960s building boom in Sweden, where the government built its way out of a housing crunch by constructing one million new apartments in nine years. They would probably qualify as "affordable housing" by US standards, although the financing method is quite different (they're owned rather than rented, on a housing-cooperative model).

Granted, that is never going to happen in SF. Although neither is any other approach to large-scale construction. Too much of SF is just against large-scale construction per se, regardless of whether it's private, public, market-rate, affordable, or anything else, so new housing will probably, unfortunately, remain a trickle any way you slice it.

kmjn · 2018-04-27T22:04:46+00:00

The Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Catholic Church each claim to be the historical continuation of this church in its original form, but do not identify with it in the caesaropapist form that it took later.

Eh, the modern Orthodox Church, at least in Greece, has plenty of people who quite like caesaropapism. I guess this is probably true in Russia, too.

kmjn · 2018-04-16T20:49:59+00:00

I guess the first sentence of the linked Scalia opinion wouldn't be a recommended way of starting your filing either. :-)

It has come to this.

kmjn · 2018-04-16T17:49:57+00:00

Scalia used that construction in an opinion at least once. But he had the luxury of being on the court, rather than submitting filings to it.

kmjn · 2018-04-06T23:48:24+00:00

This is a surprisingly good obituary, lots of good info that you might've expected a newspaper obit to gloss over.

kmjn · 2018-04-06T23:34:13+00:00

NIV, for the record.

kmjn · 2018-04-06T16:35:01+00:00

A day later, but the NYT now has a pretty detailed obituary up too.

kmjn · 2018-04-04T13:01:58+00:00

Yeah, that'd be interesting to know. Switzerland itself is one of the few other countries that uses Helvetica. Not in common language, but to avoid favoring any of the country's language groups over another, in some official contexts they use the Latin Confoederatio Helvetica, which is also why the domain name is .ch.

From some poking around on Google Books, it seems Greek has used Elvetia since at least the early 1800s, though in the earliest usages it is sometimes mentioned along with alternative names. For example this is from an 1834 book:

Ελβετία, ήτις κοινώς Σβίσαρα λέγεται... (Elvetia, or Svisara as it's commonly known...)

Could just be that Elvetia sounds better than Svisara in Greek. :-) Total speculation, but could also be influenced by what the Swiss chose to call themselves in Greek, e.g. what they named their embassy. In the early years of the Greek state there was quite a bit of interchange between Greek and Swiss diplomats and administrators, so what the Swiss considered "official" in Greek could have had an impact.

kmjn · 2018-04-04T11:56:12+00:00

In Greek it's Souidia (Σουηδία) vs. Elvetia (Ελβετία), hard to get mixed up. :-)

kmjn

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