Život je nekad siv, nekad žut...

By-stander effect

A 1968 study by Darley and Latane first demonstrated the bystander effect in the laboratory. The most common explanation is that, with others present, observers all assume that someone else is going to intervene and so they each individually refrain from doing so. People may also assume that other bystanders may be more qualified to help, such as being a doctor or police officer, and their intervention would thus be unneeded. Beneath this is a fear of "losing face" in front of the other bystanders from being superseded by a "superior" helper or even from the possibility of offering unwanted assistance. They may also assume that since the other bystanders have not yet intervened, no intervention is necessary.

Diffusion of responsibility

Diffusion of responsibility is a social phenomena which tends to occur in groups of people above a certain critical size when responsibility is not explicitly assigned.
Diffusion of responsibility can manifest itself
- in a group of peers who act or, through inaction, allow events to occur which they would never allow if alone (see bystander apathy for an example) or
- in hierarchical organizations as when, for example, underlings claim that they were following orders and supervisors claim that they were just issuing directives and not doing anything per se.

Ну какую бы мне систему придумать с языками? А то как ни соберусь в ЖЖ писать, все мучаюсь - на каком языке писать?

This won't be terribly interesting to people not somehow involved with languages and/or linguistics, but there are discussions about languages going on in LJ from time to time, so I thought I'd put this in.

1. There this one discussion going on here: http://www.livejournal.com/community/linguists/48381.html?nc=36 about linguists and languages they speak. Most people say that they find the question "So how many/what languages do you speak?" annoying, since linguists are people studying language structure (and other things)in general, and some of them don't speak anything but their native language, or their native language and English. While in general I agree that linguistics per se is a study of language in general, and not one particular one, it's interesting to see linguists who know only their native language (usually, English). My personal interest in linguistics came exactly from learning languages - and from speaking them. And although linguistics research gives me immense pleasure, there is nothing like learning how a language works just by speaking it!

2. Language/dialect. Many times I had heated discussions with people about distinctions between a language and a dialect. Russian/Ukranian, Russian/Belorussian, Serbian/Croatian, Serbian/Bosnian and others. I will say this: distinction between a language and a dialect is purely a political one. "Language is a dialect with a navy" (not sure if that's the right wording). Some languages have very few differences and yet they are called different languages (for example, Bosnian and Serbian - although I fully respect the right of Bosnians to have their own language). Some dialects are so different that two people speaking them will be unable to understand each other, and yet these two are called dialects (as for example, in China - Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligable). So while linguistically I agree that Bosnian is very close to Serbian to the point that otherwise I would consider them the same language, I still think it's a question of politics, and in political terms I believe that Bosnians should have their own language if they want to.

3. One language harder than another. Another issue that came up several times is whether one language is harder than another one. Suppose we have language A and language B. I believe that abstract discussions in terms of "A is harder than B" or vice versa are non-sensical. Usually, these statements are put in the form of "A is harder than B because A has 123 verb tenses" or "B is harder than A because there are tones in B". Well, all that is irrelevant, really, because how can one really compare verb tenses and tones? It is possible to compare two languages for their difficulty when talking about learning those languages and with respect to a particular person who is learning them, since that particular person will have a mother tongue C, which we can compare with A and B for presence/absence of particular features. Such as: an English speaking student will have more trouble with Russian than with Spanish, because 1) Russian has cases, E+S don't, 2) R has a different alphabet from E+S, 3) roots of the words in Russian are mostly Slavic, mostly Roman in E+S, 4) there's aspect of verbs in R, no such thing in E+S, and so on.

It is cold, nasty, raining a little outside, but one thing made me ecstatic. There's a tree that I pass on the way to the metro station (there are actually many trees on my way), and today I saw the small green leaves on it for the first time! Yay, spring is here!

Here's a diary of an American college student living in Saint-Petersburg for a year: http://students.ou.edu/W/Heather.E.Worley-2/
Very well-written, interesting and enlightening. And I'd say objective in not being prejudiced in either direction ("all Russian is best" or "all American is best"). Recommend to all (regardless of your country of origin).

http://www.diveintopython.org/object_oriented_framework/instantiating_classes.html :

As a former philosophy major, it disturbs me to think that things disappear when no one is looking at them, but that's exactly what happens in Python.