Month: September 2016
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Big data, Japan and education
I like data. And I like data when it is big. The Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture and Science and Technology (MEXT) in Japan announced that it will promote the use of big data. According to a source quoted in an article in today’s Japan News only 6.8 percent of 1,100 companies surveyed said they utilise big…
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Why we should care about literacy?
While you are reading this you should think about how effortlessly you are doing so. And by being able to you are have (I hope) learnt something valuable. At least we, as human beings, have connected. According to Derrida, writing is marked by absence. what he means by this is that the containers we call…
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In the reference corpus, we trust
People will always ask (and rightly so) how can we trust a corpus to be representative of the language we are studying. The answer is we can’t. But we can make sure it is as unbiased as possible but carefully setting criteria which will ensure at least it is reproducible and somewhat representative. Take the…
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Who is the next Natsume Soseki? Scholarships and the Japanese people
This year is the 100th anniversary of the death of the Japanese novelist, Natsume Soseki. Until recently he had been featured on the Japanese one-thousand yen banknote (about USD10). He had studied in London on government scholarship for two years from 1900. This month the Soseki Museum in London privately run by Ikuo Tsunematsu, a scholar,…
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