The UK has a visa waiver for transit passengers (they're not that idiotic, they want Heathrow to keep being the big hub that it is; you do get to talk to an officer, but you generally don't need to apply in advance). Generally UK immigration is bad (like having to turn up and give your fingerprints every time you apply for a visa, so no application by post; in my case, that means a flight of 1,100 km and back every 6 months). Here's a blog post according to which being on a dissertation defense committee also requires a work permit (according to possibly overzealous HR): http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/10/world-class...
Most Schengen countries are more or less straightforward per se, though I'm not sure how his case would pan out (here in Norway, according to the immigration authority's webpage, "researchers and lecturers" are exempt from the work permit requirement, though I'm not sure how broad that category is).
Last time I checked, the waiver only applied if you were coming to/from a whitelist of countries, which included the US. In the past, I've had to explicitly avoid Heathrow because of its visa requirements (and I was just on transit)...
I think they also have a blacklist of countries for which you need a visa regardless of where you're coming/going from/to. The list includes Colombia, for example.
Tl;dr: there is a whitelist for transit visa waivers, so citizens of some countries need to apply for a transit visa in advance. However, you can apply from a waiver if you normally need a transit visa but you are going to/from the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand. You can also get a waiver if you are resident in the US, Canada or EU/EEA, irrespective of your citizenship.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what modern generative linguistics is all about (to be fair, it is extremely widespread). The aim of this branch of science is expressly not to "learn to produce and interpret varied utterances" (called E-language in the jargon), but to understand the cognitive processes behind the production and interpretation of utterances (called I-language). Now you may agree or disagree with the methods and assumptions used in the pursuit of this goal, but it is patently unfair to accuse the field of failing to do something it never set out to do.
I feel there is excessive emphasis on "what Chomsky said" and "what Chomsky did". Norvig chooses to point out that the principles and parameters framework is, let's say, imperfect, but, well, Chomsky would agree. Moreover, if you zoom out and stop obsessing about quotes from "Syntactic Structures", you will realize that a lot of the work that's being done in theoretical linguistics is not quite as barren. Yes, statistical methods for (say) anaphora resolution can be extremely efficient, but basically very few people had thought about anaphoric relations in any systematic way before generative linguistics came around.
Moreover, rule-based NLP approaches also have their place, and they are often the direct result of theoretical advances. A case in point is the modelling of morphophonology (which is necessary for spell checking, dictionaries and text generation for morphologically complex languages): many successful approaches are those based on finite-state machines, which could not have happened without Johnson and later Koskenniemi using them to formalize the rule-based approach pioneered by Halle and (yes) Chomsky (well, not quite, but this is still the point of reference for rule-based phonology).
(I am a theoretical phonologist, but my colleagues who do actual NLP work of this type tell me that statistical methods aren't that great for the sort of work they do.)
I don't think you can do it. Technically, the lists are available (for a short time if I am not mistaken) for perusal at a tax office; in practice, they are released to the media (e.g. major news outlets), who give you access to search by name plus league tables and aggregated statistics by year of birth, postcode etc.
Yes. Actually, the public information is not the income or value of property, but the amount of tax paid on these, which means that the numbers splashed all over the internet are estimates (for instance, people with zero-income dependants are taxed at a lower rate).
In my experience as a foreigner in Scandinavia, Swedes are way way faster to switch to English, many do it almost as soon as I make a small mistake, whereas Norwegians are much more tolerant and will keep up unless I switch myself.
>the languages of the top 5 countries have a ridiculously small speaking population
Dutch has over twenty million native speakers, Swedish has ten million. That is not ridiculously small. Even Norwegian's four and a half million is, on a global scale, very respectable. To say nothing of the fact that the number of "translated sources" is not a function of the number of speakers, but of the wealth of the country and the spread of written culture (which is very high in all of these cases).
Ridiculously small is a relative thing; compare with the hundreds of millions of Mandarin and Spanish speakers or even the 130 million Japanese speakers and you're talking about a much smaller market to target.
Moreover the wealth and cultural influence of these countries is a function of their willingness to interact beyond their linguistic sphere of influence.
exactly. Mandarin, english, spanish, the arabic family, portuguese, russian, urdu and probably others all have speaking populations of more than 200 millions.
my argument of the lack of translated sources was not related to the inability of translating, so wealth and literacy are not relevant.
I was referring to the economics of going after a much smaller market.
A publisher is more likely to target french and german before going after norwegian, thus a non mainstream author may appear in a finnish translation much after the publication in english, if ever.
Or a movie distribution company may have less incentive to target the niche of TROMA aficionados in dutch than it does for the spanish ones.
They both would have relatively similar costs for the translation, but a much lower possible return.
Wealth and literacy are quite relevant, because most translations are not done by the original publisher, but by local actors who have to live with the local market. If there are are sufficiently many Danes who are ready to spend money on (say) books, the local publishers will do it.
I agree. I grew up in Moscow, have lived in Norway for some time now and (I think) picked up the friendlier attitude - but I've never experienced that others are somehow uncomfortable with me smiling or whatever when I'm back. (I think this is important because a lot of the stereotypes come down not to the smile per se, but to the fact that people maybe be more self-conscious about talking to a foreigner or similar.)
Not quite, and there has been some interesting experimental work lately... but no, not really. Here is a relevant link from Language Log, and there are many more where this comes from: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592
Most Schengen countries are more or less straightforward per se, though I'm not sure how his case would pan out (here in Norway, according to the immigration authority's webpage, "researchers and lecturers" are exempt from the work permit requirement, though I'm not sure how broad that category is).