Jim DeLaHunt, world-ready

Another stimulating Internationalisation and Unicode Conference (IUC36) just finished up last week (October 22-24, 2012). As usual it was rich with interesting people, stimulating subjects, and inspiration. My tutorial, Building multilingual websites in Drupal 7 and Joomla! 2.5, was well-attended and seemed to go well. My final paper and slides are posted at the preceding link.

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I never met Derek Miller. I take that back. I may well have met him, say at the Northern Voice conference, the annual gathering of the B.C. blogging and social media scene.  I almost certainly heard him play drums; I’m told his band, The Neurotics, played at the start line of the Vancouver Sun Run, our annual 50,000 person 10k stampede. Certainly we had a lot of friends in common. But I became aware of Derek Miller through one of his intriguing ideas. I then grew to admire his bravery, his unsentimental clarity, his humour, his compassion, as he compellingly narrated his own journey towards death.  And as the community, in which he made waves and I bob in the ripples, mourned him, it became clear how many people loved and admired him.

I first came across Derek when researching what people were learning about digital legacies: what happens to one’s online persona and works when one dies.  Derek apparently coined the term “digital executor”, the person who has the responsibility to take over all one’s blogs and accounts and presence on the net on one’s death. I think it is a brilliant term. Continue Reading »

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I’m an amateur opera and symphonic chorus singer. Most of the classical music and opera I perform is old. Not just pre-iPhone old, but usually well over a hundred years old. These works have outlived even the outrageously long copyright terms imposed on our culture by greedy commercial interests. They are clearly in the public domain; they have returned to the shared culture from which they grew.

But when I want to learn a new work, like Verdi’s opera Macbeth or Mozart’s Requiem, why do I find myself paying $24-$40 for a music score which probably cost $5 to print? Why does the book contain stern warnings not to photocopy the contents, even it is little more than a facsimile of a previous edition, which itself is in public domain?  It is because these music score products still cling to a pre-internet business model, based on selling “molecules” (the physical artifact of the book) for a price based on the value of the “bits” (the information or arrangement of notes we call the musical composition, plus the value of the editing, plus the value of the typesetting), and the costs of distributing and warehousing those molecules.

This shouldn’t be. The music itself — the bits, the abstract genius which is Beethoven’s or Mahler’s, not the later editorial changes, or the molecules on which the bits are printed — is in the public domain, so its cost is zero. Volunteers are willing to scan or transcribe old musical scores for free. So a digital file with a score ought to be accessible for the marginal cost of storage, duplication and delivery.  And in an era of cheap disks and high-speed internet, that marginal cost is zero.

Many classical music and opera scores are indeed available, free for the downloading. Below are links to some useful sites for the classical or opera musician to find them. But there’s more. In the digital world, scores should get better, too: more correct, easier to use, more customised. If a fraction of every chorus and orchestra pitched in to ratchet forward the quality of the free scores for music they perform, we could make a huge difference.

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During July-Sept 2009, the Government of Canada held public copyright consultations, with an eye to writing new copyright law. They asked for submissions addressing five topics.  Here’s one of my submissions, on “Competition and Investment“. It’s hard to tell what will become of these consultations. My submission did eventually show up on the official submissions page, but I still want to publish it for the record on my own blog.  I have two more submissions, “Copyright and you (me)” and “Copyright and the test of time“, which I published in recent weeks.

Q: What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?

A: Three changes:

1. relinquish Crown Copyright
2. create legal structures for free culture, and industries based on it
3. don’t take on the job of defending obsolete business models

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During July-Sept 2009, the Government of Canada held public copyright consultations, with an eye to writing new copyright law. They asked for submissions addressing five topics.  Here’s one of my submissions, on the “test of time“. It’s hard to tell what will become of these consultations, because the government may fall (again) before Parliament gets a chance to pass a new bill. My submission did eventually show up on the official submissions page, but I still want to publish it for the record on my own blog.  I have two more submissions, one on “Copyright and you (me)” which I published last month, and one which I’ll dribble out in the coming days.

Q: Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time?

A: The largest single dynamic is the change in delivery of cultural works from physical containers (paper books, CD disks, celluloid film) to digital information (ebooks, music files, computer networks).

Physical containers are:

1. either immediately accessible by humans (books), or accessible via limited machines which did not copy the container.
2. expensive to duplicate, and expensive to transport. Continue Reading »

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During July-Sept 2009, the Government of Canada held public copyright consultations, with an eye to writing new copyright law. They asked for submissions addressing five topics.  Here’s one of my submissions, on “Copyright and you“. It’s hard to tell what will become of these consultations, because the government may fall (again) before Parliament gets a chance to pass a new bill. My submission may eventually show up on the official submissions page. Until then, here it is, for the record.  I have two more submissions which I’ll dribble out in the coming days.

Q: How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?

A: This topic should not just be about copyright, it should also be about culture. I absorb culture, some of it through copyrighted works, some through public domain or non-copyrighted works. I also create works: essays, blog posts, musical performances, even submissions to government consultations. Thus I am *both* a producer and a consumer.

All culture is built by mixing and innovating based on previous culture. Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” was based on German folks tales written down a few centuries before.

The purpose of copyright is to strike a balance: to allow a limited right to prevent copying, in exchange for a larger social and cultural good. In today’s Canada, this balance has been greatly distorted, in favour of the publisher and the corporation, against the vast majority of artists, against the public, and against the culture. Digital technology, extra-long copyright terms, and aggressive policies by industry groups mean that publishers have greatly expanded their power to prevent copying. The public interest and the culture are harmed.
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I encountered a new blog from my i18n tribe today, Localization Best Practices. Their post, “Pidgins and Creoles” or “Why Machine-only Translation Will Always Fall Short”, caught my eye.  It is interesting, even if I don’t fully agree with them.

Jonathan writes that, at a recent conference on localisation:

…an audience member asked me about machine translation, and if it would ever completely take the place of human linguists in the industry. I answered “No,” although I did concede that machine translation is consistently making strides and does have a place in the localization community. He then mentioned that a scientific group in Europe recently had success with a robot performing a live human appendectomy. He believed that if something that delicate could be automated, what made something a “simple” as language beyond the scope of machines and artificial intelligence?  I thought about his question and then simply said, “Because there are no pidgins or creoles for appendectomies.” Continue Reading »

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This was fun!  On Tuesday night (9. Sept 2008), there was a tribute to the 20th anniversary of Unicode at the 32nd Internationalization and Unicode Conference.  I wrote this in a creative fury on Monday afternoon. The anniversary celebration was at an evening reception. It was very funny and enjoyable. Several other people contributed amusing tributes. My song appeared to be well-received. I hope you enjoy it.

Unicode Doggerel

(Sung to the tune of  “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General”, by Gilbert and Sullivan.)

I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme,
a million scalars, astral planes, and UTFs like six-&-teen,
and UAX and UTR, collation, bidi, properties,
I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme.

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I’m going to be a panelist at the Internet Marketing Conference Vancouver 2008, which runs from September 11-12, 2008. The panel is called “Writing for the Web“. It is full of experts on writing — and then there’s me. I’ll be approaching from the topic crosswise, talking about international and multilingual issues. In other words, how your writing is affected if it will be translated, or is part of a multinational project.

The panelists are an interesting bunch. I’m looking forward to meeting them. They are:

• Crawford Kilian, author of “Writing for the Web 3.0“. My spouse sweated bullets to write two books, and they shared content. Crof has written 30.
• Elizabeth Southall, Powerhouse Copy. Just reading her website makes my jaw drop. The lady knows her copy.
  
• Tom McNamara, McNamara Communications. Writing for the web since 1995, which is about as long as we’ve had the web.
• Monique Trottier, Boxcar Marketing, which is a Vancouver-based internet marketing company.
• Moderator: Michael Straker, VKI Studios, which is an Internet marketing and website usability firm.
• Jim DeLaHunt, Jim DeLaHunt & Associates. That would be me.

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One of the answers I occasionally write at LinkedIn Answers seemed worth reposting here. The question was: “Do all languages in the world use Western numerals (1, 2, 3 etc) to express numerical values?“. My answer (slightly revised):

The simple answer to your question is, “No”. Or, “Yes”. It depends which exact question you are asking.

Is it the case that all languages in the world use only Western numerals (usually known as “Arabic” or “Hindu-Arabic numerals“, by the way) to express numerical values? No. Many languages use multiple number forms, depending on context. In the English language, for example, a numerical value could be expressed with words (“one”) in text, Hindu-Arabic numerals (“1”) in a technical context, or Roman numerals (“i”, “I”) in lists. Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, and Chinese all have native characters to express numerical values, which are used in some contexts.

Do all languages in the world use Western numerals sometimes, in some contexts, to express numerical values? Yes — mostly, probably. The qualifications are because I hate to make generalisations about human culture; it’s so diverse. And, note that languages without written forms probably don’t use Hindu-Arabic numerals at all.

Is it the case that Western numerals are — in all cultures, in all contexts — the idiomatic, preferred way to express numerical values? No. They aren’t even sufficient for all contexts in English (viz “one”, “i”).

Do all cultures which use Western numerals to express numerical values do so in the same way? No. In particular, the punctuation between the whole and the fractional part of a number, and the grouping of digits, differ by cultures. North America uses “1,234,567.89”; many European cultures use “1.234.567,89”; I’ve seen Japanese texts that say “123,4567.89”. See the CLDR number format patterns, creating international number formats in Excel, and the user guide to ICU formatting numbers.

Let’s shift focus from expressing numbers in cultures to implementing numbers in software products.

If you were making priority decisions for a software product (that’s my background) to expand its market internationally, and that product expresses numerical values using Hindu-Arabic numerals in some contexts appropriate in North America, can you be confident that it’s the only system you’ll need to express numerical values? No. You of course need to look at the cultural requirements of each new market as you go. But I’m confident that over time, some market will require some system other than Hindu-Arabic numerals to express numerical values. So I’m confident that sooner or later, you will have to give that software product the ability to express numerical values in a variety of ways (i.e., to internationalise it).

Postscript: the questioner, LinkedIn product manager Minna King, was kind enough to mark this as the “Best Answer” of the six posted.

[Edited for clarity based on reader feedback.]

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