Oh TSA....

After a half-hour delay at the security line, the supervisor showed up, and things turned from annoying to surreal. After looking at the book and flashcards, the supervisor asked me: "Do you know who did 9/11?" Taken totally aback, I answered: "Osama Bin Laden." Then she asked me if I knew what language Osama Bin Laden spoke. "Arabic," I replied. "So do you see why these cards are suspicious?" she finished.

Imagine going from being in line at the airport to having a TSA supervisor imply you had some connection with the worst act of terrorism ever committed against your country—all over the course of a few minutes.

I love when people look at me weird when I tell them the creation of the TSA was unnecessary.
But yes, there is an issue when you give morons power, and especially when those same morons think they're profilers.

the dregs of society

Poor training. But the article does mention that they found the words "terrorist" and "bomb" on the flashdisks.

Its not a detailed enough article. But, with no training to validate this, I would probably look into someone's luggage if there was "bomb" or "terrorist" mentioned anywhere in their soft or hard copy material.

Poor training. But the article does mention that they found the words "terrorist" and "bomb" on the flashdisks.

Its not a detailed enough article. But, with no training to validate this, I would probably look into someone's luggage if there was "bomb" or "terrorist" mentioned anywhere in their soft or hard copy material.

Some of the first words I learned in Russian was bomb, tank, and gun from my high school textbook.

Any idea why?

The first words I learned after basic greetings and "My name is..." while studying French and Spanish were for things like book, pen, and school. The context seems obvious. When I studied Japanese... (running to go grab my old JP book) our first "nouns" were telephone and language words. Japanese being so context-dependent, we actually learned a whole lot of "adjectives" first, since whole conversations can be carried out in fluent Japanese without ever naming what the hell you're talking about.

I find it depressing that someone engaged in Arabic studies would have time to learn the words "terrorist" and "bomb." I know them in other languages mostly as a result of reading news in those languages, so... I guess it makes sense.

It still strikes me as weird to have in a high school textbook. It'd be like cracking open a Spanish textbook today and having "drugs" and "murder" be among the first words taught.

In one story, the fictional friends see a group of Afghan mujahedeen cleaning their weapons as they prepare to fight the Soviet army.

Maqbool tells Basheer they should help the rebel fighters ready their machine guns. Basheer concurs. Soon they are meeting with a mujahedeen commander.

“We want you to help clean the weapons and fight the Russians in jihad,” he tells Maqbool and Basheer.

The youngsters agree. Now, presumably, they are soldiers themselves.

The story, and many like it, appear in the millions of textbooks written, printed and distributed during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The books taught reading and math and sought to turn children against the Red Army and the Afghan communist government.

The textbooks’ publisher: The University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Center for Afghanistan Studies, operating inside Pakistan on a U.S. government grant.

It still strikes me as weird to have in a high school textbook. It'd be like cracking open a Spanish textbook today and having "drugs" and "murder" be among the first words taught.

Yes, because those words
If he had a piece of paper that said "I am a terrorist, and have a bomb", then you might have a point.
Flashcards are a common tool for memorization (e.g. vocabulary for languages).

Some of the first words I learned in Russian was bomb, tank, and gun from my high school textbook.

Your criteria would create a lot of unneccessary searches if people carried any recent magazines, newpapers, or any crime/mystery novels.

It is weird. Language affects perception of yourself and others around you. It's very interesting how another language is taught and how people view that culture/people from that.

FOR years, researchers in bilingualism have been touting striking findings about how bilingualism affects the brain. Two of the most memorable involve “executive control” and delayed dementia. With the first, bilinguals have shown that they are better able to focus on demanding mental tasks despite distractions. In other studies, it has been estimated that bilinguals see the onset of dementia, on average, about five years later than monolinguals do.

This week comes new evidence* for the pile: researchers led by Roberto Filippi of Anglia Ruskin University have found that young bilingual pupils did a better job answering tricky questions with a noisy voice in the background than a monolingual control group did. The study was small (just 40 pupils, only 20 in each group). But its robustness is helped by the diversity of the bilinguals, who spoke Italian, Spanish, Bengali, Polish, Russian and others in addition to English. The experimenters tried to distract the pupils with random unrelated recordings in English (which all the pupils spoke) and Greek (which none of them did). The bilinguals did significantly better at ignoring the Greek distraction. (They did just a bit better with the English one.)

The researchers in this line of inquiry tend to share a common hypothesis: that being bilingual is a kind of constant inhibitory mental exercise. With two languages in the mind, nearly everything has two labels (words) and nearly everything can be expressed in two different kinds of sentences (grammar). Every time a thing is named, an alternative must be suppressed. Every time a sentence is constructed, the other way of constructing it must be suppressed. Blocking out distracting information is exactly what researchers find that bilinguals do well. And as for dementia, the effect seems to be a kind of analogue to physical activity over the course of a lifetime keeping a body fit. Mental exercise keeps the brain fit, and bilingualism is just that kind of exercise. (Crucially, the most striking findings relate to native bilinguals. The effects are weak to nonexistent for those who merely have a passable ability, infrequently used, in a second language.)

Why bilinguals seem to do better in quite a few differently designed studies does, however, need more research. Another paper published earlier this year** failed to replicate a cornerstone 2004*** study of the bilingual-advantage research. The new study, using elderly participants, found that Asian-language-plus-English bilinguals in Scotland, as well as Gaelic-English bilinguals, did no better than monolinguals on a task that required ignoring a visual distraction. The authors of the 2014 study speculate that the 2004 study used a crucially different kind of bilingual. Those studied in 2014 in Scotland were not frequently required to switch between their languages. The Gaelic-English bilinguals had not been educated in Gaelic, and presumably spoke it to a small group of friends and family, and only in certain settings. The Asian-language speakers had been educated earlier in their Asian tongues, but in Scotland spoke their heritage language only at home, and used English more outside home and family circles. The researchers in the 2004 study tested pupils educated in both languages, those more likely to have two ready labels for a wide range of vocabulary, and who were forced to switch often.

If the advantage accrues to those who switch more often—and especially those who use more than one language with the same people (like Puerto Rican New Yorkers who rapidly switch back and forth between Spanish and English in the same two-person conversation)—then we are left with a refined version of the “fitness” analogy. Just as recent exercise trends stress variety over repetition, moving between languages, not just knowledge of two of them, may be a key part of the bilingual advantage. Amazingly, some parents still think bilingualism might harm a child's development. Perhaps selling bilingualism as an elite, varied exercise—a kind of Crossfit of the mind—might convince more parents to give it a try.



* Filippi, R., Morris, J., Richardson, F., Bright, P., Thomas, M.S.C, Karmiloff-Smith, A., and Marian, V., “Bilingual children show an advantage in controlling verbal interference during spoken language comprehension”, Bilingualism: Language & Cognition 2014.

** Kirk, N., Fiala, L., Scott-Brown, K.C. and Kempe, V., “No evidence for reduced Simon cost in elderly bilinguals and bidialectals”, Journal of Cognitive Psychology 2014.

*** Bialystok, E., Craik, F.I.M., Klein, R., and Viswanathan, M., "Bilignualism, aging and cognitive control: evidence from the Simon task", Psychology & Aging, 2004.

For the life of me I can't remember the full title of that book. Google is not helping. Ooh idoit (дурак) was also a vocab word in the russian book

As I said, lack of proper training. How many people are oblivious enough of air travel sensitivities to travel with any content of any kind that might be considered suspicious.

You can be arrested for just saying the word "bomb" on a flight.

I'm not saying it was the right move. There aren't enough details to make an educated decision. "Bomb" and "Terrorist" were available somewhere in some form. What I am saying is it is pretty understandable how the security employees might have been thinking. I highly doubt they just randomly decided to detain the guy without any, what they perceived to be, reasonable cause.

If he had turned out to be a terrorist or intended harm, think how ridiculous the news headlines would be "Terrorist had the words "Bomb" and "Terrorist" on flashcards but security failed to act".


Its not a black or white situation.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/10/johnson-bilingual-brains

While that is interesting, that's not what I was referring to.

Yes, switching between languages means you are labelling things in your mind but it also means you are learning about another cultures labelling habits.

Language greatly affects how you perceive the world around you.

Danish requires you to understand the context of a conversation because of how many words which are spelled and sound the same have very different meanings.

Number one example is the verbs to marry and to poison. They are both gift in Danish. I was watching a news story 5-6 years ago with Danish subtitles at the gym about horses in Belgium. At first I thought they said the horses had been married. No, the horses had been poisoned.

There are also sayings (common in many lamguages) which when the words are individually translated sound like gibberish.

Example:
"bury the hatchet" means to settle differences. Directly translating that people might think you literally need to bury a hatchet in the ground and that is where the meaning orginally came from (from some Native Americans who did this), but that is not what we do today.
"I'll ride shotgun" means to ride in the front passanger seat of a car. During the expansion of the West this literally meant the person who carried a shotgun.

Danes also have many sayings (so many) such as "going to stick a branch in my ear" which means going to get drunk/out to party. I have idea where that came from. The Danes who said it had no idea where it came from, just that it meant that.

So, (in my opinion) while switching between to languages might limit a person to "labelling" words it also expands their thought process on the culture involved

Edit:
Not even getting into languages that don't have an alphabet (e.g. Cantonese) and so how they learn and communicate is different