I will add to this as a grad student in Arabic linguistics and culture:

In Arab/Middle Eastern and generally third world culture, there is a lot more value placed on getting a degree in something that will be lucrative. Becoming a doctor or engineer is extremely important in these societies (lawyers don't make much, so it's not as important), and a system of testing reinforces this: only students who get the highest scores on the tests can enroll in the medical and engineering faculty of most Middle Eastern universities, while the lower the test score is the more liberal artsy the degree will be. I knew a couple of girls who really wanted to study biomedical engineering, but ended up in the English language and literature department due to their test scores.

There is also an immense amount of pressure to get a degree in a prestigious, money making field, which pushes a lot of students to pursue these degrees.

The results of this study, however, aren't necessarily applicable to the situation in the Middle East, I feel. First, liberal arts educations in the Middle East do NOT emphasize critical thinking. Like almost all fields, they focus on memorization - all tests in almost all departments are multiple choice. Some of my friends who study liberal arts subjects there have never had to write an essay - when one of them did, it was terrible, and failed to advance a critical thesis in any way shape or form. It's not like the US, where students are trained to deconstruct everything in liberal arts, while in engineering its more mathmatical. In the Middle East, both science and liberal arts are taught in substantially similar ways, with a strong emphasis on memorization.

Second, many students who do become engineers do so for economic reasons, not because of their personal interests. Almost all major literary figures in the Middle East had day jobs, and engineering is not necessarily a bad choice. A friend in Damascus is a struggling actor, but he's enrolled in a engineering program since his parents wouldn't support him otherwise. Thus, the kind of self selection that is important to the authors' argument really isn't at play to the same degree in the Middle East as it would be in the US.

I think the point that people miss is that every country has some degree of corruption, but it is what levels it is active at and how they deal with that corruption that is important.

In the US, what we might term "corruption" in the sense of favoritism (or deviations from a US sense of "meritocracy") tend to occur at the very local level (small town nepotism, "networking", etc), or at the more rarefied levels of government and business (quod pro quos from both of the political parties, lobbying, the kind of no-bid blackwater/Halliburton sort of think, insider trading, etc). This isn't to say that corruption at the top is not a problem (in fact, it is much more influential in the long run than corruption at the bottom), but simply in the US it tends to be limited to the upper reaches of government and finance.

In many other countries, the striking contrast to this is corruption in the middle, in addition to the top and bottom. Getting a job is basically impossible in some countries without appropriate connections, bribery is rampant and expected for basic "government provided" services, public works are often mired in those same problems of bribery (not scratching enough backs, etc). Even worse is when the guardians of civil society, the police, are dangerous to approach and more often on the side of criminals, as in Russia.

The other major dividing line is the public reaction to exposure of corruption. In societies where corruption is most widespread, "revelations" are generally shrugged off (and have been probably more widely known prior to their revelation), whereas in less corrupt economies, there is at least some backlash against corruption, rather than simple apathy or active suppression. Being a whistleblower in the US can be bad for your job. Being a whistleblower in other countries (as shown by many of the posts pointing out other instances where political opponents have been assassinated, etc) can result in indefinite incarceration and torture, perhaps with an "accidental" death in prison.

The advent of youtube, on the other hand, gives a voice to those who would be otherwise suppressed. Take the story of Imad Kabir, an Egyptian taxi driver. He was arrested (without charges) for participating in a fight. He was subsequently sodomized with a broomstick, which was video taped by the perpetrators. They were so sure of their immunity that they showed it to his co-workers, perhaps as a warning. When Kabir initially complained, he was actually prosecuted and jailed for assaulting an officer (dating back to his original assault arrest), but as the youtube video spread on various blogs, the officers were finally arrested. Without the internet, the officers who tortured Kabir probably would still be doing that kind of shit. Even the people who did post it to their blogs were threatened by the authorities.

Now I finally know what it'll take to put together a winning application package...just have to cut and paste some naughty pictures into my statement of purpose, and voila!

Actually, that may be true of some academic journals, but most deal primarily with MS Word documents. Some publishers might grudgingly deal with Latex documents (I know John Benjamin's mentions it in their style requirements), but the people who run conferences and therefore are in charge of submitting the proceedings tend not to be computer saavy enough to work with anything other than MS Word files (god save whoever has to deal with the millions of random fonts people use, use/non-use of styles, etc).

This of course depends on your field - in Comp Sci, I'd wager there're many more journals that regularly accept latex files. In linguistics, it's somewhat rarer, and as you get further into the humanities, it becomes increasingly difficult to find anyone who's heard of Latex at all.

Actually, California law VC 21202 States:

a) Any person operating a bicycle upon a roadway at a speed less than the normal speed of traffic moving in the same direction at such time shall ride as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway except under any of the following situations: ...
When reasonably necessary to avoid conditions (including, but not limited to, fixed or moving objects, vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, animals, surface hazards, or substandard width lanes) that make it unsafe to continue along the right-hand curb or edge. For purposes of this section, a "substandard width lane" is a lane that is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane.

So it looks like that's not only permitted, but explicitly defined by law - if the lane it too narrow for a car to safely pass the bike, then it's the bikes right to ride in the lane.

Not in California.

In California, you need a front light and rear reflector, that's it.

Which is why most of what you said is nonsense.

Oh no! Does this mean they'll have to use a sound stage in Vancouver?

Though I agree that the summary was rather ridiculous, I think that it does point to one of the problems of archival research in the Middle East. I'm a linguist, so I don't do too much with this, but a friend was trying to find some documents about the Fatimid era in an Egyptian archive (obviously much more recent historically than the cuneiform mentioned here.)

The archive she used was a total mess. The indices were almost useless - when she could find what she was looking for, the index number didn't match any manuscripts, or the manuscript itself was in the wrong place (and therefore could not be found without a multiday search.) Even worse, another researcher was trying to find works on mathematics (riyaadiyaat in Arabic), and when looking through the index, found the letter "r" missing from an index that went "d-dh-z", when "r" comes in between "dh" and "z." (As if the index in English went "L-N-O"). When he asked, he was told to look under "h" for "hisaabaat" 'calculations', but wasn't told what would happen if he actually needed something from 'r'.

Contrast this to American and European libraries with thorough records, a consistent indexing system, and access to resources like Worldcat. Even the American open-stacks library is a bit of a rarity world-wide, and as anyone who has done research in closed-stack libraries can tell you, that makes things a lot easier.

Actually, this is still true to a certain degree in academia even today. In my field (Arabic linguistics) much of the work is done by Germans, often in German. My "German for Reading" course had students from a number of departments for the same reason, including a couple of engineers who were working on areas that are apparently quite hot in Germany right now but less so in the US.

Part of the reason for this is that German universities are much more lax in what they require from professors vs. the US. German professors often have a much lighter teaching load than in the US, freeing them up to do a lot more research.

If you're really working on important photography stuff, why not just buy an external monitor that has much better color reproduction and viewing angles. If you're working on this for a job, you should invest in the proper equipment for that job. I'm not even totally clear on why you need a laptop for final photographic production work.

I'm a linguist, and I can tell you that I wouldn't write an article on how bad the built-in speakers are for transcription of complex language data. I buy high quality headphones instead.

Actually, Sayyid Qutub started out as an extremely liberal secular cultural thinker, but became somewhat disenchanted with Western Liberalism. However, he didn't begin writing such radical works until he was jailed under Gamal Abd an-Nasr, and tortured heavily. His philosophy was not actually aimed at the west per se, but rather at the secular government of Nasr, whose legitimacy he tried to challenge on the basis of the idea of "daar al-haarb" and "daar as-salaam."

The quote you show above is not about Western powers per se, but rather about the illegitimacy of the Nasr regime. The "daar al-harb" here is Egypt, not the US.

In fact, his ideas would probably have been better articulated had he NOT died from torture in prison. However, the important point here is that acts of torture actually significantly radicallized Qutub, and led to him producing this sort of highly malleable doctrine, something we should think about with respect to our own actions today (torture of possibly innocent people in Guantanamo, bombing of Gaza).

And IAGSIAS(I Am a Graduate Student in Arabic Studies)

First, try this edit on for size:

Second, I think you forget that under the Ottomans, and in fact, throughout the history of the Middle East, the area now thought of as Palestine was one of the most cosmopolitan and dense areas in the region, due to the presence of important ports along the coast, as well as important religious sites (i.e. Jerusalem). It was a mercantile region focusing on crafts and trade as well as agriculture. To imply that the area west of the Jordan river was sparsely populated solely by bedouin nomads is not historically accurate.

I will come right out and say I have a bias - I did my undergrad in linguistics, and am doing my graduate work in Arabic linguistics (emphasizing pedagogy). However, I think a lot of people have been absolutely right that you should learn another language. The thing that a lot of the people here haven't really touched on here is that regardless of WHAT language you choose (and there are a lot of good suggestions) what you get out of learning language goes beyond the language itself. What you really learn is how different and varied language can be, which in turn makes you think about your own language in a lot of interesting ways, as well as making learning a third language even easier.

Think about it like a computer language - I originally learned BASIC, then went on to C/C++, then Java. With each language, it got easier, and I learned what to expect out of a computer language - methods to move data around, conditional statements, subroutines and functions. I learned how things fit together, and what to expect when I encounter a new language.

The same is true when learning another language - you find the startling, but totally logical way that other languages express concepts you take for granted. You learn words and phrases which barely have any equivalent your own language, and which are sort of a new world of concepts and vocabulary. It gets you thinking. And when you come to another language, no matter how closely or distantly related it might be to what you know, you'll look at things and think, "hey, I've seen that sort of thing before."

And this is true of any language - just because Spanish, French or German are related to English doesn't mean they're any less different or exotic than many other languages like Arabic and Chinese. You'll get fluent faster if you choose them, because vocabulary is one of the biggest limiting factors on fluency, but I really say you should something for the sake of the process as much as the result.