Keith Devlin on free-form knowledge representation

We have, it seems, become so accustomed to working on a keyboard, and generating nicely laid out pages, we are rapidly losing, if indeed we have not already lost, the habit—and love—of scribbling with paper and pencil. Our presentation technologies encourage form over substance. But if (free-form) scribbling goes away, then I think mathematics goes … Read more

The difficulty of conducting empirical studies

“Empirical studies are extremely difficult to conduct in applied linguistics, as indeed in any other area of social sciences or the humanities, given the enormous number of different factors which can impact on any given study” (p.264). Boulton, A. (2012). Corpus consultation for ESP. In  Boulton, A., Carter-Thomas, S. and Rowley-Jolivet, E. (eds.). 2012. Corpus-Informed … Read more