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Minggu, 21 Juni 2015

Intralanguage, Inter-language, Inter-semiotic Translation.

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ORIGINAL TEXT
2.      Terjemahan Intrabahasa, Antarbahasa, Intersemiotik
Di dalam literatur penerjemahan, ada beberapa ragam terjemahan yang pernah dikemukakan oleh para ahli. Ragam-ragam tersebut ada yang digolongkan menurut jenis sistem tanda yang terlibat, jenis naskah yang diterjemahkan, dan juga menurut proses penerjemahan serta penekanannya.

Roman Jakobson (1959:234) membedakan terjemahan menjadi tiga jenis, yaitu terjemahan intrabahasa, terjemahan antarbahasa, dan terjemahan intersemiotik.

Yang dimaksud terjemahan intrabahasa adalah pengubahan suatu teks menjadi teks lain berdasarkan interpretasi penerjemah. Dan kedua teks ini ditulis dalam bahasa yang sama. Jadi, bila kita menuliskan kembali puisi Chairil Anwar, Aku, ke dalam bentuk prosa di dalam bahasa Indonesia, maka kita melakukan penerjemahan intrabahasa.

Jenis terjemahan kedua adalah terjemahan antarbahasa. Terjemahan jenis ini adalah terjemahan dalam arti yang sesungguhnya. Dalam jenis ini, penerjemah menuliskan kembali makna atau gagasan teks bahasa sumber ke dalam teks bahasa sasaran.

Yang terakhir adalah jenis terjemahan intersemiotik. Jenis ini mencakup penafsiran sebuah teks ke dalam bentuk atau system tanda yang lain. Sebagai contoh, penafsiran novel menjadi sebuah karya film.

COMPLETE TRANSLATION TEXT
2.  Intralanguage, Interlanguage, Intersemiotic Translation.
In literature translation, there are variation of translations that have been explained by experts.

The variations have been classed by kinds of sign system that is involved, the kinds of script that has been translated, and also the translation process and also the stress.

Roman Jakobson( 1959:234) differentiates translation into 3 kinds, that are intralanguage translation, Interlanguage Translation and Intersemiotic translation.

What intralanguage means is changing a text into another text based on the translating interpretation. And both of the text is written in the same language. So if we rewrote Chairil Anwar’s poem, Aku, into an Indonesian prose, therefore we translate it into intralanguage.

The second kind of translation is interlanguage. This kind of translation is translated into the real meaning. In this kind, the translator rewrites the source language meanings or idea of the text into the target language.

The last kind of translation is intersemiotic translation. This kind includes an interpretation of a text into another system. For example, an interpretation of a novel into a film.

NAME :           Achmad Andika.S
NPM    :           17611923
Class    :           4SA04
Softskill

Sabtu, 09 Mei 2015

Intralanguage, Interlanguage and Intersemiotic Translation.

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                2. Intralanguage, Interlanguage and Intersemiotic Translation.
In literature translation, there are variations translations that have been advanced experts. The variations have been classed by kinds of system sign that is involved, the kind of script that has been translated, and also the translation process and also the stress.
Roman Jakobson( 1959:234) differentiates translations into 3 kinds, that is intralanguage translation, Interlanguage Translation and Intersemiotic translation.

What intralanguage is

Minggu, 03 Mei 2015

Variations of Translation Softwares

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1.       Trados : SDL Trados is a computer-assisted translation software suite, originally developed by the German company Trados GmbH and currently available from SDL International, a provider of translation management software, content management and language services. It provides translation memory and terminology management.

·         Advantage: Translator immediately sees which parts of the text are to be translated, which makes it simple to concentrate on the essential. Anyone who has attempted to translate a text in electronic format knows how difficult it is, since each time the already translated source text must be deleted. As an alternative, one must work with two texts side-by-side, or open the original text on the screen again and then return to the already translated text.
·         Disadvantage: Careless mistakes and increases the risk of skipping a sentence or a word, it is more difficult if received as hard copy. If the translator does not have the possibility of converting the text into an electronic format by using optical character recognition, they must constantly shift the focus between the paper and the screen.


2.       Ginger : Ginger Software is an Israeli start-up company that has developed language enhancement technology that uses statistical algorithms in conjunction with natural language processing, aiming to improve written communications, develop English speaking skills and boost smartphone productivity. The company was founded towards the end of 2007 by Yael Karov and Avner Zangvil. Ginger Software differentiates itself by recognizing words in the context of complete sentences.

·         Advantage: You learn the topics that are most relevant to you, those that cause most of your writing mistakes. You practice by correcting your own sentences, instead of textbook learning examples that are not necessarily relevant for your specific use of English. You learn faster because the learning program is personalized to meet your needs. No need to practice topics that you already know, or that are too advanced for you. Whenever you write an email, an essay, or a status on Facebook, you can, in a single click, get corrections from Ginger, as well as explanations on how to avoid repeating those same mistakes in the future.
·         Disadvantages: it has a disadvantage that it slows down the speed of your PC to some extent, but when you stop it from working on the browser the speed is improved.


3.       Systran : SYSTRAN, founded by Dr. Peter Toma in 1968, is one of the oldest machine translation companies. SYSTRAN has done extensive work for the United States Department of Defense and the European Commission.

·         Advantage: Supports unlimited user access and millions of real-time and batch translations per day as demonstrated by the leading search engines, global corporations, and governments. Scalable, open and robust, SYSTRAN solutions use standard APIs, support universal file formats and are easy to integrate with third-party applications. SYSTRAN delivers the highest translation speed available for machine translation solutions. SYSTRAN also delivers the largest breadth of machine translation software products in the market which offer fast and cost-effective customization.
·         Disadvantage: you have to buy particular language combinations. For example, it costs more to have software that will translate both French and Spanish into English.

4.       Sdl : SDL plc is a company providing software and service solutions for language translation purposes including interpretation services. It is based in Maidenhead, England and is listed on the London Stock Exchange. SDL is an abbreviation for "Software and Documentation Localization."

·         Advantage: it can reduce the number and severity of vulnerabilities in software. In order to measure the extent to which these goals are met, security experts analyzed public vulnerability counts in "pre-SDL" and "post-SDL" versions of the same product in the 12 months (or more) following the release.
·         Disadvantage: SDL include poor efficiency of the generated code and inadequate support for complex data type, algorithm, concurrency and hardware interface descriptions.


5.       WordbeeA web-based application that allows interaction between the project manager, translator and proofreader in real time as well as simultaneous translation

·         Advantage: Simultaneous translation means you can translate a source text into different languages simultaneously. Wordbee enables proofreading and approving of translation memories (or previously translated files), in order to build new translation memories or export translation memories from other software.

·         Disadvantage: spell checker for QA turned out be buggy, not finding all errors and especiailly not finding accidentally entered 'second letter' caps.

Screenshots of the software in order :

1.Trados

2. Ginger 

3. Systran 
4. SDL 

5. Wordbee 

Rabu, 28 Januari 2015

Franco hates sony hackers

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James Franco: 'Sony hack made me sick'
The actor said his health was affected by the fallout from the cyber-attack on Sony Pictures, who were targeted thanks to Franco’s film The Interview


James Franco has said that the furore around his comedy The Interview, which prompted a devastating hack on Sony Pictures and threats of terrorism against US cinemas, affected his health.
“There was this pressure. There was so much attention on it — attention on a level you never expected. It was a shock to my system, and I got sick,” he said. “But I was never scared for my safety or anything.”
 In The Interview, Franco plays a blowhard talk show host, chaperoned by his producer played by Seth Rogen – the pair are hired by the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-un after the pair secure an interview with the North Korean leader. The storyline angered a hacking group linked to the country, who leaked a vast amount of data from Sony, and whose terror threats caused the film to be pulled from cinemas. It has since been successful via on-demand services and a small theatrical release in independent cinemas, earning $45m.
Franco added: “It was a situation where there was nothing for me to do to. As soon as they called the press off, and the movie was pulled from theatres, there was nothing to do. They weren’t looking to me to make any decisions. It was just sitting around and staying quiet.”
His comments came in an interview about his new film I Am Michael, directed by Justin Kelly and executive produced by Gus Van Sant, which has premiered at the Sundance film festival. It’s the true story of Michael Glatze, a gay rights campaigner who renounced his sexuality and turned to Christianity. Franco met with Glatze at the premiere, and said that: “I think the movie has helped him release some of these extreme views that basically gays are sinners. And that it’s helped him heal a little bit and maybe showed him that just because he doesn’t want to identify as gay doesn’t mean he has to completely destroy or condemn everything about gay lifestyles.”
On a threesome scene between Franco, Zachary Quinto and Charlie Carver, Franco said: “I can’t even remember what happened. I think I was going for it more than they were.”
Reviewing the film for the Guardian at Sundance, Jordan Hoffman wasn’t particularly taken with it: “It feels as if it’s hewing too close to both an agenda and the truth of the story, instead of exploring the emotional and intellectual truths that lie beneath it... [it] is fatally unsure of its own identity.”
Preposition       :
About : tentang
After : sesudah
Against : terhadap
Around : di sekeliling
At        : ada/di/pada
Beneath : di bawah
Between : di antara
By        : dengan/oleh
For       : selama/untuk
From    : dari
In         : di
Of        : dari
Off      : lepas
On       : di atas/ pada
Since    : sejak
To        : ke
Via       : melalui
With     : dengan

Name   : Achmad Andika S.
Class    : 4sa04
NPM    : 17611923

Softskill last assignment

Senin, 01 Desember 2014

Putin’s Kleptocracy

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‘Putin’s Kleptocracy,’ by Karen Dawisha
By RAJAN MENONNOV. 25, 2014
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/15/books/review/30menon/30menon-master180.jpg
Now in his third (nonconsecutive) presidential term, Vladimir Putin presents himself as the strong and virtuous leader who rescued Russia from the chaos, corruption, penury and weakness of the 1990s.
State-controlled news media and Kremlin spin doctors disseminate this message diligently — and to good effect, judging from Putin’s 80 percent approval rating. But with “Putin’s Kleptocracy,” Karen Dawisha, a respected scholar of Soviet and Russian politics at Miami University in Ohio, seeks to shred this carefully constructed narrative.
Her verdict is not merely that Putin’s boast of having built a potent, efficient state that fights for the little guy and against the venality of the powerful is bunk. Her bedrock claims are that the essential character of Putin’s system is colossal corruption and that he is a prime beneficiary. The thievery, she says, has made him fabulously rich, along with a coterie of trusted friends dating back to his days as a K.G.B. officer in Communist East Germany, then as first deputy mayor in 1990s St. Petersburg, then as head of the Federal Security Service.
In explaining the system’s workings, Dawisha enumerates the standard shenanigans of crooked regimes: bribetaking from domestic and foreign companies seeking business permits; kickbacks from inflated no-bid contracts for state projects; privatization deals rigged to enrich cronies who will later be cash cows for the Kremlin; illicit exports of raw materials purchased at state-subsidized prices and sold for a killing; “donations” from oligarchs eager to keep feeding at the government’s trough; real estate scams yielding mega-profits and palatial homes; money laundering; election-fixing; labyrinthine offshore accounts; lucrative partnerships with the mob; and the intimidation, even elimination, of would-be whistle-blowers.
To prosper, Russia’s superrich must demonstrate absolute loyalty to the president. As Mikhail Khodorkovsky and other tycoons have discovered, the punishment for defiance is severe.
Dawisha won’t disappoint readers seeking examples of industrial-size sleaze. She reckons Putin’s private wealth at $40 billion and lists among his prized possessions yachts, planes and palaces — along with a $700,000 wristwatch collection for good measure. As for the Friends of Vladimir, Dawisha writes that “more than half of the $50 billion spent on the Sochi Olympics simply disappeared into the pockets of Putin’s cronies.” The Rotenberg brothers, Putin’s childhood chums, alone garnered $2.5 billion of the outlay for the games.
Russia’s roster of 110 billionaires remains remarkably static, even as the wealthy in other countries rise and fall. What these plutocrats share are longstanding, close connections to Putin. And not a few are former K.G.B. operatives themselves.
Dawisha’s charges are not entirely new: Her copiously researched account relies on books, news reports, official documents, memoirs, WikiLeaks and witness testimonies collected by Russian and foreign journalists. The torrent of detail, some of it well known and peripheral to her kleptocracy theme, can drown readers who are untutored in Soviet and Russian politics. Still, “Putin’s Kleptocracy” is the most persuasive account we have of corruption in contemporary Russia. Dawisha won’t be getting a Russian visa anytime soon. Her indictment — even if it wouldn’t stand up in a court of law — hits Putin where it really hurts.
He may cop to being an authoritarian (he boasts of building a strong state), a nationalist (he wears a cross, preaches patriotism and praises the Orthodox Church) and an empire builder (he brags about retaking Crimea and is unapologetic about seeking a sphere of influence). But the accusation that he’s a common crook, or even an uncommon one, is different — and a charge he doesn’t treat lightly. That’s why Russian reporters avoid it, especially as political controls have tightened, and why Dawisha’s original publisher, Cambridge University Press, declined to print the book on the advice of its lawyers worried about the possibility of legal action.
The true tragedy is that corruption, state-sponsored, energy-driven and totaling hundreds of billions annually, has mortgaged Russia’s future. Freedom has withered. Money for the investments urgently needed to make Russia innovative and prosperous has been diverted to enrich a few.
Alas, that’s what kleptocracies do.

GERUND   :           workings
                                  Work (verb)-Working(verb)-Workings(noun)
Example      :           Rabin works the king’s workings

Name                      :           Achmad Andika S.
Class                       :           4SA04

Npm                        :           17611923 

Minggu, 26 Oktober 2014

Can Video Games Fend Off Mental Decline?

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Direct and Indirect Speech (softskill)
Can Video Games Fend Off Mental Decline?
By CLIVE THOMPSONOCT. 23, 2014
 “You just crashed a little bit,” Adam Gazzaley said.
It was true: I’d slammed my rocket-powered surfboard into an icy riverbank. This was at Gazzaley’s San Francisco lab, in a nook cluttered with multicolored skullcaps and wires that hooked up to an E.E.G. machine. The video game I was playing wasn’t the sort typically pitched at kids or even middle-aged, Gen X gamers. Indeed, its intended users include people over 60 — because the game might just help fend off the mental decline that accompanies aging.

It was awfully hard to play, even for my Call of Duty-toughened brain. Project: Evo, as the game is called, was designed to tax several mental abilities at once. As I maneuvered the surfboard down winding river pathways, I was supposed to avoid hitting the sides, which required what Gazzaley said was “visual-motor tracking.” But I also had to watch out for targets: I was tasked with tapping the screen whenever a red fish jumped out of the water. The game increased in difficulty as I improved, making the river twistier and obliging me to remember turns I’d taken. (These were “working-memory challenges.”) Soon the targets became more confusing — I was trying to tap blue birds and green fish, but the game faked me out by mixing in green birds and blue fish. This was testing my “selective attention,” or how quickly I could assess a situation and react to it.
After only two minutes of play, I was making all manner of mistakes, stabbing frantically at the wrong fish as the game sped up.
“It’s hard,” Gazzaley said, smiling broadly as he took back the iPad I was playing on. “It’s meant to really push it.”
“Brain training” games like Project: Evo have become big business, with Americans spending an estimated $1.3 billion a year on them. They are also a source of controversy. Industry observers warn that snake-oil salesmen abound, and nearly all neuroscientists agree there’s very little evidence yet that these games counter the mental deficits that come with getting older. Gazzaley, however, is something of an outlier. His work commands respect from even the harshest critics. He spent five years designing and testing the sort of game play I had just experienced, and he found that it does indeed appear to prompt older brains to perform like ones decades younger. (“Game changer,” the cover of Nature magazine declared when it published his findings last year.) Now Project: Evo is on its own twisty path — the Boston company that is developing it, Akili, which Gazzaley advises, is seeking approval from the Food and Drug Administration for the game. If it gets that government stamp, it might become a sort of cognitive Lipitor or Viagra, a game that your doctor can prescribe for your aging mind.
In recent years, neuroscientists have begun to map, in increasing detail, just what happens as the brain ages. The picture is bleak. Beginning in our late 40s and 50s, our working memory dims, and we lose the ability to juggle simultaneous tasks. It becomes harder to screen out distractions, to stay focused while reading or shopping. Processing speed — that is, the brain’s ability to react to stimuli — slows, which is one reason older people struggle to follow the speech of chattering children. Scientists have begun to trace the physical changes behind this decline. For example, the myelin sheathing that covers the brain’s white matter degrades, and the brain has a harder time coordinating its different regions engaged in a mental task. This dropoff has nothing to do with Alzheimer’s or dementia; this is normal aging in an otherwise healthy adult. “It’s a rough life, being a nervous system over 60 or 70 years,” says Jonathan King, who directs a cognitive-aging program at the National Institute on Aging.
Since Gazzaley began his career two decades ago, in his 20s, he has been fascinated by the puzzle of aging. Back then, neuroscience was in the midst of the “neuroplasticity” revolution, the discovery that the mature brain can change and evolve. Scientists used to believe that once you became an adult, your brain’s capabilities were fixed, like plaster. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, aided by new brain-scanning tools, they realized this wasn’t true. If you start doing something that taxes your brain in productive ways, forcing it to repeatedly engage declining skills — learning a new language, for instance — those skills get measurably sharper. The problem, of course, is that most of us are pretty lazy. We’re not often going to take up mentally difficult activities in our dotage.
Video games seemed like one possible shortcut. Researchers were discovering that playing them appeared to improve some cognitive abilities in children: Avid players were better at noticing visual stimuli and shifting the focus of their attention, the very tasks that old brains find difficult.
In 2005, Nintendo released Brain Age, a slightly tongue-in-cheek game that purported to “keep your mind in shape” through a blitz of visual quizzes — like the famous Stroop Effect test, in which the word “blue” is printed in black, for example, and you have to correctly name the font’s color. (Not as easy as it sounds.) The brain-training industry was born, and soon ads from companies like Lumosity were promising to “challenge your brain with scientifically designed training.” Posit Science, a company founded by the neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, produced BrainHQ games meant to improve capacities like your “useful field of view,” the scientific term for the width of your peripheral vision. (Yes, it too shrinks with age.)
The big question about brain games is whether they sharpen everyday skills. If you regularly play a memory game — like Lumosity’s version of the old classic Concentration — you’ll get better at playing the game. But does it help you recall where you left your reading glasses? Does it improve your brain overall? Research has shown scant evidence of that. Even crossword puzzles — often touted as a pen-and-paper form of brain training — seem to suffer from this problem. All they do is make you better at doing crosswords.
Gazzaley surmised that if a game prodded several different mental abilities simultaneously, learning to resolve the “interference” produced by such multitasking would strengthen the brain generally. So he asked game designers from LucasArts, who made Star Wars video games, to do some freelance work for him. “They said, ‘Well, you know, we’ve been teaching teenagers how to kill aliens for almost 20 years now, and we’re ready to do something different, do something of impact,’ ” Gazzaley says.
By 2009, their collaboration yielded NeuroRacer. A prototype of what became Project: Evo, it required players to pilot a car down a winding path at a constant speed while trying to keep from running off the road. At the same time, users had to pay attention to a stream of flashing icons and press a button on the game controller whenever a circle appeared. As you got better at playing it, the game got harder, in order to keep you at the edge of your abilities.
To test how the game affected older minds, Gazzaley sorted 46 participants between the ages of 60 and 85 into three groups. One group played NeuroRacer three times a week for a month. Another played a simplified version without the multitasking: Players either drove the car or clicked on the circles but not both during the same game. The third group didn’t play at all.
The results were stark. Older adults who played the hardest version of NeuroRacer became very good at it — as good as 20-year-olds playing it for the first time. And crucially, there was “transfer.” Standard laboratory tests used to gauge a person’s working memory and ability to sustain attention showed that the NeuroRacer vets had “improved significantly.” And those skills weren’t the ones the game was specifically designed to focus on — their improvement was just a positive side effect. The players didn’t merely become better at NeuroRacer; they also became sharper at other things. The control groups — whose members didn’t play the game or who didn’t drive and identify objects at the same time — didn’t get the same boost. They just got older.
Gazzaley could also see his subjects’ brains change on E.E.G. readings. The electrical patterns of those who played the full NeuroRacer resembled those of 20-year-olds, just as their gaming performances had. Key measures of activity in the prefrontal cortex altered, suggesting improvement in what researchers call executive control. Measures of brain “coherence” were better, too, indicating that different parts of the brain were in better communication with one another. Perhaps most remarkably, these gains held up over time. When Gazzaley brought the participants back into the lab six months later — during which time they hadn’t played the game — the multitasking players still performed better on diagnostic tests than the control groups.
The results sent a jolt through the academic-neuroscientist community. A Boston health care firm approached Gazzaley about producing a commercial version to “move this technology out of the lab into industry,” he says, which led to the creation of Akili. Gazzaley embarked on fresh collaborations. One is with Zynga, the company responsible for the hit game FarmVille, which is helping design MediTrain, a game that promotes “mindfulness” meditation techniques.
The lab where Gazzaley works is like a child’s fantasy version of a research facility. There’s a mood-lit game-playing room with a lipstick red chair and an 85-inch plasma TV, “the biggest, highest-quality TV you can buy.” When I visited the place earlier this month, his 24-year-old research associate, Cammie Rolle, jumped and waved her arms in front of the screen, as if doing aerobics. An Xbox Kinect camera tracked her movements as she played Gazzaley’s new game, Body Brain Trainer. Each jerk and leap controlled a horse on the screen, as she tried to avoid obstacles and lunged toward targets (vegetables and colors, in this case). The goal, Gazzaley said, was to see how physical activity might influence mental training. He hopes that forcing subjects to coordinate physical movements with mental pattern-matching will generate the sort of productive interference that, as in the case of NeuroRacer, strengthens multitasking and executive control.
“We think the embodied cognition will create a faster learning curve,” he said. It was certainly a workout. After two minutes of jumping and dodging, Rolle’s heart rate was over 140. They won’t know if it improved her brain, though, for another year.
As eager as Gazzaley is to promote his research, he is also reflexively cautious. He warned me several times that his findings will need more testing and pointed out that the data is tentative when it comes to how deeply it affects everyday mental performance. The truth is that despite 15 years of research, we don’t actually know how — or if, really — brain-training games work. “It’s a big, muddled mess,” says Thomas Redick, a cognitive psychologist at Purdue University. The published research is a grab bag of contradictory findings: Some experiments find minimal improvements, others none. Often studies test games with such different emphases — working memory, field of view or mental speed — that the results can’t be compared meaningfully. Findings from experiments with subjects who have conditions like A.D.D. don’t necessarily apply to the elderly. And while there is plenty of work on children, including claims made by the educational firm Pearson that its product CogMed increases their working memory, the evidence on this front is also uncertain.

In the commercial world, though, hyperbole reigns. App stores are littered with brazen claims — Elevate-Brain Training, for example, is “based on extensive research.” Ulman Lindenberger, a director at the Max Planck Institute, recently published a study that found that 100 days of cognitive training yielded a “relatively minor” improvement in working memory. Soon afterward, a German brain-training firm cited his paper on its website, despite the lack of any connection between his research and its product. The company even appropriated the Max Planck logo.
This month, an international group of 30 scientists — including Lindenberger — became so fed up that they issued “TheConsensus on the Brain Training Industry From the Scientific Community,” a withering statement denouncing the hype by both companies and media. “Claims promoting brain games,” they wrote, “are frequently exaggerated and at times outright misleading.” One of the group’s organizers, Laura Carstensen, the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, says, “I started just feeling like we were obligated — we the scientific community in the aging world — to say something and to not just sit by and have this go on.” She is particularly enraged by claims that games can forestall Alzheimer’s. “I find that unconscionable, because there’s zero evidence for that, and it is on top of the list of aging people’s fears.” Carstensen has heard from older people who assumed the games’ benefits were proven, as well as from poor patients who were forgoing other daily items to pay monthly subscription fees for brain games.
Carstensen and her colleagues recommend that people adopt more healthful habits, including regular physical activity, because a weak cardiovascular system limits blood flow to the brain. Active efforts to master new skills — a new sport, another language — may help, as does an active social life. None of these techniques, of course, have million-dollar industries intent on proving they’re good for our brains.
That said, Carstensen and other skeptics do not dismiss brain training entirely. If you’re playing these games in moderation, they say, there isn’t any harm. And maybe they help. “It’s perfectly possible that if you do this for some time that you will see some changes in your brain,” Lindenberger says. “I mean, why not?” They all want to see more rigorous research done, and many cite Gazzaley’s work as a model.

Gazzaley himself signed the letter, though he pushed the group to use less pessimistic rhetoric. “I really was a pain,” he says. One concern was that excessively negative statements might scare off research-funding agencies. “Do we really want to sabotage this?” he asked them. “Does anyone actually think there’s nothing here? My view is that from the work that we’ve done, there’s a signal. I’m a cautious optimist. If I didn’t think there was a signal, I’d be out of here — I’m not going to waste my entire career.”
Even Michael Merzenich, the founder of Posit Science — one of the oldest makers of brain-training products — acknowledges that skepticism is warranted. “There is a lot of hocus-pocus in the marketplace and a lot of exaggeration,” he told me. Yet when it comes to his own BrainHQ games, Merzenich confidently argues that they are proven to work, noting that they have been used in many more studies than his competitors’ products. “For a lot of people, in the state they’re in, sitting down in front of your iPad or computer can save their bacon,” he says. He too recommends leading an active life but says that “for time spent, there’s nothing more efficient for driving neurological change” than his games. His views make Merzenich a polarizing character in the field. When I asked Lindenberger about Merzenich, he said, “I don’t see how he can base his business on science in the sense of having evidence for these very big claims.”
So far, only one study has followed a large group of older subjects for years and also looked for real-world effects. Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly, or Active, began in 1999 with nearly 3,000 healthy older adults. One group of the subjects played a crude speed-of-processing computer game, originally developed by Karlene Ball, the chairwoman of the psychology department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and later acquired by Posit Science. It flashed pictures for shorter and shorter durations and challenged players to identify them. These subjects received a total of only about 10 hours’ worth of training over five weeks, with a few hours of follow-up “booster” training nearly a year later and then again three years after that.
Yet the benefits seemed to hold up. When tested fully 10 years later, the group of video-game players still performed better on a speed-of-processing test than members of a control group that received no training. More startling were some results found outside the lab: Those who had played the computer game had been involved in 50 percent fewer car accidents than the control group. The training seemingly made them more perceptive behind the wheel.
The next step toward legitimacy — beyond long and patient studies like this one — might come from the F.D.A. Several games are now going through the federal approval process. Akili is currently arranging trials of Project: Evo to treat conditions that accompany routine aging and as a tool to detect the early onset of Alzheimer’s. Eddie Martucci, Akili’s vice president, says he wants to do enough tests to prove the game’s power not just to the F.D.A. but also to doctors, so they’ll prescribe it: “It’s not our business model to squeak through,” Martucci says. “We want doctors and regulatory agencies to have no doubt.”
Merzenich’s company, Posit Science, is pursuing F.D.A. approval for a speed-of-processing game that has shown success in treating hemispatial neglect in stroke patients, a condition that causes patients to lose one side of their vision and sometimes neglect a limb. “We saw some real-world effects,” says Tom Van Vleet, a neuropsychologist who worked on the game before he was hired by Posit Science. After playing the game, he claims, “one guy used his arm for the first time in six years.”
Ann Stewart, who is 66, participated in Gazzaley’s NeuroRacer study. Recently I visited her cozy, art-filled home, where she has lived alone since her husband died several years ago. Witty and white-haired, Stewart hardly seemed cognitively challenged. Before retiring, she was a partner in a commercial real estate firm. (“I had a huge Rolodex of brokers and people,” she said.) She also reads avidly and sings; not long ago, she attended a Big Sur musicians’ camp. But in her 60s, she found herself becoming forgetful, leaving her purse in the car overnight. “That was scary,” she told me. When she heard about the trial, she jumped at the opportunity.
She became quite addicted to NeuroRacer — and good at it. “I was really kind of sad when they took it away from me!” she said. Her experience illustrates both the potential and the limits of brain training. Technically, she’s part of the cohort who improved and says she feels she became better at multitasking, “more conscious of what I was doing every day.” But she struggled when I asked her for examples of how this had improved her daily life. In fact, to keep from forgetting her purse, she hit upon a more prosaic, low-tech solution: She bought a bigger one that’s harder to leave behind accidentally.
The elderly have long been masters of devising clever tricks to compensate for mental failings, turning objects all around them into cognitive props. Medicine might be left on the kitchen table, its presence there a daily reminder that pills need to be taken. To-do lists on Post-it notes serve as scaffolds for their memory. If you’ve already lost cognitive function, and brain training can only go so far, you find other ways to cope.
It might very well be that equally promising technology for our brains will augment rather than improve them. Already technology firms are developing methods to help the elderly by offloading memory and cognition, creating digital tools more sophisticated than oversize purses. The company Vitality, for example, has created GlowCaps, pill bottles that track when they’ve been opened. If users forget to take their pills on time, LEDs in the bottle cap might light up as a reminder; if it goes unopened for hours, the bottle sends an alert by email or text. A 2010 trial found that users of these smart bottles had a 98 percent rate of taking meds on time, compared with 71 percent in a control group. (Full disclosure: I have given an unpaid talk about my book “Smarter Than You Think” for Partners Healthcare, the nonprofit agency that financed this experiment.) A small study involving a similar device in China also found positive results.
You can imagine a world where tools like this offer compensating help in even more active ways. Self-driving cars could significantly help seniors cope with the mental challenges associated with driving. Wearable computers like the Apple Watch or Google Glass could combine GPS and location sensors to remind our aging brains of tasks we planned to do: If you’re at the grocery store, don’t forget the dog food.
In younger people, digital tools have prompted social fears — at what point have we outsourced so much of our brain that it’s no longer our brain? The elderly, already dealing with cognitive decline, may not have as much use for such metaphysical questions. Having the world help you think, through whatever means, may be philosophy enough.
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Smarter Than You Think.”


Statement          :
“You just crashed a little bit,” Adam Gazzaley said (Direct)
Adam Gazzaley said he just crashed a little bit (Indirect)
“It’s a rough life, being a nervous system over 60 or 70 years,” says Jonathan King (direct)
Jonathan King says It’s a rough life, being a nervous system over 60 or 70 years. (indirect)

Question      :
“Do we really want to sabotage this?” he asked them. (direct)
he asked them that do they really want to sabotage them. (indirect)

Imperative :
“I was really kind of sad when they took it away from me!” she said.(direct)
she said she was really kind of sad when they took it away from her. (indirect)

Name    : Achmad Andika S.
Class      : 4sa04
NPM      : 1711923

Pembelajaran Bahasa Inggris Berbasis Komputer.
Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/magazine/can-video-games-fend-off-mental-decline.html?_r=0

Senin, 06 Oktober 2014

Active and Passive Voice

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ACTIVE VOICE
In Active Voice, things that do the actions (verb) are considered as Subject, whereas the thing receiving the action is called Object. It is the natural form of a sentence since we can find it on every writing forms.
[Thing doing action/Subject] + [verb] + [Thing receiving action/Object]
Examples         :
·         German researchers conducted a study Video games aren't bad for you
·         They're actually making your life better.
·         The team separated children age 7 to 13 into two groups, one of which played an action game called "Rayman Raving Rabids" while the other played a lower tempo game. 
·         The study's authors believe that the process of locating and aiming at enemies exercised gamers' eyes.

PASSIVE VOICE
Passive Voice is an exact opposite of Active Voice, the subject is one who received actions and things that do the actions is placed as the object. Passive voice is used if the object is more important to be emphasized in the sentence rather than the subject, it can be used if there are no subject to be mentioned or the subject is unknown.
[Thing receiving action/Object] + [be] + [past participle of verb/verb3] + [by] + [Thing doing action/Subject]
Examples         :
·         This proves that specific brain regions can be trained by means of video games.
·         A study of 681 healthy individuals ages 50 and older revealed that playing 10 hours of a specially designed video game was able to stall the natural decline of different cognitive skills by up to seven years, in some cases.
·         In 2010, researchers presented evidence at the American Pain Society's annual scientific meeting that video games, specifically ones with an emphasis on virtual reality, have proven effective in reducing anxiety or pain caused by medical procedures or chronic illness.
·         In addition, those being treated for burn wounds found a decline in their pain ratings by rates of 30 to 50 percent.
·         “The present results advance the idea that the link between electronic gameplay and psychosocial functioning is nuanced and suggests that the limits focused guidelines advanced by the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Medical Association, and Royal College of Pediatrics may need further evaluation.”

All the examples are taken from  : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/07/video-games-good-for-us_n_4164723.html