Global Pragmatica LLC®

This post has very little to do with JMP scripting, content strategy, analytics, and the other stuff that Global Pragmatica LLC® can help with. But it’s important, and I’m committed to using every platform available to me to get the word out:

Since suicide is a contagious disease, and it’s in the headlines again, I think it’s urgent for parents, friends, family, teachers, coaches, and vague acquaintances of young gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, queer, and questioning folk to be on the alert in coming weeks.

LGBTQQ youth are statistically at extremely high risk for suicide, because, let’s face it—adolescence, middle school, and high school are awful to begin with. Teenagers are in the most oppressive, least supportive environment that most of us will ever face in our whole lives. For anyone who’s a little different, it’s a whole lot worse. For young folks who are dealing with all the usual adolescent crap AND are beginning to wonder if they’re even bigger misfits than everybody else around them, middle school and high school crap goes way beyond annoying and difficult to potentially fatal.

If you are LGBTQQ:

 
• It gets better! Life sucks now, but it won’t always suck. Just get through it somehow. Live into adulthood.

 

• Look around for the people who see you—they can help. They might not be able to relate to everything you’re going through, but they will help.

 

• If your family is awful, that’s not your fault—get the support you need wherever you can, and maybe someday your family will come around. They probably will. If they don’t, they suck, and they’re not your fault. Move on. Save your own life.

 

• Grow into adulthood—because IT GETS BETTER. Life will be really, really good someday, and the stuff that makes it hardest now will be some of the stuff that makes it the most beautiful later on, but you have to keep yourself alive to reach the promised land.

 

• If what you’re hearing in a church or shul or mosque or temple or wherever isn’t that you are loved, worthwhile, and meaningful, then it’s those people who are wrong, not you. These places are all made up of people, and people get stuff wrong, but God isn’t taking orders from those people. Any god worth believing in loves you just the way you are. (And for that matter, any people worth believing in love you just the way you are, too.)

If you are family, friend, acquaintance, teacher, coach, or something to LGBTQQ kids:

 
• It doesn’t matter if you understand or can relate to the LGBTQQ stuff. You don’t have to. All you have to remember is that these are young people going through difficult stuff on their way to becoming beautiful, loving, fulfilled adults, and they need love and support like everybody else.

 

• They’re getting all kinds of messages that something about them makes them not good enough, and all those messages are wrong. Give them the messages they desperately need to hear: that they’re good people, they’re worthwhile, they’re lovable, they matter.

 

• And IT GETS BETTER. It just does. They need to know that.

 

• If what they’re hearing in a church or shul or mosque or temple or wherever is part of the problem, remind them that this place is made up of people who get stuff wrong sometimes, and God doesn’t take orders from those people. Any god worth believing in loves them just the way they are.

My own adolescence wasn’t too bad. I grew up with parents and other adults who might have been clueless at the time about LGBTQQ stuff, but they had that unconditional love thing figured out. As a result, the crap I heard at school and church didn’t get far enough under my skin to do real damage—but I sure heard a lot of damaging crap! And I know way too many people for whom the crap they heard at school and at church and worst of all at home became overpowering, fatal messages, and they’re no longer with us.

We’ve lost way too many good people to fear, despair, and ignorance. Please do not let yourself or someone you see become yet another one of them. IT GETS BETTER.

A recording of the webinar panel discussion I moderated yesterday is now available here.

Bridging the gap between software development and localization

If you’re involved in software development, localization, internationalization, or globalization, you should watch this for a great introduction to the issues particularly with regard to stakeholder awareness, education, commitment, and communication—it was a lively panel with more than a few “hot button” topics getting lively debate, featuring a number of industry experts:

• Val Swisher, Founder & CEO of Content Rules
• Danica Brinton, Senior Director of International at Zynga
• Dale Schultz, Globalization Test Architect at IBM
• Edwin Hoogerbeets, Senior Internationalization Engineer at Palm
• Adam Asnes, CEO & President of Lingoport
• Erin Vang, Principal Pragmatist of Global Pragmatica LLC®

Free sample of Erin Vang’s work as a moderator

If you’re in charge of setting up panel discussions or conferences for your company and you’re wondering whether engaging a professional facilitator as your moderator for the event is worthwhile, you might want to watch this as a free sample—see how I work to make the conversation more valuable for the audience members and panel participants. I work as an audience advocate to ensure that the event delivers the content that was promised, that it’s lively and interesting, and that we get past the buzzwords, spin, and hot air right away—we get right into the content.

Erin Vang moderates panel discussion on software l10n

Cross-posted from Lingoport.com

So, you’ve developed a new software application, and have high aspirations in terms of selling your application to a global audience. Now what? Problems often arise between developers, localization managers, and business managers due to perceived lack of support, time, and money.

This lack of understanding can lead to great frustration within the development tiers. Join us for an hour long online panel discussion and learn how some of the best known industry thought leaders are contributing to bridging the gap between software development and localization.

The panel features the following industry thought leaders and experts from the software development, content development, internationalization, and localization industries:

• Val Swisher, Founder & CEO of Content Rules
• Danica Brinton, Senior Director of International at Zynga
• Dale Schultz, Globalization Test Architect at IBM
• Edwin Hoogerbeets, Senior Internationalization Engineer at Palm
• Adam Asnes, CEO & President of Lingoport

Online Panel Discussion: “Bridging the Gap Between Software Development and Localization”
Date and Times: Wednesday, August 3rd at 9:30am PT / 10:30am MT / 11:30am CT / 12:30pm ET
Registration: Register for free @ https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/964415249
Where: Your desktop

Erin Vang, Owner of GlobalPragmatica will be facilitating the online panel discussion. Erin has over twenty years of expe­ri­ence in sta­tis­ti­cal soft­ware doc­u­men­ta­tion, qual­ity assur­ance, project man­age­ment, and local­iza­tion, most recently as Inter­na­tional Pro­gram Man­ager for the JMP Research and Devel­op­ment at SAS, and pre­vi­ously with Aba­cus Con­cepts and SYSTAT. She is currently designing a localization program for Dolby Laboratories.

This presentation is intended for technical managers, software engineers, test engineering managers, QA managers, internationalization and localization managers, technical writers, content developers, and anyone wanting to learn more on how to optimize their global software releases.

We’d love to hear from you. Please send any questions or topics you’d like to have discussed during this panel to Chris Raulf @ chris (at) lingoport.com.

Update 4 August 2011

The recording of our panel discussion is now available here.

This article was originally published in slightly-edited form by Multilingual magazine, September 2010 and is reprinted here with permission. Erin Vang would like to thank Multilingual for graciously consenting to republication of this article in the GlobalPragmatica blog.

In 1998 I planned a trip to Norway and set about educating myself. In addition to the usual stack of guidebooks, language books, and cassettes, I picked up a copy of Norway: Culture Shock! A survival guide to customs and etiquette. I hate being the Ugly American when I travel, so I wanted to learn some of the little niceties that would help me blend in.

I enjoyed the book, but it felt inside-out and backwards to me somehow—all kinds of behaviors and cultural details that I considered normal were explained as if they were completely bizarre. It was astonishing to me that, for example, the book went to the trouble of explaining that you shouldn’t ask Norwegians how much money they make. You shouldn’t expect Norwegians to divulge much about themselves to strangers, or even for that matter to friends. When visiting a Norwegian family in their home, you should decline offers of food and drink at first and only relent after repeated offers are made. Further, an offer of “coffee” doesn’t mean a hot beverage. “Coffee” means a full lunch spread, with open-faced sandwiches, a variety of side dishes, perhaps some fruit soup, and at least an assortment of cookies if not cake for dessert. If you’re lucky, there will be leftover dumplings and ham, sliced and fried up together.

Well, duh! That’s normal, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

I should probably mention that I grew up in the snow belt of North America in a series of small towns settled in large part by Norwegian and German immigrants and still populated mostly by their descendants, who tell Ole and Lena jokes and would call a Norwegian-Swedish couple a “mixed marriage.” It turns out that I grew up with a Norwegian sensibility about things.

Eventually I turned to the “About the author” section in the back of the book and learned that she was an Asian woman who had married a Norwegian man and moved to Norway.

So the book was inside-out and backwards for me! Ostensibly it described Norwegian customs, but I learned more about which Norwegian customs seem odd to an Asian and in turn what the Asian norms are. I also learned how my sense of normal differs from the rest of North America, because the very things she pointed out about Norwegians are the traits that have made me stick out since I left the snow belt.

North America from the outside in

I’ve since had the privilege of traveling quite a bit in Asia and Europe as a localization program manager, continuing my inside-out cultural learning over dinners and drinks with my localization teams and in-country colleagues.

What particularly strikes me about Japan is its quiet, compact order and elaborate attention to manners, and upon returning home from Japan I’m always startled by how big, messy, and casual we Americans are. We think nothing of taking a sip of a beer as soon as it arrives, and if we pause for a toast, it’s just “Cheers!” with much noisy banging of glasses, and no attention to whose glass clinks higher or lower. We walk down office hallways talking in full voice, we’re more likely to call something sarcastic into our colleagues’ open doors than to notice whether they’re busy, and by the time we’ve gone past three people’s offices, we’ve walked past more space than a dozen comparable Japanese office-workers would use, and all of it is messier.

Over dinner in Korea one night I learned what I’d never noticed before in years of sampling Korean music, dance, and theater: that it reflects millenia of sadness. Korea’s long history is full of invasions, wars, cultural loss, and great deprivation. Korea’s classical and folk arts express the reserved, wary sadness of a people ravaged for tens of centuries by neighbors in every direction. A Korean attending an arts festival in North America would be stunned to see singers smiling, actors laughing, dancers frolicking, and performers of all types making joyful eye contact with their audiences. Korean arts serve a more important purpose than entertainment and fun: they remember loss and struggle, they record perseverance, they offer perspective about daily challenges in a context of surviving the unsurvivable.

North Americans think we are familiar with Chinese food until we actually visit China and are confronted with the real thing. Theirs is a cuisine of poverty, making the most of scarcity by using parts of the animal we call scraps, using plants we call “weeds,” and using elaborate techniques and richly layered flavors to make them all palatable. We might think that “American food” would seem simple and decadent to Chinese visitors, but in fact they are as perplexed by our foods as we are by theirs. The thing that puzzles them the most? That our foods come in big hunks and separated piles—think of a dinner at a typical American steakhouse, where your plate comes with a huge hunk of meat, an enormous baked potato, and a pile of one vegetable, all arranged so that nothing is touching. I was startled to discover that the foods my Chinese colleagues preferred were those that mingled meats and vegetables in one dish, all in one-fork pieces, such as a casserole. Their comfort had nothing to do with the flavors and everything to do with shapes!

North America from the inside out

What most North Americans probably don’t consider is that we are all outsiders in North America. Our planet’s third largest land mass after Asia and Africa is home to twenty more nations besides the biggest three, Canada, the United States, and Mexico. We are all outsiders in twenty-two of those countries. Narrowing the focus to just the US, our nation’s young history is one of myriad immigrant and native cultures settling tiny pockets of a vast continent. Cultures have blended to a certain extent with those of the other peoples in the vicinity, and the resulting regional identities persist to the present. The lines are starting to blur in the age of national and global television, radio, and internet, but the potential for cultural conflict and misunderstanding is far greater than many people realize. I’ll share a few of the more amusing examples from my own life.

When I left my Norwegian enclave in the snow belt and arrived in Chicago for grad school, I couldn’t figure out why my friends never offered me anything to eat or drink when I visited. It wasn’t until some fellow Norwegian-Lutheran-Minnesotans from my alma mater joked about our common tendency to turn things down three times before accepting that I realized what the problem was. My friends did offer me drinks and snacks, but out of Norwegian-American habit, I always said something along the lines of, “Oh, I’m fine–no, thank you.” But that was that! My friends didn’t realize that the first three times you offer something don’t count!

I spent about a dozen years working for SAS and traveling frequently to corporate headquarters in Cary, North Carolina. Much later I found the Culture Shock! series book on the American South and finally began to understand some of my experiences there. When my colleagues had responded to one of my ideas with, “Bless your heart!” they weren’t gratefully commending my cleverness—they were saying, approximately, “Oh, you poor baffled freak… you just don’t understand anything.” When they called me “Yankee,” it wasn’t a slight as I thought; they were just acknowledging that I was different. When I jokingly called myself a “damn Yankee” once, I was corrected with a smile: “You’re not a ‘damn Yankee’! You’re just a Yankee. Damn Yankees are the ones who don’t leave.”

We’re all outsiders

When a friend of yours grieves a death in the family or is recovering from surgery, do you send flowers?

What on earth for? What good are the flowers going to do anyone? Where I’m from, we make a tuna noodle hotdish complete with crumbled potato chips on top, and we bring it over to the house, hot and ready to serve, in a casserole carefully labeled with our last name on a piece of masking tape. We do this whether we like tuna noodle casserole or not, because it’s what is done.

Being an outsider in North America is not a privilege reserved for visitors from other countries.

Statisticians and data analysts are in a kerfuffle about the recent remarks of AnnMaria De Mars, Ph.D. (President of The Julia Group and a SAS Global Forum attendee) in her blog that the open source statistical analysis tool R is an “epic fail,” or to put it in Twitterese, #epicfail:

I know that R is free and I am actually a Unix fan and think Open Source software is a great idea. However, for me personally and for most users, both individual and organizational, the much greater cost of software is the time it takes to install it, maintain it, learn it and document it. On that, R is an epic fail.

And oh, how the hashtags and comments and teeth-gnashing began!

Nathan Yau’s excellent FlowingData blog recaps the kerfuffle nicely, and his post has accumulated a thoughtful comments thread, as has Dr. De Mars’, to both of which I added my thoughts, expanded here:

To make my prejudices clear, I’ve spent several decades in commercial statistical software development (working in a variety of R&D roles at SYSTAT, StatView, JMP, SAS, and Predictum, and I now do custom JMP scripting, etc., for Global Pragmatica LLC.

I can say with hard-won authority that:

– good statistical software development is difficult and expensive
– good quality assurance is more difficult and expensive
– designing a good graphical user interface is difficult, and expensive
– a good GUI is worthwhile, because the easier it is to try more things, the more things you will try, &
– creative insight is worth a lot more than programming skill

Even commercial software tends to be under-supported, and I’ll be the first to admit that my own programming is as buggy as anybody else’s, but if I’m making life-and-death or world-changing decisions, I want to be sure that I’m not the only one who’s looked at my code, tested border cases, considered the implications of missing values, controlled for underflow and overflow errors, done smart things with floating point fuzziness, and generally thought about any given problem in a few more directions than I have. I want to know that when serious bugs are discovered, the knowledge will be disseminated and somebody’s job is on the line to fix them.

For all these reasons, I temper my sincere enthusiasm about the wide open frontiers of open source products like R with a conservative appreciation for software that has a big company’s reputation and future riding on its accuracy, and preferably a big company that has been in the business long enough to develop the paranoia that drives a fierce QA program.

R is great for what it is, as long as you bear in mind what it isn’t. Your own R code or R code that you find sitting around is only as good as your commitment to testing and understanding of thorny computational gotchas.

I share the apparently-common opinion that R’s interface leaves a lot to be desired. Confidentiality agreements prevent me from confirming or denying the rumors about JMP 9 interfacing with R, but I will say that if they turn out to be true, both products would benefit from it. JMP, like any commercial product, improves when it faces stiff competition and attends to it, and R, like most open source products, could use a better front end.

And now let me make my case for R being an epic success.

I like open source software. I use a bunch of it, and I do what I can for the cause (which isn’t much more than evangelism, unfortunately). For me, the biggest win with open source software is that it makes tools available to me, and others, who don’t need them enough to justify much of a price, but who can benefit from them when they’re affordable or free. When an open source tool gets something done for me, or eases some pain at least, I’m not that picky about its interface, and I’m willing to do my own validation (where applicable).

I can’t say that I love using Linux, but as a long-time UNIX geek and Mac OS X bigot, I am glad Linux is available, I use it for certain things, and I think it’s a whole lot better than Windows and other OSes, especially when Ubuntu builds work out. (I’ve had trouble getting JMP for Linux installed on Ubuntu, but that’s probably due to my own incompetence.) OpenOffice is kind of a pain, but it’s better than paying Microsoft for the privilege of enduring the epic fail that is Office, and it has much better support than Office for import/export of other formats. I love it that any number of open source projects are developing such fabulous tools as bzr version control, which I use daily, and that the FINK project is porting a whole bunch of great open source UNIX widgets to Mac OS X.

I think it’s wonderful that some of the world’s greatest analytical minds are using R to create publicly available routines for power-analysts. I love it that students and people who can’t afford commercial stats software, or who won’t use it enough to justify buying a license, have a high-quality open source option, if they’re willing to work at it a bit. I think it’s great that people who think Excel is good enough can’t make a price objection to upgrading to R.

I believe that democratizing innovation and proliferating analytical competence are good for us all. I count on projects like R and Linux to push commercial developers to make better products, and to force pricing and licensing of those products to remain reasonable. Monopolies are good for nobody, including monopolists.

Long live the proponents of R!

What do you think? Do you trust open source stats code? Do you think R’s interface is good enough? Is JMP’s any better? How heavily do you factor quality of documentation into decisions about software?