Gary Chapman taught on Lightroom 4 in our School of Photography I last Friday.
And it's an Oscar frontrunner...
Wow! :-(
@Shteyngart Like most busy mega-celebrities, I’ve decided to outsource my tweets.
#Outsourced2India Namaste, everyone! This is the Real Gary Shteyngart from NYC, USA!
#Outsourced2India Savoured some excellent aloo parathas at the test match against Pakistan.
#Outsourced2India I meant to say, enjoyed a bang-up FilletO’Cheese at the NJ Giants Sporting Centre. Go, squadron!
#Outsourced2India Looking out my window I can see the No. 6 train, pulling out of Union Square Terminus.
#Outsourced2India So many people clinging to the No. 6 train today! They must be heading to their villages for Diwali holiday.
#Outsourced2India Just found out they’re out-outsourcing the Real Gary to Italy because the rupee is strong & euro about to collapse.
#Outsourced2Italy Ciao, tutti! I am the Gari Autentico. I make the tweet about my real life in a new york.
#Outsourced2Italy O Madonna! My mistress and my mother shes fight about where to make the ski, Cervinia or Monte Bianco.
#Outsourced2Italy Brought laundry to my mama, she also wash the shoe, and we plan my 63rd birthday party with the cake and the stripper.
#Outsource2Italy Oggi I go to the bank but they say I have none the money. I vote Berlusconi 10 years, how this happen?
#Outsourced2Italy Porca miseria! My mistress is the Calabrese she make a violence on my face and now my wife she see.
#Outsourced2Italy I buy the lighter from the Nigerian at the mercato and give to my Filipina and now she is on fire. Che disastro!
#Outsourced2Italy Autentico Gari commence the 6-week ski in Monte Bianco. I out-out-outsource to Belarus. Ciao, ragazze.
#Outsourced2Minsk Hello. It is Real Gary. I am depressed.
#Outsourced2Minsk Still depressed.
#Outsourced2Minsk Drunk and depressed.
#Outsourced2Minsk Just drunk.
#Outsourced2Minsk Best friend Oleg throw me out of his Lada. He beat me. I beat him. Depressed.
#Outsourced2Minsk Drunk with Oleg. Now he is Best Friend FOREVER. I am so happy. Depressed.
#Outsourced2Minsk Ice fishing with BFF Oleg. He throw me in hole. I beat him. Depressed.
#Outsourced2Minsk Wife leaving for Moscow to be “hand model.” Very depressed.
#Outsourced2Minsk Got 10 years in labor camp for wearing wrong shirt to parade. Whatever. Outsourcing continues to Korea.
#Outsourced2Seoul Annyeong haseyo! This is the Real Gary Shteyngart, ranked 1,546th important American writer.
#Outsourced2Seoul Today Pastor Choi say Jesus have 2.2 billion followers, I have only 5,165. I feel a big shame in front of pastor.
#Outsourced2Seoul I must get Science of Tweeting Ph.D. at Dongguk University. This give me “leg up.”
#Outsourced2Seoul Stayed up 72 hours studying @AlecBaldwin tweets. He is top successful American, probably went to Harvard.
#Outsourced2Seoul Going out to Lotte World with pretty Ewha graduate Hong, Eun-hee!
#Outsourced2Seoul Find out Hong, Eun-hee parents want only Korea Tech graduate for Eun-hee and also Methodist. I feel a big shame.
#Outsourced2Seoul Appa compare me with my cool younger brother Dong Min (Dougie) who already tweet for Jennifer Weiner. I feel a big shame.
#Outsourced2Seoul Umma say I must make tweet funnier. Today my leg crushed by truck because I was thinking abt work! HA HA Now in hospital.
#Outsourced2Seoul Tweet boss say I am not A-team. I am maybe B-team or C-team. I feel a big shame in front of him. Also family.
#Outsourced2Seoul Standing on Mapo Bridge over Han River. I have no wife, no car, no top college degree, no leg. Wish I could outsource myse
#Outsourced2Seoul Last tweet was over 140 characters. Please accept my sincere apologies for this horrible mistake. Goodbye, cruel wo ♦
from the New Yorker
BY LAURAN NEERGAARD | THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Babies don't learn to talk just from hearing sounds. New research suggests they're lip-readers too.
It happens during that magical stage when a baby's babbling gradually changes from gibberish into syllables and eventually into that first "mama" or "dada."
Florida scientists discovered that starting around age 6 months, babies begin shifting from the intent eye gaze of early infancy to studying mouths when people talk to them.
"The baby in order to imitate you has to figure out how to shape their lips to make that particular sound they're hearing," explains developmental psychologist David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic University, who led the study being published Monday. "It's an incredibly complex process."
Apparently it doesn't take them too long to absorb the movements that match basic sounds. By their first birthdays, babies start shifting back to look you in the eye again — unless they hear the unfamiliar sounds of a foreign language. Then, they stick with lip-reading a bit longer.
"It's a pretty intriguing finding," says University of Iowa psychology professor Bob McMurray, who also studies speech development. The babies "know what they need to know about, and they're able to deploy their attention to what's important at that point in development."
The new research appears in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It offers more evidence that quality face-time with your tot is very important for speech development — more than, say, turning on the latest baby DVD.
It also begs the question of whether babies who turn out to have developmental disorders, including autism, learn to speak the same way, or if they show differences that just might provide an early warning sign.
Unraveling how babies learn to speak isn't merely a curiosity. Neuroscientists want to know how to encourage that process, especially if it doesn't seem to be happening on time. Plus, it helps them understand how the brain wires itself early in life for learning all kinds of things.
Those coos of early infancy start changing around age 6 months, growing into the syllables of the baby's native language until the first word emerges, usually just before age 1.
A lot of research has centered on the audio side. That sing-song speech that parents intuitively use? Scientists know the pitch attracts babies' attention, and the rhythm exaggerates key sounds. Other studies have shown that babies who are best at distinguishing between vowel sounds like "ah" and "ee" shortly before their first birthday wind up with better vocabularies and pre-reading skills by kindergarten.
But scientists have long known that babies also look to speakers' faces for important social cues about what they're hearing. Just like adults, they're drawn to the eyes, which convey important nonverbal messages like the emotion connected to words and where to direct attention.
Lewkowicz went a step further, wondering whether babies look to the lips for cues as well, sort of like how adults lip-read to decipher what someone's saying at a noisy party.
So he and doctoral student Amy Hansen-Tift tested nearly 180 babies, groups of them at ages 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 months.
How? They showed videos of a woman speaking in English or Spanish to babies of English speakers. A gadget mounted on a soft headband tracked where each baby was focusing his or her gaze and for how long.
They found a dramatic shift in attention: When the speaker used English, the 4-month-olds gazed mostly into her eyes. The 6-month-olds spent equal amounts of time looking at the eyes and the mouth. The 8- and 10-month-olds studied mostly the mouth.
At 12 months, attention started shifting back toward the speaker's eyes.
It makes sense that at 6 months, babies begin observing lip movement, Lewkowicz says, because that's about the time babies' brains gain the ability to control their attention rather than automatically look toward noise.
But what happened when these babies accustomed to English heard Spanish? The 12-month-olds studied the mouth longer, just like younger babies. They needed the extra information to decipher the unfamiliar sounds.
That fits with research into bilingualism that shows babies' brains fine-tune themselves to start distinguishing the sounds of their native language over other languages in the first year of life. That's one reason it's easier for babies to become bilingual than older children or adults.
But the continued lip-reading shows the 1-year-olds clearly still "are primed for learning," McMurray says.
Babies are so hard to study that this is "a fairly heroic data set," says Duke University cognitive neuroscientist Greg Appelbaum, who found the research so compelling that he wants to know more.
Are the babies who start to shift their gaze back to the eyes a bit earlier better learners, or impatient to their own detriment? What happens with a foreign language after 12 months?
Lewkowicz is continuing his studies of typically developing babies. He theorizes that there may be different patterns in children at risk of autism, something autism experts caution would be hard to prove.