Briefly: Turkish University to Offer Armenian Language Course

Turkish university to offer Armenian language course

Using a $23,500 grant from the German Marshall Fund’s Black Sea Trust, Kadir Has University in Istanbul plans to begin offering Armenian language lessons this month.

Serdar Dinler, director of the university’s Center for Lifelong Learning, said by telephone that the course would be taught by a doctoral candidate from Armenia as part of a cultural exchange between countries whose ties have been fraught for a century.

“Turkey is becoming an energy-transit corridor and a center for diplomacy in the region,” Mr. Dinler said. “Also the Turkish government has a new ‘zero problems’ policy with its neighbors, so we believe that the new generation in Turkey needs to have more dialogue with neighboring countries, including Armenia, Russia, Iran, Greece, etc. Knowing the language can only help.”

Kadir Has is a private university established along the Golden Horn in 1997 and named after its founder, a Turkish automotive magnate.

— SUSANNE FOWLER

Students not ready to adopt Kindle for notes and reading

Just seven months after adopting an e-reading device, the Kindle DX, for university-level reading and note-taking, some 60 percent of students had put it aside in favor of traditional learning material, according to a new study presented at a conference on human-computer interaction by the Association for Computing Machinery in Vancouver, British Columbia, last week.

The study’s authors are investigating the impact of electronic reading devices on higher learning. “We are still trying to understand what we lose or gain by the adoption of e-reading technology,” said Alex Thayer, the primary co-author of the study and a doctoral student in human centered design and engineering at the University of Washington.

Students found it difficult to adapt traditional reading, scanning and note-taking methods to the platform. The study’s authors found that the e-reader disrupted students’ ability to remember the physical location of passages and notes in book.

However, the study also found that the e-reader, owing to its size and portability, was more likely to replace paper-based learning than computer-based learning. Students are more likely to use a Kindle than a computer on public transit, for example, Mr. Thayer explained.

The study is based on the learning habits of 39 first-year graduate students at the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering. Despite a relatively small sample size, the study represents one of the first to look at long term academic learning habits of students using electronic readers, according to the study’s authors.

“E-readers are not where they need to be in order to support academic reading,” Professor Charlotte Lee, who led the study, said in a statement.

— CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE

View the original article here

A Candidate in Peru Tacks Toward Brazil’s Course

 

But in a transformation this year that points to the eclipse of Venezuela by Brazil, Mr. Humala has swapped the red shirts for dark suits, explicitly rejected talk of seizing private companies and celebrated Brazil’s market-oriented economic model, while distancing himself from Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez.

Mr. Humala, 48, made the shift after hiring Brazilian campaign advisers tied to Brazil’s governing Workers Party. Now, in a surprise to Peru’s establishment, whose candidates split the vote in the first round in April, the strategy has helped make Mr. Humala, a former army officer who led a military revolt in 2000, the front-runner in polls in a tight race with Keiko Fujimori.

“The Venezuelan model is not applicable to Peru,” Mr. Humala said bluntly in a wide-ranging interview at his home here. If he is elected, he said, Peru will not join the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, or ALBA, the Venezuelan-led political bloc that includes Bolivia, Cuba and Nicaragua.

In contrast, Mr. Humala repeatedly praised Brazil and Brazilian companies, which are major investors in Peru’s mines, steel industry and hydroelectric projects, and the new Interoceanic Highway connecting western Brazil to Peru’s Pacific coast. All together, Brazilian investment here could climb above $30 billion over the next decade, according to the Brazil-Peru Chamber of Commerce and Integration.

“The Brazilian experience has delivered success and results by respecting freedom of the press, the adequate management of the macroeconomy, monetary stability,” Mr. Humala said. “Brazil has combined economic growth with social inclusion.”

Ahead of the June 5 runoff election, doubts surrounding Mr. Humala have accentuated a notable schism within Peru’s conservative elite.

Fearing a return to the authoritarianism and generalized corruption of the government of Ms. Fujimori’s father, Alberto Fujimori, who is jailed here after being convicted of human rights abuses, the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa said he preferred Mr. Humala, “unhappily and with fear,” over Ms. Fujimori, who has surrounded herself with her father’s old advisers. (In recent days, Ms. Fujimori has also spoken glowingly of Brazil’s economic and social policies.)

Prominent figures like Archbishop Juan Luis Cipriani of Lima have since lashed out at Mr. Vargas Llosa, Peru’s leading intellectual, for supporting Mr. Humala, and the established news media have mounted a barrage of coverage critical of his candidacy.

Undaunted by the controversy, Mr. Humala, speaking in a measured tone for more than 90 minutes in his spacious home, insisted that his transformation was genuine. But his family figures in this election, too.

Ollanta Humala has publicly disavowed the thinking of his father, Isaac Humala, a lawyer who espouses an ultranationalist ideology that calls for the supremacy of “copper-skinned” Peruvians, and the candidate said his own ideas were merely “nationalist in the context of consolidating the Peruvian nation.”

“Peru has changed, so we politicians must also change,” he said, referring to Peru’s recent economic boom. “Politicians cannot keep seeing ghosts, keep seeing cold wars and past schemes.”

Calling the United States a “brother country,” Mr. Humala further distanced himself from Venezuela’s president by saying he wanted to “qualitatively improve” ties with Washington, partly by engaging in a cooperative fight against drug trafficking in Peru, which is grappling with soaring cocaine production.

“We must work hand in hand,” Mr. Humala, dressed in a white shirt and jeans, said of Peru and the United States and of plans to strengthen ties with the Drug Enforcement Administration, which Venezuela and Bolivia have expelled. “We need to improve our intelligence cooperation.”

For Mr. Humala, who took 31.7 percent of the vote in the first round against 23.6 percent for Ms. Fujimori, it has been a struggle to lure middle-class voters in Lima and other cities to his side. His plan to raise taxes on mining companies to finance social programs appeals to poor voters in the mountain regions and tropical lowlands, but fears over his controversial past as a military officer, and doubts about his nationalist statements in the not-so-distant past, have many on edge.

“He isn’t what he intends to portray,” said Claudia Carrillo, 37, a secretary here. “Even if you burn a chicken’s beak, they’ll continue pecking.”

Mr. Humala still chafes at criticism of the military uprising he led in 2000, calling it an “insurgency” instead of a “rebellion.” Another episode that haunts Mr. Humala involves claims that he disappeared and tortured civilians while stationed at the Madre Mía counterinsurgency base in 1992 during the war against the Maoists of the Shining Path.

Andrea Zarate contributed reporting from Lima.