Questões de Concurso

   Over the past couple of years, the growing debate around automated facial recognition has reached a boiling point. As developers have continued to swiftly expand the scope of these kinds of technologies into an almost unbounded range of applications, an increasingly strident chorus of critical voices has sounded concerns about the injurious effects of the proliferation of such systems on impacted individuals and communities. Critics argue that the irresponsible design and use of facial detection and recognition technologies (FDRTs) threaten to violate civil liberties, infringe on basic human rights and further entrench structural racism and systemic marginalisation. In addition, they argue that the gradual creep of face surveillance infrastructures into every domain of lived experience may eventually eradicate the modern democratic forms of life that have long provided cherished means to individual flourishing, social solidarity and human self-creation.

   Defenders, by contrast, emphasise the gains in public safety, security and efficiency that digitally streamlined capacities for facial identification, identity verification and trait characterisation may bring. These proponents point to potential real-world benefits like the added security of facial recognition enhanced border control, the increased efficacy of missing children or criminal suspect searches that are driven by the application of brute force facial analysis to largescale databases and the many added conveniences of facial verification in the business of everyday life.

   Whatever side of the debate on which one lands, it would appear that FDRTs are here to stay.

Adapted from: understanding_bias_in_facial_recognition_technology.pdf

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  As a linguist, I understand that language shifts and changes. The voiced z sound of houses is being replaced by an unvoiced s sound. The abbreviation A.I. has become a verb, as in “He A.I.ed it.” Neologisms abound, and new words often make us think of things in new ways.

  But I don’t adopt all of the changes. I still say houses with a z. I avoid some new words that seem too flash-in-the-pan (like cheugy and delulu). By the time I might begin using them, they are probably already on their way out. Some bits of neology, I used ironically at first, but soon found myself adopting as part of my everyday vocabulary, and dropped them. Still, there are some usages that I can’t quite bring myself to embrace.

  One is iconic. Everywhere I turn, I hear something described as the most iconic: movies, songs, sports figures, fictional characters, vehicles, photographs. Iconic has shifted to mean “famous.” My experience with the word comes from the semiotic triad of icon, index, and symbol, three of the 66 categories of signs proposed by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. For me, icons are visual representations: they resemble something. Dictionaries have now added definitions like “widely recognized and well-established” or “widely known and acknowledged especially for distinctive excellence.” Iconic has widened its meaning, but I haven’t come along.

(Edwin L. Battistella. https://blog.oup.com/2025/01/ some-barely-iconic-epic-usages/. Adaptado)

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  It has taken many years to bring the language teaching profession around to realizing the importance of listening in second and foreign language learning. As observed by Rivers, long an advocate for listening comprehension, “Speaking does not of itself constitute communication unless what is said is comprehended by another person”. Teaching the comprehension of spoken speech is therefore of primary importance if the communication aim is to be reached” (1966, pp. 196, 204). The reasons for the nearly total neglect of listening are difficult to assess, but as Morley notes, “Perhaps an assumption that listening is a reflex, a little like breathing - listening seldom receives overt teaching attention in one’s native language - has masked the importance and complexity of listening with understanding in a non-native language” (1972, p. vii).

  In reality, listening is used far more than any other single language skill in normal daily life. On average, we can expect to listen twice as much as we speak, four times more than we read, and five times more than we write.

(Joan Morley,. In: Marianne Celce-Murcia, (Ed.). Teaching English as a

second or foreign language. Boston: Heinle&Heinle-Thomson, 2001. Adaptado)