Blog posts, essays and journalism by Dominik, from 2001 to the present, on AI, language, metaphor and learning. Each piece links to where it is published.
The explainer corrects common misconceptions about language-model architecture, memory, capabilities, training, tool use, and emotional representation.
The piece reports how Claude Code rebuilt a dormant WordPress blog as an Astro static site while preserving content, URLs, comments, and operational records.
The guide explains how Agent Skills combine language-model judgement with reusable instructions, files, and scripts to support reliable workflows within context and memory limits.
The essay argues that human and language-model cognition operates through meaning-rich schemas rather than the formal symbol manipulation performed by computers.
The essay argues that humans and language models interpret code through schemas while computers execute formal instructions without semantic understanding.
The piece records the blog's semi-retirement and introduces Schemas and Propositions as a new venue for work on language, cognition, and artificial intelligence.
The explainer uses Winograd-style examples to show that propositions depend on contextual schemas that cannot be exhaustively represented as rules or facts.
The piece contrasts narrative and ruminative sensemaking and argues that durable learning combines guided sequences with iterative, non-linear exploration.
The piece recommends books and exercises for improving academic writing through habits, sentence craft, social support, emotional awareness, and deliberate practice.
The piece proposes tests for persistent identity, autonomous intentionality, embodiment, theory of mind, and conversational implicature when assessing claims of machine sentience.
The piece maps maps, itineraries, briefings, and guides onto education to show that learning requires supported travel through a domain rather than preparation alone.
The piece explains how idiomaticity, underdetermination, and textual cohesion make metaphor translation difficult for the same reasons that translation generally is difficult.
The piece argues that ecological psychology must account for learned knowledge, language, social interaction, and deliberate reasoning if it is to explain a directly meaningful human world.
The piece compares history with weather to argue that historical models can identify patterns without supporting precise causal explanations or useful long-range predictions.
The piece argues that academic writing should prioritise scrupulous argument, explicit structure, and manageable sentence length over fashionable stylistic advice.
The piece uses Tolkien's distinction between allegory and applicability to argue that readers continually renegotiate metaphors rather than remain confined by authorial intent.
The piece expands a proposal for forged families by showing how kinship, hospitality, obligation, and state support interact across different societies.
The piece argues that concise principles become empty social signals unless practical wisdom reconnects them to changing behaviour in specific contexts.
The piece presents a revisionist history and anthropology reading list that challenges Eurocentric, state-centred, and linear accounts of human development.
The piece argues that benchmark victories do not establish human-like understanding and proposes prolonged supervised performance as a stronger test of artificial intelligence.
The piece argues that metaphor dynamically restructures knowledge through negotiated sensemaking rather than simply explaining abstract ideas with concrete ones.
The piece recommends five complementary books for understanding expert performance through mental representations, deliberate practice, conceptual blending, social knowledge, and reflection in action.
The piece uses translation and music as partial models for how writing forces implicit thoughts into explicit commitments that require practice to express clearly.
The piece distinguishes associative, lexical, inferential, instrumental, and creative understanding as overlapping levels that require progressively richer mental representations.
The piece argues that metaphors support learning only when they function within sustained practice as invitations, instruments, or catalysts rather than isolated explanations.
The piece argues that linguistics will improve through a productive interaction between better data and better theory rather than through more rigid definitions alone.
The piece shows how popular retellings of Schrödinger's cat and the butterfly effect turn cautionary scientific analogies into misleading literal claims.
The piece identifies unresolved questions about deliberate and automatic metaphor processing, the relation between textual and conceptual metaphor, and variation in figurative understanding.
The piece uses time zones, scheduling, and data transfer to show why seemingly simple tasks remain difficult for both people and artificial intelligence.
The piece argues that machine-learning systems represent problem spaces without possessing the flexible, embodied, and metacognitive mental representations used by humans.
The piece analyses an extended comparison to show that metaphor and simile operate together within a dynamic process of discourse-based meaning construction.
The piece provides a selective route through Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things that prioritises its account of categories, cognitive models, embodiment, and metaphor.
The piece argues that perfect reference is impossible and proposes pragmatic, provisional heuristics for living with the resulting limits on knowledge and rationality.
The piece compares music and language to show that their shared structural features do not erase fundamental differences in meaning, acquisition, and dialogue.
The piece presents seventeen findings from linguistics that teachers, journalists, policy experts, and grammar commentators should understand about language.
The piece argues that religion rarely causes wars on its own and that military capacity, legitimating glory, and competition for resources provide stronger recurring conditions.
This note presents three conference abstracts on open licensing and accessibility, early licensing decisions in projects, and sustainable models for producing open educational resources.
The piece argues that claims about exceptional metaphor use in Indigenous American languages require comparative evidence rather than cultural stereotypes.
This piece introduces Research Zoo as a practical platform that could support guerrilla researchers, practitioner collaboration, shared research design, and funding.
This piece argues that confusion, demotivation, weak expert interaction, and attrition are general properties of schooling rather than distinctive failures of MOOCs.
This piece rejects profit as a guarantee of educational quality and proposes open content, portable data, open platforms, and relationship-based services as sustainable alternatives.
The piece explains how to assemble Wikipedia articles into textbooks and compares the workflow, accessibility, and alternatives for collaborative book creation.
This piece argues that entrepreneurship is a partial metaphor for educational change whose useful funding and collaboration models do not justify importing startup assumptions wholesale.
This piece argues that critics judge MOOCs against an idealised account of higher education and should compare evidence about access, learning, assessment, and teaching across both forms.
This video introduction asks how open courses can fund participation, assessment, and recognition without depending on large institutions or proprietary scarcity.
This piece argues that MOOC completion rates must be interpreted through scale, participant motivation, investment, and the different consequences of leaving a free course.
This guide explains why and how to make a course more MOOC-like through open participation, personal learning networks, simple tools, and digital skills.
This piece answers criticisms of MOOCs by comparing them with conventional higher education and emphasising access, openness, peer learning, and institutional change.
The piece compares Drupal and WordPress and recommends each platform for different organisational needs, technical capacities, and maintenance budgets.
This piece argues that researchers should make their learning networks more open through blogging and social media so newcomers and practitioners can participate.
The piece argues that scientific and religious knowledge share social practices and narratives despite making different claims about method and utility.
The piece argues that education policy should account for the labour costs and uncertain outcomes of innovation while funding local experimentation within an equitable central safety net.
This piece supports public participation in research funding but rejects printed outputs and context-free quantitative claims about development programmes.
The piece identifies six recurring Drupal usability problems and argues for an extended core that can improve the product independently of the platform.
The piece argues that education technology events and public funding should give open-source software, Creative Commons resources, and teacher-led innovation a central role.
This piece argues that open, pseudonymous, trackable review could make scholarly trust more accountable and loosen academic publishing's control over knowledge.
The piece argues that the internet accelerates communication but leaves most human institutions and activities constrained by human time and attention.
This review assesses OpenIDEO as a model for community-based research while identifying gaps in brainstorming, reputation, user-led questions, tagging, and project branching.
The piece argues that neuroscience cannot explain language by assuming direct structural correspondences between brain activity and linguistic phenomena.
This piece proposes a neuroscience knowledge-exchange network that gives researchers and practitioners equal roles in discussion, curation, reputation, and small-scale research.
This piece argues that educational repositories need trusted communities, social curation, and regular discovery channels to make shared resources useful.
This note assesses Get The Data as a quantitative research community whose question-and-answer and reputation features could help organise broader research projects.
This piece proposes community-based educational research in which practitioners and researchers define questions, award small grants, and share situated findings during the work.
This piece uses the Anthologize project to argue that short, inexpensive, public projects can produce useful tools and research through iterative work.
This piece presents Harvard OpenScholar as a model for institutional academic communities and argues that cross-institutional federation should follow.
The piece reports on Mahara UK 2010 through contemporaneous tweets about e-portfolio practice, implementation barriers, and forthcoming platform features.
This piece summarises evidence that researchers rarely use Web 2.0 services and argues that institutions should support experimentation without centralising it.
This piece proposes a federated academic identity that joins sign-on, profiles, scholarly outputs, social connections, privacy controls, and professional review across services.
This piece proposes an online community where practitioners, researchers, and funders jointly formulate questions, conduct research, and share results.
The piece argues that learning technologists should prioritise listening to users because simple software often supports unanticipated uses better than feature-heavy systems.
The piece argues that political opponents treat language as producing inevitable conclusions and therefore interpret disagreement as incompetence or corruption.
The piece argues that the US Constitution's default meaning of limited copyright conflicts with laws that extend corporate control without promoting progress.
The piece argues that scientific reductionism reflects a folk theory of truth and proposes level-specific tendencies as an alternative model of knowledge.
The piece shows how converting a population-level gender pay gap into an individual unpaid-work scenario changes the claim's meaning and policy implications.
The piece argues that categorisation enables both ordinary navigation and social prejudice while negotiation permits people to revise its consequences.
The piece argues that explanations of the September 11 attacks for children should present competing perspectives explicitly instead of using syntactically simplified but conceptually opaque prose.
The piece argues that growing computing power and information volume will not yield human cognition or knowledge without models of embodied and social processes.
The piece explains a pageant contestant's incoherent answer as a failed attempt to integrate stock public frames under pressure rather than evidence of low intelligence.
The piece challenges the news-diet metaphor by showing that audiences exercise political autonomy in ways that simple models of media causation cannot explain.
The piece challenges theories that treat ordinary audiences as cognitively captive to propaganda while exempting trained analysts from the same influence.
The piece argues that journalistic anecdotes acquire truth through negotiated interpretation and that verification checklists cannot remove this dependence.
The piece analyses schematic euphemisms in Iraq war reporting and asks how discourse analysis can avoid disguising political participation as objectivity.
The piece argues that linguistic competence includes negotiated tension between conservative norms and innovation, including the linguist's political role.
The piece argues that a Wittgenstein quotation reflects folk theories that separate logical intelligence from language's imperfect and deceptive expression.
The piece uses the phrase liberal fascism to show how generative analogies are judged through negotiated aptness and credibility rather than truth alone.
The piece uses a persistent misunderstanding of trophy wife to argue that speakers can privately misconstrue entrenched lexical and grammatical constructions.
The piece argues that emphatic slurs do not reliably reveal underlying prejudice and that discourse analysis cannot securely recover an individual text's hidden meaning.
The piece analyses how ritual qualifications and historical analogies preserve the symbolic significance of the September 11 attacks while permitting criticism.
The piece argues that education chiefly supplies knowledge and membership signals that establish credibility rather than uniformly transforming attitudes or abilities.
The piece argues that online collectives reorganise social connections without removing hierarchy, marginality, or human limits on maintaining relationships.
The piece argues that critics of free-market doctrine can reproduce the same ritualised ideological reasoning when they present their own framework as human nature.
The piece reviews Accepted as a comedy that combines progressive educational theories while avoiding the unwanted consequences of genuine student choice.
The piece compares Wikipedia with the Encyclopédie as collaborative, contested, commercially divergent projects for organising and spreading knowledge.
The piece compares engagement with The Archers to an optical illusion in which listeners switch between an imagined world and awareness of its construction.
The piece reviews Revenge of the Nerds as a blend of liberation narrative and teenage comedy whose celebrated protagonists commit acts now recognised as sexual abuse.
The piece argues that metaphors can describe complex experiences more accurately than adjectives because readers construct richer mental images from them.
The piece argues that allied countries can treat the United States as an empire through symbolic analogies even when the United States rejects that identity.
The piece argues that debates over declaring English a national language reveal that English-speaking countries are not exempt from linguistic nationalism.
The piece argues that an analogy between feminism and Islam reproduces teleological history and accepts distorted accounts of both movements' visible extremes.
The piece cautions that an apparent association between gender equality and sexual satisfaction may be a research-generated symmetry without explanatory meaning.
The piece analyses Geena Davis's award speech as a challenge to gender expectations and an example of role-model narratives used to represent social change.
The piece distinguishes predictions about individual future events from probabilistic descriptions of past trends and treats prediction claims as integrative narratives.
The piece argues that school vouchers overextend a market metaphor that cannot represent education's multiple participants, purposes, and social consequences.
The piece argues that mature electronic-paper devices will eventually replace paper for most reading without radically changing literacy or information sharing.
The post argues that reporting on gendered internet use assimilates evidence into conventional stereotypes while minimising findings that contradict them.
The post proposes a cognitive revision of Propp's folktale morphology in which narrative elements pair form with meaning and combine through conceptual integration.
The post defends feminism as the appropriate name for analysing women's position in society and cognition because the term preserves the movement's critical force.
The post argues that imposed psychological debriefing can obstruct culturally situated recovery and examines rebuilding as a metaphor for emotional life.
The post argues that personal experience can motivate both scientific and unscientific conclusions, so scientific authority requires more than an idealised method.
The post argues that expertise can narrow judgement, while public decision-making still depends on experts selected through political and group identities.
The post examines how the quantity and survival of evidence constrain historical interpretation without preventing extensive scholarship from fragmentary sources.
The post argues that powerful and subordinate cultures construct reciprocal stereotypes that combine resentment, admiration, condescension, and identification.
The post argues that fictional narratives can normalise exceptional violence and that legal exceptions for torture would expand the circumstances treated as exceptional.
The post argues that civil partnerships reveal the ritual basis of marriage and that changes in heterosexual marriage made same-sex marriage conceptually possible.
The post uses inconsistent attitudes to execution to argue that human reasoning relies on prototypes and weighted schemas rather than strict logical entailment.
The post explains how communist legacies and post-communist hostility to feminism have limited recognition and enforcement of gender equality in the Czech Republic.
The post argues that American culture-war participants experience opposing institutions as threats to the validity of their identities and conceptual frames.
The post argues that synthetic phonics cannot transform literacy or society because educational interventions operate within complex and recurring institutional patterns.
The post contrasts individualist and collectivist accounts of sacrifice and argues that Western reporting interprets collective duty through individual motives.
The post argues that complex social systems are more amenable to changes in their conditions than to direct control, while still requiring regulation of harmful outcomes.
The post rejects a single model of real literacy and argues that concerns about digital snippets must account for varied reading and information practices.
The post argues that rapid increases in computing power do not predict social change because technical capabilities interact unevenly with cognitive and social constraints.
The post challenges research that treats all effects of divorce as damage and argues that children normally develop multiple identities across contexts.
The post argues that discrepancies between state and federal tests expose the limited relationship between test performance and broader knowledge or ability.
The post argues that xenophobic accounts may describe intercultural conflict more accurately than naive multiculturalism while failing because they treat cultures as static.
The post argues that English colonists judged Indigenous food practices through cultural assumptions about proper cultivation and asks how such judgements shaped settlement.
The post argues that social regularities can be treated like natural laws whose effects may be mitigated even when their exact outcomes cannot be predicted.
The post argues that women reaching high political office does not by itself advance women's rights and compares the symbolic roles of several women leaders.
The post uses the contrast between access journalism and close reading to argue that guided analysis can matter more than expert transmission in education.
The post distinguishes evolutionary facts from theories of evolutionary mechanisms and proposes a way to discuss intelligent design in science education.
Britské listy · 24 February 2003 · JournalismCzech
The piece uses a Washington Post quotation to argue that even liberal American commentary treats the world as a domain of United States responsibility and control.
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Journalism by outlet
Dominik wrote for the Czech and English press from 1997 to 2021. The pieces below are the ones with an online address; the rest of the print archive is not published on this site.