Traditional roles of women in the home and a negative bias in workplace support result in less career success for women versus men at the same stage of their research careers, determined researchers at the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in a study appearing in the November 2007 issue of EMBO reports. …
Read the full news release at Alpha Galileo
The Ig Nobel Award in linguistics has been given to “A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards”, according to BBC News.
Lauri Karttunen, a research fellow at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, Inc., a Xerox Company), has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Computational Linguistics, the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation. In the area of computational linguistics, Karttunen was one of the first pioneers to realize and exploit the potential of finite-state transducers for linguistic applications. …
Read the full news release at Yahoo! Finance news
If they were Scousers they’d be “made up”; from the Black Country they’d be “bostin”. But researchers from the University of Leeds are naturally “well chuffed” to receive a £460,000 grant to examine and catalogue the dialects and diversities of the English language.
Read the full article at Alpha Galileo
A University of Arizona scientist who has specialized in studying how fireflies and other creatures communicate has won a million-dollar grant to conduct a pioneering 5-year study on the roles that attention and memory play when the human brain hears and processes spoken language. …
Read the full news article at Medical News Today
In 2005, PLoS Medicine published an essay by John Ioannidis, called “Why most published research findings are false,” that has been downloaded over 100,000 times and that was called “an instant cult classic” in a Boston Globe op-ed of July 27 2006. This week, PLoS Medicine revisits the essay, publishing two articles by researchers that move the debate in two new directions. …
Read the full news article at Science Daily
A new wiki has been set up with computational linguistics in mind. Mark Joseph writes at Linguistlist:
“The purpose of this wiki is to facilitate the sharing of information on all aspects of Computational Linguistics. Wikipedia contains some excellent articles on Computational Linguistics, but the mandate of Wikipedia is to be an encyclopedia. This means that Wikipedia articles must be written for a general audience, not for specialists. It also means that content such as job ads and course outlines is not suitable for Wikipedia. Therefore this new wiki was created to fill a role that Wikipedia cannot fill.”
You can access it here.
I have, actually, for a long time thought that there should be a wiki for linguistics in general. One could take the linguistics articles available at Wikipedia as a starting point (there are, after all, a good number of them), and perhaps see if something like the Utrecht University’s Lexicon of Linguistics (which does not seem to be updated) could also be incorporated into it. And then, of course, one would need a lot of volunteers to populate the wiki.
And now that I am mentioning that, I might just as well mention another idea for a website that could turn out to be useful: a database of native speakers willing to help linguists in their research. It would be marvellous if one could, with just a few clicks of the mouse, contact native speakers of language X for information about one thing or another. At least I could do with such a feature in my own research.
The idea of a one-size-fits-all model for PhD study is simplistic, patronizing and bad for science. A recipe such as Georgia Chenevix-Trench’s, detailed in “What Makes a Good PhD Student?” is just one model for PhD success.
Read the full article at Nature
A small Amazon tribe, the Pirahã, have no number system. Is the reason neurological–they cannot count–or psychosocial–they just do not want to? An interview with Daniel L. Everett
Read the full interview (subscription needed) at Scientific American
Linguists are calling for an online public database, similar to the human genome project, that would allow researchers to collaboratively share different studies of language impairment.
Read the full article at New Scientist
Jane from lingforum.com contacted me about a new discussion forum for linguists. It works with a webforum-based interface, and can be accessed at http://www.lingforum.com/forum/. Lingforum is still very new, so comparisons with other linguistics related discussion groups such as those found at linguistlist.org should probably not yet be made. I wish all the best for lingforum.com.
I also followed some links from lingforum.com and found my way to http://www.lingnews.net/, which I might describe as a community-based version of Lingformant (i.e. rather than having one editor, any registered member can post articles). If you think that the range of articles here at Lingformant is too narrow (I didn’t, for example, bother to post about the whole linguistically rather irrelevant circus surrounding Hugo Chávez’s recent comments on Chomsky’s book and death, which has obviously done a lot to boost the sales of Chomsky’s political writings, as well as made MIT send out a statement that Chomsky is still very much alive), then Lingnews may be something you would like to take a look at. Or better yet, subscribe to both Lingformant and Lingnet, and while you are at it, also add Inttranews, Language Log and Phonoloblog (see links on the side column) to the mix. If you still continue to miss linguistics articles, there must be something wrong with you!
Women are being filtered out of high-level science, math and engineering jobs in the United States, and there is no good reason for it, according to a National Academies report released on Monday.
Read the full article at Reuters
From the ConCat website: “OT assumes that the grammar of a natural language consists of a set of constraints, called Con, plus an ordering on these constraints. In many (but not all) versions of OT, it is assumed that Con is universal: the ranking is the only difference between languages. There is as yet no agreement on the contents of Con. Furthermore, there is a lot of confusion in the literature about the orignal sources and formulation of many constraints. ConCat aims to build an encyclopedia of constraints which have been proposed, citing their original sources. ConCat assumes the form of a wiki: it can be freely edited by any interested party. All constraints are welcome; it is not our goal to present one particular view on constraints.”
Click here to visit the ConCat archive
Most of the science published today is in journals that can only be read by subscribers. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is part of a movement advocating the unrestricted dissemination of scientific information: open-access (OA) publishing. In this issue of the open-access journal PLoS Biology, Gunther Eysenbach provides robust evidence that open-access articles (OA articles) are more immediately recognized and cited than non-OA articles. As such, it adds objective support to the belief that open-access publication speeds up scientific dialog between researchers and, consequently, should be extended to the whole scientific literature as quickly as possible.
Read the full article at BrightSurf
It’s rare to use the words ‘hip hop’ and ’serious academic research’ in the same sentence, but a University of Calgary linguistics professor has relied on rap music as source material for a study of African American vernacular English.
Read the full article at University of Calgary
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