Laryngeal Air Sacs
So, I got a request from a friend of mine to make an abstract on the fly for a poster for Friday. I stayed up until 3am and banged this out. Tonight, I hope to write the poster justifying it into...
View ArticleAcademic Networking
Who are the movers and shakers in your field? You can use social network theory on your bibliographies to find out: Today I learned about some studies looking at social networks constructed from...
View ArticleCultural Evolution and the Impending Singularity
Prof. Alfred Hubler is an actual mad professor who is a danger to life as we know it. In a talk this evening he went from ball bearings in castor oil to hyper-advanced machine intelligence and from...
View ArticleCreative cultural transmission as chaotic sampling
Last week I attended a lecture by Liz Bradley on chaos. Chaos has been used to create variations on musical and dance sequences (Dabby, 2008; Bradley & Stuart, 1998). I was interested to see...
View ArticleA random walk model of linguistic complexity
EDIT: Since writing this post, I have discovered a major flaw with the conclusion which is described here. One of the problems with large-scale statistical analyses of linguistic typologies is the...
View ArticleLinguistic diversity and traffic accidents
I was thinking about Daniel Nettle’s model of linguistic diversity which showed that linguistic variation tends to decline even with a small amount of migration between communities. I wondered if...
View ArticleSonority and Sex: Why smaller communities are louder
Through this post on Sprogmuseet about Atkinson’s analysis of the out of Africa hypothesis, I found an article by Ember & Ember (2007) (who also quantified the link between colour lexicon size and...
View ArticleDoes a Smart Phone make Smart Science?
A new paper in plos one, published today, has shown that experiments on human cognition needn’t be confined to the lab. Experiments on human cognitive abilities, such as language, often rely on testing...
View ArticleCultural differences in lateral transmission: Phylogenetic trees are OK for...
The three areas under analysis An article in PLos ONE debunks the myth that hunter-gatherer societies borrow more words than agriculturalist societies. In doing so, it suggests that horizontal...
View ArticleTalk to the Virtual Hands
A new paper in PlosOne has used new fancy research methods to look at whether humans are more capable of describing a word using just spoken communication, or whether the use of gesture also helps....
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