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Posts

August 26, 2012

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12:25 PM | Cliches, information and metaphors: Overcoming prejudice with metahor hacking and getting it back again
“We have to use cliches,” said professor Abhijit Banerjee at the start of his LSE lecture on Poor Economics. “The world is just too complicated.” He continued. “Which is why it is all the more important, we choose the right cliches.” [I'm paraphrasing here.] This is an insight at the very heart of linguistics. Every [...]
Metaphor Hacker
Language | Philosophy

August 24, 2012

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2:35 AM | Have you seen me before?
I have been using PCA to correct blink artifact in an EEG study that I am presenting at AMLaP in a couple weeks. Generally, I think I've gotten pretty good at detecting blinks. I do see other things that look like artifact but which I don't understand as well. For instance, look at this channel plot: (You should be able to increase the size of the picture by opening it in a new window). So this looks a bit like a blink, but it's in the wrong place entirely. This is a 128 electrode EGI cap, […]
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

August 19, 2012

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10:17 AM | Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-08-19
A Fee-Based Twitter Is No More Ideologically Pure Than An Ad-Supported Twitter http://t.co/clqZnbQb Bad #metaphors make for bad choices # Powered by Twitter Tools
Metaphor Hacker
Language | Philosophy

August 17, 2012

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10:23 PM | Around the Internet - 7/30/2012
Citations There have been a bunch of posts lately on citations and the Impact Factor. I started with these two posts by DrugMonkey. These posts have links to others in the chain, which you can follow. Here's a slightly older post (from late July) on reasons to self-cite. Next topic So I didn't actually see anything else interesting this week. Possibly because I've been trying to streamline a bootstrapping analysis (which I may blog about when I finally get it done). Early in the […]
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

August 03, 2012

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10:41 AM | Evolutionary Linguistics conferences in Beijing and Geneva
Two recent calls for papers in evolutionary Linguistics: Conference in Evolutionary Linguistics 2012.  November 9th-11th, 2012, Peking University. Submission deadline: September 1st. The keynote speakers include Prof. William S.-Y. Wang, William Labov and Morten Christiansen. Session on Origin of language and human cognition at the International Congress of Linguistics. July 22nd-27th, Geneva. Submission deadline: September [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

August 01, 2012

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3:08 PM | New source of post-doctoral funding
NSF has just announced what appears to be a new post-doctoral fellowship. The document linked to lists two different tracks: Broadening Participation and Interdisciplinary Research in Behavioral and Social Sciences. It is the second one that seems to be new. Here's the heart of the description: Track 2. Interdisciplinary Research in Behavioral and Social Sciences (SPRF-IBSS): The SPRF-IBSS track aims to support interdisciplinary training where at least one of the disciplinary components is an […]
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

July 27, 2012

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8:06 AM | Evolution of the Speech Code: Higher-Order Symbolism and the Linguistic Big Bang
Two months ago Daniel Silverman (San Jose State University) gave a talk at the LEC on the Evolution of the Speech Code: Higher-Order Symbolism and the Linguistic Big Bang. With his permission, I’ve posted below a PDF of a paper he’s written based on the talk — it’s really fascinating stuff and chock-a-block with ideas. [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

July 25, 2012

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12:23 AM | Another bunch of retractions
It appears that a series of papers, written by a German business professor, are being retracted. This particular scandal doesn't seem to involve data fabrication, though. Instead, he is accused of double-publishing (publishing the same work in multiple journals) and also of making errors in his analyses (this lengthy article -- already linked to above -- discusses the issues in detail). It's possible that I was not paying attention before, but there seems to be more publication scandals […]
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

July 22, 2012

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3:00 AM | Making up your data
Having finished reading the Simonsohn paper on detecting fraud, I have come to two conclusions: 1. Making up high-quality data is really hard. Part of the problem with making up data is that you have to introduce some randomness into it. If your study involves asking people how much they are willing to pay for a black t-shirt, you can't just write down that they all were willing to pay the average (say $12). You have to write down some variation ($12, $14, $7, $9, etc.). The problem is […]
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

July 20, 2012

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9:46 PM | Detecting fraud
Uri Simonsohn has now posted a working paper describing how he detected those two recent cases of data fraud. Should my other writing projects progress fast enough, I'll write about it soon. I'll also post links to any interesting discussions I come across.
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

July 13, 2012

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12:06 PM | A visual depiction of vision
Filed here, so I can use it next time I teach intro psychology: What did we do before XKCD?
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

July 11, 2012

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9:41 AM | Visualising language similarity through translation statistics
A tweet put me on to UNESCO’s Index Translationum – World Bibliography of Translation.  It’s a list of books that have been translated from one langauge into another.  I wondered if there was a way to use this to look at language similarity which took bilingualism into account.  Essentially, if two languages are very different [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

July 10, 2012

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3:45 PM | Update on Dragon Dictate
I recently bought a new computer, and Dragon Dictate is working much better on it, if not perfectly. And this is despite the fact that I have trained the new copy much less than the old one. One annoying/funny problem that keeps coming up: Dictate always transcribes "resubmission" as "recent mission". So, "Here's the news from the resubmission" becomes "Here's the news from the recent mission."
Games with Words
Language | Psychology

July 05, 2012

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10:09 AM | Ancient theories of langauge evolution: The origin of the monolingual myth
Here’s a talk by János Németh on the Prehistory of Evolutionary Linguistics.   Németh demonstrates that thinking about the origins of language predates the Enlightenment by over a thousand years.  Ideas that actually appear pretty modern were discussed in Ancient Greece.  However, after this initial burst of progress, there was a thousand year gap where no progress [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
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10:09 AM | Ancient theories of language evolution: The origin of the monolingual myth
Here’s a talk by János Németh on the Prehistory of Evolutionary Linguistics.   Németh demonstrates that thinking about the origins of language predates the Enlightenment by over a thousand years.  Ideas that actually appear pretty modern were discussed in Ancient Greece.  However, after this initial burst of progress, there was a thousand year gap where no progress [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

July 04, 2012

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8:21 AM | Higgs Boson and Big Data
It’s not about cultural evolution, but I think most people who have even a passing interest in science are gearing up to welcome Higgs Boson to the elementary particle party. Anyway, here’s a nicely put together video on explaining what the Higgs Boson is and why its discovery is significant: The Higgs Boson Explained from [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

June 27, 2012

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9:33 AM | Building a Network Means Knowing Who You Talk To
Why do people follow others on Twitter, only to require them to validate with a service like TrueTwit when they wish to follow back? When I follow somebody, I make that decision based on interacting with them, having a look at their timeline, or finding them in follower lists of people I rate. I will [...]
Speech and Science
Computer Science | Language

June 26, 2012

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7:41 PM | 5 million years
Blatant abuse of the blog for personal reasons.  But what else is a blog for? In 5 days time my band is performing at our first gig. To promote it, I’ve written a parody of 5 Years time by Noah and the Whale It’s about 5 million years of language evolution. Luckily, I won’t be playing [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

June 09, 2012

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5:13 PM | Plenary talk videos from Evolang
Videos from the plenary lectures of the Evolution of Language conference are now online, here. The setup is quite impressive, with seperate videos of the speakers and slides. The cover shot comes from one of my favourite moments of EvoLang, when Russel Gray taught us how to play a cut shot in cricket (about 43 [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
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9:22 AM | Exercise and Depression – A Tale of Misreporting and A Ray of Hope
There has been a lot of fury about a randomised controlled trial that showed “exercise did not help with depression” Except that it showed no such thing, and the authors acknowledge this openly in the conclusions of their paper. (Martin Robbins traces the Chinese Whispers succinctly at the Guardian.) So What Was That Study About? [...]
Speech and Science
Computer Science | Language

June 08, 2012

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1:25 PM | Results of Evolve a Band Name!
Here are the results from yesterday’s Evolve a Band Name experiment.  I have to say, the is a lot of creativity evident in the data!  Also, a technical oversight on my part leads to a lesson about cultural evolution… If you haven’t taken part yet, go here! Method Participants were presented with 10 band names [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

June 05, 2012

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12:49 PM | Evolve a Band Name!
Me and my band are looking for a new name.  It’s a tough decision: we need one that’s clear and catchy.  If only there was a process that took some names and made them more easily learnable.  Wait, what about Iterated Learning? (see Jame’s post for a summary) Click here to participate in our Band [...]

Kirby, S., Cornish, H. & Smith, K. (2008). Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105 (31) 10681-10686. DOI:

Tallerman, M. (2007). Did our ancestors speak a holistic protolanguage?, Lingua, 117 (3) 579-604. DOI:

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation

May 26, 2012

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9:28 AM | Science Defies Stereotypes
In a recent post, Athene Donald argued that an overemphasis on “geekiness” and associated cultural stereotypes might turn many girls off science. I agree with her. Although I’m a proud geekette, there are many paths to science, and many ways of living as a scientist. You don’t have to conform to anybody’s stereotype; all you [...]
Speech and Science
Computer Science | Language

May 25, 2012

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9:17 AM | Visualising Language Typology – Plotting WALS with Heat Maps
This is a side project I’ve been working on with Rory Turnbull and Alexis Palmer I recently presented a paper with the same title at the European Association of Computational Linguistics conference, in the Visualisation of Linguistic Patterns Workshop in Avignon (You can read about another paper presented by Gerhard Jäger in this workshop here [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language

May 22, 2012

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10:18 AM | How Can We Help Researchers For Whom English is a Second Language Write Good Papers?
Neuroskeptic pointed out one instance where plagiarism may be forgivable – when authors whose first language is not English copy small passages from papers to put together their literature review Now, if authors are clever enough to write an academic paper, their English should be good enough to summarise complex papers in a few words, [...]
Speech and Science
Computer Science | Language

May 15, 2012

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12:26 PM | Knowledge Pyramids in Telecare
In circumstances where it can take clinicians and therapists a long time to reach the patients who need them, or where patients need to travel long distances in order to see a specialist, telemedicine comes into its own. Telecardiology or teleradiology allow specialists to receive and assess data from remote locations, giving instant feedback if [...]
Speech and Science
Computer Science | Language

May 11, 2012

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3:41 PM | Having more children affects your basic word order
Last week in an EU:Sci podcast, Christos Christodoulopoulos challenged me to find a correlation between the basic word order of the language people use and the number of children they have.  This was off the back of a number of spurious correlations with which readers of Replicated Typo will be familiar.  Here are the results! [...]

Sean Roberts & James Winters (2012). Constructing Knowledge: Nomothetic approaches to language evolution, Five Approaches to Language Evolution: Proceedings of the Workshops of the 9th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, Other:

Gell-Mann, M. & Ruhlen, M. (2011). The origin and evolution of word order, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (42) 17290-17295. DOI:

Luke Maurits Why are some word orders more common than others? A uniform information density account, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 23 Other:

A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
Citation

May 08, 2012

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2:22 AM | Moodscope: Track your mood – social, but discreet
There are many low and high tech solutions for tracking one’s moods and feelings, from the humble notebook to the shiny app, from detailed, free-form diaries to ticking a couple of boxes on a form. Many people track their mood informally using social media, letting their online support network know how they feel through blog [...]
Speech and Science
Computer Science | Language

May 07, 2012

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3:47 PM | Since one can't be snarky in a response to a review...
I'll do it here. I am currently revising a paper for resubmission. On the whole, the reviews are fairly reasonable, with the exception of one cranky comment from a reviewer who complains that our literature review is woefully incomplete. This incompleteness seems to be our failure to cite one particular study. The reviewer writes It is possible that this work is flawed, but it really should be discussed. It does seem to be a relevant study and we would have cited it, had we known about it. [...]
Games with Words
Language | Psychology
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1:07 PM | Podcast on spurious correlations between social structures and linguistic structures
This week’s EU:Sci podcast includes an interview with me about my work on spurious correlations between social structures and linguistic structures (see my overview post here).  Christos Christodoulopoulos challenges me to find a link between the number of children a family has and the basic word order they use.  Complete nonsense with an important message:  [...]
A Replicated Typo
Evolution | Language
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