Animal communication, hockey player edition

In case you missed the biggest language or communication news of the week, here it is:

Scientists Believe Hockey Players May Communicate By Banging Sticks Against Boards

At least one contributor to this blog plays hockey (and the image here may be the stick he uses, in fact); it's good to know that he's capable of some form of communication beyond snarky blog posts.

Here's a key piece of the story, from biologists at Stanford:

“We found that hockey players can use stick-banging to indicate anything from disagreement with a referee to encouragement of their teammates,” said lead researcher Dr. Margaret Cundiff, who explained that players typically strike the boards a single time with force when they want to display anger, or use multiple softer taps in order to display approval. “Sometimes, an entire bench full of players will begin banging the boards in unison—either signaling that a goal has occurred, or that the players want a goal to occur. This actually lets hockey players ‘speak’ to each other, if you will, in surprisingly complex ways far beyond what was previously anticipated. They are truly magnificent creatures.”

Wow, magnificent indeed. 

Thank you, The Onion, for continuing top-shelf science journalism.

Science and Nature "distorting the scientific process"

Was too busy to blog this when I first saw it, but it doesn't seem like it's circulating as widely as I would have expected … Nobel Prize winner Randy Schekman has announced he's boycotting Science, Nature and Cell, because they …

are distorting the scientific process and represent a "tyranny" that must be broken.

The original article has this important note:

He also attacks a widespread metric called an "impact factor", used by many top-tier journals in their marketing. 

A journal's impact factor is a measure of how often its papers are cited, and is used as a proxy for quality. But Schekman said it was "toxic influence" on science that "introduced a distortion". He writes: "A paper can become highly cited because it is good science - or because it is eye-catching, provocative, or wrong."

This act alone won't change things, but maybe it's a start?

Image from here.

To produce science and to produce scientists

I have no clue whether readers of this blog know or follow Josh Schimel, who does Writing Science (and a book by the same name). He has a really nice piece here on a question that's  been eating at me lately. It's not the title of the piece ("Why strong labs sometimes submit weak papers"), but rather this much bigger point:

we must remember that as professors, we have two responsibilities: one is to produce science; the second is to produce scientists. The latter may be the more important—our highest responsibility is as mentor and trainer and while single papers easily disappear into the morass, the scientists we train create a living legacy. 

I’m sure almost all of us have had to deal with manuscripts where we knew it would be much easier to take the data and just write the paper ourselves, rather than try to coax a student’s work into a polished form. But doing that would undermine them; they need to learn how to write good papers, how to manage the process, and how to gauge when a paper is ready to submit.

I'd be curious to hear what other people, faculty and students, think about that balance and how to find it. It is something I struggle with just about every single day. 

And a big h.t. to Lauren Lew-Hall (@dialect) for tweeting about the post.

Emmett Bennett and Linear B

I found out yesterday that Emmett Bennett passed away two weeks ago here in Madison. He was an emeritus professor of Classics, where he taught for almost 30 years. As the NYT obit linked above describes, he played a key role in deciphering the early Greek texts in the script called Linear B, one of the amazing stories of philology. Unfortunately, I don't know the story well enough to tell any more than it's told in the obit or the sketch here. (I'll dig a little to see if I can find out more.)

You can see some of his documents here, including tables of symbols he worked out. You may think that a Classics prof working on ancient clay tablets wouldn't be too cutting edge, but he was using punch cards back in the 1940s, held a patent (it looks like), and worked to figure out ancient bookkeeping.

For now, it's another reminder of the Wisconsin tradition, not only in ancient languages but also in the use of new technologies and the value of thinking broadly.

Image from here, the first page of a piece in the American Journal of Archeology from 1950.

"From irregular verbs, a career"

How's that for a section title? It's from the big flashy piece in Science Times about Steven Pinker, mostly about his new book.

Grant proposal advice

Science Times has a nice interview with the famous brain scientist Michael Gazzaniga this morning (here), including this from the bit called "Midnight Labs and Martini Time":

On Grant Proposals
This whole idea that you write up an experiment laying out all methods and questions you’re going to answer beforehand; it’s nonsense. That’s not the way it works. You’re just trying whatever it is you’re trying; you don’t know what’s going to happen, and then whoosh! — the thing pours right out there and generates the next questions, questions you never would have thought of before.

Slow Science

I like the 'slow food' movement a lot, and for a lot of reasons. Slow Science has been around for a while, but I just learned of a new manifesto from France. Here's the link, and there's an English version.

Many readers probably know this similar thing: slow-science.org, but any manifesto that starts out with 'we don't blog' and 'we don't tweet' may be trying my patience a little. (Of course they actually write 'we don't twitter', which is kind of endearing.)

Really, I guess I'd been expecting some kind of organized backlash to the speeding up of everything in research.

So, verbistas, what do you make of the initiative?

Image from here.

Blobology and neurosexism

I first learned of Cordelia Fine's new book, DELUSIONS OF GENDER: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, on the Log a while back, but have only now read a couple of reviews (and I'm not likely to read the book. But let me quote from Wray Herbert's review in the Washington Post:

About halfway through this irreverent and important book, cognitive psychologist Cordelia Fine offers a fairly technical explanation of the fMRI, a common kind of brain scan. By now, everyone is familiar with these head-shaped images, with their splashes of red and orange and green and blue. But far fewer know what those colors really mean or where they come from.

It's not as if these machines are taking color videos of the human brain in action -- not even close. In fact, these high-tech scanners are gathering data several steps removed from brain activity and even further from behavior. They are measuring the magnetic quality of hemoglobin, as a proxy for the blood oxygen being consumed in particular regions of the brain. If the measurement is different from what one would expect, scientists slap some color on that region of the map: hot, vibrant shades such as red if it's more than expected; cool, subdued tones if it's less.

Fine calls this "blobology": the science -- or art -- of creating images and then interpreting them as if they have something to do with human behavior. Her detailed explanation of brain-scanning technology is essential to her argument, as it conveys a sense of just how difficult it is to interpret such raw data. She isn't opposed to neuroscience or brain imaging; quite the opposite. But she is ardently against making authoritative interpretations of ambiguous data.

Now, heck, maybe I will read this book. Anyway, I sure like that attitude. I had heard blobology before, I'm pretty sure (and it gets a good set of g-hits). But only now does it strike me as filling a really big lexical gap in scientific vocabulary: We've got ways of referring to the gross over-interpretation of shaky evidence, but nothing nearly so catchy as blobology.

I don't know if it's Word of the Year material, yet, but I say we start using it.

Image from here.

Science journalism and 'general science' journals

There's been occasional note here of the ups and downs of work published in places like Science and Nature. This article in the NYT addresses that issue pretty directly.

Zimmer on "quant(s)"

Wow, it is so nice to pick up the NYT Sunday Magazine on the "On Language" weeks and know that there will be a fine column in there by Ben Zimmer. This week, he tackles Quants, that is

experts in mathematics, physics and computer science who brought sophisticated quantitative approaches to the world of Wall Street.

The story of how increasingly advanced mathematical models shaped the markets — and led to serious problems — is everywhere today. In academia, it echoes longstanding complaints by non-quant social scientists about the dominance of quant stuff.

This is relevant for linguistics. The field is experiencing huge and amazing progress thanks to our own quants, in about every subbranch. (OK, anthropological linguistics is probably largely untouched by it, but ... .) The local linguists here seem to embrace this trend, but they talk a lot about the need to keep some perspective — to be sure that they know what they're putting into the model and how to interpret what comes out. Seems like the right way to go.

Image from here.

Science: "just one view of the world, just another story"

The Commonwealth of Kentucky is considering legislation now that has this as its first paragraph:

Teachers, principals, and other school administrators are encouraged to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories being studied.

Of course this is not about creating a generation of super-thinkers, but rather explicitly about getting kids to challenge topics "including but not limited to the study of evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." (GRE question: which of those things isn't like the rest?) The NYT has a piece on the topic this morning, including a link to the bill. The title of this post is, in fact, from a quote in the article by Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State:

“Wherever there is a battle over evolution now,” he said, “there is a secondary battle to diminish other hot-button issues like Big Bang and, increasingly, climate change. It is all about casting doubt on the veracity of science — to say it is just one view of the world, just another story, no better or more valid than fundamentalism.”

Two points. First, let's just cut to the chase and give the big answer about the advantages and disadvantages of scientific theories in general. On the downside:


But also the upside:


Second, there's one theory that really needs extensive testing by young people, lol theory:

The theory that the internet phrase lol,meaning "laugh out loud", can be placed at any part in any sentence and make said sentence lose all credibilty and seriousness.

ex 1
Doc: We need to operate on your colon lol, you have cancer.

ex 2
Jesus: Take this all of you and eat it, it is my body, lol.

ex 3
Me: Will you marry me? Lol.

And yes, lol theory was the February 15, 2009 Urban Word of the Day. Get to work young people!

Images from here and here.

Science Channel takes a stand: For science

Wow, here's some breaking science news I haven't seen covered anywhere yet:

Science Channel president Clark Bunting told reporters Tuesday that his cable network was "completely incapable" of watering down science any further than it already had. "Look, we've tried, we really have, but it's simply not possible to set the bar any lower," said a visibly exhausted Bunting, adding that he "could not in good conscience" make science any more mindless or insultingly juvenile.

Well, here's the word from Team Verb: You go, Science Channel, you go. We've got your back. In some sense: We'll happily keep dumbing down science long after you've stopped. At least for language and related areas. Juvenile? Mindless? It's who we are. It's what we do.

Sure, we can see why you have to keep to the 5% science content minimum, but we do not feel compelled. Trust us. We've got your back.

Peer Review

A group of us did a panel for graduate students at the just-concluded LSA, on getting published in Linguistics. (Here's a link to a summary, and here's a link to a website where our handout is posted.) I wish I would have known about the following video, though - I certainly would have recommended it...

Reasoning, quantitative and otherwise

We've had serious losses in the world of public intellectuals recently.

Like about half the planet, I used Paul Samuelson's econ textbook way back when. (Not the first edition from 1948, but an early enough one.) NPR interviewed Paul Krugman, a former student of his, tonight. In talking about the role of math in economics, Krugman said that Samuelson wanted mathematical sophistication, but "math in the service of ideas".

That reminded me of Stephen Toulmin, who passed away earlier this month. I certainly didn't agree with him about everything, but I do try to keep in mind his admonition, viewing (to quote the linked obit just above):

formal logic as an overly abstract, inadequate representation of how human beings actually argue. He also challenged its claims to universality, as well as its faith in absolute truth and moral certainty.

The Brain's language

From here:

The Brain's Language and Its Politics - An Afternoon with George Lakoff

Friday, Oct 30 3:00p at MLK Jr. Library, San Jose,CA
"We now have a detailed theory of how ideas and language arise from the physical brain. That theory, applied to American politics, explains a great deal about contemporary political disputes."
This lecture will explore the new Neural Linguistics & how it applies to our political life.

Price: Free Age Suitability: Teens and up

Tags: politics,linguistics, brain, lakoff

"We now have a detailed theory of how ideas and language arise from the physical brain. That theory, applied to American politics, explains a great deal about contemporary political disputes."
This lecture will explore the new Neural Linguistics & how it applies to our political life.
Lecture & discussion followed by book signing.
Sponsored by Linguistic & Language Development Student Association. Funded in part by SJSU Associated Students.

I'd be plenty happy with a 'detailed theory of how ideas and language raise from the physical brain'. Application to politics is all gravy. In case anybody is in SF and happens to make this, we'd really appreciate a report. (Just to be clear: No snark intended, I would be very curious what Lakoff's current big picture looks like … these are dizzyingly big claims.)

Image from here.

War on science over, clueless foot soldier fights on ...

Someone just passed me a message including this:

Help Save Political Science Research Funding within NSF
On October 7, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) proposed Amendment 2631 to the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010 (HR 2847). The amendment seeks to eliminate research funding for political science programs within the National Science Foundation (NSF). The spending bill is currently on the Senate floor. A vote on the amendment could take place today or early next week. The American Political Science Association posted an online petition, asking Senators to block the Coburn Amendment, here.

You can go here for some additional discussion. As someone unconnected to NSF funding for Political Science, I say sign the petition. Wait, change that: As a citizen of the country who thinks understanding how the system works is a good thing, I say sign the petition.

Image from here.

Dollo's Law

There's a new piece out about Dollo's Law* in Nature which I first found out about from the NYT's Science Times yesterday. Louis Dollo was a 19th c. paleontologist who hypothesized that evolution is not reversible (quoting from here):

An organism is unable to return, even partially, to a previous stage already realized in the ranks of its ancestors.

Or as one of the Nature authors, Joseph Thornton, puts it in the Science Times piece, mutations "burn the bridge that evolution just crossed." I think most people today don't see the irreversibility as a law, but a very high probability, and Thornton takes that view.

The scientists tried to undo a set of mutations in a molecule (a glucocorticoid receptor) and found that you couldn't get it back to its earlier evolutionary state. They argue that the complexity of the evolutionary path and interactions among changes shut down the road to reversal.

Dr. Thornton believes it says something important about the course of evolutionary history. Natural selection can achieve many things, but it is hemmed in. Even harmless, random mutations can block its path. “The biology we ended up with was not inevitable,” he said. “It was just one roll of the evolutionary dice.”

This caught my eye because Dollo's Law is a notion that gets talked about, mostly informally, here and there in linguistics. It's part of the ongoing discussion about how linguistic change and biological evolution run parallel, or don't. It's a little coincidence then to find that This Modern World was covering "Language is a virus" at the same time (click to enlarge):

Sigh, some evolution I wish could be reversed.

*That's a Wikipedia entry that needs some editing.

New journal: Rejecta Mathematica

There's a new journal out there, Rejecta Mathematica, here. From the FAQ:

What is Rejecta Mathematica?

Rejecta Mathematica is an open access online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences.

Is this some kind of joke?

No, Rejecta Mathematica is real.

But weren't those papers rejected for a reason?

Quite probably, yes.

So why publish them?

We believe that many previously rejected papers (even those rejected for legitimate reasons) can nonetheless have legitimate value to the academic community. This value may take many forms:

• "mapping the blind alleys of science": papers containing negative results can warn others against futile directions;
• "reinventing the wheel": papers accidentally rederiving a known result may contain new insight or ideas;
• "squaring the circle": papers discovered to contain a serious technical flaw may nevertheless contain information or ideas of interest;
• "applications of cold fusion": papers based on a controversial premise may contain ideas applicable in more traditional settings;
• "misunderstood genius": other papers may simply have no natural home among existing journals.

Many authors of a rejected paper may simply have disagreed with or chosen to not address the original reviewers' concerns. Rejecta Mathematica also gives those authors the chance to speak out in defense of their own paper.

Is anybody else slightly unnerved at the thought of being rejected by this journal?

Theory and evidence

Here's a quote (slightly modified) that could be uttered about many fields and even lobbed across partisan lines within some fields:

As I see it, the profession went astray because we, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.

What's the profession? It's economics, and this is from Paul Krugman's NYT Sunday Magazine piece this morning, here, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?".

Happily, I don't seem to hear this much in linguistics these days. No doubt a matter of who you hang out with, but it seems like everybody I deal with seriously agrees on the need for working hard with good data.

Guest post: Burning down the house

This in, slipped under the door of a young colleague yesterday, signed only "√v".

As a minion of Mr. V, I do not like reading but sometimes I am forced to do it. I was pleasantly surprised to find that people are apparently working on the relationship between language and genes. Specifically, an article in Science Daily about language and genes was forwarded to me (reading email doesn't count). I had to read through the article a few times to fully understand it and have to go with what the article says about the research since the actual article hasn't hit PNAS yet …

The first part of the article makes perfect sense and I really can't imagine anyone who works on language to really disagree with the ideas. A few confusions need to be fixed though and some clarity added. The important summary sentence is:

By modelling the ways in which genes for language might have evolved alongside language itself, the study showed that genetic adaptation to language would be highly unlikely, as cultural conventions change much more rapidly than genes.

This research contains all of the important aspects of genes, language, culture and variation that need to be considered to say something enlightened about this question but unfortunately gets all kinds of things confused.

The main form of the argument as suggested by the SD article is that

(1) we know the time rate of genetic change
(2) we know the time rate of language change
(3) a similarity between the time rates of language change and genetic change would suggest that there could be a causal relationship between them
(4) we know that the time rates for language change and genetic change do not match (language changes too quickly)
(5) therefore, there can not be a causal relationship between language and genes
(6) therefore, culture must determine language

Steps (1)-(3) are rather straightforward and sensible. Its when we start getting to steps (4)-(6) that things begin to get a little strange …

We have to unpack (4) to ask deeper (possible philosophical) questions about language change. Specifically, what do we mean by language change here? More importantly, how tight is the connection between specific language features (e.g. words, rules, word order, etc.) and genes.

Many sensible people I know assume that the particular words of a language (e.g. gato, cat, kuching, chien, etc.) have no genetic basis what-so-ever and instead they are learned. If particular words were genetically encoded then we would expect much less flexibility in infants to learn particular languages when geographically displaced from genetic distribution areas. It would also be very difficult to explain how we continually learn words throughout our entire lifetime. Or, if we flip this around, the cost of genetically encoding specific words would be extraordinarily costly from an evolutionary point of view.

These same sensible people make similar assumptions about having to learn language specific rules, constraints, word orders, pragmatics, sociophonetics, etc. All aspects of language that vary crosslinguistically. This variation must be learned from experience and it appears that any homo sapien child that is cognitively normal can learn any language they are exposed to.

So the question is how to answer the question of whether 'language' has changed or not given a particular example of say Old English to Modern English.

Sure, language has changed in this example and we know this because a speaker of Modern English can not understand Old English. We can get more specific than this and show particular changes in the phonology, morphology and syntax of these two distinct languages. More importantly we can probably say that 'culture' has caused the change from OE to ME if we assume that culture is the accumulation of human behavior that other humans experience from birth. Put in a simpler manner, a baby born in the 10th century got input from a different language than a baby born in the 20th and thus it should not be a surprise that a different language is spoken by both.

The culture has changed and thus the language has changed but have the 'language genes' changed? This is where I think the SD article (and possibly the PNAS article) begins to go horribly wrong.

It would be an unimaginable state of hubris to even suggest that we know even the beginnings of how genes map to higher level behaviors such as specific languages. This is where the Royal Linguistic Society in London may have had it right in banning discussion about the origins of language. This is where the main flaw in the argument outlined by the SD article arrises. In order for the argument to go through, specific languages must be directly coded in the genes. In other words as Old English gradually changed into Modern English there must have been a similar and correlated change in the genetic make-up of speakers of Old English to Modern English. At this point in time, all sane people should rejoice that this hypothesis has been excluded by this line of research. Hooray.

The real question for people who want to investigate the relationship between language and genes is 'who actually believed the above hypothesis in the first place?' No progress in our understanding of language or genes or the mapping between the two is made by burning straw men. Progress is only made when truly informed theories are being compared. Unfortunately, most of the current work on genes and language is embarrassingly devoid of any knowledge of informed theories of language.

An informed theory of language will answer at least the following three questions:

(1) what is unique to each language
(2) what is universal to all languages
(3) how do children learn language

At the current time, we do not have anything beyond a beginning of a sketch of an answer to any of these questions. If these are good questions though, we can see where useful work in paralleling our knowledge about genes and language can occur.

What is universal to all languages should be universally encoded in our genes somehow. Looking at human behavior in an abstract enough manner may unveil the stability that would be required to allow a Baldwin type of effect to encode these abstract schema into the genotype of homo sapiens.

Having an answer to how children learn language is likely to improve our understanding as to what is encoded in the homo sapien genome specific to language. It appears that there is a surprising cross linguistic stability to how children learn language (both spoken and signed) which again suggests a general genotype.

Finally, we have to understand what is specific to each language because this will clearly demarcate what is not part of the homo sapien genotype. This will clearly highlight the role of culture in determining aspects of language.

The most beautiful aspects of these questions (all of them not just the last three) is that I have the strong suspicion that at one point in time most of the answers will be empirically based even if some of the answers suggest a rational basis for some aspects of human nature.

The most frustrating aspects of these questions is that most people are not patient enough to wait for our understanding of language to progress enough to be able to even ask good questions. The most likely cause of this impatitence is an expert's illusion in that since we use language everyday with little thought, it must be a very simple phenomena. Thus, who needs to really nail down the details … let's just fire up the gene sequencer and do some heavy math … that does sound cool though …

√v

PS: I don't know who you are, √v, but you're welcome to join Team Verb.