"It's gonna take martial law"

... as the great George Clinton said.

Seriously, it's getting hard to avoid thinking that we no longer live under rule of law in Wisconsin. Last week's publication of the anti-union law and the claim that it's now in force, all despite a (repeated) court injunction, would seem to ice that case. And if you read this, you surely long since know that UW History professor Bill Cronon is facing an order from the Republican Party of Wisconsin for the University to release all of his work emails that contain these words (see here and here):

Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.

As a seasoned administrator at the University told me last week, this list of keywords is "the clearest fishing expedition I've ever seen in a FOIA request". Now, I've never dealt with Freedom of Information Act requests, but I'll take their word for it.

A number of people around campus are now putting all those words into their signature files, so that all of their emails include all those terms. Here's one example:

If you would like to correspond with me about any of the topics below, please email me at ---------@gmail.com.

Republican, first amendment, Scott Walker, recall, free speech, collective bargaining, fearless sifting and winnowing, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, Mary Bell

Some have suggested making the keywords into poetry. Others are opening it up with the famous Sifting and Winnowing quote. Have fun.

What would public authority mean for the Wisconsin Idea?

That's a huge question and suddenly a pressing one. Happily a real all-star panel has been assembled to address it. See here (and click to embiggen, as we linguists like to say):

On Wisconsin!

This is your brain on IPA.

Word going round is that your phonetics friends' brains are wired different than yours. Kudos for being special. In a brain science article with an amazingly low number of authors, Golestani, Price and Scott (Journal of Neuroscience, 16 March 2001, 31(11):4213-4220) may provide one reason why transcription training has waned in years from phonetics programs--and I thought it was due to the prevalence of open source phonetic programs (anyone heard of Praat?) or the dropping of prices of computing processing (anymore anyone heard of IBM?).

From their abstract:

Phoneticians were also more likely to have multiple or split left transverse gyri in the auditory cortex than nonexpert controls, and the amount of phonetic transcription training did not predict auditory cortex morphology.

This is evidence backing the annoying 'how many languages do you speak' question from nonlinguists--well, at least for the phoneticians (anymore anyone heard of syntax and semantics?) At least phonologists can justify those two obligatory weeks teaching phonetics at the beginning of the semester.

So what do they think is the source of the difference between phoneticians' and nonphoneticians' brains:

The transverse gyri are thought to be established in utero; our results thus suggest that this gross morphological difference may have existed before the onset of phonetic training, and that its presence confers an advantage of sufficient magnitude to affect career choices.

After reading these quotes from the abstract, the authors say this at the beginning of the last paragraph in the article:

In conclusion, our results demonstrate that extensive training with speech sound analysis, and maybe even with articulation- based approaches, can lead to plastic changes in Broca’s area. This has potential implications for training-related remediation for individuals with phonological difficulties (e.g., developmental dyslexia), and in the domain of second language learning.

So is it training or no training? I'm not brain guy (haven't used it in years) and look forward to digger further in this paper to figure out how one gets from results demonstrating that training doesn't matter to implications that training matters. I'll stop now, my brain really does hurt, and look forward to waking up to hear what the extra strength brain of Mark Liberman of Language Log has to say.

The privatization of the University of Wisconsin-Madison

That's how people are now talking about the move for 'public authority', once known as the "New Badger Partnership" and increasing called the "Walker-Martin Plan". The teaching assistants union (TAA) voted last night to endorse this:

The TAA opposes the New Badger Partnership, especially the separation of UW-Madison from the UW System, the formation of the public authority model, and the threat to affordability and accessibility it poses to public education and the lack of protection for labor unions on campus. The TAA also objects to the non-transparent and undemocratic process by which the New Badger Partnership was designed.

This may be a turning point in the debate on this topic. Word is that it's a tough call in the legislature.

Overnor Pawlenty: Is he oin roue?

An alert member of Team Verb called my attention to a passage from this piece in the New York Times about Tim Pawlenty's efforts to be everything to everybody:

The knock on Mr. Pawlenty, according to conversations with voters, is that his speeches sound sincere but do not always sizzle. At a faith forum last week in Iowa, he displayed vigor. But the next day at the Statehouse, the talk among several Republicans was that it seemed he had suddenly developed a Southern accent as he tried connecting to voters by speaking louder and with more energy.

The political blog of Radio Iowa heard it too and noted, “Pawlenty seems to be adopting a Southern accent as he talks about his record as governor.” As he spoke of the country’s challenges, he dropped the letter G, saying: “It ain’t gonna be easy. This is about plowin’ ahead and gettin’ the job done.”

The salient point here is probably the 'gentleman's ain't'. The gonna, where the going to indicates future tense, is so common that even Joe Biden used it in the VP debate with Palin. And the use of to plow adds to the folksy air. I haven't heard the audio, but I'm guessing that Pawlenty didn't actually adopt a Southern accent.

Image from reason.com.

Viral spread, and of language change

Put huge numbers of people together in tight quarters, like say occupying a state capitol building, for a few weeks, toss in Wisconsin winter weather and the stress and strain of losing virtually all bargaining rights for all public workers in your state and what happens? Some evil bugs going around.

One of our crew has gotten it ... persistent hacking, more phlegm than clogs the guv's stunted conscience, etc. He passed along this email after giving it one of the common names …

OK. Capitol Cough, huh? That makes three names I have heard for the sick that has descended upon any who spent time in the Capitol: the Capitol Cough, the Capitol Plague, and the worst one yet, Rotundabola.

It's also being called the Capitol Crud and, wait for it, Scott Snot.

Do we need a reader's poll?

14 corporate lobbyists working for privatization of UW?

Efforts to make the University of Wisconsin – Madison into a semi-private entity are moving very fast. We learned only recently that a private lobbying group, Badger Advocates, was formed "to advocate and build support for the University of Wisconsin - Madison", according to their disclosure form (here).

It's amazing that 14 big money corporate lobbyist have been hired to work on "the 2011-12 Wisconsin State Budget as it relates to UW-Madison". Considerably more amazing is that the Chancellor, at Monday's Faculty Senate meeting, declared no knowledge of this group or these people.

The most detailed story to date is here. The piece concludes that …

the Walker-Martin initiative is really about corporatizing a formerly public institution.

Is there any other way to read this situation?

Public (or is that really 'private'?) authority status for UW-Madison

This will be must see stuff. A debate began at the Senate meeting on Monday and will continue this week. This was just forwarded to us.

Public authority status for UW-Madison represents the most fundamental change to this campus in nearly 40 years, and the issue has come up during a time of fiscal and political crisis. Our University community must have a solid basis for informed discussion of these matters. To this end, PROFS has assembled a distinguished panel of speakers who will present four perspectives on this topic. The discussion will take place:

Thursday, March 10
4-5:30 pm
Wisconsin Idea Room, Education Building, 1000 Bascom Mall

Speakers include:

University of Wisconsin Regent Tom Loftus
former Assistant Chancellor Harry Peterson
Professor Cyrena Pondrom
Professor Jeremi Suri

The panel is aimed at offering diverse views on the issue of public authority status for UW-Madison independent of UW-System. The expertise of the panel spans national and state politics and US and Wisconsin higher education leadership, including knowledge of the history of higher education in Wisconsin and understanding of the state and campus budget processes.

This event is free and open to the public.

Scott Walker's vowels, formant values

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that some linguists here at Wisconsin did a lot of analysis of Sarah Palin's speech when she appeared on the national scene. The same crew, now with a bunch of students, is following up with Governor Scott Walker's vowels. Based on the analysis of hundreds of tokens from the budget speech this week, they have assembled the vowel chart below:
It appears, in short, that for every measurement, NO VALUE was recorded. More to follow ...

The Giving of Tools

(from here)

In the wordle above, if you let your eye move left to right beginning with state, make, spending, next ... just above spending (no comment) you'll see the word tools. In his budget address Tuesday, WI Governor Scott Walker uses the word tools opposite the usual “if you have a hammer, everything’s a nail” type meaning that some have accused him of using. I suspect the intended allusion is to the maxim: “there’s a right tool for every job.” But, the over application of the term in diverse contexts conveys to me that the good people of the state will have all kinds of governing techniques to use on any difficulty. A local municipality could use a sledgehammer when a screwdriver would do, or a chisel when oil is necessary (e.g., a school district could lay off a few union-oriented teachers, impose a wage freeze, spin off the good teachers and wealthy students into a charter school in order to retain a school superintendent).

In the speech he uses 'tool' five times:
1. Not having to be locked into union negotiated deals and high retirement costs: “… so local government and state government have the tools to deal with reduced revenue …” (cannot refer to more tax money since he’s capped that)

2. These must be coping tools, i.e., trade-offs “…, their local communities will be forced to manage these reductions in aid without the benefit of the tools provided in the repair bill.”

3. Vouchers and independent charter schools: “…we give schools across the state the tools to make up for those reductions …” (privatization of education)

4. What UW leaders refer to as flexibility, assuming in procurements, faculty retention, capital improvement decisions: “…we will give our flagship, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the tools it needs to remain a world leader in research and instruction …”

5. Either #1 or #2: “Where we must make reductions, we do so wisely, by giving local governments the tools to save even more money than overall reductions in state aid.”

[FYI, UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin, for want of creativity in an email sent to faculty yesterday, also parroted the word tool.]

Glenn Grothman

Glenn Grothman on MSNBC right now:

The protesters in the capitol are "slobs", "college students who are having a party", people "defacing our beautiful capitol", and "unemployed people looking for a place to hang out".

I've been down there, and that's just too far from reality to warrant further comment.

For the record, this is the same guy who last year encountered snow-covered roads en route to the capitol and then proposed a bill that would have taken away Madison's management of its own streets. This from a militant tea bagger anti-government goon.

Glenn, we're not paying for THIS idiot test.

University of Wisconsin – Madison, bleeding to death?

The governor is proposes a cut of $125 million dollars in state funding to UW – Madison per year. We got 476 from the state last year. 26% cut total.