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Chocolate Consumption, Traffic Accidents and Serial Killers
Last month there was a paper published about a correlation between chocolate consumption and Nobel Laureates. EDIT: I now see the article may not be accessible to everyone. Here’s a summary: Messerli...
View ArticleWays to protolanguage conference
The third Ways to Protolanguage conference has released its call for papers. It will take place in Wrocław, Poland from 25–26 May. The deadline for submission is 31 March. Plenary speakers include...
View ArticleMost important paper on cultural evolution that includes acacia trees published
Last month saw the publication of a paper by James and I (our first paper!) on the so-called ‘nomothetic’ approach to links between language structure and social structure. In it we review the recent...
View ArticleThe 3rd annual meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution
There’s the European Human Behaviour & Evolution Association (EHBEA), the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), and the European Society for the study of Human Evolution (ESHE) too. I’m...
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Whorfian economics reconsidered: Why future tense?
Update: I have carried out some more analyses that paint a different picture to the one presented below. Oops! A recently accepted paper by Keith Chen has been getting a lot of press coverage. Chen...
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Whorfian economics reconsidered: Residuals and Causal Graphs
Yesterday I posted an analysis of some work by Prof. Keith Chen on the link between future tense marking and economic decisions. Prof. Chen made some suggestions about changes to the analysis, some of...
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Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses
Zach Weinersmith of SMBC comics and various science folk are putting on a Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses. The festival will include presentations of “well-argued and thoroughly researched but...
View ArticlePositions available on major Research Project on Cultural and Cognitive...
The university of St. Andrews is on a hiring frenzy: Applications are invited to join an interdisciplinary research programme directed by Professors Kevin Laland (School of Biology) and Andrew Whiten...
View ArticleMore Language Evolution positions available
It’s job frenzy out there. You can see here seven postdoctoral positions in the Dutch research consortium ”Language in Interaction” including one on language evolution below: WP 5: Language evolution...
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Iterated learning using YouTube videos
I recently discovered that videos uploaded to YouTube are automatically transcribed (if they’re in English). As you might guess, the transcriptions are not perfect, so there will be a discrepancy...
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Sticking the tongue out: Early imitation in infants
Albert Einstein sticking out the tongue to a neonate in an attempt to test their imitation of tongue protrusion. The nativism-empiricism debate haunts the fields of language acquisition and evolution...
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Iterated learning using Youtube videos and speech synthesis
This is a guest post by Justin Quillinan (of Chimp Challenge fame). Cast your reminisce pods back a few days and recall Sean’s iterated learning experiment using the automated transcription of YouTube...
View ArticleWorkshop: On the Emergence of Consensus and Misunderstanding: Models and...
Call for participants for an interdisciplinary workshop “On the Emergence of Consensus and Misunderstanding: Models and Experiments“. The workshop will be held at La Sapienza University in Rome,...
View ArticleFive Year Postdoctoral Position, Australian National University: The...
This is a job advert for a computational linguist/cultural evolutionist at the Australian National University in Canberra. It’s basically the dream job for a modeller – you’ll get to help design the...
View ArticleFellowship opportunity in Language Evolution, Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh are offering a Chancellor’s fellowship and are keen to attract applicants particularly in the area of language evolution. The position is a 5 year post doc that is expected...
View ArticleWhat made us human? Biological and cultural Evolution of Homo sapiens
There are some interesting speakers at this workshop with some talking about language evolution: What made us human? Biological and cultural Evolution of Homo sapiens Erice, Sicily, October 14-19, 2014...
View ArticleLanguage Games with the Museum of Parallel Art
I’ve just found a new online game called the museum of parallel art (thanks to my friend Robin). The info on the trailer reads as follows: Visiting the virtual Museum of Parallel Art is a very special...
View ArticleRussell Gray on the evolution of cognition, language and culture
You can watch Russell Gray give three lectures about evolutionary approaches to language, cognition and culture at this year’s Nijmegen lectures. Gray covered a huge range of studies from tool use by...
View ArticleSyntax of Mind Conference
A conference on the Syntax of Mind is taking place April 17-19 in Vienna, immediately following Evolang. Registration is free and they are accepting abstracts for talks and posters. From the website:...
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The great language game: Confusing languages
This is a guest post by Hedvig Skirgård. The Great Language Game, have you heard of it? It’s an online game where players compete in matching audio clips to the correct language. The game was created...
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