Those who have been following the Marc Hauser case, on LLOG or elsewhere, may have missed this: Carolyn Y. Johnson, "Harvard report shines light on ex-researcher's misconduct", Boston Globe 5/30/2014: When former Harvard pyschology professor Marc Hauser was found solely responsible in a series of six scientific misconduct cases in 2012, he distanced himself from […]
There's new information emerging from the slow-motion Marc Hauser train wreck. Carolyn Johnson, "Journal editor questions Harvard researcher's data", Boston Globe 8/27/2010: The editor of a scientific journal said today the only "plausible" conclusion he can draw, on the basis of access he has been given to an investigation of prominent Harvard psychology professor Marc […]
There's an excellent discussion of some methodological issues behind the Marc Hauser scandal at Neuron Culture, "Updated: This Hauser thing is getting hard to watch". The post points out that the information released so far leaves many questions unanswered about what the lab's official methodology was, and what Hauser and other lab members really did.
Tom Bartlett, "Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard", Chronicle of Higher Education 8/19/2010: Ever since word got out that a prominent Harvard University researcher was on leave after an investigation into academic wrongdoing, a key question has remained unanswered: What, exactly, did he do? […] An internal document, however, sheds light on what was […]
[This is a guest post by Denis Mair] River SnowLiu Zongyuan (773-819) Over ranged mountains, no birds are seen in flightOn every pathway, human traces are being erasedIn a solitary boat, an old man in rough-weather gearIs out on the cold river, fishing in the snow {Here the mountains are just a backdrop in a […]
From my 10th grade high school world history class in 1959, I was intrigued by the evocative, mysterious Mamluks. I was impressed by their achievements in statecraft, art, architecture, and many other fields. Thus Mamluk is a word that is very well known in English, even to a rural highschooler in Osnaburg Township of Stark […]
I was thrilled when I came upon this 3:04 YouTube video by chance on the morning of the mid-Autumn festival (October 1):
This is a guest post by Herbert Terrace and Michael Studdert-Kennedy, in the form of a response to Marc Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky, and Richard C. Lewontin, "The Mystery of Language Evolution", Frontiers of Psychology 2014. Herb Terrace explains: At Charles Yang's suggestion, Michael Studdert-Kennedy and I […]
Fernanda Santos and Christine Hauser, "Arizona News Anchor Is Drawn Into Debate on Her Accent and the Use of Spanish", NYT 9/3/2015: An Arizona news anchor defended her pronunciation of Spanish words during English broadcasts, saying she delivers them the way the language is intended to be spoken. […] Ms. Ruiz, who was raised in […]
In comments to "Suffer the consequences " (4/19/15), Jongseong Park and Bob Ramsey bemoaned what they considered to be the overuse of hyphens in the transliteration of Hangeul. In a later comment, I explained that the hyphens between virtually all syllables in the transliterations were due to the Hangeul converter we've been using, which automatically […]
I recently read through Marc Hauser et al., "The Mystery of Language Evolution", Frontiers in Psychology 2014, which expresses a strongly skeptical view on every aspect of the topic, including this one: [S]tudies of nonhuman animals provide virtually no relevant parallels to human linguistic communication, and none to the underlying biological capacity.
Andrew Shields encountered the idea — on Facebook and vigorously promoted on this blog — that the Chinese character for poetry, shī 诗, consists of two parts meaning "word" and "temple". Furthermore, it is claimed that this is a particularly apt way to represent the notion of poetry, one that is conspicuously missing in Western […]
Pete Warden, "Why you should never trust a data scientist", 7/18/2013: The wonderful thing about being a data scientist is that I get all of the credibility of genuine science, with none of the irritating peer review or reproducibility worries. […] I’ve never ceased to be disturbed at how the inclusion of numbers and the mention […]