on humility

On Humility:


Today is my birthday. All of the many happy birthday posts on my Facebook wall today have been touching and reminded me of one of the most humble moments of my life, a moment I have always deeply treasured. While a grad student in Buffalo, three thousand miles away from my home and family, I was struck with serious illness and spent many weeks in and out of hospitals. During one long three week hospital stay at Rochester's excellent Strong Memorial Hospital, I was surprised one day when about a dozen Buffalo linguist grad students all paraded into my room. They had car pooled up the hour plus drive from Buffalo to Rochester to visit me. In many ways I am a typical American male, I suppress my emotions, I minimize emotional feeling. But that day was one of the most touching moments of my life. And I felt humbled by the outpouring of friendship and love of my fellow students. I also remember being terribly conflicted because in some ways, I felt I didn't deserve this. It is so much harder to accept love than to give it. I don't know why that is. Several years later another Buffalo grad student was having serious medical issues and many of us were helping her with basic daily chores. After I had helped her with groceries one day, she was clearly embarrassed by her need to be helped. I remember sitting down with her, telling her the story of when the dozen grad students drove up to see me. I told her how difficult it was for me to be helpless in that moment, but how grateful I was that they did that for me. I told her we all must find a way to accept love in our lives. It is no easy thing. But once we can accept the love of others, it is then that we know our place. I am reminded of what The Wizard of Oz told the Tin Man: "A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others."

changes in referential phrasing in presidential debates

During Wednesday night's presidential debate, @Fritinancy tweeted a quip that got my eye:

She caught on to the fact that Mitt Romney used a variation of the name of The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, often referred to as Simpson-Bowles, but also as Bowles-Simpson.

This piqued my lingo interests so I downloaded the CNN transcript and dug up some fascinating facts.

It is Mitt Romney who first introduces the term Bowles-Simpson and Obama follows his lead, but then Jim Lehrer introduces the Simpson-Bowles variation and Romney follows his lead...until he doesn't. Obama never used the Simpson-Bowles version and Lehrer never used the Bowles-Simpson version.

Here are all instances of the term from the debate:

21:21:38: ROMNEY: …And so what I do is I bring down the tax rates, lower deductions and exemptions, the same idea behind Bowles-Simpson, by the way, get the rates down, lower deductions and exemptions, to create more jobs, because there's nothing better for getting us to a balanced budget than having more people working, earning more money, paying more taxes.

21:28:37: OBAMA:… Governor ROMNEY earlier mentioned the Bowles-Simpson commission. Well, that's how the commission -- bipartisan commission that talked about how we should move forward suggested we have to do it, in a balanced way with some revenue and some spending cuts.

21:31:34: LEHRER: Governor, what about Simpson-Bowles? Do you support Simpson-Bowles?
21:31:34: ROMNEY: Simpson-Bowles, the president should have grabbed that.
21:31:35: LEHRER: No, I mean, do you support Simpson-Bowles?
21:31:36: ROMNEYI have my own plan. It's not the same as Simpson-Bowles. But in my view, the president should have grabbed it. If you wanted to make some adjustments to it, take it, go to Congress, fight for it.

22:11:10: ROMNEY… That's one way one could do it. One could follow Bowles-Simpson as a model and take deduction by deduction and make differences that way.

I can't help but be reminded of the classic Krauss and Weinheimer (1964) experiments Changes in reference phrases as a function of frequency of usage in social interaction. I can't find the paper online, but it involves two participants converging on a shared (typically short) form of a name for an unknown new object.

knowing your own mind...

How well do you understand your own biases? Is there a way to objectively identify your own biases, without the convoluted mess that is your own conscious meta-thinking?

Why yes, yes there is. Harvard has graciously posted online more than a dozen Implicit Association Tasks. This is a well respected, and kinda freaky, reaction time test that pairs symbols (often words, but can be pictures too) and tests how closely you associate them. It's a subtle and clever test and basically, unbeatable (you can try to *fake* your responses all you want, they'll catch you because of methodological design ... hint .. you can't go too slow).

I recommend everyone giving it a try, if only to get a taste off empirical cognitive science methods.

a fiendishly clever branding proposal

Dear artists, scholars, good-deed-doers, what if I offered to pay you money to let me place my name in front of yours on everything you do. Every time your name gets mentioned from now on, my name will be mentioned too, usually first. Keep in mind, I'm willing to PAY you for this. You can make some money by letting me brand your work product from now on with my name. I won't do anything else (like help you in any way), but every time you get noticed for your efforts, I'll pay you one time right now to forever let my name be a part of your public notice. All newspaper articles written about you, all magazine profiles, even on any official bios you may post online or in print, my name will now be there, alongside yours.

My question is, how much would you charge me for this? Would the right price be higher than $1,000? $10,000? $500,000?

This is my perspective on the MacArthur Fellowship (aka the Genius Grant).

I don't see the difference between what the MacArthur foundation does and the offer I made above, with one crucial exception: I gave you a choice, they didn't.

The MacArthur foundation never asks you if you want to be branded with their name for the rest of your life. In fact, they don't even tell you that you are a target of their branding campaign until it's too late. And what's the fellows' compensation? A tidy sum, but couched in the offer I make above, I'm guessing almost every single MacArthur fellow would seriously hesitate before agreeing to it, and many would say no.

Am I being cynical? A curmudgeon? Too clever for my own good?

Or is The MacArthur foundation the most wickedly clever viral branding campaign ever? One could argue that they get nothing out of this ... then again, I didn't claim to get anything out of the above proposal either. In the end, I gave you a choice, they didn't.

"come to lab"

Over at the Language Log, the Mark Liberman has posted a reference to a noun phrase he found interesting. The actress Amy Adams, speaking about a director, said "he'd just say hey, come to set, I want you to- to do something…"

The Liberman found the use of "come to set" to be analogous to "go to college":

And what struck me was Adams' inclusion of set in the class of singular count nouns that can be used in a prepositional phrase without a determiner, in a non-referential or generic interpretation: come to bed, go to college, stay in school, and so on...But this isn't quite enough — I don't think that even the most dedicated chemistry researchers would talk about "going to lab"...it seems that members of certain "communities of practice" extend this class of anarthrous status-nouns in community-specific ways."

The comments section has been relatively active and I posted a few points myself regarding "going to lab", leading to a bit of a disagreement regarding the relative referentiality of several minimal sentences.

In the interest of collecting some empirical evidence, does anyone see a difference in referentiality between the following minimal set:

(a) he'd just say hey, come to set, I want you to- to do something.
(b) he'd just say hey, come to lab, I want you to- to do something.
(c) he'd just say hey, come to college, I want you to- to do something.
(e) he'd just say hey, come to church, I want you to- to do something.

I don't think any of (a-e) meet the same non-referentiality of (f-g)):

(f) She went to college in the 1970s.
(g) He goes to church on Sundays.

I think I see a poster forming... PS; Carrie Niziolek has posted a set of "in lab" examples here.

My New Job: SETA

After many months of waiting, I am finally beginning my new job, which marks my return to linguistics as a career.

I am now a contracted SETA (Scientific, Engineering and Technical Assistant) for US government Program Managers who fund scientific research and development projects related to linguistics in academia and industry. My principle role will be more-or-less as a consultant, advising PMs about state-of-the-art research and methods in cognitive linguistics and computational linguistics in order to facilitate their funded programs.

Marc Hauser [finally] responds

And his defense is that he tried to do too much?? Ugh, this reeks of self-obsessed arrogance:

Although I have fundamental differences with some of the findings in the ORI report, I acknowledge that I made mistakes. I tried to do too much, teaching courses, running a large lab of students, sitting on several editorial boards, directing the Mind, Brain & Behavior Program at Harvard, conducting multiple research collaborations, and writing for the general public. I let important details get away from my control, and as head of the lab, I take responsibility for all errors made within the lab, whether or not I was directly involved. I am saddened that this investigation has caused some to question all of my work, rather than the few papers and unpublished studies in question. Before, during and after the investigation, many of my lab’s research findings were replicated by independent researchers. I remain proud of the many important papers generated by myself, my collaborators and my students over the years. I am also deeply gratified to see my students carve out significant areas of research at major universities around the world.

Ugh...