coglanglab's blog
This week I am in Lyon, France, for the 3rd Experimental Pragmatics meeting. I had plans to live-blog CUNY and SRCD, neither of which quite happened, but I'm giving it a go for Day 2 of Xprag, and we'll see how it goes.
Raymond Kurzweil, inventor and futurist, predicts that by the 2030s, it will be possible to
PLoS One has published over 5,000 papers. Is that a sign of success or failure?
Scientists have long debated the evolution of language. Did it emerge along with the appearance of modern homo sapiens, 130,000-200,000 years ago? Or did it happen as late as 50,000 years ago, explaining the cultural ferment at that time?
The American Association of University Professors recently released a report on the financial situation of professors. One interesting datum apparently gleaned from the report is a ranking of universities by full professor salaries.
This is the question asked by the Bologna Process, an alliance of some higher education authorities.
I'm currently at the CUNY Human Sentence Processing conference. I'll start blogging the most interesting reports soon, but at the moment I'm too busy conferencing to actually write about the conference. In the meantime, in honor of the conference, I give you this slide from GraphJam:
The New York Times has a profile of a finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search (for those of you who missed the change, that's the renamed Westinghouse competition). Newspaper articles -- by style less than by design -- are often cryptic, and this one notes in a single-sentence paragraph towards the end that the profiled student's project is "the only behavioral science project among the 40 finalists."
The latest round-up of Web-based experiments.
Do vaccines give Somalis autism? Can diabetes give you Alzheimer's? Does losing make you win? Anyone scanning the science news articles this week would know the answers to these questions.
"This is a year of no jobs." Ph.D.s are stacked up "like planes hovering over La Guardia. -- Catherine Stimpson, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University.
Martha Farah (Neuroscientist, UPenn) and Nancey Murphy (Theologian, Fuller Theological Seminary), writing in a recent issue of Science, argue that "neuroscience will post a far more fundamental challenge than evolutionary biology to many religions."
