Evolang 8: 2010

Dear Colleagues,

The following scholars have agreed to participate as plenary speakers in EVOLANG 8, 2010:

Stephen Anderson (Yale)
Morten Christiansen (Cornell)
Terrence Deacon (Berkeley)
Peter Gardenfors (Lund)
Marc Hauser (Harvard)
Wil Roebroeks (Leiden)
Eors Szathmary (Budapest)
Maggie Tallerman (Newcastle)

The conference dates are 14-17 April, 2010. The conference will take place at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. The current plan is to schedule two or three workshops on Saturday the 17th, in the afternoon, and a general public symposium on Tuesday 13th.

Thanks go to Rudie Botha and his local organizing team for progress so far.

A call for submissions will be circulated very shortly.

Best wishes,
Jim Hurford

Summer Institute in Cognitive Sciences 2010

Theme of the Summer Institute: The Origins of Language

Participating disciplines:

• Anthropology
• Archaeology
• Computer Sciences
• Linguistics
• Neurosciences
• Paleontology
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Zoology

Dates: June 21^st to 30^th 2010

Language: Due to its international character, the Summer Institute will be held entirely in English.

The Institute is intended for:

• graduate and post-graduate students from the participating disciplines,
• faculty members, scholars, engineers, and professionals from these disciplines.

2009 Brazilian International Meeting of Cognitive Science

2009 Brazilian International Meeting of Cognitive Science

September 2, 2009 – September 4, 2009

Welcome to the website of the 8th Brazilian International Meeting of Cognitive Science - EBICC2009. In 2009, the EBICC Conference will be held in Campinas, SP, at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - University of Campinas, from 2-4 September. The main theme of this conference will be:

Cognitive Technologies: Interdisciplinarity and Convergence
(the official language in this conference is English ... works in Portuguese only will be considered for panels)

Solving a computational problem

A major obstacle in the simulation was the time it would take for agents to generate a random production based on the evolving probabilities of their articulatory space. The idea was that for any production, a continuous value for place of articulation (the degree would be kept constant for now) would be generated and then the acoustic output would be computed. It takes at least some 2 seconds to calculate each vowel. Multiplying that by the number of agents anf the thousand/millions of turns, it would take a lot of time to run a single simulation. The solution is to make this production digital and store previously all the possible results. It will be much faster to store some 100 or 200 places of articulations (vowels only) linearly spaced. The computation time would be replaced for memory access time. With at least 100 linearly spaced points, the continuity would be present and the non-linearity of the articulatory-acoustic relation would remain intact.

With this change, it will be possible to run simulations much faster than what I estimated before and also to test most of the parameters ranges which produce stable conditions. The goal now is to have a simulation using a real vocal tract for the Abralin conference next March.

Whacky idea?

Search for the prevalence of myopia in different populations. A connection to brachiomanual gestural language?

Still making the headlines

Moe, the missing chimp from SoCal, is back to old time fame. Now, the Washington Post has a story about him. More factual information and quite touchy-feely. A sample:

Because maybe chimpanzees aren't really supposed to wear short pants and live in suburban houses with humans who treat them as their child. It never really ends well, does it? Because even though the humans love them dearly, cute baby chimps grow into big adult apes, who can bite, which can have a tragic trajectory, as we shall see.

But then again, who are we to judge, those of us who have never put a pair of pajamas on an ape.

Soon, somebody will start selling t-shirts: "Live free".

Adding insult to injury?

Continuing to report o nthe Saga of Moe, the missing chimp from CA, now the headlines try to capture the reader's attention this way:

Toilet-trained chimpanzee goes missing in Californian forest

And a touching story at the end:

The couple broke down in tears at a press conference in Los Angeles. "What am I going to do?" said Ms Davis. "He meant the world to us," said her husband. "He was the best man at my wedding."

Well, I guess he had to be toilet-trained and he is a nice chimp, otherwise he might have started to throw crap at everybody, as sometimes they do. I wonder how he was dressed...