Neanderthal Genome Unraveled

Technology Review: Neanderthal Genome Unraveled

Toddlers' Gesturing Linked To Later Vocabulary And School Readiness

Toddlers' Gesturing Linked To Later Vocabulary And School Readiness

"ScienceDaily (Feb. 12, 2009) — Children who convey more meanings with gestures at age 14 months have much larger vocabularies at 54 months than children who convey fewer meanings and are accordingly better prepared for school, according to research at the University of Chicago published in the journal Science on Friday, Feb. 13."

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?