http://simon.net.nz Simon Greenhill's Website Mon, 02 Jun 2008 06:00:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I will be talking about Pacific settlement and Austronesian languages at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting next week in Kyoto, Japan: The settlement of the Pacific is one of the great chapters of human history. This region was settled by the Austronesian people during the last 10,000 years, eventually ... http://simon.net.nz/articles/talk-hbes-2008-pacific-settlement-and-austronesian-languages/ In our Brevia, we used the example of Webster's Dictionary--widely regarded as the inaugurating dictionary of American English--to illustrate how the desire for a distinct social identity can motivate language changes, such as spelling. Of course, some changes may have begun much earlier. We are not aware that anyone has ... http://simon.net.nz/articles/parsing-the-evolution-of-language-letter/ I'll be talking at the NZ Phylogenetics Meeting this week on Horizontal transmission and cultural phylogenies: Phylogenetic tree thinking is beginning to revolutionise studies of linguistic and cultural evolution. However, linguistic and cultural traits are easily transmitted horizontally ("borrowed") between cultures. Indeed, well over 95% of the words in the Oxford ... http://simon.net.nz/articles/talk-horizontal-transmission-and-cultural-phylogenies/ Linguists speculate that human languages often evolve in rapid or punctuational bursts, sometimes associated with their emergence from other languages, but this phenomenon has never been demonstrated. We use vocabulary data from three of the world’s major language groups – Bantu, Indo-European and Austronesian – to show that 10-33% ... http://simon.net.nz/articles/languages-evolve-in-punctuational-bursts/ Current debates about “Darwinizing culture” have typically focused on the validity of memetics. In this paper we argue that meme-like inheritance is not a necessary requirement for descent with modification. We suggest that an alternative and more productive way of Darwinizing culture can be found in the ... http://simon.net.nz/articles/the-pleasures-and-perils-of-darwinizing-culture-with-phylogenies/ Greenhill, S. J., Blust. R, & Gray, R.D. (2005-2007) The Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database. http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/austronesian http://simon.net.nz/articles/the-austronesian-basic-vocabulary-database/ Here's the abstract of the talk I gave at the Seventh International Conference on Oceanic Linguistics (COOL7), in Noumea, New Caledonia, entitled Language trees and the des langues et base de données du vocabulaire austronésien (Language trees and the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database): Nombre de données linguistiques essentielles recueillies au fil ... http://simon.net.nz/articles/conference-cool7-language-trees-and-the-des-langues-et-base-de-donnees-du-vocabulaire-austronesien/ Intrusion detection? Over on Mezzoblue, Dave Shea found out that his website had been compromised subtly. The attacker had exploited some (as yet unknown) security hole and quietly modified his website to link to the standard spam sites. Within a few hours there were tens of posts from people who'd checked their ... http://simon.net.nz/articles/simple-webserver-file-alteration-monitoring-using-integrit/ Pacific settlement and Austronesian languages. Greenhill, S.J. & R.D. Gray Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, New Zealand; This is the abstract of a talk I gave at Doom '07 - The Annual New Zealand Phylogenetics Meeting at Whakapapa, New Zealand. The settlement of the Pacific is one of the greatest population ... http://simon.net.nz/articles/doom-2007-pacific-settlement-and-austronesian-languages/ Here's a simple little script to query PubMed for a Digitial Object Identifier (a DOI) Usage is quite simple, find a DOI somewhere, e.g. 10.1038/nature02029 (for this groundbreaking paper), and run this: [code] lurch:~ python pythonquery.py 10.1038/nature02029 [/code] ... and via the magic of webservices and XML, and with a bit of luck, you'll get ... http://simon.net.nz/articles/query-pubmed-for-citation-information-using-a-doi-and-python/