By Lucy Ferriss. This is the question I get most often when people learn I have a new novel out. I understand the context of the question. If you walk into a Barnes & Noble, or go browsing on Amazon, you will see real or virtual shelves devoted to Mystery, Romance, Thrillers, Historical, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Young Adult. My books, and the books of most writers I happen to know, don’t belong on any of them. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. My husband teases me for skipping past much of the bulk of newspaper editorials to get to the comments. He’s a social scientist, interested in government policies and the social order; I’m a fiction writer, interested in how personalities respond to rhetorical maneuvers. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. I noticed that W. Stanley Jevons’s remarkably successful little book Elementary Lessons in Logic (reprinted annually for decades after its appearance in 1870) uses language learning to illustrate two ways of acquiring or transmitting knowledge (see Lesson XXIV, “On Method, Analysis and Synthesis”). One is the method of instruction. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. I love this time of year in Edinburgh. The weather, of course, remains its usual disgraceful self: high winds with on-and-off rain the past few days. The gap between the David Hume Tower and the business school still funnels the wind into gusts that can lift small-framed people off their feet. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. It’s unsettling for a linguist to find serious doubt being expressed in a quality newspaper not just about whether one kilogram means “one kilogram” (it seems the standard kilogram, a cylinder of platinum and iridium kept under lock and key in France, may have been losing a tiny fraction of its weight), but also about whether one means “one.” Yet according to The Independent (July 15), a recent court judgment casts doubt on the latter. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. Several correspondents sent me links to James Gingell’s recent Guardian article about what George Orwell would have thought about today’s human-resources professionals. Gingell sees HR professionals as evil slimeballs. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. We have seen it before, with bonobos and monkeys and parrots and dogs and cows and dolphins. Even bats. Heaven knows how many beasts of the field and birds of the air have been the subjects of irresponsible science journalism claiming that animal behavior reveals how human language originated, or (more commonly) that they use language just like humans. More...
By Meg Bernhard. It’s difficult to keep students engaged — and awake — when assigning them readings from long and often dull textbooks. Two researchers wanted to change that.
Their creation is zyBooks, a web-based platform that mixes learning activities such as question sets and animations with some written content, largely as a replacement for text. More...
By Meg Bernhard. Imagine a world where you’re driving to campus, and before you get there, your car tells you to park in one lot because it already knows another is full. That could soon be the reality at Carnegie Mellon University, where researchers have teamed up with Google to place wireless sensors around the campus to connect everyday items with the web. More...
By Mary Ellen McIntire. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are leading an effort to create a one-stop shop for data sets that would otherwise be lost to the public after the papers they were produced for are published. More...
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