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Sesquipedalian #24
the SESQUIPEDALIAN Volume VI, No. 24
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Mad Festival May 2, 1996
TRUE TALES OF IN-DUH-VIDUALS
These true reports were filed by anonymous DNRC operatives:
Sighting #1:
I was busy writing some computer program for one of my classes and my
roommate asked me if he could use my coffee maker. I said, "sure."
The next thing I hear is, "Hey, where do you put the coffee?" I turn to
see that he has filled the filter basket with water and is
(unsuccessfully) trying to keep the water in the basket by plugging the
hole at the bottom with his finger. He and the floor are both covered
with water.
Sighting #2:
I was at the airport, checking in at the gate, when the airport employee
asked, "Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?"
I said, "If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?"
He smiled and nodded knowingly, "That's why we ask."
Sighting #3:
The stoplight on the corner buzzes when it is safe to cross
the street. I was crossing with an intellectually
challenged co-worker of mine, when she asked if I knew what
the buzzer was for. I explained that it signals to blind people when the
light is red. She responded, appalled, "What on earth are blind people
doing DRIVING???"
Sighting #4:
At a goodbye lunch for an old and dear co-worker who is leaving the
company due to "rightsizing," our manager spoke up and said, "This is
fun. We should have lunch like this more often."
Not another word was spoken. We just looked at each other like deer
staring into the headlights of an approaching truck.
Sighting #5:
I worked with an Induhvidual who plugged her power strip back into itself
and for the life of her could not understand why her system would not
turn on.
Sighting #6 (a rare "double sighting"):
A friend had a brilliant idea for saving disk space. He thought if he
put all his Microsoft Word documents into a tiny font they'd take up less
room. When he told me I was with another friend. She thought it was a
good idea too.
Sighting #7 (from Tech Support):
Tech Support: "How much free space do you have on your hard drive?"
Induhvidual: "Well, my wife likes to get up there on that
Internet, and she downloaded ten hours of free
space. Is that enough?"
Sighting #8 (from Tech Support):
Induhvidual: Now what do I do?
Tech Support: What is the prompt on the screen?
Induhvidual: It's asking for "Enter Your Last Name."
Tech Support: Okay, so type in your last name.
Induhvidual: How do you spell that?
Sighting #9 (from Tech Support):
We received a support call from a customer who had problems connecting to
some dial-in lines. He said he found a solution to his connection
problems and would like to share it with us.
When he heard his modem retraining upon dialing in,
he would pick up the phone and make a "Kckgkth" noise, like a modem, into
the phone. Then he would hang up and get a reliable connection. He told
us he would be glad to record this noise and send it to us so that our
other customers could benefit from it.
After we stopped rolling on the floor laughing, we told him
he was just inserting line noise and was connecting at a lower speed.
-------
[from the Dilbert newsletter]
-\-/-\ LOOK WHO'S TALKING \-/-\-
This weekend only, the return of:
Magical Costa Rican Mints
-A Monologue About Adolescence-
written and performed by the Lx. Department's Very Own
Rudolph Delson
Florence Moore Hall (Right Across the parking lot from
Tressider, in the Paloma Lounge)
Friday, May 3, 7pm
Free (!) and Open to the Public
Fun! Critics rave: "this is the best one man show
written and performed by the
Linguistics Department's own Rudy
Delson that you can see this
Friday at Flo Mo at 7. No Foolin'."
-- ALSO NOTED: This weekend, CSLI hosts the first annual
Stanford-Berkeley-UCSC Student Conference in Linguistics. Contact
Maria-Eugenia Nino (nino@csli) for details. Stanford students who
will be speaking include: Rachel Nordlinger, Jennifer Arnold, Andrea
Kortenhoven, Qing Zhang, Arto Anttila, Christine Poulin, Scott
Schwenter, Rob Malouf, Emily Bender, and Yukiko Morimoto.
-\-/-\ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM \-/-\-
**** IMPORTANT: NOTE CHANGE OF ROOM ****
Stanford Linguistics Department Colloquium
in conjunction with CSLI Publications
Friday, May 3, 3:30 pm.
Cordura 100, CSLI (NOTE ROOM CHANGE!!)
Paul Kay
UC Berkeley
Semantic Universals in Color Terminology
The World Color Survey (WCS) was begun in the late seventies to test
and refine the hypotheses proposed by Berlin and Kay (1969) that (1)
there are universal constraints on the patterns of color naming across
languages and (2) there are universal constraints on the temporal
development of systems of basic color terms. The WCS has collected
data in 110 non-literate language communities from (usually)
twenty-five speakers per community, insofar as possible monolingual.
Partial analysis of the resulting data show that (a) the main lines of
the broad hypotheses given as (1) and (2) above are confirmed, (b) the
specifics of the evolutionary sequence proposed in 1969 must be
loosened in the light of more recent data, (c) the resulting picture
accords in some detail with known or proposed properties of the visual
system, confirming the further hypothesis that universals in the
semantics of color naming are driven by universals in the visual
processing of color (probably shared with non-speaking species such as
the great apes and old world monkeys).
__________________________________________________________________
Reference: Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their
Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: U. of Cal. Press.
--------------
Reception follows.
For directions and a complete list of colloquia, see
http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/~kessler/colloq/
NOTE: Next week's colloquium will be given by Janet Pierrehumbert
(Northwestern U) on THURSDAY May 9, at 3.30pm in 460-146. Title TBA.
-\-/-\ PHONOLOGY WORKSHOP \-/-\-
CV ALTERNATIONS IN FINNISH: AN UNDERSPECIFICATION APPROACH
Andrew Dolbey and Ronald Sprouse
UC Berkeley
Thursday, May 2, 1996, 7:30 p.m.
Margaret Jacks Hall, Seminar Room 146
-\-/-\ FELLOWSHIPS/ASSISTANTSHIPS \-/-\-
-- UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON: Information Technology Research Institute
(ITRI). The ITRI invites PhD applicants with good Honours degrees (or
equivalent) in artificial intelligence, computer science,
computational linguistics, anthropology, sociology, design studies or
related fields. Studentships are available for a 3-year period to
work on the following areas:
- computational lexicography and lexical engineering
- computer supported collaborative design
- computer supported writing
- constraint satisfaction
- discourse analysis
- ethnographic analysis of design and engineering groups
- information extraction
- lexical representation
- multilingual language engineering
- natural language generation
Application forms are available from:
Research Administrator
ITRI
Mithras Annex
University of Brighton
Lewes Road
Brighton BN2 4AT
email: admin@itri.brighton.ac.uk
Applications deadline: 15th May 1996. This document may also be found
at http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/posts/studentships.html
For more information about the ITRI see
http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk
-\-/-\ TRUE LINGUISTICS \-/-\-
An argument for...
Thesis: Our understanding of GB theory is innate.
Metathesis: We have an innate GB theory faculty, or module.
1) Many people from many different cultural backgrounds have
successfully learned GB theory. Therefore, the ability to understand
it must be a common human trait. Further, the pervasiveness of such
"deep" features as the Capitalization of All Theoretical Constructs
points to not just an innate ability to understand GB, but
an innate understanding of GB.
2) Argument from the poverty of the stimulus: Come on, if
we didn't already understand it, do you really think we would be
able to figure it out from such an obscure literature?
3) Argument from the arcaneness of the apparatus:
a) We clearly don't want to posit that graduate students
have a learning faculty powerful enough to actually learn (and
not just discover inside themselves) something as beautifully
complex as GB theory.
b) As this beautiful, complex theory clearly has no
application to other cognitive processes, our innate knowledge
of it must constitute its own module.
[Emily Bender]
-\-/-\ JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS \-/-\-
(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)
-- BELL LABS: Bell Laboratories is seeking to hire a highly qualified
candidate with a background in finite-state methods in natural
language and speech processing. The successful candidate will:
- have a strong background in algorithms for finite-state machines,
(for example, algorithms for fast runtime composition and intersection
of machines, and minimization techniques for transducers);
- have a strong interest in applying finite-state
technology in areas related to speech and natural language, as
well as in assisting in the construction of efficient tools for
compiling linguistic descriptions into finite-state representations;
- hold a PhD in a relevant area, such as Computer Science,
Computational Linguistics or Cognitive Science.
Previous work in this area by those of us at Bell Laboratories and
AT&T Research, has involved applications of finite-state models in
speech recognition and speech synthesis. The following papers give a
sense of the range of applications that have already been
investigated, and which we plan to continue investigating:
Fernando Pereira, Michael Riley, and Richard Sproat. 1994. Weighted
rational transductions and their application to human language
processing. In ARPA Workshop on Human Language Technology, pages
249--254. Advanced Research Projects Agency, March 8--11.
Fernando Pereira and Michael Riley. 1996. "Speech recognition by
composition of weighted finite automata." CMP-LG archive paper
9603001. (http://xxx.lanl.gov/cmp-lg/)
Mehryar Mohri and Richard Sproat. 1996. "An efficient compiler for
weighted rewrite rules." In 34rd Annual Meeting of the Association
for Computational Linguistics, Morristown, NJ. Association for
Computational Linguistics. (Soon to be available from CMP-LG)
Richard Sproat and Michael Riley. 1996a. "Compilation of Weighted
Finite-State Transducers from Decision Trees." In 34rd Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics, Morristown, NJ. Association
for Computational Linguistics. (Soon to be available from CMP-LG)
Richard Sproat. 1996b. Multilingual text analysis for text-to-speech
synthesis. In Proceedings of the ECAI-96 Workshop on Extended Finite
State Models of Language, Budapest, Hungary. European Conference on
Artificial Intelligence. (Soon to be available from CMP-LG)
(Because of the diversity of applications for this technology, it is
unclear at present whether the position will be in the Linguistics
Research Department, the Speech Synthesis Research Department, or the
Speech Recognition Research Department: however departmental
assignments have no bearing on one's collaborational possibilities.)
Interested candidates should send CVs along with statements of
research interests to:
Richard Sproat
Speech Synthesis Research Department
Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory
Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies | tel (908) 582-5296
700 Mountain Avenue, Room 2d-451 | fax (908) 582-7308
Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA | rws@bell-labs.com
(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)
-\-/-\ INSTA-PRIZE \-/-\-
-- SQUARE: Leonardo of Pisa (1175-1250 AD), otherwise known as
Fibonacci, is famous for the series of numbers that bears his name.
The puzzle that spawned this series-- 'How many pairs of rabbits will
be produced in a year, beginning with a single pair, if in every month
each pair bears a new pair which becomes productive from the second
month on?'-- is propounded in his book on mathematics _Liber Abaci._
That work also contains the following puzzle, said to be put to
Fibonacci in 1225 by the Emperor Frederick II, who had come to Pisa to
test Fibonacci's reputation:
'Find a square that remains a square when it is increased or
decreased by 5.'
First correct answer wins this week's insta-prize.
Solution to HARDLY WORKING can be found by typing 'help hercules' at
the command line.
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-\-/-\ CONSERVE DISK SPACE \-/-\-
So you may delete your copy after you've read it (or better yet,
before you've read it), the Sesquipedalian Weekly Herald is stored
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Berkeley (in the directory /usr/pub.), or on the Linguistics
Department home page (http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/). The most
current issue of the Herald can be found by typing 'help quip'.
Neither Stanford University nor the Linguistics Department, nor any of
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