Noam Chomsky: MIT professor, writer and activist

"in this system of immense power, small differences can translate into large outcomes"

Also: Chomsky now has a weblog --- or, perhaps more accurately --- someone is posting Chomsky's comments on the Net for him:

Turning the Tide

All the entries read as though someone started recording Chomsky mid-lecture. For a few days, one could post comments. Not surprisingly, that did not last.

[via Brian Weatherson's Thoughts Arguments and Rants]

The first meeting of SPRIG will be this Friday, 9 AM, in the Phonetics Lab, Bartlett 6 (in the basement of Bartlett if you've never been there). Download the newest version of PRAAT beforehand.

1. Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
2. Women's Health Information and Support Centre

<a href="./"</a>.

Though WHISC has a tiny readership, we feel that this should not stop us from being #1. Anyway, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation seems to prefer WHINSEC.

Robert Stalnaker spoke earlier this evening at Amherst College:

The Department of Communication Disorders cordially invited you to attend a presentation on Thursday, March 25th, 4-5 p.m. in 321 Arnold House:

[If fewer interesting people with stimulating questions had stopped by the WHISC editorial offices today, we would have gotten this issue out in time for these notices to be of use to you.]

Lisa, Taka, and I presented one oral presentation and two posters at the Speech and Prosody conference in Nara, Japan, March 23-26, 2004. Lisa did an astounding job of delivering the talk in a very limited time (12 minute presentation, 3 minute question period). The oral presentation was particularly well received, inviting many interesting questions from linguists as well as engineers. The posters attracted the attention of many people as well, and the discussion with people from different backgrounds (such as JTobi people from Ohio State and engineers who are mainly interested in speech synthesis) was particularly fruitiful. Mariko Sugahara, who graduated from UMass last year, also presented a paper. Tateishi Koichi (who graduated around 1990) was also there and engaged in discussion with us on a variety of topics. The picture of mini-Umass-reunion should be sent to you from Taka shortly.

Luis Alonso-Ovalle has posted his forthcoming NELS paper:

Luis Alonso-Ovalle. 2004. Simplification of Disjunctive Antecedents. In Keir Moulton and Matthew Wolf, eds., 2004), Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 34. University of Massachusetts, Amherst: GLSA.

Dear WHISCERS,

Volodja and I got back Saturday evening from a week in Prague at the Mathesius Lecture Series (probably the last one ever), where we gave four lectures and attended lectures by Manfred Krifka and Stuart Shieber, and spent time with a number of our Prague friends and with 5 Georgian friends and colleagues who were attending Mathesius.

I especially enjoyed Manfred's lectures. Besides his 3-lecture series, he also delivered the annual Roman Jakobson lecture for the Prague Linguistics Circle, which all Mathesius participants were able to attend. (And then he was at a conference with Angelika in Leipzig at the end of last week.)

Background:

The Gen and Eval mechanisms are central for OT. Gen is a pattern generator. It creates the set of possible structural realizations of an input --- the candidate outputs. For our purposes, candidate outputs can be strings. Eval evaluates the entire set to determine which candidate output is optimal with respect to a finite set of constraints.

Here is your task:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

Assume that the candidate set is given by the set of all permutation variants of the words in the quotation. This simplification (to a finite candidate set, with no symbols added or taken away) is not inherent in OT, but it is a live possibility that the set of potential winners is finite. With just this restriction in place, is it reasonable to accept the deal, given that you will get the money only after delivering?

Here are some clues:

1. Calculate the candidates. How many possible candidates are there?
2. Approximate your time calculation, allowing yourself the following time scheme for your future tough, but well-paid job: 1 second per eval operation; 14 hours per day, 7 days a week.
3. Guess: When will you be finished and get your money?

   a.	within 10 years
   b.	before your retirement age
   c.	at the age when Jeanne Calment died (121 years)
   d.	before the end of this millenium (i.e. Dec. 31st 3000)
   e.	later, but still in the life time of our solar system
   f.	later

The task of WHISC Whimsy #1 was to insert one word per box such that the example becomes a grammatical German sentence (inserting commas to taste):

verkehrt verkehrt verkehrt verkehrt verkehrt verkehrt

Jan Anderssen was the first and only WHISC reader to supply a correct answer:

Wer	weiss,	wer	verkehrt	verkehrt	verkehrt	verkehrt,	verkehrt	verkehrt.
Who	knows	who	traffics	wrongly	traffics	wrongly	traffics	wrongly.
'The one who knows that whoever traffics wrongly traffics wrongly is one who traffics wrongly himself.'

Wer	wo,	man	verkehrt	verkehrt	verkehrt	verkehrt,	verkehrt	verkehrt.
Who	where	one	traffics	wrongly	traffics	wrongly	traffics	wrongly.
cf. 'Wer dort, wo man andersherum verkehrt, andersherum verkehrt, der verkehrt verkehrt.'

In brief, WHISC Whimsy #2 told the story of a professor who valiantly displayed 19 CVC roots of proto-Finno-Ugric that he claimed to be derived from proto Indo-European (PIE). The question: Can we be sure that these are not accidental matches?

Hubert's answer begins from the solution to the Birthday Paradox: How many people must be in a room for the chances of two of them having the same birthday to rise above 50%? The answer is 23. Hubert then reasoned that 19 CVC roots out of a basic vocabulary of about 3000 places the chance level at 190 correspondences.

Hubert continues

A week later, the professor for Indo-European Studies called me into his office. Look, he said to me, 35 Students are enrolled in my class, and there are no two with the same birthday. (He was not impressed by me pointing out that I had said: chance greater than 50%)