Andrew Gelman on statistical fallacies in baseball reportage.

My landlady has gone on holiday to Italy.

I'm here with the cats.

One of which likes to spend the day out in the street.

As it turns out, the cat needs to be lured home again at night: one must go out into the street and meow loudly: MEOW. MEOOOOW. MEOOOOW.

The cat doesn't seem to be very discriminating. It doesn't need its mistress's voice. It just needs a human meowing loudly at midnight to call it home.

The two cats are now chowing down on a tin of petnatur 100% Bio (HERZRAGOUT).

I recognize that "language exams" can be (and sometimes are) designed to test something other than language proficiency. When I was a graduate student, we needed to demonstrate proficiency in two languages other than English. In principle, all that was required was the ability to translate a linguistics article, with access to a dictionary. Having achieved roughly that level of competence in German, I was planned to take the German exam. Then one of my fellow grad students, a native speaker of German who had an undergraduate degree from a well-regarded institution in Austria, told me that she had failed that exam.

Mark Liberman at Language Log, Language Tests for Immigrants to Canada

The first rule is an "internal" one: it has nothing to do with your relation with others, it concerns you yourself in isolation. It is as follows:

"Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward."

This rule tells us that the obviously possible should be shunned as well as the obviously impossible: the first would not be instructive, the second would be hopeless, and both in their own way are barren.

E W Dijkstra, Rules for Successful Scientific Research (ht Aleks Jakulin at Statistical Modeling)

Burkett & Griffiths (2010) go a long way to applying populaitonal thinking to language evolution. They describe a Bayesian model of language acquisition that takes into consideration multiple teachers and multiple languages. They point out that a learner who is trying to settle on a single grammar which fits data from multiple speakers violates the principle of Bayesian rational analysis. Burkett & Griffiths rectify this problem by defining a model in which a learner takes into account that the data it receives may be generated by different speakers who may speak more than one language.

Doing this involves a lot of complications. Here’s a list of things I had to look up before coming close to understanding the paper:

• Bernoulli distributions
• Beta distributions
• Hyperparameters
• Wright-Fisher model of genetic drift
• Kroenecker’s delta function
• Dirichlet process
• Gibbs Sampler
• Chinese Restaurant Process

Yes, probably dirt basic for mathematicians, but terrifying to us mere linguists. This took me about a month to get to grips with...

(Learning Multiple Languages from Multiple Teachers, at replicated typo
ht MR)

HDW MEETS AGENT

Terrific piece by Jonathan Franzen on Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, at the NY Times Book Review.

From Randall Jarrell's introduction:

Louie is a potentiality still sure that what awaits it in the world is potentiality, not actuality. That she is escaping from some Pollitts to some more Pollitts, that she herself will end as an actuality among actualities, an accomplished fact, is an old or middle-aged truth or half-truth that Louie doesn't know.