[PHOTO] Boarding at Spadina

Boarding for the 510 Spadina at Spadina TTC station occurs indoors, in an underground loop. An approximation to light rail, here? Perhaps.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday notes

• Daniel Drezner links to an analysis of the import of Taiwanese-American basketball star Jeremy Lin that makes the point that Lin likely never would have come to prominence had he (say) grown up in China instead of the United States: not only is he not tall enough, but the concentration of China's sports bureaucracy on sports to the exclusion of all else puts off the parents of many potential players.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's SEK fisks an essay claiming to be literary analysis in its conspiracy theory claiming Obama's books were ghostwritten by one left-wing radical or another.


• NewAPPSBlog examines the connections between economist Adam Smith and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, seeing the extent to which their conceptions of freedom were compatible.


• Not Rocket Science reproduces the news of the thirty thousand year old seeds frozen in the permafrost which were made to flower.


• John Lorinc at Spacing Toronto reacts to yesterday's firing of Gary Webster by arguing that the anti-Ford majority on Toronto's city council should mobilize against him.


• Toronto transit blogger Steve Munro thinks the same.


• Finally, Sublime Oblivion's Anatoly Karlin posts a brief note suggesting that, with recent population growth driven by immigration and rising fertility along with falling mortality rates, Russia has left its demographic crisis period.

[BRIEF NOTE] Two notes on the origins of human language

Human language may well have originated in the African continent with the human species. One recent study even claimed that it was possible to determine the part of Africa where language evolved. A recent (summarized) study in Science suggests that this recent study made overblown claims.

In the beginning was the word – yes, but where exactly? Last year, Quentin Atkinson, a cultural anthropologist at Auckland University in New Zealand, proposed that the cradle of language could be localized in the southwest of Africa. The report, which appeared in Science, one of the world's leading scholarly journals, was seized upon by the media and caused something of a sensation. Now however, linguist Michael Cysouw from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich has published a commentary in Science which argues that this neat "Out-of-Africa" hypothesis for the origin of language is not adequately supported by the data presented. The search for the site of origin of language remains very much alive.

Atkinson based his claim on a comparative analysis of the numbers of phonemes found in about 500 present-day languages. Phonemes are the most basic sound units – consonants, vowels and tones – that form the basis of semantic differentiation in all languages. The number of phonemes used in natural languages varies widely. Atkinson, who is a biologist and psychologist by training, found that the highest levels of phoneme diversity occurred in languages spoken in southwestern Africa. Furthermore, according to his statistical analysis, the size of the phoneme inventory in a language tends to decrease with distance from this hotspot. To interpret this finding Atkinson invoked a parallel from population genetics. Biologists have observed an analogous effect, insofar as human genetic diversity is found to decrease with distance from Africa, where our species originated. This is attributed to the so-called founder effect. As people migrated from the continent and small groups continued to disperse, each inevitably came to represent an ever-shrinking fraction of the total genetic diversity present in the African population as a whole.

So does such a founder effect play a similarly significant effect in the dispersal and differentiation of languages? Michael Cysouw regards Atkinson's finding as "artefactual". Cysouw, whose work is funded by one of the prestigious Starting Grants awarded by the European Research Council (ERC), heads a research group that studies quantitative comparative linguistics in LMU's Faculty of Languages and Literatures. He says he has no objection in principle to the use of methods borrowed from other disciplines to tackle questions in linguistics, but that problems arise from their inappropriate application. For example, he finds that if Atkinson's method is employed to examine other aspects of language, such as the construction of subordinate clauses or the use of the passive mood, the results "do not point in the same direction".

Indeed, in their article in Science, Cysouw and his coauthors Steven Moran (LMU) and Dan Dediu of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen show that, depending on the features considered, Atkinson's method places the site of origin of language in eastern Africa or the Caucasus or somewhere else entirely. As Cysouw points out, linguists have long sought to throw light on the origin of language by analyzing patterns of language distribution. The problem is that such relationships can be reliably traced only as far back as about 10,000 years before the present.

It's notoriously difficult to come up with hard data on languages in deep historical time, with the various efforts to construct ur-languages predating the earliest recorded languages (i.e. Sumerian, Akkadian, Chinese) or plausible reconstructions (i.e. Indo-European) tending to be mutually contradictory. The data is too sparse and the time too deep, at least for the methods we've developed so far.

All that said, I wonder if the different results reported in the summary of Cysouw's paper--language originated in southwest Africa as defined by this trait, in east Africa according to that, in the Caucasus as shown by a third--might actually constitute a point against the monogenesis of language, against the idea that language evolved in a single region or even a single community before being picked up by the remainder of the human species. If different widely separated populations developed language independently and then came into contact with each other, the resulting contact languages might retain each source language's distinctive traits. (Might. I speculate at the limit of my knowledge.)

Thoughts?

[LINK] "Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed"

In the most recent of a series of guest posts at Charlie Stross' blog, Cat Valente argues--inspired by her experience living in a Japan that combined highly-advanced technology in the public sphere with little and expensive technology in the private sphere of the home--that there's a bias developing or even closely identifying with the future technologies associated with the private, female sphere.

[I]t began to occur to me that the tech I was using was incredibly gendered. In the "male" sphere, of professional operations, offices, corporations, pop culture, businesses, the available technology was extremely high-level, better than anywhere I'd yet lived. In the "female" sphere, the home, domestic duties, daily chores, cleaning, heating, anything inside the walls of a house, it was on a level my grandmother would find familiar.

Given that during the time I was there the Japanese parliament was suggesting removing the social safety net (social security benefits, in American parlance) for women who chose not to have children, and the issue of young men who expected a stay at home wife and young women who wanted to have careers was quite a hot one, I could not then and still do not believe that divide was an accident. The simple fact is that domestic chores take a huge amount of time and energy, and if a woman is occupied doing them, and especially doing them without the machines that speed up the process considerably, means that she rarely has the time to pursue interests and a career. Though for cultural and financial reasons, Japanese houses often house more than one generation, the lack of technology creates so much unnecessary work that most of my neighborhood required both the young mother and grandmother in a household to devote their days to it.

I don't think there's some dastardly man in a high office making Mr. Burns fingers and saying: EXCELLENT. I have oppressed women for another day! Let us celebrate! (Except the PMs who wanted to take away benefits for childless women--but not childless men.) This kind of thing is always more subtle than that. People who have imbibed from their culture that men and business are important and women and the home are slightly distasteful and irrelevant spending their time on inventions applicable to one and not the other. Corporate managers approving projects along the same lines. Everyone performs their upbringing in their work in one way or another. Obviously, I don't consider business a male bailiwick and the home the kingdom of woman, but a whole lot of people do, and a goodly number of them have a massive influence on the allocation of R & D funds and the political narrative than I do. Right this very second, here in the US, we are having an actual, serious, if incredibly stupid, conversation about whether or not women should have easy access to birth control. We are having this conversation because significant humans in our government believe women should not have access to it at all. I'm super excited about that, because it means it's 1965 and we're gonna go to the moon soon.

And Japan is HARDLY alone. C.f. that entire viciously moronic conversation about the care and feeding of my uterus. I merely noticed it for the first time over there. The article I linked to is fascinating because it is a very high tech response to a domestic issue, which is something I don't come across very often. Most of us are cooking in kitchens quite recognizable from 40 years ago. The Roomba in the corner of my living room is about the only chore-class object in my house that that same grandmother would not have used in cleaning up after my parents.

One of the things that has frustrated me about science fiction is that technology pertaining to the smaller aspects of our lives is often neglected in favor of big giant rockets and exotic weaponry. Birth control seems non-existent and childbirth is still rocking the stirrups. And the home is at best not mentioned much. One of the things that "the future," when we use that word as a metonymy for an idealized world in which machines solve all our problems, is supposed to do for us is give us time. Relieve us from work that is repetitive or unpleasant and allow us the sheer, simple hours in the day to do more. And yet, by far the biggest time sink going is the need to clean our habitats, prepare food and clothing, and maintain our environments. For those who have always had the, dare I say, privilege of ignoring that work, you simply cannot imagine how much time it takes to do all that and then turn around and do it again, often multiple times a day if there are offspring at play. Despite the fact that we here in the first world are supposed to have leveled up our gender equality stat, women still perform the majority of this labor, often in addition to a full shift outside the home. Fully automating this activity would free humanity on a scale that even the most awesome BFG can't even begin to contemplate.

I like her conclusion.

The future is not evenly distributed. Not along cultural lines, along language lines, along political, economic, class, or generational lines. And most certainly not along gender lines. A significant portion of the digital world proceeds on the quiet, probably subconscious meme that the future belongs to men and women are just along for the ride. Oh, sure, some women can play with the big boys. If they act right. But not the girly ones. They're feminine, therefore: weak and frivolous and shallow and shrill.

They can do the laundry.