A Bit More Detail

• Architectuul features a photo essay made by Evan Panagopoulos in the course of a hurried three-hour visit to the Socialist Modernist and modern highlights of 20th century Kiev architecture.


• Bad Astrronomer Phil Plait notes how the latest planet found in the Kepler-47 circumbinary system evokes Tatooine.


• Centauri Dreams looks at tide and radiation, and their impacts on potential habitability, in the TRAPPIST-1 system.


• Citizen Science Salon looks at how the TV show Cyberchase can help get young people interested in science and math.


• Crooked Timber mourns historian David Brion Davis.


• The Crux looks at how the HMS Challenger pioneered the study of the deeps of the oceans, with that ship's survey of the Mariana Trench.


• D-Brief looks at how a snowball chamber using supercooled water can be used to hunt for dark matter.


• Earther shares photos of the heartbreaking and artificial devastation of the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil.


• Gizmodo shares a beautiful Hubble photograph of the southern Crab Nebula.


• Information is Beautiful shares a reworked version of the Julia Galef illustration of the San Francisco area meme space.


• io9 notes that, fresh from being Thor, Jane Foster is set to become a Valkyrie in a new comic.


• JSTOR Daily explains the Victorian fondness for leeches, in medicine and in popular culture.


• Language Hat links to an interview with linguist Amina Mettouchi, a specialist in Berber languages.


• Language Log shares the report of a one-time Jewish refugee on changing language use in Shanghai, in the 1940s and now.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on the horror of self-appointed militias capturing supposed undocumented migrants in the southwestern US.


• Marginal Revolution reports on the circumstances in which volunteer militaries can outperform conscript militaries.


• At the NYR Daily, Christopher Benfey reports on the surprisingly intense connection between bees and mourning.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw, responding to Israel Folau, considers free expression and employment.


• The Planetary Society Blog shares a guest post from Barney Magrath on the surprisingly cheap adaptations needed to make an iPhone suitable for astrophotography.


• Peter Rukavina reports on the hotly-contested PEI provincial election of 1966.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains what the discovery of helium hydride actually means.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little praises the Jill Lepore US history These Truths for its comprehensiveness.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the growing divergences in demographics between different post-Soviet countries.


• Arnold Zwicky starts with another Peeps creation and moves on from there.

‘Wasp’ is an English word, but ‘telk’ is not. You and I know this because we speak English. But in a French laboratory, six baboons have also learned to tell the difference between genuine English words, and nonsense ones. They can sort their wasps from their telks, even though they have no idea that the former means a stinging insect and the latter means nothing. They don’t understand the language, but can ‘read’ nonetheless.

At its most basic level, reading is about recognising patterns. We look at letters (or other symbols) and identify them based on their number, position and angles of lines. This is a trivial task, and one that doesn’t require any language. Letters are no different to any other object in our environment that we can recognise. A pigeon can be trained to do discriminate between letters.

The next step is harder. We unite letters into words by looking at their positions relative to one another. This is called “orthographic processing”. It’s the stage where, according to general consensus, language kicks in. As we see clusters of letters, we think about the sounds they represent and we read the word aloud in our heads. But Jonathan Grainger from Aix-Marseille University has shown that orthographic processing can happen without any knowledge of language, or how words are meant to sound.

Grainger trained baboons to recognise English words, and tell them apart from very similar nonsense words. The monkeys learned quickly, and could even categorise words they had never seen before. They weren’t anglophiles by any stretch. Instead, their abilities suggest that the act of reading words is just a more advanced version of the pattern-recognition skill that lets us identify letters. It’s a skill that was there long before the first human had scrawled the first letter.

[. . .]

None of the six baboons had seen words or letters before. But over a month and a half, and thousands of trials, all of them learned to distinguish words from non-words with around 75 per cent accuracy (50 per cent would be pure guesswork). The most successful of them – Dan – built up a vocabulary of 308 words.

Their achievement is remarkable, not least because the non-words were very similar to the actual ones. Rather than obvious fakes like ‘qzxc’, they all contained pairs of letters that occur in real words, although they veered towards rarer combinations. And the monkeys weren’t just memorising the words. They were still more likely to pick a set of letters they had never seen before, if it was an actual English word.

Grainger thinks that the baboons learned to tell the real words from the fakes by using the frequencies of letter combinations within them. They learned which combinations were most likely to be found in real words, and made their choices accordingly. They had gleaned the stats of English, without any knowledge of the language itself.

Stanislas Deheane, one of the leading figures in the science of reading, thinks that the study is “extraordinarily exciting”. He says, “It fits very nicely with my own research, which suggests that reading relies, in part, on learning the purely visual statistics of letters and their combinations.”

• The Bloor-Lansdowne blog covers the celebration surrounding the reopening of the Bloor-Lansdowne Library.


• Centauri Dreams covers the possibility that life in the Galaxy might emerge in great, irregular waves as punctuated evolution would hold, reports more signs that water may exist on/inside Enceladus, and suggests that the threat from comets to Earth may be quite exaggerated.


• Demography Matters co-blogger Aslak Berg points out that better metrics indicate that European fertility is substantially higher than TFRs would indicate.


• The Dragon's Tales links to Venus exploration proposals and the discovery of evidence of an asteroidal collision with Earth 129 thousand years ago.


• Edward Lucas reviews a new book by the admittedly problematic Andrew Roberts that makes the point that Germany's loss of the Second World War has everything to do with Naziism and Hitler's erratic nature.


• A Fistful of Euros covers the news about the expansion of new liberal visa rules to only some Yugoslav successor states, and reports on the growing irrelevance of Kosovar Albanians and Serbians to each other.


• Language Hat reports on recent neurological discoveries suggesting that brain damage is more likely to damage knowledge of a second language than of a first.


• Marginal Revolution links to an article claiming that China's also suffering a bubble economy, with commenters disputing the accuracy of foreign reports.


• Spacing Toronto's Jake Schabas reports about a charming secret garden on Eglinton Street and touches on the history of market gardens.


• Slap Upside the Head lets us know that a Saskatchewan public marriage commissioner who claimed that he didn't have to perform gay marriages because of his religion lost his case.


• Torontoist blogs about Hamilton's image-changing efforts, vintage ads about a defunct store chance, and the Bloor-Gladstone Library's revival.
  
• Towleroad reports, rather surprisingly, that Albania's president says he wants to push for gay marriage in his country.

• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism wonders if the European Union, free from the United States' baggage and much closer than China, could give a post-Castro Cuba some sort of protectorate status.


• The Lounsbury at 'Aqoul observes that al-Jazeerah's coverage of the Kosovo independence celebrations included more than a few pairings of Kosovar and American flags. Good public relations?


• At Crooked Timber, Christ Bertram's celebratory post on Castro and John Quiggin's more measured consideration of dictatorship might both have generated more heat than light, but there's still enough of the latter there. If you page past the flamewars, that is.


• Ken MacLeod speculates that Technocracy and science fiction are too close for comfort.


• Joel at Far Outliers has had a few good Timothy Garton Ash excerpts, including one on Belgrade in 1997, one in Sarajevo in 1995, and one in Kosovo in 1998, one on Bosnia in 1998, and finally, a personal view of Yugoslavia's murder.


• At Joe. My. God, Rupert Everett is quoted as saying that pride marches have become depoliticized. The blogger and many commenters disagree.


• In the aftermath of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to Australian Aborigines, Language Log has its own take on the situation, touching upon Australian Aborigine languages.


• normblog blogs about Castro's unsurprisingly long period in office and his appropriation of the word "amor."


• Strange Maps describes the Republic of New Netherlands, population 31.2 million.

• In the light of Mike Huckabee's recent victory in Iowa's Republican caucuses, the criticism of 1948's Richard that Huckabee's refusal to accept evolution should be seen as a hallmark of non-rational intellectually should be heeded. Elect the right person, guys.


• Over at 'Aqoul, The Lounsbury examines the badly-structured housing market for lower- and middle-class Egyptians.


• Claus Vistesen predicts that some of the more prominent economics-related news stories in 2008 will include slow Japanese growth, a patchwork of performances in Europe, the impact of the declining value of the US dollar on international capital flows, and the risk of stagflation.


• Joe. My. God links to disturbing reports that the incidence of HIV infection among young MSM in New York City is rising. Canadian statistics seem to suggest that this trend hasn't manifested north of the border, but it may be only a matter of time.


• Mark Liberman at Language Log blogs about how the use of two different scripts for Hindustani helped produce separate Hindu and Urdu languages by the time of Partition, despite the languages' continued mutual intelligibility at the popular level.


• Norman Geras' essay "Criticism and Cleanliness" is an interesting meditation on the circumstances under which citizens of imperfect democracies can criticize faults elsewhere in the world.


• The Pagan Prattle has a roundup of fundamentalists' predictions of apocalypse in the year 2008.


• Strange Maps hosts Charles Joseph MInard's famous statistical map showing the horrific casualties resulting from Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia.
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Although we knew the area we were moving to, we hadn't taken on board its linguistic complexity. If I look out of the window now I can see areas where four distinct languages are spoken.

Our house is on the northern boundary of the old kingdom of Béarn and the view is across the lovely Béarnaise countryside to the Pyrenees on the skyline. Now Béarn is part of France and its official language is French although that is a recent phenomenon.

Many of our older friends in the area only started to learn French when they went to school and their parents' generation never spoke it at all. But also we can see the (Spanish) Pyrenees - another language which is the main means of communication in a number of the mountain passes on the French side of the border.