Simon J. Greenhill

Switzerland decided not to fund humanities and social sciences in their new national research funding...

Academia.edu - Find Research Papers, Topics, Researchers Academia.edu is the platform to share, find, and explore 50 Million research papers. Join us to accelerate your research needs & academic interests.

FYI, Academia.edu has changed its terms of service to give an irrevocable worldwide license for anything uploaded to its site to be used for generative AI. I do not consent to this and have pulled all my papers.

New contribution to our Blog / Journal on Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice, this time by our doctoral student David Snee and myself:

Computing Detailed Colexifications with Missing Data Information from the CLICS⁴ Collection

doi.org/10.15475/cal...

calc.hypotheses.org/9164

a man is standing next to a row of chairs in the sand . ALT: a man is standing next to a row of chairs in the sand .

tibble

Oh that is lovely!

Uni ordered to return student's $8000 fees after she failed a paper The student failed a paper she needed to get into a higher doctoral course.

Well this is just a great precedent for NZ universities: www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/disputes-...

Is Email Making Professors Stupid? It used to simplify crucial tasks. Now it’s strangling scholars’ ability to think.

To be a professor in 2026 is to be a middle-manager who has to teach from time to time and who likes to write in their spare time.

www.chronicle.com/article/is-e...

#rstats

The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics will be running a special issue commemorating the 25th anniversary of the official release of R. (The Univ. of Auckland was the birthplace of R.) They invited various people to contribute articles, including me. 🧵 1/

Seconded

Language learning as ontogenetic adaptation

Opinion by Manuel Bohn (@elmanubohn.bsky.social) & Marisa Casillas
tinyurl.com/48pdbv5b

PhD student grant (3 years) on the evolution of written communication My team recruits a PhD student to work under the supervision of Olivier Morin on the evolution of written communication, within a project jointly led by Olivier Morin, Hugo Mercier, and Marc Allassonn...

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

hey this looks great, thanks!

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

Hey linguists -- chickens can distinguish bouba and kiki:

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right-wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly Elon Musk’s social media platform is boosting conservative content – and it’s having long-lasting effects on how users see the world.

Research now backs up that if you let X (formerly Twitter) algorithms determine what you read, your views will shift to the right theconversation.com/a-few-weeks-...

cool, I'll check those out. Been meaning to look into pak anyway

package_cost.R GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

Ah, of course. I knocked this one up (using code I found online, can't take credit): gist.github.com/SimonGreenhi...

Ah! pkgndep looks perfect, thanks.

hey #rstats -- is there a way to see how many dependencies etc that adding a dependency to your package brings in?

I'm trying to keep a package I'm writing small and lean but also powerful. All without importing the kitchen sink and taking hours to install.

Depends massively on the handling editor. The journal allows people to propose themselves as editors, which I think means bad actors can take advantage

Ageing red deer alter their spatial behaviour and become less social - Nature Ecology & Evolution Using 46 years of individually monitored data for European red deer, the authors show that older individuals become less socially connected, with correlated changes to their spatial behaviour.

Same.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

‘Bizarre’ linguistics paper on water retracted by Springer Nature Jordanian professor’s free-wheeling study is pulled and an editorial board member sacked after linguists criticised ‘extremely strange’ article

Not the only dodgy paper in this journal:

www.timeshighereducation.com/news/bizarre...

Meta patented an AI that lets you keep posting after you die Meta was recently granted a patent for tech to keep your social media accounts running using AI if you take a break or die.

Okay but genuine question does fiction count as prior art because I have literally written this story

dumplings are a side effect of Mongols

Bar chart showing the 19 biggest Pacific Islander cities, starting with Auckland and Port Moresby.

Auckland is the world's biggest Pacific Islander city, but which is second? Turns out to be Port Moresby, followed by several Indonesian cities of West New Guinea. Blog post in my series on Pacific people movement issues, with #rstats code, at freerangestats.info/blog/2026/02...

Congratulation! Looks like a great paper!

SBS Seminar Series 2026. Professor Carl Bergstrom. Seminar 1: Information foraging in a social media world. 11am-12pm Seminar 2: Modern day oracles or bullshit machines: How to thrive in a ChatGPT world. 1 pm -2 pm Venue: 114-G14 Time: 11 am - 2 PM Thursday 19 February Light refreshments 12pm-1pm

Hi Auckland friends, I'll be in town and giving a couple of seminars this coming Thursday. Details below.

That fits my recollection. mendeley was great until elsevier bought it

Meet the APSPM 2026 organisers: Caroline, Jordan and Ashar. We're 3 ECRs based in Australia/NZ passionate about protein evolution and developing new approaches and applications to advance this exciting field.

biosig.lab.uq.edu.au/strphy26/org...
@official-smbe.bsky.social

Don't worry the universities WILL make changes!

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