Simon J. Greenhill

Very excited to announce that our three Special Issues on Vanuatu languages are out in Te Reo. Thank you to all the authors, reviewers, my co-editors, our brilliant typesetter, and NZLingSoc. 43 authors, 5 introductions, 25 articles and a book review... nzlingsoc.org/journal/curr...

I was kindly invited to talk about my research at @cudanlab.bsky.social, and here's a video of that talk. And no, it's not about Steve Jobs 😄, but about evolution of the arts – 🎸📚🎨

We still need a lot of sunlight under the rock of university governance University councils can no longer be a law unto themselves.

With the Senate report on university governance due this week, @nteunion.bsky.social's @lachlanclohesy.bsky.social writes on the current state of university governance.

"It is now clear that university councils and their executives have been acting as a law unto themselves."

Nice to have numbers on this! I can very much second the statement "mapping Earth's biodiversity is far from over".

Looking at the many boxes of Ugandan wasps on the table in front of me right now, mostly with species new to science, it feels as if we've barely started.

<em>Population and Development Review</em> | Population Council Journal | Wiley Online Library This study documents the concentration of childbearing to later reproductive ages, analyzing global patterns of fertility postponement from 1950 to 2040. We study late fertility (ages 30+) and very l...

“Globally, more than one out of three births in 2023 occurs to women aged 30 and above, compared to only one in four in 1990. Historical comparisons indicate similar late fertility patterns in pre-demographic transition populations and early industrialized societies”

NZ continues to shoot itself in the foot with short sighted STEM obsession

A screenshot taken by someone on Twitter/X of Elon Musk agreeing with a tweet that shows the EU flag being peeled back to reveal a Nazi one. For Elon’s purposes here Nazis are apparently bad, but you can’t rely on that with him, of course.

The latest from an honored member of the Royal Society. Every week he attacks the foundations of society in the UK and the EU and @royalsociety.org is apparently too worried about retribution to do anything about it.

The next meetings of the Script Keepers Network will be next Sunday, 14th December, all very welcome. Here are the zoom registration links:

09:00 ET (14.00 GMT) - us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

16:00 ET (21.00 GMT) - us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Look, I appreciate the things parents to do mess with their kids (they deserve it) but this is a step too far.

NO THANK YOU

Oh! I’d seen ggraph but not this - thanks!

@phylieu.bsky.social & I have a new preprint out: "Statistical and structural bias in birth-death models" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's NOT a "the sky is falling in div methods again" but estimates can be biased, and that can happen in small clades even on big trees (MiSSE, Clads, BAMM)

1/2

Yes! I’ve been following him for a while. Would love to have an opportunity to use this too, but as you say, stupid pdf

Well done :)

Yes!!! I’m editing these out of my writing constantly now, and it pisses me off because LLMs have ruined one of my favourite punctuation marks.

I published my first graph using #ggplot2 in 15 years ago. I'm bored. What's the new cool thing in statistical visualisation? #rstats

Picture of front cover of Theme Issue entitled "Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures." The image on the front cover is of a Yao honey hunter in Mozambique holding retrieved honeycomb.

Today sees the publication of the Theme Issue featuring the CES Transformation Fund grant scheme. Enjoy! royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...
@durhamdcerc.bsky.social @durhamanthropology.bsky.social @cultevolfunding.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social

Die Steinzeit-Schamanin von Bad Dürrenberg - mächtige "Urarierin" mit dunkler Hautfarbe Vor etwa 9.000 Jahren lebte die Schamanin von Bad Dürrenberg. Neue Forschung zu ihrem Skelett und Grab mit vielen Beigaben brachte Überraschungen.

If you're not German, you may have missed this:

1934: Nazi "archaeologists" prepping for a rally find a skeleton,
declare it to be the uber-male ur-arian;

2019: Archaeologists revisit finds;
evidence implies she was a powerful female shaman of color.

🙃😊😂

www.deutschlandfunk.de/schamanin-ba...

Hmm 🤔

it really does feel like the US is a few days away from kristallnacht.

The StW 573 Little Foot Fossil Should Not Be Attributed to Australopithecus prometheus Objectives To test the hypothesis that the StW 573 (Little Foot) fossil specimen should be attributed taxonomically to Australopithecus prometheus. Materials and Methods We adopt the methods of cl...

Challenging the name!
Jesse Martin & colleagues argue Little Foot (StW 573) can’t be called Australopithecus prometheus…
…dissent in the fossil world 🦴😅😁

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Monkeys have rhythm Synchronizing movements to music is a hallmark of human culture, but its evolutionary and neurobiological origins remain unknown. This ability requires (i) extracting a steady rhythmic pulse, or beat,...

New in Science, Macaques tap to the beat.

Very cool study for its main result and its null one: consistent with nearly every other comparative study of music, monkeys don't differentiate beats by their relative strength—which even young children do innately. Monkeys have rhythm but not meter!

macaques can synchronize to a subjective beat in real music and even spontaneously do so over alternative strategies.

Haven’t read the full article yet, but this is a big deal if true!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

we have to go back. to warn them.

Nov 30 2022 - the day the internet ceased being human only and started rotting under the weight of AI

tegabrain.com/Slop-Evader

Happy World Linguistics Day 🎉

Not Saussure how to celebrate? Episodes 12 and 13 of our podcast will give your plans some structure...

🎙️ hiphilangsci.net/2021/02/01/p...

🎙️ hiphilangsci.net/2021/03/01/p...

#LinguisticBirthdays #LinguisticQuotes #Histlx #WorldLinguisticsDay

ANUs map of Papuan Languages.

Fun #linguistic fact for World Linguistics Day:

If North America had the same linguistic diversity as New Guinea we’d expect Indigenous Americans to speak ~28,000 languages.

I'm wondering about the network dynamics here. Twitter has a massively skewed scale-free network (i.e. few accounts with MASSIVE followers, and many people with few followers). Here the distribution seems to be flatter. This means info flow is slower and more local

Only 4 days left!

"It is against the TOS to be talked into suicide by our LLM" is possibly the most evil tech bro thing I've ever read