Vera Kempe

Cambridge University cosies up to Reform The vice-chancellor expects Nigel Farage to model his policies on Trump and says other Russell Group members are meeting his allies

Columbia at least had the decency to wait until they were blackmailed before caving in. What's Cambridge's excuse?

Such a beautifully written piece about how medical hyper-specialisation makes it difficult to connect the dots as a complex systems approach would require.

Good news still exist.

Wieder eine faszinierende und lehrreiche Gelegenheit für mich, an einer deutschen Handbuchübersetzung mitzuwirken und weitere Übersetzungen zu koordinieren.

Direkt zur deutschen Version geht es über diesen Link:
sks.to/autocracy-de

As autocratization proceeds in the U.S. and elsewhere, it's time for a stock-take. Where are we, where are we going? What works? What might work better? Nearly 6 months after we published the Anti-Autocracy Handbook sks.to/autocracy the SciBeh team is hosting its next big event ....


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What enables human language? A biocultural framework Explaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l...

What enables human language? A biocultural framework. New paper by Inbal Arnon & al. with @limorraviv.bsky.social , @profsimonfisher.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1126/science.adq8303

In light of the assault on American science by its own government that launched in January this year, we published the Anti-Autocracy Handbook in June to provide some guidance to scholars about how to respond to an emerging autocracy. The handbook is available at: sks.to/autocracy. 1/n


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Announcing publication of the full Special Issue of LDR on the Development of Metaphor. Thank you to Ingrid Lossius Falkum and Mary Beth Neff, PhD for organizing this volume and serving as Guest Editors! ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/issue/100/in...

Top researchers consider leaving U.S. amid funding cuts: 'The science world is ending' A poll from the journal Nature found that 75% of researchers in the U.S. are considering leaving the country. That includes a man who’s been dubbed the "Mozart of Math." Stephanie Sy examines what’s b...

The US funds the bulk of biomedical research globally by far. It's not like other countries can simply take up the slack. The more likely: people leave research, new people don't become researchers. There is no happy ending. www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

Actually, this is a library subscription-based model from what I can tell, and not a commons-based model so still vulnerable to university funding fluctuations.

Thanks. I think we also need an independent abstracting and indexing system as the legacy databases like Scopus etc. make it difficult for Diamond OA journals to be included.

Would love to see some concrete ideas on how to start implementing community-based volunteer-driven science publishing. Maybe start by federating all existing diamond OA journals?

Congratulations to Chiara Pompei, Serena Lecce, Paola Del Sette, Elena Didoni, Luca Bischetti & Valentina Bambini on publication of The Role of Metaphor in Children's Persuasive Communication in the LDR Special Issue on Development of Metaphor Comprehension. ldr.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/8...

When parental care hurts: Extended parental care and the evolution of overparenting Abstract. In recent years, childrearing in high-income countries has become described as ‘relentless’ in its demands on parents. In response to growing del

New paper out today with Zhian Chen.

We argue that modern intensive parenting is not only exhausting for parents, but in some cases disrupts healthy child development.

What is 'overparenting'? And can evolutionary theory help us understand how we got here?

academic.oup.com/emph/advance...

YouTube video by Professor Christina Pagel 5 things that have happened since Monday to undermine democracy in Trump's America

The latest from Trump world in under 2 minutes.

youtu.be/CvwHfu0627w

Just rearrange the letters? -> CheckMate 🤣

If you have two measures of the same confounder, you can just include both of them in your regression model Sometimes, researchers worry about multicollinearity in situations where it’s actually a non-issue. Here’s one such scenario. Imagine a situation where you are interested in the effect of X on Y (X...

New blog post!

Let's say you have two measures meant to capture the same confounder. They're highly correlated. Can you still proceed with your regression analysis?

(I admit, the title is a bit of a spoiler)

www.the100.ci/2025/10/13/i...

Any chance for Bunnyland - The Movie to come to a stats class near us anytime soon?

No. There are no results. The paper is sloppy and laced with errors. For a rebuttal listen here: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/n...

Do these idiots really want their GPs, consultants and professors to go do volunteering work rather than focus on their jobs? Trying to picture my breast surgeon steaming clothes at the charity shop…

Authoritarianism Feels Surprisingly Normal—Until It Doesn’t Life in Venezuela was deceptively mundane. Then everything collapsed.

"Living through the rise of a dictatorship just means inhabiting a space that is gradually shrinking. There’s no point in resisting, not at first. You just make do with whatever breathing room you still have—until you lose that too."
Read Gisela Salim-Peyer:
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Absolutely right. But the view that learner mistakes are the driving force is still very prevalent in Lang Dev and Generative circles, and this is our target audience. Hence pub in Psych Review. Our aim was to systematically dismantle the arguments that lead to this mistaken conclusion.

Fair point! We know that sociolinguists are well aware of these dynamics but the field of language development is still very much invested in the idea that kid's mistakes (and learning constraints more broadly) are the main driver of change. So in a way that is the target audience.

💡 The idea that children drive language change is widely accepted — but does it hold up?

New research co-authored by Dr Vera Kempe challenges this view, showing little evidence that child-led innovations spread through communities.

Read more: www.mpi.nl/publications...

Super proud of this work and very grateful for all the amazing people who provided valuable feedback along the way @remivantrijp.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @cedricboeckx.bsky.social @inbalarnon.bsky.social ❤️❤️❤️🙏

So rewarding to work with these two brilliant people to check whether the existing evidence supports the persistent claim that children's simplifying errors drive language change. It doesn't. psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...
@limorraviv.bsky.social @damianblasi.bsky.social

I remember the great kindness with which Wietske welcomed us into the scientific community when a bunch of us clueless ECRs crawled out from behind the Iron Curtain in the early 90s. RIP Wietske Vonk www.mpi.nl/news/wietske...

Abstract of the paper.

Title page of the paper.

The Item Response Warehouse is a new data resource for psychometricians interested in developing methods using bigger and more diverse sets of instruments: itemresponsewarehouse.org

New paper out now at BRM: doi.org/10.3758/s134...

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Staying with me after yesterday's #uklvc15 poster session is Schaeffler et al.'s point that Child-Directed Speech was different in soviet East Germany than in the West. Less influence on individualism influences CDS phonetic features!

#acquisition #linguistics #sociolinguistics #contextmatters