Simon Kirby

My first ever book cover! Made with maths, pencil, drawing robot, and photographic negative. Thank you @limorraviv.bsky.social and @cedricboeckx.bsky.social for asking me to do it, and for the lovely handwritten dedication inside 😊

Book cover by Simon Kirby

Delighted to announce the publication of a collaborative effort, co-led by @limorraviv.bsky.social @mpi-nl.bsky.social, showcasing the ways in which researchers have made language evolution an empirical issue: A handbook of experimental approaches to the fascinating problem of language evolution 🧪

Language and Communication is on the GESDA science breakthrough radar for the first time! Language evolution, AI, empirical method and multilingualism are the four core topics. Make your views known on how likely breakthroughs are in these areas, and how soon they might happen: tinyurl.com/2r29yep6

A blonde woman in a grey t-shirt and a brunette woman in a red vest sit at a table. Both are smiling. On the table there is a plush monkey toy, a blue tray, and a green vine.

Join us at the National Museum of Scotland July 19th to learn about animal communication and what makes human communication different from the rest of our primate family! 🐵 www.nms.ac.uk/events/monke...

Introducing Dr Keogh! 🎓 Very emotional to have finally closed the chapter on my time at the @uoe-cle.bsky.social 😭 but glad to have passed this milestone in the company of my wonderful supervisors @simonkirby.bsky.social and Jenny Culbertson, and my PhD twin Elizabeth Pankratz. We made it!

#PhDone

Eugenics is on the rise again: human geneticists must take a stand Scientists must push back against the threat of rising white nationalism and the dangerous and pseudoscientific ideas of eugenics.

Scientists must push back against the threat of rising white nationalism and the dangerous and pseudoscientific ideas of eugenics

https://go.nature.com/4jGqiUc

So lucky and proud to have someone as dedicated to his students as Christian as a colleague.

Earlier this month, @nerdpro.bsky.social and I collaborated on an Atmosphere screening of my favourite film, Arrival. It was a lot of fun projecting animated Heptapod writing and quotations from Chiang’s original. We also wrote an essay you might like: www.mediascot.org/atmosphere/a...

Many thanks to @wired.com & @thiccreese.bsky.social for covering our work on stereotype bias!!
The new dataset is SHADES, now available here: huggingface.co/datasets/LanguageShades/BiasShades
The first of its kind for analyzing GenAI stereotyping across many languages+cultures.
Published at NAACL.🤗

If six months ago you'd told me that in autumn 2025 I'd have to go to Canada to get my annual COVID vaccine but I wouldn't do it because coming back through immigrations was too risky for someone who had criticized the government, I would have looked at you like you were having a stroke.

Funk music history and Black liberation in a full-length documentary, online - CDM Create Digital Music Hip hop, new wave, techno, and house are inseparable from funk history - and any discussion of funk in the 1970s demands a conversation about Black liberation. Emmy winner and MacArthur Fellow Stanley...

"Funk was a genre of sonic color, a genre that crossed oceans, a genre rooted in radical joy and inclusivity. We Want The Funk! makes clear that Black art is not just expression — it’s liberation." -Black Enterprise review. The full documentary is online:

Exclusive: Trump team freezes new NSF awards — and could soon axe hundreds of grants The National Science Foundation is the latest US agency to be disrupted by Elon Musk’s DOGE.

All new research grants have been frozen at the US National Science Foundation — an action apparently ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency

https://go.nature.com/42pvdDe

NIH moving to ban all future grants to universities with DEI programs or Israel boycotts, document suggests NIH appears to be preparing to prohibit the awarding of new grants to institutions that have DEI programs or boycott Israeli companies

NIH moving to ban all future grants to universities with DEI programs or Israel boycotts, document suggests. Story by @aniloza.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2025/04/21/t...

IPSOS finds collapse in European pro-US sentiment in last 6 months. In October 2024 50% of Dutch thought the US would have a positive influence on the world; in April 2024 that has plummeted to 20%. Similar drops in France, Italy, Germany et al. www.ipsos.com/en/americas-...

These are now woke DEI books

Didn't take too long, apparently:

forward.com/fast-forward...

a bald man with a shaved head is wearing a gray suit Alt: Dr. EVIL (a bald man with a shaved head, wearing a gray suit) says "right"

New NSF "Broad Impact" guidelines, "Research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities"
#Linguistics #DeafCommunities #IndigenousCommunities
#RacializedCommunities
#MinoritizedCommunities

Joseph Allen @j_g_allen --> WH sends Harvard letter making outrageous (and illegal) demands --> WH now says it was sent by accident (oops!) --> WH blames Harvard (?) for reacting to the letter they sent --> Harvard: The letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised,” Harvard said in a statement on Friday. “Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government — even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach — do not question its authenticity or seriousness.” Harvard's statement continued: 2:52 AM · Apr 19, 2025 · 547.7K Views

This is simply extraordinary. The Trump administration's argument is, essentially: if you receive some massively aggressive legal missive from the White House, don't respond in a timely way. Instead, chill out for a bit, in case we take it all back.

Given the state of the US, there's an opportunity for UK HE to stick its nostrils above the waves for a bit and keep paddling, but the govt's terror about Reform in the red wall will, it seems, block that and leave one of the UK's international export successes to drown. Totally irrational.

I am genuinely baffled by mainstream political antipathy towards international students (which is not shared by the voting public, who are presumably delighted that they subsidise their kids’ education). The only “problem” solved by dissuading them from coming is the existence of universities at all

Clipping from the Guardian article by Sam Fowles pointing out that the Supreme Court judgment explicitly states that their role is not to define the meaning of the word “woman”.

The court *explicitly* does not attempt to define “woman”. No matter the harms this judgment will cause an endlessly beleaguered & oppressed minority (whilst doing nothing about the real source of gender-based violence), we should not allow lazy headline writers to claim it means more that it does.

Promising hints of life found on distant planet K2-18b Scientists find new but tentative evidence that a faraway world orbiting another star may be home to life.

An astonishing headline reporting on new observations from a team led to Nikku Madhusudhan claims they’ve found ‘hints of life’ on a planet orbiting a dwarf star some 124 light years away. What’s going on? (1/n) www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... 🔭 🧪

Solidarity with my trans friends & colleagues on a difficult day for them. Depressing to hear that (once again) trans voices seem to have been left out of evidence gathering by the court. Let’s not allow this ruling to be overzealously interpreted by those trying to erase trans voices even further.

"I do not mind if you think slowly, but I do mind when you publish more quickly than you think." Wolfgang Pauli

Imagine trying to deport someone for their "expected beliefs"

Tackling Accent Bias at an Elite University Lecturer in Sociolinguistics, Dr Christian Ilbury, describes Speaking Out, an event designed to address class-based prejudice within the University.

Lecturer in #Sociolinguistics @christianilbury.bsky.social
leads the charge against linguistic prejudice in academia. At Speaking Out, researchers & students came confronted #accentbias - that unfairly links how we speak with how we're judged. Read More: edin.ac/3Ei04Zc

Everyone should listen to this podcast featuring British Guardian reporter @adamgabbatt.bsky.social from beginning to end.

It’s very difficult to feel fully safe about totally “white” non-Muslim Western friends in the US now, let alone non-white & Muslim students.

open.spotify.com/episode/1EVS...

Columbia University caves to demands to restore $400m from Trump administration Measures include empowering security officers to arrest people, and reassigning control of Middle East department

Exclusive: NIH freezes all research grants to Columbia University Amid negotiations with Trump, the university could risk losing nearly $700 million

How it started / How it's going

Postdoctoral Researcher in psychology/cognitive science with focus on social learning and cultural evolution Do you want to contribute to top quality medical research? The Mechanisms of Social Behavior lab at the Karolinska Institutet (PI: Björn Lindström) in Stockholm, Sweden is seeking a highly qualified

Postdoc opening in beautiful Stockholm 🇸🇪!
Join us at Karolinska Institutet to explore how interdependent traits shape social learning and cultural evolution.
🧠 Behavioral + computational work
🤝 Work w/ labs in Amsterdam @lucasmolleman.bsky.social & Leuven

Details: shorturl.at/Wzy9o

Super cool work! The method used here is very exciting and suggests that some form of compositionality could potentially be widespread outside of language! How similar (in form and origins) this type of compositionality is to what we find in language remains I think an open question.