Pretty Little Girl's School

How many interpretations does the following utterance have?

Pretty little girl's school.

Believe it or not, there are at least five interpretations.

1. There is a girl's school, and this school is little, and it is pretty.

2. There is a little girl, and her school is pretty.

3. There is a little girl, who happens to be pretty, and she has a school.

4. There is a girl's school, and this school is pretty little (aka not so large).

5. There is a girl who is pretty little (aka not so large), and she has a school.

Get that? If you want an illustration, you can find it here, along with other fun linguistic stuff.



(Embassy of Burkina Faso, from my Embassy Row Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 7: Semantic Relatedness

How do you know that one word is related to another word? So, are the words animal and bird related? How about spoon and fork? How about restaurant and wine?

People have tried to see whether these words actually have a special relationship in our mind. And most of the time, they test these claims by devising priming studies. These studies consist of giving people a certain stimulus, called a prime, and then they observe the time the person reacts to another stimulus, namely, the target. The idea is, if these two words are related, then when you see the first word, then the second word gets activated as well, and therefore it takes less time for a person to recognize that word than an unrelated word.

Most people have actually devised these experiments, and they have found that the activation actually varies depending on what type of relation a pair of words has. So, words that belong to the same superordinate, such as turkey and goose (they are both animals) prime each other, but words that are just related to the same script or scenario, such as restaurant and wine don't prime as much.

People who do research on these usually have a larger research program that involves seeing the architecture of the brain. These studies usually give light as to how our worlds are organized in our heads.

So, how do you see the world?



(Embassies of Kenya and Armenia, from my Embassy Row Series)

Stravinsky, Vivaldi, and Brahms

Yesterday was another night in which the UB Symphony Orchestra had a performance. I attended this concert due to the fact that my friend performs in it, and overall, it was a good night.

The program included Stravinsky's Berceuse and Finale from The Firebird; Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Trumpets, Strings, and Continuo; and Brahms' Symphony in E Minor.

I liked the first two pieces. The orchestra had a good time internalizing the piece. The Stravinsky had a great range of dynamics, and so the orchestra handled those differences quite well. It did a great job in painting the scene that was associated in the piece.

Then, there was the trumpet concerto. The two trumpeters did a good job as well, and even though the piece was rather old, and the orchestra was very small due to the fact that it was only written for strings and harpsichord, the sound was still very full and mature.

After the intermission, the Brahms symphony was performed. Here is where I started to doubt the musical quality. The Brahms symphony was very cerebral, dense, and difficult. I think the strings, especially those in the higher register, needed more practice, since there were times in which I think they needed to play together in a fast manner, and yet the notes just ended up being smooshed together, becoming indistinct. Brahms wrote very difficult complex pieces, and I think this orchestra was not yet ready for it.



(Chancery of South Korea, from my Embassy Row Series)

Ontological Promiscuity

So I have this new schedule for the remainder of the semester. I impose upon myself to read approximately 5 hours a day, and think for 3 hours a day. This will hopefully hold true except for Tuesday and Friday, because those are the days in which I have a 3-hour class in the morning and I have lab duties or lab meetings in the afternoon.

Now what should be the purpose of this schedule? It is done in order to churn out a dissertation proposal by the end of the semester, and hopefully defend it during the summer. Obviously, writing a dissertation never occurs in a vacuum: one always situates oneself within the current state of affairs. The period of the Renaissance Man is over: chances are other people have done something that relates to one wants to do. So that is basically what I am doing right now, reading and thinking how previous studies have been deficient, and what I can do to improve it.

So yesterday, I went to my friend's orchestra rehearsal. I didn't have to, but I accompanied her. The thing is, I knew that if I just went home straight, I would just be lulled to sleep, and I wouldn't accomplish anything. Yesterday was Tuesday, and so I had a three-hour class in the morning, and I had a three-hour lab duty in the afternoon, which I spent multi-tasking. I would load the experiments and run the subjects in the running rooms, and then when things settle down, I was doing informant work for another classmate of mine (she wanted some Tagalog sentences), and after her, another classmate of mine saw me and asked for my statistical expertise in interpreting a paper we were reading. She asked help how to understand the statistical jargon of the paper. Speaking of which, a number of people in my department already consider me their stats guru. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. Perhaps it is a good thing, since even though I don't have an interest in what they do, I can devise statistical tests and design experiments for them. Last week, I met with some other graduate student and helped him design his dissertation experiment, telling him how the stimuli are to be constructed, and how the fillers are to be designed as well, to avoid boredom and satiation effects, and so on.

Anyway, that was a long digression. So yeah, the rehearsal yesterday took three hours, so basically, I had three hours of reading time that I added to my schedule yesterday. I learned about ontological promiscuity. It has something to do with one's assumptions on model-theoretic formal semantics and inference.

So there, I don't want to go into technicalities, so I'll leave it at that.



(Latvijas Republikas Vēstniecība, from my Embassy Row Series)

Book Review: The Rope Eater by Ben Jones

This is proof that even though the world operates with control and chaos, it still has a scintilla of normalcy to it. So when it comes to the books that I read, I get good books, and I get bad books as well. And since the last book I read was a very good book, perhaps there are high chances that this next book that I read would be a bad one.

And indeed, it was a not-so-good book.

The Rope Eater is a novel by Ben Jones, which is basically an adventure travel novel. This is about a military deserter, who is recruited to go to an expedition, on a ship, that would sail for the Arctic starting from New England, in the middle of winter. It chronicles the different adventures that the men faced, and how they were sailing, with the intent of finding a tropical archipelago in the middle of the Arctic circle.

I brought this book with me while I was flying to San Francisco, and perhaps, due to the fact that I wanted something to while away my time, I went ahead and read the first hundred pages on the plane. Well, it started great, then it turned good, then it turned okay, and finally, it turned bad. Let me tell you why i think so.

I suppose the good adventure novel is one in which there are ups and downs in the story: there would be enemies to battle against, strange conditions to deal with, and so on, but the group more or less still overcomes these and continue. However, with this one, it seemed, and yes, it turned out that until the end, it is just a pathetic exercise in elimination and endurance. You kill one man at a time, you inflict the men with strange diseases one at a time, you chop off the hands and feet of the men due to gangrene one at a time, until at the very end of the novel, all that remains is one single person: the narrator. Now you wonder whether the narrator would survive to tell you the story, and in some miraculous loop-hole at the very end, he does.

It was a test in endurance reading this book. Not recommendable. Although on a scale of 5, I give it a 2, since it was definitely not boring. Plenty of icy situations to imagine about. Or maybe that is just because I live in Buffalo.

See my other book reviews here.



(Ambasada României, from my Embassy Row Series)

Zoom

Time seems to be zooming by really fast. Little did I realize that it already is the seventh week of the semester.

With that in mind, there are plenty of things that are currently in my plate. I have a dissertation proposal to churn, and in order to do that, I have this schedule that roughly involves reading for 5 hours a day, and thinking for 3 hours a day. Basically, as my adviser put it, I need to establish a brand name for myself. What will I be known for? I have a basic idea regarding that, but I need some specific questions that I need to formulate and answer with the dissertation.

This week is also open house weekend. This means that a number of prospective graduate students are coming in for a visit. They will see how the campus is like, and they will see whether they would want to be here and study in graduate school.

I have a mid-term coming up next week. This is for my Psycholinguistics class. I basically know the material, but I still need to work on internalizing things, so that I would get a good grade out of it.

This is also the time in which I need to start thinking about my future. After this semester, I only have my dissertation to write, and so things are starting to wind down. I am not sure whether the department will be funding me for next year, so I am starting to think of alternative sources of funding, and what the implications of those will be regarding my living arrangements, my timeline with regard to graduating, and so on. There are a couple of labs that need research assistants, and I am interested in what they do, so I might apply to those. My adviser already told me that he would be happy to write a recommendation letter for me.

Oh, one last thing. Finally, I was able to file my qualifying paper and satisfy that requirement. I got all the relevant signatures this morning and sent the document to the main office. That means that it is sure that I am graduating with a master's degree this coming June.

So there, time flies. Things change.



(Former Turkish Chancery, from my Embassy Row Series)

A Very Long Engagement

There seems to be a bug that is going around the department nowadays. And many people seem to have been catching it. It is the marriage bug.

Well, the thing is, ever since Winter Break, people around me seem to have been getting engaged, and soon to be married. First, there was one, then another followed, and then we learn that a guy proposed to his girlfriend, and then the latest one is when we were in San Francisco, when we learned that one other guy proposed to his girlfriend as well.

So whenever we hear an engagement announcement, of course, it is an occasion to be happy, but the next question would be who is going to be next?

So yeah, that seems to be the newest fad in town.

Which makes me wonder, what is the feeling like? What is it like to be overwhelmed by some indescribable feeling that you want to be with someone else, until the rest of your life? The funny thing is, Blaise Pascal, who is a mathematician, even left a quote, which says, Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas. The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing. I tend to think of this feeling called love in terms of supply-and-demand and constraint satisfaction. We all have different needs, and these different needs are weighed differently. Some have heavier weights than others. It is simply a matter of which weight is heavier which will then drive us to pursue actions that would satisfy those needs.

So theoretically, one can model this set of constraints, and weigh them accordingly. Now, the point of being engaged is when the set of weights that correspond to one's need to spend one's life with someone else tips over. There should be a threshold, a certain measurable point, in which if the set of weights are adjusted so that the overall sum of constraints end up requiring one's system to propose, then an engagement occurs. Otherwise, then it will not. I could imagine perhaps using a probabilistic model where one can solve for P(B|A) where B stands for engagement and A stands for the set of one's current constraints. Depending on the overall sum of A, the probability of B occurring may be high or low.

I suppose this is a very interesting mathematical problem.



(Embassy of Ireland, from my Embassy Row Series)

The Return

So I suppose every event has an end, and sometimes, the end seems to be so abrupt that there are times in which it seems that the brief period in which one was out of town seemed to be a mirage, and one doubts as to whether one actually has been out of town.

But anyway, I am back in Buffalo, safe and sound.

We left Berkeley after the last talk of the conference. It was raining for the whole weekend that we were there, and yesterday was pretty much the same. However, during the afternoon, the sun made its appearance, so I decided to skip the last parallel session (given the fact that I am not interested in either sociolinguistics or phonetics anyway) and did a walking tour of the very picturesque campus. Before leaving, I printed a Berkeley walking tour guide of the campus, and I basically followed that.

I started from the West Entrance, and for the next two hours, I made my way all around the campus. It was beautiful, and it reminded me of the campus of the University of the Philippines at Diliman. There were plenty of trees, and the buildings were little oases around the different mini-forests in the campus. There were plenty of buildings that were rather bizarre or peculiar. And one thing I noticed too was that there were several parking spots designated for Nobel Laureates. Wow. This is one heavy-duty university. I liked the campus layout. Unlike my current campus here in Buffalo, the buildings are single-unit structures, not linked altogether by overpasses or tunnels. But then, they don't get the cold winter weather that we get here in Buffalo, so why do that type of architecture?

Anyway, after the walking tour, I went back to Dwinelle Hall to attend the last keynote speaker of the conference. And after that, we immediately proceeded to the airport.

My flight would be taking me to New York City, and then to Buffalo. Of course, as is always the case when flying eastward, I didn't look forward to it, since I need to sleep, but then the aircraft conditions usually do not permit me to do so. I still remember that sleepless flight of mine from Chicago to London en-route to Copenhagen last summer. I was wide awake the whole time.

Anyway, for this one, it was better than I expected. It was shorter than the flight going to San Francisco, but then we were helped with tailwinds, so that was one of the reasons. By the time we landed in John F. Kennedy International Airport, I had a few hours of sleep. I boosted my waking hours with a venti coffee.

So there, now I am back here. Tomorrow will be like every other Wednesday. I have work to do in my office, and I am back in the cycle again.



(Πρεσβεία της Ελλάδος, from my Embassy Row Series)

Movement Allergies

So the conference started at February 14, the day where everyone seemed to be in love, or if one is a cynic, the day where singles become totally aware of their singlehood that they decided to label it “Singleness Awareness Day.”

Anyway, we arrived pretty early into the location, and we were able to find the registration location even though Dwinelle Hall was a maze, and according to legend, was constructed by twin architects who had a grudge against each other. We registered, had good coffee, and listened to many different talks about linguistics, ranging from negation to sign language. This was also the day in which I gave my talk, and it actually went well. My session was well-attended, and people gave constructed comments and thought-provoking questions. All in all, I think my talk was a success. If they wanted to throw tomatoes at me, I had my tomato shield with me.

The thing about this conference that I attended was that it is not a conference of a particular school of thought. Basically, talks were open to all schools of thought, including those that I really do not believe in. Back when I was in undergrad, I encountered linguistic theories positing constituent movement, traces, null arguments, and so forth. But then, later I realized that I couldn’t believe in that because there seemed to be no psychological reality to it. If there was no psychological reality to my linguistic theorizing, then what was the point of theorizing? I hate positing complex models if that wasn’t really what is happening in people’s heads. After all, why did I decide to delve into cognitive psychology if not to find out about language and psychological reality?

Anyway, like I said, there are talks which make use of these mechanisms. And it baffles me sometimes that there are indeed people who believe in these things, and take these to be the truth. They posit movement of syntactic arguments from different parts of the clause, and they take it that it really happens in one’s head, deriving one structure from another.

Back a few decades ago, psychologists decided to test Chomsky’s “Derivational Theory of Complexity”. What this theory says is that sentences vary in their complexity. One sentence can be the source of another sentence, so a declarative sentence such as John swept the room. can be the source of the interrogative Did John sweep the room? Linguists say that the verb do makes the second sentence more complex than the first, therefore the second sentence is derived from the first sentence. The hypothesis is that the more complex a sentence is, the harder it is to process. Psychologists tested this, and guess what? It was not the case. They did not find any significant difference in processing load with respect to the sentences. Now Chomsky had a good opt-out. He said that there is a difference between linguistic competence and linguistic performance. Basically, he says that one’s knowledge of one’s language does not necessarily reflect one’s use of language. What psychologists observed therefore was simply the usage of language, and not the people’s knowledge of their language per se.

This now makes Chomsky’s claim untestable, and unfalsifiable.

Now wonder I decided to abandon that school of thought. I realized that while finishing my undergrad degree.

And now I see people pursuing advanced degrees and they believe in these theories, without psychological reality. They create hypotheses and caveats to their theories just so they can explain the data, but they never wonder whether the processes that they posit really happen in people’s heads.

At least, the take-home message I take in this experience is that it is better that one knows one’s enemies. By listening to some of the talks like these, I know what other people are doing, and I know how to make the arguments that would be counter to these.

But then again, sometimes, I cannot help but be baffled when people posit these weird constructs like traces and movement. Maybe I have a movement allergy, I just react wildly when I see these in paper.



(Embassy of Egypt, from my Embassy Row Series)

Seeing the Pacific

I spent the past Friday gallivanting around the city of San Francisco and seeing what I can see within a day. The thing is, we scheduled to arrive in San Francisco two days before the conference, and the conference started yesterday. Because you never know, it is winter, and something might happen that would delay us, and so we had the extra precaution of arriving two days earlier. If something happens, there's still another day, if not, then there's an extra day to see the city. We figured that is the right move since both of our talks were on the first day, yesterday. Because if we didn't make it in time for our talks, what is the point in going?

Anyway, I won't give a travelogue of what we did because I sent a couple of postcards to family and I would not want to spoil the suspense. Still, there are a few observations to be made.

This is the first in eight years for me to see the Pacific Ocean up close and personal. The last time was in Guam, when we had those night swimming activities with the family. San Francisco Bay was very picturesque, a bit chilly, but otherwise, dear old Pacific was there. There was a qualitative difference between this ocean and the Atlantic, which I have bumped into as well a few times, when I was in New York City.

Golden Gate Bridge is not golden, but rather, painted in international orange. It also is one of the most popular places to commit suicide. We never got to go up close, since the clouds decided to rain on us late afternoon, but we saw it nonetheless.

San Francisco's hills are awesome. There was this neighborhood near the Palace of Fine Arts that had cute little houses lined next to each other. Every unit had perhaps two or three unites inside, and they were painted in different pastel colours. It made me want to live there. Perhaps there's an open position in UC Berkeley's Psychology Department?

The seagulls are huge and not afraid of people. While riding the ferry (this should give readers a clue as to where was our primary destination in the morning), the seagulls were riding next to us, and their wings were just unbelievably wide. And perhaps, since I have ornirhypophobia (which was further reinforced to me when a rather sad incident happened to me while listening to an open concert in Rome), I was always watching the top of my head, seeing whether there were birds flying on top of me. And guess what, it did happen, but I was able to dodge it.

While in the bus, I experienced a little cognitive dissonance, when I heard a bunch of kids calling me. Or rather, someone with the exact same pronunciation as my name.

So there, that was my first taste of the West Coast. Pretty good so far.



(The Chancery of Greece, and the Embassies of Georgia and Turkmenistan, from my Embassy Row Series)

Book Review: Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

What if one night, you come back to your house and find that a doppelganger has taken over the life of your wife? What if there is this woman, who looks like your wife, smells like your wife, talks like your wife, sounds like your wife, is in your house, and yet you are fully convinced that that is an impostor, and your wife was taken away by some unknown force, some unknown entity, and replaced with this doppelganger?

That is the premise that this debut novel of author Rivka Galchen presents to the reader. From the very start, it captivates the reader that dares open and read the first chapter. It tells the tale of psychiatrist Dr. Leo Liebenstein, and his Argentine wife, Rema. Leo is convinced that one night, the woman that he sees in his apartment in New York is not his wife, but a doppelganger, which he calls a simulacrum of his wife. He then goes ahead to find his wife, bringing him to the Patagonia region of Argentina.

Add to that a schizoid patient of Leo by the name of Harvey, who believes that he receives secret messages from a secret meteorological organization called Royal Academy of Meteorology, with instructions on how to manipulate the weather, so that they can counter the efforts of the renegade group called "The 49". As the novel progresses, the reader is led into this maze of a psychological thriller, because the question of reality and trust with the first-person narrative is put into the test more and more. More and more the reader is led to question whether the first-person narrative of Leo is indeed what is real or not.

Of course, not all of this is a cliffhanging thriller. There are some comedic effects, such as the episode when Leo meditates on the English-translated menu of the cafe in El Calafate, in which the English menu had drinks that had names such as Bloody Girl and Bloody Great, which was a mistranslation of Sangria Chica and Sangria Grande. I had been giggling and laughing as I was reading this book. It is funny, yet it tackles serious issues as well, such as the philosophy of the mind and existentialism. If it were made into a movie, I would see this as something that Charlie Kaufman would be doing.

Many critics had commented that this book was especially risky due to the fact that it used a certain literary technique of using a real character as a character in the book. There is this character, named Tzvi Gal-Chen who appears in the book, apparently as someone who belongs to the Royal Academy of Meteorology, and is portrayed as communicating with Harvey and Leo throughout the book. In reality, Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen is the author's real father, who happens to be indeed a meteorologist by profession, who passed away a decade ago. Indeed, modeling a character based on a true figure is in a way, risky, due to the preconceived notions that come up with it, but the book still carries through. I do believe this is one of the most original books that I read recently. Based on my book, it'll pass with flying colors.

See my other book reviews here.



(Ambassade du Luxembourg, from my Embassy Row Series)

Travelers and IQ

Yesterday, I flew from Buffalo to San Francisco. And during the whole trip, there were a few incidents that made it rather interesting.

First, it started with the lady that was before us in the security line. The way she was dressed made it look like she never flew before. Did she know that her bangles, her large hoop earrings, her chains on her wrists, her necklaces, all that metal would set off the alarm really hard? I bet if she did not remove those pieces of metal from her body, the whole alarm system would go and have a synchronized “PINGGGG!!!” It was insane. It took her a long long time to pass security, and she held up the line, including us, which was following her. She even had the TSA agent help her with unlatching her necklace! That lady’s travel IQ is indeed low.

Anyway, that was the first one.

The second one involves an eavesdropped conversation between two men. We were waiting in Atlanta International Airport for our flight to San Francisco. The two men were discussing boarding procedures, and how they think it is insane that the whole boarding process is done that way. They thought that Zone 1 was First Class, when indeed it wasn’t. They also were disappointed that they didn’t get upgraded due to the fact that the flight was very full. Anyway, it was all whining and that sort of stuff.

Now, another interesting one involves another eavesdropped conversation in Atlanta Airport as well. We got some food while waiting for our flight. Now the table next to us sat a rather middle-aged man, very tanned, quite slick in his use of money, and in front of him was this late twenties Southern girl. As their conversation went, it seemed that they were having a long-distance affair. The guy is from the Northeast, and he was talking to the girl about his wife, where they met and all that, while the girl is from another part of the country, and they were planning their next meeting together. During the whole conversation, I couldn’t help but think whether the girl’s brain was actually functioning, because it was so clear that the guy was sweet-talking her.

Anyway, those were some of the fun and interesting stories so far that this trip had in store for me. It was rather a little disconcerting, but not in a bad way, that this is one of the rare trips I have in which I have company in the airplane. I suppose last year, I traveled with my adviser when we were flying back from Raleigh to Buffalo, but that was still business talk. We were talking all along in the plane of academic stuff.

This time, it is different. Even though I have a friend with me, which is also giving a talk in the conference, we weren’t discussing academics at all. We completed a crossword puzzle, we had an experience of semantic priming in the aircraft screen, and I pointed out a plane that was carrying my people.

Anyway, I should end this post here. I am tired and I need to go to sleep.



(Embassies of Togo and Sudan, from my Embassy Row Series)

Body Language and Wealth

I found an interesting article on the news the other day, about two psychologists who have found that one's body language is related to one's social economic status. You can find the report on the study by Michael Kraus and Dr. Dacher Keltner here and here. I have made a little search, and Michael Kraus is an advanced graduate student working in Dr. Keltner's lab. If your interest is piqued, then you might as well see what other things they research by visiting their lab website here.

Now this finding strikes me as a fascinating finding. In the core of the study of the human behavioral processes is the debate on whether humans are totally separate from animals as a creature, or if humans simply are higher order animals. It is a question of whether us humans are different or not with respect to other animals. Do we belong to the same category or not?

In a somewhat long-winded way, my own research also deals with this topic. Not that I am arguing for or against a specialized language faculty in the brain, but there are indeed people who argue that humans have a special capability to handle certain things that other species do not handle, like language. Some people argue that we humans are equipped with a special language acquisition device, which enables us to learn language easily and effortlessly.

Other people on the other hand argue that the way we deal with language is no different from the way we deal with other sensory input. We treat speech sounds using categorical perception, but other sounds are not treated the same way. But then other scientists argue that other animals such as Japanese quail and chinchillas also do categorical perception.

So where can one draw the line? At this point, the debate in science is still raging strong, and both sides have good arguments. This article I believe is interesting, because it shows that we humans also have an animalistic side. If we have power, we will do whatever it takes to show the other person that the other person is weak, and it would be detrimental to make a move that would make the person with power somehow dislike the other person. After all, the weak person wants the powerful person to like him. But the powerful person does not need the weak person to like him. He has power, and so he doesn't need the other person.

It brings memories, as kids, when we want something from our parents, when we would sweet talk those who have the power to grant our wishes, so that they would grant it. Same principle at work here.

I tend to believe that humans are just higher order animals. There may be lots of things that we humans can do and that other animals cannot. One of them is having conscious thought. However, if one looks at things closely, most of these behavior can be explained by simple general principles. In language processing, linguistic phenomena can be explained by positing simple general principles of cognition. People have argued that we don't need a language-specialized black box in our head. Same thing with social dynamics.

This now ties back to what I always have believed in. That humans are selfish, and humans are curious. I used to believe that humans are inherently evil as well, but it seemed to be redundant with selfishness and curiosity. I am down to these two tenets now. And the findings of Kraus and Keltner just adds further evidence to these.



(Eesti Suursaatkond Washingtonis, from my Embassy Row Series)

Have You Been to this Lab Before?

"Hi! Have you been to this lab before?"

"No."

"Ok, kindly just give me a second. Hmmmm, it says here on our records that you have just been here last week, and you have already been the participant of the current experiment that is currently running. I am sorry to tell you that you cannot be a participant in the experiment for the second time."

"Oh, but I didn't know that it is the same experiment."

"But if you would kindly look at the sign-up page, it tells you there what the eligibility requirements are."

-----

"Hi! Have you been to this lab before?"

"No."

"Ok then. Before we start, I need to ask you a few questions. What was the language that you have been speaking from birth up to the age of five?"

"Spanish."

"Oh, I am sorry to tell you but you are not eligible for this experiment. In this experiment, we are only looking for native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. Unfortunately, we cannot run you as a participant."

"Ok."

(one week later)

"Hi! Have you been to this lab before?"

"No."

"Ok then. Before we start, I have a few questions to ask you. What was the language that you have been speaking from birth up to the age of five?"

"Spanish."

-----

"Hi! Have you been to this lab before?"

"I don't think so."

"Ok. Before we start, I need to ask a few personal questions if you don't mind, ok?"

"Sure."

"What is the language that you have been speaking from birth to the age of five?"

"English."

"Due to the fact that our experiments are federally funded, we have to ask you the following questions. If you feel uncomfortable answering them, you may choose not to. First question, what do you think your gender is?"

"Hmmm, (hesitates) female?"



(Statue of Tomas Masaryk, from my Embassy Row Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 6: Scrambling

Ever wondered why different languages are arranged differently? You know, how other languages have the subject appearing first, and then the verb, and then the object?

If you understand English, which is duh, you're reading this blog in the first place, so I assume you do, well, anyway, you may have noticed that the doer of the action usually appears first. So the following two sentences have two different meanings.

1. Bob kissed Mary.
2. Mary kissed Bob.

In English, the position of the nouns tell you what the desired action is. So in the above examples, the first noun tells you that it is the one who did the action.

However, it is not always the case that the first noun is the doer of the action. So you can have sentences that have focused elements, or sentences in a different voice, such as the passive, like the following examples.

3. As for Mary, I hate her.
4. Mary was kissed by Bob.

Mary appears as the first noun in the above two sentences, but she is not the one doing the hating, nor the kissing.

Although, one can say that these are not the default sentence patterns of English. However, in other languages, this is not the case. There are languages that can easily mix and move around their nouns. Examples include languages in the Uralic and Altaic family, such as Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish. East Asian languages such as Japanese and Korean can also do this.

So English speakers may ask: how do they keep track of who is doing what if the nouns can move around? Well, unlike English, these languages that permit scrambling have markers on the nouns that tell the hearer what role this noun has. So the doer of the action usually has a suffix that indicates that it is the doer of the action. The receiver of the action also has a suffix indicating that it is the receiver of the action. So, wherever the nouns appear in the sentence, because of the fact that it is marked for its role, then one can simply scramble things around and it would still make sense.



(Anderson House, from my Embassy Row Series)

The Meltdown

Finally, I am seeing grass again.

Starting last Saturday, the temperature here has been around the mid-40s Fahrenheit. That meant that these snowbanks that I have been seeing every day, will be gone soon. That doesn't mean that winter is over, not yet, but at least, these piles will be melted away and perhaps there wouldn't be anymore accumulation for the rest of the season.

But I know that is not likely to happen. All this is is a break weather break, Mother Nature giving us time to melt the snow, because who knows, sometime later, there would be another accumulation, and we would have no place to put the snow again.

But in the meantime, I am happy. The snowbanks are icky, since all the dirt remains and the snow melts. There are huge dark gray piles on the sides of the road, and these are basically dirt piles minus the snow. I feel like an archaeologist, since the melting snow reveals artifacts that have been buried for quite a while now.



(Embassy of India, from my Embassy Row Series)

Book Review: Gallatin Canyon by Thomas McGuane

I have noticed something with regard to my reading habits. It seems that I am slowly warming up to the idea of reading a book that is not a novel, but instead is a collection of short stories. And this book that I recently finished is one of them.

The thing that usually irks me about short story collections is the fact that I usually find myself at a loss when I finally get to like the protagonist, and suddenly the story ends and another one begins. I suppose that is just how short stories are, and that is just a fact of life. But once I learned to see past that, and appreciate that, then I supposed I was good to go.

So this one is another one of those collections, and the stories, aside from two who share a common protagonist, are not related to one another. The only common theme that the stories have on each other is the fact that every story is set in rural America. No urban talk at all here. It doesn't have to be on the mountain or on an outback. One story in fact was set in the ocean, when the protagonist decided to go and set sail, and let the wind guide him while being tossed and turned in the Gulf Stream.

I suppose I like this collection since it features several visual imaging techniques, mixing the feeling of loneliness and fear. Especially since I have the experience of passing by a dark rural highway in the American back-country, so there are plenty of imagery that one can conjure as one reads this collection. The final story is a good ending too: there was this scene where the protagonist and his partner were driving at night, and suddenly a car decides to tailgate them. The ensuing chase and inevitable disastrous end was a nice conclusion to the book.

All in all, I give it 4 out of 5 stars. It doesn't have full points, but it is way better than the average.

See my other book reviews here.



(Statue of Mahatma Gandhi, from my Embassy Row Series)

Progress Report

Yesterday ended the semester's fourth week. I always wonder how fast time flies, and considering that we are just one week shy of the semester being one-third over, one gets the feeling that indeed, time moves really fast.

Anyway, so far, I have accomplished quite a few things. By yesterday, I was able to somehow ground an idea and distill it into a possible dissertation topic. Right now, my goal is to be a hunter-gatherer of previous work and see and review them so I won't be duplicating them. The good thing about this one is that when I plugged in the relevant keywords in a major database of articles, only 63 hits came up. That means that there is work to be done.

My project that I am working with a professor is also progressing: I have finished devising the stimuli for our experiment, and right now, I am doing the paperwork so that we could actually run the experiment. I need to make sure that our protocol is approved by the university research committee, so that there would be an assurance that we would not harm our participants.

My two classes in which I am taking are also progressing well: I am about two-to-three weeks ahead with regard to the readings, so that means I still have good time management, and I am not getting behind. It also gives me time to re-read some of the articles that I do not fully grasp yet, such as the debate in spoken word recognition between the dual-route cascading models and the parallel distributed processing models. My goal is to be able to understand these different models of language processing so that they would be ready by my fingertips.

Yesterday, two of my friends had a dry-run for their talks for the upcoming conference that I am also a part of. That turned out well. After the dry-run, we all went to our favorite Thai restaurant, and after that, my friend and I saw this play downtown. It is entitled On The Way to Heaven, and it is about a naive and vulnerable housewife who is seduced by her pastor, and the drama that ensues from that situation. It was a very interesting and thought-provoking play that tackles issues about ministers and so-called men of God, and how sometimes a conflict of interest arises in the situation between the shepherd and the flock.

Anyway, that was my fourth week, so far. I am now back at work, since there are still plenty of things that are on my plate, and I will be knocking them one by one.



(Ambassade du Maroc, from my Embassy Row Series)

Freeze-Dried Nostrils

Yesterday was the coldest day so far here, at least in my opinion. Rarely do I see a negative temperature in Fahrenheit, but yesterday, when I woke up and called the Weather Channel, the temperature was a whopping -1 Fahrenheit. It was so cold.

The moment I got out of the house, I inhaled, and it felt that the surface of my nose, both inside and outside, just froze. It seemed like the day after tomorrow.

Now the bizarre thing is, the sun was out. It was shining its bloody rays to us, and yet there was no heat. There was light, but no heat.

Anyway, the good thing is that for the next few days, we will actually get above freezing temperatures. Around mid-40s they say. Now that is a welcome and desirable thing, since new mountains are being created in the Buffalo topography, and these mounds of snow need to melt.



(Kedutaan Besar Indonesia, from my Embassy Row Series)

Taking Flight Yet Again

Yes, I am an airline geek. And whenever I fly, I have these trademark here-are-my-aircraft posts again. I did it when I was flying to the US when I first moved here, I also did it when I went to Quito and to Manila in the summer of 2007. I did it when I went for a backpacking trip to Peru, and most recently, I did it again when I flew to Denmark and Hungary this past summer.

So I am doing it again.

Next week, I will be flying to the other side of the country in order to be thrown tomatoes at. The following will be my mode of transportation.



First, I will be inside this lovely Delta Air Lines McDonnell-Douglas MD-88, also known as the Mad Dog. This will take me from Buffalo to Atlanta. This happens to be my first time to ride this type of aircraft, and also the first time to pass through Delta Air Lines' superhub in Atlanta. It is a huge airport.



Next on the list is this Delta Air Lines Boeing 767 that will then carry me from Atlanta to San Francisco. I have been to San Francisco International Airport 4 years ago, so nothing new there. This will also be the eighth time that I will be in a Boeing 767. Previous trips on a 767 included my trip from Osaka to Guam, New York City to Bogota and back, and Paris to Chicago.



After people throw tomatoes at me, I will then ride on this Delta Air Lines Boeing 737 from San Francisco to New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport. I have been plenty of times to JFK before, but this will be the first time I will utilize Terminal 3, where Delta keeps its hub. This will be the tenth time I will ride a Boeing 737. According to my database, this is the aircraft type in which I have the most number of flights.



The last leg of my trip would be implemented with this small regional jet, a Delta Air Lines Embraer ERJ-145. This will take me from New York City to Buffalo. Nothing new here, this will be my ninth flight in an ERJ-145. Both this aircraft type and the Boeing 747 is tied for second place in my history. We'll see how long they last in that position.

So there, once again, I am excited to be airborne. But then, I do know that once I get to the airport, the excitement will diminish, and sooner or later I will simply feel that this is just another routine I have to do, including the security, the boarding, the take-off and landing, and so on.



(Embaixada de Portugal, from my Embassy Row Series)

Perpetuum Mobile

Today was a busy day. However, there were plenty of things that I suppose made this day a little more bearable.

These things happen to be about travel, both real and unreal, actual and virtual.

First of all, let me point out that I have a new series of photos, which started with my post from yesterday. I started my Embassy Row Series, which, as you may deduce from, is a series of photos that I took last December 2007, when I visited my Russian friend who goes to Georgetown. I took a walk along Massachusetts Avenue, and had the experience of being in several countries in just one afternoon! I began with the Colombian Embassy yesterday, and today features the Blaine Mansion.

Another travel related factoid is that my favorite TV reality show is coming up with a new season: none other than The Amazing Race. Starting February 15, a new set of teams are again going to frolic around the world. I always enjoy watching this show, for several reasons, including seeing Americans with low travelers IQ get in trouble overseas, and see exotic locales and plan my next vacation, and just vicariously experience travel from someone else's eyes.

Finally, earlier today, as I was in lab running a participant, I logged on to Google, and was rather taken by my curiosity to use their Google Earth map function. Through satellite imaging, I saw the current state of my past habitation, in Japan. I saw my old school, which grew some buildings, and I saw the train station next to my house, which seemed to have been renovated, and I saw my old apartment building, and the neighborhood surrounding it. I traced back the route I always took every morning when I would walk to school, and I saw other places that I recall back from the past.



(Blaine Mansion, from my Embassy Row Series)

Book Review: Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles

Now this is one good book that I have read. Jonathan Miles' first novel, entitled Dear American Airlines, is one book that I would praise for its originality.

Here's the gist of it. The book is a novel written in the form of a rant. There is this one middle-aged man, Benjamin Ford, who is flying from New York City to Los Angeles, and he has a forty-five minute lay-over in Chicago. However, due to weather reasons, his flight got delayed, and he is now stranded in the Chicago O'Hare International Airport. One learns that he circled Chicago over and over, until the pilot was forced to land in Peoria, and later was bussed to Chicago. He then spends the next 20-something hours in Chicago, and he has nothing to do, except to write a complaint letter to the airline.

That's why the novel is entitled that way. It is a 180-page rant which somehow involves his pathetic life, his miserable alcoholism, his failed relationships, his attempts on being a poet, his child trouble, his schizophrenic mother, among others. He is on the way to Los Angeles to attend his daughter's wedding, who happens to be getting married with a girl. Yes, his daughter is lesbian. Later on, we also learn that he had suicidal intentions of his own.

Anyway, the most fascinating thing about this novel is that the concept is very original. Who would think of a novel in the form of a rant? And even more amazing, is the fact that it can be sustained for 180 pages! It is indeed one of the most original novels I have read in a while, and I am just fascinated at how much material it covered, all forming a coherent whole, with minor characters such as other passengers, people from the past, a TSA officer, and others. The author also made a good job of checking his facts: American Airlines does have a hub in Chicago, the gate numbers are all correct as being American Airlines gates, and the lay-out of the airport, as much as it is described in the novel, are pretty much accurate. I suppose I have flown through Chicago enough to know this.

Anyway, I totally recommend this book for anyone to read. If you want to read an original book, don't hesitate to pick this one up.

See my other book reviews here.



(Embajada de Colombia, from my Embassy Row Series)

A Year's Worth of Backlog

This is the final post that will carry a picture coming from my Mount Vernon series. Whew! I cannot believe that it took me this long to finally post the photos from my trip to Mount Vernon, which, by the way, happened back in December 2007. And I wasn't even posting all of the photos I took! I was only posting the ones that I think were good, and the duplicate ones are simply stored in my back-up drive and not posted here.

So yeah, I have a backlog of about a year when posting photos. My photos from my trip to Washington DC aren't done yet, all I have posted are the ones from Arlington Cemetery, which was the previous photo series, and the Mount Vernon photos, which is ending today. My next post will have another series started, still in conjunction with my Washington DC photos.

Speaking of backlogs, I have quite a few of them at the moment. Well, it can or cannot be considered backlogs, but more like things to do. It is already February, and tomorrow begins the fourth week of the semester. There are plenty of things to do!

I am delivering a talk in about two weeks: my manuscript is already ready, but I still need to see whether I will go overtime with it or not. My slides are finalized by now, but I still need to print about 30 copies of my handouts. I also need to finalize the revision of my qualifying paper, and make it APA-compliant, so that the presentation of the experimental data is not all over the place. I also need to figure out the prospectus of my dissertation and see what I will be doing for this magnum opus.

I have just written a recommendation letter for a student, but I still need to print it in a paper with the official letterhead, so I will head to the department office and ask for some official-looking paper. I have a quiz to prepare for Tuesday, and I have a meeting with an unknown person tomorrow at 9:00.

The weird thing is, I like this state in which there are things to do. I remember hating semester breaks during high school and college, since there was no deadlines to beat, and so all I would do was read a book, stare at the wall, lie in bed, stare at the ceiling, wash, rinse, repeat. Boring. But, this deadline thing, it somehow makes my adrenaline go crazy, and it gives me a natural high of sorts.

I need to recharge my camera's batteries. I am bringing it with me to the other side of the country, and I am hoping to snap some shots of California. If I will base it on schedule, I will be making a photo series of those photos that I will be taking around March 2010.



(Path to Exit, from my Mount Vernon Series)