http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=169

A few days ago an unusual article appeared in The Hindu. It is about the fragment of a pot shown above, a pot used for collecting toddy (palm sap, modern Tamil கள்ளு) made about 1800 years ago. The writing on the pot is in Tamil Brahmi, a writing system that only fairly recently has come to be well understood. It says: n̪a:kan uɾal, Old Tamil for "Naakan's (pot with) toddy-sap". In modern Tamil writing this would be: னாகந் உறல். As the article points out, the fact that a poor toddy-tapper would write his name on a pot is indicative of mass literacy at the time.

The article is interesting to me in part just because of the photograph. I've seen photographs of Tamil Brahmi texts before, but never in color, and having never been to India, I've never seen such a text in person. The other interesting thing about the article is the authorship. Newspaper articles are usually written by reporters. As we not infrequently note here on Language Log, there are a few good ones, but all too often they get things wrong. Well, this article is not by reporters; it is right from the horse's mouth. The authors are S. Rajagopal, retired senior archaeologist with the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology and Iravatham Mahadevan, an eminent student of early Indian writing and leading authority on Tamil Brahmi, author of the Early Tamil Epigraphy volume in the Harvard Oriental Series, which belongs on every shelf. This is like having a newspaper article on physics written by Stephen Hawking. I hope it's the beginning of a trend.

It's a gorgeous day in Austin. Perfect weather for rock climbing sizing conduits, conductors, and duct banks for a water treatment plant.

http://www.melankolia.net/gameblog/archives/2008/05/chris_farrell_is_back.html

One of my favourite bloggers, Chris Farrell, is back! His new blog is called Illuminating Games. His insights on Glory to Rome are interesting, especially considering I just bought the game (I'm hoping to play it next Thursday, we'll see).

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http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=168

Google Translate has added ten languages to its repertoire: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech,Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian,Polish, Romanian and Swedish. With the languages previously available (Arabic, Chinese (traditional and simplified writing), Dutch, English, French,German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish), Google now handles 23 languages. These comprise less than one-half of one percent of the world's languages, but their speakers include more than half of the world's population.

The interesting thing about the languages added is that they do not for the most part represent the next most widely spoken languages. Hindi is the exception, with over 300 million speakers. The others have a modest number of speakers. Moreover, in several cases the demand for translation into the language is probably small: most Scandinavians, for example, are comfortable in English. If Google were trying to add languages in descending order of number of speakers, they should have added such languages as Indonesian, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, Marathi and Vietnamese.

In all likelihood, the order in which Google adds languages is probably determined partly by economics (relatively small numbers of speakers of languages used in wealthy countries will provide more advertising revenue than large numbers of speakers of languages used in poor countries) and partly by the availability of sufficiently large amounts of bilingual text, which they use to train their statistical translator.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=167

My colleague Tom Bever felt he had really hit the big time today when he learned that one of his example sentences had made it into the funny pages. Admittedly, it was in the linguistically hypersophisticated Dinosaur Comics (as usual, click on the image to see it full-size):

For a brief introduction to the example, try the Wikipedia article on garden-path sentences¹, or for a rather more thorough discussion, Chapter 1, section 4.2 of this on-line introductory neuropsychology coursebook, in which Tom is referred to as 'a famous psycholinguist'. [Aside to Tom: It's true! Big time! Quick, ask for a raise — my finder's fee is a mere 10%.]

Because I'd rather draw trees than grade papers, here's two trees (done in a kind of Simpler Syntax/Syntactic Structures style, just because it's, well, simpler) illustrating the correct and garden-pathed parses of the sentence.

I actually prefer an analysis where raced past the barn is an adjective phrase headed by an adjectival participle, although I represented it as a reduced relative with elided that and was in honor of the usual term for the construction. English has a constraint against prenominal adjective phrases that would account for the postnominal order (compare the similar book/*the book similar vs. the book similar to Don Quixote/*the similar to Don Quixote book). Me, I'm not scared of bracketing paradoxes. But never mind.

I do really love drawing trees. Someday if you're good I'll show you the Buffalo buffalo tree.

¹The Wikipedia article says that the idiom from which the name of the garden path phenomenon is drawn is "to be led down the garden path". I always thought you were led up the garden path. Google's on my side, 1070 to 1920, though just barely; combined the expression gets fewer hits than, e.g., "screw the pooch". This is why my undergraduates don't understand me.

For the past week or so, Kyeli and I have been working on a Video Game Ontology project. We've been categorizing all video games based on principled distinctions, unlike the messy genres used by reviewers (and by Wikipedia) these days, which haphazardly combine gameplay elements, perspective, theme, and I/O modalities. We've run into some really interesting edge cases, and I'd like to get some input from y'all on this one.

My question for today is: What are the defining gameplay elements of a sports videogame, as opposed to an action videogame?

Thematic elements don't count, so it doesn't matter that it's based on a real-life sport, it doesn't matter that your dudes look like people in sporting uniforms, it doesn't matter that it takes place on a grassy field instead of in outer space, etc. In fact, since the word "sports" is a thematic word, I'll call this type of game "Foo games" when attempting to describe their gameplay. And it's just the gameplay we're talking about. Imagine all these games reduced to their Atari 2600 versions, where everything is just squares. Then we still have Pong (a Foo game) vs. Space Invaders (an Action game), which have two very different gameplay styles.

I'm tentatively defining an Action game as a game where you directly control your player in real time, quick reflexes are important, and there are enemies to avoid and possibly interact with in other ways. The enemies seem to be an important gameplay element of the Action gameplay genre.

And then we have Foo games. Let's leave racing games and vehicle sims out of the Foo category for now, and just look at games that would have been labeled "sports" but don't include vehicles or racing. Like these:

• Wii Tennis
• Mario Strikers Charged
• ...many more games based on volleyball, basketball, baseball, etc.
• Pong

But what about 1-player Foo games, like bowling or golf? I'll call those "games of skill" instead of "Foo games". These are games where 1 player interacts with the environment using skill and precision to score points. The environment contains neither opponents (as in 2-player Foo games) nor enemies (as in Action games) Like these:

• Pangya Super Swing Golf
• Wii Bowling
• Darts
• Ring Toss
• Monkey Target

• Bomb Blox
• Pool
• Shuffleboard

My worry about these category descriptions of Foo and Action gameplay is that they're actually letting a little bit of theme sneak in with the "killing" distinction. Like Combat for the Atari 2600. You sort of kill your opponent, but really you're just scoring a point, it's not a gameplay sort of killing. And it has all the other elements of a 2-player Foo game, like symmetry. So I think the killing in Combat is just thematic, and that from a gameplay perspective it's just scoring a point.

And if Combat is a Foo game, then I can even think of an (admittedly obscure) example where the Foo game 2-way symmetry is broken: Air-Sea Battle. All these exceptions torment me so! (:

And what about Soul Calibur vs. a Foo Fencing game, like in Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games? They're both head-to-head symmetric games where you attack your opponent with swords, but Soul Calibur I'd classify as a fighting game (a subcategory of Action game, I'd think) and Fencing I'd categorize as a Foo game. But why? And what about games like Karate Champ? Is that an Action game or a Foo game?

Any insight you can offer about the differences between Foo games and Action games would be greatly appreciated. Or if you just want to point out the ways in which I'm wrong, that might be helpful too. (:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TetrapodZoology/~3/292333465/identify_the_oddity.php

http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/2008/05/identify_the_oddity.php

What the hell is this? As usual, I'm sure that many people will get it, but oddities (clues?) to note include the paired shallow concavities on the dorsal surface, the rugose laterodorsal patches and the clusters of large foramina. Have fun...

PS - I'll post the answer on Sunday night.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=166

As a result of some Language Log posts a couple of years ago, I get quite a few inquiries from journalists about Dr. Leonard Sax and his science-based arguments for single-sex education. It's in the nature of things that only a small fraction of such discussions wind up in the resulting articles. For example, for Elizabeth Weil's NYT Magazine piece ("Teaching Boys and Girls Separately", 3/2/2008), I wound up sending about 4,000 words worth of emails to the author and her fact-checker, in response to their questions about specific points raised in some of Dr. Sax's writings. In the final article, this all wound up as background to a 250-word passage about sex differences in hearing. (See "Scupulously avoiding sigma", 3/2/2008, for some comments about other aspects of the article.)

I'm not complaining; Ms. Weil had a lot of material to cover, and she didn't have a lot of space to work with. However, another recent journalist's inquiry, raising some of the same issues, inspired me start a new policy. From now on, when I get inquiries from journalists, I'll try to post an edited version of my responses on Language Log. This may be of interest to some readers — and of course our famous money-back guarantee is available to the rest of you — and it will also make it easier for me to deal with subsequent questions about the same issues.

In this case, I'll start with my responses to the four new questions that arrived yesterday afternoon. The answer to the last one brings up some of those emails sent to Elizabeth Weil, which I'll post in an edited form later this weekend.

In his books, Leonard Sax is a political activist using science to make a case, not a scientist evaluating a hypothesis.

Science is sometimes on his side, sometimes neutral or equivocal, and sometimes against him. He picks the results that fit his agenda, ignoring those that don't; and all too often, he misunderstands, exaggerates or misrepresents the results that he presents.

There's detailed support for these assertions in some Language Log posts from 2006:

"David Brooks, cognitive neuroscientist" (6/12/2006)
"Are men emotional children?" (6/24/2005)
"Of rats and (wo)men" (8/19/2006)
"Leonard Sax on hearing" (8/22/2006)
"More on rats and men and women" (8/22/2006)
"The emerging science of gendered yelling" (9/5/2006)
"Girls and boys and classroom noise" (9/9/2006)

This doesn't mean that his conclusions are false, but it does mean that his appeals to science are not trustworthy.

This question assumes that girls have better verbal skills than boys. In fact, that generalization is somewhere between misleading and false. And you don't have to be a linguistics professor to figure this out — you just need to look at the published numbers from tests related to verbal skills, with a little bit of basic statistics to see what they mean.

I encourage you to look into it for yourself — some references are below — but here's a summary of what (I think) it all means in practical terms.

If you pick a hundred girls and a hundred boys at random, and give them a battery of standardized tests measuring various sorts of verbal abilities, and split the group into upper and lower halves based on the results, the highest-scoring hundred kids will probably include about 52 girls and 48 boys, while the lower-scoring hundred kids will be about 48 girls and 52 boys. (This is based on the 0.10 effect size that is calculated for studies since 1973 in the Shibley & Linn meta-analysis, cited below. The details will vary quite a bit, depending on what tests you use, and what population of girls and boys you sample from — for some tests and some populations, the top half is likely to have more boys in it than girls.)

This is a difference, but it's not a very big one. The effects are small, complex, and variable over time and social setting. In my opinion, the causes remain uncertain.

According to Janet Shibley Hyde and Marcia C. Linn, "Gender Differences in Verbal Ability: A Meta-Analysis", Psychological Bulletin, 104:1 53-69 (1988):

Many regard gender differences in verbal ability to be one of the well-established findings in psychology. To reassess this belief, we located 165 studies that reported data on gender differences in verbal ability. The weighted mean effect size (d) was +0.11, indicating a slight female superiority in performance. The difference is so small that we argue that gender differences in verbal ability no longer exist. Analyses of effect sizes for different measures of verbal ability showed almost all to be small in magnitude: for vocabulary, d = 0.02; for analogies, d = −0.16 (slight male superiority in performance); for reading comprehension, d = 0.03; for speech production, d = 0.33 (the largest effect size); for essay writing, d = 0.09; for anagrams, d = 0.22; and for tests of general verbal ability, d = 0.20. For the 1985 administration of the Scholastic Aptitude Test-Verbal, d = −0.11, indicating superior male performance. Analysis of tests requiring different cognitive processes involved in verbal ability yielded no evidence of substantial gender differences in any aspect of processing. Similarly, an analysis by age indicated no striking changes in the magnitude of gender differences at different ages, countering Maccoby and Jacklin's (1974) conclusion that gender differences in verbal ability emerge around age 11. For studies published in 1973 or earlier, d = 0.23 and for studies published after 1973, d = 0.10, indicating a slight decline in the magnitude of the gender difference in recent years.

[At this point, the reader obviously needs to understand what "effect size" means. It's a measure of between-group differences, expressed in terms of the amount of within-group variation; and the usual qualitative interpretation is that 0.2 is a small effect size, 0.5 is a moderate effect size, and 0.8 or larger is a large effect size. In more technical language, this is "Cohen's d", the difference in means divided by the pooled standard deviation. As a point of comparison, the effect size for sex differences in height among American 18-year-olds is about d=2.21. For more discussion of the concept, try my post "Gabby guys: the effect size" (9/23/2006) or the Wikipedia article. For a discussion of why it matters that most citizens (even intellectuals) have no clue about any of this, see "The Pirahã and us" (10/6/2007).]

A more recent meta-analysis gave a table of 124 quantitative estimates of sex-difference effect sizes, taken from 46 published meta-analyses of gender differences in general (Janet Shibley Hyde, "The Gender Similarities Hypothesis", American Psychologist, 60(6): 581-592, 2005) . These deal with many different cognitive and behavioral measures, from "mathematics computation" to "job attribute preference". Pulling out those that compared verbal skills, we get:

The asterisks indicate that "data were from major, large national samples". Positive values of d represent higher scores for females, negative values indicate higher scores for males (I've switched the sign compared to Table 1 in the source, in order to make the sign consistent with the practice in Hyde & Linn above.). Although 7 of the 8 meta-analyses show an advantage for females, only three of those are non-negligible in magnitude.

And the biggest effect sizes — 0.45 and 0.40 from the Feingold [1988] study — are worth looking into a little further. That study is Alan Feingold, "Cognitive Gender Differences Are Disappearing", American Psychologist 43(2) 95:103, 1988. Its abstract:

Gender differences in cognitive abilities were determined using the norms from the four standardizations of the Differential Aptitude Tests conducted between 1947 and 1980, and from the four standardizations of the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test/Scholastic Aptitude Test conducted between 1960 and 1983. The standardized gender differences (ds) were averaged over grade of examinees and year of standardization to obtain a mean effect size for each ability, and variations among effect sizes were examined for grade, year, and Grade × Year trends. Girls scored higher than boys on scales of grammar, spelling, and perceptual speed; boys had higher means on measures of spatial visualization, high school mathematics, and mechanical aptitude; and no average gender differences were found on tests of verbal reasoning, arithmetic, and figural reasoning. Gender differences declined precipitously over the years surveyed, and the increases in these differences over the high school grades have diminished. The important exception to the rule of vanishing gender differences is that the well-documented gender gap at the upper levels of performance on high school mathematics has remained constant over the past 27 years.

Here are some relevant numbers from Feingold's paper, dealing with SAT verbal scores from 1960 to 1983. Again, the values are effect sizes, with positive values indicating that girls' average scores were higher, and negative values indicating that boys' average scores were higher. The most important thing is that all the effect sizes are small; but it's also interesting to look at the trend:

Just to show how different things can be, for a different test in a different language and society, here are some numbers from Robert Colom et al., "Are cognitive sex differences disappearing? Evidence from Spanish populations", Personality and Individual Differences 27(6): 1189-1195, 1999.

This is from "the Spanish translation of the DAT", which is "a battery of six reliable group-administered paper-and-pencil tests, which measure "verbal ability (Verbal Reasoning, VR), perceptual speed (Clerical Speed and Accuracy, CSA), three dimensional spatial visualization (Space Relations, SR), artihmetic (Numerical Ability, NA), mechanical ability (Mechanical Reasoning, MR), and figural reasoning (Abstract Reasoning, AR)". The American data from the DAT Verbal Reasoning subtest yielded an effect size of 0.02 in favor of females, but the Spanish data from the translation of the same test showed an effect size of 0.30 in favor of males in 1979 and 0.31 in favor of males in 1995. Since these are large national studies in both cases, the source of the difference is certainly not statistical sampling error. And I very much doubt that there can be significant sex-linked population-genetic differences between the U.S. and Spain. There must be some differences in the test-taking population, or the culture, or the school system.

There are many interesting scientific questions about where measured sex differences (and other group differences) in verbal abilities come from. (For a review as of a decade ago, see Alan Feingold, "Cognitive gender differences: Where are they, and why are they?", Learning and Individual Differences 8(1):25-32, 1996.) But in my opinion, such differences are nowhere near large enough or consistent enough to be an argument for sex-segregated education.

The short answer to both questions is that I don't know.

But my impression is that the main overall trend is for girls and women to do better rather than for boys and men to do worse; that this is a world-wide effect, which is unlikely to be the result of U.S.-specific educational or social developments over the past few decades.; and that the causes are almost certainly not sex differences in perceptual or cognitive skills or styles.

Educational trends in the Arab world provide a striking case study. In response to my discussion of David Brooks' channeling of Leonard Sax ("David Brooks, Cognitive Neuroscientist", 6/12/2006), Lameen Souag wrote

I wonder how Brooks would account for similar phenomena elsewhere, such as Qatar, where men's dropout rates are higher than women's even at primary school and more than twice as many women as men attend university, or Algeria, where 20% more women than men make it to the baccalaureate, or Kuwait, where two-thirds of university students are women. Learning styles yes - sitting down in one place and paying attention all day is a sore trial for most boys - but there's surely something broader going on here than choice of violence-filled vs. touchy-feely literature, never mind his further inferences about brains.

Qatar: http://lughat.blogspot.com/2006/04/more-from-qatar.html
Algeria: http://jazairana.blogspot.com/2006/06/60-of-bac-candidates-are-women.html
Kuwait: http://gender.pogar.org/countries/country.asp?cid=8

As far as I can tell, most if not all schools in Qatar continue to be segregated by sex (see this Rand report, which says that "Three levels of general education are provided: primary (grades 1-6), preparatory (grades 7-9), and secondary (grades 10-12), with girls and boys in separate schools.") I'm not sure whether Algerian schools are single-sex or not. The cited link suggests that university classes have been segregated by sex in Kuwait since 1996, and I presume that elementary and secondary school are sex-segregated there as well.

The educational "gender gap" is clearly a serious issue, one that deserves careful study and attention. Leonard Sax has argued forcefully that it results from large differences between the sexes in many perceptual, cognitive and behavioral dimensions: "Girls and boys play differently. They learn differently. They fight differently. They see the world differently. They hear differently." But I've argued that Dr. Sax's account of sex differences in sight and hearing, at least, is highly exaggerated.

And there are many studies suggesting that the most important factors in this area are not perceptual or cognitive at all. Thus Brian A. Jacob, "Where the boys aren't: non-cognitive skills, returns to school and the gender gap in higher education", Economics of Education Review 21(6) 589-598, 2002:

Nearly 60 percent of college students today are women. Using longitudinal data on a nationally representative cohort of eighth grade students in 1988, I examine two potential explanations for the differential attendance rates of men and women—returns to schooling and non-cognitive skills. […] I find that higher non-cognitive skills and college premiums among women account for nearly 90 percent of the gender gap in higher education. Interestingly, non-cognitive factors continue to influence college enrollment after controlling for high school achievement.

It's also important to be clear about where there are gaps and where there aren't, and what the trends really are. Thus Muna Husain and Daniel L. Millimet, "The Mythical 'Boy Crisis'?", Economics of Education Review, in press, 2008:

The popular press has put forth the idea that the US educational system is experiencing a “Boy Crisis,” where boys are losing ground to girls across multiple dimensions. Here, we analyze these claims in the context of math and reading achievement during early primary school. We reach two conclusions. First, white boys outperform white girls in math across virtually the entire distribution by the end of third grade; there is less evidence for other races. Second, boys lag behind girls in reading at the start of kindergarten and at the end of third grade across all races, but only the lowest-achieving boys lose ground over the first four years; boys gain ground between first and third grades.

From the page "About Leonard Sax MD PhD" at the web site of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education:

Mark Liberman, at the University of Pennsylvania, has posted several blogs attacking Dr. Sax's positions regarding sex differences in hearing and vision. Dr. Sax has replied directly to Professor Liberman (via snail mail). Having received no response from Professor Liberman, Dr. Sax has agreed to post these letters online.

Click here to read Dr. Sax's letter regarding sex differences in hearing;
click here to read Dr. Sax's letter regarding sex differences in vision.

My blog posts from 2006 criticized Dr. Sax for exaggerating, misunderstanding or misrepresenting sex differences described in scientific studies of hearing and vision. In these letters, originally sent to me a few months ago in paper form, he counters mainly by citing other studies.

This doesn't affect my original complaint of exaggeration, misunderstanding and misrepresentation. And I've been hoping to avoid a protracted controversy about points that I don't believe are very much in doubt. However, I've read the additional references that he brings forward in these letters — that's mostly what those 4,000 words of email to Elizabeth Weil and her fact checker were about — and I'll post something about them later this weekend.

[I've left comments off for this post. However, feel free to send me email on the subject, and I'll add updates or corrections as appropriate. And after I've posted my response to Dr. Sax's letters, I'll set up an open thread on the subject for those who want to register their opinions, suggestions, anecdotes, and so forth.]

http://gaming.powerblogs.com/posts/1211034294.shtml

Chris Farrell has a new post, so back onto the blogroll.

For a minor celebrity, Rich Sommers has pretty good taste in games. On an almost related note, there's the "Brushes with Fame" geeklist.

Time's up gets a deluxe edition. I'm not sold on the "fourth round" (with pantomiming) ... it's a good idea, but difficult. We tried making the 4th round simultaneous. All players on one side close their eyes and the other side poses. That stops any problems with trying to quickly open and close your eyes over 30 seconds. Still didn't quite work.

I do think that the "Titles" (instead of Celebrity names") idea is good, although everyone seems to want to put in a title that is also a name. (I liked "Tom Jones," personally).

I read the three-way discussion with Michael Barnes, Ryan Bretsch, and Eric Martin a few days ago. There was one good point (by Barnes):

That whole “different strokes” approach winds up undermining the whole point of having an opinion, discussing it, and defending it. That’s fine in day-to-day life and that’s how I live in pretty much all respects, but when it comes to opinion-making and criticism that shouldn’t be the de facto defense.

BGG has polls. Now they need to stop having so damn many (A geek-dime fee per poll. You heard it here first).