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This lovely tree diagramming a sentence that means "Elizabeth read a lot in Welsh." is brought you by these lovely people. I won't tell you the embarrassing story that involves someone telling me about the site, I'll just sum it up in the sentence: I just did a lot of stupid things all in the same PDF file.
This little kid melts my cold, cold heart.
These kids do, too.
They have become my new favorite study break, after Free Rice and Peter Thiel, of course.
I would like to say that this is the reason why I don't get a lot done, but it isn't. Actually, Cooper serves as a sick sort of motivation as its usually a fun challenge trying to work around him. Plus, its nice to have him in the room when I talk through an idea. I don't know why, but I feel a little less crazy when I'm talking to my cat as opposed to talking to an empty room. (Note: I said "less crazy" as it is still very "crazy cat lady" of me to have "discussions" with my cat.)
So, at the risk of sounding like Bob Barker, you should spay or neuter your pet. I was at the SPCA earlier (looking for Kingsley). In the stray room, I saw a kitten who couldn't have been older than 7 weeks old because it needed to be fostered. Someone has to bottle feed the little guy every couple of hours. It was so sad. This is kitten litter season, so this isn't the first time that I've been in the stray room and seen kittens. Previously, there have been mama kitties with entire litters. This time, it was just the one kitten, all alone. It tugged at my heart strings, I tell you.
I have a job interview today. I'm pretty excited about it.
So, about a month ago, I had the opportunity to first watch a referential communication task and then to participate in one. The task was adopted for use in linguistic studies from a social psychology task called the Krause task. More or less, one person describes something to the another person so that the other person can pick the right card or photograph or novel object or what have you. In the morning, I watched a psychologist describe tangrams to a linguist while a student of Communication disorders listened in and tried to identify the same tangrams. It turns out, we do better at things when we can ask questions and in general participate in the "naming" of novel things. (The linguist and the psychologist were allowed to discuss the figures.) Later in the day, I described a set of photographs to someone who had to match their set to mine. We weren't allowed to discuss this time, I just had to describe the photo in as much detail as I thought necessary so that the other participant could pick the right photograph. We got them all right. It turns out, in pretty much line with hypotheses about English speakers, that I mostly use intrinsic and relative frames of reference when I'm describing the orientation of objects. (Intrinsic in that the object is the thing that the orientation is projected from and Relative in that I was the thing that the orientation was projected from.)
Now, why would anyone want to make people play these little games? Lots of reasons. Its easier to get people to want to participate (and to do well) if your task is fun. If you want to study discourse, you need to get people to talk. If you want to look at, say, spatial frames of reference, you need to get people to talk about things that are oriented in specific ways in space. Or, if you want to study something else that can be done in the form of a matching game.
So, I'm sitting in my friend's fiance's Grandmother's house in Clinton, New York, reading my weekly installment of Yr Wythnos (The Week), the BBC's cylchlythyr cymraeg (Welsh Newsletter) written for a myfyrwyr (student) such as myself. The first article was about guidelines for farmers, more or less, and by its title, the second article is about the railway. I won't get to read it until later because I have to go get ready for church.
All I can think is, this is an interesting turn my life has taken.
