An excerpt from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus about #music and ambiguity:
« Relationship [in music] is everything. And if you want to give it a more precise name, it is "ambiguity." To illustrate the meaning of the word, he played for me chord-progressions belonging to no definite key; demonstrated for me how such a progression fluctuates between C major and G major, if one leaves out the F [...] how it keeps the ear uncertain [...] "You know what I find?" he asked. "That music turns the equivocal into a system. Take this or that note. You can understand it so or respectively so. You can think of it as sharpened or flattened, and you can, if you are clever, take advantage of the double sense as much as you like." »
This somewhat echoes the conclusion of a scientific paper by Pressnitzer, Suied and Shamma on #Auditory Scene Analysis :
« Music is an especially challenging stimulus to make sense, as most of it is abstract without any clear reference to an external object. By embedding several latent perceptual organizations into complex acoustical scenes, music may well be able to challenge the listener with a rich set of possibilities that can be freely entertained, with no other potential consequence than being surprised, rejoiced, or moved. » https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2011.00158/full #ASA #AuditorySceneAnalysis #MusicPerception #Cognition #CognitiveScience
Thinking about kinds of analysis errors. There are errors of design, doing the wrong analysis intentionally, & also errors of execution, doing the wrong analysis by accident. Like this 2016 example in which country codes entered as continuous by accident. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)30670-4
Working in ways to prevent such errors is important. I simulate synthetic data to validate my analysis. Even in simple contexts, accidents can happen. Because computers suck and are out to get us.
I swear, I've been submitting articles to journals for almost 10 years now and I still have no idea what to write in the cover letter. Like, what can I say that the editors won't get from just skimming the abstract and looking at the contact info associated with my profile in the submisison system?
WE SHOULD BE PAST THE NEED FOR COVER LETTERS, DAMMIT! THIS IS THE FUTURE!
A question that is reminiscent of both Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's work (and also of some of @gregeganSF books): what sort of things can be truly generated by simulation? As John Searle said: "No one would suppose that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of the formal sequence in lactation and photosynthesis". Similarly, Dennett stresses that a simulated hurricane causes no floods and devastation... Or does it? Maybe if you manage to integrate an AI in the simulation, then from its point of view this would look like a real hurricane. But at least it is not a hurricane at the "level" of the programmer. Now there are also things that are "truly" generated by simulation at the level of the programmer. Think of mathematical proof. If you design a computer program to produce mathematical proofs, then it won't generate simulated mathematical proofs but true mathematical proofs. The same goes for language or music. Now the big question is : on which side of this divide does the mind fall? Is it more like milk or more like language?
#AcademiaAntiracistFightClub ✊24 juillet 2023
Série de l'été #DelaraceESR🌞
"Rejeter la thèse bien étayée de l’existence d’un racisme systémique (...) ne devrait pas être le fait de personnes qui exercent un métier scientifique".
par @anthrofuentes
https://academia.hypotheses.org/50733
Job alert! I'm hiring a postdoc to work on the dynamics of speech rhythms in #French and #German. This is part of the #ANR-#DFG project #DRhyaDS (https://qoto.org/@leovarnet/109550769028496021).
Please share widely!
https://mycore.core-cloud.net/index.php/s/nVjBSw9H9OChpMF
@linguistics @psycholinguistics
A question that is reminiscent of both Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's work (and also of some of @gregeganSF books): what sort of things can be truly generated by simulation? As John Searle said: "No one would suppose that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of the formal sequence in lactation and photosynthesis". Similarly, Dennett stresses that a simulated hurricane causes no floods and devastation... Or does it? Maybe if you manage to integrate an AI in the simulation, then from its point of view this would look like a real hurricane. But at least it is not a hurricane at the "level" of the programmer. Now there are also things that are "truly" generated by simulation at the level of the programmer. Think of mathematical proof. If you design a computer program to produce mathematical proofs, then it won't generate simulated mathematical proofs but true mathematical proofs. The same goes for language or music. Now the big question is : on which side of this divide does the mind fall? Is it more like milk or more like language?
Grâce à l'import des médailles d'argent du CNRS sur #Wikidata, on peut à présent répondre à cette question : à partir de quand la parité dans la remise de ces récompenses est-elle atteinte ?
Le n°14 de la revue GLAD! vient de sortir ; tout est en accès libre
https://journals.openedition.org/glad/
Contenu listé en images avec description
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169?via%3Dihub
"Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century"
Une critique détaillée de la position de #Pinker selon qui le capitalisme industriel a permis à l'humanité de sortir de la pauvreté. Je parlais de cet argumentaire et de ses détracteurs dans cette note de blog :
https://dbao.leo-varnet.fr/2019/08/26/triomphe-des-lumieres-ou-faillite-de-la-raison/
#econometrics #StevenPinker
What is the cost of science being conducted in English? @tatsuya_amano &co reveal that non-native English speakers spend more effort than native speakers in conducting scientific activities (reading, writing, preparing presentations...) #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/46Rfptc
Have you read the JASA Express letter, Speech beyond the binary: Some acoustic-phonetic and auditory-perceptual characteristics of non-binary speakers, by Brandon Merritt? Check it out at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0017642
#PrideMonth
Holy _shit_ this paper, and the insight behind it.
You know how every receiver is also a transmitter, _well_: every text predictor is also text compressor, and vice-versa.
You can outperform massive neural networks running millions of parameters, with a novel applications of _gzip_.
Géraldine Carranante, post-doctorante au @lsp_ens dans mon équipe de recherche, revient sur son parcours et ce qui l'a amenée à faire de la philosophie dans un laboratoire de psychophysique de @cognition_ens https://youtu.be/V_xz1p5PrEU
I feel like this comic has been my whole career as a linguistics researcher. Eg "progressing" from "should we be talking about Noun Phrases or Determiner Phrases?" to "what is a Noun really"?
So... good?
J’ai commencé à prendre la mesure d’un truc : le sentiment de toute-puissance qu’on gagné ces sphères à l’aune de la crise sanitaire. Celles-ci ayant endossé pleinement une posture de « Gardiens de l’Ordre Public » et porté l’auréole héroïque que cela leur a prodigué.
CNRS researcher at École normale supérieure Paris. Auditory perception, psycholinguistics, hearing loss. My toots are searchable #tootfinder.