A couple of months ago, Randall Munroe’s xkcd web comic explained the design of the Saturn V rocket using only the thousand most common words of English: “the Up Goer Five explained using only the ten hundred words people use the most often”.

Explaining hard things in simple language has now become an internet meme. Just this morning, I found Walton Jones explaining his lab’s work on the genetics and neuroscience of olfaction in Drosophila: “We are interested in how little animals with six legs smell things”. There is a tumblr blog with many of these summaries.

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor makes it easy to experiment with writing down your research in the ten hundred most used words. Here’s an attempt at an up-goer five abstract for my upcoming colloquium talk at McGill (“Hedging your ifs and vice versa”, joint work with Thony Gillies):

How does the word “if” help things we say mean what they mean? It can work together with other words like “maybe” and “probably” to make things we say less strong. But how does it do that?

Many people have tried to find out how this works, but we will show that they face a big problem when one looks at people talking to each other and pointing to things the other said.

Can we do better?

There are some obstacles for a linguist. You often need to mention linguistic expressions that you work on. I was lucky that if, maybe, and probably are licit. On the other hand, “sentence” is not allowed.

Related: George Boolos’ classic exploit “Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable”.

We are deeply saddened by Aaron Swartz’s death, and send our condolences to all who knew him. We are very mindful of his commitment to the open access movement. It inspires our own commitment to work for a situation where academic knowledge is freely available, so that others are not menaced by the kind of prosecution that he faced. We encourage everyone to visit www.rememberaaronsw.com, a memorial site created by Aaron’s family and friends.

Scott Aaronson
Sasha Costanza-Chock
Ellen Finnie Duranceau
Kai von Fintel
Richard Holton
George Stephanopoulos
Anne Whiston Spirn

Members of the MIT Open Access Working Group

[cross-posted from the OA Working Group wiki and Scott Aaronson’s blog]

[Crossposted from S&P Editors Blog]

We are excited to share good news about the future of S&P. We have been working with the LSA on moving S&P out of its current incubating stage to the next level with fuller support. This morning, the LSA Executive Committee unanimously approved an agreement to that effect.

As of today, S&P is a full-fledged LSA journal, alongside Language but independent of it. The LSA will join MIT and the University of Texas in providing financial support to the journal. In return, S&P is to become a journal owned by the LSA and titled “Semantics and Pragmatics” with the subtitle “A Journal of the Linguistic Society of America”.

The day-to-day operations of the journal will not change. The current editorial team will stay in place. The policies and procedures, including the open access nature of the journal, will remain as they are. Big decisions will be made cooperatively by the LSA Executive Committee, the editors, and the S&P advisory committee.

Both the LSA and the S&P team are excited about this partnership. Open access is the future of scholarly communication and we intend to work together to make S&P the best journal in its field and a model for our discipline and others.

[Crossposted from the S&P Editors Blog:]

Semantics & Pragmatics today published an underground classic, Craige Roberts’ famous paper "Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics", which had previously been published in a volume of OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, and then circulated in a slighly edited manuscript form, but was never officially published. With the help of Anders Schoubye, Chris Brown, and Justin Cope, the old manuscript was transformed into LaTeX and formatted for the S&P stylesheet. Craige wrote a new afterword and prepared an annotated bibliography, which is linked from the afterword. We’re proud to be able to make this classic paper and the supplementary material available in an official publication.

Reissuing underground classics is a worthwhile undertaking, we believe. Some famous examples are David Kaplan’s "Demonstratives" published in Themes from Kaplan, Kripke on presupposition published in Linguistic Inquiry, and in a sense also Grice’s William James Lectures. There was also volume 7 of the series "Syntax and Semantics" entitled "Notes from the linguistic underground" (edited by Jim McCawley in 1976), featuring famous papers such as Karttunen’s "Discourse referents" and gems like "Why you can’t do so into the sink" by Lakoff & Ross. So, we are continuing a respectable tradition.

Question for our audience: which other underground classics in semantics and pragmatics should S&P consider publishing? You can email us at , comment on our Facebook page or our Google+ page, tweet (cc’ing @semprag), or leave a comment on our Editors Blog.

Next June (26–28), I will be one of three invited speakers (together with Dorothy Edgington and Alan Hajek) at a conference on conditionals in Barcelona. There is a call for papers for nine additional talks (full papers of up to 5000 words): http://www.ub.edu/logosbw/bw8/BW8CallforPapers.pdf. The basics:

Papers may directly deal with issues in the semantics or pragmatics of conditionals (indicative or counterfactual), or they may focus on more applied issues in which conditionals figure prominently (philosophical puzzles which essentially employ a conditional premise, issues in belief revision or decision theory).

We invite submissions for 45-minute presentations (with 45 minutes for discussion). Submissions should take the form of a full paper not exceeding 5000 words with a 150-300 word abstract suitable for blind review. Authors’ names, postal address, affiliation, phone number and e-mail address should be given separately. Please send your submission by e-mail in an attached file in pdf-format to barcelonaworkshop2013@gmail.com. Submissions will be blind refereed by an international committee, and selected on the basis of general quality and relevance to the topic of the workshop.

Submissions must be received by February 1, 2013.

Communication of acceptance: April 1, 2013.

I received this email:

Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:06:16 +0000
Subject: Curriculum Vitae for Scientists and Researchers
From: Olivia Frogous olivia.frogous@gmail.com

Dear Kai Von Fintel,

I would like you to consider Cestagi when updating your curriculum vitae for this upcoming academic year. Cestagi is a web application that allows you to create and manage your CV with ease using academic best practices. Your personalized CV page can be monitored using Google-like visitor analytics and easily exported offline into Word, Latex, or PDF using various templates including NSF and NIH standards.

I encourage you to take some time and learn more about this free service by visiting:

http://www.cestagi.com/

Please recommend Cestagi to your colleagues and friends who you feel would benefit from it.

Best regards,

Olivia
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology

I know of no “Olivia Frogous” at MIT and a search verified that there is no such person here. A Google search revealed at least one page where another institution was warning about this person (who had identified themselves as being affiliated with that institution in an email). So, appropriately suspicious, I looked at the advertised web service for sharing CVs.

At first glance, it looks legitimate and includes a privacy policy and terms & conditions of use. But there’s no information whatsoever on the site about who is behind the service and where it is run from. The whois information on the domain is deliberately uninformative as well, it just states who their registrar and webhost is.

There is a Quora query about this service with a positive reply from someone calling themselves “Mark Frendrope”, whose only presence on the web appears to be to tout Cestagi in a few places.

At this point, I can only assume that this may well be a fraudulent enterprise, perhaps designed to harvest personal information from those who upload their CVs to it. I would stay away from it at all costs and look for other ways of sharing academic information about yourself (Academia.edu comes to mind, or just posting your CV on your own webpages).

To repeat, following up on the fraudulent claim in the email signature that “Olivia Frogous” is affiliated with MIT somehow, I have found no evidence that Cestagi is a legitimate service with identifiable people standing behind it.

Update (2012-11-20): After I posted this note, I was immediately contacted by anonymous staff at Cestagi and asked to take the note down. I said I would update it if they gave me relevant information and and if they explained the spam campaign. It took quite a while but the website is now updated and identifies the owner (and sole staff?) of the site as Adrian M. Kopacz, a recent Mechanical Engineering PhD from Northwestern University.

I’m still awaiting an explanation for the spam campaign and the fraudulent affiliation claims by the spammers. By the way, a friend reported getting similar emails: from “Ann Mrego”, purportedly affiliated with Northwestern University, and “Stan Latuga”, “from” UC Berkeley; both institutions my friend has had e-mail accounts with. Google searches did not turn up any results for these people at these institutions. So, it does seem like there was a systematic campaign and I hope it’s not continuing.

Update (2013-01-29): I still have a bad feeling about this operation. Adrian Kopacz emailed me as follows: “I wish for you to remove this content, including my personal information, as it reflects negatively on the branding of Cestagi.” I do not intend to take this down nor to revise its cautionary tone unless and until the spammy character of the enterprise is cleaned up. I fail to see why this individual would not want his personal information to be associated with his own project, unless, of course, the project is not one that he can be proud of.

In the mean time, another MIT affiliate reports receiving an email touting Cestagi, this one from “John Merlocke”, another name that does not turn up anything via Google search, except a shell Google+ profile. So, the spamming campaign from made-up people does seem to be continuing. [I do wonder which fake name generator is being used to make up these names.]

One more update (2013-01-29): Word now that the spam/phishing campaign definitely continues unabated. Researchers at the United States Geological Survey have been receiving identical emails touting Cestagi from someone called “Stacy Ferando” (again a name that yields no Google hits other than a shell Google+ profile).

The template that the campaign currently uses is this:

Dear $X,

I noticed you have an outdated curriculum vitae web page. You should keep it up-to-date while working at $Y.

You may want to take advantage of Cestagi to create and maintain a curriculum vitae following academic regulations and best practices:

http://www.cestagi.com/

Please let others know about this free platform. I believe it will be of great benefit to everyone.

Warm regards,

$FAKE-NAME

Needless to say, my correspondents do not have outdated CVs.

Our fall semantics seminar at MIT will be a kind of “super-seminar”. We will discuss current research on expressions of preference and priority, including deontic modals, imperatives, desiderative attitudes, and so on. The seminar will feature several guest speakers (Ana Arregui, Fabrizio Cariani, Cleo Condoravdi, Thony Gillies, Magda Kaufmann, Dilip Ninan, perhaps more), some of whom will be semi-regular participants as well. If you’re in the Boston area, feel free to visit the seminar: Fridays 11-2 in Room 32-D461.

The website for the class is openly accessible for people who would like to kibitz from afar.

Abstracts for the Semantics & Pragmatics session during next summer’s International Congress of Linguists are due this coming week on September 1.

• More info about our session: here
• URL for submissions (through the ICL website): http://www.cil19.org/en/calls-for-papers/call/.

Found via Facebook this morning: Guidelines for writing abstracts, drawn up a while ago by Johan Rooryck and Vincent van Heuven after consultation of the Linguist List. I pretty much agree 100% with these guidelines, but about 200% with this one: “Don’t put your examples on a separate page, even when the abstract guidelines allow you to do so: abstract reviewers hate having to go back and forth between pages”. (This is a corollary of the same principle that banishes endnotes from academic publishing.)

There’s a nascent new social network, app.net, which is trying a new approach. It is user-supported rather than ad-supported. Its users pay an annual fee and thus, unlike Facebook and Twitter, access to the users are not sold to the real customers, ad buying companies.

I use social networks for five purposes:

• connecting with family, neighbors, true friends & acquaintances
• connecting with colleagues in linguistics & philosophy
• connecting and following fellow computer geeks
• current awareness in science, politics, breaking news
• following “celebrities” in sports & entertainment

For the first purpose, Facebook is indispensable and even though I don’t like the platform, I can’t imagine abandoning it and giving up the connections I maintain through it.

The academic and geek networking happens a little bit through Facebook, a bit through Google+, and mostly through Twitter. These purposes I could imagine moving to app.net, since there’s a professional aspect to it and thus the idea makes sense that one might pay a modest fee to have a spam-free well-lit environment for this kind of networking.

The last two purposes are almost exclusively happening on Twitter for me, but could just as well happen through RSS and email subscriptions (and listening to the radio and podcasts). There’s no lock-in here.

So, I can imagine that I’d give up on Google+ and Twitter, and have my personal networking happening on Facebook and my professional networking on app.net (I wish they would come up with a better name, though).

There was a Kickstarter-like start-up campaign to get app.net some initial funding. They reached their $500,000 goal this morning, perhaps not completely unconnected to the fact that Stephen Fry announced his support on Twitter. I joined just now, partially to make sure I would be able to claim “fintelkai” as my username, not that anyone else would have a legitimate reason to get that name.

Obviously, social networks need critical mass (and Google+ seems to be an example of one that is not quite there yet). So, the probabilities of success are somewhat low, but it’s worth trying, I think. The way Facebook and increasingly Twitter are treating their users to serve their real customers (and shareholders) is not nice.