After much postponement, writing the final report for my NWO Veni grant (2015-2018) turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. It made me realise a couple of things — key among them the role of serendipity in shaping fundamental research. The project was called “Towards a science of linguistic depiction”. Looking at the publications that came out of it and at imperfect indicators like citations, it’s made some useful contributions.

2018 was, in general, a pretty good year for me. Certainly, parts of it were marred by handling my new hearing loss, but an assistive device (a speech-filtering microphone system) has greatly helped with this, although I am still functionally deaf in many environments. On the plus side, though, I moved house to the Kent coast and it has been one of the best things we’ve done in years.

I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area.

I have always had a fondness for things considered marginal in linguistics. The tide may be turning for at least some marginalia: work on ideophones is clearly on the rise, and initiatives such as Martina Wiltschko’s Eh lab at UBC and a new nonlexical vocalizations project at Linköping University show there is significant interest in this area. Part I from my notes on a workshop on ‘Ideophones and non-lexical vocalizations’.

The announcement of Plan S – an ambitious undertaking to mandate open access in Europe by 2020 on most funded research, but also now expanding overseas, potentially to the States and beyond – has prompted debates about the place of academic freedom in the selection of publication venue and whether OA mandates might infringe on such rights. This is an old debate – Stuart Shrieber wrote about it in 2009.

If you read any review of the M-Audio Trigger Finger Pro, it sounds like a steal. A sequencer, drum machine, and more, all packed into a hardware unit that is available for about £100 on Ebay. Steal. The problem is, it seems that these reviewers have never actually tried to record midi output from the device. The synchronisation is totally messed up. The latency unpredictably varies between takes and the recorded output is never the same.

A coalition of funders from across Europe has proposed a bold initiative, called Plan S, to push towards OA for 2020. It includes the following 10 points: Authors retain copyright of their publication with no restrictions. All publications must be published under an open license, preferably the Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY. In all cases, the license applied should fulfil the requirements defined by the Berlin Declaration;

I started writing this post back in August, and I hurried it a little because of a Limping Chicken article guest written by researchers at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at University College London. I’ve known the DCAL folks for years, and they graciously acknowledged some of my previous writings on this issue.

As you may know, the Centre for Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck publishes and maintains a piece of open-source software for journal publishing called Janeway. This software is licensed under the AGPLv3. We chose this license for several reasons, but the most important was that we wanted strong CopyLeft protection, including for server-side usage, on this software.

I spent some time this morning trying to work out why my CPU - the beastly Intel i9 7980XE - was capped at 2.6ghz when the BIOS allows scaling to 4.3ghz. When I ran the usually suggested cpufreq and cpupower commands, I received: “no or unknown cpufreq driver is active on this CPU”. The reason for this was that you need, in the UEFI/BIOS, to enable: Intel Enhanced SpeedStep and the option to expose pstates.