When Languages Die: The Extinction Of The World\u27s Languages And The Erosion Of Human Knowledge

In When Languages Die, K. David Harrison illustrates the individual face of language loss, as well as its global scale. Languages are the accretion of thousands of years of a people\u27s science and art - from observations of ecological patterns to creation myths. The author shows that the disappearance of a language is a loss not only for the community of speakers itself but also for our common human knowledge of mathematics, biology, geography, philosophy, agriculture, and linguistics. In this century, we face a massive erosion of the human knowledge base. The global abandonment of indigenous languages will bring a massive loss of accumulated knowledge and culture - this book argues for the irreplaceable nature of these unique knowledge systems and the urgency of documenting them before they are lost forever

Posterior mean and variance approximation for regression and time series problems

This paper develops a methodology for approximating the posterior first two moments of the posterior distribution in Bayesian inference. Partially specified probability models that are defined only by specifying means and variances, are constructed based upon second-order conditional independence in order to facilitate posterior updating and prediction of required distributional quantities. Such models are formulated particularly for multivariate regression and time series analysis with unknown observational variance-covariance components. The similarities and differences of these models with the Bayes linear approach are established. Several subclasses of important models, including regression and time series models with errors following multivariate t, inverted multivariate t and Wishart distributions, are discussed in detail. Two numerical examples consisting of simulated data and of US investment and change in inventory data illustrate the proposed methodology

Ethnic origin of the victim as an aggravating factor in sentencing sexual offenders

This article examines R v Jamal Muhammed Raheem Ul Nasir, a Court of Appeal case where leave to appeal against a seven-year custodial sentence for sexual offences against children was refused. The appellant argued that his sentence length was excessive because the judge viewed the female victims’ ethnic and religious origin as an aggravating factor. In light of a number of charities’ condemning the judgment, this article evaluates whether the Court of Appeal made the correct decision, particularly in the wider context of sentencing principles. It also considers whether causing shame to a victim and her family can be regarded as an aggravating factor when sentencing sexual offences, and discusses the circumstances where the victim’s ethnic origin should be taken into account

Formalization of Complex Vectors in Higher-Order Logic

Complex vector analysis is widely used to analyze continuous systems in many disciplines, including physics and engineering. In this paper, we present a higher-order-logic formalization of the complex vector space to facilitate conducting this analysis within the sound core of a theorem prover: HOL Light. Our definition of complex vector builds upon the definitions of complex numbers and real vectors. This extension allows us to extensively benefit from the already verified theorems based on complex analysis and real vector analysis. To show the practical usefulness of our library we adopt it to formalize electromagnetic fields and to prove the law of reflection for the planar waves.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figur

Vacuum energy, spectral determinant and heat kernel asymptotics of graph Laplacians with general vertex matching conditions

We consider Laplace operators on metric graphs, networks of one-dimensional line segments (bonds), with matching conditions at the vertices that make the operator self-adjoint. Such quantum graphs provide a simple model of quantum mechanics in a classically chaotic system with multiple scales corresponding to the lengths of the bonds. For graph Laplacians we briefly report results for the spectral determinant, vacuum energy and heat kernel asymptotics of general graphs in terms of the vertex matching conditions.Comment: 5 pages, submitted to proceedings of QFEXT09, minor corrections made

Anthropological Linguistics (LING21, ANTH020N) Syllabus

Anthropological Linguistics course description:Communication and culture mutually define one another across communities worldwide. Human linguistic diversity, language contact and language change, and face-to-face communication continue to be key areas of inquiry for both linguistics and anthropology. Colonialism, globalization, mobility, and new technologies are changing the way we transmit and conceive of cultural knowledge, community, and our selves and the natural environment. In this course we draw attention to codeswitching, creoles, language endangerment, and constructed languages as reflections of our changing societies. We also address the ethics of fieldwork as a means of investigating these important social phenomena at the interfaces of language/ecology, language/identity, Global North/South