en vacances

The CogSci Librarian is en vacances until early June. Blog on!

Still more new books!

Just arrived at Hampshire:

Blackwell Handbook Of Judgment And Decision Making ; by DEREK J. KOEHLER, et al. publisher: Blackwell, 2005. for more info.

Ecological Psychoacoustics; by John G. Neuhoff . publisher: Elsevier, 2004. for more info.

Evolution and ethics : human morality in biological and religious perspective; by edited by Philip Clayton and Jeffrey Schloss. publisher: Eerdmans, 2004. for more info.

Gaming Hacks; by Simon Carless. publisher: O’Reilly, 2004. for more info.

Global Media Go to War: Role of News and Entertainment Media During the 2003 Iraq War; by RALPH D. BERENGER (Editor). publisher: Marquette, 2004. for more info.

Handbook of emotions; by edited by Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones. publisher: Guilford, 2000. for more info.

Happiness: Lessons from a New Science; by Richard Layard. publisher: Penguin, 2005. for more info.

Knowledge and lotteries; by John Hawthorne. publisher: Oxford, 2004. for more info.

Mind : introduction to cognitive science; by Paul Thagard. publisher: MIT, 2005. for more info.

News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership And Its Threat To Democracy; by Elliot D. Cohen. publisher: Prometheus, 2005. for more info.

Sweet dreams : philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness; by Daniel C. Dennett. publisher: MIT, 2005. for more info.

The dynamic dance : nonvocal communication in African great apes; by Barbara J. King. publisher: Harvard, 2004. for more info.

The ethical brain; by Michael S. Gazzaniga. publisher: Dana, 2005. for more info.

Conversational Computers

Great article in the June Scientific American about efforts at IBM to create normal-sounding synthetic speech. They call it "concatenative speech synthesis" and it builds on phonemes required for particular words. The article is available for Hampshire folks via EBSCO's Academic Search Premier. But there's a great chart which illustrates how real words become syntheetic words, so if you can look at the print issue, you'll see that as well.

WordCount of the British National Corpus

Another fun word game, this time from wordcount.org, which tells you how popular a word is according to the British National Corpus. There are over 86,000 words in wordcount's database (vs 100 million in the corpus itself). You can either search for a word to see how popular it is ("Stephanie" is 2 words more popular than "noses", for example) or browse to see the 100th most popular word (got) and the words that follow.

Fun in a wasting time kind of way.

(thanks to Marylane Block's "Neat New Stuff" for the link)

Library of Congress @ Audible

Interesting lectures on the future of technology from the Library of Congress are available for free at Audible.com. Speakers include Lawrence Lessig on Copyright Law in Cyberspace (03/03/05), Neil Gershenfeld, of MIT on "From the Library of Information to the Library of Things" (03/28/05), and David Weinberger of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society (and Howard Dean's "Internet Advisor") on Blogs (11/15/04)

(if that link doesn't work, go to audible.com & search for Library of Congress). These were initially broadcast on CSPAN.

Gazzaniga profiled in the NYTimes

Nice profile of Michael Gazzaniga, one of the grandfathers of cognitive neuroscience, in the May 10, 2005 New York Times.

Hampshire owns many of his books; browse the list from the
online catalog, including an order for his latest, The Ethical Brain. The 3d edition of his book The Cognitive Neurosciences is in Hampshire's reference collection.

Trial Databases at Hampshire

'Tis the season for trials!

- LLBA (Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts), a swell database for linguistics research. Coverage 1973-present. Trial runs through June 10, 2005.

- RefWorks is a citation manager database which enables you to manage citations for your Div III and other papers online. You must create a free account to use RefWorks, and if you want to access this from off-campus, you must enter Hampshire's group ID to access your account: RWHampC. Trial runs through May 31, 2005.

- NewsBank -- America's Newspapers & World Newspapers. Covers over 1500 newspapers in the U.S. and around the world. Generally mid-1980s to present. Trial runs through early June 2005.

These are all on the library's Trial page as well. Note: these are for Hampshire campers only.

More New Books!

Applied linguistics as social science; by Alison Sealey and Bob Carter. publisher: Continuum, 2004. for more info.

Bilingual children's language and literacy development; by edited by R. Barnard and T. Glynn. publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2003. for more info.

Exploring Animal Behavior in Laboratory and Field: An Hypothesis-testing Approach to the Development, Causation, Function, and Evolution of Animal Behavior; by Bonnie J. Ploger, Ken Yasukawa. publisher: Academic, 2002. for more info.

How dogs think : understanding the canine mind; by Stanley Coren. publisher: Free Press, 2004. for more info.

If dogs could talk : exploring the canine mind; by Vilmos Csanyi ; translated by Richard E. Quandt. publisher: North Point Press, 2005. for more info.

Library in a book : power of the news media; by Harry Henderson. publisher: Facts on File, 2004. for more info.

Google Relevance Might Improve

New Scientist reports in its May 1, 2005 issue that Google "has plans that will dramatically improve" ranking in news searches. Google has filed patents which suggest that they will give extra points to "credible" US & worldwide news sources which would be added into their relevance ranking formula. That is, content from CNN or the BBC would get extra points for being "credible", which might cause CNN or the BBC's site to display higher in the results list.

Definitely worth watching!

Language Log Blog

The linguists among you might enjoy this Language Log blog. Covers such interesting and lexically significant topics as the semantics of "tightie whities", possible cognitive benefits of television, and brain structure in Williams Syndrome. Created by Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Thanks to Emily for the link.

Linguistics & Reference Questions

Interesting article in the May 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology on linguistics & answering reference questions. Hampshire doesn't have access to the full-text online, but you can read the citation & abstract at the Wiley / JASIST home page. I was able to download the pdf without paying, so maybe it's free!

A linguistic analysis of question taxonomies.
Jeffrey Pomerantz Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Volume 56, Issue 7, Pages 715 - 728.