More Citizens, More Science

For the last couple years, most articles about Citizen Science -- in which amateurs contribute to scientific projects -- have been hagiography. These articles were nearly exclusively Ra! Ra!, all about the exciting new development.

It seems that we've matured a bit as a field, because lately I've run across a couple articles that, while still being positive overall, have laid out some real criticism. For instance, in an article in Harvard Magazine, Katherine Xue concludes with the worry that citizen science may be less about involving the public and more about cheap labor (full disclosure: I was interviewed for and appear in this article). Many citizen science projects, she notes, are little more than games or, worse, rote labor, with little true engagement for the volunteer in the scientific mission.

Similarly, in a much-tweeted article at The Guardian, Michelle Kilfoyle and Hayley Birch write, "Who really benefits the most from [citizen science]: the amateurs or the professionals? … Most well-known initiatives are the big crowdsourcing projects: big on the number of participants but not necessarily the level of participation."

Introducing the VerbCorner Forum

These articles resonated with me. Ever since we launched VerbCorner, our citizen science project looking at the structure of language, meaning, and thought, we've wanted to find additional ways to get our volunteers involved in the science and get more out of participation. VerbCorner is very much a crowdsourcing project -- most of what volunteers do on the site is contribute labor. We've always had this blog, where people could learn more about the project, but that's not especially interactive.

To that end, we've added a forum where anyone and everyone involved in the project can discuss the project, offer suggestions, debate the science, and discuss anything related (syntax, semantics, etc.). We have high hopes for this forum. Over the years, I have gotten a lot of emails from participants in the various projects at GamesWithWords.org, emails with questions about the projects, ideas for new experiments, and -- all too often -- reports of bugs or type-os. These emails have been extremely useful, and in a few cases have even led to entirely new research directions. But email is a blunt instrument, and I expect that for everyone who has emailed, at least ten others had similar comments but never got around to tracking down our email address.

I hope to see you on the forum!

GamesWithWords on Scientific American

Over the last week, ScientificAmerican.com has published two articles by me. The most recent, "Citizen Scientists decode meaning, memory and laughter," discusses how citizen science projects -- science projects involving collaborations between professional scientists and amateur volunteers -- are now being used to answer questions about the human mind.

Citizen Science – projects which involve collaboration between professional scientists and teams of enthusiastic amateurs — is big these days. It’s been great for layfolk interested in science, who can now not just read about science but participate in it. It has been great for scientists, with numerous mega-successes like Zooniverse and Foldit. Citizen Science has also been a boon for science writing, since readers can literally engage with the story.

However, the Citizen Science bonanza has not contributed to all scientific disciplines equally, with many projects in zoology and astronomy but less in physics and the science of the mind. It is maybe no surprise that there have been few Citizen Science projects in particle physics (not many people have accelerators in their back yards!), but the fact that there has been very little Citizen Science of the mind is perhaps more remarkable.

The article goes on to discuss three new mind-related citizen science projects, including our own VerbCorner project.

The second, "How to understand the deep structures of language," describes some really exciting work on how to explain linguistic universals -- work that was conducted by colleagues of mine at MIT.

In an exciting recent paper, Ted Gibson and colleagues provide evidence for a design-constraint explanation of a well-known bias involving case endings and word order. Case-markers are special affixes stuck onto nouns that specify whether the noun is the subject or object (etc.) of the verb. In English, you can see this on pronouns (compare "she talked with her"), but otherwise, English, like most SVO languages (languages where the typical word order is Subject, Verb, Object) does not mark case. In contrast, Japanese, like most SOV languages (languages where the typical word order is Subject, Object, Verb) does mark case, with -wa added to subjects and -o added to direct objects. "Yasu saw the bird" is translated as "Yasu-wa tori-o mita" and "The bird saw Yasu" is translated as "Tori-wa Yasu-o mita." The question is why there is this relationship between case-marking and SOV word order.

The article ran in the Mind Matters column, which invites scientists to write about the paper that came out in the last year that they are most excited about. It was very easy for me to choose this one.

VerbCorner (and others) on SciStarter.Com

There is a brief profile of our crowd-sourcing project VerbCorner on SciStarter.com, with a number of quotes form yours truly.

SciStarter profiles a lot of Citizen Science / Crowd-sourced Science projects. Interestingly, most are physical sciences, with only one project listed under psychology (interestingly, also a language project).

This is not a feature of SciStarter but more a feature of Citizen Science. The Scientific American database only lists two projects under "mind and brain" -- and I'm pretty sure they didn't even have that category last time I checked. This is interesting, because psychologists have been using the Internet to do research for a very long time -- probably longer than anyone else. But we've been very late to the Citizen Science party.

Not, of course, that you shouldn't want to participant in non-cognitive science projects. There are a bunch of great ones. I've personally mostly only done the ones at Zooniverse, but SciStarter lists hundreds.

Blogger Spam Filter: Not Totally Useless

For the first time ever, Google/Blogger's spam filter actually caught a spam comment. Usually, it lets the spam go right through unmolested and only traps legitimate comments.

We can hope this is the start of a trend.

Priest, Altars and Peer Review

David Dobbs at Neuron Culture is complaining about NASA and peer review:

A NASA spokesperson has dismissed a major critique of the Science arsenic bug paper based not on the criticism's merits, but on its venue -- it appeared in a blog rather than a peer-reviewed journal. Apparently ideas are valid (or not) based on their content, or even the reputation of the author, but on where they're published.

I'm not known for my strong endorsement of the fetishism of peer review, but even so I think Dobbs is being somewhat unfair. My reading of history is that scientists have been plugging the peer-review mantra because they're tired of having to respond to ignorant assholes who appear on Oprah spouting nonsense. I mean, yes, you can address wacko claims about vaccines causing autism or the lack of global warming on their merits (they have none), but it gets tiresome to repeat. In any case, relatively few members of the public can follow the actual arguments, so it becomes an issue of who you believe. And that's a hard game to win, since saying "so-and-so doesn't know what they're talking about" sounds elitist even when it's true, and "elitism" (read: "meritocracy") is for some reason unpopular.

Focusing on peer review as a mechanism for establishing authority is convenient, because the public (thinks it) understands the mechanisms. You're not saying, "Believe me because I am a wise scientist," but "Believe the documented record." And since Jenny McCarthy doesn't publish in peer-reviewed journals, you can (try to) exclude her and other nuttos from the conversation.

So I think there are good reasons for a NASA spokesman, when speaking with a reporter, to dismiss blogs. Taking a critique in a blog seriously in public is only going to open the floodgates. I mean, there are a *lot* of blogs out there. That doesn't mean that the scientists involved aren't taking the a series critique by a serious scientist seriously just because the criticism appeared in a blog. I hope that they are, and we don't want to read too much into NASA's official statement.

All that said, I'm not sure focusing on peer-reviewed science has been helping very much. I mean, McCarthy still gets booked on Oprah anyway.

Question: What are sisters good for?

Answer: increasing your score on a 13-question test of happiness by 1 unit on one of the 13 questions.

A recent study of the effect of sisters on happiness has been getting a lot of press since it was featured on at the New York Times. It's just started hitting my corner of the blogosphere, since Mark Liberman filing an entry at Language Log early in the evening. On the whole, he was unimpressed. The paper didn't report data in sufficient detail to really get a sense of what was going on, so he tried to extrapolate based on what was in fact reported. His best estimate was that having a sister accounted for 0.4% of the variance in people's happiness.

This is a long way from the statement that "Adolescents with sisters feel less lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious and fearful", which is how ABC News characterized the study's findings, or "Statistical analyses showed that having a sister protected adolescents form feeling lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious and fearful", which is what the BUY press release said ... Such statements are true if you take "A's are X-er than B's" to mean simply that a statistical analysis showed that the mean value of a sample of X's was higher than the mean value of a sample of Y's, by an amount that was unlikely to be the result of sampling error.

Only an hour later, the ever wide-eyed Jonah Lehrer wrote

There's a surprisingly robust literature on the emotional benefits of having sisters. It turns out that having at least one female sibling makes us happier and less prone to depression...

I think this demonstrates nicely the added value of blogging, particularly science blogging. Journalists (like Lehrer) are rarely in a position to pick apart the methods of a study, whereas scientist bloggers can. I know many people miss the old media world, but the new one is exciting.

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For more thoughts on science blogging, check this and this.

Words and non-words

"...the modern non-word 'blogger'..." -- Dr. Royce Murray, editor of the journal Analytic Chemistry.

"209,000,000 results (0.21 seconds)" -- Google search for the "non-word" blogger.


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There has been a lot of discussion about Royce Murray's bizzarre attack on blogging in the latest JAC editorial (the key sentence: I believe that the current phenomenon of "bloggers" should be of serious concern to scientists).

Dr. Isis has posted a nice take-down of the piece focusing on the age old testy relationship between scientists and journalists. My bigger concern with the editorial is that it is clear that Murray has no idea what a blog is, yet feels justified in writing an article about blogging. Here's a telling sentence:

Bloggers are entrepreneurs who sell “news” (more properly, opinion) to mass media: internet, radio, TV, and to some extent print news. In former days, these individuals would be referred to as “freelance writers”, which they still are; the creation of the modern non-word “blogger” does not change the purveyor.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! A freelance writer does sell articles to established media entities. Bloggers mostly write for their own blog (hence the "non-word" blog-ger). There are of course those who are hired to blog for major media outlets like Scientific American or Wired, but then they are essentially columnists (in fact, many of the columnists at The New York Times have NYTimes blogs at the request of the newspaper).

This magnifies, for the lay reader, the dual problems in assessing credibility: a) not having a single stable employer (like a newspaper, which can insist on credentials and/or education background) frees the blogger from the requirement of consistent information reliability ... Who are the fact-checkers now?

Wait, newspapers don't insist on credentials and don't fact-check the stories they get from freelancers? Why is Murray complaining about bloggers, then? In any case, it's not like journals like Analytic Chemistry do a good job of fact-checking what they publish or that they stop publishing papers by people whose results never replicate. Journal editors living in glass houses...

This focus on credentials is a bit odd -- I thought truth was the only credential a scientist needed -- and in any case seriously misplaced. I challenge Murray to find a popular science blog written by someone who is neither a fully-credentialed scientist writing about his/her area of expertise, nor a well-established science journalist working for a major media outlet.

Are there crack-pot bloggers out there? Sure. But most don't have much of an audience (certainly, their audience is smaller than the fact-checked, establishment media-approved Glenn Beck). Instead, we have a network of scientists and science enthusiasts discussing, analyzing and presenting science. What's to hate about that?

Wait -- Jonah Lehrer Wants Reading to be Harder?

Recently Jonah Lehrer, now at Wired, wrote a ode to books, titled The Future of Reading. Many people are sad to see the slow replacement of physical books by e-readers -- though probably not many people who have lugged 50 pounds of books in a backpack across Siberia, though that's a different story. The take-home message appears 2/3 of the way down:

So here’s my wish for e-readers. I’d love them to include a feature that allows us to undo their ease, to make the act of reading just a little bit more difficult. Perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color scheme. Our eyes will need to struggle, and we’ll certainly read slower, but that’s the point: Only then will we process the text a little less unconsciously, with less reliance on the ventral pathway. We won’t just scan the words – we will contemplate their meaning.

As someone whose to-read list grows several times faster than I actually do any reading, I've never wished to read more slowly. But Lehrer is a science writer, and (he thinks) there's more to this argument than just aesthetics. As far as I can tell, though, it's based on a profound misunderstanding of the science. Since he manages to get through the entire post without ever citing a specific experiment, it's hard to tell for sure, but here's what I've managed to piece together. 

Reading Research

Here's Lehrer:

Let me explain. Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the College de France in Paris, has helped illuminate the neural anatomy of reading. It turns out that the literate brain contains two distinct pathways for making sense of words, which are activated in different contexts. One pathway is known as the ventral route, and it’s direct and efficient, accounting for the vast majority of our reading. The process goes like this: We see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word’s semantic meaning. According to Dehaene, this ventral pathway is turned on by “routinized, familiar passages” of prose, and relies on a bit of cortex known as visual word form area (VWFA).

So far, so good. Dehaene is a brilliant researcher who has had an enormous effect on several areas of cognition (I'm more familiar with his work on number). I'm a bit out-of-date on reading research (and remember Lehrer doesn't actually cite anything to back up his argument), but this looks like an updated version of the old distinction between whole-word reading and real-time composition. That is, it goes without saying that you must "sound out" novel words that you've never encountered before, such as gafrumpenznout. However, it seems that as you become more familiar with a particular word (maybe Gafrumpenznout is your last name), you can recognize the word quickly without sounding it out.

Here's the abstract from a relevant 2008 Dehaene group paper:

Fast, parallel word recognition, in expert readers, relies on sectors of the left ventral occipito-temporal pathway collectively known as the visual word form area. This expertise is thought to arise from perceptual learning mechanisms that extract informative features from the input strings. The perceptual expertise hypothesis leads to two predictions: (1) parallel word recognition, based on the ventral visual system, should be limited to words displayed in a familiar format (foveal horizontal words with normally spaced letters); (2) words displayed in formats outside this field of expertise should be read serially, under supervision of dorsal parietal attention systems. We presented adult readers with words that were progressively degraded in three different ways (word rotation, letter spacing, and displacement to the visual periphery).

When the words are degraded in these various ways, participants had a harder time reading and recruited different parts of the brain. A (slightly) more general public-friendly version of this story appears in this earlier paper. This appears to be the paper that Lehrer is referring to, since he says that Dehaene, in experiments, activates the dorsal pathways "in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters or filling the prose with errant punctuation."

And the Vision Science Behind It

This work makes a lot of sense, given what we know about vision. Visual objects -- such as letters -- "crowd" each other. In other words, when there are several that are close together, it's hard to see any of them. This effect is worse in peripheral vision. Therefore, to see all the letters in a long-ish word, you may need to fixate on multiple parts of the word.

However, orthography is heavily redundant. One good demonstration of this is rmvng ll th vwls frm sntnc. You can still read with some of the letters missing (and of course some languages, like Hebrew, never print vowels). Moreover, sentence context can help you guess what a particular word is. So if you're reading a familiar word in a familiar context, you may not need to see all the letters well in order to identify it. The less certain you are of what the word is, the more carefully you'll have to look at it.

The Error

So far, this research appears to be about visual identification of familiar objects. Lehrer makes a big leap, though:

When you are a reading a straightforward sentence, or a paragraph full of tropes and cliches, you’re almost certainly relying on this ventral neural highway. As a result, the act of reading seems effortless and easy. We don’t have to think about the words on the page ...  Deheane’s research demonstrates that even fluent adults are still forced to occasionally make sense of texts. We’re suddenly conscious of the words on the page; the automatic act has lost its automaticity.

This suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of awareness. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica and rendered on lucid e-ink screens are read quickly and effortlessly. Meanwhile, unusual sentences with complex clauses and smudged ink tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra work – the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher the words – wakes us up.

It's based on this that he argues that e-readers should make it harder to read, because then we'd pay more attention to what we're reading. The problem is that he seems to have confused the effort expended in recognizing the visual form of a word -- the focus of Dehaene's work -- with effort expended in interpreting the meaning of the sentence. Moreover, he seems to think that the harder it is to understand something, the more we'll understand it -- which seems backwards to me. Now it is true that the more deeply we process something the better we remember it, but it's not clear that making something hard to see necessarily means we process it more deeply. In any case, we'd want some evidence that this is so, which Lehrer doesn't cite.

Which brings me back to citation. Dehaene did just publish a book on reading, which I haven't read because it's (a) long, and (b) not available on the Internet. Maybe Dehaene makes the claim that Lehrer is attributing to him in that book. Maybe there's even evidence to back that claim up. As far as I can tell, that work wasn't done by Dehaene (as Lehrer implies) since I can't find it on Dehaene's website. Though maybe it's there under a non-obvious title (Dehaene publishes a lot!). This would be solved if Lehrer would cite his sources.

Caveat


I like Lehrer's writing, and I've enjoyed the few interactions I've had with him. I think occasional (frequent?) confusion is a necessary hazard of being a science writer. I have only a very small number of topics I feel I understand well enough to write about them competently. Lehrer, by profession, must write about a very wide range of topics, and it's not humanly possible to understand many of them very well.


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DEHAENE, S., COHEN, L., SIGMAN, M., & VINCKIER, F. (2005). The neural code for written words: a proposal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9 (7), 335-341 DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2005.05.004

Cohen L, Dehaene S, Vinckier F, Jobert A, & Montavont A (2008). Reading normal and degraded words: contribution of the dorsal and ventral visual pathways. NeuroImage, 40 (1), 353-66 PMID: 18182174

Photos: margolove, kms !

Shilling

I recently received the following invitation:

Hi my name is [redacted] and I’m a blog spotter. I basically scour popular blogs in an effort to find great writers. I loved your post on Science, Grime and Republicans, nice job!

I’d like to get straight to the point.

Our client wants people like you to sponsor their products and will pay you to do so. They’ve launched an educational product on September 7th that teaches others how to make money on the internet by using Facebook and Social Media.

We want to pay you for recommending that product to your loyal blog readers and we will pay you up to $200 for each person that you refer. If you make just one sale a day you’re looking at making around $6000 per month.

All you need to do is create a few blog posts that recommend this product. You may also use one of our nice banners and place it on your blog.

Rumor would suggest that a fair number of bloggers do strike such bargains (no idea about the proportion). So just in case any of my loyal readers are wondering, I will never take money to recommend a product. If I recommend a product, it's because I like it.

Anonymity

It seems that most science bloggers use pseudonyms. To an extent, I do this, though it's trivial for anyone who is checking to figure out who I am (I know, since I get emails sent to my work account from people who read the blog). This was a conscious choice, and I have my reasons.

1. I suppose one would choose anonymity just in case one's blogging pissed off people who are in a position to hurt you. That would be mostly people in your own field. Honestly, I doubt it would take anyone in my field long to figure out what university I was at. Like anyone, I write most about the topics my friends and colleagues are discussing, and that's a function of who my friends and colleagues are.

(In fact, a few years ago, someone I knew was able to guess what class I was taking, based on my blog topics.)

2. I write a lot about the field, graduate school, and the job market. But within academia, every field is different. For that matter, even if you just wanted to discuss graduate student admission policy within psychology, the fact is that there is a huge amount of variation from department to department. So I can really only write about my experiences. For you to be able to use that information, you have a have a sense of what kind of school I'm at (a large, private research university) and in what field (psychology).

I read a number of bloggers who write about research as an institution, about the job market, etc., but who refuse to say what field they're in. This makes it extremely difficult to know what to make of what they say.

For instance, take my recent disagreement with Prodigal Academic. Prodigal and some other bloggers were discussing the fact that few people considering graduate school in science know how low the odds of getting a tenure-track job are. I suggested that actually they aren't misinformed about academia per se, but about the difference between a top-tier school and even a mid-tier school. I point out that at a top-tier psychology program, just about everybody who graduates goes on to get a tenure-track job. Prodigal says that in her field, at least, that's not true (and she suspects it's not true in my field, either).

The difference is that you can actually go to the websites of top psychology programs and check that I'm right. We can't do the same for Prodigal, because we have no idea what field she's in. We just have to take her word for it.

3. I suspect many people choose pseudonyms because they don't want to censor what they say. They don't want to piss anybody off. I think that to maintain my anonymity, I would have to censor a great deal of what I say. For one thing, I couldn't blog about the one thing I know best: my own work.

There is the risk of pissing people off. And trust me, I worry about it. But being careful about not pissing people off is probably a good thing, whether you're anonymous or know. Angry people rarely change their minds, and presumably we anger people precisely when we disagree with them.

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So why don't I actually blog under my name? I want people who Google me by name to find my academic website and my professional work first, not the blog.

What are the best cognitive science blogs?

If you look to your right, you'll see I've been doing some long-needed maintenance to my blog roll. As before, I'm limiting it to blogs that I actually read (though not all the blogs I read), and I have it organized by subject matter. As I did this, I noticed that the selection of cognitive science and language blogs is rather paltry. Most of the science blogs I read -- including many not included in the blog rolls -- are written by physical scientists.

Sure there are more of them than us, but even so it seems there should be more good cognitive science and language blogs. So I'm going to crowd-source this and ask you, dear readers, who should I be reading that I'm not?

The Job Search

The Prodigal Academic has a fascinating post on how candidates for job academic job searches are chosen. I've never been through a job search (on either end), so I have no real comment. The closest I came was filing job applications for two searches in the History & Religion department at Oberlin. What impressed me then, as now, is how many there were.

Skeptical of the Skeptics

I have complained -- more than once -- that the media and the public believe a psychological fact (some people are addicted to computer games) if a neuroimaging study is somehow involved, even if the study itself is irrelevant (after all, the definition of addiction does not require a certain pattern of brain activity -- it requires a certain pattern of physical activity).

Not surprisingly, I and like-minded researchers were pleased when a study came out last year quantifying this apparent fact. That is, the researchers actually found that people rated an explanation of a psychological phenomenon as better if it contained an irrelevant neuroscience fact.

Neuroskeptic has written a very provocative piece urging us to be skeptical of this paper:

This kind of research - which claims to provide hard, scientific evidence for the existence of a commonly believed in psychological phenomenon, usually some annoyingly irrational human quirk - is dangerous; it should always be read with extra care. The danger is that the results can seem so obviously true ("Well of course!") and so important ("How many times have I complained about this?") that the methodological strengths and weaknesses of the study go unnoticed.

Read the rest of the post here.

Another language blog

My favorite language blog remains Language Log. However, I was informed of a very interesting blog on language. Like Language Log, it's focus is not empirical research (as is the focus here). But the group of authors do regularly hit on interesting phenomena in language and have insightful things to say about them. I recommend that you check it out.

Physics is for wimps

Matt Springer may not have been throwing down the gauntlet in his Oct. 21 post, but I'm picking it up. In a well-written and well-reasoned short essay, he lays out just what is so difficult about the study of consciousness:

PZ Myers, as is his wont, recently wrote here that after his death he will have ceased to be. In other words, his experience of consciousness will have ended forever. Can we test this?

He goes on to describe some possible ways you might test the hypothesis. It turns out it is very difficult.

[PZ Myers] could die and then make the observation as to whether or not he still existed. If he still did he'd be surprised, but at least he'd be able to observe that he was still somehow existing. If he didn't still exist, he's not around to make the observation of his nonexistence. So personal experimentation can't verify his prediction.

Springer goes through some possible ways one might use neuroscience to test the hypothesis. None of them are very good either. In the end, he concludes:

Where am I going with this? Nowhere, that's the point. Clean experimental testability is why I like physics.

Now, I like physics, too. I almost majored in it. But I like cognitive science more for precisely this reason: developing the right experiment doesn't just take knowing the literature or being able to build precision machinery, though both help. What distinguishes the geniuses in our field is their ability to design an experiment to test something nobody ever thought was testable. (After that, the engineering skill comes in.)

Hands thrown up.

Many people threw up their hands at answering basic questions like how many types of light receptors do we have in our eyes or how fast does a signal travel down a nerve cell ("instantanously" was one popular hypothesis) until Hermann von Helmholtz designed ingenious behavioral experiments long before the technology was available to answer those questions (and likely before anyone knew such technology would be available).

However, while Helmholtz pioneered brilliants methods for understanding the way the adult mind works, he declared it impossible to ever know what a baby was thinking. His methods wouldn't work with babies, and he couldn't think of any others. A hundred years later, however, researchers like Susan Carey, Liz Spelke and others pioneered new techniques to probe the minds of babes. Spelke managed to prove babies only a few months old have basic aspects of object perception in place. But Spelke herself despaired of ever testing certain aspects of object perception in newborns, until a different set of researchers (Valenza, Leo, Gava & Simion, 2006) devised an ingenious experiment that ultimately proved we are born with the ability to perceive objects (not just a blooming, buzzing confusion).

"I study dead people, everywhere."

I'm not saying I know how to test whether dead people are conscious. I'm still stumped by much easier puzzles. But a difficult question is a challenge, not a reason to avoid the subject.

The Best Language Site on the Web

News junkies might start up their web browser day any number of ways. There are those who prefer the Post to the Times. Those with a business mind might start with the Journal. On the West Coast, there are those who swear by LA's daily. I myself start with Slate.

However, I can state with little fear of correction, that the website of record for die-hard language buffs is the Language Log. The Language Log, I admit, is not for the faint of heart. The bloggers are linguists, and they like nothing better than parsing syntax. This is not William Safire.

What makes the Language Log great is that the writers really know what they are talking about. Growing up, I went to a chamber music camp several summers in a row (I played viola). One of my friends who attended the camp was a singer. One year, a violinist in her ensemble decided that, rather than play the violin part, she wanted do the voice part for one movement of a piece. I never heard them perform, but I am assured she was awful. My friend complained:

"If you haven't studied the violin, you wouldn't try to perform a difficult piece for an audience of trained musicians. You'd barely be able to get a single note in tune, and you'd know it. Everybody can open their mouths and make sound come out, which means they think they can sing."

The world of language is afflicted with a similar problem. Everybody speaks a language, and many people believe they are experts in language (here, here, here). A great deal of what is written about language is embarrasing. To make matters worse, the field is packed with urban legends about all the (they have less than a half-dozen, approximately the same number as we have in English). Here is an urban legend the Language Log uncovered about the Irish not having a word for sex.

Language is one of the most complicated things in existence, and even the professionals understand remarkably little. The bloggers at the Language Log do a great job of giving even the casual reader a feel for what language is really about. They also spend a considerable portion of their time debunking fallacies and myths. If you read only one blog about language, LL would be my choice. If you read two, then you might consider reading my blog as well:)

Mirroring

For a while I've also been writing a blog about CLL for scienceblogs.com, so as to reach a more targeted audience. That's a lot of work, so from here on out, I'll probably just mirror the two blogs.

Again, why have two blogs with the same material? A lot of the traffic that a blog at blogspot or scienceblogs gets is via the general site feed. At blogspot, the readers are a broad spectrum of people interested in a wide variety of things. At scienceblogs, it's limited to people who would be interested in a bunch of science blogs. There are advantages to both types of audiences.

Please feel free to leave comments in you have anything to say about this strategy.