Lisa Davidson

@lisabdavidson.bsky.social

Phonetics, Language Acquisition, CogSci | co-editor Laboratory Phonology | ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi

Creaky voice/vocal fry is back in the news, but this time to highlight the scientific research about it :) I'm both happy to be quoted in this article and to be the general editor of the journal that published Jeanne Brown and colleagues' paper to begin with! www.newscientist.com/article/2526...

Vocal fry is more common in men, actually, find scientists

The creaky noise known as vocal fry that people generally associate with young women – and some find irritating – is actually more common in men

newscientist.com

📣 ICE OUT FOR GOOD! 🪧 NYC Stands with Minneapolis 📆 Friday, January 23rd ⏰ 4:00 PM 📍 Union Square, NYC On January 23rd, we will rally and march in solidarity with Minneapolis-St. Paul as they face an expanding occupation and escalating ICE violence. Info: bit.ly/4jPDjw2

ICE OUT FOR GOOD, 4:00 PM UNION SQUARE, Friday, January 23, MARCH ON ICE PROFITEERS

NYC linguists give the linguistic answer, but also patiently explain why this isn't an excuse: “We can learn hard names. We can do it. We can figure out how the spellings map to the sounds. We can all get there. We just have to practice.” - @laurelmack.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Why Can’t People Pronounce ‘Zohran Mamdani’? (Gift Article)

Friends and foes keep getting it wrong. Mr. Mamdani says, “It’s pretty phonetic honestly.”

nytimes.com

notice the general mood of the timeline? how everyone is in a good mood and there’s a lot less misery and dooming? how there’s a lot of “we’re going to beat these assholes”? anyway that’s why these events are important

If you’ve ever asked AI to summarize a paper, you know it provides only a surface-level and uncritical description. Even if you asked it for a review, what criteria would it use to provide meaningful critical feedback? If it said “X is unclear”, how would you know humans would feel that way?

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Oh FFS. Because what overburdened peer review systems really need is more noise between the reviewers & ACs. Yeah, that's the ticket. aaai.org/aaai-launche... >>

Screenshot of AAAI automated review announcement reading:

1. Supplementary First-Stage Reviews: LLM-generated reviews will be included as one component of the
initial review stage, providing an additional perspective alongside traditional human expert evaluations.
2. Discussion Summary Assistance: LLMs will assist the Senior Program Committee (SPC) members by
summarizing reviewer discussions, helping to highlight key points of consensus and disagreement among
human reviewers.

I found an example in the wild on here of a possible suffix usage that we were discussing in class. I want to show my students, but since the post is critical of the administration, I'm worried about potential consequences, even though the content is entirely irrelevant. This is what we've come to.

Someday when we can look back at this time, we'll see that there were some profiles in courage. Many judges who made the right call, so many incredibly brave civil servants, labor and immigrant leaders, a handful of college administrator (but a few), even a couple of politicians.

FactPost@factpostnews.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Host: There are new calls this morning for RFK Jr.'s resignation, and those calls coming from inside HHS itself. More than 1,000 current and former HHS workers are making this demand in a letter released this morning. They say his leadership has "put the health of all Americans at risk"