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Posts by Gavin Lamb

If you know a high school student interested in language and/or puzzles, tell 'em about the linguistics olympiads, there are lots of national versions in many countries plus an international competition!

3 months ago 61 36 3 1
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10 notable books on conservation and the environment published in 2025 The year 2025 might be seen as one of backsliding when it comes to tackling the environmental crises that face our planet. Political leadership in places like the U.S. and elsewhere chose to throw…

2025 was a difficult year for conservation, but scientists, activists, and communities continue the struggle — and their stories hint at a brighter future.

Here’s a sample of notable environmental books published this year. Views in books are the authors’, not necessarily Mongabay’s.

3 months ago 29 12 0 1

Happy to have published two out of this year's top ten most read posts on Language on the Move.

Listening to all the podcast episodes has also been a highlight of my year. Check them out!

3 months ago 8 2 0 0
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Up and Down With… Polarisation? Intrinsic and Instrumental Polarisation Dynamics in US Climate Policy Debates | Article | Politics and Governance Philip Leifeld, Dana R. Fisher

So happy that my paper with Philip Leifeld, ā€œUp and Down With… Polarisation? Intrinsic and Instrumental Polarisation Dynamics in US Climate Policy Debates,ā€ is included in this issue. The topic is particularly relevant now www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandg...

3 months ago 6 1 0 0
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Social bonds decrease epigenetic age in male bottlenose dolphins - Communications Biology Across 40 years of behavioural and epigenetic data, male dolphins with stronger social relationships show lower epigenetic ages and therefore appear to age slower compared to those with weaker social ...

🐬 Can friendship slow ageing?

In wild bottlenose dolphins, strong social relationships aren’t just important for social life — they may actually influence biological ageing.
@liviagerber.bsky.social
#ScienceCommunication #MarineMammals #Ageing #MAVELab

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

3 months ago 20 8 1 0

Good starter packs circulating here on science and environment

3 months ago 5 2 0 0
Doctoral student in Political Science, specialization in political economy and political behavior Doctoral position inĀ Political Science, specialization in political economy and political behavior The Department of Political Science

Open PhD position in Political Science with specialization in political economy and political behavior at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Details below:
web103.reachmee.com/ext/I005/10...

4 months ago 1 1 0 0

Hard to overstate how concerning this is. There are over 46,000 people, a school, and a hospital in the flash flood warning area. Washington communities have been bracing for levee failures as another round of atmospheric rivers arrives to full rivers and saturated soils.

3 months ago 107 56 3 1
Fig. 1.   Spectrograms and oscillograms of (A) two meows and (B) two purrs. Oscillograms depict sound
pressure over time, and spectrograms depict frequency over time. All spectrograms were created with a
1024-point FFT, 16-bit depth, and a Hamming Window with 87.5% overlap (sampling rate: 96 kHz, frequency  resolution: 94 Hz, time resolution: 1.33 ms). The two pictures on the right depict Koda, a 15-year-old male
Ragdoll cat, meowing and purring (credit: Marisa Idolo).

Fig. 1. Spectrograms and oscillograms of (A) two meows and (B) two purrs. Oscillograms depict sound pressure over time, and spectrograms depict frequency over time. All spectrograms were created with a 1024-point FFT, 16-bit depth, and a Hamming Window with 87.5% overlap (sampling rate: 96 kHz, frequency resolution: 94 Hz, time resolution: 1.33 ms). The two pictures on the right depict Koda, a 15-year-old male Ragdoll cat, meowing and purring (credit: Marisa Idolo).

what's in a meow?? 🐈

New from @berlinbatlab.bsky.social!

1. "we examined meows and purrs to establish how individual identity is encoded"
2. stronger individual signature in purrs than in meows
3. domestic cat meows more variable than those of wild felids

#bioacoustics
#prattle šŸ’¬
#neuroskyence

3 months ago 47 11 1 0
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A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

part 2 of this book has several chapters worth checking out on histories of environmental movements in Hawaiā€˜i. www.dukeupress.edu/a-nation-ris...

3 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Working on #CriticalDiscourseStudies?
āŒ›The deadline for abstract submission to #CADAAD2026 is fast approaching!
šŸ”½
www.cadaad2026.com/138021/detai...
@cadaad.bsky.social @cadaad-journal.bsky.social

4 months ago 13 7 0 2
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Temperatures in a patch of Antarctic moss can vary as much as an entire mountain range The moss beds in Antarctica are like miniature forests – they create their own climate.

New from us

theconversation.com/temperatures...

4 months ago 15 6 2 1
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Animal-Computer Interaction: The emergence of a discipline In this editorial to the IJHCS Special Issue on Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI), we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art in this emerging fie…

Animal-Computer Interaction: The emergence of a discipline www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

4 months ago 2 0 0 0
Language Log Ā» Pets with buttons

in case you weren't aware of r/petswithbuttons!🐈 "My cat has started to use 'vacuum' as a curse word": "For example, he will ask for "snackieā€ when we JUST got done with snackie and I will say ā€œsnackie all doneā€ and then he will go spam the vacuum button."
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72193...

4 months ago 3 1 1 0
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Kai Erikson, Sociologist Who Probed Invisible Scars of Disasters, Dies at 94

Oh, seeing now that Kai Erikson passed away last month. ā€œEverything in its Pathā€ was really formative to me early on in grad school, and when I decided to study Paradise after the Camp Fire. It’s probably become more relevant than even he could have imagined…an important legacy to leave behind.

4 months ago 2 1 0 0
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European cities warn: without more support, urban climate resilience plans risk collapse - Eurocities A new Eurocities Pulse survey of 54 cities from 17 European countries reveals that cities face growing climate threats, but limited funding, staffing shortages, and fragmented governance are holding b...

New report from Eurocities "While most cities rely on municipal revenue (87%) and EU funding (83%) for climate adaptation, only around 50% have or are developing a dedicated financing strategy. Alarmingly, 28% said national or local regulations prevent them from accessing certain types of funding."

4 months ago 1 0 0 0
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The Search for New Stories to Live By: Econarrative and Ethical Leadership This course is for anyone who is aware of the trajectory of society towards collapse under ever-growing inequality and environmental destruction, and who wants change at the only level that can make a...

Interesting new free course in ecolinguistics & environmental communication from UN SDG:Learn!🌿: The Search for New Stories to Live By: Econarrative and Ethical Leadership
www.unsdglearn.org/courses/the-...

4 months ago 1 0 0 0
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Accenture dubs its 800,000 staff ā€˜reinventors’ as it adapts to AI Move follows in footsteps of Disney’s ā€˜imagineers’ and Amazon’s ā€˜ninja coders’

"Deborah Cameron, former professor of language and communication at Oxford university, said using terms for staff that are ā€œso out of step with what most people think your business isā€ risked attracting ā€œincomprehension or ridiculeā€.

www.ft.com/content/6689...

4 months ago 1 0 0 0
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Is the Field Guide Sustainable? Rethinking Genre in the Face of Ecological Catastrophe In 1934, Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds became an unexpectedly hot commodity. Booksellers blazed through Houghton Mifflin’s cautious initial re

My advisee Milo Watson just had his essay published by ISLE as an advance article! It’s a great piece on field guides: how they traditionally worked as a genre and how the genre is changing to address ongoing ecological catastrophe. Currently open access—check it out! #envhum

4 months ago 5 1 0 0
AI LEARN AI LEARN Landing Page

"During the next year AI LEARN will be hiring approximately 25 PhD, Postdoc, and Researcher positions in a variety of fields at locations: NTNU (Trondheim, Norway), University of Bergen (Bergen, Norway), University of Oslo (Oslo, Norway), and the University of Murcia (Murcia Spain)."

4 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Scientists explore underwater calls of Hawaiian monk seals When Hawaiian monk seals vocalize underwater, they’re not just making random noise.

Scientists explore underwater calls of Hawaiian monk seals: ā€œWe found that wild Hawaiian monk seals are producing lots of vocalizations all of the time,ā€ said Kirby Parnell, a PhD candidate with the Marine Mammal Research Program."

4 months ago 14 3 0 0
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River Life and the Upspring of Nature

Reading today!šŸ“š "In River Life and the Upspring of Nature Naveeda Khan examines the relationship between nature and culture through the study of the everyday existence of chauras, the people who live on the chars (sandbars) within the Jamuna River in Bangladesh." #ethnography

4 months ago 1 0 0 0

"when subsequently forming advice on the topic based on their search, those who learn from LLM syntheses (vs. traditional web links) feel less invested in forming their advice, and, more importantly, create advice that is sparser, less original and ultimately less likely to be adopted by recipients"

4 months ago 0 0 0 0
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Can AI translate Native languages in times of disaster? - High Country News In the wake of Typhoon Halong, an AI language company wants to hire Native translators, raising questions about data sovereignty.

"Can AI translate Native languages in times of disaster?
In the wake of Typhoon Halong, an AI language company wants to hire Native translators, raising questions about data sovereignty."

4 months ago 1 0 0 0
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Why Italians Are Growing Apples for Wild Bears For some conservationists, preserving the wilderness no longer means just setting land aside and leaving animals alone.

reminded me of this story from a few years ago: "Understandably, not everyone is excited about an Italian version of a grizzly bear showing up in their backyard, and a team of carefully selected ā€œbear ambassadorsā€ works hard to convince locals of the value of their polarizing neighbor."

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The Hunt Is On for Bears in Japan After Deadly Attacks

"Experts have attributed the rise in attacks partly to climate change, with storms wreaking havoc on vegetation like beech trees, which produce the nuts that bears depend on. Bears have grown increasingly brazen in their quest for calories, venturing into urban centers in search of scraps."

4 months ago 0 0 1 0
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PhD Fellowship in Museum Education (288983) | University of Stavanger Job title: PhD Fellowship in Museum Education (288983), Employer: University of Stavanger, Deadline: Sunday, January 4, 2026

My colleague Marie-Theres Fojuth has advertised a fully funded 3-year PhD Fellowship in Museum Education @unistavanger.bsky.social with the «Into the Fjords: Blue Museums as Arenas of Learning about Vulnerable Ecosystems (FJORDS)» project. Perfect for Scandinavian-speaking #envhum #envhist people!

5 months ago 29 31 0 1
Application - Class of Language - LMU Munich

LMU Munich offers a funded PhD position for three years at the Graduate School of Language & Literature. The deadline for applications is 7 December 2025:
www.en.lipp.uni-muenchen.de/application/...

5 months ago 5 3 0 0
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Postdoctoral Scholar - Script Encoding Initiative - Linguistics Department University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!

Job!šŸ“£ "The Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley invites applications for a two-year postdoctoral scholar position. The postdoc will contribute to an NSF-funded project on the politics of digitizing newly-invented writing systems"

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