#linguistics

Birthright Citizenship and Youth Crime Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

"Our findings suggest that inclusive citizenship policies can reduce crime and its associated costs, which in turn could strengthen social cohesion."

www.nber.org/papers/w35070

Why Modern Chinese is Just ‘English with Hanzi’ Hanzi Shells, English Souls: The Europeanization of the Chinese Language

"Modern Chinese is a cyborg. It possesses the body of the Han Dynasty, the flesh and bone of characters, but runs on a Western-style neural network."

#Chinese #language #Mandarin

open.substack.com/pub/oldnorth...

new Economist cover

AI and research papers the future is here (pretty much)

"The honest summary is that the current publishing ecosystem is a rent-collecting prestige hierarchy dressed up as quality control."

arnoldkling.substack.com/p/ai-and-res...

WIRECUTTER Microplastics Are Everywhere. Here's How to Avoid Eating Them.

Ok step one is to make them look less delicious

Repair Workers Accidentally Stumble Upon Lost Remains of Legendary 'Fourth Musketeer' Under some old, loose tiles lay the real-life counterpart of d'Artagnan from The Three Musketeers.

Repair Workers Accidentally Stumble Upon Lost Remains of Legendary 'Fourth Musketeer' gizmodo.com/repair-workers-accidenta...

Bilingual narrative development: Analyzing sentences and stories within and across languages - Tatiana I. Ramos Gallardo, Michelle N. Ramos, Giang T. Pham, Kerry Danahy Ebert, 2026 Aims and objectives: Narrative samples provide an ecologically valid measurement of bilingual children’s skills at the sentence (microstructure) and story level...

"Bidirectional cross-language associations in macrostructure suggest that storytelling reflects underlying cognitive mechanisms that are not language-specific."

#language #research

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Brad Lander is too humble to say this, but this ALSO means that when ICE detained him on June 17 last year, they had no authority to do so. He's got standing here. (He was formally arrested a second time--I think that was NYPD goons.)

I agree. This event has been meteorologically astonishing, and its impacts will be felt long after it ends in terms of record low snowpack, sharply increased wildfire risk, and extreme low watershed runoff/streamflow into summer and beyond.

Trump Has Detained the Parents of More Than 11,000 U.S. Citizen Kids A ProPublica analysis of new ICE data shows that Trump has detained parents of U.S. citizen children at about twice the rate that Biden did, and moms have been deported four times as often.

NEW: For the first time, ProPublica has been able to quantify how many U.S. citizen children have been directly affected by Trump’s immigration crackdown: more than 11,000 kids had a parent detained — and that’s an undercount. 1/ 🧵
www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Immigrant kids can attend school regardless of citizenship – some states are challenging this standard The Heritage Foundation released a policy document in February 2026 that spells out how states can try to challenge a 1982 Supreme Court ruling that enshrined immigrant students’ right to attend schoo...

"The universal right to public education in the U.S. has long been taken for granted – but this right, like others, might be more fragile than it seems."

theconversation.com/immigrant-ki...

Constructing Meaning from Language: Visual Knowledge in People Born Blind and in Large Language Models A key function of language is to enable concept construction, but empirically disentangling the contribution of language from the contribution of other (e.g., sensory) experiences is challenging. Comp...

"Language enables concept construction from the ground up, without sensory evidence, and is intimately linked to intuitive theories."

#language

www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Speech sounds are a blur—here’s how your brain sorts them out Speech blurs together unless you know the language; scientists found the brain signal that separates the words

"When we compute sounds, we are computing words.”

#language #research

www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-...

Division of labor between phonology and semantics in Chinese L2 learners and its relation to L2 literacy - Reading and Writing This study investigated how the division of labor between phonological and semantic processing manifests in Chinese second language (L2) learners across proficiency levels. Thirty-nine native speakers...

"These findings suggest that efficient integration of phonological and semantic cues at both lexical and sub‑lexical levels is important for literacy acquisition in Chinese L2 learners."

#language #research

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

"Resting-state can be highly reliable. But reliability does not guarantee validity."

Global knowledge in 131 languages and dialects about children’s speech development, assessment, and intervention This paper exhorts communication specialists to look beyond English language knowledge by providing evidence to disrupt the unsubstantiated belief that there are few assessment and intervention res...

"This paper exhorts communication specialists to look beyond English language knowledge by providing evidence to disrupt the unsubstantiated belief that there are few assessment and intervention resources for supporting #multilingual children’s #speech."

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Time series plot depicting predicted Nino 3.4 region ocean temperature anomalies from the latest (Mar 2026) ECMWF ensemble. It depicts an extremely rapid rise in such temperatures, from modest negative anomalies to strong positive anomalies, by mid-summer 2026--indicative of a transition from weak-moderate La Nina conditions to moderate-strong El Nino conditions over just a few months.

Whew.

All signs are increasingly pointing to a significant, if not strong to very strong, El Niño event. I'll have more to say in coming weeks & months, but for now I'll just say that this is increasingly likely to become a major regional-to-global climate driver in 2026-2027.

Many Minds podcast – Listener survey A brief survey for listeners of the Many Minds podcast.

Happy 6th anniversary to us!! 🎉🎉

Thanks for spending time with us, old friends and new! As we celebrate this milestone, we've launched a short audience survey to get your thoughts on the show (and its future).

We would be most grateful for your participation!

Link: forms.gle/AnJSopuX8Cho...

Inside the Underground Safe Houses Sheltering Immigrants From ICE

"Organizing by ordinary people to shelter immigrants in private homes represents an emerging, invisible front of resistance.

These are not seasoned activists. They are neighbors, like Jean."

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/u...

📍For me, the big takeaway is this: the assumptions we make shape the questions we ask. Treat tracts as uniform highways, and they look uniform. Look along them instead, and striking, replicable patterns emerge. We hope this work advances how we study brain development. 12/n

This is a bombshell: "the Pentagon wanted the company to allow for the collection and analysis of unclassified, commercial bulk data on Americans, such as geolocation and web browsing data"

This kind of agenda echoes the defunded Total Information Awareness effort, post-9/11

## Overall Summary This storyboard comprises four illustrated panels created on textured, off-white paper, featuring simulated thumbtack holes in the corners. The artwork employs a realistic black ink drawing style combined with muted color washes in grey, brown, amber, and blue. Each panel includes messy, translucent grey marker lines that scribble or cross over parts of the drawings and text underneath, imparting a sense of a draft or edited proof. --- ### Top-Left Panel **Image:** The panel presents an extreme close-up of a person's eyes and nose, gazing directly forward. The skin texture reveals intricate details, including wrinkles and bags under the eyes, conveying age. **Text Below:** Handwritten in script: “We begin with a face, up close, uncomfortably. He’s surprised by how old he has become." --- ### Top-Right Panel **Image:** This panel depicts a crystal tumbler filled with amber liquid—likely whiskey or scotch—next to the disembodied head of a smiling, bearded man on a wooden surface. **Text Below:** The handwritten script states, “But while his constraints have grown, his savoring of what is in front of him has also increased." --- ### Bottom-Left Panel **Image:** An open silver laptop sits on a table, displaying generic data, graphs, text, and browser tabs to suggest ongoing work. **Text Below:** The handwritten note reads, “Even work was something he looked forward to after a healthy period of rest, always." --- ### Bottom-Right Panel **Image:** From behind, a man in a cable-knit sweater stands looking at a city skyline at night through a large window. A full moon glows in the sky, while small children's toys rest on the windowsill. **Text Below:** The handwritten script concludes, “We close with the man standing at his child’s bedroom window at night, the moon, a reminder of Nature, somewhere."

Overall Summary A detailed four-panel storyboard page presented on a sheet of textured paper, held with copper thumbtacks in all four corners. The artwork utilizes a high-realism ink etching style and watercolor washes, with translucent grey marker scribbles layered over parts of the drawings and text to create an 'edited draft' appearance. Top-Left Panel Image: An extreme close-up of intensely lined and wrinkled eyes and the bridge of a nose, belonging to an aged man looking directly forward. A large grey marker cross-out is integrated into the facial lines. Text Below: Handwritten in script: “We begin with a face up close, uncomfortably. He’s surprised by how old he has become." Top-Right Panel Image: A detailed cut-crystal whiskey glass filled with amber liquid and the solemn, bearded head of a man. The background contrasts a rigid geometric 'constraints' pattern with an organic smoky swirl. Grey marker is over the glass and man's hair. Text Below: Handwritten in script: “But while his constraints have expanded, his Savoring of what there is in front of him has also grown, commensurately.” Bottom-Left Panel Image: An open silver laptop with a clear screen displaying detailed interface windows, including an email client, text, and a graph. Grey marker lines scribble over the screen and keyboard. Text Below: Handwritten in script: “Even work was something he looked forward to returning to, after a healthy period of rest, while thinking about it, always." Bottom-Right Panel Image: A man in a detailed cream-colored cable-knit sweater viewed from behind, standing at a large window looking out at a detailed night cityscape skyline. A prominent full moon is visible. Grey marker is on the man's back. Text Below: Handwritten in script: “We close with the man standing at his child’s bedroom window at night, the moon, a reminder of Nature, somewhere.”

My original sketches and awful handwriting compared to a NanoBanana2 version.

#drawing #AI

Every anti-vaxxer I encounter seems to love weird unregulated supplements. They hate Big Pharma but they love Little Pharma, Big Pharma’s younger sibling who grew up without any adult supervision.

if you believe in any form of free enterprise at all, the idea that the Pentagon can not only cut off your contract but designate you a supply chain risk and prevent other companies from buying from you just because you won't build killbots for the government should be terrifying

It's not hyperbole to suggest that today we have a federal government that doesn't so much represent or resemble a federal administration as it does a family crime syndicate.

From Atoms to AI: The Futile Search for a “Perfect” Language Tracing the boundaries of reason through Lucretius and Descartes, and what they reveal about the cognitive limits of both humans and machines.

"...ultimately, when we reflect on language, the data we’re considering is ourselves."

#language #AI

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/from-atoms-t... #AI #Elements #Language #Lucretius via @mitpress.bsky.social

Cover of The Lancet:

@thelancet.com
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

This is kind of crazy. If associative learning--the cornerstone of intelligence--can occur without a single synapse or neuron, then that means intelligence is fractal.

That means the same principles of prediction and adaptation that we see in a human brain could be operating within a single cell.