When I first studied phonetic transcription I learned about broad and narrow transcription, where narrow transcription contains much more detail, like the presence of aspiration on consonants and fine distinctions of tongue height. Of course it makes sense that you wouldn’t always want to go into such detail, but at the time I didn’t think about what detail was excluded from broad transcription and why.
\n\n\n\nIn phonology we learned about phonemes, and how phoneme categories glossed over many of those same details that were excluded from broad transcription. For reasons I never quite grasped, though, we were told that phonemic transcription was a very different thing from broad transcription, and we were not to confuse them. Okay.
\n\n\n\nI got a better explanation from my first phonetics professor, Jacques Filliolet, who used three levels of analysis: niveau g\u00e9n\u00e9ralisant, niveau pertinent and niveau particularisant. We can translate them as general, specific and detailed levels.
\n\n\n\nWhen I started teaching phonology, I realized that the broad vs. narrow distinction did not reflect what I read in books and papers and saw at conferences. When people are actually using phonetic transcription there is no consistent set of features that they leave out or include.
\n\n\n\nWhat people do instead is include the relevant features and leave out the irrelevant ones. Which features are relevant depends on the topic of discussion. If it’s a paper about aspiration, or a paper about variation where aspiration may or may not be relevant, they will include aspiration. If it isn’t, they won’t.
\n\n\n\nI realized that sometimes linguists need to go into more detail than phonetic transcription can easily handle, so they use even finer-grained representations like formant frequencies, gestural scores and voice onset times.
\n\n\n\nRecently I realized that this just means phonetic transcription is a form of communication. In all forms of communication we adjust the level of detail we provide to convey the relevant information to our audience and leave out the irrelevant parts.
\n\n\n\nPhonemes are another, more organic way that we do this. This explains why phonemic transcription is not the same as broad transcription: we often want to talk about what sounds go into a phoneme without adding other details. For example, we may want to talk about how English /t/ typically includes both aspirated and unaspirated stops, without talking about fundamental frequency or lip closure.
\n\n\n\nAnother possible translation of Filliolet’s niveau pertinent is “the appropriate level.” This is really what we’re all aiming for: the level of detail that is most appropriate for the circumstances.
\n\n\n\nFinding the right level of detail for phonetic transcription is actually not hard for students to learn; they do it all the time in regular language. The simplest way to teach it is to give the students assignments that require a particular level of detail.
\n\n\n\nStudents are sometimes frustrated that there is not a single way to transcribe a given utterance. In addition to these differences of level of description, there are stylistic differences: do you write [r] instead of [\u0279] for an English bunched /r/?
\n\n\n\nOf course the International Phonetic Alphabet was sold as just such a consistent system: one symbol for one sound, in contrast with the messy reality of writing systems. To me this feels very Modernist and Utopian, and it is no accident that it was invented at the same time as other big modernist projects like Esperanto, Principia Mathematica, and International Style architecture.
\n\n\n\nThe IPA falls short of the ideal consistent representation that was sold to people, but has largely succeeded in providing enough consistency, and keeping enough of the mess at bay, for specific purposes like documenting language variation and language acquisition.
\n\n\n\nThe key is that almost everything we use phonetic transcription for involves comparing two or more different pronunciations. When we teach transcription, we need to highlight that.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/6vtnw-mvh14","guid":"https://www.grieve-smith.com/blog1/?p=718","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ipa-vowel-chart-with-audio.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1449273600,"rid":"qbg1t-x7730","summary":"When I first studied phonetic transcription I learned about broad and narrow transcription, where narrow transcription contains much more detail, like the presence of aspiration on consonants and fine distinctions of tongue height.","tags":["Phonetics","Teaching"],"title":"Levels of phonetic description","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2015/12/levels-of-phonetic-description/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"Last week
We see reduction in all the words and phrases we say most often. \"How\nare you?\" becomes \"Hiya\" and then \"Hi.\" \"I don't know\" becomes \"I dunno\"\nand then something I can't even write, a single \"uh\" vowel with a\nlow-high-low tone pattern. \"I am going to let you\" becomes \"I'm gonna\nlet you,\" and then, in the speech of Kanye West and Eminem,\n\"amaletchoo.\"
\nA lot of people find these frequency effects confusing. How can high\nfrequency words and phrases be simultaneously the first to change and\nthe last to change? What makes this possible is that they are two\ndifferent kinds of change. Entrenchment is about forgetting, and the\nmore we do things, the more we remember how to do them. Reduction is\nabout ease, and the more we do things the easier they become.
\nThis is like any habit. Because I take the subway to Times Square so\nfrequently, I not only never forget the way, but I do all kinds of\nthings to make it faster and easier. I know where to stand on the\nplatform, where to sit on the train, and when to stand up, so that I get\noff right by the most convenient staircase.
\nMore importantly, I have a low-level \"muscle memory\" of the movements\ninvolved in the trip. Every time, I climb the stairs the same way, sit\ndown the same way, stand up the same way. It's the same with unlocking\nmy apartment door or cooking a steak. My movements are all smaller and\nsmoother. I can do a lot of it without thinking.
\nAs with entrenchment, I learned about the Reduction Effect in class\nwith Joan Bybee. In one of her early papers,
I know I said I'd talk about why it's not so surprising that we get\n\"snuck.\" I'm almost there; I wanted to get this relatively\nstraightforward stuff out of the way first.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/kn515-c1g41","guid":"https://www.grieve-smith.com/blog1/?p=251","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/5381906272_69a38b010e.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1381104000,"rid":"w62xe-vfs23","summary":"Last week I talked about how high-frequency words and phrases resist analogical change. This entrenchment happens because analogical change is driven by forgetting, and it's harder to forget something that you've said a lot. In this post I want to talk about a different effect of frequency, the reduction effect, where high-frequency words and phrases get shortened and simplified. We see reduction in all the words and phrases we say most often.","tags":["Frequency","Language Change","Morphology"],"title":"The Reduction Effect","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2013/10/the-reduction-effect","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe ?the pronunciation? of individual words – implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription. I worked around it in face-to-face classes by hearing the students? accents and asking them to pronounce any words if their transcriptions differed from what I expected. I was also able to illustrate the pronunciation of various IPA symbols by pronouncing the sounds in class.
\nIn the summer of 2013 I taught linguistics online for the first time, and it was much more difficult to give students a sense of the sounds I expected them to produce, and to get a sense of the sounds they associated with particular symbols. On top of that I discovered I had another challenge: I couldn?t trust these students to do the work if the answers were available anywhere online. Some of them would google the questions, find the answers, copy and paste. Homework done!
\nSummer courses move so fast that I wasn?t able to change the exercises until it was too late. In the fall of 2014 I taught the course again, and created several new exercises. I realized that there was now a huge wealth of speech data available online, in the form of streaming and downloadable audio, created for entertainment, education and archives. I chose a podcast episode that seemed relatively interesting and asked my students to transcribe specific words and phrases.
\nIt immediately became clear to me that instead of listening to the sounds and using Richard Ishida?s IPA Picker or another tool to transcribe what they heard, the students were listening to the words, looking them up one by one in the dictionary, and copying and pasting word transcriptions. In some cases Roman Mars?s pronunciations were different from the dictionary transcriptions, but they were close enough that my low grades felt like quibbling to them.
\nI tried a different strategy: I noticed that another reporter on the podcast, Joel Werner, spoke with an Australian accent, so I asked the students to transcribe his speech. They began to understand: ?Professor, do we still have to transcribe the entire word even though a letter from the word may not be pronounced due to an accent?? asked one student. Others noticed that the long vowels were shifted relative to American pronunciations.
\nFor tests and quizzes, I found that I could make excerpts of sound and video files using editing software like Audacity and Microsoft Movie Maker. That allowed me to isolate particular words or groups of words so that the students didn?t waste time locating content in a three-minute video, or a twenty-minute podcast.
\nThis still left a problem: how much detail were the students expected to include, and how could I specify that for them in the instructions? Back in 2013, in a unit on language variation, I had used accent tag videos to replace the hierarchy implied in most discussions of accents with a more explicit, less judgmental contrast between ?sounds like me? and ?sounds different.? I realized that the accent tags were also good for transcription practice, because they contained multiple pronunciations of words that differed in socially meaningful ways – in fact, the very purpose that phonetic transcription was invented for. Phonetic transcription is a tool for talking about differences in pronunciation.
\nThe following semester, Spring 2015, I created a “Comparing Accents” assignment, where I gave the students links to excerpts of two accent tag videos, containing the word list segment of the accent tag task. I then asked them to find pairs of words that the two speakers pronounced differently and transcribe them in ways that highlighted the differences. To give them practice reading IPA notation, I gave them transcriptions and asked them to upload recordings of themselves pronouncing the transcriptions.
\nI was pleased to find that I actually could teach phonetic transcription online, and even write tests that assessed the students? abilities to transcribe, thanks to accent tag videos and the principle that transcription is about communicating differences.
\nI also found these techniques to be useful for teaching other aspects of linguistics, such as language variation, and for teaching in face-to-face courses.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/yjerw-44893","guid":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/?p=1123","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/comparing-accents.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1504569600,"rid":"agff6-73q19","summary":"When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe ?the pronunciation? of individual words \u2013 implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription.","tags":["Accent Tags","Phonetics","Teaching"],"title":"Teaching phonetic transcription online","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2017/09/teaching-phonetic-transcription-online/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"I’ve written in the past about instrumentalism, the scientific practice of treating theories as tools that can be evaluated by their usefulness, rather than as claims that can be evaluated as true or false. If you haven’t tried this way of looking at science, I highly recommend it! But if theories are tools, what are they used for? What makes a theory more or less useful?
\n\n\n\nThe process of science starts when someone makes an observation about the world. If we don’t understand the observation, we need to explore more, make more observations. We make hypotheses and test them, trying to get to a general principle that we can apply to a whole range of situations. We may then look for ways to apply this principle to our interactions with the world.
\n\n\n\nAt every step of this process there is communication. The person who makes the initial observation, the people who make the further observations, who make the hypotheses, who test them, who who generalize the findings, who apply them: these are usually multiple people. They need to communicate all these things (observations, hypotheses, applications) to each other. Even if it’s one single person who does it all end to end, that person needs to communicate with their past and future selves, in the form of notes or even just thinking aloud.
\n\n\n\nThese observations, hypotheses and applications are always new, because that’s what science is for: processing new information. It’s hard to deal with new information, to integrate it with the systems we already have for dealing with the world. What helps us in this regard are finding similarities between the new information and things we already know about the world. Once we find those similarities, we need to record this for our own reference and to signal it to others: other researchers, technologists and the rest of the population.
\n\n\n\nIn informal settings, we already have ways of finding and communicating similarities between different observations. We use similes and metaphors: a person’s eyes may be blue like the sky, not blue like police lights. These are not just idle observations, though: the similarities often have implications for how we respond to things. If someone is leaving a job and they say that they’re passing the baton to a new person, they are signaling a similarity between their job and a relay race, and the suggestion is that the new person will be expected to continue towards the same goal the way a relay runner continues along the racecourse.
\n\n\n\nTheories and models are just formalized versions of metaphors: saying that light is a wave is a way of noting that it can move through the air like a wave moves through water. That theory allowed scientists to predict that light would diffract around objects the way that water waves behave when they encounter objects, a testable hypothesis that has been confirmed. This in turn allowed technologists to design lasers and other devices that took advantage of those wavelike properties, applications that have proven useful.
\n\n\n\nHere’s a metaphor that will hopefully help you understand how theories are communication tools: another communication tool is a photograph. Sometimes I see a photograph of myself and I notice that I’ve recently lost weight. Let’s say that I have been cutting back on snacks and I see a photo like that. I have other tools for discovering that I’ve lost weight, like scales and measuring tape and what I can observe of my body with my own eyes, but seeing a photo can communicate it to me in a different way and suggest that if I continue cutting back on snacks I will continue to lose weight. Similarly, if I post that photo on Facebook my friends can see that I’ve lost weight and understand that I’m going to continue to cut back on snacks.
\n\n\n\nA theory is like a photograph in that there is no single best photograph. To communicate my weight loss I would want a photo that shows my full body, but to communicate my feelings about it, a close-up on my face might be more appropriate. Friends of mine who get new tattoos on their legs will take close-ups of the tattoos. We may have six different photos of the exact same thing (full body, face or leg, for example), and be satisfied with them all. Theories are similar: they depend entirely on the purpose of communication.
\n\n\n\nA theory is like a photograph in that the best level of detail depends on what is being communicated and who the target is. If a friend takes a close-up of four square inches of their calf, that may be enough to show off their new tattoo, but a close-up of four square inches of my calf will probably not tell me or anyone else how much weight I’ve lost. Similarly, if I get someone to take an aerial photograph of me, that may indicate where I am at the time, but it will not communicate much about my weight. This applies to theories: a model with too much detail will simply swamp the researchers, and one with too little will not convey anything coherent about the topic.
\n\n\n\nA theory is like a photograph in that its effectiveness depends on who is on the other end of the communication. If someone who doesn’t know me sees that picture, they will have no idea how much I weighed before, or that my weight has been affecting my health. They will just see a person, and interpret it in whatever way they can.
\n\n\n\nA photograph may not be the best way to communicate my weight loss to my doctor. Their methods depend on measurable benchmarks, and they would prefer to see actual measurements made with scales or tape. On the other hand, a photo is a better way to communicate my weight loss to my Facebook friends than posting scale and tape measurements on Facebook, because they (or some of them at least) are more concerned with the overall way I look.
\n\n\n\nA theory’s effectiveness similarly depends on its audience. Population researchers may be familiar with the theories of Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra, so if I tell them that ne…pas in French follows a Lotka-Volterra model, they are likely to understand. Chemists have probably never heard of Lotka or Volterra, so if I tell them the same thing I’m likely to get a blank stare.
\n\n\n\nThis means that there is no absolute standard for comparing theories. We are never going to find the best theory. We may be able to compare theories for a particular purpose, with a particular level of detail, aimed at a particular audience, but even then there may be several theories that work about as well.
\n\n\n\nWhen I tell people about this instrumental approach to scientific theories and models, some of them get anxious. If there’s no way for theories to be true or false, how can we ever have a complete picture of the universe? The answer is that we can’t. Kurt G\u00f6del showed decades ago with his Incompleteness Theorem that no theory or model can ever completely capture reality, not even a mathematical or computer model. Jorge Luis Borges illustrated it with his story of the map that is the same size as the territory.
\n\n\n\nScience is not about finding out everything. It’s not about getting a complete picture. That’s because reality is too big and complex for our understanding, or for the formal systems that our computers are based on. It’s just about figuring out more than we knew before. It will never be finished. And that’s okay.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/p5dc6-wwr09","guid":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/?p=1205","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/20180517_224401.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1526601600,"rid":"peqp1-rhr44","summary":"I've written in the past about instrumentalism, the scientific practice of treating theories as tools that can be evaluated by their usefulness, rather than as claims that can be evaluated as true or false.","tags":["Science","Semantics"],"title":"Theories are tools for communication","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2018/05/theories-are-tools-for-communication/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"You've probably heard the joke about the two people camping in the\nwoods who encounter a hungry predator. One person stops to put on\nrunning shoes. The other says, \"Why are you wasting time? Even with\nrunning shoes you're not going to outrun that animal!\" The other\nreplies, \"I don't have to outrun the animal, I just have to outrun\nyou.\"
\nFor me this joke highlights a problem with the way some people argue\nabout climate change. First of all, spreading uncertainty and doubt\nagainst competitors is a common marketing tactic, and as Naomi Orestes\nand Erik Conway documented in their book
In the case of climate change, as with fundamentalist criticisms of\nevolution, there is a lot of stress on the idea that the climatic models\nare \"only a theory,\" and that they leave room for the possibility of\nerror. The whole idea is to deter a certain number of influential people\nfrom taking action.
\nThe latest example is Bret Stephens, newly hired as an opinion\ncolumnist by New York Times editors who should really have known better.\n
Since all Stephens did was to say those two things, none of which\namount to an actual critique of climate change or an argument that we\nshould not act, the intensely negative reactions it generated may be a\nlittle surprising. But it helps if you look back at Stephens's history\nand see that he's written more or less the same thing over and over\nagain, at the Wall Street Journal and other places.
\nMany of the responses to Stephens's column have pointed out that if\nthere's any serious chance of climate change having the effects that\nhave been predicted, we should do something about it. The logical next\nstep is talking about possible actions. Stephens hasn't talked about any\npossible actions in over fifteen years, which is pretty solid evidence\nof concern trolling: he pretends to be offering constructive criticism\nwhile having no interest in actually doing anything constructive. And if\nyou go all the way back to
Stephens is very careful not to recommend any particular course of\naction, but sometimes he hints at the potential costs of following\nrecommendations based on the most widely accepted climate change models.\nUnderlying all his columns is the implication that the status quo is\njust fine: Stephens doesn't want to do anything to reduce carbon\nemissions. He wants us to keep mining coal, pumping oil and driving\neverywhere in single-occupant vehicles.
\nPeople are correctly discerning Stephens's intent: to spread\nconfusion and doubt, disrupting the consensus on climate change and\nproviding cover for greedy polluters and ideologues of happy motoring.\nBut they play into his trap, responding in ways that look repressive,\ninflexible and intolerant. In other words, Bret Stephens is the Milo\nYiannopoulos of climate change.
\nStephens's trolling is particularly effective because he exploits a\nweakness in the way mainstream scientists handle theories. In science,\nhypotheses are predictions that can be tested and found to be true or\nfalse: the hypothesis that you can sail around the world was confirmed\nwhen Juan Sebasti\u00e1n Elcano completed Magellan's expedition.
\nMany people view scientific theories as similarly either true or\nfalse. Those that are true \u2013 complete and consistent models of reality \u2013\nare valid and useful, but those that are false are worthless. For them,\nGalileo's measurements of the movements of the planets demonstrated that\nthe heliocentric model of the solar system is true and the model with\nthe earth at the center is false.
\nIn this all-or-nothing view of science, uncertainty is death. If\nthere is any doubt about a theory, it has not been completely proven,\nand is therefore worthless for predicting the future and guiding us as\nwe decide what to do.
\nTrolls like Bret Stephens and the Marshall Institute exploit this\nintolerance of uncertainty by playing up any shred of doubt about\nclimate change. And there are many such doubts, because this is actually\nthe way science is supposed to work: highlighting uncertainty and being\ncautious about results. Many people respond to them in the most\nunscientific ways, by downplaying doubts and pointing to the widespread\nbelief in climate change among scientists.
\nThe all-or-nothing approach to theories is actually a betrayal of the\nscientific method. The caution built into the gathering of scientific\nevidence was not intended as a recipe for paralysis or preparation for\npopularity contests. There is a way to use cautious reports and\nuncertain models as the basis for decisive action.
\nThis approach to science is called instrumentalism, and
In an instrumentalist view, when we find fossils that are\nintermediate between species it does not demonstrate that evolution is\ntrue and creation is false. Instead, it demonstrates that evolution is a\nbetter predictor of what we will find underground, and produces more\nsatisfying explanations of fossils.
\nNote that when we evaluate theories from an instrumental perspective,\nit is always relative to other theories that might also be useful for\nunderstanding and predicting the same data. Like the two people running\nfrom the wild animal, we are not comparing theories against some\nabsolute standard of truth, but against each other.
\nIn climate change, instrumentalism simply says that certain climate\nmodels have been better than others at predicting the rising temperature\nreadings and melting glaciers we have seen recently. These models\nsuggest that it is all the driving we're doing and the dirty power\nplants we're running that are causing these rising temperatures, and to\nreduce the dangers from rising temperatures we need to reconfigure our\nway of living around walking and reducing our power consumption.
\nEvaluating theories relative to each other in this way takes all the\nbite out of Bret Stephens's favorite weapon. He never makes it explicit,\nbut he does have a theory: that we're not doing much to raise the\ntemperature of the planet. If we make his theory explicit and evaluate\nit against the best climate change models, it sucks. It makes no sense\nof the melting glaciers and rising tides, and has done a horrible job of\npredicting climate readings.
\nWe can fight against Bret Stephens and his fellow merchants of doubt.\nBut in order to do that, we need to set aside our greatest weakness: the\nbelief that theories can be true, and must be proven true to be the\nbasis for action. We don't have to outrun Stephens's uncertainty; we\njust have to outrun his love of the status quo. And instrumentalism is\nthe pair of running shoes we need to do that.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/wk86y-8b289","guid":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog1/?p=964","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1493683200,"rid":"g8fb2-1kf34","summary":"The Problem You've probably heard the joke about the two people camping in the woods who encounter a hungry predator. One person stops to put on running shoes. The other says, \"Why are you wasting time? Even with running shoes you're not going to outrun that animal!\" The other replies, \"I don't have to outrun the animal, I just have to outrun you.\" For me this joke highlights a problem with the way some people argue about climate change.","tags":["Science"],"title":"I just have to outrun your theory","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2017/05/i-just-have-to-outrun-your-theory","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"In
But what if we don't have the time to examine everything, and we\ndon't have to be absolutely sure? As it turns out, a lot of times we can\nbe pretty sure. We just need a representative sample of everything. It's\nquicker than examining every member of your population, and it may even\nbe more accurate, since there are always measurement errors, and\nmeasuring a lot of things increases the chance of an error.
\nPierre-Simon Laplace figured that out for the French Empire. In the\nearly nineteenth century, Napoleon had conquered half Europe, but he\ndidn't have a good idea how many subjects he had. Based on the work of\nThomas Bayes, Laplace knew that a relatively small sample of data would\ngive him a good estimate. He also figured out that he needed the sample\nto be representative to get a good estimate.
\n\"The most precise method consists of (1) choosing districts\ndistributed in a roughly uniform manner throughout the Empire, in order\nto generalize the result, independently of local circumstances,\" wrote\nLaplace in 1814. If you didn't have a uniform distribution, you might\nwind up getting all your data from mountainous districts and\nunderestimating the population, or getting data from urban districts and\noverestimating. Another way to avoid basing your generalizations on\nunrepresentative data is random sampling.
\nA famous example
\"Average Italian Female\" by Colin Spears
\nWhat can be deceiving is that you get things that look like averages\nand percentages. And they are averages and percentages! But they're not\nnecessarily averages of the things you want an average of. A striking\nexample comes from a blogger named Colin Spears, who was intrigued by
Some bloggers, like
Keep this in mind the next time you see an average or a percentage.\nWhat was their sampling method? If it wasn't uniform or random, it's not\nan average or percentage of anything meaningful. If you trust it, you\nmay wind up spreading inaccuracies, like a prediction for President\nLandon or a twentysomething average Italian woman. And won't your face\nbe red!
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/z94mk-g6f35","guid":"https://www.grieve-smith.com/blog1/?p=304","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Laplace_Pierre-Simon_marquis_de.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1389225600,"rid":"rdr5d-98c37","summary":"In my previous post, I discussed the differences between existential and universal statements. In particular, the standard of evidence is different: to be sure that an existential statement is correct we only need to see one example, but to be sure a universal is correct we have to have examined everything. But what if we don't have the time to examine everything, and we don't have to be absolutely sure?","tags":["Sampling","Science"],"title":"Estimating universals, averages and percentages","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2014/01/estimating-universals-averages-and-percentages","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"I started writing this post back in August, and I hurried it a little because of a Limping Chicken article guest written by researchers at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at University College London. I’ve known the DCAL folks for years, and they graciously acknowledged some of my previous writings on this issue. I know they don’t think the textual form of British Sign Language is written English, so I was surprised that they used the term “sign-to-text” in the title of their article and in a tweet announcing the article. After I brought it up, Dr. Kearsy Cormier acknowledged that there was potential for confusion in that term.
\nSo, what does “sign-to-text” mean, and why do I find it problematic in this context? “Sign-to-text” is an analogy with “speech-to-text,” also known as speech recognition, the technology that enables dictation software like DragonSpeak. Speech recognition is also used by agents like Siri to interpret words we say so that they can act on them.
\nThere are other computer technologies that rely on the concept of text. Speech synthesis is also known as text-to-speech. It’s the technology that enables a computer to read a text aloud. It can also be used by agents like Siri and Alexa to produce sounds we understand as words. Machine translation is another one: it typically proceeds from text in one language to text in another language. When the DCAL researchers wrote “sign-to-text” they meant a sign recognition system hooked up to a BSL-to-English machine translation system.
\nYears ago I became interested in the possibility of applying these technologies to sign languages, and created a prototype sign synthesis system, SignSynth, and an experimental English-to-American Sign Language system.
\nI realized that all these technologies make heavy use of text. If we want automated audiobooks or virtual assistants or machine translation with sign languages, we need some kind of text, or we need to figure out a new way of accomplishing these things without text. So what does text mean for a sign language?
\nOne big thing I discovered when working on SignSynth is that (unlike the DCAL researchers) many people really think that the written form of ASL (or BSL) is written English. On one level that makes a certain sense, because when we train ASL signers for literacy we typically teach them to read and write English. On another level, it’s completely nuts if you know anything about sign languages. The syntax of ASL is completely different from that of English, and in some ways resembles Mandarin Chinese or Swahili more than English.
\nIt’s bad enough that we have speakers of languages like Moroccan Arabic and Fujianese that have to write in a related language (written Arabic and written Chinese, respectively) that is different in non-trivial ways that take years of schooling to master. ASL and English are so totally different that it’s like writing Korean or Japanese with Chinese characters. People actually did this for centuries until someone smart invented hangul and katakana, which enabled huge jumps in literacy.
\nThere are real costs to this, serious costs. I spent some time volunteering with Deaf and hard-of-hearing fifth graders in an elementary school, and after years of drills they were able to put English words on paper and pronounce them when they saw them. But it became clear to me that despite their obvious intelligence and curiosity, they had no idea that they could use words on paper to send a message, or that some of the words they saw might have a message for them.
\nThere are a number of Deaf people who are able to master English early on. But from extensive reading and discussions with Deaf people, it is clear to me that the experience of these kids is typical of that for the vast majority of Deaf people.
\nIt is a tremendous injustice to a child, and a tremendous waste of that child’s time and attention, for them to get to the age of twelve, at normal intelligence, without being able to use writing. This is the result of portraying English as the written form of ASL or BSL.
\nSo what is the written form of ASL? Simply put, it doesn’t have one, despite several writing systems that have been invented, and it won’t have one until Deaf people adopt one. There will be no sign-to-text until signers have text, in their language.
\nI can say more about that, but I’ll leave it for another post.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/68prj-tvj11","guid":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/?p=1214","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20180926_222219-002.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1538006400,"rid":"c5s8d-5ef60","summary":"I started writing this post back in August, and I hurried it a little because of a Limping Chicken article guest written by researchers at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at University College London. I've known the DCAL folks for years, and they graciously acknowledged some of my previous writings on this issue.","tags":["Language Politics","Natural Language Generation","Sign Languages","Software"],"title":"What is \"text\" for a sign language?","updated_at":1792530050,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2018/09/what-is-text-for-a-sign-language/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"Last month I guessed that\nwhen
Wittgenstein's example came from the area of games, where poker is\ncompetitive and contains elements of chance, tic-tac-toe is competitive\nbut involves no element of chance, and solitaire contains elements of\nchance but is not competitive. Meanwhile, there are things that are not\ngames but are competitive, like war, and things that are not games but\ninvolve chance, like weather forecasting.
\nIn my previous post I had four criteria for \"games,\" but I chose to\nfocus on two of them to make the diagrams easier to read.
\nSimilarly, George Lakoff argued, a typical mother provides\ngenetic material to her child and nurtures the child once it is born. A\ngenetic mother does not necessarily nurture the child and an adoptive\nmother does not provide genetic material, but they are both considered\nto be mothers. A father can provide genetic material, and an teacher can\nnurture, but they are not mothers. Lakoff calls these radial\ncategories.
\n(Strictly speaking, war contains elements of chance, and fathers can\nnurture, so the diagrams don't quite fit the way people think about\nthese categories, but it's hard to capture everything.)
\nBack to Hastings-on-Hudson: it is legally incorporated as a village,\nbut it is more suburban than rural, bordering on the city of Yonkers.\nGreenwich Village and Queens Village were once villages, but are now\nneighborhoods in New York City, and may not be considered villages by\nanyone anymore. Meanwhile,
These \"family resemblances\" are everywhere in human categorization,\nand they are the basis for many of what I call \"category fights.\" The\nexistence of this kind of polysemy is rarely acknowledged,\nunfortunately, and many people argue over these categories as though\nthey were Platonic categories with necessary and sufficient conditions,\nwhen the actual facts are more complicated.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/mdhcv-f5q67","guid":"https://www.grieve-smith.com/blog1/?p=38","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/villages1.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1363392000,"rid":"805tx-0qe16","summary":"Last month I guessed that when Ari Wallach said that Hastings-on-Hudson is a village \"in a Wittgensteinian sense,\" he meant that it was part of a family of things that are called \"villages,\" but don't all share the same set of criteria. Wallach confirmed on Twitter that this was what he meant.","tags":["Categorization"],"title":"Wittgensteinian villages","updated_at":1792530050,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2013/03/wittgensteinian-villages","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"There’s a famous story about swans that Nasim Taleb used for the title of his recent book. European zoologists had seen swans, and all the swans they had seen had white feathers, so they said that all the swans in the world were in fact white. Then a European went to Australia and saw swans with black feathers. Taleb’s point is that no matter how much we know, we don’t know what we don’t know, and overconfidence in our knowledge can make us rigid and vulnerable.
\nSentences like “There are swans,” or “there are black swans” are what logicians call existential statements. “All swans are white” is a universal statement. In science, the two are very different and require different kinds of evidence.
\nAll it takes to make an existential statement is a single observation. I know that there are swans because I’ve seen at least one. But to say that all swans are white with certainty requires us to have seen every swan. The European zoologists made that universal statement without universal observations, and all it took was one observation of a black swan to prove them wrong.
\nNow here’s a point that seems to be missed: averages are universal statements. Actually, they’re made with some relatively simple arithmetic applied to data from all members of a category, so they entail universal statements. If the Regal Swan Foundation says “Mute Swans? wingspans average 78 inches,” we take that to mean someone measured all the mute swans (or a representative sample; I’ll get into that in another post). If someone says that and then you find out they only measured swans in their local park, you’d feel deceived, wouldn’t you?
\nHere’s another one: percentages are universal statements. How can it be a universal statement to say that ten percent of people are left-handed? Well, you have to look at all of them to know for sure that the rest are not. And the same thing goes for “most,” “the majority” and other words that entail statements about fractions. I think this is why Robyn Hitchcock said, “the silent majority is the crime of the century”: if the silent majority really is silent, there’s no way for the person making the claim to know what they think.
\nOn the other hand, statements about units and fractions of units are only existential statements. I have two cats, and I ate half a sausage roll for dinner last night. Words like “many,” “some” and “a few” are also existential statements. I’ve seen many white swans, but I claim no knowledge of the ones I haven’t seen. The only way you could falsify that statement is by process of elimination: showing that there aren’t enough swans in my experience to count as “many.”
\nSo the bottom line is that in order to make a universal statement, including a percentage or an average, you need to have looked at all the members of the group. But in order to make an existential statement, you only need one.
\nNow here’s why I’m writing this post: this stuff sounds simple, and I feel like I’m writing it for kids, but there are a lot of people who don’t follow it. Either they’ve never been taught about the standards of evidence for universals, or they’ve been taught to ignore them. Most of the times I’ve read “all,” people seem to get that it’s a universal and don’t say it unless they can reasonably claim to have data from all of the things concerned. But a lot of people have trouble with “most” and averages, and especially percentages. You can’t say “most” unless you’ve seen them all.
\nWell, there actually is a way you can say “most” without seeing them all. It’s called induction, but it’s hard to do, harder than a lot of people seem to think. I’ll talk about that in a future post.
\n![\"The](\"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/20150819_165448-e1440036721327-150x150.jpg\")
(Update, August 19, 2015: I liked the black swan drawing above so much I decided that it should exist on T-shirts. And you too can call into existence T-shirts, throw pillows, travel mugs – all with the Existential Black Swan on them! I’ll get a cut of the money. Click here for details.)
![\"Genny,](\"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image.png\")
Every morning in the fall of 1997 I would wake up at 6AM and immediately jump out of bed. I went straight to my Fujitsu laptop in the home office, leaving my then-girlfriend sleeping in the bedroom. I didn't have anywhere to be; nobody was paying me, and this wasn’t for a class. I was working on a new project: a sign-language synthesis prototype.
\n\n\n\nThis project was the culmination of several threads in my life. I had been inspired to go back to grad school by spending time talking about language with my girlfriend, a linguist who had just earned her PhD. For the past two years I had been making my living in information technology, working my way up from Microsoft Office trainer to LAN operations tech. I had also been taking night classes at the American Sign Language Institute and participating in discussions on SLLING-L, a sign linguistics email list, and the SignWriting List.
\n\n\n\nI had chosen the linguistics doctoral program at the University of New Mexico because I knew it was strong in sign linguistics, and I had just arrived in August. I was taking a course in psycholinguistics with the sign linguist Jill Morford, and a course in ASL.
\n\n\n\nSeveral people had asked me, “So you’re interested in language, and you’re interested in computers. Is there a way you could combine these interests?” I replied, “Well, there’s speech synthesis,” but that technology was already pretty well established. I realized that there wasn’t much in the area of technology for sign languages. What would sign synthesis look like?
\n\n\n\nWhen I arrived in Albuquerque I mentioned this idea to Sean Burke, a linguist and programmer I had made friends with on an earlier visit. Sean suggested using Virtual Reality Modeling Language, a standard for describing three-dimensional objects and their movements. People could install a plugin in their web browsers, and point it to a VRML (since renamed Web3D) site, and the plugin would display the 3D animation.
\n\n\n\nI followed Sean’s tip and discovered that there was a standard for specifying and animating humanoids in VRML, and a way to control the plugin through Javascript. I created a basic animation of a sign using Javascript, but after numerous frustrations I concluded that it was best to assemble the VRML through a custom Perl templating system controlled by CGI forms.
\n\n\n\nOnce my system was working to the point that it could create intelligible signs, I showed it to the faculty and students who were studying sign languages. The strongest interest came from Jill Morford, my psycholinguistics professor, who recognized that I had created a sign-language analog of the early speech synthesizers that were used at Haskins Labs to demonstrate the categorical nature of speech perception and its acquisition in language learners.
\n\n\n\nJill realized that my system, which I had dubbed SignSynth, could be used to test whether perception of sign languages is similarly categorical, and how it is acquired. The following year she obtained a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the question, and included some money to support me part time and get an office that I shared with a couple other students.
\n\n\n\nAround that time I had a meeting with my Committee on Studies. They liked my work, but told me that simply creating a sign synthesis system wasn’t theoretical enough for a Linguistics dissertation. If I used it, I would have to use it to demonstrate an answer to some theoretical question.
\n\n\n\nThat year I also took a course in literacy education called Teaching Reading to the ESL Student. The professor, Leila Flores-Due\u00f1as, was happy to support me applying these lessons to Deaf students, but throughout the course she stressed the importance of grounding our teaching in the priorities of our students, and orienting our research to the goals of the populations we were studying. She pointed out further that we should be working to help lift up people who were oppressed or disadvantaged, so when we are working with people in those situations we have a particular obligation to fit our work to their priorities.
\n\n\n\nI realized that the same principle applied to developing applications: an app that touches disadvantaged people should help them to fulfill their goals. This brought back to mind the fact that I had never seen a Deaf person ask for a sign synthesis or natural language processing application.
\n\n\n\nI actually hadn’t talked much with Deaf people about language technology. This was in part because there is a general suspicion of hearing people in Deaf communities, particularly of hearing people who come bearing language technology. The suspicion is well earned; check out what Deaf people have to say about Alexander Graham Bell.
\n\n\n\nI had difficulty overcoming this suspicion because I had only been studying American Sign Language for a few years. I could communicate with Deaf people, but only if they were patient, and many of them had no reason to be patient with some random hearing person. I realized that I didn’t necessarily have any technology that could help them accomplish their goals, and if i did, they weren’t necessarily going to try it.
\n\n\n\nThat year I ran into two major challenges in sign synthesis, both relating to the placement of hands in space. The higher-level challenge relates to signs that are called depicting or iconic verbs, or classifier predicates. In these signs, the relative location, orientation and movement of the signer’s hands are used to refer to a similar spatial relationship or movement. In a classic example, an ASL signer can depict the movement of a car by making the “3” vehicle classifier shape with one hand and moving that hand in a scaled-down version of the car’s movements.
\n\n\n\nIconic verbs are very difficult to specify in a user interface, because the level of detail of the location and movement is only constrained by the signer’s control of their hands, and the audience’s visual perception abilities. Specifying, representing and transmitting such signs is, at a minimum, a vastly different task than that for lexical signs, where there is a relatively small set of locations and movements.
\n\n\n\nThe lower-level challenge involved figuring out how to bend the shoulder, elbow and wrist on a humanoid figure so that the figure’s hand winds up in a particular place, facing in a particular direction. This is a well-known problem, called inverse kinematics, that we humans solve intuitively every time we make a gesture or pick up an object.
\n\n\n\nThere are computer libraries for inverse kinematics, and I tried to connect my animation code to those libraries, but they were written in C++, not Perl, and after several months I still hadn’t figured it out.
\n\n\n\nI described these challenges of inverse kinematics and representing classifier predicates to my committee, but they did not consider them to be theoretical enough for a dissertation. I was able to create the videos for Jill Morford’s categorical perception experiments, and she suggested that I could study categorical perception for my dissertation. In retrospect I should maybe have taken her up on it, but instead I decided to study a cosmopolitan, largely privileged community where the speakers were all long dead: the history of Parisian French through theater.
\n\n\n\nMy papers on SignSynth are routinely cited as one of the pioneering works in text-to-sign, mostly by developers who didn’t have a Professor Flores-Due\u00f1as to teach them the importance of serving the language community, and who don’t follow my lead in separating synthesis from translation.
\n\n\n\nThe paper that Jill Morford wrote with me and my fellow students about categorical perception has also had lasting influence; we failed to find a strong effect of categorical perception to match those found in speech, and the implications of that are still being discussed.
\n\n\n\nI never wanted to commercialize SignSynth, knowing that average incomes for Deaf people tend to be significantly lower than the general population, so I made it publicly available as a web application. The original application relied on third-party browser plugins to display the VRML, but over time, web browser makers dropped support for those plugins.
\n\n\n\nIn 2022 I rewrote SignSynth from scratch in Javascript, using a relatively new 3D graphics library, Three.js, and made the code available on GitHub.\u00a0 I updated the interface to follow “character pickers” like Richard Ishida’s IPA Character Picker, replacing the old interface that was heavy on drop-down menus.\u00a0 I also created a standalone character picker for the Stokoe notation that it used for the original text.
\n\n\n\nThinking back to 1997, what got me so excited, what inspired me to move across the country and start a doctoral program with no promise of funding, living off of part time jobs and student loans, and spend so many unpaid hours every day, was the idea that I was creating something new, something that could be useful to people.
\n\n\n\nWhen I was young, I admired inventors, both real-life inventors like Thomas Edison and fictional ones like Professor Bullfinch from the Danny Dunn books. My father, my stepfather and my mother’s boyfriends in between were all tinkerers, and they made useful things. I didn’t have money to buy a lot of tools and equipment, or space to keep it in, but I did have access to computers, and the skills to program them.
\n\n\n\nLooking back, there was some ego in this. Why was it important for me to make these things, and not someone else? Why not be satisfied fixing the Novell servers for Chase Manhattan, or even sending faxes for John Hancock?
\n\n\n\nTo be fair to myself, I have never been a competitive inventor. While I was working on SignSynth I met several people who were working on similar systems, and I always tried to be positive, supportive and cooperative. I let the quality of my work speak for itself, and trusted people to judge its value for themselves.
\n\n\n\nI’ve never felt like I was the best inventor, programmer or researcher in the world, but even in 1997 I had a fair amount of experience and education in research and technology. I felt like those skills were being wasted when I was taking telephone messages at John Hancock, and even when I was reinstalling network drivers. Of course, there are a lot of highly skilled people out there, maybe more than there’s a need for.
\n\n\n\nAfter putting SignSynth on the shelf and focusing on French negation for my dissertation, I didn’t feel the same level of excitement; the theoretical advancements that my committee demanded felt small by comparison, although I’m still proud of them.
\n\n\n\nI have felt a bit more excitement for my recent work for the New School. It’s a more simple project, just retrieving class listings or final grades from the student information system and presenting it in a table, but it helps save time and effort for students and faculty. Less exciting, but still satisfying.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/kht3b-en789","guid":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/?p=1544","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1766534400,"rid":"x9t7h-vej93","summary":"The beginning Every morning in the fall of 1997 I would wake up at 6AM and immediately jump out of bed. I went straight to my Fujitsu laptop in the home office, leaving my then-girlfriend sleeping in the bedroom. I didn't have anywhere to be; nobody was paying me, and this wasn't for a class.","tags":["Academia","Information Technology","Phonology","Sign Languages","Software"],"title":"The story of SignSynth","updated_at":1792530050,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2025/12/the-story-of-signsynth/","version":"v1"}}],"items":[{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"When I first studied phonetic transcription I learned about broad and narrow transcription, where narrow transcription contains much more detail, like the presence of aspiration on consonants and fine distinctions of tongue height. Of course it makes sense that you wouldn’t always want to go into such detail, but at the time I didn’t think about what detail was excluded from broad transcription and why.
\n\n\n\nIn phonology we learned about phonemes, and how phoneme categories glossed over many of those same details that were excluded from broad transcription. For reasons I never quite grasped, though, we were told that phonemic transcription was a very different thing from broad transcription, and we were not to confuse them. Okay.
\n\n\n\nI got a better explanation from my first phonetics professor, Jacques Filliolet, who used three levels of analysis: niveau g\u00e9n\u00e9ralisant, niveau pertinent and niveau particularisant. We can translate them as general, specific and detailed levels.
\n\n\n\nWhen I started teaching phonology, I realized that the broad vs. narrow distinction did not reflect what I read in books and papers and saw at conferences. When people are actually using phonetic transcription there is no consistent set of features that they leave out or include.
\n\n\n\nWhat people do instead is include the relevant features and leave out the irrelevant ones. Which features are relevant depends on the topic of discussion. If it’s a paper about aspiration, or a paper about variation where aspiration may or may not be relevant, they will include aspiration. If it isn’t, they won’t.
\n\n\n\nI realized that sometimes linguists need to go into more detail than phonetic transcription can easily handle, so they use even finer-grained representations like formant frequencies, gestural scores and voice onset times.
\n\n\n\nRecently I realized that this just means phonetic transcription is a form of communication. In all forms of communication we adjust the level of detail we provide to convey the relevant information to our audience and leave out the irrelevant parts.
\n\n\n\nPhonemes are another, more organic way that we do this. This explains why phonemic transcription is not the same as broad transcription: we often want to talk about what sounds go into a phoneme without adding other details. For example, we may want to talk about how English /t/ typically includes both aspirated and unaspirated stops, without talking about fundamental frequency or lip closure.
\n\n\n\nAnother possible translation of Filliolet’s niveau pertinent is “the appropriate level.” This is really what we’re all aiming for: the level of detail that is most appropriate for the circumstances.
\n\n\n\nFinding the right level of detail for phonetic transcription is actually not hard for students to learn; they do it all the time in regular language. The simplest way to teach it is to give the students assignments that require a particular level of detail.
\n\n\n\nStudents are sometimes frustrated that there is not a single way to transcribe a given utterance. In addition to these differences of level of description, there are stylistic differences: do you write [r] instead of [\u0279] for an English bunched /r/?
\n\n\n\nOf course the International Phonetic Alphabet was sold as just such a consistent system: one symbol for one sound, in contrast with the messy reality of writing systems. To me this feels very Modernist and Utopian, and it is no accident that it was invented at the same time as other big modernist projects like Esperanto, Principia Mathematica, and International Style architecture.
\n\n\n\nThe IPA falls short of the ideal consistent representation that was sold to people, but has largely succeeded in providing enough consistency, and keeping enough of the mess at bay, for specific purposes like documenting language variation and language acquisition.
\n\n\n\nThe key is that almost everything we use phonetic transcription for involves comparing two or more different pronunciations. When we teach transcription, we need to highlight that.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/6vtnw-mvh14","guid":"https://www.grieve-smith.com/blog1/?p=718","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ipa-vowel-chart-with-audio.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1449273600,"rid":"qbg1t-x7730","summary":"When I first studied phonetic transcription I learned about broad and narrow transcription, where narrow transcription contains much more detail, like the presence of aspiration on consonants and fine distinctions of tongue height.","tags":["Phonetics","Teaching"],"title":"Levels of phonetic description","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2015/12/levels-of-phonetic-description/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"Last week
We see reduction in all the words and phrases we say most often. \"How\nare you?\" becomes \"Hiya\" and then \"Hi.\" \"I don't know\" becomes \"I dunno\"\nand then something I can't even write, a single \"uh\" vowel with a\nlow-high-low tone pattern. \"I am going to let you\" becomes \"I'm gonna\nlet you,\" and then, in the speech of Kanye West and Eminem,\n\"amaletchoo.\"
\nA lot of people find these frequency effects confusing. How can high\nfrequency words and phrases be simultaneously the first to change and\nthe last to change? What makes this possible is that they are two\ndifferent kinds of change. Entrenchment is about forgetting, and the\nmore we do things, the more we remember how to do them. Reduction is\nabout ease, and the more we do things the easier they become.
\nThis is like any habit. Because I take the subway to Times Square so\nfrequently, I not only never forget the way, but I do all kinds of\nthings to make it faster and easier. I know where to stand on the\nplatform, where to sit on the train, and when to stand up, so that I get\noff right by the most convenient staircase.
\nMore importantly, I have a low-level \"muscle memory\" of the movements\ninvolved in the trip. Every time, I climb the stairs the same way, sit\ndown the same way, stand up the same way. It's the same with unlocking\nmy apartment door or cooking a steak. My movements are all smaller and\nsmoother. I can do a lot of it without thinking.
\nAs with entrenchment, I learned about the Reduction Effect in class\nwith Joan Bybee. In one of her early papers,
I know I said I'd talk about why it's not so surprising that we get\n\"snuck.\" I'm almost there; I wanted to get this relatively\nstraightforward stuff out of the way first.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/kn515-c1g41","guid":"https://www.grieve-smith.com/blog1/?p=251","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/5381906272_69a38b010e.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1381104000,"rid":"w62xe-vfs23","summary":"Last week I talked about how high-frequency words and phrases resist analogical change. This entrenchment happens because analogical change is driven by forgetting, and it's harder to forget something that you've said a lot. In this post I want to talk about a different effect of frequency, the reduction effect, where high-frequency words and phrases get shortened and simplified. We see reduction in all the words and phrases we say most often.","tags":["Frequency","Language Change","Morphology"],"title":"The Reduction Effect","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2013/10/the-reduction-effect","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe ?the pronunciation? of individual words – implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription. I worked around it in face-to-face classes by hearing the students? accents and asking them to pronounce any words if their transcriptions differed from what I expected. I was also able to illustrate the pronunciation of various IPA symbols by pronouncing the sounds in class.
\nIn the summer of 2013 I taught linguistics online for the first time, and it was much more difficult to give students a sense of the sounds I expected them to produce, and to get a sense of the sounds they associated with particular symbols. On top of that I discovered I had another challenge: I couldn?t trust these students to do the work if the answers were available anywhere online. Some of them would google the questions, find the answers, copy and paste. Homework done!
\nSummer courses move so fast that I wasn?t able to change the exercises until it was too late. In the fall of 2014 I taught the course again, and created several new exercises. I realized that there was now a huge wealth of speech data available online, in the form of streaming and downloadable audio, created for entertainment, education and archives. I chose a podcast episode that seemed relatively interesting and asked my students to transcribe specific words and phrases.
\nIt immediately became clear to me that instead of listening to the sounds and using Richard Ishida?s IPA Picker or another tool to transcribe what they heard, the students were listening to the words, looking them up one by one in the dictionary, and copying and pasting word transcriptions. In some cases Roman Mars?s pronunciations were different from the dictionary transcriptions, but they were close enough that my low grades felt like quibbling to them.
\nI tried a different strategy: I noticed that another reporter on the podcast, Joel Werner, spoke with an Australian accent, so I asked the students to transcribe his speech. They began to understand: ?Professor, do we still have to transcribe the entire word even though a letter from the word may not be pronounced due to an accent?? asked one student. Others noticed that the long vowels were shifted relative to American pronunciations.
\nFor tests and quizzes, I found that I could make excerpts of sound and video files using editing software like Audacity and Microsoft Movie Maker. That allowed me to isolate particular words or groups of words so that the students didn?t waste time locating content in a three-minute video, or a twenty-minute podcast.
\nThis still left a problem: how much detail were the students expected to include, and how could I specify that for them in the instructions? Back in 2013, in a unit on language variation, I had used accent tag videos to replace the hierarchy implied in most discussions of accents with a more explicit, less judgmental contrast between ?sounds like me? and ?sounds different.? I realized that the accent tags were also good for transcription practice, because they contained multiple pronunciations of words that differed in socially meaningful ways – in fact, the very purpose that phonetic transcription was invented for. Phonetic transcription is a tool for talking about differences in pronunciation.
\nThe following semester, Spring 2015, I created a “Comparing Accents” assignment, where I gave the students links to excerpts of two accent tag videos, containing the word list segment of the accent tag task. I then asked them to find pairs of words that the two speakers pronounced differently and transcribe them in ways that highlighted the differences. To give them practice reading IPA notation, I gave them transcriptions and asked them to upload recordings of themselves pronouncing the transcriptions.
\nI was pleased to find that I actually could teach phonetic transcription online, and even write tests that assessed the students? abilities to transcribe, thanks to accent tag videos and the principle that transcription is about communicating differences.
\nI also found these techniques to be useful for teaching other aspects of linguistics, such as language variation, and for teaching in face-to-face courses.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/yjerw-44893","guid":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/?p=1123","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/comparing-accents.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1504569600,"rid":"agff6-73q19","summary":"When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe ?the pronunciation? of individual words \u2013 implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription.","tags":["Accent Tags","Phonetics","Teaching"],"title":"Teaching phonetic transcription online","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2017/09/teaching-phonetic-transcription-online/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"I’ve written in the past about instrumentalism, the scientific practice of treating theories as tools that can be evaluated by their usefulness, rather than as claims that can be evaluated as true or false. If you haven’t tried this way of looking at science, I highly recommend it! But if theories are tools, what are they used for? What makes a theory more or less useful?
\n\n\n\nThe process of science starts when someone makes an observation about the world. If we don’t understand the observation, we need to explore more, make more observations. We make hypotheses and test them, trying to get to a general principle that we can apply to a whole range of situations. We may then look for ways to apply this principle to our interactions with the world.
\n\n\n\nAt every step of this process there is communication. The person who makes the initial observation, the people who make the further observations, who make the hypotheses, who test them, who who generalize the findings, who apply them: these are usually multiple people. They need to communicate all these things (observations, hypotheses, applications) to each other. Even if it’s one single person who does it all end to end, that person needs to communicate with their past and future selves, in the form of notes or even just thinking aloud.
\n\n\n\nThese observations, hypotheses and applications are always new, because that’s what science is for: processing new information. It’s hard to deal with new information, to integrate it with the systems we already have for dealing with the world. What helps us in this regard are finding similarities between the new information and things we already know about the world. Once we find those similarities, we need to record this for our own reference and to signal it to others: other researchers, technologists and the rest of the population.
\n\n\n\nIn informal settings, we already have ways of finding and communicating similarities between different observations. We use similes and metaphors: a person’s eyes may be blue like the sky, not blue like police lights. These are not just idle observations, though: the similarities often have implications for how we respond to things. If someone is leaving a job and they say that they’re passing the baton to a new person, they are signaling a similarity between their job and a relay race, and the suggestion is that the new person will be expected to continue towards the same goal the way a relay runner continues along the racecourse.
\n\n\n\nTheories and models are just formalized versions of metaphors: saying that light is a wave is a way of noting that it can move through the air like a wave moves through water. That theory allowed scientists to predict that light would diffract around objects the way that water waves behave when they encounter objects, a testable hypothesis that has been confirmed. This in turn allowed technologists to design lasers and other devices that took advantage of those wavelike properties, applications that have proven useful.
\n\n\n\nHere’s a metaphor that will hopefully help you understand how theories are communication tools: another communication tool is a photograph. Sometimes I see a photograph of myself and I notice that I’ve recently lost weight. Let’s say that I have been cutting back on snacks and I see a photo like that. I have other tools for discovering that I’ve lost weight, like scales and measuring tape and what I can observe of my body with my own eyes, but seeing a photo can communicate it to me in a different way and suggest that if I continue cutting back on snacks I will continue to lose weight. Similarly, if I post that photo on Facebook my friends can see that I’ve lost weight and understand that I’m going to continue to cut back on snacks.
\n\n\n\nA theory is like a photograph in that there is no single best photograph. To communicate my weight loss I would want a photo that shows my full body, but to communicate my feelings about it, a close-up on my face might be more appropriate. Friends of mine who get new tattoos on their legs will take close-ups of the tattoos. We may have six different photos of the exact same thing (full body, face or leg, for example), and be satisfied with them all. Theories are similar: they depend entirely on the purpose of communication.
\n\n\n\nA theory is like a photograph in that the best level of detail depends on what is being communicated and who the target is. If a friend takes a close-up of four square inches of their calf, that may be enough to show off their new tattoo, but a close-up of four square inches of my calf will probably not tell me or anyone else how much weight I’ve lost. Similarly, if I get someone to take an aerial photograph of me, that may indicate where I am at the time, but it will not communicate much about my weight. This applies to theories: a model with too much detail will simply swamp the researchers, and one with too little will not convey anything coherent about the topic.
\n\n\n\nA theory is like a photograph in that its effectiveness depends on who is on the other end of the communication. If someone who doesn’t know me sees that picture, they will have no idea how much I weighed before, or that my weight has been affecting my health. They will just see a person, and interpret it in whatever way they can.
\n\n\n\nA photograph may not be the best way to communicate my weight loss to my doctor. Their methods depend on measurable benchmarks, and they would prefer to see actual measurements made with scales or tape. On the other hand, a photo is a better way to communicate my weight loss to my Facebook friends than posting scale and tape measurements on Facebook, because they (or some of them at least) are more concerned with the overall way I look.
\n\n\n\nA theory’s effectiveness similarly depends on its audience. Population researchers may be familiar with the theories of Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra, so if I tell them that ne…pas in French follows a Lotka-Volterra model, they are likely to understand. Chemists have probably never heard of Lotka or Volterra, so if I tell them the same thing I’m likely to get a blank stare.
\n\n\n\nThis means that there is no absolute standard for comparing theories. We are never going to find the best theory. We may be able to compare theories for a particular purpose, with a particular level of detail, aimed at a particular audience, but even then there may be several theories that work about as well.
\n\n\n\nWhen I tell people about this instrumental approach to scientific theories and models, some of them get anxious. If there’s no way for theories to be true or false, how can we ever have a complete picture of the universe? The answer is that we can’t. Kurt G\u00f6del showed decades ago with his Incompleteness Theorem that no theory or model can ever completely capture reality, not even a mathematical or computer model. Jorge Luis Borges illustrated it with his story of the map that is the same size as the territory.
\n\n\n\nScience is not about finding out everything. It’s not about getting a complete picture. That’s because reality is too big and complex for our understanding, or for the formal systems that our computers are based on. It’s just about figuring out more than we knew before. It will never be finished. And that’s okay.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/p5dc6-wwr09","guid":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/?p=1205","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/20180517_224401.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1526601600,"rid":"peqp1-rhr44","summary":"I've written in the past about instrumentalism, the scientific practice of treating theories as tools that can be evaluated by their usefulness, rather than as claims that can be evaluated as true or false.","tags":["Science","Semantics"],"title":"Theories are tools for communication","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2018/05/theories-are-tools-for-communication/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"You've probably heard the joke about the two people camping in the\nwoods who encounter a hungry predator. One person stops to put on\nrunning shoes. The other says, \"Why are you wasting time? Even with\nrunning shoes you're not going to outrun that animal!\" The other\nreplies, \"I don't have to outrun the animal, I just have to outrun\nyou.\"
\nFor me this joke highlights a problem with the way some people argue\nabout climate change. First of all, spreading uncertainty and doubt\nagainst competitors is a common marketing tactic, and as Naomi Orestes\nand Erik Conway documented in their book
In the case of climate change, as with fundamentalist criticisms of\nevolution, there is a lot of stress on the idea that the climatic models\nare \"only a theory,\" and that they leave room for the possibility of\nerror. The whole idea is to deter a certain number of influential people\nfrom taking action.
\nThe latest example is Bret Stephens, newly hired as an opinion\ncolumnist by New York Times editors who should really have known better.\n
Since all Stephens did was to say those two things, none of which\namount to an actual critique of climate change or an argument that we\nshould not act, the intensely negative reactions it generated may be a\nlittle surprising. But it helps if you look back at Stephens's history\nand see that he's written more or less the same thing over and over\nagain, at the Wall Street Journal and other places.
\nMany of the responses to Stephens's column have pointed out that if\nthere's any serious chance of climate change having the effects that\nhave been predicted, we should do something about it. The logical next\nstep is talking about possible actions. Stephens hasn't talked about any\npossible actions in over fifteen years, which is pretty solid evidence\nof concern trolling: he pretends to be offering constructive criticism\nwhile having no interest in actually doing anything constructive. And if\nyou go all the way back to
Stephens is very careful not to recommend any particular course of\naction, but sometimes he hints at the potential costs of following\nrecommendations based on the most widely accepted climate change models.\nUnderlying all his columns is the implication that the status quo is\njust fine: Stephens doesn't want to do anything to reduce carbon\nemissions. He wants us to keep mining coal, pumping oil and driving\neverywhere in single-occupant vehicles.
\nPeople are correctly discerning Stephens's intent: to spread\nconfusion and doubt, disrupting the consensus on climate change and\nproviding cover for greedy polluters and ideologues of happy motoring.\nBut they play into his trap, responding in ways that look repressive,\ninflexible and intolerant. In other words, Bret Stephens is the Milo\nYiannopoulos of climate change.
\nStephens's trolling is particularly effective because he exploits a\nweakness in the way mainstream scientists handle theories. In science,\nhypotheses are predictions that can be tested and found to be true or\nfalse: the hypothesis that you can sail around the world was confirmed\nwhen Juan Sebasti\u00e1n Elcano completed Magellan's expedition.
\nMany people view scientific theories as similarly either true or\nfalse. Those that are true \u2013 complete and consistent models of reality \u2013\nare valid and useful, but those that are false are worthless. For them,\nGalileo's measurements of the movements of the planets demonstrated that\nthe heliocentric model of the solar system is true and the model with\nthe earth at the center is false.
\nIn this all-or-nothing view of science, uncertainty is death. If\nthere is any doubt about a theory, it has not been completely proven,\nand is therefore worthless for predicting the future and guiding us as\nwe decide what to do.
\nTrolls like Bret Stephens and the Marshall Institute exploit this\nintolerance of uncertainty by playing up any shred of doubt about\nclimate change. And there are many such doubts, because this is actually\nthe way science is supposed to work: highlighting uncertainty and being\ncautious about results. Many people respond to them in the most\nunscientific ways, by downplaying doubts and pointing to the widespread\nbelief in climate change among scientists.
\nThe all-or-nothing approach to theories is actually a betrayal of the\nscientific method. The caution built into the gathering of scientific\nevidence was not intended as a recipe for paralysis or preparation for\npopularity contests. There is a way to use cautious reports and\nuncertain models as the basis for decisive action.
\nThis approach to science is called instrumentalism, and
In an instrumentalist view, when we find fossils that are\nintermediate between species it does not demonstrate that evolution is\ntrue and creation is false. Instead, it demonstrates that evolution is a\nbetter predictor of what we will find underground, and produces more\nsatisfying explanations of fossils.
\nNote that when we evaluate theories from an instrumental perspective,\nit is always relative to other theories that might also be useful for\nunderstanding and predicting the same data. Like the two people running\nfrom the wild animal, we are not comparing theories against some\nabsolute standard of truth, but against each other.
\nIn climate change, instrumentalism simply says that certain climate\nmodels have been better than others at predicting the rising temperature\nreadings and melting glaciers we have seen recently. These models\nsuggest that it is all the driving we're doing and the dirty power\nplants we're running that are causing these rising temperatures, and to\nreduce the dangers from rising temperatures we need to reconfigure our\nway of living around walking and reducing our power consumption.
\nEvaluating theories relative to each other in this way takes all the\nbite out of Bret Stephens's favorite weapon. He never makes it explicit,\nbut he does have a theory: that we're not doing much to raise the\ntemperature of the planet. If we make his theory explicit and evaluate\nit against the best climate change models, it sucks. It makes no sense\nof the melting glaciers and rising tides, and has done a horrible job of\npredicting climate readings.
\nWe can fight against Bret Stephens and his fellow merchants of doubt.\nBut in order to do that, we need to set aside our greatest weakness: the\nbelief that theories can be true, and must be proven true to be the\nbasis for action. We don't have to outrun Stephens's uncertainty; we\njust have to outrun his love of the status quo. And instrumentalism is\nthe pair of running shoes we need to do that.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/wk86y-8b289","guid":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog1/?p=964","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1493683200,"rid":"g8fb2-1kf34","summary":"The Problem You've probably heard the joke about the two people camping in the woods who encounter a hungry predator. One person stops to put on running shoes. The other says, \"Why are you wasting time? Even with running shoes you're not going to outrun that animal!\" The other replies, \"I don't have to outrun the animal, I just have to outrun you.\" For me this joke highlights a problem with the way some people argue about climate change.","tags":["Science"],"title":"I just have to outrun your theory","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2017/05/i-just-have-to-outrun-your-theory","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"In
But what if we don't have the time to examine everything, and we\ndon't have to be absolutely sure? As it turns out, a lot of times we can\nbe pretty sure. We just need a representative sample of everything. It's\nquicker than examining every member of your population, and it may even\nbe more accurate, since there are always measurement errors, and\nmeasuring a lot of things increases the chance of an error.
\nPierre-Simon Laplace figured that out for the French Empire. In the\nearly nineteenth century, Napoleon had conquered half Europe, but he\ndidn't have a good idea how many subjects he had. Based on the work of\nThomas Bayes, Laplace knew that a relatively small sample of data would\ngive him a good estimate. He also figured out that he needed the sample\nto be representative to get a good estimate.
\n\"The most precise method consists of (1) choosing districts\ndistributed in a roughly uniform manner throughout the Empire, in order\nto generalize the result, independently of local circumstances,\" wrote\nLaplace in 1814. If you didn't have a uniform distribution, you might\nwind up getting all your data from mountainous districts and\nunderestimating the population, or getting data from urban districts and\noverestimating. Another way to avoid basing your generalizations on\nunrepresentative data is random sampling.
\nA famous example
\"Average Italian Female\" by Colin Spears
\nWhat can be deceiving is that you get things that look like averages\nand percentages. And they are averages and percentages! But they're not\nnecessarily averages of the things you want an average of. A striking\nexample comes from a blogger named Colin Spears, who was intrigued by
Some bloggers, like
Keep this in mind the next time you see an average or a percentage.\nWhat was their sampling method? If it wasn't uniform or random, it's not\nan average or percentage of anything meaningful. If you trust it, you\nmay wind up spreading inaccuracies, like a prediction for President\nLandon or a twentysomething average Italian woman. And won't your face\nbe red!
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/z94mk-g6f35","guid":"https://www.grieve-smith.com/blog1/?p=304","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Laplace_Pierre-Simon_marquis_de.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1389225600,"rid":"rdr5d-98c37","summary":"In my previous post, I discussed the differences between existential and universal statements. In particular, the standard of evidence is different: to be sure that an existential statement is correct we only need to see one example, but to be sure a universal is correct we have to have examined everything. But what if we don't have the time to examine everything, and we don't have to be absolutely sure?","tags":["Sampling","Science"],"title":"Estimating universals, averages and percentages","updated_at":1792530051,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2014/01/estimating-universals-averages-and-percentages","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"I started writing this post back in August, and I hurried it a little because of a Limping Chicken article guest written by researchers at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at University College London. I’ve known the DCAL folks for years, and they graciously acknowledged some of my previous writings on this issue. I know they don’t think the textual form of British Sign Language is written English, so I was surprised that they used the term “sign-to-text” in the title of their article and in a tweet announcing the article. After I brought it up, Dr. Kearsy Cormier acknowledged that there was potential for confusion in that term.
\nSo, what does “sign-to-text” mean, and why do I find it problematic in this context? “Sign-to-text” is an analogy with “speech-to-text,” also known as speech recognition, the technology that enables dictation software like DragonSpeak. Speech recognition is also used by agents like Siri to interpret words we say so that they can act on them.
\nThere are other computer technologies that rely on the concept of text. Speech synthesis is also known as text-to-speech. It’s the technology that enables a computer to read a text aloud. It can also be used by agents like Siri and Alexa to produce sounds we understand as words. Machine translation is another one: it typically proceeds from text in one language to text in another language. When the DCAL researchers wrote “sign-to-text” they meant a sign recognition system hooked up to a BSL-to-English machine translation system.
\nYears ago I became interested in the possibility of applying these technologies to sign languages, and created a prototype sign synthesis system, SignSynth, and an experimental English-to-American Sign Language system.
\nI realized that all these technologies make heavy use of text. If we want automated audiobooks or virtual assistants or machine translation with sign languages, we need some kind of text, or we need to figure out a new way of accomplishing these things without text. So what does text mean for a sign language?
\nOne big thing I discovered when working on SignSynth is that (unlike the DCAL researchers) many people really think that the written form of ASL (or BSL) is written English. On one level that makes a certain sense, because when we train ASL signers for literacy we typically teach them to read and write English. On another level, it’s completely nuts if you know anything about sign languages. The syntax of ASL is completely different from that of English, and in some ways resembles Mandarin Chinese or Swahili more than English.
\nIt’s bad enough that we have speakers of languages like Moroccan Arabic and Fujianese that have to write in a related language (written Arabic and written Chinese, respectively) that is different in non-trivial ways that take years of schooling to master. ASL and English are so totally different that it’s like writing Korean or Japanese with Chinese characters. People actually did this for centuries until someone smart invented hangul and katakana, which enabled huge jumps in literacy.
\nThere are real costs to this, serious costs. I spent some time volunteering with Deaf and hard-of-hearing fifth graders in an elementary school, and after years of drills they were able to put English words on paper and pronounce them when they saw them. But it became clear to me that despite their obvious intelligence and curiosity, they had no idea that they could use words on paper to send a message, or that some of the words they saw might have a message for them.
\nThere are a number of Deaf people who are able to master English early on. But from extensive reading and discussions with Deaf people, it is clear to me that the experience of these kids is typical of that for the vast majority of Deaf people.
\nIt is a tremendous injustice to a child, and a tremendous waste of that child’s time and attention, for them to get to the age of twelve, at normal intelligence, without being able to use writing. This is the result of portraying English as the written form of ASL or BSL.
\nSo what is the written form of ASL? Simply put, it doesn’t have one, despite several writing systems that have been invented, and it won’t have one until Deaf people adopt one. There will be no sign-to-text until signers have text, in their language.
\nI can say more about that, but I’ll leave it for another post.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/68prj-tvj11","guid":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/?p=1214","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20180926_222219-002.jpg","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1538006400,"rid":"c5s8d-5ef60","summary":"I started writing this post back in August, and I hurried it a little because of a Limping Chicken article guest written by researchers at the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre at University College London. I've known the DCAL folks for years, and they graciously acknowledged some of my previous writings on this issue.","tags":["Language Politics","Natural Language Generation","Sign Languages","Software"],"title":"What is \"text\" for a sign language?","updated_at":1792530050,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2018/09/what-is-text-for-a-sign-language/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"Last month I guessed that\nwhen
Wittgenstein's example came from the area of games, where poker is\ncompetitive and contains elements of chance, tic-tac-toe is competitive\nbut involves no element of chance, and solitaire contains elements of\nchance but is not competitive. Meanwhile, there are things that are not\ngames but are competitive, like war, and things that are not games but\ninvolve chance, like weather forecasting.
\nIn my previous post I had four criteria for \"games,\" but I chose to\nfocus on two of them to make the diagrams easier to read.
\nSimilarly, George Lakoff argued, a typical mother provides\ngenetic material to her child and nurtures the child once it is born. A\ngenetic mother does not necessarily nurture the child and an adoptive\nmother does not provide genetic material, but they are both considered\nto be mothers. A father can provide genetic material, and an teacher can\nnurture, but they are not mothers. Lakoff calls these radial\ncategories.
\n(Strictly speaking, war contains elements of chance, and fathers can\nnurture, so the diagrams don't quite fit the way people think about\nthese categories, but it's hard to capture everything.)
\nBack to Hastings-on-Hudson: it is legally incorporated as a village,\nbut it is more suburban than rural, bordering on the city of Yonkers.\nGreenwich Village and Queens Village were once villages, but are now\nneighborhoods in New York City, and may not be considered villages by\nanyone anymore. Meanwhile,
These \"family resemblances\" are everywhere in human categorization,\nand they are the basis for many of what I call \"category fights.\" The\nexistence of this kind of polysemy is rarely acknowledged,\nunfortunately, and many people argue over these categories as though\nthey were Platonic categories with necessary and sufficient conditions,\nwhen the actual facts are more complicated.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/mdhcv-f5q67","guid":"https://www.grieve-smith.com/blog1/?p=38","image":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/villages1.png","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1363392000,"rid":"805tx-0qe16","summary":"Last month I guessed that when Ari Wallach said that Hastings-on-Hudson is a village \"in a Wittgensteinian sense,\" he meant that it was part of a family of things that are called \"villages,\" but don't all share the same set of criteria. Wallach confirmed on Twitter that this was what he meant.","tags":["Categorization"],"title":"Wittgensteinian villages","updated_at":1792530050,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2013/03/wittgensteinian-villages","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Grieve-Smith","given":"Angus","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9306-7233"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea","created":1673222400,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"by Angus Grieve-Smith","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/grieve_smith","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/ace7000d-39a4-4fe1-b759-06cb82edd3ea/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/feed/atom/","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress","home_page_url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"grieve_smith","status":"active","subfield":"1203","title":"Technology and language","updated":1791166917,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"Technology and language","blog_slug":"grieve_smith","content_html":"There’s a famous story about swans that Nasim Taleb used for the title of his recent book. European zoologists had seen swans, and all the swans they had seen had white feathers, so they said that all the swans in the world were in fact white. Then a European went to Australia and saw swans with black feathers. Taleb’s point is that no matter how much we know, we don’t know what we don’t know, and overconfidence in our knowledge can make us rigid and vulnerable.
\nSentences like “There are swans,” or “there are black swans” are what logicians call existential statements. “All swans are white” is a universal statement. In science, the two are very different and require different kinds of evidence.
\nAll it takes to make an existential statement is a single observation. I know that there are swans because I’ve seen at least one. But to say that all swans are white with certainty requires us to have seen every swan. The European zoologists made that universal statement without universal observations, and all it took was one observation of a black swan to prove them wrong.
\nNow here’s a point that seems to be missed: averages are universal statements. Actually, they’re made with some relatively simple arithmetic applied to data from all members of a category, so they entail universal statements. If the Regal Swan Foundation says “Mute Swans? wingspans average 78 inches,” we take that to mean someone measured all the mute swans (or a representative sample; I’ll get into that in another post). If someone says that and then you find out they only measured swans in their local park, you’d feel deceived, wouldn’t you?
\nHere’s another one: percentages are universal statements. How can it be a universal statement to say that ten percent of people are left-handed? Well, you have to look at all of them to know for sure that the rest are not. And the same thing goes for “most,” “the majority” and other words that entail statements about fractions. I think this is why Robyn Hitchcock said, “the silent majority is the crime of the century”: if the silent majority really is silent, there’s no way for the person making the claim to know what they think.
\nOn the other hand, statements about units and fractions of units are only existential statements. I have two cats, and I ate half a sausage roll for dinner last night. Words like “many,” “some” and “a few” are also existential statements. I’ve seen many white swans, but I claim no knowledge of the ones I haven’t seen. The only way you could falsify that statement is by process of elimination: showing that there aren’t enough swans in my experience to count as “many.”
\nSo the bottom line is that in order to make a universal statement, including a percentage or an average, you need to have looked at all the members of the group. But in order to make an existential statement, you only need one.
\nNow here’s why I’m writing this post: this stuff sounds simple, and I feel like I’m writing it for kids, but there are a lot of people who don’t follow it. Either they’ve never been taught about the standards of evidence for universals, or they’ve been taught to ignore them. Most of the times I’ve read “all,” people seem to get that it’s a universal and don’t say it unless they can reasonably claim to have data from all of the things concerned. But a lot of people have trouble with “most” and averages, and especially percentages. You can’t say “most” unless you’ve seen them all.
\nWell, there actually is a way you can say “most” without seeing them all. It’s called induction, but it’s hard to do, harder than a lot of people seem to think. I’ll talk about that in a future post.
\n (Update, August 19, 2015: I liked the black swan drawing above so much I decided that it should exist on T-shirts. And you too can call into existence T-shirts, throw pillows, travel mugs – all with the Existential Black Swan on them! I’ll get a cut of the money. Click here for details.)
Every morning in the fall of 1997 I would wake up at 6AM and immediately jump out of bed. I went straight to my Fujitsu laptop in the home office, leaving my then-girlfriend sleeping in the bedroom. I didn't have anywhere to be; nobody was paying me, and this wasn’t for a class. I was working on a new project: a sign-language synthesis prototype.
\n\n\n\nThis project was the culmination of several threads in my life. I had been inspired to go back to grad school by spending time talking about language with my girlfriend, a linguist who had just earned her PhD. For the past two years I had been making my living in information technology, working my way up from Microsoft Office trainer to LAN operations tech. I had also been taking night classes at the American Sign Language Institute and participating in discussions on SLLING-L, a sign linguistics email list, and the SignWriting List.
\n\n\n\nI had chosen the linguistics doctoral program at the University of New Mexico because I knew it was strong in sign linguistics, and I had just arrived in August. I was taking a course in psycholinguistics with the sign linguist Jill Morford, and a course in ASL.
\n\n\n\nSeveral people had asked me, “So you’re interested in language, and you’re interested in computers. Is there a way you could combine these interests?” I replied, “Well, there’s speech synthesis,” but that technology was already pretty well established. I realized that there wasn’t much in the area of technology for sign languages. What would sign synthesis look like?
\n\n\n\nWhen I arrived in Albuquerque I mentioned this idea to Sean Burke, a linguist and programmer I had made friends with on an earlier visit. Sean suggested using Virtual Reality Modeling Language, a standard for describing three-dimensional objects and their movements. People could install a plugin in their web browsers, and point it to a VRML (since renamed Web3D) site, and the plugin would display the 3D animation.
\n\n\n\nI followed Sean’s tip and discovered that there was a standard for specifying and animating humanoids in VRML, and a way to control the plugin through Javascript. I created a basic animation of a sign using Javascript, but after numerous frustrations I concluded that it was best to assemble the VRML through a custom Perl templating system controlled by CGI forms.
\n\n\n\nOnce my system was working to the point that it could create intelligible signs, I showed it to the faculty and students who were studying sign languages. The strongest interest came from Jill Morford, my psycholinguistics professor, who recognized that I had created a sign-language analog of the early speech synthesizers that were used at Haskins Labs to demonstrate the categorical nature of speech perception and its acquisition in language learners.
\n\n\n\nJill realized that my system, which I had dubbed SignSynth, could be used to test whether perception of sign languages is similarly categorical, and how it is acquired. The following year she obtained a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the question, and included some money to support me part time and get an office that I shared with a couple other students.
\n\n\n\nAround that time I had a meeting with my Committee on Studies. They liked my work, but told me that simply creating a sign synthesis system wasn’t theoretical enough for a Linguistics dissertation. If I used it, I would have to use it to demonstrate an answer to some theoretical question.
\n\n\n\nThat year I also took a course in literacy education called Teaching Reading to the ESL Student. The professor, Leila Flores-Due\u00f1as, was happy to support me applying these lessons to Deaf students, but throughout the course she stressed the importance of grounding our teaching in the priorities of our students, and orienting our research to the goals of the populations we were studying. She pointed out further that we should be working to help lift up people who were oppressed or disadvantaged, so when we are working with people in those situations we have a particular obligation to fit our work to their priorities.
\n\n\n\nI realized that the same principle applied to developing applications: an app that touches disadvantaged people should help them to fulfill their goals. This brought back to mind the fact that I had never seen a Deaf person ask for a sign synthesis or natural language processing application.
\n\n\n\nI actually hadn’t talked much with Deaf people about language technology. This was in part because there is a general suspicion of hearing people in Deaf communities, particularly of hearing people who come bearing language technology. The suspicion is well earned; check out what Deaf people have to say about Alexander Graham Bell.
\n\n\n\nI had difficulty overcoming this suspicion because I had only been studying American Sign Language for a few years. I could communicate with Deaf people, but only if they were patient, and many of them had no reason to be patient with some random hearing person. I realized that I didn’t necessarily have any technology that could help them accomplish their goals, and if i did, they weren’t necessarily going to try it.
\n\n\n\nThat year I ran into two major challenges in sign synthesis, both relating to the placement of hands in space. The higher-level challenge relates to signs that are called depicting or iconic verbs, or classifier predicates. In these signs, the relative location, orientation and movement of the signer’s hands are used to refer to a similar spatial relationship or movement. In a classic example, an ASL signer can depict the movement of a car by making the “3” vehicle classifier shape with one hand and moving that hand in a scaled-down version of the car’s movements.
\n\n\n\nIconic verbs are very difficult to specify in a user interface, because the level of detail of the location and movement is only constrained by the signer’s control of their hands, and the audience’s visual perception abilities. Specifying, representing and transmitting such signs is, at a minimum, a vastly different task than that for lexical signs, where there is a relatively small set of locations and movements.
\n\n\n\nThe lower-level challenge involved figuring out how to bend the shoulder, elbow and wrist on a humanoid figure so that the figure’s hand winds up in a particular place, facing in a particular direction. This is a well-known problem, called inverse kinematics, that we humans solve intuitively every time we make a gesture or pick up an object.
\n\n\n\nThere are computer libraries for inverse kinematics, and I tried to connect my animation code to those libraries, but they were written in C++, not Perl, and after several months I still hadn’t figured it out.
\n\n\n\nI described these challenges of inverse kinematics and representing classifier predicates to my committee, but they did not consider them to be theoretical enough for a dissertation. I was able to create the videos for Jill Morford’s categorical perception experiments, and she suggested that I could study categorical perception for my dissertation. In retrospect I should maybe have taken her up on it, but instead I decided to study a cosmopolitan, largely privileged community where the speakers were all long dead: the history of Parisian French through theater.
\n\n\n\nMy papers on SignSynth are routinely cited as one of the pioneering works in text-to-sign, mostly by developers who didn’t have a Professor Flores-Due\u00f1as to teach them the importance of serving the language community, and who don’t follow my lead in separating synthesis from translation.
\n\n\n\nThe paper that Jill Morford wrote with me and my fellow students about categorical perception has also had lasting influence; we failed to find a strong effect of categorical perception to match those found in speech, and the implications of that are still being discussed.
\n\n\n\nI never wanted to commercialize SignSynth, knowing that average incomes for Deaf people tend to be significantly lower than the general population, so I made it publicly available as a web application. The original application relied on third-party browser plugins to display the VRML, but over time, web browser makers dropped support for those plugins.
\n\n\n\nIn 2022 I rewrote SignSynth from scratch in Javascript, using a relatively new 3D graphics library, Three.js, and made the code available on GitHub.\u00a0 I updated the interface to follow “character pickers” like Richard Ishida’s IPA Character Picker, replacing the old interface that was heavy on drop-down menus.\u00a0 I also created a standalone character picker for the Stokoe notation that it used for the original text.
\n\n\n\nThinking back to 1997, what got me so excited, what inspired me to move across the country and start a doctoral program with no promise of funding, living off of part time jobs and student loans, and spend so many unpaid hours every day, was the idea that I was creating something new, something that could be useful to people.
\n\n\n\nWhen I was young, I admired inventors, both real-life inventors like Thomas Edison and fictional ones like Professor Bullfinch from the Danny Dunn books. My father, my stepfather and my mother’s boyfriends in between were all tinkerers, and they made useful things. I didn’t have money to buy a lot of tools and equipment, or space to keep it in, but I did have access to computers, and the skills to program them.
\n\n\n\nLooking back, there was some ego in this. Why was it important for me to make these things, and not someone else? Why not be satisfied fixing the Novell servers for Chase Manhattan, or even sending faxes for John Hancock?
\n\n\n\nTo be fair to myself, I have never been a competitive inventor. While I was working on SignSynth I met several people who were working on similar systems, and I always tried to be positive, supportive and cooperative. I let the quality of my work speak for itself, and trusted people to judge its value for themselves.
\n\n\n\nI’ve never felt like I was the best inventor, programmer or researcher in the world, but even in 1997 I had a fair amount of experience and education in research and technology. I felt like those skills were being wasted when I was taking telephone messages at John Hancock, and even when I was reinstalling network drivers. Of course, there are a lot of highly skilled people out there, maybe more than there’s a need for.
\n\n\n\nAfter putting SignSynth on the shelf and focusing on French negation for my dissertation, I didn’t feel the same level of excitement; the theoretical advancements that my committee demanded felt small by comparison, although I’m still proud of them.
\n\n\n\nI have felt a bit more excitement for my recent work for the New School. It’s a more simple project, just retrieving class listings or final grades from the student information system and presenting it in a table, but it helps save time and effort for students and faculty. Less exciting, but still satisfying.
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/kht3b-en789","guid":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/?p=1544","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1766534400,"rid":"x9t7h-vej93","summary":"The beginning Every morning in the fall of 1997 I would wake up at 6AM and immediately jump out of bed. I went straight to my Fujitsu laptop in the home office, leaving my then-girlfriend sleeping in the bedroom. I didn't have anywhere to be; nobody was paying me, and this wasn't for a class.","tags":["Academia","Information Technology","Phonology","Sign Languages","Software"],"title":"The story of SignSynth","updated_at":1792530050,"url":"https://grieve-smith.com/blog/2025/12/the-story-of-signsynth/","version":"v1"}],"out_of":57832,"page":1,"per_page":10,"total-results":57832}