Recent highlights

1. •Recently back from the 43rd Societas Linguistica Europaea Annual Meeting➚ in Vilnius – and what a lot of fun it was, too! If you didn’t get a copy of the handout of my paper (talk), you can download it here➚. Hot on the heels of that was this meeting at UCL➚ – currently writing up my contribution.
   

2. •Latest papers... Noise-induced dynamical transition in systems with symmetric absorbing states➚ (with Dominic Russell), Lattice Models of Nonequilibrium Bacterial Dynamics➚ (with Alasdair Thompson, Julien Tailleur and Mike Cates), Dynamical transition in the open-boundary totally asymmetric exclusion process➚ (with Arno Proeme and Martin Evans, shortly to appear in J Phys A) and Cross-situational learning: An experimental study of word-learning mechanisms➚ (with Andy Smith and Kenny Smith, to hit the pages of Cognitive Science). More on their way!
   

3. •Half of July was spent at Physics by the Lake➚, an annual summer school for starting Condensed Matter PhD students. This year’s was, I think, the most enjoyable yet – but who knows what future years may bring? Details of the 2011 school will be published on the website when they are finalised.
   

4. •The Language Learning 60th Anniversary book is now out and contains a number of interesting articles on “Language as a Complex Adaptive System” (two of which are co-written by me). See here for the Table of Contents➚. This is available from all good booksellers➚ and we even have a review➚! (No, I don’t get any royalties).
   

5. •I participated in an Applications of Complexity Science meeting➚ (Brunel, UK, 18 November) and  Darwin09 – 150 years after Darwin: From molecular evolution to language➚ (Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 23-7 November 2009)
   

6. •Read our opinion piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences entitled Building social cognitive models of language change➚ to find out how statistical-physics type modelling might help us understand the cognitive and social mechanisms underlying culture change.

write Dr Richard Blythe, SUPA, School of Physics and Astronomy, Mayfield Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3HZ, UK

email r.a.blythe [at] ed.ac.uk · phone +44 131 650 5105 · fax +44 131 650 5209