A hearty Sesquicongratulations to Neal Snider who passed his dissertation oral last Thursday. Way to go, Neal!

This summer, four undergraduates are working on faculty-supervised research projects, namely:

• Richard Futrell (Joan Bresnan's project on Predicting the Genitive Alternation )
• Nicole Fernandez and Rachel Cristy (Meghan Sumner's project The Learning, Generalization, and Use of Non-Native Contrastive Cues )
• Kimberly Chu (Eve Clark's project First Language Acquisition)

And the website for the 2009 LSA Linguistic Institute, hosted by UC Berkeley, is now up (though rather incomplete....). Check it out HERE. The full list of faculty should be posted later this month.

Lots of travel this summer. Here's just a sample of the activities people have planned:

The ACL Meeting is coming right up, in Columbus, Ohio. It includes papers coauthored by Dan Jurafsky, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Chris Manning, Sharon Goldwater, not to mention alums Emily Bender and Mark Johnson.

The Summer LSA Meeting is also in Columbus this July. That program contains a paper by Laura Whitton, a poster by Mike Speriosu, and a plenary talk by John Rickford and Tom Wasow.

The LFG Conference in Sydney, Australia has papers by department alumni Ash Asudeh, Mary Dalrymple, Ida Toivonen, Rachel Nordlinger, Miriam Butt, and Alex Alsina.

And the HPSG Conference in Keihanna, Japan has papers by alums Steve Wechsler, Dan Flickinger, and Emily Bender. Ivan Sag will also be there to cheer them on.

Inbal Arnon will present a paper in Moscow at the third International Cognitive Science Conference before she and Eve Clark present a joint poster at the International Association for the Study of Child Language in Edinburgh, where Nola Stephens also has a poster. Eve travels to Edinburgh via Bulgaria, where she is teaching in the 15th International Summer School in Cognitive Science, held at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. After Edinburgh, she's off to Brighton where she's giving a paper and serving as session discussant at the International Conference on Language, Communication and Cognition. In Brighton, Eve will meet up with Meghan Sumner, who is presenting a paper at the same conference. Meghan gets to Brighton after a month in Germany (where the kids get to spend time with the grandparents). And before that, Meghan is presenting a paper in Paris for the ASA. Meanwhile, Laura Staum Casasanto and Daniel Casasanto will also present papers at the Brighton conference (Daniel will in fact present three!), but before that she'll present a joint paper with Ivan Sag at the 30th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Washington, where Neal Snider, Lera Boroditsky, Jay McClelland, Barbara Tversky, Herb Clark, Daniel Casasanto, and alums Roger Levy and Florian Jaeger are all on the program as well (not to mention Noam Chomsky and Douglas Hofstadter).

Arto Anttila and Olga Dmitrieva have a poster at LabPhon11 at the Victoria University of Wellingon in New Zealand (30 June - 2 July), where whichever one of them goes will probably run into Stacy Lewis, who is presenting a paper at IGALA 5, which follows directly in the same venue (3-5 July). Arto will also present at the Workshop on Case Variation held later this month in Stuttgart, Germany, where Miriam Butt is also presenting a paper.

Asya Pereltsvaig is also off to present a paper in Columbus - not at ACL, but at the Third Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society. After that, she's off to Italy to present an invited talk at the University of Venice.

Why aren't your summer plans listed here? Because we don't know about them...

All three UG Honors theses presented on May 30 were outstanding. They were by David Hall (Symbolic Systems), Karl Pichotta (Symbolic Systems), and Mackenzie Price (Linguistics).



UG Honors Presentations

The Social Committee has raised the bar for all future Social Committees, it seems. The cuisine at last Friday's party was, like, totally, totally awesome.... Here's some photos to give you a flavor...

Political Science for Dummies

Democratic

You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

Republican

You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

Socialist

You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

Communist

You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

Capitalist, American style

You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

Bureaucracy, American style

You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.

American Corporation

You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

French Corporation

You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

Japanese Corporation

You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

German Corporation

You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

Italian Corporation

You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

Russian Corporation

You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

Taliban Corporation

You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts.
You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.

Iraqi Corporation

You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

Polish Corporation

You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

Belgian Corporation

You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.

Florida Corporation

You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think is the best-looking cow.

California Corporation

You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegals.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.

For events farther in the future consult the Upcoming Events Page.

WEDNESDAY, 11 JUNE

• NASA Demonstration

  Beth Ann Hockey (UCSC) and students/partners
  "Spoken Dialog Systems"
  12:30pm, CREST Facility, Bldg. 538c, NASA Ames, Moffet Field

SUNDAY, 15 JUNE

• Stanford Commencement

  Speaker is Oprah Winfrey
  9:30am, Stanford Stadium
  Open to the public; no tickets needed

• Department Commencement

  12:30pm (Note corrected time), Koret Park (the grove between the School of Education, Meyer Library, and Green Library)

UPCOMING EVENTS (always under construction)

LINGUISTIC DEPARTMENT EVENTS PAGE

Got broader interests? The New Sesquipedalian recommends reading or even subscribing to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.

WHAT'S HAPPENING AT UC SANTA CRUZ?

WHAT'S GOING ON AT UC BERKELEY?

HOW ABOUT MIT? UMass Amherst? U Chicago? Rutgers?

1. China Red Cross (Chinese Site)
If connection fails, please try here.
Visa card acceptable.

2. Chinese Consulate in San Francisco, please write a check and put "5.12 Sichuan earthquake donation" as the memo.

Mailing Address:
Consul Yan Li
Education Office,
The Consulate General of the People's Republic of China,
1450 Laguna street, San Fransisco, CA 94115.


The consulate will forward your donation to China Red Cross

3. Chinese Consulate in Houston
Acceptable:check/money order/cashier's check
Payable to:Chinese Consulate General in Houston
Memo: Earthquake donation, ????
Address:811 Holman Street, Houston, TX 77002
Tel:(713)522-0438

4. Chinese Consulate in New York: Chinese, English

5. Chinese Embassy in UK: Chinese, English

6. Chinese Embassy in Australia: English

Your ENTIRE contribution is guaranteed to go to the earthquake relief directly if you choose above options. However, for convenience, if you prefer to pay online, you can try the following. Administrative or transactional fee may apply.

Other options:

• International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) (English, Francais and Espanol)
  
  Credit card acceptable. Click on "how to help"-->"online donations" --> "China Earthquake"
• Hongkong Red Cross (English and Chinese)
  
  Visa and Master card acceptable. Donation amount in HK dollars.
• American Red Cross (English)
  
  Major rredit cards acceptable.
• Canadian Red Cross (English, Francais)
  
  Credit Card or Interac Online Payment Service
• British Red Cross
  
  Donation in GBP only and major credit cards acceptable.
• Mercy Corps (English)
  
  Major credit card acceptable. US dollars only.
• Silicon Valley Tsinghua Network (SVTN) (English Site)

The Stanford Blood Center is reporting a shortage of types O, A, B-, and AB-. For an appointment, visit http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies. The Blood Center is also raising money for a new bloodmobile.

Want to contribute information? Want to be a reporter? Want to see something appear here regularly? Want to be a regular columnist? Want to take over running the entire operation? Write directly to sesquip@gmail.com.