@benjamingeer@zirk.us
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

benjamingeer

@benjamingeer@zirk.us

Software developer and ex-academic (sociology, conceptual history, cognitive linguistics, Arabic culture, digital humanities). I like connecting with people around the world and sharing knowledge.

Current hobbies:

• Open-access, open-source critical sheet music editions: https://tondauer.art
• Arabic podcast on ecology, migration, and inequality: https://كوكبنا.شبكة
• Reviews of 21st-century Arabic books on the history of ideas
• Playing classical piano music: https://makertube.net/c/benjamin_geer_channel/videos

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benjamingeer, to art
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

A Book from the Sky is a 600-page book published in 1988 by Chinese artist Xu Bing, consisting entirely of nonsense, using only meaningless, imaginary Chinese characters, printed in the style of medieval woodblock editions. According to Xu, his main purpose was to "expose the fact that Chinese literary culture is boring”. 😄 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Book_from_the_Sky

NicoleCRust, to science
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

When should one call themselves an X researcher?

There are so many different types of researchers. Weather researchers, climate researchers, brain researchers. And within those categories, the nuances (like memory researchers).

When someone says they are an X researcher, what does that imply to you? In other words, what qualifies? Does it just imply that they are curious about X? Or perhaps that they know a bit more about it - perhaps they've mastered some scholarly literature or they've done at least one experiment? Or maybe even published a paper in a peer reviewed journal? Or maybe even more - perhaps they have a body of work on the topic; maybe they even run a lab (and have grants to support X research).

On one hand, no one should gate keep curiosity! On the other, certain terms imply knowledge and qualifications. I'm a "researcher". But just because I know a lot about memory doesn't automatically mean that people should listen to me about climate or economics. And I once read a very good book about ecosystems, but I don't think that means I should quality as an ecosystem researcher. So what, then, might instead?

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@vicgrinberg @NicoleCRust To me it just means that researching X is a large part of your job. I think researchers who have just finished their PhD are researchers, even if they haven’t published much yet.

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@vicgrinberg You said the crucial thing for you is publications. So if someone is a postdoc and spends their whole day doing research, but none of it has been published yet, are they a researcher? @NicoleCRust

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@vicgrinberg In the humanities, people are supposed to turn their PhD thesis into a book and publish it, but this can take years. Meanwhile they may be employed as postdocs, and probably have very few publications. Yet it's often said that PhD students and postdocs are the best experts on their topic (better than their supervisors), because they had to read and critique a huge amount of research on that topic when working on their thesis. @NicoleCRust

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@vicgrinberg The difference is that one of them is doing their PhD or postdoc in maths at a university and the other one isn't. This is why we have universities.

First you said you wanted significant contributions, "paper(s) or one extremely impactful paper or a book or something else, in any case something peer reviewed". Now you say essays and conference contributions (neither of which are peer reviewed) are OK. If it's not in your field, how will you judge it?

@NicoleCRust

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@vicgrinberg I'm just saying that if you only count people who have already had a major impact in their field as researchers, you're excluding a lot of early-career researchers. Publications are hard to evaluate if they're not in your field. We all know that rubbish sometimes gets published in peer reviewed journals. In practice, we tend to look at the reputation of the institution or department that the person is working in.

benjamingeer, to ai
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

‘Back in the 1960s, if you played a 2,600Hz tone into an AT&T pay phone, you could make calls without paying.… the problem was general: Data and control used the same channel…. mixing data with commands is at the root of many of our computer security vulnerabilities…. Prompt injection is a similar technique for attacking large language models (LLMs)…. In one example, someone tricked a car-dealership’s chatbot into selling them a car for $1.’

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/05/llms-data-control-path-insecurity.html

benjamingeer, to China
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

“Fujian province will allow women to legally access their partners’ property details without lengthy court proceedings.” https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1015119 #China #inequality #women

benjamingeer, to linguistics
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

“Starting with Volume 35 (2024), Cognitive Linguistics is transformed into a Diamond Open Access journal thanks to our subscribers participating in the Subscribe to Open (S2O) project. All current content will be published under a Creative Commons License (CC-BY 4.0) at no cost to authors and will be freely available to readers.”

https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/cogl/html

cc @petersuber

@linguistics

mbonsma, to random
@mbonsma@mastodon.social avatar

The pedal bike clicked for my 4-year-old this week. His grin, his squeals of laughter, his "I'm going really fast! This is fun!" while we ride beside him - one of the best feelings I've ever had as a parent.

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@mbonsma When one of our kids got the hang of it, he said, “Now I’ll never have to walk again!”

benjamingeer, to classicalmusic
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“We live in a world where the recording industry has been around for a hundred years. Every known piece has been recorded many times and is widely available. To put it simply, listeners and musicians alike are fed up with the usual repertoire.” https://culture.pl/en/article/many-composers-have-been-erased-from-history-an-interview-with-marcin-swiatkiewicz @classicalmusic

benjamingeer, to random French
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

Plus jeunes donc plus verts ?

« les moins de 25 ans ne sont pas plus acquis à la cause environnementale que les plus âgés : leurs attitudes ne diffèrent pas significativement de celles des moins de 60 ans »

https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-de-science-politique-2023-1-page-41.htm?tap=7r7er51ndewdi&wt.mc_id=crn-tap-m-alternatives

benjamingeer, to Korean
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

Why is it so hard for English teachers to learn Japanese? https://www.languageonthemove.com/why-is-it-so-hard-for-english-teachers-to-learn-japanese/

benjamingeer, to climate
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

‘Long before the political crisis, food
production in Niger began falling victim
to the increasingly hostile environment,
as the Sahara desert crept south and
drought degraded the soil. “Production
decreased every harvest season until there was nothing coming out,” says Mamadou.’

Those who can, leave: Vignettes from Niger’s border with Benin

in issue 159 of @thecontinent

benjamingeer, to literature
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

All translations of literature seem to contain unfortunate mistakes that will probably never be corrected. Here in Leri Price’s translation of Khaled Khalifa’s novel No One Prayed Over Their Graves (a good translation overall), الفتيات السافرات means girls who don’t wear the hijab, not girls who travel.

couldn't care less about their criticisms when they described her as a disgraced woman who kept company with strangers and boasted of her friendships with Christians, Jews, and girls who traveled abroad.

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

Also, I don’t mean to be picky, but ثلاثة أمتار is three metres, not thirty.

the skeleton of a strange beast over thirty meters long

Cmastication, to random
@Cmastication@mastodon.social avatar

I did the dumbest little project tonight. I find it amusing that my European colleagues don't realize that their country is basically the size of Indiana.. or Tennessee or some other state that they can't find on a map. So I pulled the data to determine which state is most like which country. My 3 metrics are: population, land mass, and GDP. I have the data cleaned up. So maybe now a simple Shiny app?

What should I do with this project?

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@Cmastication @oxl Can your American colleagues find the states of Germany on a map? Bavaria is bigger than West Virginia.

benjamingeer,
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@kellogh @Cmastication @oxl I always thought it was just called Dakota and was invented by Paul McCartney for the song Rocky Raccoon.

benjamingeer, to random
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

Right-wing populists in South Africa have started copying their American counterparts by calling for a border wall https://africasacountry.com/2024/04/border-politics/

gallegre, to random French
@gallegre@mas.to avatar

Opinion provocatrice:
EELV (Les Ecologistes), c'est un peu comme un réseau social qui a mal tourné. Le pb des réseaux c'est le piège qui veut que ce sont les personnes qui ont le moins de choses à dire, qui parlent le plus (cf vos boucles WhatsApp). Les RS règlent ce problème par le vote (rt fav)...et les algorithmes. Le PS réglait ça par un objectif commun: gagner des élections pour distribuer des postes. Un parti ne peut être un endroit de délibération démocratique permanent.

benjamingeer,
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@gallegre Un parti est fait pour prendre le pouvoir, oui, mais dans le but d'infléchir le comportement de l'État dans un sens particulier. Dans la mesure où le PS était un parti qui se désignait comme « socialiste », il avait aussi une idéologie (aussi floue soit-elle) et ne faisait pas n'importe quoi pour prendre le pouvoir (par ex. devenir un parti d'extrême droite). C'est justement l'idéologie du parti qui lui attire des membres et des électeurs et lui permet de gagner des élections.

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@gallegre Pour arriver à défendre des intérêts de classe, il faut s'attirer des électeurs de cette classe-là, en s'adressant à eux et en évoquant leurs valeurs, leur importance, la place qu'ils méritent d'occuper dans la société par rapport à d'autres, c'est-à-dire une idéologie.

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@gallegre Ayant été brièvement militant d'EELV, ce qui m'a frappé c'était que le mot « écologie » avait des sens complètement différents pour différentes catégories de militants. Pour certains, c'était la lutte contre les ondes électromagnétiques. Pour d'autres, c'était des repas bio dans les cantines scolaires. Pour une minorité seulement, la lutte contre le réchauffement climatique.

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@gallegre En ce qui concerne les intérêts de classe, une autre chose m'a frappé : l'absence totale du mot « impôts » dans le programme officiel d'EELV. Dans la pratique, il y avait des militants de droite et de gauche. Je crois qu'il faut quand même un minimum de consensus idéologique pour qu'un parti tienne la route.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

People on Twitter are debating whether a person using uncommon words like "delve" are trying to sound smarter than they are, or worse, are ChatGPT bots, because "normal" people don't talk like that.

You don't have to get upset, or embroiled in the debate. Not worth the time or attention. But I'll share some important context as your friendly neighborhood Nigerian 🙋🏿‍♂️

Many Nigerians have bigger English language vocabularies and better command of grammar than the typical American or English person

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@mekkaokereke There are also a lot of different Englishes in Europe. It’s my first language, but I’ve lived here long enough that I’ve picked up aspects of these, and my kids have done so even more. When Germans say “We have to finish it until Friday” (i.e. by Friday), or French people say “Normally I’m free this weekend” (i.e. I should be), it sounds fine to me. English isn’t the exclusive property of any group, it belongs to everyone who uses it.

mina, to random
@mina@berlin.social avatar

@gaysteve

Can this be real?

benjamingeer,
@benjamingeer@zirk.us avatar

@titia @mina @gaysteve In a similar vein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweigt_stille,_plaudert_nicht,_BWV_211

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