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I’ve updated the design of this site. My goal was to get a template I liked better than the one that I had. I’m prepping for this to be my regular website for research and teaching, something I’ll want to have quite spiffed up before I go on the academic job market. The photo image in the header is one I took while we were near the Cape of Good Hope, Western Cape, South Aftrica, early in 2012. I really loved the color of the orange lichen that was quite common in that area. I’ve also fired up a Twitter Read More …

Another reading from Ling8920 Tager-Flusberg, H. (2000). Language and understanding minds: connections in autism. In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, & D. J. Cohen (Eds.), Understanding other minds: Perspectives from autism and developmental cognitive neuroscience (2nd ed., pp. 1–45). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tager-Flusberg noted that recent research had identified links among autism, impairment in pragmatic function—“in the ability to use language to communicate effectively in a range of social contexts”—and theory of mind (p. 3). But she is distressed by the “relative neglect” of study of impairments in lexical and syntactic function in the same population. The aim of this Read More …

Analytical summary of an article from my Ling 8920 class, which focuses on cognition and language, particularly on language deficiencies. Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A. M., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a “theory of mind” ? Cognition, 21(1), 37–46. The authors note that mental retardation cannot be the cause of autistic subjects’ inability to form normal social relations because (a) there are autistic persons with normal IQs and (b) “mentally retarded non-autistic children, such as Down’s syndrome, are socially competent relative to their mental age” (p. 38). The authors define theory of mind (after Premack and Woodruff) as Read More …

I have 18 students in an 8:00 a.m. class who have been dutifully (if a bit groggily and yawningly) showing up three times a week to work on their writing. The course is not just about writing, though. It’s titled “Writing and Academic Inquiry,” and my goal has been to work with them on their writing as a skill but also to introduce them to writing as a subject of inquiry. The topic I selected is called by various names; by its proponents, “automated essay scoring” (which is its handle on Wikipedia) “automated writing assessment,” “automated writing evaluation,” and the Read More …

Well, the 2012-2013 school year has started, and I’m in it up to my eyeballs. (You can see my report on last year here.) But it’s pretty exciting stuff. I’ve got two classes this fall, PhD qualifying exams in the spring, and two new “course preps” this year. I’m also continuing my research activities. More on all these items below. My fall classes are both in Cognitive Science, the last I need to complete my formal minor in that field. The survey course, with Prof. Johnson in the Carlson School of Management, is pretty sweeping in its scope. I’m hoping Read More …

Last year went very well, though not exactly as I predicted at its outset. I took three classes a semester last year, up from the 2-per of the previous year. This meant that I dropped my activity in my law firm from about 2/3 time to about 1/2 time. That proved not to be a problem because we hired a bright new associate attorney in April 2011 who is glad to pick up the slack (partly because he knows he’ll ‘inherit’ most of my interest in the firm in a couple years). After the first year of classes, which focused Read More …

  (Updated Aug 19 to add picture and correct typos!) Below is the bibliography of the 150 or so books, book chapters, and articles I’m studying for my PhD qualifying exams in spring 2013. I need to pass these exams to be permitted to write my dissertation. The texts are actually divided into four groups, based on the faculty members who will be writing the question and reading my answer for each group: Rhetorical theory (Dr. Berkenkotter); scientific and technical communication (Dr. Breuch); law, language, logic (my specialty; Dr. Schuster); and computational methods (Dr. Pakhomov). There are two items yet Read More …

… and why even (or especially) flat-earth fundamentalists should not be threatened by it On January 13, 2012, on the 23rd anniversary of our first date—which was also a Friday the 13th—Bob and I got married in New York City. This union has little legal significance: Minnesota does not recognize it, and if some folks have their way, by year-end there will be a state constitutional amendment preventing its recognition. A few states and countries will honor our decision to claim responsibility for each other, but not our home state, where we spend most of our time. Our relationship did Read More …

In today’s class, we’re having visits from Dr. John Logie and Dr. Christina Haas, both professors in the department. Logie will be talking about rhetorical analysis and Haas about grounded theory. We read two studies for today; not surprisingly, they employed rhetorical analysis and grounded theory. Here they are: Harper, F. M., Weinberg, J., Logie, J., & Konstan, J. A. (2010). Question types in social Q&A sites. First Monday, 15(7). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt/printerFriendly/2913/2571 Teston, C. B. (2009). A Grounded Investigation of Genred Guidelines in Cancer Care Deliberations. Written Communication, 26(3), 320 -348. doi:10.1177/0741088309336937 The Harper study (on which Prof. Logie Read More …