Kazuko Hiramatsu

One of my favorite procrastination sites is Sporcle. There are quite a few language-related games there so I can easily convince myself that I’m not really wasting time. Plus, I always learn something. (“Mentally stimulating diversions”, indeed!)

Watching Jeopardy the other day, I learned of another site, Guess my word. It’s really simple yet entertaining. You guess the word-of-the-day by typing a word. After each guess, you get a reply stating whether your guess comes alphabetically before or after the target word.

I’ll be adding this to my procrastination toolkit. Does anyone have other suggestions?

Here’s a relatively new linguistics blog from Melbourne that you might enjoy.

http://www.superlinguo.com/

Every semester, I get questions about the effectiveness of the “Your Baby Can Read” program. Here’s a clip from the Today show (April 13, 2011) that discusses a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission filed by the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/42557517/ns/today-money/

I’m available for advising appointments (English TCP, Linguistics minor, new English major with specialization in Linguistics). Please email me or stop by.

We have one upper-level course in Summer 2011 and two in Fall 2011. If you are a Linguistics minor or French/Spanish & Linguistics major, you should take LIN 313 in the fall since this course is not offered very often.

Summer 2011

Fall 2011

Is anyone else having trouble understanding the news about radiation levels?  Here’s a link to a visual representation of radiation doses (by xkcd‘s Randall Munroe). And from NPR’s Here and Now, listen to a musical representation of radiation doses by Adam Ragusea.

It’s official!  We’ve received the final approvals for our new English major with a specialization in Linguistics. For the requirements, click here.

Feel free to email me or stop by my office for advising or additional information.

There’s a new online monthly magazine aimed at introducing linguistics to the public. Check out their first issue!

http://popularlinguisticsonline.org/

(A hat tip goes out to somebody but I can’t remember who mentioned this to me–a student? colleague?)

The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) hosts an annual summer research program for outstanding undergraduate students underrepresented in their fields of study.

Click here for more information about the program and here for which linguistics professors will be participating in the program this year.

Last weekend, the American Dialect Society voted “app” as the word of the year for 2010. Check out the ADS site for all of the nominees and a press release listing the winners. This year, there are photos from the event as well as a video on the Visual Thesaurus.

http://www.americandialect.org/

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/2568/

UM-Flint has been recognized for its civic engagement in the Flint community! We’ve received a Community Engagement classification by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Read more about it here.