• Thanks to all who took part in the Open House, which seemed to go very well, as far as anyone can tell. The fact that today's faculty meeting is at 8:30 AM, however, shows that nothing is perfect...
• And the prospie party was a great success on Wednesday night. Things got a bit carried away, though, when the band started switching instruments: Lis on drums, Ivan on guitar, and Dan Jurafsky singing! Whodathunk? Hal Tily caught a bit of it on his phone camera. Check it out HERE.

• Look Who's Talking

  • Cleo Condoravdi is away this weekend in Tuebingen, where she is an invited speaker at the Workshop on Negation and Polarity. She's presenting a talk called: NPI Licensing and Negation in Temporal Clauses.
  • Dmitry Levinson is also giving a talk at the Tuebingen workshop, called: Licensing of Negative Polarity Particles in English.
  • In addition, Peter Sells and Shin-Sook Kim (U. Frankfurt) are giving a presentation at that same workshop called: Generalizing the Immediate Scope Constraint on NPI Licensing.
  • And the Georgetown University Round Table (GURT) has a couple of Stanford folks presenting this weekend:
    
    
    • Stefan Kaufmann (Northwestern University) and Misa Miyachi (University of Chicago) talking about: Case marking and the modal dimension of temporal expressions
    • John Beavers (Georgetown U.) presenting: Predicting argument realization from preposition semantics.
  
  
• The Stanford Blood Center has a shortage of all types. For an appointment, goto http://bloodcenter.stanford.edu/ or call 650-723-7831. It only takes an hour of your time and you get free cookies.
  
• Daylight Savings Time changes this weekend in those parts of the US that observe it. This is earlier than usual and will result in some computers being an hour off since, unless patched, they will not know about the change. Note that it is not sufficient in most cases to manually change the time on your computer since some applications depend on local time and some on universal time. Instead, you need to update the info about timezones/daylight savings changes. Stanford has some info at http://dst2007.stanford.edu/

Rebecca Scarborough to Join the Council on Foreign Relations?

Whoa... According to last week's Financial Times, it looks like our own Rebecca Scarborough has been invited to join the Council on Foreign Relations, a famous Washington think tank! Uhh... wait a minute. Upon closer inspection, this might be Angelina Jolie masquerading as Rebecca... What gives? Rebecca is going to Colorado next year, isn't she?

• From the web-lore:
  
  Being a graduate student is like becoming all of the Seven Dwarves. In the middle, you are usually sick (`Sneezy'), tired (`Sleepy'), and irritable (`Grumpy'). But at the end, they call you `Doc', and then you're `Happy'.
• Anonymous:
  
  
  1. How Do You Catch a Unique Rabbit? Unique Up On It.
  2. How Do You Catch a Tame Rabbit? Tame Way, Unique Up On It.
  3. How Do Crazy People Go Through The Forest? They Take The Psycho Path.
  4. How Do You Get Holy Water? You Boil The Hell Out Of It.
  5. What Do Fish Say When They Hit a Concrete Wall? Dam!
  6. What Do Eskimos Get From Sitting On The Ice too Long? Polaroids.
  7. What Do You Call a Boomerang That Doesn't work? A Stick.
  8. What Do You Call Cheese That Isn't Yours? Nacho Cheese.
  9. What Do You Call Santa's Helpers? Subordinate Clauses.
  10. What Do You Call Four Bullfighters In Quicksand? Quattro Sinko.
  11. What Do You Get From a Pampered Cow? Spoiled Milk.
  12. What Do You Get When You Cross a Snowman With a Vampire? Frostbite.
  13. What Lies At The Bottom Of The Ocean And Twitches? A Nervous Wreck.
  14. What's The Difference Between Roast Beef And Pea Soup? Anyone Can Roast Beef.
  15. Where Do You Find a Dog With No Legs? Right Where You Left Him.
  16. Why Do Gorillas Have Big Nostrils? Because They Have Big Fingers.
  17. Why Don't Blind People Like To Sky Dive? Because It Scares The Dog.
  18. What Kind Of Coffee Was Served On The Titanic? Sanka.
  19. What Is The Difference Between a Harley And a Hoover? The Location Of The Dirt Bag.
  20. Why Did Pilgrims' Pants Always Fall Down? Because They Wore Their B Hat.
  21. What's The Difference Between a Bad Golfer And a Bad Skydiver? A Bad Golfer Goes Whack, Dang!
  A Bad Skydiver Goes Dang! Whack.
  22. How Is a TexasTornado And a AlabamaDivorce The Same? Somebody's Gonna Lose A Trailer!

• FRIDAY, 9 MARCH

  • SocioLunch

    12:30 in MJH 110 (the former Ugly Dark Room)
    

  • Friday Cognitive Seminar (Psychology)

    15:15 in Jordan Hall (Bldg. 420), room 050
    
    
    
    • Steve Flusberg: Thinking about thinking about thinking: language, space, and folk psychology
      
    • Jeremy Glick: Trigrams, ah, ah, ah: Counting the way towards Bayesian connectionism with word segmentation.
    • Daniel Sternberg: Causality as context in implicit contingency learning

  • Linguistics Department Colloquium

    15:30 in MJH 126
    
    John McCarthy (U. Mass.)
    Getting to Optimality (abstract)
    

  • Weekly Social

    17:00 in the department lounge. Gourmet delights from the Social Committee.
    
  
  
• SATURDAY, 10 MARCH

  • Dynamics of Probabilistic Grammar Project

    Kick-off event: 12:00 -- 17:00 in MJH 126 (Lunch Provided)
    
    
• MONDAY, 12 MARCH
  

  • Berkeley Phonetics and Phonology Forum

    12:00 in 46 Dwinelle Hall (UC Berkeley)
    
    Mike Grosvald (UC Davis)
    Long-distance vowel-to-vowel coarticulation: Production & perception study
  
  
• TUESDAY, 13 MARCH
  

  • CSLI Tea

    15:00 in the Cordura Hall Greenhouse
    

  • Stanford Syntax Workshop

    MJH 126
    
    Jan Strunk (U. of Bochum and Stanford)
    Extraposition Myth Busting
    
    
  
  
• THURSDAY, 15 MARCH

  • UCSC Syntax Circle

    12:00 in Humanities 1, 200 (UC Santa Cruz)
    
    Kyle Rawlins will present some of his ongoing research on the syntax of bare disjunctive interrogatives.
    

  • Symbolic Systems Forum

    16:15 in Bldg. 380, room 380C (Math Corner)
    
    Gorkem Ozbek (SSP MS Candidate)
    Toward a Translation Model for English to Turkish Machine Translation
    

  • Stanford Psychology of Language Tea (SPLAT)

    17:15 in MJH 126
    
    Neal Snider
    TBA
    
  
  
  
• FRIDAY, 16 MARCH

  • 8TH ANNUAL SEMANTICS FEST

    All day in MJH 126.

  • SocioLunch

    12:30 in MJH 110 (the former Ugly Dark Room)
    

  • Berkeley Syntax and Semantics Circle

    14:30 in 1229 Dwinelle Hall (UC Berkeley)
    
    Rebecca Cover (UC Berkeley) will present a talk on her research.
    

  • Philosophy Department Colloquium

    15:15pm in Bldg. 90, room 92Q
    
    Thomas Ricketts (U. of Pittsburgh)
    Logical Segmentation and Higher-Order Quantification in Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus'
    

  • InfoSeminar (Computer Science Department)

    16:15pm in Gates B12
    
    Phokion Kolaitis (IBM Almaden Research)
    The Query Containment Problem: Set Semantics vs. Bag Semantics
    

  • Weekly Social

    17:00 in the department lounge. Gourmet delights from the Social Committee.
    
  
  

• For local linguistic events, always consult the Department's event page, available RIGHT HERE
  
  
• Got broader interests? The New Sesquipedalian recommends reading or even subscribing to the CSLI Calendar, available HERE.
  
  
• What's happening at UC Santa Cruz? Find out HERE.
  
  
• What's going on at UC Berkeley? Check it out HERE.