Tootfinder

Eyeballing Figure 1 of their response actually seems to support this: the three subregions in the Americas contain nearly 80 % of all polysynthetic languages. In each of them, the median population size lies below the global median. However, if we compare within each of these three regions, polysynthetic languages have a higher median L1_population size than non-polysynthetic ones. Might this pattern point towards a classic Simpson's paradox?
A negative global association arises because polysynth lang are concentrated in regions with smaller overall populations, even though within regions the relationsh is positive. Once we account for that structure—as our mixed logit models do—the supposed "global" negative effect reverses direction.

Dies ist mein erster Beitrag mit dem Plugin Mastodon Autopost für WordPress - https://wordpress.org/plugins/autopost-to-mastodon/

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A Wordpress Plugin that automatically posts your new articles to Mastodon. The best: It is set and forget!

Alone into the rocks: Tunnel walk and traces of glacial plucking at 2200m
(And yes, the colors really were that stunning...)
#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Photography

Observation of Crystalline Nonlocal Volume Plasmon Waves
Sathwik Bharadwaj, Makoto Schreiber, Jungho Mun, Sam Ruttiman, Pronoy Das, Misa Hayashida, Marek Malac, Peter Nordlander, Zubin Jacob
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07612

Observation of Crystalline Nonlocal Volume Plasmon Waves
In plasmonics, nonlocal effects arise when the material response to optical excitations is strongly dependent on the spatial correlations of the excitation. It is well known that a classical free electron gas system supports local Drude volume plasmon waves. Whereas a compressible quantum electron gas system sustains hydrodynamic volume plasmons with nonlocal dispersion isotropic across all high-symmetry directions. Here, distinct from Drude and Hydrodynamic plasmon waves, we present the first …

¿Tiene usted sitios hechos en WordPress y le gustaría que el contenido llegue a una audiencia directamente sin depender de redes sociales privadas?
Esta es otra prueba de una publicación de un sitio en WordPress que tiene activado el plugin de integración con el Fediverso, haciendo que se pueda interactuar con el contenido desde Mastodon y cualquier otra red social abierta que use el protocolo ActivityPub.
En este caso la pšgina es un producto de una tienda en línea con el plugin…

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Warum gibts nicht ein Plugin für eine normale Webseite, die mit Soziale Netzwerk, wie das Ferdiverse verbindet?
Könnte man per RSS-Feed seine Beiträge von einer Normalen Webseite zu z.B.: Mastodon schicken ? Das wäre doch echt bahnbrechend, dann bräuchte man kein exra Plugin, sondern nimmt einfach ein Tool, was es eh schon seit Jahren gibt ;D

Finally, what Xia & Lindell call a "separation problem" is, in our view, a feature of our approach and not a bug.
If, e.g., all languages in a family are polysynthetic (or none are), that’s not a statistical artefact – it’s the signal. The outcome is well associated with genealogy, showing that family membership captures someth genuinely informative about the process. When the model finds that family explains a large share of the variance, that's not a failure–it's evidence that phylogenetic structure dominates the pattern.
So while Xia & Lindell insist that "autocorrelation due to relationships and distance cannot be captured in family or regional-level analyses", we see that as an empirical question – and we treated it as one.
The real test is whether a mixed model that explicitly represents phylogeny and geography performs worse than their alternative, where the entire shared history of languages and environments is effectively collapsed into a single dimension (an eigenvector).
In other words: we model relationships – Xia & Lindell summarise them into one number per language.

Xia & Lindell have also published a response (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2518837122) – unsurprisingly, we don’t agree with most of their arguments. What puzzles us most is their claim that the re-analysis (their Table 1) "strengthens [their] conclusions." On the contrary:
In the Polysynthesis analysis, Small_Family has a minuscule averaged effect estimate (0.02) with a standard error more than four times larger (0.085). Together with a posterior inclusion probability (PIP) of just 0.085, this means the variable is rarely included in the best-supported models and its estimated effect is highly uncertain – essentially indistinguishable from zero. We therefore still struggle to see how this could be taken as support for their earlier statement that "different measures of language isolation – social, physical and *phylogenetic* – are important predictors of polysynthesis."

Out now in PNAS: Statistical errors undermine claims about the evolution of #polysynthetic #languages by Alex Koplenig and me: #linguistics 🧶 coming up...