Linguists studying a signing system that spontaneously developed in an isolated Bedouin village say they have captured a new language being generated from scratch. They believe its features may reflect the innate neural circuitry that governs the brain’s faculty for language.

The language, known as Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, is used in a village of some 3,500 people in the Negev desert of Israel. They are descendants of a single founder, who arrived 200 years ago from Egypt and married a local woman. Two of the couple’s five sons were deaf, as are about 150 members of the community today.

The clan has long been known to geneticists, but only now have linguists studied its sign language. A team led by Dr. Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa says in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today that the Bedouin sign language developed spontaneously and without outside influence. It is not related to Israeli or Jordanian sign languages, and its word order differs from that of the spoken languages of the region.

Source: A New Language Arises, and Scientists Watch It Evolve – The New York Times

[Somehow I’m just feeling really moved by this one. -e]

http://awesomepeoplereading.tumblr.com/post/130201249072/master-painters-gabriel-ritter-von-max

When flipping through these prints by Netherlands-based printmaker Jaco Putker it’s difficult to pintpoint the exact emotion one should feel, but generally, if it’s somewhere between amused and terrified, that’s just what the artist intends. Putker combines both digital preparation with traditional photopolymer (solar plate) etching to create collages that can be both highly ridiculous and downright frightening. He refers to the artworks as “illustrations to fables which don’t exist, but hopefully take shape in the beholders’ minds.”

Source: Dually Sinister and Playful Solarplate Etchings by Jaco Putker | Colossal

Anosognosia (/æˌnɒsɒɡˈnoʊziə/, /æˌnɒsɒɡˈnoʊʒə/; from Ancient Greek ἀ- a-, “without”, νόσος nosos, “disease” and γνῶσις gnōsis, “knowledge”) is a deficit of self-awareness, a condition in which a person who suffers a certain disability seems unaware of the existence of his or her disability.

I was particularly interested to learn that

As with unilateral neglect, caloric reflex testing (squirting ice cold water into the left ear) is known to temporarily ameliorate unawareness of impairment. It is not entirely clear how this works, although it is thought that the unconscious shift of attention or focus caused by the intense stimulation of the vestibular system temporarily influences awareness.

Anosognosia – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Today, the land registry system in Honduras is controlled and updated by government officials. The closed nature of the system means that the data are not secured and are thus susceptible to manipulation. The same applies to many similar government ledgers around the world.

This sort of setup has, for example, led to consternation in some countries over the apparently disproportionate number of current and former civil servants owning prime beachfront real estate.

With blockchain, it’s possible to make changes to public ledgers more efficiently. Meanwhile, anyone can see exactly who has authorised a given change to, for example, a land registry ledger.

“Distributed architecture, immutability and transparency are the three main attributes that allow blockchain-based apps to combat fraud and corruption,” says Abhi Dohal, VP of Business Development at Epigraph. “The most well-known blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain, is secured by more computational power than all the Google servers combined.”

Today Corrupt Officials Spend Your Money—Tomorrow Blockchain Will Stop Them – Singularity HUB

For close watchers of the interactions between the Justice Department and the financial industry, the mistrial in the Dewey & LeBoeuf case was about more than just the fact that a handful of jurors were too overwhelmed by the evidence presented to reach a verdict. The mistrial, after a four months in court and 22 days of deliberations, hints at a much deeper problem: Perhaps most financial crime has reached a level of such complexity that it’s beyond the reach of the law.

Has It Become Impossible to Prosecute White-Collar Crime? – Bloomberg Business

[OK, I’m curious. -egg]

Mormon Transhumanist Association is the world’s largest advocacy network for ethical use of technology and religion to extend human abilities.

Mormon Transhumanist Association

[More info is gradually emerging on China’s social networking dystopia. -e]

Where you go, what you buy, who you know, how many points are on your driving licence, how your pupils rate you. These are just a few of the measures which the Chinese government plans to use to give scores to all its citizens.

China’s Social Credit System (SCS) will come up with these ratings by linking up personal data held by banks, e-commerce sites and social media. The scores will serve not just to indicate an individual’s credit risk, but could be used by potential landlords, employers and even romantic partners to gauge an individual’s character.

“It isn’t just about financial creditworthiness,” says Rogier Creemers, who studies Chinese media policy and political change at the University of Oxford. “All that behaviour will be integrated into one comprehensive assessment of you as a person, which will then be used to make you eligible or ineligible for certain jobs, or social services.”

Inside China’s plan to give every citizen a character score | New Scientist

[Streaming (for a little while) via NPR’s “First Listen.” -egg]

Like short stories forming a non-linear but narratively cohesive whole, the eleven songs on Divers travel from war zones to the wilderness, from a darkened coastline to a comfortable cottage in the hills. Their protagonists may be alive or dead, they may be ghosts or babies just born. Newsom is the omniscient but shifty narrator, speaking in an “I” that both inhabits her characters and stands a bit apart from them, showing them up. Her deepest concerns are about the perils of fixing meaning. Like that other cultivated innocent, William Blake, Newsom senses a godlike mystery at the heart of the imaginative process and recognizes its parallel in the entropy of nature, what she calls, at the album’s climax, “the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating joy of life.” But she also knows that every artist — every person, in fact, who uses language, or traces the edges of her own body in the distance from the ones she longs to embrace — inevitably stills the rapture of fecundity by trying to give it shape. In that shape is the shadow of mortality. The sometimes rambling, sometimes rushing act of telling that is Divers ends mid-word.

First Listen: Joanna Newsom, ‘Divers’

Poorly Drawn Lines – My Fun Side