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Monday, Nov 27, 2023 - 23:14 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Three Million

It's been almost a month since the last post, just like that, and this humble blog's passed three million pageviews in that time. Nothing very impressive in this age of billion-hits-in-three-months YouTube sensations and influencer simp/粉丝 farming, one supposes, but still not too bad for an essentially unfindable (through search engines) and unadvertised outlet.

I suppose I could throw out minor involvements in summit organization as a mitigating factor, but that would be mostly an excuse; but in the spirit of shared (dilettante) research from the event, let's return to blogging with a couple of ideas:


Long Look At Short Sight

Myopia treatment had been last discussed in some depth here some two years ago, from what I can recall, and Monday's Garnagol has inspired some follow-up observations, given that entry's announcement of Ronaldo (alas). In the meantime, new interventions such as Japanese "smart glasses" to possibly slow progression have been introduced, but with actual reversal still out of reach, there has been continued emphasis on preventing myopia (progression) in kids locally. The latest development from a week or so ago has seen NUS link up with the Technical University of Munich, to optimize (ultraviolet) light exposure for schoolchildren (and the elderly, although to improve sleep quality/mood in their case), to reduce myopia rates.

Personally, despite the recent focus on (sun)light levels, I remain curious about the contribution of eyeball focus, which one supposes is an independent (if correlated) factor. In other words, if a child regularly exercises his focus by alternating between looking at close objects and faraway ones (i.e. about the horizon), instead of being glued to TikTok etc., would this be sufficient to mitigate myopia even given poor (sun)light conditions? There might be room for natural experiments in this end, with one more-obvious population possibly being Eskimos/Inuit, who might linger under long polar nights for weeks or months on end.

A cursory search of the literature reports extremely low rates of myopia for Inuit about a century ago (elders, from a 1975 paper), however with significantly increased prevalence in Inuit youngsters already noted some fifty years back. Interestingly, this prevalence was noted to be especially pronounced in females, which the authors suggest indicates an environmental and not genetic cause - in particular, school attendance (with male Inuit youngsters tending to go about hunting instead)

Given this, an emphasis on (sun)light exposure might possibly be reconsidered, especially if interpreted as "sitting outdoors but still watching videos on the smartphone". Indeed, it seems that myopia is nearly nonexistent amongst present-day hunter-gatherers, whom one would expect to spend much of their day scanning the prairie, or at least potential animal hiding places, at various distances. Well, it would sure be nice if there were evidence from populations with relatively low (UV/sun)light exposure, but high habitual eyeball focus/accommodation exercising, to properly disentangle the contribution of these two factors - which seems lacking in some prior literature.


In Such A Bind

Perhaps I'll make a fool of myself for misinterpretation or not keeping up with latest theory here, but what the heck. It's been a few years since I last attended linguistics classes, but some random surfing had me back at Wikipedia's Poverty of the stimulus page, and its Binding theory example in particular. To save a click, I will reproduce the section here:

  1. While he was dancing, the Ninja Turtle ate pizza.
  2. He ate pizza while the Ninja Turtle was dancing.
In general, pronouns can refer to any prominent individual in the discourse context. However, a pronoun cannot find its antecedent in certain structural positions, as defined by the Binding Theory. For example, the pronoun "he" can refer to the Ninja Turtle in (1) but not (2), above. Given that speech to children does not indicate what interpretations are impossible, the input is equally consistent with a grammar that allows coreference between "he" and "the Ninja Turtle" in (2) and one that does not. But, since all speakers of English recognize that (2) does not allow this coreference, this aspect of the grammar must come from some property internal to the learner.


As background, Poverty of the stimulus (POS) is Chomsky's theory (dating from 1959) that since children are not exposed to rich enough (speech) data to acquire every feature of their language (i.e. their knowledge is underdetermined), there is some inborn biological human universal grammar that allows them to (consistently) infer the correct structure, where multiple grammatical interpretations are possible. In the Binding theory example above, the argument is that everyone understands that for sentence (1), "he" can refer to either the Ninja Turtle or some other person (turtle?), while for sentence (2) the initial "He" must be a different entity than the Ninja Turtle referenced later in the sentence.

However, is it really true that no data D distinguishes the target grammar from all other grammar consistent with the input, for this (binding) pattern?

Given that humans (often?) learn (their first?) language via visual correspondence (e.g. actual people/turtles, dolls, comics, etc.), it does not seem immediately clear that children never employ the wrong usage of (2) (i.e. expect "He" to refer to the Ninja Turtle) while acquiring the language, before eventually converting to the expected usage on (repeated?) correction. Did Chomsky (or other POS supporters) have a (complete) transcribed corpus of toddler speech in making this assertion, one wonders; certainly at least some preschool English teachers might scoff at the grammaticality of their charges? Well, from current trends, one might perhaps train a not-so-large language model (NSLLM) with deliberately-impoverished stimuli/data, and see what (grammar) we get!


Introducing The Latest Hamsters


Right before surprise grooming
[N.B. Don't worry, Mr. Robo is used to it. Mostly.]




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