I have a new paper out on Tasmanian languages, published by the Transactions of the Royal Society.

Emily Gasser has been awarded a Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the NSF and a East Asia & Pacific Summer Institutes fellowship from the NSF and the Royal Society of New Zealand. She will spend two months in the summer of 2012 conducting phylogenetic research with Prof. Russell Gray at the University of Auckland, followed by a semester of fieldwork in West Papua, Indonesia.

I am pleased to announce that Hannah Haynie (currently UC Berkeley) will be joining the Dynamics of Hunter-Gatherer Language Change project in the fall. Her area of expertise is North American languages, particularly Sierra Miwok.

I recently prepared this plain language version of Yale's video release form. Yale requires this from people being recorded as part of colloquium presentations, field methods projects, and other projects, where the videos might end up being released (e.g. published on the departmental web site, or on a project page, or used in research). It's separate from the informed consent protocol, as a student and I found recently, when we had prepared a plain language consent script, only to find that we were required to use this form with this precise wording.