Laura C. Dees
Doing a PhD (or trying to) in the realm of evolutionary language science @Uni Zurich, generally interested in linguistic and cultural diversity.
Background pic: one of Matthew Wongs masterpieces
- Reposted by Laura C. DeesIsrael has murdered more than 500 Palestinians in Gaza since it signed the so called ceasefire. One of the latest is a 3 year old child.
- Reposted by Laura C. Dees"Those who failed to correctly pronounce the trilled –r, as in the shibboleth perejil ‘parsley’, were deemed to be Haitian and, as a consequence, were murdered.” Bullock & Toribio. 2014. "From Trujillo to the terremoto." Int'l Jrl of the soc. of lng, 227: 83-100. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsley...
- Reposted by Laura C. DeesGood news everyone, _Nature_ has published 66 Open Access articles to date in 2026! This means Springer-Nature has gobbled up USD$837,540 of science funding this year. I'm sure we couldn't think of anything better to do with that money. #OpenScience
- on the road to nowhere
- OpenAI just released Prism, a LaTeX editor with embedded ChatGPT for free. Writing a paper has never been easier. Clogging the scientific publishing pipeline has never been easier. It took me 54 seconds to write up an experiment I did not actually conduct. prism.openai.com
- Reposted by Laura C. DeesSome tools for thinking about AI in a time when the companies making them are trying to destroy teaching and learning itself... 1/n 🧵
- Reposted by Laura C. DeesIf you feel bad for not having published all the papers from your PhD yet... This paper is the discussion of my thesis, and it took me about 6 years to publish it! Thank you to my lovely collaborators @geoffreymesbahi.bsky.social and @maelmleroux.bsky.social for the (much-needed) final push!
- 🚨New animal linguistics paper🚨 Together with @geoffreymesbahi.bsky.social and @maelmleroux.bsky.social, we tried to finally answer this question: Do titi monkeys have complex syntactic skills? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
- Reposted by Laura C. DeesNederland kan in de komende jaren een taalpolitiek voorbeeldland worden. neerlandistiek.nl/2026/01/mijn...
- Reposted by Laura C. DeesInstead of withdrawing from Gaza, Israel has imposed a so-called "Yellow-Line," leaving its military occupying 58% of Gaza and forcibly confining Palestinians to the remaining 42 percent. This largely unmarked and lethal boundary functions as de facto annexation... 1/3
- such an exciting topic!!
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- In 2025 I spent 19 full nights or large parts of the day on a train travelling through Europe. There’s so much to improve still (looking at you, Germany) but it’s exciting to see the growing number of possibilities the European rail network offers!
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- Reposted by Laura C. DeesIsrael hunted a 70 year old lady down with a gun drone and then hoovered above to make sure she bled out next to her dying son. They both join almost 1,000 Palestinians Israel has massacred or maimed in its genocide during the "ceasefire". www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12...
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- Reposted by Laura C. DeesI am by no means a prominent public intellectual, but my inbox is increasingly filled with messages from people who have been convinced by sycophantic chatbots that they have discovered revolutionary theories that entirely upend our scientific understanding of the universe.
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- Reposted by Laura C. Deesbeing available when needed, offering constructive criticism as well as motivation and recognition, being humane (do not request unreasonable achievements, or expect huge personal sacrifices, respect holidays, time to rest etc.), there's probably more but this are top three to me
- genuinely curious: what, according to my academic followers, are characteristics of good doctoral supervision?
- @jennekevanderwal.bsky.social @chiarazulberti.bsky.social I agree with both of you, but also feel that “being available” can be interpreted in so many ways.. what about things like collective goal-setting, working out when and how to reach goals? and do we ideally use formal tools for this or not?
- things look so bleak.. and Europe seems to have stopped caring since the start of the ceasefire which is not a ceasefire
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- Reposted by Laura C. DeesWhen you consider the *ecocide* alongside the genocide being perpetrated in Gaza, you begin to grasp the totality of the Israeli state’s attempt to eliminate both the Palestinians and their homeland. My column today. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
- "The big perspective change from ancient DNA study is that people living today are almost never the descendants of the people in the same place thousands of years before." "People’s stories about their history are almost always wrong."
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- hemeltergend
- in the context of sharing something uplifting every once in a while: this documentary about two brothers dipping their toes in the world of "extreme birdwatching" is so joyful, genuine and funny, and it has stunning bird footage! youtu.be/zl-wAqplQAo?...
- “Wie om veiligheid vraagt zonder macht, vraagt om bescherming in plaats van zeggenschap.”
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- Reposted by Laura C. DeesOur paper is out! We linked genetic and linguistic data to study how contact changes language and found consistent patterns of borrowing across contact situations @balthasarbickel.bsky.social @chiarabarbieri.bsky.social @nccrlanguage.bsky.social @isle-uzh.bsky.social doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adv7521
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- Reposted by Laura C. DeesIsrael is carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being and social fabric of Palestinian life. Read more:
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- It comes with a nicely condensed press release: www.eurekalert.org/news-release...
- So happy that this paper lead by Joseph Mine is finally out! Was cool to be part of this project on the social learning of multi-modal communication in chimpanzees, which is slightly outside of my usual scope (and it’s my first co-authored paper too, yay!) :) journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
- So happy that this paper lead by Joseph Mine is finally out! Was cool to be part of this project on the social learning of multi-modal communication in chimpanzees, which is slightly outside of my usual scope (and it’s my first co-authored paper too, yay!) :) journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...
- Reposted by Laura C. DeesThis is amongst the most impactful two minutes of broadcasting I’ve ever seen. By Emma Murphy, International Editor, ITV News. #Gaza
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- Such a fascinating topic! I’d totally recommend his brilliant book “Bye Bye I Love You” as well, which features reflections on ritual last words and much more relating to the opening and closing of the “interaction window” at the beginning and end of the lifespan.
- A new peer-reviewed open access article by me, all about ritual last words in five major religions. "Ritual last words" are sacred sounds, prayers, songs, names of deities, etc., prescribed to be spoken at the very end of life, ideally at the moment of expiry. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
- Reposted by Laura C. DeesA horrifying statement published today by the Editorial Committee of the Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency. "Without immediate intervention, the last reporters in Gaza will die" Translation from French to English by @cnorristrent.bsky.social:
- and European governments continue to stand by and watch
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- Reposted by Laura C. DeesWe're hiring! Join us to work at the intersection of social interaction and language technology. Postdoc and PhD positions in my Futures of Language research group, based at Radboud University in Nijmegen, NL Read more: markdingemanse.net/futures/news... #linguistics #interaction #sts #emca #hci
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- Reposted by Laura C. DeesAfrican prisoners made sound recordings in German camps in WW1: this is what they had to say theconversation.com/african-pris...
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- we're tired
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- Reposted by Laura C. DeesMoeten we het nog uitspellen?
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- Reposted by Laura C. DeesI'm hiring! 2 x PhDs and 1 x PostDoc, to work with me at Uni Zurich on a project investigating how semantic patterns differ by geographic region. Linguistic typology, data science, spatial analysis, phylogenetic methods, potential fieldwork... REPOST 🙏 www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/jobs.html
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- Reposted by Laura C. Dees🚨New in @science.org🚨 With Simon Townsend (@nccrlanguage.bsky.social) and Martin Surbeck, we have investigated whether wild bonobos can combine calls in complex combinations, similar to how humans combine words into sentences 🧪 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #ScienceResearch #AnimalCommunication
