“When God shows mercy to the miserable sinner, he does it without respect to any merit in him. He does it freely, ‘without money and without price.’ It is a pure act of grace on the part of God. ‘By grace ye are saved.’ If he were to deal with us according to our own deserving, we would never be saved. But we are saved because he is gracious. The doctrine of salvation by grace was early taught. God himself was the revealer of it, and was the first preacher of it, and he commanded his prophets, apostles, and ministering servants to the end of time to preach it. It is the only doctrine that can meet our case as sinful, unworthy, and lost in ourselves, the only doctrine that can give hope to the poor sinner struggling under a sense of sin and misery, and needing to be saved. God is graciously disposed to save sinners, and he made a provision of grace in the eternal covenant to save such as we are.”

So said Donald Macfarlane in a sermon on Exodus 34: 4-7, the account of what Jehovah said when he wanted Moses to know him and his character: “The Lord passed by before him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness in truth…“

[I'm only going to be at the computer sporadically from now until the start of next week. Just in case it matters.]

Donald Macfarlane, Sermons on the love of God and cognate themes. (Sermon VI, God’s Name Proclaimed.) FPP.

An email update from Barnabas Fund says that they’re still able to get aid into Burma, via Christian contacts who they were already in touch with.

Barnabas Fund’s aid for Christian victims of the Burma cyclone is being channelled through Christian organisations and churches on the ground in Burma, to which we have access. It is NOT going through the Burmese government.
We have already sent a first grant and we would like to assure supporters that our partners are based in Burma and do not need to get visas to enter the country. They are already there.
Please do continue to give. There will be a great need for many months as we move from emergency relief to reconstruction and the rebuilding of the homes and lives of the Christian community.

As you likely already know, in non-Western contexts, indigenous Christians are often among the most deprived/despised groups in a country, and natural disasters can leave them with absolutely nothing and no source of help. Barnabas Fund is a nondenominational charity which mainly helps needy Christians in contexts of persecution and/or destitution. Donations for Burma can be made via a secure server on this page here.

I’ve been having a wee smattering of referrals from the Scottish Roundup (’Reporting from Scotland’s Soapbox’).

I hope nobody’s too disappointed to arrive in the search for Scottish political commentary, only to find me doing little more than writing round the clock and singing to mice.

Other stuff that may possibly be of interest (generated manually, not automatically, and with occasional dubiety as to their politicality (and/or Scottishness)):

* Fraudulence still unproven

* Privacy in Scotland

* Shetland terror horror shock

* Scottish age of consent non-consultation

* Extraordinary apology

* We need to care

I’m just sitting at my desk, right here in the office, working on a paragraph, trying not to fret too much about the fact that two little mice are hiding behind a bookcase on the other side of the room. They converged on it within minutes of each other, from out of the kitchen and along the skirting board of different walls.

I can’t go home yet, it’s only 8 o’clock!

And what might they get up to if there was nobody at all here to stamp on the floor and sing along noisily to internet radio?

Ohhhh, the sheer unending grinding, aching, draining, wearing, grinding pain of writing a thesis.

Truly, my friends, of making many revisions there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

(Ecclesiastes 12: 12, postgrad paraphrase).

Meanwhile, some unconnected stuff:

* a moral dilemma over the Lisbon treaty. Is it possible to pledge to buy an Irish friend a pint of Guinness and a £5 bet if Ireland votes no to the treaty, without condoning gambling?

* the first part of this post is the clearest thing I’ve ever seen on Helm’s Deep

* old news, but the Catholic Teuchtar highlights a report of how the decision to hold a highland show over the weekend discriminates against people who want to keep Sunday special.

“Of all the kinds of union or unity that exist for creatures, the union of believers with Christ is the highest. The greatest mystery of being is the mystery of the trinity - three persons in one God. The great mystery of godliness is the mystery of the incarnation, that the Son of God became man and was manifest in the flesh. But the greatest mystery of creaturely relations is the union of the people of God with Christ.”

John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, p169 (BoT 1955)

So I’ve been tagged by the poetic Mr Benedict Ambrose. I assume it doesn’t have to be interesting.

1. The rules of the game get posted on the beginning.
2. Each player answers the rules about himself [or indeed herself].
3. At the end of the post, the player tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they’ve been tagged and asking them to read his [or her] blog.

What I was doing ten years ago:
Ten years was just over a third of my life ago. I was still in school, sitting my Highers and my driving test. Soon to apply to study language at university, and the rest is just recent history.

Five things on my To-Do list today:
1. Recover from doing a presentation, (a) first thing in the morning and (b) when I should be writing up
2. Add graphs to chapters 2 and 3
3. Discuss the spoonerism correlations
4. Fix all the 40-odd cross-references that Microsoft Word messed up on me yesterday
5. Go and hear a lecture by Michael Tomasello in the afternoon, when I should be writing up

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1. Organise mortgages for all the engaged couples and newly weds I know
2. Pension off all my family members
3. Donate wildly to the CI, Oxfam, Barnabas, Macmillan …
4. Get myself some proper bookcases
5. Be the next RW Forsyth

Three of my bad habits:
1. Nodding off at my desk
2. and hoping nobody notices
3. Uttering to my supervisors phrases such as, ‘No that shouldn’t be a problem, it won’t take too long I don’t imagine.’

Five places I’ve lived:
1. Aberdeen
2. Stornoway
3. Edinburgh
4. Er,
5. That’s it

Five jobs I’ve had:
1. Cleaning rooms in hotels
2. Ironing curtains in a laundry
3. Transcribing children’s disordered speech
4. Proofreading
5. Bits of tutoring and lecturing

Five books I’ve recently read:
Depends how recently is defined, and do repeats count?
1. Pennington (ed), Phonology in Context
2. DA Carson, The Gagging of God
3. Thomas Boston, A View of the Covenant of Grace
4. Tomasello, Constructing a Language
5. Matthew Henry, The Communicant’s Companion

Five people or communities I’m going to tag:
* Clare, my tea companion
* Richard the reiterator
* Andii at nouslife
* Grant, frog-squisher extraordinaire
* James, secure in the knowledge he won’t be interested

If I wasn’t both too skint and too immersed in writing, I’d be interested in getting hold of these books on language acquisition newly announced on the Linguist List.

• Semantics in Acquisition, which seeks to apply formal semantics to language acquisition. I still have fond memories of (struggling to keep on top of) formal semantics and it would be intriguing to see how successfully it can handle child language acquisition.
• Optimality Theory, Phonological Acquisition and Disorders, by Dinnsen and Gierut. Particularly their claim that there is indeed clinical relevance in what Optimality Theoretic accounts can offer makes the book sound appealing. And makes me wish I was going to ICPLA Istanbul to hear Martin Ball’s plenary; but I’m not.

Also of interest on the Linguist List recently was this review of a book on language acquisition from the perspective of modularity. The review is generally positive, but takes issue with what seems to be a major theme of the book:

The most controversial claim in this book concerns ”ethical modularity”, namely that the modular theory of mind may preserve the dignity of a child. First of all, it should be beyond doubt that the dignity of a child should always be preserved: a child having failed in a particular language (or cognitive) task should incur no disadvantages such as demotion to a lower class or to a class for handicapped pupils, misclassification as imbecile, or personal offence. However, it may not be that easy to achieve this goal. Can cognitive science help here? Roeper is convinced that by maintaining a modular theory of mind we can avoid harm to the children that are entrusted to our care. The modular theory may lend itself less easily to misuse than alternative theories. The argument claims that a modular theory naturally preserves the dignity of the child because the failure of a child in one task (if a failure at all) will remain a local one in just one module whereas all other modules may still be intact. The acknowledgement of the child’s general cognitive integrity preserves her dignity. In contrast, a theory that generalizes a local deficit to a global one is more likely to lead to a violation of the child’s dignity with all its negative consequences.

Interesting and useful fact of the week:

If you’re using d′ as a measure of discrimination sensitivity, and if you have small numbers of trials from which to calculate proportions of hits and false alarms, you are likely to end up trying to get z-transformations of 0 or 1, which means that d‘ is undefined.

There is however a range of conventions for how to deal with this.

Wickens (2001) says a value can arbitrarily be assigned to the otherwise empty category, eg, for f, a value corresponding to 1/(N+1), or 1/(2N+1), or 1/(10N+1) can be assigned, where N = number of noise trials.

This chap says, for proportions of 0 use instead 1/N and for proportions of 1 use (N-1)/N, where N is the number of trials used in calculating the proportions.

Macmillan and Creelman make two suggestions. One is to convert proportions of 0 to 1/(2N), and proportions of 1 to 1-1/(2N), where N is the number of proportions used in the calculation. The other is to add 0.5 to all data cells regardless of whether there are zeroes present.

Most usefully of all, this information can all be found online, in Google Books in the case of Wickens and Macmillan and Creelman. Although thanks to the prodigious - the triumphant - efficiency of the note-taking skills of one of my officemates, we didn’t even need to resort to googling in order to have the information at our fingertips. It’s very satisfying when that happens.

Yesterday the Christian Institute announced that its lawyers have contacted Google to remind them of their duties under the 2006 Equality Act.

Google has rejected an advert which would have referred readers to the Christian Institute for news and views on UK abortion-related legislation (currently, obviously, highly topical).

The reason they gave was their policy of finding “abortion and religion-related content” to be inappropriate. (Although strangely, the CI’s lawyers’ letter points out that this policy is not given in writing on Google’s policy page.)

Today it seems that Google have clarified their decision by saying that they only allow ads that “have factual information about abortion.”

I’d have quite a lot to say about that, but Cranmer said it quicker and better:

Setting aside that Google now presumes to judge on epistemological matters (are all its links filtered and censored for ‘factual’ accuracy?), it is curious indeed that it is only when abortion is presented via a religious site that the material is banned: Google permits abortion-related advertisements from the secularists, atheists, irreligious, non-religious and the mentally depraved (if some of these terms are not mutually inclusive). Needless to say, the perspectives of these are overwhelmingly ‘pro-choice’, and all must be considered by Google to be ‘factual’.
But Google does not permit Christians to advertise their pro-life beliefs.

(Read the rest here: The Christians who sued Google.)

Says the doughty Ann Widdecombe: “It does seem to me to be the most appalling and blatant case of religious discrimination.”

Further information and links available from the Christian Institute.

[PS - I know I said I wasn't going to post anything controversial for the next two months. I hope this won't be controversial. Feel free to comment but I'm not arguing with anyone ]