User:Bn

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Hello. I am Bruce Nevin (he/him/his). Here are some of the aspects of my life which are reflected in my editing.

My degrees are in linguistics (BA 1968, MA 1970, PhD 1998, all from the University of Pennsylvania). I was a student of Zellig Harris during the development of Operator Grammar and emergence of the theory of linguistic information. I am a Life Member of the LSA and a member of the SSILA.

My dissertation, Aspects of Pit River phonology, was based on fieldwork on the Achumawi language 1970-1974, during which time parents in the tribe recruited me to teach the language to their children in the public school system and subsequently to organize and fund an educational center. There are now no fluent speakers. Since 2012 language activists in the tribe have increasingly engaged my support, using the linguistic database that I began developing in 1987 using software. [[1]] funding for this work began with a one-year fellowship in 2013, followed by 3-year grants in 2016, 2020, and 2023, whereafter the database will be 'repatriated' to the community. The most recent grant includes development of a parallel FLEx database for the neighboring Atsugewi language. Project employees are members of the Pit River Tribe, and one is currently earning his PhD in NAS and linguistics at UC Davis.

For 13 years, I worked for what I call 'America's least-wellknown famous company' Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) as a writer, editor, and software developer, then with the Lightstream acquisition I moved to Cisco Systems for another 15 years until 2011. I am recording clerk and treasurer of my local Quaker meeting.

In addition to linguistics, I have been a close student of Perceptual Control Theory since 1991. I am a past President both of the Control Systems Group and of its successor, the Association for Perceptual Control Theory (IAPCT), of which I am Treasurer. I have publications in both fields.

Tools[edit]


talk page structure[edit]

As a general rule:

  • Use colons to indent responses (one colon equals a short tab in wikitext). e.g.
  • outdent (make text flush left) when you are starting a new thought (loosely put). you can also outdent when things get too cramped on the right, but then use the {{od}} template to show that you've done that.
  • make sure that quotes are highlighted effectively, so that people can easily distinguish between what you're saying and what you're pointing to. use italics or<blockquote>...</blockquote> blocks to do this. there are also some more high-toned quotation box templates if you need them.
  • Try to keep talk as linear as possible - the more you intersperse comments, the less sense it will make to later readers.
  • Templates can be found (mostly) at wp:templates
  • The {{tl}} template creates a link to the named template page.

Work on guidelines[edit]

I spent some time in 2010 working on clarifying the "Fringe theories" editorial guideline. I got into this because I saw some editors blocking citation of what they called "fringe authors" and "fringe publishers". By their lights, any source that writes about a marginalized topic or publishes such writing is thereby itself tainted as 'fringe'. They did not notice the circularity of their logic (or maybe did but didn't care).

Since then, looking over discussion pages, I've seen a great deal of needless vituperation and edit warring around the pejorative uses of Fringe. More temperate editors say that the word "fringe" means peripheral or marginal, and that the pejorative senses "extreme" and "lunatic" are not intended and are not appropriate in Wikipedia.

However, the definition of fringe in the RH dictionary is

something regarded as peripheral, marginal, secondary, or extreme in relation to something else: the lunatic fringe of a strong political party.

Secondary means subordinate in some recognized way. Unless the tail is trying to wag the dog (WP:UNDUE), merely subordinate topics would be uncontroversial, and not Fringe. So we're not dealing with the entire meaning of "fringe" here. Taking out the "secondary" and "subordinate" senses, what's left in the scope of the definition of "fringe" is peripheral, marginal, or extreme. Extreme is the part that raises people's passions. I proposed that we jettison these two parts of the meaning of the word "fringe", the irrelevant part and the troublemaking part, and I suggested that the guideline should talk about peripheral or marginal theories as peripheral or marginal theories, and leave name-calling like extreme (or "lunatic" as in dictionary's example) out of our editorial guidelines.

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