This is the frontpage for WinterWiki, the central place to find news and results for Winter Storm 2009.

Winter Storm is an intensive 2-week workshop organized by the U of Maryland's language science community in connection with its NSF-IGERT program on Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity. It is also supported by the Department of Linguistics and by the College of Arts & Humanities.

Winter Storm in 2009 runs from Monday January 12th to Friday January 23rd. Monday January 19th is MLK Day: there will be no scheduled activities, but the time can be used for working on Winter Storm projects. Tuesday January 20th the day will be left open for the Inauguration of President Obama.

UPDATE: The assessment survey is ready! Please fill it out as soon as possible (preferably by the end of the weekend). We need your feedback, regardless of the extent of your involvement in Winter Storm.

WinterWiki is growing - check back for updated information. Participants will also need to be able to edit WinterWiki, as we'll be working on this together. Email Mike Shvartsman (email: mshvarts) or Derek Monner (dmonner at cs) with your preferred login name and they will send you a password.

Most activities will take place in Marie Mount Hall. The R course will be taking place in Plant Sciences 1113 (to the east of Bio/Psych), in order to accommodate the huge demand. In order to access the suites of lab rooms in MMH you will need to get your ID card authorized. Send your ID card info to Bill Idsardi, who can arrange authorization for you.

If you will be participating in the R course, you should plan to install R on your computer before the first class, and bring the computer to the classes if possible. Instructions for this are available on the pages for the R course. R is free, and runs on any platform you might want to use (and many that you wouldn't want to use). If you have difficulty installing R on your computer, or have other set-up questions, come to 1413 Marie Mount early on Monday 12th, and help (and coffee and bagels) will be available.

Lunch will be available at the talks taking place in 1108B Marie Mount each day. We need 'Lunch Elves'. See details below.

Coffee, espresso, and tea will be available throughout Winter Storm. But we could use donations of coffee, tea, milk (or cookies).

We plan to have After Hours activities (yes, that means fun). Likely on Wednesday evenings. We've been busy planning the nerdy stuff, so this part isn't yet arranged. Let us know if you know a good time when you see one, and would like to help with this.

• R

It's so big even the New York Times has noticed. It's estimated that 250,000 people are now using R to analyze data. That's a lot of people who need to get a life. Every morning during Winter Storm Pedro Alcocer, Brian Dillon, and Bill Idsardi will be our guides to what the big fuss is about.

There is a slight change in the schedule - Clustering is moved to next week, and regression is moved up to Friday.

• Woodward: Infant studies
• Bolger: Language learning and Education
• Newman: Infant studies
• Ratner: Stuttering
• Lidz: Sentences
• Idsardi: Sounds
• Reggia: Computational modeling

Annie Gagliardi (email: acg39), Sunyoung Lee (email: sunyoung), and Alexis Wellwood (email: wellwood) are recruiting volunteers to help organize the food and drink part of the diversity talks. Two volunteers per day will be responsible for ordering/picking up food and beverages, as well as taking charge of clean-up for that day.

We want people from all areas to participate in the planning, and we hope to provide a variety of meal types. As people volunteer and plans are made, the table below will be filled in. If you see something missing, and want to help out, please feel free to fill in the blanks with your info, or to send Annie, Sunyoung, or Alexis an email and tell them which day you'd like to volunteer for. Regardless, these three are here to support all volunteers!

Guidelines

• Budget should be under $100
• Check levels of cups, plates, napkins, etc. in time to buy more
• Keep all receipts and get a list of attendees in order to be reimbursed by Kathi

Learning sound systems

Critical periods

Relative clauses

Two groups will focus on learning how to use specialized tools for psycho/neurolinguistic research. The groups will learn how to run experiments, acquire and analyze data for a new experiment, and build sets of on-line instructions for these procedures on WinterWiki.

• Eye_Tracking - NEW: Please add your name to the list if you are participating!

One of the IGERT program's equipment acquisitions is a new EyeLink 1000 eye-tracker, suitable for high resolution studies of reading. Mike Shvartsman and Erika Hussey will lead this group.

• EEG An overview of using the lab's EEG equipment and data-analysis software. Dave Kush and Shannon Hoerner will be leading the group with the help of Brian Dillon and Pedro Alcocer.

As we ramp up our new IGERT program, many new things need to be planned, and involvement from a broad range of students and faculty is essential. We may use late afternoons (tea time!) to convene smaller planning meetings, e.g., for outreach activities, web site, program assessment.

Many more things will go here.

We have a wiki-fied version of the Winter Storm Assessment survey. If we missed a question that you want to have answered next time, please add it in the appropriate place.

The assessment survey responses have been analyzed and digested into a short slideshow. If you have further comments, or ideas on how to address the issues with the first Winter Storm that the assessment committee identified, put them here!