Sheri Wells-Jensen's guest appearances

Sheri Wells-Jensen

Language Creation Society

SparkDialog

BG Ideas

Adam Frank

Guy Consolmagno

Evan Thompson

Shannon Orr

Tony Milligan

Aubrey de Grey

Nina Strohminger

Charles Kanwischer

Ethan Siegel

Avi Loeb

Jerry Reed

Tim Davis

Briana Pobiner

Eric Elnes

David Danks

OwlTail

What would happen if we found a message from a civilization on another planet?  Chances are, they won’t be speaking English.  We can’t talk to dolphins, dogs, or trees.  What makes us think we ever would able to understand a message from not only another species, but from another planet?  How would we go about decoding a message from ET? In the movies, we’ve seen messages made primarily of mathematics, which is supposedly the universal language.  We’ve gone about teaching aliens our languages, while learning theirs.  Is any of that realistic?   Today, we’re talking to Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen.  Sheri is what’s called a xenolinguist – a person who makes it her business to wonder how we would actually decode a message from ET.  By looking at the commonalities of the 7,000 or so human languages that have existed over time, she can come up with some generalizations that languages would have.  But then she asks some questions that explore what is fundamental in a language in general.  What if the aliens have a hive mind?  What if they have no eyes?  What if they have different genders, or no gender at all?   All of these things, in some way or another, affect the language that they speak. Sheri is also a member of METI – or Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.  You can think of METI as a twin of SETI – while SETI searches for extraterrestrial intelligences, METI thinks about how we can message them, or how we would start decoding a message from ET.   It’s a fascinating discussion – and a lot of fun.  But more than that – by the end, we realize that even if we never find a message, or even if we never decode it, we learn a lot about who we are as humans.   Background music you hear are clips from Pumpkin Soup and reCreation by Airtone licensed under CC by 3.0, In Suspense at PodSummit licensed under CC0 1.0, Kalte Ohren  by Dysfunction AL licensed under CC by 3.0, The Right Voice by Robbero licensed under CC by 3.0, Longing by gurdonark licensed under CC by 3.0, and 28 Aussens@iten by Stefan Kartenberg licensed under CC by 3.0.   The post Ep 68: They’re Not Speaking English – Decoding a Message from ET – with guest Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen appeared first on Elizabeth Fernandez.

What would happen if we found a message from a civilization on another planet? Chances are, they won’t be speaking English. We can’t talk to <a href="https://sparkdialog.com/the-dolphin-whisperer/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">dolphins</a>, dogs, or trees. What makes us think we ever would able to understand a message from not only another species, but from another planet? <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/fernandezelizabeth/2019/07/21/how-could-we-decode-a-message-from-extraterrestrials/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">How would we go about decoding</a> a message from ET? In the movies, we’ve seen messages made primarily of mathematics, which is supposedly the universal language. We’ve gone about teaching aliens our languages, while learning theirs. Is any of that realistic? Today, we’re talking to <a href="http://personal.bgsu.edu/~swellsj/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen</a>. Sheri is what’s called a xenolinguist – a person who makes it her business to wonder how we would actually decode a message from ET. By looking at the commonalities of the 7,000 or so human languages that have existed over time, she can come up with some generalizations that languages would have. But then she asks some questions that explore what is fundamental in a language in general. What if the aliens have a hive mind? What if they have no eyes? What if they have different genders, or no gender at all? All of these things, in some way or another, affect the language that they speak. Sheri is also a member of <a href="http://meti.org/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">METI</a> – or Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence. You can think of METI as a twin of <a href="https://www.seti.org/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">SETI</a> – while SETI searches for extraterrestrial intelligences, METI thinks about how we can message them, or how we would start decoding a message from ET. It’s a fascinating discussion – and a lot of fun. But more than that – by the end, we realize that even if we never find a message, or even if we never decode it, we learn a lot about who we are as humans. Background music you hear are clips from <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/56765" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Pumpkin Soup</a> and <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/airtone/59721" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">reCreation</a> by Airtone licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">CC by 3.0</a>, <a href="http://podsummit.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/In-Suspense.mp3" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">In Suspense</a> at PodSummit licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">CC0 1.0</a>, <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/destinazione_altrove/59536" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Kalte Ohren</a> by Dysfunction AL licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">CC by 3.0</a>, <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/Robbero/59992" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">The Right Voice</a> by Robbero licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">CC by 3.0</a>, <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/gurdonark/43947" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">Longing</a> by gurdonark licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">CC by 3.0</a>, and <a href="http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/JeffSpeed68/56171" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">28 Aussens@iten</a> by Stefan Kartenberg licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" rel="noreferrer noopener nofollow" target="_blank">CC by 3.0</a>. The post <a href="https://sparkdialog.com/decoding-a-message-from-et/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ep 68: They’re Not Speaking English – Decoding a Message from ET – with guest Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen</a> appeared first on <a href="https://sparkdialog.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Elizabeth Fernandez</a>.

Ep 68: They’re Not Speaking English – Decoding a Message from ET – with guest Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen

Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen is an associate professor of linguistics at BGSU. She discusses her research project “Imagining Life on Other Planets,”which she worked on during her time as an ICS Faculty Fellow in Spring 2018. Dr. Wells-Jensen's research on xenolinguistics (the study of alien languages) aims to have people question commonly held beliefs about able-bodied and disabled people in our society.   Transcript:     Jolie Sheffer:                          Welcome to the BG Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, an associate professor of English and American Culture Studies and the director of ICS. Jolie Sheffer:                          This is the first of several episodes featuring the ICS' Spring 2018 faculty fellows. ICS is proud to sponsor fellowships to promote the research and creative work of faculty here at BGSU. Those who receive awards are freed from one semester of teaching and service to devote unimpeded time to the projects they have proposed. These projects must be of both intellectual significance and social relevance in hopes that their work will generate conversations across disciplines and engage both academic and broader community audiences. Jolie Sheffer:                          Today we are joined by Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, associate professor of English. Dr. Wells-Jensen holds a PhD in linguistics from the State University of New York, University of Buffalo, and her academic interests include phonetics, psycholinguistics, speech production language preservation, Braille, and xenolinguistics. She's also a member of the Advisory Board of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence International and has given papers on the relationship between intelligence, perception, and language at the SETI Institute and the International Space Development Conference. Jolie Sheffer:                          We intend to focus today on Dr. Wells-Jensen's current project entitled Imagining Life on Other Planets, Reimagining Life on Earth. In this research, Dr. Wells-Jensen explores how an intelligent blind alien race would survive and function, as well as the implications of blindness on their civilization and our ability to find and communicate with them. Her work interrogates our socially-constructed assumptions about ability and disability and questions the limits we place on one another. I'm very please to welcome Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen to the program as one of ICS' spring 2018 faculty fellows. Thanks for joining me, Sheri. Dr. Wells-Jensen: Thanks. I'm happy to be here. Jolie Sheffer:                          We're very excited to have you as one of our fellows. Can you start by telling us a bit more about the project you're working on right now? Dr. Wells-Jensen: I came to this project through a weaving path. It wasn't a natural outgrowth of anything, I don't think. I was invited in fabulous tribute to my 12-year-old nerdy self as sort of a fantasy come true. I was invited to give a paper about language and thought at the SETI Institute. In a desperate attempt to seem like I knew what I was talking about before that talk, I read everything I could get my hands on about SETI and what their research ... what they were doing lately. One of the assumptions that I came upon in a lot of their work is that any extraterrestrial civilization capable of building a telescope so that we could contact them would necessarily have some analog of human vision. I thought, "Wow, really? Really? Really?" It seemed like that was a box that we didn't need to be in. So I put together a paper doing exactly what you might expect, so explaining how an alien race with more or less the abilities that we have as humans except that they can't see would put together a technological civilization. I gave th

Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen is an associate professor of linguistics at BGSU. She discusses her research project “Imagining Life on Other Planets,”which she worked on during her time as an ICS Faculty Fellow in Spring 2018. Dr. Wells-Jensen's research on xenolinguistics (the study of alien languages) aims to have people question commonly held beliefs about able-bodied and disabled people in our society. Transcript: Jolie Sheffer:                          Welcome to the BG Ideas Podcast, a collaboration between the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society and the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University. I'm Jolie Sheffer, an associate professor of English and American Culture Studies and the director of ICS. Jolie Sheffer:                          This is the first of several episodes featuring the ICS' Spring 2018 faculty fellows. ICS is proud to sponsor fellowships to promote the research and creative work of faculty here at BGSU. Those who receive awards are freed from one semester of teaching and service to devote unimpeded time to the projects they have proposed. These projects must be of both intellectual significance and social relevance in hopes that their work will generate conversations across disciplines and engage both academic and broader community audiences. Jolie Sheffer:                          Today we are joined by Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, associate professor of English. Dr. Wells-Jensen holds a PhD in linguistics from the State University of New York, University of Buffalo, and her academic interests include phonetics, psycholinguistics, speech production language preservation, Braille, and xenolinguistics. She's also a member of the Advisory Board of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence International and has given papers on the relationship between intelligence, perception, and language at the SETI Institute and the International Space Development Conference. Jolie Sheffer:                          We intend to focus today on Dr. Wells-Jensen's current project entitled Imagining Life on Other Planets, Reimagining Life on Earth. In this research, Dr. Wells-Jensen explores how an intelligent blind alien race would survive and function, as well as the implications of blindness on their civilization and our ability to find and communicate with them. Her work interrogates our socially-constructed assumptions about ability and disability and questions the limits we place on one another. I'm very please to welcome Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen to the program as one of ICS' spring 2018 faculty fellows. Thanks for joining me, Sheri. Dr. Wells-Jensen: Thanks. I'm happy to be here. Jolie Sheffer:                          We're very excited to have you as one of our fellows. Can you start by telling us a bit more about the project you're working on right now? Dr. Wells-Jensen: I came to this project through a weaving path. It wasn't a natural outgrowth of anything, I don't think. I was invited in fabulous tribute to my 12-year-old nerdy self as sort of a fantasy come true. I was invited to give a paper about language and thought at the SETI Institute. In a desperate attempt to seem like I knew what I was talking about before that talk, I read everything I could get my hands on about SETI and what their research ... what they were doing lately. One of the assumptions that I came upon in a lot of their work is that any extraterrestrial civilization capable of building a telescope so that we could contact them would necessarily have some analog of human vision. I thought, "Wow, really? Really? Really?" It seemed like that was a box that we didn't need to be in. So I put together a paper doing exactly what you might expect, so explaining how an alien race with more or less the abilities that we have as humans except that they can't see would put together a technological civilization. I gave th

104: Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen

[podcast]http://conlang.org/podcast/LCS_Podcast-013-Wells-Jensen.mp3[/podcast] David and Sai interview Sheri Wells-Jensen about her work in the world of conlanging, and her work as a linguist at Bowling Green State University. .mp3 recording | Dr. Wells-Jensen’s Webpage Talk about a really, really good idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could google a person and hear what they sounded like? Ooh! Or even better! Take an audio sample of someone’s voice, play it into your computer’s microphone, and have it find that person! I found this aspect of her work the most interesting, and hope it comes to fruition. If you want to take a look at what she has so far, go to VoxDB.org. For those of you who always wanted to do a little conlanging as part of your college degree, you can check out the webpage accompanying Sheri’s class here. And, of course, if you’re shopping for undergraduate institutions, you might consider Bowling Green State University. There are, by the way, some wonderful sounding conlangs described by Sheri in this interview. Several bits of the languages created by her students are incorporated into the website linked to above. There are a number of “fun” languages (e.g. the language of vending machines) that sound like they’re worth following up on. In addition to applying for the Dothraki job, Sheri and I also share a connection to Speculative Grammarian. She’s penned several articles for SpecGram (you can see them here), including proposing a Braille orthography for thlIngan Hol. In a nutshell, anything Sheri’s put her name to is worth taking a look at. We had a fun time talking with her, and I look forward to being able to talk to her again. Audio edited by Jeff Burke; music by Gary Shannon.

[podcast]<a href="http://conlang.org/podcast/LCS_Podcast-013-Wells-Jensen.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://conlang.org/podcast/LCS_Podcast-013-Wells-Jensen.mp3</a>[/podcast] David and Sai interview Sheri Wells-Jensen about her work in the world of conlanging, and her work as a linguist at Bowling Green State University. <a href="http://conlang.org/podcast/LCS_Podcast-013-Wells-Jensen.mp3" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">.mp3 recording</a> | <a href="http://personal.bgsu.edu/~swellsj/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Dr. Wells-Jensen’s Webpage</a> Talk about a really, really good idea. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could google a person and hear what they sounded like? Ooh! Or even better! Take an audio sample of someone’s voice, play it into your computer’s microphone, and have it find that person! I found this aspect of her work the most interesting, and hope it comes to fruition. If you want to take a look at what she has so far, go to <a href="http://voxdb.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">VoxDB.org</a>. For those of you who always wanted to do a little conlanging as part of your college degree, you can check out the webpage accompanying Sheri’s class <a href="http://www.fridaynightlinguistics.org/languagecreation/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>. And, of course, if you’re shopping for undergraduate institutions, you might consider Bowling Green State University. There are, by the way, some wonderful sounding conlangs described by Sheri in this interview. Several bits of the languages created by her students are incorporated into the website linked to above. There are a number of “fun” languages (e.g. the language of vending machines) that sound like they’re worth following up on. In addition to applying for the Dothraki job, Sheri and I also share a connection to <a href="http://www.specgram.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Speculative Grammarian</a>. She’s penned several articles for SpecGram (you can see them <a href="http://specgram.com/authorindex7.html#W" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a>), including proposing <a href="http://specgram.com/CLII.2/06.wells-jensen.klingon.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a Braille orthography for thlIngan Hol</a>. In a nutshell, anything Sheri’s put her name to is worth taking a look at. We had a fun time talking with her, and I look forward to being able to talk to her again. Audio edited by Jeff Burke; music by <a href="http://www.fiziwig.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Gary Shannon</a>.

Interview with Sheri Wells-Jensen