Simon J. Greenhill

@simongreenhill.bsky.social

1.8K followers 1K following 690 posts

I study how languages and cultures evolve. Primarily with phylogenies and other assorted computational methods. Based at @Biology_UoA. Never met a language phylogeny or a cultural phylogeny I didn't like. #phylolinguistics .. more

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Simon James Greenhill is a New Zealand scientist who works on the application of quantitative methods to the study of cultural evolution and human prehistory. He is well known for creating and building various linguistics databases, including the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database, TransNewGuinea.org, Pulotu, and many others. In addition to Austronesian, he has contributed to the study of the phylogeny of many language families, including Dravidian and Sino-Tibetan. .. more

Computer science 19%

Communication & Media Studies 19%

Posts Replies Media Videos

Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill

Structural Phylogenetics (StrPhy) @strphy.bsky.social · 11h

Meet the APSPM 2026 organisers: Caroline, Jordan and Ashar. We're 3 ECRs based in Australia/NZ passionate about protein evolution and developing new approaches and applications to advance this exciting field.

biosig.lab.uq.edu.au/strphy26/org...
@official-smbe.bsky.social

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 23h

Don't worry the universities WILL make changes!

MENTAL HEALTH WEBINARS

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 23h

Good news everyone, I'm proud to announce

Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill

Erik Hansson @erikhansson.bsky.social · 1d

Google backs African push to reclaim AI language data
A new 21-language data set gives African institutions ownership and control in a field long dominated by Big Tech.
restofworld.org/2026/google-...
#language #diversity #Africa #langsky

Google backs African push to reclaim AI language data

A new 21-language data set gives African institutions ownership and control in a field long dominated by Big Tech.

restofworld.org

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 1d

82% of Australian university staff are emotionally exhausted. 70% think their uni doesn’t care.

Universities need to do better

The Research Whisperer @therealrw.bsky.social · 1d

Australian University Census of Staff Wellbeing is now out - some shocking stats!

Census WEBSITE for more info and full report: stresscafe.net/census/

#AcademicSky #AustralianUnis

Highlighted statistics:
69% disagreed that 'Senior management considers employee psychological health to be as important as productivity.'
73% disagreed that risks to their psychological health are actively monitored.
82% of participants ranked high or very high in emotional exhaustion.

Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill, Catherine J. Frieman, Melanie O’Brien , and 1 more Simon J. Greenhill, Catherine J. Frieman, Melanie O’Brien, Samuele Ramellini

The Research Whisperer @therealrw.bsky.social · 1d

Australian University Census of Staff Wellbeing is now out - some shocking stats!

Census WEBSITE for more info and full report: stresscafe.net/census/

#AcademicSky #AustralianUnis

Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill

Susan Gasser @susanmgasser.bsky.social · 2d

Let’s celebrate women and girls in scientific research! Often underestimated, women drive research in biomedical sciences both intellectually and at the bench. Research should be a “gender-blind” endeavor, but rarely is. Stop bigotry ! Stop unconscious bias ! Go women & girls!

Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill

Annika Tjuka @annikatjuka.bsky.social · 2d

Happy International Day of Women in Science! #WomenInScience #11February

Reposted by Martín Haspelmath, Simon J. Greenhill, Melanie C. Green

MPI-EVA Leipzig @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social · 3d

Children around the world process #gaze in similar ways. Large cross-cultural study led by @elmanubohn.bsky.social & @dbmhaun.bsky.social finds common 'processing signature' of gaze following. @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social @leuphana.bsky.social tinyurl.com/278wxka3 & academic.oup.com/chidev/advan...

Children around the world process gaze in similar ways

Large cross-cultural study finds common 'processing signature' of gaze following despite differences in accuracy and development

tinyurl.com

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 4d

<1 month later>

UNI ADMIN: Please provide unique project code, your last email went into spam.

Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill

Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 5d

Being a professor is like Picture of Dorian Gray except it’s the students who stay young and full of life while you decay year after year in front of them

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 6d

You’re 3?! Oh I’m jealous.

(And yes humans are far better at being awful than animals are)

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 6d

Do it!

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 6d

see Erdős-Bacon number. Natalie Portman is a 5

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 6d

Cognitive Science needs an Epstein number so we can track the creeps.
E1 if you hung out with him on the island, E2 if you just let him buy you a lab at MIT…

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 6d

Mathematicians track how close they were to the genius Erdős:

If you published with him your Erdős number is 1. If you published with an E1 you are E2, etc

There are databases you can lookup about this (I’m E5)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%...

Erdős number - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdős_number

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 6d

Erdős number - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdős_number

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 6d

dont forget his 3 or 4 monographs on barnacles!

Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill

Alexandra Witze @alexwitze.bsky.social · 6d

Sorry for the preview pic in your feed, but we've posted a thoughtful story by @dangaristo.bsky.social that delves into the tangled web of relationships between Jeffrey Epstein and various scientists: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Epstein files reveal deeper ties to scientists than previously known

Latest batch of documents show researchers consulting the financier and sex offender on publications, visas and more.

www.nature.com

Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill

Chris Buckley @chrisbuckley.bsky.social · 6d

Demonstration of a purely instrument-based analysis of archaeological artifacts (arrowheads), coupled with a Bayesian analysis of phylogeny ... reproduces the classical typology, and much more besides ... osf.io/preprints/so...

OSF

osf.io

Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill

Neil Cohn @neilcohn.bsky.social · 6d

A longstanding feature of language is that more frequent words are shorter than less frequent words. In our latest paper analyzing our corpus of 1000+ comics, we show a similar trade-off between the size and frequency of panels with different amounts of information www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Active vs. inactive information in comic panels

Reposted by Simon J. Greenhill

CNRS Ile-de-France Villejuif @cnrs-idf-villejuif.bsky.social · 6d

🗣️ La collection #Pangloss offre, en libre accès, des documents linguistiques sonores, avec une spécialité de langues rares ou peu étudiées.
🎙️Explications avec Alexis Michaud, directeur de recherche CNRS au LACITO, qui assure la gestion de la collection Pangloss ⤵️
www.radiofrance.fr/francecultur...

La plateforme Pangloss rend accessible en ligne les langues rares

À l'occasion d'une journée d'étude consacrée aux mutations des patrimoines sonores au musée du quai Branly Jacques Chirac, Marie Sorbier s'entretient avec le linguiste Alexis Michaud pour comprendre l...

www.radiofrance.fr

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 7d

I think it's important to teach functions (code organisation, abstraction, easier testing/abstraction/extension etc.)

I've taught these as a "machine": everytime you insert "a^nb" it produces T. Then you write the machine as a script first, then wrap it as a function.

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 8d

(I want to stress that this was exactly how my phone completed that)

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 8d

Yep looks useful

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 9d

Agree with you both here. You can make important contributions but still be an evil person. you can’t ignore the contribution and you shouldn’t ignore the shittiness

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 9d

www.reddit.com/r/asklinguis...

From the asklinguistics community on Reddit

Explore this post and more from the asklinguistics community

www.reddit.com

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 9d

Psst. Anyone wanna buy a flash drive with a slightly used copy of "Encylopedia of Language and Linguistics" on it? 🤯

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 9d

Genau

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 9d

Almost as good as my rule of thumb: has anyone you know ever written anything in it you want to cite? If not, then it’s not the Journal for you.

Jeffrey Perkel (he/him) @jperkel.bsky.social · 10d

🚨Scientists 🚨: Tired of come-ons from journals & conferences that may or may not be predatory? A new tool called Aletheia-Probe could help. 🧪 By @silverjacket.bsky.social @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Is this journal legitimate? This tool can help you decide

Aletheia-Probe provides a one-stop shop to help you assess whether journals and conferences are trustworthy or predatory.

www.nature.com

Simon J. Greenhill @simongreenhill.bsky.social · 9d

👏🏻

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