End of semester update

Utterology-wise: NSF-funded work is going amazingly well; the first online Maltese corpus now exists - you can see it here. Deep gratitude to my research assistants, Dainon Woudstra and Jerid Francom for their hard work on this project, which will soon be migrating to a more secure location on my lab's website. Thanks as well to Albert Gatt, who provided me with 75% of the tokens in the database. Meeting Albert, a gifted computational linguist, was one of many benefits of attending the inaugural meeting of the International Society for Maltese Linguistics back in October. We're now proceeding with the Hebrew database side of the project.

Neighborhood-wise: Excitement abounds over the latest neighborhood elections. New blood will be joining the board, and leadership changes on next year's board herald perhaps a more proactive era; we'll see. I'm happy to say that I will be stepping down from the neighborhood association board after three years - I need the break. I'm sure I'll be back, though, after a year or so of relaxation. I should say that various recent events have left me feeling a bit discouraged, but the composition of the new board gives me renewed hope. For all the Armory Park residents reading this, please take note: when you get your membership forms in January, fill them out so you can officially join the association and take part in next year's election process. Turn-out was relatively low this year; we can do much better!