This is an official summary of the Israel Antiquities Authority’s final report into the Yehoash Inscription and the James Ossuary.

Word of the almost simultaneously discovery of the bone box known as the “James Ossuary” and the Yehoash inscription, from an unknown source (not from an methodical excavation), together with the emotions raised by the finds and extensive public interest amongst Jews and Christians, obliged the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the body responsible for all archaeological activities in Israel, to take action, to examine the finds and formulate a position on the subject. The IAA agreed to a short exhibit of the ossuary in Canada.

Numerous articles, all appearing within a short period of time, either confirm or deny the authenticity of the items. If the pieces are authentic (particularly the Yehoash inscription), then they are of great scientific value. The IAA was thus bound to do everything possible to arrive at the truth and present its conclusions…

— FINAL REPORT OF THE EXAMINING COMMITTEES FOR THE YEHOASH INSCRIPTION AND JAMES OSSUARY

“Give me enough parallel data, and you can have a translation system for any two languages in a matter of hours,” said Dr. Och, a computer scientist in the USC School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute.

Och spoke after the 2003 Benchmark Tests for machine translation carried out in May and June of this year by the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Och’s translations proved best in the 2003 head-to-head tests against 7 Arabic systems (5 research and 2 commercial-off-the-shelf products) and 14 Chinese systems (9 research and 5 off-the-shelf). In the previous, 2002 evaluations they had proved similarly superior.

The researcher discussed his methods at a NIST post-mortem workshop on the benchmarking held July 22-23 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Och is a standout exponent of a newer method of using computers to translate one language into another that has become more successful in recent years as the ability of computers to handle large bodies of information has grown, and the volume of text and matched translations in digital form has exploded, on (for example) multilingual newspaper or government web sites.

Och’s method uses matched bilingual texts, the computer-encoded equivalents of the famous Rosetta Stone inscriptions. Or, rather, gigabytes and gigabytes of Rosetta Stones.

“Our approach uses statistical models to find the most likely translation for a given input,” Och explained

“It is quite different from the older, symbolic approaches to machine translation used in most existing commercial systems, which try to encode the grammar and the lexicon of a foreign language in a computer program that analyzes the grammatical structure of the foreign text, and then produces English based on hard rules,” he continued.

“Instead of telling the computer how to translate, we let it figure it out by itself. First, we feed the system it with a parallel corpus, that is, a collection of texts in the foreign language and their translations into English.

“The computer uses this information to tune the parameters of a statistical model of the translation process. During the translation of new text, the system tries to find the English sentence that is the most likely translation of the foreign input sentence, based on these statistical models.”

This method ignores, or rather rolls over, explicit grammatical rules and even traditional dictionary lists of vocabulary in favor of letting the computer itself find matchup patterns between a given Chinese or Arabic (or any other language) texts and English translations.

[Romancing the Rosetta Stone]

Speaking of Rosetta Stones: Egypt is now demanding that the original one be returned. The British as always with these things are unmoved.

Thanks Peter

For three generations, they have compiled and argued, agonized and transcribed — toiling in monastic tedium to turn an intricate, 44-letter language into six volumes, so far, of word after long-forgotten word.

They have delved into the grammatical roots of “antahpravesakama” and debated the pun hidden in “anangada.” They’ve done a brain-numbingly complete dissection of “anekakrta.”

Now, 55 years after a group of scholars began composing the authoritative dictionary of Sanskrit, the long-dead language of India’s ancient glory, they are almost done — with the first letter.

“Sanskrit,” sighed Vinayaka Bhatta, chief editor of Deccan College’s dictionary project, “is not easy to translate.”

[After 55 years of toil, Sanskrit dictionary not even close]

And here’s a little snippet about the language spoken by Adam and Eve (well, not exactly, but…). It probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that Adam was, in fact, a Basque.

Gene research is helping clear up the mystery of the
origins of the Basque people, a culture that apparently came out of
East Africa 50,000 years ago and passed through the Middle East on the
way to Western Europe, a University of Nevada researcher says.

That’s one of the reasons when reviewing documents written in the
ancient Sumerian language, “you would swear you are reading Basque,”
said Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, adjunct professor for the Center for Basque
Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.

It’s also why some cities in the Middle East have names that could be
Basque-related, such as Ur, Uruk and Mari, he said. The name of a
Basque goddess is Mari.

“The Basque came out of East Africa 50,000 or so years ago and passed
through the Middle East,” Mallea-Olaetxe said during a recent
presentation at Northeastern Nevada Museum as part of the National
Basque Festival in Elko.

Mallea-Olaetxe said scientists traced the female gene back 150,000
years to East Africa but for research purposes followed the male Y
chromosome that enables researchers to trace human whereabouts.

They started tracing the male gene to 60,000 years ago in East Africa,
and then through the Middle East to Central Asia some 40,000 years ago,
the professor said.

Linguists suspected long before the genetic research that an old
language in Central Asia “looked suspiciously like Basque,”
Mallea-Olaetxe said. That language, Burushaski, is dead now, he said.

So genetic research is proving the linguists right, he said.

[Genes
help solve mystery of Basque origins] 

I’m sure they’ll be greatly reassured, Joxe.

An archaeological
site
in Siberia — long thought to be the original jumping-off point for
crossing the Bering land bridge into North America — is actually much
younger than previously believed, shaking the theory that the first
Americans migrated overland during the final cold snap of the last
great ice age.

Using radiocarbon
dating, scientists found that the Ushki site, the remains of a
community of hunters clustered around Ushki Lake in northeastern
Russia, appears to be only about 13,000 years old — 4,000 years
younger than originally thought.

The new date places
the Ushki settlement in the same time period as the Clovis site, an
ancient community found in New Mexico, making it highly unlikely that
people could have traversed the thousands of miles from Siberia in such
a short period.

“This was the last
site out there in Siberia that could have been an ancestor for the
Clovis,” said Michael Waters, co-author of the research appearing today
in the journal Science. “We have to think bigger now and start thinking
outside the box.”

[New
questions about migration of first Americans]

The subject of when humans first arrived in America is
hotly contested by academics.

On one side of the argument are researchers who claim America was first
populated around 13,000 years ago, toward the end of the last Ice Age.
On the other are those who propose a much earlier date for colonisation
of the continent – possibly around 30,000-40,000 years ago.

The authors of the latest study reject the latter theory, proposing
that humans entered America no earlier than 18,000 years ago.

[Date
limit set on first Americans]

A Museum of London conservator shows the contents of a Roman tin box
after opening it for the first time since its discovery in London, July
28, 2003. Archaeologists excavating the site of a major Roman temple in
London found the box containing a white cream still bearing the finger
marks of the person who last used it, nearly 2,000 years ago, museum
officials said. [more]

Almost 2,000 years ago, at a temple in Roman London, someone with slender fingers took a small tin box, scooped a blob of white paste into the lid, and used that as a palette to smear the paste on to … a face? Hands? An image of a god? The archaeologists jostling for position yesterday, as the box was opened for the first time in almost 2,000 years, had no idea.

The beautifully made box was easier to open than a new jar of Marmite. There was a gasp as conservator Liz Barham gently twisted off the lid to reveal perfectly preserved fingerprints, so small they may have been those of a woman or even a child. There was a second gasp as the smell hit the company.

“Asses’ milk?” wondered Francis Grew, the curator of archaeology at the Museum of London. “Asses’ yoghurt,” retorted Hedley Swaine, the keeper of early London archaeology.

“A somewhat sulphurous smell, highly characteristic of waterlogged deposits from that site,” Ms Barham said carefully. “And cheesy,” she added, unable to stop her nose from wrinkling as the paste warmed under the camera lights.

[2,000-year-old pot opened]

Linguistic nativism or the innateness hypothesis is the claim, advanced by Chomsky (1986) and
Pinker (1994) amongst others, that human beings are endowed with an innately, presumably genetically,
specified domain specific knowledge of language. This knowledge is tacit, that is to
say not accessible to conscious thought, and it specifies in some detail the nature of possible human
languages, including a set of syntactic categories, a set of possible phrase structure rules,
constraints on admissible transformations and so on. The primary argument for this bold hypothesis
is the so-called Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus (APS), that the linguistic input or
evidence available to the infant child is so impoverished and degenerate that no general, domain-independent
learning algorithm could possibly learn a plausible grammar without assistance.

An obvious refutation of this argument is to demonstrate the existence of an algorithm that can
learn a reasonable grammar, from that amount of data. It is that issue that this thesis is intended
to study. Nonetheless the algorithms presented here are I hope of general interest as pieces of
computational linguistics or machine learning research.

[more (PDF)]

From James to John?

Police officials said they had found the ossuary,
said to be worth
as much as $2-million (U.S.), sitting on a toilet in a shed on the roof
of Golan’s modest Tel Aviv apartment. They also claimed to have found
forging tools on the premises and several semi-completed forgeries. [more]

See also :

Update
on Oded Golan’s basement (April, 2003)

As you may have already guessed, I’m still pretty much in hiatus mode. There won’t be much to see here for a few more weeks except perhaps the occasional news clipping.

In the meantime you might like to try browsing the archive.

The image shows an impression by David A. Hardy of a possible scene from a moon orbiting the extra-solar planet in orbit around the star HD70642. The planet has a mass about twice that of Jupiter and orbits the star in roughly six years, with a nearly circular orbit of more than three times the Earth-Sun distance. The star HD70642 is a 7th magnitude star in the southern constellation Puppis, and has properties very similar to that of our sun. The similarity in appearance of the extra-solar planet to Jupiter arises because the planets have a similar mass. The possible existence of the moons has been inferred from our knowledge of the planets in our own solar system and from theories of planetary formation—they have not actually been detected.

The ‘orbit’ diagram shows the size and shape of the star HD70642 orbit compared with the orbits of planets in our own Solar System

Illustration of the Doppler Wobble Technique.

Astronomers looking for planetary systems
that resemble our own solar system have found the most similar formation
so far. British astronomers, working with Australian and American
colleagues, have discovered a planet like Jupiter in orbit round a
nearby star that is very like our own Sun. Among the hundred found so
far, this system is the one most similar to our Solar System. The
planet’s orbit is like that of Jupiter in our own Solar System,
especially as it is nearly circular and there are no bigger planets
closer in to its star.

“This planet is going round in a nearly circular orbit three-fifths
the size of our own Jupiter. This is the closest we have yet got to a
real Solar System-like planet, and advances our search for systems that
are even more like our own,” said UK team leader Hugh Jones of Liverpool
John Moores University.

The planet was discovered using the 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian
Telescope [AAT] in New South Wales, Australia. The discovery, which is
part of a large search for solar systems that resemble our own, will be
announced today (Thursday, July 3rd 2003) by Hugh Jones (Liverpool John
Moores University) at a conference on “Extrasolar Planets: Today and
Tomorrow” in Paris, France.

“It is the exquisite precision of our measurements that lets us
search for these Jupiters – they are harder to find than the more exotic
planets found so far. Perhaps most stars will be shown to have planets
like our own Solar System”, said Dr Alan Penny, from the Rutherford
Appleton Laboratory.

The new planet, which has a mass about twice that of Jupiter,
circles its star (HD70642) about every six years. HD70642 can be found
in the constellation Puppis and is about 90 light years away from Earth.
The planet is 3.3 times further from its star as the Earth is from the
Sun (about halfway between Mars and Jupiter if it were in our own
system).

The long-term goal of this programme is the detection of true
analogues to the Solar System: planetary systems with giant planets in
long circular orbits and small rocky planets on shorter circular orbits.
This discovery of a -Jupiter- like gas giant planet around a nearby star
is a step toward this goal. The discovery of other such planets and
planetary satellites within the next decade will help astronomers
assess the Solar System’s place in the galaxy and whether planetary
systems like our own are common or rare.

Prior to the discovery of extrasolar planets, planetary systems were
generally predicted to be similar to the Solar System – giant planets
orbiting beyond 4 Earth-Sun distances in circular orbits, and
terrestrial mass planets in inner orbits. The danger of using
theoretical ideas to extrapolate from just one example – our own Solar
System – has been shown by the extrasolar planetary systems now known to
exist which have very different properties. Planetary systems are much
more diverse than ever imagined.

However these new planets have only been found around one-tenth of
stars where they were looked for. It is possible that the harder-to-find
very Solar System-like planets do exist around most stars.

The vast majority of the presently known extrasolar planets lie in
elliptical orbits, which would preclude the existence of habitable
terrestrial planets. Previously, the only gas giant found to orbit
beyond 3 Earth-Sun distances in a near circular orbit was the outer
planet of the 47 Ursa Majoris system – a system which also includes an
inner gas giant at 2 Earth-Sun distances (unlike the Solar System). This
discovery of a 3.3 Earth-Sun distance planet in a near circular orbit
around a Sun-like star bears the closest likeness to our Solar System
found to date and demonstrates our searches are precise enough to find
Jupiter- like planets in Jupiter-like orbit.

To find evidence of planets, the astronomers use a high- precision
technique developed by Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institute of
Washington and Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley
to measure how much a star “wobbles” in space as it is affected by a
planet’s gravity. As an unseen planet orbits a distant star, the
gravitational pull causes the star to move back and forth in space. That
wobble can be detected by the ‘Doppler shifting’ it causes in the
star’s light. This discovery demonstrates that the long term precision
of the team’s technique is 3 metres per second (7mph) making the
Anglo-Australian Planet Search at least as precise as any of the many
planet search projects underway.

[Astronomers
find ‘home from home’ – 90 light years away! ]

See also:

Scientists
Discover Planetary System Similar to Our Own