Latest news with #Arnon
The Star
23-05-2025
- Politics
- The Star
Jailed lawyer wins international rights prize
A lawyer jailed for criticising the monarchy has won an international human rights prize in recognition of his efforts to promote freedom of expression and democratic reform. Arnon Nampa, 40, was named the Asia-Pacific recipient of this year's Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk, becoming the first Thai national to receive the honour. He is currently serving a 22-year prison sentence following multiple convictions under Thailand's strict lese-majeste law, which criminalises criticism of the monarchy, as well as other offences. In a statement, Thai Lawyers for Human Rights said Arnon was recognised for 'his role in promoting and protecting human rights despite facing danger and serious risks to his own personal safety'. The Front Line Defenders Award, presented annually by the Ireland-based organisation, highlights the work of activists around the world who operate under threat. In a letter read by a member of his family during the award ceremony in Dublin, Arnon called it 'a profound honour' that gave him 'strength for the road ahead'. He described Thailand's political repression as a generational battle against the 'old order' marked by suppression of dissent. Arnon rose to prominence during Thailand's 2020 youth-led pro-democracy protests, where he publicly called for reform of the monarchy and military-backed government. His taboo-breaking speeches and online posts have led to a series of convictions under lese majeste, or Section 112 of the Penal Code, which carries sentences up to 15 years in prison per offence. — AFP
The Star
23-05-2025
- Politics
- The Star
Jailed Thai lawyer wins international rights award; first man from South-East Asian nation to win prestigious title
Arnon Nampa, 40, was named the Asia-Pacific recipient of this year's Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk, becoming the first Thai national to receive the honour. -- Photo: The Nation Thailand/ANN BANGKOK (AFP): A Thai lawyer jailed for criticising the monarchy has won an international human rights prize in recognition of his efforts to promote freedom of expression and democratic reform. Arnon Nampa, 40, was named the Asia-Pacific recipient of this year's Front Line Defenders Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk, becoming the first Thai national to receive the honour. He is currently serving a 22-year prison sentence following multiple convictions under Thailand's strict lese-majeste law, which criminalises criticism of the monarchy, as well as other offences. In a statement, Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR) said Arnon was recognised for "his role in promoting and protecting human rights despite facing danger and serious risks to his own personal safety". The Front Line Defenders Award, presented annually by the Ireland-based organisation, highlights the work of activists around the world who operate under threat. In a letter read by a member of his family during the award ceremony in Dublin, Arnon called it "a profound honour" that gives him "strength for the road ahead". He described Thailand's political repression as a generational battle against the "old order" marked by suppression of dissent. Arnon rose to prominence during Thailand's 2020 youth-led pro-democracy protests, where he publicly called for reform of the monarchy and military-backed government. His taboo-breaking speeches and online posts have led to a series of convictions under lese majeste, or Section 112 of the Penal Code, which carries sentences up to 15 years in prison per offence. TLHR says his total jail term now amounts to 22 years, and he has been in detention since September 2023, with appeals against all convictions currently pending. In 2024 alone, he submitted at least 41 bail requests, all of which were denied. Rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned Arnon's imprisonment and called for his release. - AFP
CBC
08-02-2025
- Science
- CBC
Whale song shows 'hallmarks' of human language
Social Sharing There's a reason "antidisestablishmentarianism" is more a piece of trivia than vital to the English language. Because a word that long is not what human language favours. According to experts, we tend toward efficiency and brevity — with statistical laws that persist across cultures. Perhaps now, even across species. Two new studies this week focused on whale song and found striking, structural parallels to human language, especially in humpback whales. To be clear, we're no closer to translating the meaning of those soulful, haunting, put it-on-a-best-selling-record songs from these ocean giants. But experts say it highlights the role of evolutionary pressures in complex communication. From the mouths of babes The first study, published in Science, focused on humpback whale song because it is culturally transmitted — in other words, taught and changed over time just like human language. The interdisciplinary collaboration took eight years as researchers painstakingly gathered recordings from a pod of humpbacks and broke them down into smaller components. The key to their analysis was a method based on how human babies learn. "One of the first challenges that infants face in breaking into language is discovering what the relevant units are," explains author Inbal Arnon, professor of psychology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Though they don't know they're doing it, babies use low-level statistical reasoning to figure out which relevant sounds are more likely to follow others. "Let's think about the [word] 'baby.' How likely are you to hear bee if you just heard bay?" Arnon said, suggesting that infants figure out these likelihoods innately. This logic led them to find a pattern in humpback whale song known as Zipfian distribution — which, in human language, dictates that the most frequent word is twice as used as the next frequent word. "It's this kind of characteristic fingerprint of human language," said Simon Kirby, co-author and professor of language evolution at the University of Edinburgh. "So it's a really surprising thing to find it in this completely unrelated species of humpback whales producing songs deep in the ocean." The researchers theorize that it flips the idea that we've evolved to be good at language — instead, they suggest it implies both that language evolves in order to be passed down better, and that this applies to species other than humans. "If a language has to be learned in order to get from one generation to the next," Kirby suggested, "then the languages that are learnable are the only ones that will survive." WATCH | What did you say? Whales can't hear each other over all our noise: Whale are struggling to hear each because of human noise, study suggests 12 months ago Duration 1:45 Researchers found that baleen whales can't make their songs in deeper parts of the ocean, forcing them closer to the surface — and closer to human-caused noise pollution. Succinct Cetaceans The other study, published in Science Advances, found that whale song has parallels to another hallmark of human language: efficiency. "In general, in language, we try to convey as much information as we can," said Mason Youngblood, an animal behaviour and cultural evolution researcher at Stony Brook University in New York. He says the cost is high for humpbacks to sing, considering they bellow their songs across vast distances under water while holding their breath and cycling it through their bodies. "It's important to do so in the cheapest way possible," Youngblood said. "And the easiest way to do that is by reducing vocalization time." The research found some whales — including humpbacks, bowhead, blue and fin whales — adhere to two linguistic laws: Menzerath's Law and Zipf's Law of Abbreviation. Put simply, both laws mean you spend less time blabbing. While not quite universal, Youngblood says it points to the constraints that shape the evolution of communication in different species. Moving, but not meaning Shane Gero, a scientist in residence at Ottawa's Carleton University and the lead biologist for Project CETI, finds the cultural transmission aspect interesting. "You learn these things from your mother and your grandmother and your grandmother's mother," said Gero, who was not involved with the study. "And that yields the need for speakers and listeners to … be concise, for lack of a better word." But he and others warn that breaking down whale song in this way is not like breaking down a sentence into words — in other words, just because we can find patterns in their songs doesn't mean we know what whales are saying. "Detecting a pattern like this doesn't make any direct connection to semantics," Gero explained from Ottawa. "In fact, there's plenty of science that shows you can find this in improvisational jazz." That comparison to musical structure might be the best way to appreciate the parallels, suggests Tecumseh Fitch, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna who studies bioacoustics.
National Geographic
06-02-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
What the science of baby-speak can tell us about whale songs
(Explore the hidden world of whale culture.) Infants inspire a new way to study whales A first indication of this came when researchers recorded a few whales in the process of changing their song, seamlessly replacing specific themes by new ones with a similar arrangement of sound elements. 'They were singing old and new themes smushed together, but it was really structured. This way, they'd transition nicely from one theme to the other, or replace the old theme with the new theme entirely. That was our first hint that segmentation was important,' says Ellen Garland, a marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and one of the authors of the study. Garland, who is also a National Geographic Explorer, has listened to hundreds of hours of whale songs for hundreds of hours and use short pauses and characteristic sequences to identify the individual elements they're made of. But when she saw Inbal Arnon, a psycholinguist at the Hebrew University in Israel, present her work on how infants learn to identify individual words in the stream of sound that is spoken language, they had an idea. 'What if I we applied the same logic to whale song? Would that work?' Arnon and language evolution researcher Simon Kirby of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, had already developed an algorithm that applies similar principles to those children use to segment language. 'It basically learns how likely a certain sound is to be followed by another,' Arnon explains. 'Sounds that commonly co-occur are probably part of the same word. But if a sound is followed by another one that is rarely heard right after, that might be a new word.' When Arnon and Kirby applied the algorithm to more than 30 hours of humpback songs Garland's team had recorded near New Caledonia, the song segments it detected were reassuringly close to those Garland would have identified herself—but not quite the same. And when they compared the frequency at which these different elements occurred, a pattern emerged that had only been found in humans before. The most common word—or in this case, song segment—occurred twice as often as the second most common one, thrice as often as the third most common one, and so on. Some segments are very frequent, many others quite rare.
