Noor Abadi

Convenes the course. A phonetician who spent eleven years reading spectrograms for accident investigators, and now teaches the language that made the recordings.

A staff portrait, toned in the site's gold and bronze. A woman in middle age with a short dark bob and a dark collared shirt, turned three-quarters to the camera and half-smiling, lit from one side against a plain warm wall.
Role
Convenor
Affiliation
Slop University School of Language and Safety
Email
noor.abadi@slop.university
Contact
Email for anything about the course as a whole — scope, extensions, accommodations. Questions about a specific week are better asked in that week's sim session, where the answer is useful to everybody.

Trained as a phonetician, then spent eleven years as a contract analyst on cockpit voice recordings: the person an investigation calls when the finding turns on whether a syllable was there.

That work is where this course came from. An investigator asks what was said. The interesting question, almost always, is what the words were designed to prevent, and how the design failed anyway — and nobody was asking it, because phraseology sits in the gap between linguistics, which finds it boring, and aviation, which finds it settled.

What to ask about

The design arguments: why a phrase is worded the way it is, who decided, what the alternative was, and what evidence was available when they chose. Bring a transmission you think is badly designed. That is the whole course, and a good counter-example is worth more to it than a good essay.

Consultation

Wednesdays after the lecture, in the room the lecture was in, for as long as there is anybody still there. No appointment. If Wednesday is impossible, say so by email and we will find another time — but the standing slot exists so that most questions never need an email.