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Imagine putting on a virtual reality headset and entering a world where you can explore communities, like Missoula, except your character, and everyone you interact with, speaks Salish, Cheyenne or Blackfoot. Imagine having a device like Amazon's Alexa that understands and speaks exclusively in Indigenous languages. Or imagine a digital language playground in Facebook's Metaverse, where programmers create interactive games to enhance Indigenous language learning. Michael Running Wolf, a Northern Cheyenne man who is earning his Ph.D. in computer science, wants to make these dreams a reality. Running Wolf grew up in Birney, a town with a population of 150 just south of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. He spent most of his childhood living without electricity. Running Wolf can speak some Cheyenne, but he wants Indigenous language learning to be more accessible, immersive and engaging. And he believes artificial intelligence is the solution. Running Wolf is one of a handful of researchers worldwide who are studying Indigenous languages and AI. He works with a small team of linguists and data scientists, and together, they analyze Indigenous languages and work to translate them into something a computer can interpret. If his team can accomplish this, Running Wolf reasons, then perhaps AI can be used to help revitalize Indigenous languages everywhere.

Artificial intelligence can make adults nervous, but experts say exploring it as a family is the best way to understand its pros and cons. It's important to understand how a chatbot works, employing a "neural network": a mathematical system that learns skills by analyzing large amounts of data. The chatbot works by scraping the internet for digital text or images. It gathers information from a variety of places, including websites, social media platforms and databases, but it does not necessarily choose the most reliable sources. In other words, even though chatbots may appear authoritative, rigorous and trustworthy, they are not always reliable and can produce content that is offensive, racist, biased, outdated, incorrect or simply inappropriate.

This article writes about the complexities of animal communication and how elephants are able to use low frequency sounds to stay in touch amongst each other. Generative artificial intelligence is able to help humans generate an algorithm that is capable of detecting animal calls, grumbles, grunts, squeaks etc and translate it into a language that humans are comfortable interpreting.

This article talks about linguistic advancements of AI. In this study, over 50% of participants could not recognize when they interacted with AI. The researchers concluded that this was due to the advance level of human linguistics that AI are not able to achieve.

Based at the University of California, Berkeley, the Greater Good Science Center sponsors groundbreaking scientific research into social and emotional well-being and helps people apply this research to their personal and professional lives. Their website has useful resources for Safe Conversations, Word Acts, and fostering better social relationships.

It's commonly believed that those who throw swear words around freely are either uneducated, lazy, have a minuscule vocabulary, or all of the above. Now, we can officially say, those who subscribe to that belief are just a**holes. A pair of psychologists from two U.S.

Doesn't use the term "niche construction," but certainly makes a case for language constructing a niche.

The more parents talk to their children, the faster those children's vocabularies grow and the better their intelligence develops. The problem seems to be cumulative. By the time children are two, there is a six-month disparity in the language-processing skills and vocabulary of toddlers from low-income families. Toddlers learn new words from their context, so the faster a child understands the words he already knows, the easier it is for him to attend to those he does not. Dr Anne Fernald, of Stanford, found that words spoken directly to a child, rather than those simply heard in the home, are what builds vocabulary. Plonking children in front of the television does not have the same effect. Neither does letting them sit at the feet of academic parents while the grown-ups converse about Plato. The effects can be seen directly in the brain. Kimberly Noble of Columbia University studies how linguistic disparities are reflected in the structure of the parts of the brain involved in processing language. Although she cannot yet prove that hearing speech causes the brain to grow, it would fit with existing theories of how experience shapes the brain. Babies are born with about 100 billion neurons, and connections between these form at an exponentially rising rate in the first years of life. It is the pattern of these connections which determines how well the brain works, and what it learns. By the time a child is three, there will be about 1,000 trillion connections in his brain, and that child's experiences continuously determine which are strengthened and which pruned. This process, gradual and more-or-less irreversible, shapes the trajectory of the child's life.And it is this gap, more than a year's pre-schooling at the age of four, which seems to determine a child's chances for the rest of his life.

An interesting story--my students, you might recall Sheryl Turkle of MIT referencing robot therapists in her TED talk. USC has developed a robot therapist, Ellie, designed to talk to people who are struggling emotionally, and to take their measure in a way no human can. Originally developed to work with military PTSD patients, Ellie's purpose: to gather information and provide real human therapists detailed analysis of patients' movements and vocal features, in order to give new insights into people struggling with emotional issues. The body, face and voice express things that words sometimes obscure. Ellie's makers believe that her ability to do this will ultimately revolutionize American mental health care.

According to research led by V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, a region of the brain known as the angular gyrus is probably at least partly responsible for the human ability to understand metaphor. Ramachandran and colleagues tested four right-handed patients with damage to the left angular gyrus. Fluent in English and otherwise intelligent and mentally lucid, the patients showed gross deficits in comprehending such common proverbs as "the grass is always greener on the other side" and "an empty vessel makes more noise." Asked to explain the sayings, the patients tended give responses that were literal. The metaphorical meaning escaped them almost entirely.

Very interesting article about acronyms. "They may be a quintessentially modern annoyance, fooling us into thinking we have a greater grip on life's complexities than we really do. But that goes hand in hand with the wonders of the modern world: I'll take COPD and modern drugs over tuberculosis in 1910 any day."

"Christian missionaries have become strangely vital to conserving endangered languages... In 1951 Pittman had started interviewing missionaries and linguists about the languages that were spoken in the parts of the world where they worked. The result was a language catalogue called Ethnologue... For example, the Spanish priests who followed the conquistadors into South America documented indigenous languages as they went."

Notes about Chaucer's writing, including his "golden rule" (polyvocality), and favorite trick ("conjuring new words to make lines rhyme or scan").

"This past December, a new video debunking this claim made the rounds."

"Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to review plays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybody Googles. What's the driving force behind it? "Looking for short cuts, especially if you have to say something over and over again, is a common motivator," says Groves."

Even though this is an .com site it's written by someone who has experience in this matter and it's really interesting because it basically tells you what to do. And when the author did this, he got into a really good school.

This website has many well-written examples of sample college essays. The only problem with these is that they are not categorized into either well written, or really long. How to conceive, create, and perfect it essay is right because it is very difficult to start your essay. Basically this essay is talking about how this person got writer's block, and how she overcame it.

I thought this article was great because it added onto the other previous articles posted onto Diigo. It gave me even more tips on how to write my College Essay. 1. Write as you speak. 2. Be original. 3. Show genuine enthusiasm. 4. Create some mystery. 5. Focus. 6. Use active verbs. 7. Use short sentences and simple words.

"He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see?"( Psalm 94:9). The origin of human language-the ability of men and women to communicate with one another in intelligent, symbolic, often abstract speech and writing is a complete mystery to evolutionists.

This article talks about how the usage of African American Vernacular English, or AAVE can be influenced based on location. This "bidialectal competence - the ability to speak two different dialects - potentially makes them less subject to dialect discrimination on both educational and economic fronts." This is due to AAVE being commonly associated with being of lower class or intelligence.