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"Because" previously had two usages: finite clause or prepositional phrase. With changing language use, "because" has evolved as a preposition. Now, instead of saying "I need to do the dishes because I have chores" which uses "because" as a finite clause, now it's acceptable to say: "I need to do the dishes, because chores" which uses "because" as a preposition.

This article posted by UCSB speaks to the fact that technology is harming our human interaction, and we are reliant on it for many aspects of our everyday lives. The author uses several examples such as texting a friend, emailing a professor (instead of going in for help,) or missing the opportunity to meet new people. It's important to be mindful of how often one is going on a device because there is more to the world than the internet, social media, etc.

Emojis were Oxford Dictionary's word of the year. And it's quickly becoming the universal language of the Internet -- after Apple included an emoji keyboard on its phones five years ago. It's estimated 6 billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis are becoming a secret language for kids.

Some of the "2016 is awful" rhetoric might be about the way we all consumed the headlines this year. Amy Mitchell, director of Journalism Research at the Pew Research Center, says what we've been witnessing in news consumption trends over the last few years has changed us. "A lot of the shift to digital is presenting a news experience that is more mixed in with other kinds of activities," she says. "You don't necessarily go online looking for news each and every time. Somebody shares it, somebody emails it to you, somebody texts a link. And so many Americans are bumping into the news throughout the course of the day." Nikki Usher, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, calls this recent phenomenon "ambient journalism," or "when you're constantly plugged in through social media and you're constantly online and engaged in some way." And that - that constant bumping into news and online discord, that constant engagement - over time, it becomes an assault. And, Usher says, besides that aggression of immediacy, a lot of the headlines we consumed this year, particularly about the election, pushed a certain narrative: a nation, and even a world, completely and disastrously divided, perhaps beyond repair. "Lots of crappy, bad things happen every year," she says, "but you aren't told over and over again that this just shows us how bad everything is."

Hawaiian nonprofit organization Awaiaulu, Inc. is in the midst of a massive translation project fueled by history, newspapers, and volunteers, that aims to bridge the gap between Hawaii's past and present. About 100 Hawaiian-language newspapers published from 1834 to 1948 are being translated by roughly 3,000 volunteers.

"Web addicts have brain changes similar to those hooked on drugs or alcohol, preliminary research suggests. ... Dr Hao Lei and colleagues write in Plos One: 'Overall, our findings indicate that IAD has abnormal white matter integrity in brain regions involving emotional generation and processing, executive attention, decision making and cognitive control.' ... Prof Gunter Schumann, chair in biological psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London, said similar findings have been found in video game addicts. ... further studies with larger numbers of subjects were needed to confirm the findings." Link to the actual study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030253

Is technology killing other languages? Some seem to think that the internet is bias against foreign languages (not English) because the "lingua franca" of the computer world is English. With so many people learning English through technology is it worth the extinction of other languages?

A few of the words recently added to Dictionary.com Deep web: the portion of the Internet that is hidden from conventional search engines, as by encryption; the aggregate of unindexed websites: Dox: Slang. to publish the private personal information of (another person) without the consent of that individual Haptics: the branch of psychology that investigates sensory data and sensation derived from the sense of touch and localized on the skin. Glanceable: noting or relating to information on an electronic screen that can be understood quickly or at a glance:

Talks about how the use of the cell-phone, (texting, social networking, etc.) is known for its detrimental effects on parent-child relationships.

Is technology bringing us closer together or driving us farther apart? "Digital storage space is now 40% more likely to cause family arguments than hogging the landline (do people still have landlines?), with 50% of us admitting to accidentally deleting stuff and 25% losing photos or contacts."

An excellent guide to how to evaluate a website.

See how websites looked in the past

Google is working on a font, Noto, that aims to include "all the world's languages" - every written language on Earth. Right now, Noto includes a wide breadth of language scripts from all around the world - specifically, 100 scripts with 100,000 characters. That includes over 600 written languages, says Jungshik Shin, an engineer on Google's text and font team. The first fonts were released in 2012. But this month, Google (in partnership with Adobe) has released a new set of Chinese-Japanese-Korean fonts - the latest in their effort to make the Internet more inclusive. But as with any product intended to be universal, the implementation gets complicated - and not everyone for whom the product is intended is happy.

Believe it or not, the Internet did not give rise to procrastination. People have struggled with habitual hesitation going back to ancient civilizations. The Greek poet Hesiod, writing around 800 B.C., cautioned not to "put your work off till tomorrow and the day after." The Roman consul Cicero called procrastination "hateful" in the conduct of affairs.

Social media users now number more than 1.4 billion - more than half of the Earth's Internet-using population. We share a lot of information on social media, but it turns out we are sharing far more than we think. Seemingly innocuous information, when analyzed against tens of thousands of other profiles, can reveal secrets you never intended to share.

Award-winning, Chinese contemporary artist, Xu Bing, has created _Book From the Ground_, a text that speakers of any language can "read." His interest in pictorial storytelling was heightened by a bubblegum wrapper he happened upon-a series of three images connected by two arrows that instructed the chewer to put the gum back into the wrapper after chewing and throw it in the trash. This became Xu's inspiration for _Book from the Ground_. Xu's book reflects cultural literacy and modern tools and technologies, rather than traditional literacy. The author predicts that the younger generation is likely to find his icon language easier to "read" because they've been exposed to these images for as long as they can remember on the Internet. "I think it can be seen two ways," says Robert Harrist, a professor of Chinese art history at Columbia University who has taught a semester-length course on Xu's work. "It's great that everybody can communicate now and stay in touch constantly through one medium or another, a kind of shared, plugged-in visual world." But at the same time, with the "flattening and evening out in communication so much is lost," especially when it comes to tense or nuance. "The real surprising thing here and the challenge and the thing I love about it is he makes you ask yourself: What is writing?" adds Harrist, who describes Xu as "the greatest living Chinese artist, simple as that.... Everything he does is profoundly thoughtful."