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Responsive interactions are the key to toddlers' ability to learn language, according to a new study. Researchers studied 36 two-year-olds, who learned new verbs either through training with a live person, live video chat technology such as Skype, or prerecorded video instruction. Children learned new words only when conversing with a person live and in the video chat, both of which involve responsive social interactions, thus highlighting the importance of responsive interactions for language learning.

"Chatting with others in a friendly-rather than competitive-tone boosts the part of the brain that helps us solve everyday problems."

Twitter is awash with trolls, spammers and misanthropes, all keen to ruin your day with a mean-spirited message or even a threat that can cause you genuine fear. It seems all too easy to set up an account and cause trouble anonymously, but an emerging field of research is making it easier to track perpetrators by looking at the way they use language when they chat.

All the technology in the world can't stop you from leaving a trail behind you when you broadcast your thoughts online or via text message. We all have individual writing styles and habits that build to create a linguistic identity. Forensic linguistic experts can penetrate technological anonymity by interrogating the linguistic clues that you leave as you write. Everything from the way someone uses capitalisation or personal pronouns, to the words someone typically omits or includes, to a breakdown of average word or sentence length, can help identify the writer of even a short text like a Tweet or text message.

Languages a world apart have a similar habit of borrowing elevated vocabulary from other languages. In 1066, because the ruling class spoke Old French, that set of vocabulary became synonymous with the elite. Everyone else used Old English. During this period, England's society was diglossic: one community, two language sets with distinct social spheres. Today, English-speakers pick and choose from the different word sets-Latinate (largely Old French borrowings) and Germanic (mostly Old English-derived words)-depending on the occasion. Although English is no longer in a diglossic relationship with another language, the Norman-era diglossia remains reflected in the way we choose and mix vocabulary. In informal chat, for example, we might go on to ask something, but in formal speech we'd proceed to inquire. There are hundreds of such pairs: match/correspond, mean/intend, see/perceive, speak/converse. Most of us choose one or the other without even thinking about the history behind the split. Germanic words are often described as earthier, simpler, and friendlier. Latinate vocabulary, on the other hand, is lofty and elite. It's amazing that nine hundred years later, the social and political structure of 12th-century England still affects how we think about and use English. The article also discusses a similar historical phenomenon in India, where much of southern India, just like Norman England, was diglossic between Sanskrit (an Indo-European language used ritually and formally by Hindu elites) and vernacular Dravidian languages. Today, that diglossia is gone, but Sanskrit-derived vocabulary still forms an upper crust, mostly pulled out for formal speech or writing.

Useful strategies to get the most out of meetings: 1. Learn the art of the pre-meeting: Get the agenda well in advance. Relentless preparation and studying the agenda will help you plot the moments for your contributions. Think of some specific ways you hope to add value or your point of view ahead of time. Before the meeting, build support for your ideas in casual chats. The direction of a meeting, including who will be contributing, is often decided in the first few minutes: participate early. 2. Be actively engaged; speak up. By not doing so, you're withholding something valuable from the team. Silence is not an act of generosity when you have a great idea. 3. Embrace the uncomfortable; speak truth to power; don't be afraid to dissent. The benefits often far outweigh the risks, even if your workplace has not embraced dissent as a necessary tool for improvement. If something does not feel right to you, odds are it is not just you. 4. Be selective re: what meetings you attend. Acknowledge the invitation and express your appreciation, then politely explain that you are unclear about how your presence will add anything and suggest that you skip it. Frame your absence as an opportunity for others to add more to the meeting.

As AI advances, so does its language. A chat bot by Google uses language to speak with others in conversation. However, it runs into some problematic issues, especially regarding its ethics. For instance, it will associate doctors as men and nurses as women. Research is being put in place to make it a safer program.

This is about how telehealth is being used during this pandemic, and the complications with expressing people's thoughts over video chat

AI writers like ChatGPT can often produce work that is, at least on first glance, indistinguishable from human writing. With a simple prompt like "write an expository essay on symbolism in Heart of Darkness," ChatGPT can spit out an organized, coherent, five-paragraph essay in seconds. (See results below.) And no two essays will be identical. In some cases, help from an AI may be as acceptable as using a Google search as part of the research process. But in many cases, it will be unacceptable for classroom work. So how do teachers deal with the growing ease with which AIs can complete student homework? Turnitin, which is known for its technology used for plagiarism detection, has posted a technology preview that shows its software automatically detecting work written by an AI writer, even going so far as to show which parts of an essay were written by AI versus human and indicate where AI writing transitions into human writing.