Group items tagged

news and opinion interactive journal for teens and college students (high-quality)

these samples, though used to illustrate excellence, all could benefit from further editing

Like Facebook or Twitter, Yik Yak is a social media network, only without user profiles. It does not sort messages according to friends or followers but by geographic location or, in many cases, by university. Only posts within a 1.5-mile radius appear, making Yik Yak well suited to college campuses. Think of it as a virtual community bulletin board - or maybe a virtual bathroom wall at the student union. It has become the go-to social feed for college students across the country to commiserate about finals, to find a party or to crack a joke about a rival school. Much of the chatter is harmless. Some of it is not. "Yik Yak is the Wild West of anonymous social apps," said Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at University of Maryland and the author of "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace." "It is being increasingly used by young people in a really intimidating and destructive way."

This articles talks about how social media has affected the way college students communicate with one another. What I found interesting was the statistics they found in the college students with 39% of the people who took the survey feeling closer to their friends because of social media, and 26% saying that they have more friends because of it. It was surprising to see the positive effect that social media had on people rather than all the negative affects it has.

Graduates! It's that time of year again ... when college graduates put on those awkward gowns and head off to commencement, where they sit in the sweltering sun or a stuffy stadium, waiting to grab their diplomas and meet up with their families while half-listening to distinguished speakers dispense timeless wisdom and advice. Check out the "best" of 2016's college commencement speeches.

In this study, researchers analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. Articles (a, an, the) are highly predictive of males, being older, and openness. As a content-related language variable, the anger category also proved highly predictive for males as well as younger individuals. Females used more emotion words [(e.g., 'excited'), and first-person singular, and mention more psychological and social processes (e.g., 'love you' and ) for 23 to 29 year olds.

Researchers from Brown University and King's College London have uncovered new details about how brain anatomy influences language development in young kids. Using advanced MRI, they find that different parts of the brain appear to be important for language development at different ages. Their study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that the explosion of language acquisition that typically occurs in children between 2 and 4 years old is not reflected in substantial changes in brain asymmetry. Structures that support language ability tend to be localized on the left side of the brain. For that reason, the researchers expected to see more myelin -- the fatty material that insulates nerve fibers and helps electrical signals zip around the brain -- developing on the left side in children entering the critical period of language acquisition. Surprisingly, anatomy did not predict language very well between the ages of 2 and 4, when language ability increases quickly. "What we actually saw was that the asymmetry of myelin was there right from the beginning, even in the youngest children in the study, around the age of 1," said the study's lead author, Jonathan O'Muircheartaigh, the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London. "Rather than increasing, those asymmetries remained pretty constant over time." That finding, the researchers say, underscores the importance of environment during this critical period for language. While asymmetry in myelin remained constant over time, the relationship between specific asymmetries and language ability did change, the study found. To investigate that relationship, the researchers compared the brain scans to a battery of language tests given to each child in the study. The comparison showed that asymmetries in different parts of the brain appear to predict language ability at different ages. "Regions of the brain that weren't important to successful language in toddlers became more important i

Interesting article looking at cell use in college classes and the impacts that has on learning.

The Gitxsan Nation, an indigenous tribe, is located in northwestern British Columbia. Victoria software developer and linguist Aidan Pine used open source code to adapt the virally-popular online game Wordle for Gitxsan. While Pine recognizes that games like Wordle can support language learners, Pine said he's it's important to remember that technology is not what keeps languages alive. "People revitalize languages through hard work and determination. And if small games like this can help or make it easier, that's great." Stay tuned--word has it there's an `Ōlelo Hawai`i version in the works, and other coder linguists can find Pineʻs code here (itʻs adaptable to any language): github.com/roedoejet/AnyLanguage-Wordle

https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2022/02/uh-maui-college-professor-releases-hawaiian-version-of-online-game-wordle/ Ka pepa uila: hulihua.net

Beginning with Gangnam Style, followed by the success of K-pop groups such as BTS, interest in Korean popular culture has skyrocketed in the past decade. One way this has manifested is through a steep rise in individuals learning the Korean language. According to a study conducted by the Modern Language Association, U.S. college student enrollment in Korean language classes has risen 78% from 2009 to 2016, reaching 15,000, while total enrollment in language classes has plateaued in recent years. The only other widely learned language with significant growth in the span was American Sign Language, which increased enrollments by 37%. Despite this trend, East Asian Studies departments have struggled to accommodate the increasing demand for Korean classes. This is because Korean language classes have been historically limited and under-resourced due to the fact that language programs in East Asian Studies have traditionally focused on Mandarin and Japanese. Experts say that K-pop is the main reason for this trend, coupled with the success of several Korean TV shows and films such as Parasite and Squid Game. The current growing trend of interest in the Korean language and culture has also been an opportunity for South Korea to engage Americans in a variety of other sectors relating to the country including business, politics, economics, and history.

The author of this article discusses the study she conducted that explored how punctuation is used in texts to convey tone. The participants in the study consisted of 122 college-aged students (mostly from Boston College), and they were surveyed to gather data and responses. The discussion of the study shows trends in how text messages are interpreted and how subtle changes in text punctuation can alter the meaning or tone of the message.

How Students Literacy Affected by Texting

Persuasive Speech Tips Steve Iman, College of Business, Cal Poly Pomona Gain attention and interest. Try a quote? Try humor(see below)? Shock or startle? ("Before this speech is finish, 5 recent students will have lost jobs in the new depression.") Try a direct question?

There's new reason to believe so-called "digital natives" really do think differently in response to technology: It may be "priming" them to think more concretely and remember details-rather than the big picture-when they work on a screen. Among young adults who regularly use smartphones and tablets, just reading a story or performing a task on a screen instead of on paper led to greater focus on concrete details, but less ability to infer meaning or quickly get the gist of a problem, found a series of experiments detailed in the Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Using a digital format can develop a "mental 'habit' of triggering a more detail-focused mindset, one that prioritizes processing local, immediate information rather than considering more abstract, decontextualized interpretations of information," wrote researchers Mary Flanagan of Dartmouth College and Geoff Kaufman of Carnegie Mellon University.

This is an interesting correlation, but is it really causation?

Wouldn't the rigor of classes taken and other extracurricular activities also play a role in GPA? Wouldn't that also be a variable in their research? And a stalker button? Why would they even install that anyway?

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like. Two terms have risen quickly from obscurity into common campus parlance. Microaggressions are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but that are thought of as a kind of violence nonetheless. For example, by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American "Where were you born?," because this implies that he or she is not a real American. Trigger warnings are alerts that professors are expected to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response. For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays misogyny and physical abuse, so that students who have been previously victimized by racism or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might "trigger" a recurrence of past trauma. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into "safe spaces" where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable.

Language in humans has evolved culturally rather than genetically, according to a new study. By modeling the ways in which genes for language might have evolved alongside language itself, the study showed that genetic adaptation to language would be highly unlikely, as cultural conventions change much more rapidly than genes. Thus, the biological machinery upon which human language is built appears to predate the emergence of language. Professor Nick Chater, University College London Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, says: "...although we have appear to have a genetic predisposition towards language, human language has evolved far more quickly than our genes could keep up with, suggesting that language is shaped and driven by culture rather than biology. The linguistic environment is continually changing; indeed, linguistic change is vastly more rapid than genetic change. "