This article discusses the language of lying. It talks about liars' tendencies and patterns. Lying is very complex, but language itself is very good lie-detector.
Launches a flash application in which you can watch muscles of the face engage to reveal certain emotions...useful in detection of lying or "fake smiles."
"A small band of linguists, engineers and computer scientists, among others, are busy training computers to recognize hallmarks of what they call emotional speech - talk that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation. ... Algorithms developed by Dr. Hirschberg and colleagues have been able to spot a liar 70 percent of the time in test situations, while people confronted with the same evidence had only 57 percent accuracy ... His lab has also found ways to use vocal cues to spot inebriation, though it hasn't yet had luck in making its computers detect humor - a hard task for the machines, he said."
"Thoughtful questions often prompt thoughtful analysis and recently a series of questions from a reader regarding 'micro-expressions' had such an effect on me. His questions made me stop and think about how the public perceives 'micro expressions' and their significance in our overall understanding of body language, and more importantly, their relevance in detecting deception."
I think it's cool that they ask us to do this, write about what makes us unique, and adults don't do it. I think it's kind of like a test to find yourself and who you are; when that happens, you are ready for college, I guess.
But most students going into college don't know who we are yet. We often apply undecided becuase we don't know what we want to be. I think part of the college experience is finding who we are. Maybe writing the essay is the first step.
Wow, this is a really interesting comment. My first thought was that he thought he was worthless, and maybe the important thing that he wrote about was how he overcame that and realized that he is a valuable and unique person.
This is the season of that excruciating rite of passage that requires college-bound seniors to take what has often been a blessedly uneventful existence and transform it into something extraordinary, intriguing, distinctive.
"Few students are as lucky as Chris Bail [...] When I was about 11 or so, a group of kids threw stones at me, and that stuck in my head. That was just a big, big experience for me, and I guess I'm really lucky to have that because I know kids that are writing about, like, concerts they went to and stuff like that.''
I am disturbed greatly.
What does not kill us will only make us stronger...
Scary thought: Students trying to get into college will take extremes for more interesting topics to write about.
What if it happens?
Pressure. It exists. But don't let it RULE or RUIN your life.
As many students across the world struggle to individualize themselves on paper in order to get into college, they often write about drastic situations that they often think are unique only to them. This however is not the case as these situations have also happened to thousands of other students and the people reading over the essays probably already have read something like that. The only true way to express yourself in your paper is to just write how you normally would instead of hyping yourself up, using big words that you normally would never use in an attempt to seem smart, or blowing your achievements out of proportion to what they really are. Just be your self and let your voice shine through your paper.
I find it quite sad that students will go to the extremes and seek something that they think admissions officers will find intriguing rather than it coming from their gut and what is important to them. In my opinion the best advice I could give to someone writing their college essay is, be yourself. Don't try to be someone you're not.
"And though they seem to have more collaborators than ever before, from cooperative English teachers to new Web sites that offer successful essays for sale, the competition seems tougher than ever, now that so many early applicants have whittled the number of available slots."
To me the college application is sounding more and more deceptive. By the time you take that raw essay written by purely yourself and it goes through multiple English teachers and websites, and other peers, it goes from your writing to like your teacher's writing. I feel that after all of the processes it goes through, all the people who review it, the finished product really doesn't show the college who YOU are.
Parents teach their children to lie. The teaching process is subtle but just as effective as if they had sent their children to formal classes in deception. How many times have parents told their kids "Look me in the eye and then tell me what you did?"
This article discusses how both verbal and body language can indicate deceit in conversation. Although there is no established method of lie detection, many psychologists are working towards creating a more accurate system to do so using a combination of technology that analyzes facial expression, speech patterns, and more.
Some people subconsciously display the telltale signs of deception that make their lies relatively easy to spot -- but other liars are much more elusive. Neuroscience has been looking into what happens in the brain to explain this difference.