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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.

Useful info for all collaborative activities. The 3 takeaways: 1. SET THE AGENDA The meeting's agenda can be summarized on a handout, written on a whiteboard or discussed explicitly at the outset, but everyone should know why they've gathered and what they're supposed to be accomplishing. The agenda provides a compass for the conversation, so the meeting can get back on track if the discussion wanders off course. 2. ​START ON TIME. END ON TIME. A definitive end time will help ensure that you accomplish what's on your agenda and get people back to their work promptly. 3. ​END WITH AN ACTION PLAN Leave the last few minutes of every meeting to discuss the next steps. This discussion should include deciding who is responsible for what, and what the deadlines are. Otherwise, all the time you spent on the meeting will be for naught. Mark Toro, managing partner of North American Properties - Atlanta, a real estate operating company, uses a phrase to end meetings that has become a common acronym in office e-mails: W.W.D.W.B.W., which stands for "Who will do what by when?"

The World in Words takes a trip to the Hawaiian Islands to meet some of Hawaii's native speakers on Ni`ihau. How have they managed to hold onto the language? What struggles do they face going forward? Is the variation of Hawaiian that Niihau speakers use different from the language spoken by the activists leading the Hawaiian revitalization movement, a.k.a. "university Hawaiian"?

When it comes to meeting that special someone, we've gone from IRL to swiping right. Online dating has changed the way people meet and communicate - and as that old saying goes, when you're trying to find bae, communication is key. With new ways to flirt, date and find love come new lingo to describe the adventures - or misadventures - of online dating.

The takeaway suggestions: 1.Give one piece of constructive feedback and let it stand on its own. Don't undermine your message by padding it with irrelevant positive statements. This might be uncomfortable at first, but research shows that people are hungry for constructive feedback. 2. Before your next one-on-one, pause to reflect before giving feedback. If you're stressed or rushed, you're more likely to deliver feedback without compassion or empathy - even if that's unintentional. 3.When you notice a problem, find a way to surface it immediately. Don't just hope a problem will go away, or assume someone else will fix it. When you speak up with compassionate directness, everyone benefits. 4. In your next meeting or one-on-one, consider another person's perspective. It can be as simple as pausing before a meeting to ask yourself, "Where is this person coming from?" By zooming out, you'll be better able to see others' motivations and understand their priorities. 5. When you receive constructive feedback, write it down and come back to it later. This will allow you to move beyond the emotion of the moment and consider more dispassionately whether it holds truth for you. 6.Turn a digital exchange into an in-person conversation. A lot of nuances of human communication are lost in digital interaction. When you get to know your co-workers as people instead of just names in your inbox, you'll build trust and camaraderie. 7. Once a day, have a conversation where you mostly listen. Don't underestimate the power of your silence. Instead of giving your opinion or changing the subject, invite the other person to go deeper.

This article talks about linguistic diversity in China and the many different dialects that exist in China. Before the coronavirus, China promoted Putonghua to eradicate poverty and improve the labor force. This is because, in China, not everyone speaks the standard variety of Chinese Mandarin and have to learn this standard version. However, the coronavirus has changed this fact and China started developing language resources to help those that don't speak standard Chinese Mandarin. Especially, because the outbreak was especially bad in Hubei, where residents speak Hubei Mandarin. Now, it's especially important for healthcare workers that don't live in Hubei but were sent down to help, to understand healthcare workers to be able to converse in Hubei Mandarin. It also touches on English being the global medium for scholarly articles, instead of any other language, such as Mandarin. Read this article to learn more about how the coronavirus is affecting the different dialects in China and how English is regarded in Chinese scholarly articles.

Like the title, this article talks about the future of language, but more specifically it focuses on the future of language through economics. It shares statistics showing each language and the number of native speakers. To know surprise, Chinese leads with 1.39 billion speakers. Yet, the most vastly spoken language is English. English is abundant in 101 countries around the world, almost double of the next leading language Hindu, which is spoken in a respectable 60 countries. English is the most universal language, but researchers have noticed that Hindu and Chinese are two rapidly emerging economies. So, it wouldn't be unwise to learn either of these languages to give yourself a helpful advantage in your career. For example, if you have a business meeting with foreigners who speak Chinese and know Mandarin, you are likely to be successful in your endeavors.

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.

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.

The article is about reading and understand body language when meeting someone for the first time, where you haven't really had any pervious chance to interact with them.

Two graduate economics students from Washington State University used Twitter to analyze how sports pundits' reputation was affected by their confidence and accuracy at predicting the outcomes to sporting events. They analysed tweets in which professional pundits and fans made predictions about the winners of a series of high-profile baseball and American Football matches. Each tweet was given a "confidence" rating depending on its language, with words like "destroy" and "annihilate" scoring higher than "beat", for example. Both the pundits and fans' predictions were worse than chance, with the professional analysts only proving correct 47 per cent of the time and amateurs 45 per cent of the time. Yet pundits' confidence was measured as 50 per cent higher than amateurs, and they gained more followers on the networking website as a result, the researchers said. Presenting their findings at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Economics and Finance earlier this year, the researchers explained that being confident could increase a pundit's following by 17 per cent, while predicting every game correctly only raised it by 3.4 per cent.There was a similar pattern among amateurs, with brash people increasing their following by 20 per cent but correct guesses only raising it by 7.3 per cent. In general, pundits are better served by being brash and making people excited, they claimed.

Suppose you are preparing for a potentially contentious meeting with someone with whom you've worked closely for years. She could be a fellow manager you want to convince to support an initiative but whose position in the matter differs from yours: how do you convince that person? While coercion and logic are not effective, "relationship-raising" is. According to a 2002 psychology study by Oriña, Wood, and Simpson, before making a request for change, mention your existing relationship with the other person and any mutually-shared goals/objectives, before delivering your appeal. " Or, in the most streamlined version of the relationship-raising approach, incorporate the pronouns "we," "our," and "us" into the request. The outcome? The relationship partners exposed to this technique shifted significantly in the requested direction. Similarly, in a British longitudinal study of effective professional negotiators, researchers found that the most successful bargainers spent 400% more time looking for areas of mutuality (e.g., shared interests) than did their mediocre counterparts.

The FOXP2 gene, a front-runner to explain the evolution of language in humans, may have rewired the brain to allow more advanced learning, according to preliminary research presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting this month. In a recent experiment, Christiane Schreiweis of the Max Planck Institute and colleagues looked at the human version of the gene in mice.

Text messaging is a surprisingly good way to get candid responses to sensitive questions, according to a new study to be presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

"According to a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society in January by Brice Russ, a graduate student at Ohio State University, the 200 million or so messages posted each day in the supposedly placeless world of Twitter may end up being a rich source of information about regional difference. ... it may allow them to track linguistic patterns on a vast scale and in something close to real time, identifying phenomena that can then be investigated more deeply by traditional fieldwork."

Emoticons - representations of facial expressions using colons, dashes, parentheses and other text symbols - originated in the days of the telegraph as a substitute for the facial expressions, hand gestures and vocal clues for different emotions that humans pick up during in-person meetings. Because printed words alone can't always convey the full emotional meaning of a conversation, emoticons have evolved into a separate language, especially with the world increasingly relying on texting, tweeting and e-mail. Called Stickers, Facebook's emoticons were born out of more than two years of research into the compassion of Facebook members, then fine-tuned by scientists specializing in human facial expressions. And while they were inspired by evolutionist Charles Darwin's studies in the mid-19th century, Facebook believes they could be a vital part of human-to-human relationships in the digital 21st century.

Three amazing stories about language: "We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago." (also, the transcript is here: http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/transcript/)

i'm enjoying it right now! check out the video, too. i'll try to bookmark it (my first!).

Ahh...I see Ryan found it first! Thanks, Ryan!