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"Rather than focusing on network dynamics, they decided to analyze the tributes by language. Jobs wasn't just an American visionary, but truly global."

Botched autocorrects are a byproduct of a technological convenience that allows typing on the go, even when the message does not always come out as planned. Yet as autocorrect technology has become more advanced, so have its errors. Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple employ dozens of linguists - or "natural language programmers," as they are known - to analyze language patterns and to track slang, even pop culture. And they can do amazing things: correct when you hit the wrong keys (the "fat finger" phenomenon) and analyze whom you are texting, how you have spoken with that person in the past, even what you've talked about. Apple's iOS 8 operating system, released in September, even purports to know how your tone changes by medium - that is, "the casual style" you may use in texting versus "the more formal language" you are likely to use in email, as the company put it in a statement. It adjusts for whom you are communicating with, knowing that your choice of words with a buddy is probably more laid-back than it would be with your boss. Your smartphone may now be able to suggest not just words but entire phrases. And the more you use it, the more it remembers, paying attention to repeated words, the structure of your sentences and tone.

An article explaining how technology affects teenagers social communication and friendships

When people listen to a preferred or a favorite song, they are able to connect better to the part of the brain called the default mode network, which is tied to how humans are able to switch between thinking about what's going on around them and their self-referential thoughts.

Whether you're networking, new to a job, or at a friend's party, talking to strangers can be a scary, but rewarding, experience. Use the above tips to go beyond empty exchanges and really get to know those you're talking to - without feeling awkward.

Author Sena Moore writes about how music can re-wire our brains for speech. Singing and speaking activate similar areas on both sides of the brain, primarily in the motor production and sensory feedback areas. Singing, however, also activates the right hemisphere in some areas more strongly than the left. Speech is a left-hemisphere-dominate function. In other words, similar networks in the brain associated with vocal production are activated when a person is singing and when s/he is speaking. And the "stronger right hemisphere" activation supports the clinical observation that those who cannot speak because of damage to the left hemisphere speech areas known as Broca's area can still produce words by singing them.

This report studies 65 political influencers belonging to the Alternative Influence Network (AIN): an assortment of scholars, media pundits, and internet celebrities who use YouTube to promote a range of political positions, from mainstream versions of libertarianism and conservatism, all the way to overt white nationalism. AIN's savvy use of YouTube promotes radicalization and adoption of extremist political viewpoints. Content creators in the AIN claim to provide an alternative media source for news and political commentary. They function as political influencers who adopt the techniques of brand influencers to build audiences and "sell" them on far-right ideology. This report presents data from approximately 65 political influencers across 81 channels. These groups uphold a broader "reactionary" position: a general opposition to feminism, social justice, or left-wing politics. Members of the AIN cast themselves as an alternative media system by: * Establishing an alternative sense of credibility based on relatability, authenticity, and accountability. * Cultivating an alternative social identity using the image of a social underdog, and countercultural appeal. Members of the AIN use the proven engagement techniques of brand influencers to spread ideological content: * Ideological Testimonials * Political Self-Branding * Search Engine Optimization * Strategic Controversy

Developmentally, teens are at particular risk for reckless online behavior, including secrecy regarding social networking. Many people - adults and kids alike - view likes, loves, comments and followers as a barometer for popularity, even within a smaller, closed group. Teens can quickly get caught up in the feedback loop, posting and sharing images and videos that they believe will gain the largest reaction. Over time, teens' own values may become convoluted within an online world of instantaneous feedback, and their behavior online can become based on their "all about the likes" values rather than their real-life values. There is a very real biological basis for this behavior. The combination of social media pressure and an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain that helps us rationalize decisions, control impulsivity and make judgments, can contribute to offensive online posts. In a recent study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that the areas of teens' brains focused on reward processing and social cognition are similarly activated when they think about money and sex - and when they view a photo receiving lots of likes on social media. When teens viewed photos deemed risky, researchers found the brain regions focused on cognitive control were not activated as much, suggesting that it could be harder for them to make good decisions when viewing images or videos that are graphic in nature.

This article discusses human communication with other animals. It states that animals won't be able to remember words like "bacteria" or "economy" because they don't have the brain capacity to understand those words. However, if you tell a dog to "sit", the dog is able to differentiate the sound of that particular word from other verbal signals, and can carry out the action. This is how learning words works. The article also discusses IQ and explains that human brains have been genetically modified for communication, and the size of our brains is also much bigger than expected in animals of the same size.

The article also underscores a quality that differentiates human language from other animal communication: grammatical orderliness. Human languages have word categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and so on. We can modify word order and word endings to create different tenses so that we can describe events from the past or imaginary ones from the future. This grammatical complexity emerges quite early in child development, beginning in the second year of life and exploding with full force in the third year of life. No nonhuman animal to date has demonstrated the ability to construct sentences with the level of grammatical complexity typical of a three-year-old human child.

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it," Jonathan Swift once wrote. It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study produced by MIT and published Thursday in Science. The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter's existence-some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years-and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. "It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information," said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. "And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature."

The brain's language regions work together as a co-ordinated network, with some parts involved in multiple functions and a level of redundancy in some processing pathways. So it's not simply a matter of one brain region doing one thing in isolation. Brain-imaging methods have revealed that much more of our brain is involved in language processing than previously thought. Thanks to fMRI technology, we now know that numerous regions in every major lobe (frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal lobes; and the cerebellum, an area at the bottom of the brain) are involved in our ability to produce and comprehend language.

This article was about the struggles and successes of several language businesses. A lot of these businesses had started out as a website and had to adapt their business to fit the time periods and society by turning into apps. Several of these businesses also had to use their own funds to support themselves in the beginning because of the economy at the time wasn't the best.

In a study, it is predicted that bilinguals have enhanced brain networks because they had a delayed onset of Alzheimer's by five years compared to monolinguals of similar educational backgrounds. Through CT scans, it was discovered that bilinguals physically had twice as much atrophy of the brain as monolinguals at the time symptoms started. This means that bilinguals showed no symptoms of Alzheimer's even though their brains physically looked like they did.

Food for thought--what were our lives like pre-Internet? Emma Rathbone's short, nostalgic literary meditation makes us think about our digitally-leashed lives. Then "you'd walk outside and squint at the sky, just you in your body, not tethered to any network, adrift by yourself in a world of strangers in the sunlight." Rathbone also gets style points for her effective use of rhetoric, specifically anaphora

Jennifer Sclafani, Georgetown University linguist, examines the idiolect of Trump. Everyone possesses an idiolect: an idiosyncratic form of language that is unique to an individual. Trump's idiolect seems particularly polarizing. Critics might decry Trump thusly: "He doesn't make any sense." "He uses a lot of small words." "His speeches are non-substantive." On the other hand, supporters see Trump as "authentic," "relatable," and "consistent." He's a "straight shooter" who "doesn't mince words." So how does one idiolect produce such polarizing evaluations? It has to do with the precarious connections between linguistic form and meaning. The relationship between the two, as the anthropologist Elinor Ochs describes, is non-exclusive, indirect, and constitutive. Put simply, there are multiple meanings associated with any given linguistic feature, and the connection between form and meaning is a two-way street Whichever meaning is activated by a specific pronunciation, or any other aspect of your idiolect, has everything to do with context: Where are you? Who is your audience? What is your purpose? What image are you trying to project? These are factors that candidates are always taking into account as they put forth their presidential selves on the campaign trail. Tailoring their speech to the context, like when a candidate takes on a drawl while campaigning in the South, has been grounds for being labeled "inconsistent" or "fake," as we've seen with Hillary Clinton, even though this type of linguistic accommodation is a perfectly natural feature of everyone's idiolect.

This article discusses how Google Translate functions. Google Translate is a relatively accurate and easy-to-use translator. At first, the system required millions of human-generated translations of texts to identify patterns, in order to provide a pretty accurate translation. Also during this early period, the translator would use English as an intermediary language-languages were translated to English and then from English to the target language. The translator was decent at translating short excerpts, but as the texts got longer, there is a decline in the quality of the translations. In 2016, Google announced they were shifting to a neural network machine learning process, which is supposed to attempt look at the full context of the texts to eliminate discrepancies in translations. This way instead of an intermediary language, the system can just translate from one language to another.

Pelota mixteca has been played for hundreds of years by indigenous people throughout the Americas. But it's more than a competitive event.

This sport is a weekly ritual and is a network for an immigrant community. It also serves a pastime for people and allows them to speak their own indigenous languages. Players who speak indigenous languages such as Zapotec and Mixtec travel to these games where there are even under-the-radar international tournaments.