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An NPR/Ipsos poll in December found that a significant number of Americans believe disinformation about the coronavirus and about settled historical facts. The findings underscore the enduring nature of unfounded conspiracies at a time when experts say disinformation is being spread on an unprecedented scale. The Internet gives conspiracy theorists a place to connect, and social media gives them a way to quickly disseminate their ideas on a mass scale. Disinformation peddlers are trying to drive traffic to websites where they can make money, or they're trying to shape a political narrative.

While there's an infinite number of stimuli in our daily lives, words that prime have been heavily researched. It has been shown that priming words can cause faster recognition or identification of something and also cause later actions that are similar to the ones read about. Because one cannot control the priming that occurs in "system 1" of the subconscious mind, people often incorrectly attribute their thoughts or actions to their own emotions, thoughts, and view points. Since many regions of the brain understand both social warmth as well as physical warmth, or both rough experiences as well rough texture, priming works without us realizing it because it creates neural linkages that only seem to connect subtly.

So basically you'll get into college if you write interesting stuff and you establish yourself as an individual. How hard can that be if we're all different people?

This article talked about how UC system used to not read the college essays. However, now that they do, it seems that a strong college essay could be the "edge" needed to make it into some of the more popular and more difficult to get accepted to UC schools. The main point that this article makes is, stand-out essays that represent the applicant's individuality can be much more beneficial than an essay that sounds like everyone else's.

This article promoted writing unique essays that establish you as an individual. This article talked about how they wanted to see more character within these essays rather than reading the same essays over again. I think that the point of this article was to stand out by being yourself and by adding some of your own personality to you essay.

Omniglot is a fun site, created by Simon Ager, who's a language enthusiast: an encyclopedia of writing systems and languages. You can use it to learn about languages, alphabets and other writing systems, and phrases, numbers and other things in many languages (the site embeds native speaker sound files). The site also provides advice on how to learn languages.

Lera Boroditsky, then an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University at the time of this article, looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think. Boroditsky's research data, collected from around the world, suggeststhat people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity. Boroditsky argues that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think - that learning a new language isn't simply learning a new way of talking, but a new way of thinking. Languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses. Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

The growing number of Hawaiian language accounts on social media is sparking discussions on how ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi can take advantage of platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Traditional approaches to language revitalization, like classroom instruction, have been fruitful, but using social media may help raise the visibility and accessibility of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi.

I found this article on writing survey questions really helpful. Definitely worth a read if you're planning to use survey instrumentation as part of your research data collection process. Badly-written questions can skew data, cause confusion, and bias respondents. The number of questions, how choices are ordered, and the demographics of who you're surveying can also affect the information that you gather.

The author delves into the nuanced role of swear words, exploring how they can forge social bonds and emphasize points in conversations. However, how acceptable these words are varies based on how they are used, as there are a number of reasons one may swear.

A new longitudinal study, led by Mary E. Brushe, a researcher at the Telethon Kids Institute at the University of Western Australia, gathered data from 220 families across South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland with children who were born in 2017. Once every six months until they turned 3, the children wore T-shirts or vests that held small digital language processors that automatically tracked their exposure to certain types of electronic noise, as well as language spoken by the child, the parent or another adult. The researchers were particularly interested in three measures of language: words spoken by an adult, child vocalizations and turns in the conversation. They modeled each measure separately and adjusted the results for age, sex and other factors, such as the mother's education level and the number of children at home. Researchers found that at almost all ages, increased screen time squelched conversation. When the children were 18 months old, each additional minute of screen time was associated with 1.3 fewer child vocalizations, for example, and when they were 2 years old, an additional minute was associated with 0.4 fewer turns in conversation. The strongest negative associations emerged when the children were 3 years old - and were exposed to an average of 2 hours 52 minutes of screen time daily. At this age, just one additional minute of screen time was associated with 6.6 fewer adult words, 4.9 fewer child vocalizations and 1.1 fewer turns in conversation.