Group items tagged

This article contains several data tables that show the different modes of communication and how often we use each one. Certain graphs organize data by gender, age, impact on school, and much more. Something that interested me was that our time spent on text-based technology has negatively impacted our ability to write. This article analyzes each set of data points and puts our usage of electronics into perspective, as technology has dominated the way we converse.

American women who work full-time make, on average, 78 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. How do we account for this? A 2007 study pointed to a variety of factors, including the industries and specific occupations women tend to choose (or are nudged into).

This genius item of clothing is printed with nearly 40 icons that travelers can use to try to get their message across if they don't know the language. Inspired by a communications breakdown on the road, the shirt is part of a range of items created by a team of Swiss guys who've formed a company, Iconspeak.

A T-shirt that is printed with 40 universal symbols so that people may point at symbols when they can't understand each other

Everyone needs a copy editor. Today, the Texas Republican Party is probably wishing it had one, too. Check out this sentence from the just-adopted 2016 party platform: As Texas Monthly rightly points out, the sentence actually says that homosexual behavior "has been ordained by God in the Bible, recognized by our nations founders, and shared by the majority of Texans."

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?

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

What do you get when you cross a mafia mobster with a sociologist? An offer you can't understand. It's an old joke, and you could substitute "sociologist" with just about any other "ologist" - the broader point being that professions use language in ways that make it hard for outsiders to understand.

Language isn't only a way of communication, but it is the basis of many different aspects of life. Both science and math are languages of their own, and to be able to understand the style of language can help your brain to think in different ways for science and math.

Before you commit to a lifelong partnership with anyone, best to take a serious look at how the two of you communicate. This free couples communication quiz might be a good starting point. How the two of you communicate is the single best indicator of how likely it is that you will enjoy your lifelong partnership.

What can you recite by heart? Your times tables? German verb formations? The Lord's Prayer? Novelist Salman Rushdie thinks it should be poetry. Speaking at the Hay Festival, the writer described memorising poems as a "lost art" that "enriches your relationship with language". David Whitley, a lecturer at Cambridge University, Whitely, whose Poetry and Memory project surveyed almost 500 people, says: "Those who memorised poems had a more personal relationship [with the poem] - they loved it for the sound and meaning, but it also connected with their life currents - people they loved, or a time that was important to them. "For people who memorise a poem, it becomes a living thing that they connect with - more so than when it is on a page. Learning by heart is often positioned as the opposite of analysis. But for many people who know a number of poems, their understanding grows over time and changes." Psychotherapist Philippa Perry agrees. She points out that memorising anything, from poems to music, means you always have it with you. She thinks that memorising poems can also be good for the health of our brains. "The way we 'grow' our brains is that we make connections between our brain cells - neural pathways. The more you exercise that network, the more you strengthen it. If you learn things by heart, you get better at it."

One of the tricks our mind plays is to highlight evidence which confirms what we already believe: a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. A research study by Princeton University suggests a possible solution. If people are asked to "consider the opposite"--analyse a study's methodology and imagine the results pointed the opposite way--they strengthen their reasoning, and consequently, are less likely to elevate the ratings of studies which they agree with or become extreme in their views.

Seven years ago, President Ts. Elbegdorj shocked Mongolians by announcing that the nation would become bilingual, with English as the second language. Mongolian is a relatively small language, landlocked between two international giants, Russian and Chinese. As Elbegdorj pointed, English would be the definitive tool to open windows on the wider world.

Making specific references to print in books while reading to children -- such as pointing out letters and words on the pages, showing capital letters, and showing how you read from left to right and top to bottom on the page--promotes greater literacy achievement in the long-term.

Our brains are set up to do two things at once, but not three, a French team reports in the journal Science. Their experiment examined an area of the brain involved in goals and rewards and tested people's abilities to accomplish up to three mental tasks at the same time. When volunteers were doing just one task, there was activity in goal-oriented areas of both frontal lobes, suggesting that the two sides of the brain were working together to get the job done. But when people took on a second task, the lobes divided their responsibilities. Since the brain has only two frontal lobes, researchers surmised there might be a limit to the number of goals and rewards it can handle. Indeed, when people started a third task, one of the original goals disappeared from their brains. Also people slowed down and made many more mistakes.

"No matter whether you're a new hire or a veteran professional, at some point you're going to have to initiate a 'difficult conversation' with a boss, co-worker or colleague. This conversation could be between you and one person, or it could be between you and an entire group of people."

"So way back in April, I first had the idea of editing together inspirational speeches. Since then, the Dow has dropped 3,000 points and one million jobs have been lost. The people of the United States are now a ragtag bunch of scruffy underdogs, down by three touchdowns at halftime, with a whole horde of orcs waiting for us right outside those locker room doors. Inspiration has become something we need." - whoever posted the video I think that this video and the caption are very powerful, but unlike my previous post these speeches are from the mainstream media, not political or progressive figures, yet they are still inspirational.

On some level we already know that language shapes the way we think. We're automatically more afraid to fight a guy named Jack Savage than somebody named Peewee Nipplepuss, even if we've never seen either of them before. It's totally illogical, but you probably run into an example of that every day, and don't notice it.

And for more on spatial orientation and color perception differences, read Guy Deutscher's _Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different Through Other Languages_. Referencing the first point that the author of the article makes, that English speakers are more apt to blame others, it's interesting how certain languages, like English, stress agency: someone/something causes an event, whereas languages like Hawaiian, are indeed, more apt to characterize situations in the passive: the event simply happened.

Interesting connections between language and the subconscious mind

""Although a great deal of research has shown that more physically imposing individuals are more likely to acquire power, this work is the first to show that powerful people feel taller than they are," says Michelle M. Duguid, PhD ... In a series of three experiments, the researchers found a definite correlation between feeling powerful and feeling tall, and even suggest that future research may want to examine whether employers should consider placing short high-ranking workers in higher offices to raise their psychological sense of power. "Height is often used as a metaphor for power," Duguid says ... "These findings may be a starting point for exploring the reciprocal relationship between the psychological and physical experiences of power," Duguid says." Full study (free PDF): http://j.mp/yxfnPV

"[In] A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley ... Brain scans revealed that people with no symptoms of Alzheimer's who engaged in cognitively stimulating activities throughout their lives had fewer deposits of beta-amyloid, a destructive protein that is the hallmark of the disease. ... While previous research has suggested that engaging in mentally stimulating activities - such as reading, writing and playing games - may help stave off Alzheimer's later in life, this new study identifies the biological target at play. ... Notably, the researchers did not find a strong connection between amyloid deposition and levels of current cognitive activity alone. "What our data suggests is that a whole lifetime of engaging in these activities has a bigger effect than being cognitively active just in older age," said Landau. The researchers are careful to point out that the study does not negate the benefits of kicking up brain activity in later years."