Group items tagged

"A new study of word frequencies in political blogs finds that equations describing earthquake evolution fit the eruption of topics onto political blogs."

Thanks, Ryan! We're going to read this for homework, since it relates to what we've been doing with computational tools and language.

more detail from Harvard about how to use N-gram

"The best part of waking up, is Folger's in your cup." "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there." "Snap, crackle, pop, Rice Krispies." Many companies use jingles as an advertising tool because they are so darn catchy. Here is a study analyzing whether it's the musical component of jingles that makes them so easy to remember.

Online Tools There are a growing number of resources that can help you use texting in the classroom. Here are some of our favorites. classparrot.com Allows you to send free text-message alerts to students and parents-think "Spelling test tomorrow" or "Don't forget your field trip money."

"Over the course of a week last year, the CMU team gathered 380,000 messages from 9,500 users, selecting messages from within the continental United States. ... Those non-standard written forms showed some interesting regional patterning. Spelling cool as coo or koo turns out to be a California thing. ... As research on Twitter dialects progresses, more research tools will likely become publicly available so that everyone can join in on the fun."

A new study by Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield, authors of the New York Times bestseller Crucial Conversations, shows nearly everyone has either seen or suffered from a catastrophic comment. Specifically, 83 percent have witnessed their colleagues say something that has had catastrophic results on their careers, reputations and businesses. Here are the top 5 blunders: 1) SUICIDE BY FEEDBACK: You thought others could handle the truth-but they didn't. 2) GOSSIP KARMA: You talked about someone or something in confidence with a colleague only to have your damning comments made public. 3) TABOO TOPICS: What it looks like: You said something about race, sex, politics or religion that you thought was safe, but others distorted it, misunderstood it, took it wrong, used it against you, etc. 4) WORD RAGE: You lost your temper and used profanity or obscenities to make your point. 5) "REPLY ALL" BLUNDERS. You accidentally shared something harmful via technology (email, text, virtual meeting tools, etc).

Article abstract: Writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events has been found to result in improvements in both physical and psychological health, in non-clinical and clinical populations. In the expressive writing paradigm, participants are asked to write about such events for 15-20 minutes on 3-5 occasions. Those who do so generally have significantly better physical and psychological outcomes compared with those who write about neutral topics. Here we present an overview of the expressive writing paradigm, outline populations for which it has been found to be beneficial and discuss possible mechanisms underlying the observed health benefits. In addition, we suggest how expressive writing can be used as a therapeutic tool for survivors of trauma and in psychiatric settings. This article provides a succinct review of relevant studies in this area, from 20 years ago to the present.

Award-winning, Chinese contemporary artist, Xu Bing, has created _Book From the Ground_, a text that speakers of any language can "read." His interest in pictorial storytelling was heightened by a bubblegum wrapper he happened upon-a series of three images connected by two arrows that instructed the chewer to put the gum back into the wrapper after chewing and throw it in the trash. This became Xu's inspiration for _Book from the Ground_. Xu's book reflects cultural literacy and modern tools and technologies, rather than traditional literacy. The author predicts that the younger generation is likely to find his icon language easier to "read" because they've been exposed to these images for as long as they can remember on the Internet. "I think it can be seen two ways," says Robert Harrist, a professor of Chinese art history at Columbia University who has taught a semester-length course on Xu's work. "It's great that everybody can communicate now and stay in touch constantly through one medium or another, a kind of shared, plugged-in visual world." But at the same time, with the "flattening and evening out in communication so much is lost," especially when it comes to tense or nuance. "The real surprising thing here and the challenge and the thing I love about it is he makes you ask yourself: What is writing?" adds Harrist, who describes Xu as "the greatest living Chinese artist, simple as that.... Everything he does is profoundly thoughtful."

Clean language are unbiased questions that can be used to get details and provide people with proper feedback. It is also to give players tools to support each other with improvement and give each other effective feedback.

Music is such a powerful tool for children, whether it be singing, playing an instrument, or just grooving along to the beat. There are so many types of songs (repetition, recognition, action, imaginative, etc.) that it reaches out to all types of learners and helps develop their language abilities as well! This article explores how music can really help people with down syndrome!

In this article, Peterson talked about how he got inspired to create the dothraki language. He said he took a course at UC Berkeley because he took a course in morphology which is the study of forms of things in particular. So he researched the words he wanted to use in the show and found their origin and started playing with sounds, phrasing, sentence structure, and ordering. But, he did pull language tools from J.J. R Tolkein and it seems like he had help from other outside sources. Although his made up language became famous in the world of Game of Thrones, he did not entirely create it himself. This article was interesting and all, but I still didn't find what I was looking for in how people create their own languages. Maybe ill try looking into J.J.R Tolkein's work.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut once opined, "There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can't be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes." Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Researchers at the University of Vermont's Computational Story Lab have analysed over 1,700 English novels to reveal six basic story types - you could call them archetypes - that form the building blocks for more complex stories. They are: 1. Rags to riches - a steady rise from bad to good fortune 2. Riches to rags - a fall from good to bad, a tragedy 3. Icarus - a rise then a fall in fortune 4. Oedipus - a fall, a rise then a fall again 5. Cinderella - rise, fall, rise 6. Man in a hole - fall, rise The researchers used sentiment analysis to get the data - a statistical technique often used by marketeers to analyse social media posts in which each word is allocated a particular 'sentiment score', based on crowdsourced data. Depending on the lexicon chosen, a word can be categorised as positive (happy) or negative (sad), or it can be associated with one or more of eight more subtle emotions, including fear, joy, surprise and anticipation. For example, the word 'happy' is positive, and associated with joy, trust and anticipation. The word 'abolish' is negative and associated with anger. Do sentiment analysis on all the words in a novel, poem or play and plot the results against time, and it's possible to see how the mood changes over the course of the text, revealing a kind of emotional narrative. While not a perfect tool - it looks at words in isolation, ignoring context - it can be surprisingly insightful when applied to larger chunks of text

This is the second part of the article about political mass communication. It mostly deals with things like collocations, fill-ins, and framing. Collocations are words that are often used with others and so carry a particular connotations because of their association. For example, calling someone a rabid feminist vs. calling them a radical feminist would suggest more danger and wildness because of the use of the word rabid. Fill-ins refer to the use of deliberately obfuscating or vague language which encourages the listeners to respond by filling-in the gaps with their own preconceived notions or biases and can be a helpful persuasive tool. For example, saying something like, "they want to control you." The "they" here is vague and thus allows the listener to fill in with whatever they want. The article also touches on doublespeak and the use of euphemisms to refer to unpleasant topics (George W. Bush and enhanced interrogation anyone?). Framing, more broadly refers to the use of these tactics to get listeners to interpret the speech in certain ways favorable to the speaker.

Both metaphor and grammar influence how people think about political candidates and elections. voters' attitudes can be influenced by a number of factors, including which information the media chooses to emphasize and how it is slanted. Framing, how a message is worded to encourage particular interpretations and inferences, can influence the perception of political candidates. Negative framing is often used to make opposing candidates seem weak, immoral and incompetent. It is persuasive because it captures attention and creates anxiety about future consequences. Grammar, though seemingly innocuous, also encodes meaning and is linked to mental experience and physical interactions with the world. Information framed with past progressive caused people to reflect more on the action details in a given time period than did information framed with simple past. Using grammatical aspect to frame campaign information, positive or negative, appears to be an effective tool for influencing how people perceive candidates' past actions. It may also be tweaked to invite inferences about what candidates will do in the future because it influences inferences about how events transpire.

This is from assistant professor Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University. She talks about how her research can show how language can shape the way that we think about time, shapes, space, colors and obejcts. "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."

which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most people would say sight or hearing, but what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?

How different languages shape the way people who speak that language think. Lera Boroditsky has done studies on the Kuuk Thaayorre, an Indigenous Australian group who instead of using words like "left" or "right," they use cardinal directions (North, South, East, West). Because of how they use cardinal directions, the Kuuk Thaayorre are very oriented.

Youngsters and adults alike will benefit from a new tool designed to keep the Nlaka' pamux language alive and well in the Nicola Valley. The eight First Nations that make up the Citxw Nlaka' pamux Assembly (CNA) are each receiving six computers equipped with licenses to an online program designed to teach the language orally.

A new study, conducted by Dr. Catherine Birken, a pediatrician and scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario, revealed the following: the more time children between the ages of six months and two years spent using handheld screens such as smartphones, tablets and electronic games, the more likely they were to experience speech delays. In the study, which involved nearly 900 children, parents reported the amount of time their children spent using screens in minutes per day at age 18 months. Researchers then used an infant toddler checklist, a validated screening tool, to assess the children's language development also at 18 months. They looked at a range of things, including whether the child uses sounds or words to get attention or help and puts words together, and how many words the child uses. Twenty percent of the children spent an average of 28 minutes a day using screens, the study found. Every 30-minute increase in daily screen time was linked to a 49% increased risk of what the researchers call expressive speech delay, which is using sounds and words. Commenting on the study, Michelle MacRoy-Higgins and Carlyn Kolker, both speech pathologists/therapists and co-authors of "Time to Talk: What You Need to Know About Your Child's Speech and Language Development," offered this advice: interact with your child. The best way to teach them language is by interacting with them, talking with them, playing with them, using different vocabulary, pointing things out to them and telling them stories.

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.