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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.

Santiago Swallow is "a Mexican-born, American motivational speaker, consultant, educator, and author, whose speeches and publications focus on understanding modern culture in the age of social networking, globally interconnected media, user generated content and the Internet," and has "dedicated himself to helping others know more about how media and personality can manipulated in the 21st Century." Though completely fictional, he boasts a Wikipedia biography and a Twitter account with tens of thousands of followers. Making up-or at least "enhancing"-an identity like this is something real people do to increase their reputation, look popular, and sell themselves. There are equally real people who profit from this by selling fake followers created by software at the push of a button. Be afraid.

The Rap Genius website annotates rap lyrics: creators hope to provide a hip-hop Wikipedia. You can listen to songs, read lyrics, and click the lines that interest you for pop-up explanations. Like Wikipedia, you can also create and annotate entries.

Robert Provine, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, examines laughter as a means of exploring mechanisms and evolution of vocal production, perception and social behavior. He examines laugh structure, compares human to chimp laughter, sociolinguistic contexts of laughter, the contagiousness of laughter, and pinpoints directions for future study. This article, originally printed in American Scientist 84. 1 (Jan-Feb, 1996): 38-47, is a more in-depth, scholarly article than the other, related article on laughter that I posted: Provine's "The Science of Laughter."

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).

There comes a uniquely emotional moment for American Hispanics who register for a freshman year of college: Is it a good idea to sign up for the formal study of Spanish?

Two University of Washington undergraduates have won a $10,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for gloves that can translate sign language into text or speech. The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize is a nationwide search for the most inventive undergraduate and graduate students. This year, UW sophomores Navid Azodi and Thomas Pryor - who are studying business administration and aeronautics and astronautics engineering, respectively - won the "Use It" undergraduate category that recognizes technology-based inventions to improve consumer devices. Their invention, "SignAloud," is a pair of gloves that can recognize hand gestures that correspond to words and phrases in American Sign Language. Each glove contains sensors that record hand position and movement and send data wirelessly via Bluetooth to a central computer. The computer looks at the gesture data through various sequential statistical regressions, similar to a neural network. If the data match a gesture, then the associated word or phrase is spoken through a speaker.

There is a strange little cultural feedback loop that's playing out again and again on social media. It begins with, say, a white American man who becomes interested in taking an outspoken stand against racism or misogyny. This article talks about a certain slang word that has become popular and how this actually has many positive effects.

This article highlights the phrases that Clinton used during the presidential debate to attract black voters. Phrases like "systematic racism", "implicit bias", "black bias", and "racist" were used to identify with the black voters. Many viewers were excited that she was facing such issues and was tackling them head on because according to this article, "A big chunk of Americans - not just people of color - want our leadership to talk about race, and to talk about policing the criminal justice system and the role that race plays in those institutions." As a presidential candidate, Clinton has been forced to become more skilled with the word choice. Here, she attempts to appeal herself to different groups of people to attract votes.

There are two versions of the writer Lauren Collins. There is the English-speaking Lauren, who, presumably, is the Lauren primarily responsible for writing her (wonderful) new memoir, When in French. And then there is the French-speaking Lauren, the one tasked with navigating a marriage and a life in a second language.

It's cool to think that speaking a language can change your perception of the world. I never thought about it before, but from studying Chinese, I feel like I have two sides to myself: an american point of view and an asian point of view. Language shapes who you are.

This article provide the most thoroughgoing analysis to date of how the income kitty - like paychecks, profit-sharing, fringe benefits and food stamps - is divided among the American population.

Some of the "2016 is awful" rhetoric might be about the way we all consumed the headlines this year. Amy Mitchell, director of Journalism Research at the Pew Research Center, says what we've been witnessing in news consumption trends over the last few years has changed us. "A lot of the shift to digital is presenting a news experience that is more mixed in with other kinds of activities," she says. "You don't necessarily go online looking for news each and every time. Somebody shares it, somebody emails it to you, somebody texts a link. And so many Americans are bumping into the news throughout the course of the day." Nikki Usher, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, calls this recent phenomenon "ambient journalism," or "when you're constantly plugged in through social media and you're constantly online and engaged in some way." And that - that constant bumping into news and online discord, that constant engagement - over time, it becomes an assault. And, Usher says, besides that aggression of immediacy, a lot of the headlines we consumed this year, particularly about the election, pushed a certain narrative: a nation, and even a world, completely and disastrously divided, perhaps beyond repair. "Lots of crappy, bad things happen every year," she says, "but you aren't told over and over again that this just shows us how bad everything is."

Perhaps no other American author has had his writing style more widely examined, more often imitated, and more intensively deconstructed than Ernest Hemingway. No one seems able to get their head around the intricacy he brings about via such simplicity. Hemingway used only the most necessary words, then pared them down even further.

Offering a written expression of condolence (from the Latin word condolere, to grieve or to suffer with someone) used to be a staple of polite society. "A letter of condolence may be abrupt, badly constructed, ungrammatical - never mind," advised the 1960 edition of Emily Post. "Grace of expression counts for nothing; sincerity alone is of value." But these days, as Facebooking, Snapchatting or simply ignoring friends has become fashionable, the rules of expressing sympathy have become muddied at best, and concealed in an onslaught of emoji at worst. Just over two and a half million Americans die every year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and we buy 90 million sympathy cards annually, a spokeswoman for Hallmark said. But 90 percent of those cards are bought by people over 40. Take-away tips from the article: 1. BEING TONGUE-TIED IS O.K. 2. SHARE A POSITIVE MEMORY 3. NO COMPARISONS 4. DON'T DODGE THE 'D' WORDS 5. GET REAL. 6. FACEBOOK IS NOT ENOUGH

Slightly more narrow survey of speeches compared to any of the earlier posts. Still I see that all of the speeches use great diction and word choice and center around topics that were and remain highly controversial and powerful even in today's society.

Tense people may miss the subtle warning signs of danger Image: Roc Canals Photography/Getty Images Worrywarts, beware: all that fretting may be for naught. Anxiety has long been interpreted as a symptom of hyperawareness and sensitivity to danger, but a study published last December in Biological Psychology turns that logic on its head.

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.