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In 2010, then CIA Director, Leon Panetta, urged renewed focus on the critical need for Americans to master foreign languages at a national summit that brought together policymakers, members of Congress, Intelligence Community officials, and leading language educators from across the country. "For the United States to get to where it needs to be will require a national commitment to strengthening America's foreign language proficiency," Director Panetta said. "A significant cultural change needs to occur. And that requires a transformation in attitude from everyone involved: individuals, government, schools and universities, and the private sector." He urged schools and universities to reach beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic to "the fourth R": the reality of the world we live in. Language skills are vital to success in an interconnected world, he said, and they are fundamental to US competitiveness and security.

Pew Researchers surveyed more than 1,500 technologists and scholars about the forces shaping the way people interact with one another online. They asked: "In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?" The vast majority of techonolgists surveyed-81 percent of them-said they expect the tone of online discourse will either stay the same or get worse in the next decade. "Cyberattacks, doxing, and trolling will continue, while social platforms, security experts, ethicists, and others will wrangle over the best ways to balance security and privacy, freedom of speech, and user protections. A great deal of this will happen in public view," Susan Etlinger, a technology industry analyst, told Pew. "The more worrisome possibility is that privacy and safety advocates, in an effort to create a more safe and equal internet, will push bad actors into more-hidden channels such as Tor." Tor is software that enables people to browse and communicate online anonymously-so it's used by people who want to cover their tracks from government surveillance, those who want to access the dark web, trolls, whistleblowers, and others. The uncomfortable truth is that humans like trolling. It's easy for people to stay anonymous while they harass, pester, and bully other people online-and it's hard for platforms to design systems to stop them. Hard for two reasons: One, because of the "ever-expanding scale of internet discourse and its accelerating complexity," as Pew puts it. And, two, because technology companies seem to have little incentive to solve this problem for people. "Very often, hate, anxiety, and anger drive participation with the platform," said Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland, in the report. "Whatever behavior increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged."

"In our still-budding digital world, where public and private spheres cross-pollinate in unpredictable ways, perhaps it's not surprising that soon-to-be parents now routinely turn to Google to vet baby names. A quick search can help ensure that a child is not saddled with the name of a serial killer, pornography star or sex offender. ... But maybe common names are more prudent. A recent study by the online security firm AVG found that 92 percent of children under 2 in the United States have some kind of online presence, whether a tagged photo, sonogram image or Facebook page."

Fascinating article on language learning using an app called Memrise. The company's goal: to take all of cognitive science's knowhow about what makes information memorable, and combine it with all the knowhow from social gaming about what makes an activity fun and addictive, and develop a web app that can help anyone memorise anything. Two takeaways for language learning, and acquiring and retaining any subject matter: 1. Elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you'll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind's eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it'll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote. Create mnemonics for vocabulary. 2. "Spaced repetition". Cognitive scientists have known for more than a century that the best way to secure memories for the long term is to impart them in repeated sessions, distributed across time, with other material interleaved in between. If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in. One study found that students studying foreign language vocabulary can get just as good long-term retention from having learning sessions spaced out every two months as from having twice as many learning sessions spaced every two weeks. To put that another way: you can learn the same material in half the total time if you don't try to cram.

An interesting slide shows overlay between monkeys' area for mirror neurons and Broca's area in humans

Seems to have a security feature that's locked me out: Forbidden You don't have permission to access /Page/docs/.../Corballis-presentation.pdf on this server.

This story is part of BBC Future's "Best of 2015" list, our greatest hits of the year. Browse the full list. - Thomas Ormerod's team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans.

This was a fascinating article that focused on one dying language in particular - Icelandic. The article details of how Icelandic is weakening to the point that some of Iceland's youngest children speak English without an Icelandic accent, and when speaking Icelandic, their syntax is unfortunately influenced by English. Further, the article detailed of how the Icelandic government aims to secure a future for this language, spoken by less than 400,000 people, through preserving it in a digital medium on an online database.

This article was intriguing as it highlighted how even one word can symbolize a definitive change. In this case, the article focused on how President Biden is using the word "equal" in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the context of "Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely and to enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and democracy." In turn, this signifies a political push, likely from Democratic progressives, who want to define the concept of equal rights as a objective the U.S. should focus from now on.

The U.S Department of Defense is cutting funding for 13/31 language flagship programs at 23 universities including Brigham Young, UH Manoa, and University of Washington. This comes as a surprise for the linguistic community as this will cut nearly half of of Chinese, Korean, Arabic, and Russian groups alike. The overall concern is this will be detrimental to national security, and global diplomacy raising conerns about the future of language education, and the U.S's ability to engage with other cultures.