Would you rather unlock your smartphone with a plain four-digit PIN or with a smiley-face emoji? Would it be easier and more pleasant to remember “????,” for example, or “2476”?
Smartphone users commonly use emojis to express moods, emotions and nuances in emails and text messages – and even communicate entire messages only with emojis.
The thatched roof held back the sun’s rays, but it could not keep the tropical heat at bay. As everyone at the research workshop headed outside for a break, small groups splintered off to gather in the shade of coconut trees and enjoy a breeze. I wandered from group to group, joining in the discussions. Each time, I noticed that…
Don’t we all sometimes come across acronyms or abbreviations used in social media which we are wondering about? Our common social media shorthand has indeed become amazingly extensive. We have acronyms and abbreviations for not only the way we chat back and forth with one another but also the marketing that we use there. It should be great to share…
Dogs can understand human speech and are only truly happy if a praising tone of voice is matched by the actual words spoken Dogs understand what some human words mean, according to a study published in the prestigious journal Science. In a world-first experiment, academics in Hungary trained 13 dogs to voluntarily lie in an MRI scanner to monitor what happened in their brain…
There are three things you can be sure of in life: death, taxes – and lying. The latter certainly appears to have been borne out by the UK’s recent Brexit referendum, with a number of the Leave campaign’s pledges looking more like porkie pies than solid truths. But from internet advertising, visa applications and academic articles to political blogs, insurance…
The final in our Computing-turns-60-series, to mark the 60th anniversary of the first computer in an Australian university, looks at how intelligent the technology has become. The term “artificial intelligence” (AI) was first used back in 1956 to describe the title of a workshop of scientists at Dartmouth, an Ivy League college in the United States. At that pioneering workshop,…
Will learning piano or violin make you better at French? Music is what penetrates most deeply into the recesses of the soul, according to Plato. Language has been held by thinkers from Locke to Leibniz and Mill to Chomsky as a mirror or a window to the mind. As American psychologist Aniruddh Pattel writes: “Language and music define us…
Should you ever wish to be reminded of those irritating workplace catchphrases, the internet abounds in news features and helpful sites – “26 Annoying Business Clichés You Should Stop Using Immediately”; “The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon”, to name just two. There is even ClichéSite.com, which claims to be the largest collection of such linguistic pinpricks. When they…