Technology has a remarkable ability to revolutionise our way of life. In the past, cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, washing machines and vacuums saved us hours of housework, and mobile phones became much more than mere communication devices. Nowadays, the topic that dominates discussions at work, school, and even in our homes is Artificial Intelligence (AI). This conversation is largely driven…
In an address to the Russian populace on Feb. 21, Russian president Vladimir Putin made several claims about the Ukrainian government’s attempts to suppress ethnic Russians and Russian speakers living in Ukraine. “The Ukrainian Parliament is continuing to discriminate against Russians,” he said, accusing Ukraine and Eastern European NATO members, of anti-Russian sentiment. “The politics of de-Russification continue. The Russian…
A California-based organisation hopes to use machine learning to decipher animal communication on a global scale. However, there are many who have their doubts about the initiative. Raskin is the co-founder and president of the Earth Species Project (ESP), a non-profit organisation with the audacious goal of deciphering non-human communication using machine learning, making all the knowledge available to the…
Lights, sounds or screens with messages: How can self-driving cars interact with humans to make their intentions clear? Autonomous driving promises to bring lots of benefits, ranging from more safety to increased mobility. However, the introduction of self-driving cars also means that we have to come up with means to communicate the intentions of these vehicles when there is no…
Image created by a botnet of 420,000 devices – watch 24 hours of global Internet activity in 8 seconds, with the higher activity in reds and yellows, and the wave shape showing where it’s day and night. The global digital language divide ÷ Try to visualise the Internet. For many, it is something hazy, suspended somewhere above our heads…
One of the best ways to describe 2021 was through language, and how we described adjustments or communicated changes to our new way of life. The language that trended in 2021 tells a story of the most consequential moments and phenomena of the year. If 2020 was “unprecedented,” then this year was its roller coaster of a follow-up. The rise of vaccines and…
It seems likely at this point that the coronavirus variants of significance will outnumber the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet at some stage. Then what? And what, by the way, is this penchant for using Greek to designate disasters? An unusual side effect of the coronavirus is the regular appearance of the Greek alphabet in newspaper headlines. The highly…
More than just words: How language affects the way we actually think Words work as a glue, allowing us to group together different experiences under one label. This is especially true for concepts that we cannot see or touch. But we still don’t really understand how language works in shaping the meaning of these more abstract concepts, or how it…
As people around the world travel more and receive more formal education, languages are predicted to vanish at an alarming rate. Denser road networks, higher levels of education, and even climate change are just a few of the factors that could lead to the loss of more than 20 percent of the world’s 7,000 languages by the end of…
