The Royal Australian Navy needed to recruit 40 Navy Cryptologic Linguists, a priority role whose primary duty is to intercept and translate foreign languages. To generate recruitment buzz, last year they launched a digital campaign that highlighted the need for human translators. Thus they began to enlist the help of Artificial Intelligence, the very technology most job seekers are fearful…
World Freedom Day has been designated in 2001 by then US President George W. Bush to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. The date is not so much about the wall itself though, but more about what it symbolised: the end of communism in both Central and Eastern Europe. This special day was created to celebrate the reunification of…
On October 29th, we celebrate the most important invention in human history: the Internet. In 1969, on that day the first Internet transmission ever had succeeded. While the Internet may not have been possible without a million other monumental inventions that came before it, it’s hard to find any other invention with such a monumental impact on mankind, having changed…
This stray dog visited a Hyundai dealership every single day, where it would constantly hang around the showroom. The local staff soon realised that the sweet pup had nowhere else to go, and during one particularly stormy and rainy night they decided to take the friendly dog in. The next day they named it ‘Tucson Prime’. Initially, the showroom took…
A short hypnotic video tells the evolution of our species with a dramatic flipbook animation
Time is relative, and there’s even something illusionist about it, and this is especially true when we try to condense the entire history of humanity within a small flipbook. This video does just that. It tells the story of the species: 550 million years of evolution in just a few seconds.
What do you get if you cross a kangaroo with an elephant? You’ll have to wait for the punchline, but you should already have shards of meaning tumbling about your mind. Now, jokes don’t have to be all that funny, of course, but if they are to work at all then they must construct something beyond the simple words deployed.…
When it comes to texting, the period, full stop, point – whatever you call it – has been getting a lot of attention. People have begun noticing slight changes to the way our smallest punctuation mark is deployed, from declarations that it’s going out of style to claims that it’s becoming angry. What they’re actually noticing is written language becoming…
The people of the United States continue to learn how polarized and divided the nation has become. In one study released in late October by the Pew Research Center, Americans were found to have become increasingly partisan in their views. On issues as diverse as health care, immigration, race and sexuality, Americans today hold more extreme and more divergent views…
Chinese is known as one of the most difficult languages to understand and interpret, and the struggle can clearly be seen from the many public signs with hilarious English mistranslation. However, China has finally unrolled a plan to eradicate “Chinglish” before the 2022 Winter Olympics and is working on improving the quality to standard English in 13 public areas like transportation, entertainment and medicine.
