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…
A visualisation of a fake vs real news distribution pattern; users who predominantly share fake news are coloured red, and users who don’t share fake news at all are coloured blue When Mark Zuckerberg told Congress Facebook would use artificial intelligence (AI) to detect fake news posted on the social media site, he wasn’t particularly specific about what that…
Have you ever worried in your student years or later in life that time may be starting to run out to achieve your goals? If so, would it be easier conveying this feeling to others if there was a word meaning just that? In German, there is. That feeling of panic associated with one’s opportunities appearing to run out is…
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…
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…
