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Next
Event
Friday, October 24, 2008, 07:00 PM: Life Extension with Jerry Emanuelson
Jerry will be talking about his 25+ year experience with life extension treatments, including hormone injections, his longevity doctor, what treatments to ask a doctor for, how to find and guide a doctor, an interesting example of the 'medical priesthood vs. empowered patient' conflict as more healthcare treatments are about prevention/enhancement, getting his DNA scanned with deCODEme and opensourcing his genome on the SNPedia.com, and more.
More...
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Linguistics
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If you’re a native Japanese speaker, respectively handicapped with a bit more than 20 phonemes in your language, some languages will seem near impossible. Picking a compatible language with similar sounds and word construction (like Spanish) instead of one with a buffet of new sounds you cannot distinguish (like Chinese) could make the difference between having meaningful conversations in 3 months instead of 3 years.
Let’s look at few of the methods I recently used to deconstructed Russian and Arabic to determine if I could reach fluency within a 3-month target time period.
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 A system pulls answers from online conversations by identifying the alpha chatterers.
The system was developed to analyze technical conversations in which an objectively correct answer exists.
Online communities are now firmly established in domains ranging from high school gossip to professional open-source software design discussions, generating huge repositories of records of human knowledge processing, pre-converted to digital form.
"For study of online natural language interaction, it's the mother lode."
The fact that human conversation has an inherent structure, including temporal ordering, references to previous statements, labeled sourcing and other clues opens the door to much deeper machine-generated understanding.
To make use of the structure, the team used a graph-based algorithm called HITS (Hypertext Induced Topic Selection).
The interactions used in the study were threaded discussions from three semesters of an undergraduate course in computer science, including 2214 messages in 640 threads, all discussing class material and posing questions about problems.
The implementation integrates three separate elements--speech act analysis, lexical similarity, and poster trustworthiness--to create links for interpretation for individual conversation participants.
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A computer program that learns to decode sounds from different languages in the same way that a baby does helps to shed new light on how people learn to talk.
The finding casts doubt on theories that babies are born knowing all the possible sounds in all of the world's languages.
"The debate in language acquisition is around the question of how much specific information about language is hard-wired into the brain of the infant and how much of the knowledge that infants acquire about language is something that can be explained by relatively general purpose learning systems."
The computer program supports the theory that babies systematically sort through sounds until they understand the structure of a language.
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For the most part, the thousands of languages in the world today fall into one of two categories (notable exceptions being Japanese, some Scandinavian dialects and northern Spain's Basque tongue): tonal or nontonal.
Two linguists believe they know the genetic underpinnings for these differences. During a study of linguistic and genetic data from 49 distinct populations, the authors discovered a striking correlation between two genes involved in brain development and language tonality.
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Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say.
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