Learning the language of innovation
Michelle Dickinson
magine travelling to a foreign country without having to worry about communicating in a different language. This may soon be a possibility thanks to Google’s new wireless headphones, which have the power to translate between 40 languages in real time.
The ability to communicate freely with people from all over the world has the potential to make the world seem much smaller and could be for huge foreign business opportunities.
Though Google isn’t the first company to offer in- ear translation devices, they are the largest, suggesting we might be at the tipping point where this type of technology turns mainstream.
Much like the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, inear translation systems allow people who speak different languages to understand and communicate with each other without having to know the other person’s ( or alien’s) language.
As a frequent traveller, I am already a user of machine translation services. My Google Translate app easily translates signs and menus in real time using augmented reality. By looking through my smartphone screen, I can instantly see a translation of the words or characters in front of me.
However, there is a big difference between being able to read a menu in a Chinese restaurant and having colloquial conversations with a local!
In- ear translation devices have suffered from teething problems in the past. Complexities around context of language still arise. For example, if you hear the sentence “I saw red” would you assume the viewing of a colour or the feeling of anger?
Machine translation devices struggle with examples like this, but with the combination of artificial intelligence, human error correction and natural language processing, the technology is rapidly advancing for deeper context understanding.
We live in a world where self- driving cars may mean that our children will never learn to drive. The question now arises around whether translation devices mean that our children won’t need to learn a second language.
As it is, relatively few Kiwis learn a second language today. According to the last census, the majority of us speak only English and only 18 per rate in having lucid dreams over the period of just one week — significantly higher compared to a baseline week where they didn’t practice any techniques. Among those who were able to go to sleep within the first five minutes of completing the MILD technique, the success rate of lucid dreaming was much higher, at almost 46 per cent of attempts.
“The MILD technique works on what we call ‘ prospective memory’ — that is, your ability to remember to do things in the future,” explained study leader Dr Denholm Aspy, of the University of Adelaide’s School of Psychology. “Importantly, those who reported success using the MILD technique were significantly less sleep- deprived the next day, indicating that lucid dreaming did not have any negative effect on sleep quality. “These results take us one step closer to developing highly effective lucid dream induction techniques that will allow us to study the many potential benefits of lucid known as Nanogirl, is an Auckland University nanotechnologist who is passionate about getting Kiwis hooked on science. Tweet her your science questions cent of us can speak more than one language.
With such a low uptake in language learning, the ability to use technology to communicate with speakers of other languages — without having any knowledge of how their languages work — sounds tempting.
The question is, if advances in speech recognition reach the point where a second language isn’t required, are there other benefits to learning a language?
Scientifically, learning a language has been shown to boost thinking skills, improve mental agility and delay the ageing of the brain. These mental improvements have been shown to occur regardless of the age the person is when they start to learn the new language.
Cultural nuances are also not picked up by machine translation devices. There are many non- verbal dreaming, such as treatment for nightmares and improvement of physical skills and abilities through rehearsal in the lucid dream environment.” UK scientists have shown for the first time how dogs move their faces in direct response to human attention.
It turns out dogs don’t respond with more facial expressions upon seeing tasty food, suggesting the animals produce expressions to communicate. Brow raising, which makes the eyes look bigger — so- called puppy dog eyes — was the dogs’ most commonly used expression in the study, which involved 24 of various breeds, all family pets. “We can now be confident the production of facial expressions made by dogs are dependent on the attention state of their audience and are not just a result of dogs being excited,” said dog cognition expert Dr Juliane Kaminski, of the University also miscommunication errors that can seem offensive if the cultural politeness rules are not observed.
Technologically, machines are still hardware that can fail at any time. With flat batteries, frozen software and dropped headphones providing physical challenges, the need for human language is still required as a backup if not as a central system.
New technologies will probably keep changing the way that we approach how we learn languages.
However, although the way that we learn maths has changed since calculators became commonplace, we still learn maths to help us understand the core principles needed to solve problems.
With that in mind, technology translators may eventually help us to raise our awareness of the differences across more languages while we still learn the complimentary crosscultural knowledge that goes with them. of Portsmouth. “They produced far more expressions when someone was watching, but seeing food treats did not have the same effect. The findings appear to support evidence dogs are sensitive to humans’ attention and expressions are potentially active attempts to communicate.” When it comes to financial investments, hedge fund managers higher in “dark triad” personality traits — psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism — perform more poorly than their peers.
That’s according to new personality psychology research, which also showed the difference was a little less than 1 per cent, annually, compared with their peers. But with large investments over several years, that slight under- performance could add up.
“We should re- think our assumptions that might favour ruthlessness or callousness in an investment manager,” said study leader Leanne ten Brinke, a social psychologist at the University of Denver. “Not only do these personality traits not improve performance, our data suggest that they many hinder it.”
The researchers measured the personality traits of 101 hedge fund managers, then compared the personality types with their investments and financial returns from 2005 to 2015.