Number of Posts: 16
Posts 1 - 10
Microsoft tries new key to unlock artificial intelligence
Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 5.2.2016
Language | English
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, brain, texting, word/writing
Summary | Microsoft has been investing a lot into artificial intelligence in order to understand more about natural language processing. Microsoft just bought SwiftKey, a keyboard app that tries to guess which word you'll want to type in your text. The app tries to work like a human brain; it analyzes your writing style and tries to predict the future.
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«Les lettres d'amour sont toujours révolutionnaires»
("Love letters are still revolutionary")
Newspaper | La Tribune de Genève
Date | 3.12.2016
Language | French
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | gender, texting, threat, word/writing
Summary | Philippe Brenot has been studying people's ways of sharing love for more than thirty years. He noticed some gender differences; for instance, women like to save love letters close to themselves whereas men save theirs in binders. Moreover, women don't write about their lover's body, whereas descriptions of female bodies are omnipresent in men's letters. However, in text messages, women are more likely to be straightforward. Brenot claims that love letters are not disappearing with new technologies. People still send each other love messages and save them.
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L'écriture sous toutes ses formes
(Writing in all its forms)
Newspaper | 24 heures
Date | 24.2.2017
Language | French
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | texting, word/writing, youth
Summary | Texting and abbreviations are more and more common. People, especially the youth, think less before they write. Sylvie Guggenheim claims that we need to get back to the basics and place writing at the center. Thus, she organized a showroom with workshops, conferences, and expositions in order to gather all the writing professionals.
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Das neue iMessage strapaziert die Nerven
(The new iMessage gets on my nerves)
Newspaper | Welt
Date | 15.9.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat, texting, word/writing
Summary | The updated iMessage has tons of new functions. It suggests appropriate emojis to replace words of a message, it now has sticker packages like the Facebook Messenger and allows for text messages to be animated. Users can also send short handwritten Messages - that it if they can still write by hand. All of the updates combined make for a much more obnoxious iMessage service.
Image Description | Images of iPhones using iMessage.
Image Tags | smartphone
Handliche Hitliste für klares Formulieren
(Handy hit list for clear articulation)
Newspaper | Appenzeller Zeitung
Date | 19.5.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | Facebook, language threat, social media, word/writing
Summary | Our ability to write clearly and poignantly is very important if we want to succeed in life. It is a complex skill that needs to be practiced and Facebook and co. do not help our sharpening of a writing style at all. Social media nurtures a much too simple genre of writing.
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Ausländer raus
(Foreigners out)
Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 1.10.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | cyberbullying, social media, threat, word/writing
Summary | Online comment sections on social media and news sites are full of hateful, wrong language. The problem with this is that the discourse about, say, foreigners and asylum seekers is dominated by negative words like "flood" and "chaos". Even the word "foreigner" is misleading becuase the world is not fundamentally divided into locals and foreigners but all of them are equal humans who happen to be born in one place or another. If we want that discourse to change, we must use the platforms which we are able to influence by responding to every hate comment in order to neutralize the discourse.
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«Jemandem zu sagen, er solle sich ficken, ist ziemlich schlimm»
(«Telling soeone to go fuck himself is pretty bad»)
Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 5.4.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | anglicisms, language threat, research/study, texting, word/writing
Summary | Linguist Elisabeth Stark is research texting communication with a corpus of 18000 text messages and even more WhatsApp messages. She says that about 2-3% of the words are anglicisms and that their amount does not seem to be rising rapidly - the word "fuck" for instance is still too strong for most German speakers. In German, sex is too taboo for taboo language. Her data also shows that Swiss people choose the local dialect rather than the standard variety when texting. Most people's langugage competencies are not compromised by this informal communication, most can adhere to conventions when a formal register is appropriate.
Image Description | Portrait of the interviewee and a Keystone image of a protest with a sign reading "fuck".
Image Tags | female(s), text
Leserbriefe
(Letters to the editor)
Newspaper | Sonntagszeitung
Date | 18.12.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | language threat, research/study, school, texting, Twitter, word/writing
Summary | The Pisa study results show that the Swiss language education concept has failed. The reading skills of Swiss students are very poor. More time is being dedicated to foreign languages than to the native language - are children now supposed to learn German from Tweets and text messages in Swiss German?
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Logisches Pisa-Ergebnis
(Logical Pisa result)
Newspaper | Appenzeller Zeitung
Date | 15.12.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | childhood, research/study, school, social media, texting, word/writing, youth
Summary | The Pisa study shows that Swiss students have decreasing writing and reading skills. This is not suprising considering the high percentage of foreign heritage children in Switzerland, the many national languages and distinct dialects, and the fact that children learn two foreign languages while still in primary school - let alone the dubious influence of new media, texting, social media, and so on.
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Auf Eigenständigkeit bestehen
(Insist on autonomy)
Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 14.3.2016
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | language threat, texting, word/writing
Summary | Digital communication like texting or blogging offer Swiss people various possibilities to express themselves in their native tongue. Linguistic autonomy has always been very important to Swiss German-speakers. This makes it all the more disheartnening that more and more Standard German is finding its way into Swiss German speech and writing.
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