|
Topic1) Britons most afraid of heights and snakes
(28th March, 2014)
A new survey from an internet-based market research company shows the things British people are most afraid of. Top of the list is heights. Over half of the people who took the survey said they had acrophobia – the medical name for the fear of heights. In second place was a fear of snakes, with 21 per cent of people saying they were "very afraid" of the slippery creatures. The third biggest fear was public speaking, with 20 per cent being "very afraid" and 36 per cent being "a little afraid" of speaking in public. Other things that frighten people most include spiders, mice, needles and injections, the sight of blood, flying, and being in small spaces. Number 10 on the list was coulrophobia – the fear of clowns.
The market research company asked over 2,000 people what they were afraid of. They had to rate 13 common phobias from "not at all afraid" to "very afraid". The researchers found that there were big differences between what men and women were afraid of, and what frightened old and young people. The researchers said: "All are not created equal when it comes to fears." The survey showed that more women than men were afraid of things, especially spiders. These scare a third of men and about half of women. Age differences showed young people were more likely to be afraid of public speaking. Those in the older age groups were more likely than younger people to be afraid of heights.
Read more: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/1403/140328-phobias.html#ixzz31bK7pewO
A YouGov survey of 2,000 people has ranked the things that British people are most afraid of. The survey asked people to rate a list of 13 phobias, and asked them to describe their fear levels for each one. Here were the top five things that terrified us:
Heights
Unsurprisingly, a fear of heights tops the list. We're not a nation of skyscrapers and vertiginous mountains. Most of us would rather not look over the edge of the Grand Canyon or climb a unsteady pylon for the rush of it. And given that vertigo gives some people the urge to jump, a healthy fear of heights seems completely sensible to us.
Since our rainy island doesn't welcome the deadliest types of snake, it's somewhat odd to see this phobia so high up on the list. We don't have to deal with the Black Mamba, a deadly snake which can move at speeds of over 12mph. Sure, you might see the odd grass snake or adder in the countryside, but you're unlikely to meet a boa constrictor on a cool spring night as you pop down to the pub. So why the fear?
This one is understandable. Gazing out on a sea of expectant faces would give anyone sweaty palms. There is an entire industry devoted to helping people who cannot face speaking publicly, so we won't try to give you too much advice. But have you tried imagining the crowd naked?
As with snakes, the UK isn't exactly overrun with poisonous, fanged arachnids. But the recent panic about False widow spiders, and the oft repeated myth about eating spiders in your sleep might have contributed to a slight shiver in our collective consciousness. Are you feeling something crawling up your arm right now?
This doesn't only apply to the shoebox sized living spaces we can barely afford thanks to the housing shortage, but to the primal fear of not being able to escape a confined place. No wonder some people over the years have devised 'safety coffins,' which have bells and breathing tubes installed just in case the departed haven't departed all the way.
The rest of the list comprised of a fear of mice, fear of needles, fear of flying, fear of crowds, fear of clowns, fear of the dark, fear of blood, and a fear of dogs. Tell us what you'd add to the list. What are your top phobias? Come and scare us in the thread below.
Questions
Q1 : What springs to mind when you hear the word 'fear'?
Q2 : What are you most afraid of and why?
Q3 : Are you afraid of public speaking?
Q4 : How can we help people over come these phobias?
• Public speaking / • Heights / • Flying
• Spiders / • The sight of blood / • Injections
Q5 : What is the most scary thing ? Rank these keywords. Put the scariest at the top.
• horror movies / • the dark / • cyber-stalkers / • ghosts
• rollercoasters / • exams / • public speaking in English / • health checks
Q6 : Why are we afraid of things that are not dangerous?
Q7 : What was your biggest fear when you were a child?
Q8 : Have you ever overcome a fear?
Q9 : Are people in different countries afraid of different things?
Q10 : What do you do when you are really scared?
Q11 : How could you get over one of your fears?
Q12 : Is fear healthy?
Topic2. Could the Language Barrier Actually Fall Within the Next 10 Years?
Even with improvements in translation technology, there are still significant hurdles.
https://newrepublic.com/article/132148/language-barrier-actually-fall-within-next-10-years
By David Arbesú
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to travel to a foreign country without having to worry about the nuisance of communicating in a different language?
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, technology policy expert Alec Ross argued that, within a decade or so, we’ll be able to communicate with one another via small earpieces with built-in microphones.
No more trying to remember your high school French when checking into a hotel in Paris. Your earpiece will automatically translate “Good evening, I have a reservation” to Bon soir, j’ai une réservation—while immediately translating the receptionist’s unintelligible babble to “I am sorry, Sir, but your credit card has been declined.”
Ross argues that because technological progress is exponential, it’s only a matter of time.
Indeed, some parents are so convinced that this technology is imminent that they’re wondering if their kids should even learn a second language.
Max Ventilla, one of AltSchool Brooklyn’s founders, recently told The New Yorker
…if the reason you are having your child learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone in a different language twenty years from now – well, the relative value of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be walking around with live-translation apps.
Needless to say, communication is only one of the many advantages of learning another language (and I would argue that it’s not even the most important one).
Furthermore, while it’s undeniable that translation tools like Bing Translator, Babelfish, or Google Translate have improved dramatically in recent years, prognosticators like Ross could be getting ahead of themselves.
As a language professor and translator, I understand the complicated nature of language’s relationship with technology and computers. In fact, language contains nuances that are impossible for computers to ever learn how to interpret.
Language rules are special
I still remember grading assignments in Spanish where someone had accidentally written that he’d sawed his parents in half, or where a student and his brother had acquired a well that was both long and pretty. Obviously, what was meant was “I saw my parents” and “my brother and I get along pretty well.” But leave it to a computer to navigate the intricacies of human languages, and there are bound to be blunders.
Even earlier this month, when asked about Twitter’s translation feature for foreign language tweets, the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey conceded that it does not happen in “real time, and the translation is not great.”
Still, anything a computer can “learn,” it will learn. And it’s safe to assume that any finite set of data (like every single work of literature ever written) will eventually make its way into the cloud.
So why not log all the rules by which languages govern themselves?
Simply put: because this is not how languages work. Even if the Florida State Senate has recently ruled that studying computer code is equivalent to learning a foreign language, the two could not be more different.
Programming is a constructed, formal language. Italian, Russian or Chinese—to name a few of the estimated 7,000 languages in the world—are natural, breathing languages which rely as much on social convention as on syntactic, phonetic or semantic rules.
Words don’t indicate meaning
As long as one is dealing with a simple written text, online translation tools will get better at replacing one “signifier”—the name Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure gave to the idea that a sign’s physical form is distinct from its meaning—with another.
Or, in other words, an increase in the quantity and accuracy of the data logged into computers will make them more capable of translating “No es bueno dormir mucho” as “It’s not good to sleep too much,” instead of the faulty “Not good sleep much,” as Google Translate still does.
Replacing a word with its equivalent in the target language is actually the “easy part” of a translator’s job. But even this seems to be a daunting task for computers.
So why do programs continue to stumble on what seem like easy translations?
It’s so difficult for computers because translation doesn’t—or shouldn’t—involve simply translating words, sentences or paragraphs. Rather, it’s about translating meaning.
And in order to infer meaning from a specific utterance, humans have to interpret a multitude of elements at the same time.
Think about all the contextual clues that go into understanding an utterance: volume, pitch, situation, even your culture—all are as likely to convey as much meaning as the words you use. Certainly, a mother’s soft-spoken advice to “be careful” elicits a much different response than someone yelling “Be careful!” from the passenger’s seat of your car.
So can computers really interpret?
As the now-classic book Metaphors We Live By has shown, languages are more metaphorical than factual in nature. Language acquisition often relies on learning abstract and figurative concepts that are very hard—if not impossible—to “explain” to a computer.
Since the way we speak often has nothing to do with the reality that surrounds us, machines are—and will continue to be—puzzled by the metaphorical nature of human communications.
This is why even a promising newcomer to the translation game like the website Unbabel, which defines itself as an “AI-powered human-quality translation,” has to rely on an army of 42,000 translators around the world to fine-tune acceptable translations.
You need a human to tell the computer that “I’m seeing red” has little to do with colors, or that “I’m going to change” probably refers to your clothes and not your personality or your self.
If interpreting the intended meaning of a written word is already overwhelming for computers, imagine a world where a machine is in charge of translating what you say out loud in specific situations.
The translation paradox
Nonetheless, technology seems to be trending in that direction. Just as “intelligent personal assistants” like Siri or Alexa are getting better at understanding what you say, there is no reason to think that the future will not bring “personal assistant translators.”
But translating is an altogether different task than finding the nearest Starbucks, because machines aim for perfection and rationality, while languages—and humans—are always imperfect and irrational.
This is the paradox of computers and languages.
If machines become too sophisticated and logical, they’ll never be able to correctly interpret human speech. If they don’t, they’ll never be able to fully interpret all the elements that come into play when two humans communicate.
Therefore, we should be very wary of a device that is incapable of interpreting the world around us. If people from different cultures can offend each other without realizing it, how can we expect a machine to do better?
Will this device be able to detect sarcasm? In Spanish-speaking countries, will it know when to use “tú” or “usted” (the informal and formal personal pronouns for “you”)? Will it be able to sort through the many different forms of address used in Japanese? How will it interpret jokes, puns and other figures of speech?
Unless engineers actually find a way to breathe a soul into a computer—pardon my figurative speech—rest assured that, when it comes to conveying and interpreting meaning using a natural language, a machine will never fully take our place.
Questions:
1. Do you agree within a decade or so, we'll be able to communicate with one another via small earpieces
translation?
2. Do you think we need to learn new languages even with the advent of the translation machine?
3. What do you think is your job prospect with the development of AI? Do you think robots will steal your job?
*스칼렛, 시에나 토픽 감사드립니다:0
|