Metaphors bias perceptions of scientific discovery

Whether ideas are "like a light bulb" or come forth as "nurtured seeds," how we describe discovery shapes people's perceptions of both inventions and inventors. Notably, Kristen Elmore (Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational ...

Online food reviews reveal inner self, Stanford linguist finds

(Phys.org) —Word choice in online restaurant reviews reveals much about people's inner worlds, according to Stanford research. The study, appearing in the April 7 issue of the journal First Monday, uses software to investigate ...

Bringing 'common sense' to text analytics

Bringing "common sense" to artificial intelligence is one of the biggest challenges in computer science: It entails equipping computers with the shared knowledge that humans use to infer meaning, make connections and communicate, ...

Hubble sees cosmic riches

(Phys.org)—This dazzling image shows the globular cluster Messier 69, or M 69 for short, as viewed through the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Globular clusters are dense collections of old stars. In this picture, foreground ...

Training computers to see metaphors

Suppose you are at an intelligence agency and your computer is faced with terabytes of text every day -- documents, emails, transcriptions of voice conversations and more -- and many contain metaphors. How do you train your ...

Sign languages help us understand the nature of metaphors

A recent study of the use of metaphors in spoken language and various sign languages shows that certain types of metaphors are difficult to convey in sign language. The study, "Iconicity and metaphor: Constraints on metaphorical ...

How public awareness campaigns can affect our thoughts

"The war against climate change." The expression is so ingrained in our language that we forget it contains a metaphor, but it does: it makes a connection between climate change and war, a war we must win. The expression ...

Metaphors for human fertilization are evolving, study shows

In a common metaphor used to describe human fertilization, sperm cells are competitors racing to penetrate a passive egg. But as critics have noted, the description is also a "fairy tale," rooted in cultural beliefs about ...

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