Archive | April, 2017

In which comedian Jimmy Fallon is discombobulated by robots

28 Apr

Watch artificial intelligence – the cutting edge of engineering – live up to its creepy image, as comedian and ‘The Tonight Show’ host Jimmy Fallon apprehensively lets a snakebot climb his leg, has a super-awkward conversation with the placid android Sophia, and gets all butterfingered with an expensive butterfly bot. The snakebot, developed at Carnegie […]

50 Popular Books You Can Read This Summer

28 Apr

To mark #WorldBookDay, the School of Oriental and African Studies asked students, academics, alumni, and friends to suggest their top picks in global literature. The response was fantastic. While SOAS received hundreds of nominations on Facebook, Twitter and their blog, they narrowed the list to 50. The list is enough to keep readers going for […]

Word Nerd: ‘Apposite unfoldments’ and other words too fancy to understand

24 Apr

For some reason, some people think that the harder something is to read, the smarter it must be. But a long word or a complex sentence is not necessarily more effective than a short word or a simple sentence. Indeed, the opposite is often true.  We have discussed before why verbosity is a terrible way […]

Word Nerd: 9 Awesome Alternatives to Awesome That You Need to Know

17 Apr

Life is awesome, right? So is pizza, The Walking Dead, and your favourite pair of Converse shoes. The word gets tired and loses its glow with overuse. Ask Dean Winchester. So, for this Word Nerd, we came up with 9 lesser-known alternatives to awesome that you can sprinkle liberally on your conversations. We hope that […]

Remembering a funny French teacher

11 Apr

Recently, someone asked on Quora, “What has been your strangest experience with a teacher. Many stories followed, including a few disturbing ones. Our favorite was this one, contributed by someone named Annie Howard: When I was studying for GCSE French, our teacher had some very odd ideas: He gave people nicknames based on their names […]

Word Nerd: 8 most commonly mispronounced British place names

10 Apr

The UK has bizarre place names. We’re not just talking about the tiny Welsh town with a name 58 characters long – Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, or Pity Me – a village in Durham County. Between these two places – the first of which we doubt you’ll ever wrap your tongue around, and the second you will never […]

‘Leaver’s Assembly’ – a slam farewell for high-school graduation

6 Apr

It’s that bittersweet time of the year when high-school seniors say farewell to their classmates, look forward to their hard-earned summer break, and prepare for an exciting new journey through college. Last year, Naina Lavakare, a student at The British School, Delhi, was asked to write a slam piece for the traditional ‘Leaver’s Assembly’ held […]

Word Nerd: Why it’s important to write concisely

3 Apr

Business news reports sometimes refer to “manufacturing units” when they mean “factories”. One college library had a sign above its photocopier that read “Reprographic Unit”. We often use two or more long words when a short one would be enough. This sort of verbosity – sometimes the result of a shaky vocabulary, and at other […]