Canadian Undergraduate Journal of Cognitive Science

In recent decades, a new variety of German called Kiezdeutsch or neighbourhood German arose as Germany experienced waves of immigration from neighbouring countries since the late 1950s. Even today, researchers and non-linguists remain divided on the definition of this linguistic phenomenon. Sociolinguistic research conducted in this area uncover firmly rooted language ideologies in Germany—ones which challenge the reality of linguistic variation and change of a standard spoken norm. From this, we gain a general understanding of the subtle nature of societal forcs that shape our attitudes towards non-standard linguistic forms and their speakers. As Kiezdeutsch is a relatively new occurrence, some sociological areas of research remain unexplored; however, such areas can benefit from more well-rounded, collaborative approaches in future studies.

Antonio Damasio’s extensive popular work on neuroscience and its philosophical and social implications has argued-in intelligent, consistent, and poetically elegant prose-that much modern thought about consciousness and mental processes unthinkingly accepts a sort of Cartesian dualism. Such a dualism separates mental processes from physical ones; further, within the realm of the physical it separates the brain from the body. According to Damasio these dualistic constructions fail to do justice to the complex and interrelated nature of consciousness. Despite all his careful work however, Damasio does not entirely escape the Cartesian error of creating dichotomies where none genuinely exist, nor does he always pick the right dichotomies to challenge. I will reject Damasio s division of reason and emotion, while upholding a scientifically defensible version of the separation between brain and body against his criticisms. I will then analyze the philosophical implications of my suggested alterations to Damasio’s view.

We designed an agent that uses supervised machine learning and word frequency analysis to analyze online dating profiles. It classifies the vocabulary that people in different age groups tend to use in their profiles, and can successfully predict the age group of a dating profile’s author. We programmed our agent in Java and used term frequency-inverse document frequency {TF-IDF) scores and multinomial logistic regression (MLR). This technique has important potential for market and research applications