The search engine giants are in the news.
Google is alleging that Microsoft’s Bing is copying its results. How do they know? And how does a search engine work anyway?
Linguist Daniel Midgley makes sense of the technology on this …
Page 41 of 41
Chaser, a border collie, can recognise the names of over 1,000 objects, and her owner claims she can carry out commands involving verbs and nouns combined.
Is this evidence that animals can use language-like skills?
Linguist Daniel Midgley investigates on …
CW: homophobic slur
This month, Canadian radio banned the Dire Straits song ‘Money for Nothing’ over an anti-gay slur in its lyrics.
Has the f-slur now become as unacceptable as other swear words? And how has the word changed since …
Last week, a computer system named Watson bested two human champions in a practice round of the trivia game Jeopardy!
Computers have beaten humans in chess before, but question answering is even more difficult because it involves the use …
NewSouth Books is planning to release a version of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn with the n-word removed.
Is it political correctness run amok, or a rather good idea? The book has found itself at the centre of controversy ever since …
It’s time to take a look back and see which words and phrases captured the zeitgeist of 2010.
Many language groups have nominated their words of the year. Will any of them survive past January?
Linguist Daniel Midgley names his …
What’s the difference between animal communication and human language?
How did humans develop the capacity for language?
Linguist Daniel Midgley talks the talk with W. Tecumseh Fitch, professor of cognitive biology at the University of Vienna, and author of …
This week, the Oxford English Dictionary dropped a bombshell: the first reference to Pavlova appears in a New Zealand publication, not an Australian one.
How much do we know about the names of our favourite desserts? Why is a lamington…
New research is revealing our secret attitudes about accent.
Our brains show different patterns when listening to people with different accents, and it impacts our judgments on how credible or trustworthy we find the speaker. But why do we have …
Programmer Nigel Leck has written a program that detects arguments against climate change on Twitter, and automatically responds with appropriate information.
The climate deniers are often unaware that they’re not dealing with a human. This is just the latest in …
Connect to us online
Awards
-
- CBAA Awards 2018: Best Radio Program — Talk
-
- Talkley Award 2018
© 2025 Talk the Talk
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑