How language can affect the way we think

Keith Chen (TED Talk: Could your language affect your ability to save money?) might be an economist, but he wants to talk about language. For instance, he points out, in Chinese, saying ?this is my uncle? is not as straightforward as you might think. In Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he?s related by marriage or birth and, if it?s your father?s brother, whether he?s older or younger.

?All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn?t let me ignore it,? says Chen. ?In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.?

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, he wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions? So he designed a study to look at how language might affect individual?s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does ? big time.

While ?futured languages,? like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, ?futureless languages? like Chinese use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen?s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant ? and we?re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that?s only the beginning. There?s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

1. Navigation and Pormpuraawans
   In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn?t refer to an object as on your ?left? or ?right,? but rather as ?northeast? or ?southwest,? writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world?s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. ?As a result of this constant linguistic training,? she writes, ?speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.? On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
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2. Blame and English Speakers
   In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we?ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, Boroditsky argues, but there?s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims.
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3. Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
   Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (PDF). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don?t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they?re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
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4. Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
   In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn?t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

In 3D computer graphics, 3D modeling (or modelling) is the process of developing a mathematical representation of any three-dimensional surface of an object (either inanimate or living) via specialized software. The product is called a 3D model. It can be displayed as a two-dimensional image through a process called 3D rendering or used in a computer simulation of physical phenomena. The model can also be physically created using 3D printing devices.

3D models represent a physical body using a collection of points in 3D space, connected by various geometric entities such as triangles, lines, curved surfaces, etc. Being a collection of data (points and other information), 3D models can be created by hand, algorithmically (procedural modeling), or scanned.

3D models are widely used anywhere in 3D graphics and CAD. Actually, their use predates the widespread use of 3D graphics on personal computers. Many computer games used pre-rendered images of 3D models as sprites before computers could render them in real-time.

Today, 3D models are used in a wide variety of fields. The medical industry uses detailed models of organs; these may be created with multiple 2-D image slices from an MRI or CT scan. The movie industry uses them as characters and objects for animated and real-life motion pictures. The video game industry uses them as assets for computer and video games. The science sector uses them as highly detailed models of chemical compounds.^[2] The architecture industry uses them to demonstrate proposed buildings and landscapes in lieu of traditional, physical architectural models. The engineering community uses them as designs of new devices, vehicles and structures as well as a host of other uses. In recent decades the earth science community has started to construct 3D geological models as a standard practice. 3D models can also be the basis for physical devices that are built with 3D printers or CNC machines

Representation

Almost all 3D models can be divided into two categories.

• Solid - These models define the volume of the object they represent (like a rock). These are more realistic, but more difficult to build. Solid models are mostly used for nonvisual simulations such as medical and engineering simulations, for CAD and specialized visual applications such as ray tracing and constructive solid geometry
• Shell/boundary - these models represent the surface, e.g. the boundary of the object, not its volume (like an infinitesimally thin eggshell). These are easier to work with than solid models. Almost all visual models used in games and film are shell models.

Because the appearance of an object depends largely on the exterior of the object, boundary representations are common in computer graphics. Two dimensional surfaces are a good analogy for the objects used in graphics, though quite often these objects are non-manifold. Since surfaces are not finite, a discrete digital approximation is required: polygonal meshes (and to a lesser extent subdivision surfaces) are by far the most common representation, although point-based representations have been gaining some popularity in recent years. Level sets are a useful representation for deforming surfaces which undergo many topological changes such as fluids.

The process of transforming representations of objects, such as the middle point coordinate of a sphere and a point on its circumference into a polygon representation of a sphere, is called tessellation. This step is used in polygon-based rendering, where objects are broken down from abstract representations ("primitives") such as spheres, cones etc., to so-called meshes, which are nets of interconnected triangles. Meshes of triangles (instead of e.g. squares) are popular as they have proven to be easy to render using scanline rendering.^[3] Polygon representations are not used in all rendering techniques, and in these cases the tessellation step is not included in the transition from abstract representation to rendered scene.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 152