“You don't ask me to speak Mandarin, okay?”: Ideologies of language and race among Chinese Singaporeans

Speak to me, melody

Music, more than any other art form, can raise the human spirit to the heights of joy or plunge it into the depths of sorrow. Yet, the power of music to influence our emotions, regardless of age or cultural background, has left philos ophers, scholars and musicians baffled; perhaps unsurprisingly, given the inevitable subject ivity of the phenomenon (Fig 1). In the late twentieth century, biolo...

Do you speak the language of dyspnea?

Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies.

Since African-Americans began competing in elections in majority white districts, researchers have postulated that some whites were reticent to tell pollsters that they intended to vote for the white candidate, causing polling to be inaccurate. Prior to 2006, it was difficult to determine empirically whether the Bradley Effect existed, and if it did, how powerful of a factor it was, since there...

Am I doing better than you? That depends on whether you ask me in English or Chinese: Self-enhancement effects of language as a cultural mindset prime

Westerners tend to judge themselves positively unless their failure relative to others is obvious, in which case they tend to distance themselves from outperforming others. Whether this tendency to self-enhance in social-comparison situations is universal or culture-bound is hotly debated. Rather than construe selfenhancement as either universal or culture-bound, we propose that its effects dep...

Human-assisted graph search: it's okay to ask questions

We consider the problem of human-assisted graph search: given a directed acyclic graph with some (unknown) target node(s), we consider the problem of finding the target node(s) by asking an omniscient human questions of the form “Is there a target node that is reachable from the current node?”. This general problem has applications in many domains that can utilize human intelligence, including ...