Books

• Mar 28, 2022

  What's in a rating?

  I often use the average ratings of books/movies from Goodreads/IMDB in order to decide what to read/watch next. Unfortunately, if there are not enough ratings, the average rating is often inflated, and it seems to decrease with the number of ratings. Plots of two datasets of books and movies show that the story is slightly more complicated.

• Jan 3, 2022

  The bilingual brain

  Have you ever felt that people change vocal timbre and tone when changing language? If you are like me, you have also gotten sometimes annoyed because people seem to get warmer when changing to their native language or logical and assertive when speaking in their second language. After listening to the course Language and the Mind (chapter 23 on bilingualism) I learned that similar phenomena have been documented by several noted researchers and used as useful tools to further explore the intimate link between language and the mind.