A sign language has emerged among three generations of deaf people and their families in a Bedouin community in the Negev desert. This newly reported case sheds light on the minimal environmental social factors required to generate a language.

When effort is observable to peers, students may try to avoid social penalties by conforming to prevailing norms. To test this hypothesis, we first consider a natural experiment that introduced a performance leaderboard into computer-based high school courses. The result was a 24 percent performance decline. The decline appears to be driven by a desire to avoid the leaderboard; top performing s...

According to the RNID, 1 in 7 people in the UK have severe hearing loss. Among these, a much smaller number, around 1 in 1000, have been deaf from birth or have never understood speech. For these pre-lingually deaf people, their natural language is often sign. Sign language is a complete natural language, used for culturally-rich communication, with many local dialects and idioms. In the UK, Br...

The Sign Language Recognition (SLR) system involves recognition of signs and their translation into normal spoken language. The hearing and speech impaired people are deeply associated with Sign Language as it is their fundamental medium of communication. Although such people can easily communicate amongst themselves, they face a serious challenge when they try to integrate into the educational...

The authors study the effect of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing on member growth at an Internet social networking site and compare it with traditional marketing vehicles. Because social network sites record the electronic invitations from existing members, outbound WOM can be precisely tracked. Along with traditional marketing, WOM can then be linked to the number of new members subsequently join...

Hand signs with symbolic meaning can often be utilized more successfully than words to communicate an intention; however, the underlying brain mechanisms are undefined. The present study using magnetoencephalography (MEG) demonstrates that the primary visual, mirror neuron, social recognition and object recognition systems are involved in hand sign recognition. MEG detected well-orchestrated mu...

Social networks and interactions in social media involve both positive and negative relationships. Signed graphs capture both types of relationships: positive edges correspond to pairs of “friends”, and negative edges to pairs of “foes”. The edge sign prediction problem is an important graph mining task for which many heuristics have recently been proposed [LHK10a; LHK10b]. In this paper we mod...

A novel wayfinding system is presented with an aim to increase workplace and life independence for cognitive-impaired patients such as people with traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, mental retardation, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease. It is based on geo-coded QR codes which embed the coordinate (x, y, floor) and social computing that helps shorten the learning curve for the people w...