Negotiation for Meaning Routines in Audio SCMC Interactions: An Expanded Framework

Negotiation for meaning, in response to instances of non-understanding, plays an important role in SLA. Meaning negotiation routines in face-to-face classroom interactions have been identified by Varonis and Gass. Smith expands the model to adapt it to text chat CMC environments. In the past decade, synchronous audio CMC has become commonly used for online language teaching, but its affordances are different from text chat CMC. Therefore, it is necessary to examine what meaning negotiation routines are in language learners’ oral interactions in this new online learning environment. In this study, participants were invited to complete two information gap tasks in which target lexical items were embedded to elicit learners’ negotiation for meaning and then they participated in a stimulated recall interview. Based on the analysis of students’ oral interactions in synchronous audio CMC, the authors propose two new possible stages in negotiation for meaning routines and demonstrate how different modes of communication can affect language learning online

A Semantic Framework for Priority-based Service Matching in Pervasive Environments

The increasing popularity of personal wireless devices has raised new demands for the efficient discovery of heterogeneous devices and services in pervasive environments. The existing approaches such as Jini [1], UPnP [8], etc., describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms in these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome the limitations in these approaches, there has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques to support effective service discovery. This paper proposes a semantic matching approach which facilitates the discovery of device-based services in a pervasive environment; the approach provides a ranking facility that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request during the matching process. The evaluation studies have shown that the matcher results correlate reasonably well with human judgement

A Survey of Housing Equity Withdrawal and Injection in Australia

Over the past decade or so, aggregate data suggest a trend increase in housing equity withdrawal in Australia, potentially stimulating household spending. However, there has been little disaggregated information on how equity is being withdrawn and injected, the characteristics of households altering housing equity, and how funds from withdrawn equity are being used. This paper uses a survey of 4 500 households commissioned by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) to address these questions. The results suggest that, during 2004, the most common method of withdrawing equity was for a household to increase the level of debt secured against a property they already owned. In contrast, most of the value of equity withdrawn was associated with property transactions, with the typical property transaction resulting in a net equity withdrawal. Turnover in the property market is therefore likely to be an important driver of cycles in aggregate housing equity withdrawal. Bivariate and logit analysis suggests a significant life-cycle influence, with the bulk of equity withdrawal being undertaken by older households, while younger households typically inject, primarily through mortgage repayments or deposits for property purchase. Finally, the results suggest that the bulk of the value of withdrawn equity was used to increase non-housing assets, although a significant proportion of households used the funds for consumption expenditure.housing equity withdrawal; housing turnover; household debt

A distributed algorithm for wireless resource allocation using coalitions and the Nash bargaining solution

In this paper a distributed, low-complexity, fast and fair resource allocation algorithm for a multiuser, wireless LTE OFDMA channel is proposed. Based on the game theoretic concept of the Nash Bargaining Solution and by grouping users into coalitions of size 2, a cooperative solution to the problem of subcarrier allocation is achieved. The fairness that our algorithm provides matches that offered by the widely accepted Proportional Fair (PF) scheduler. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a sum rate that is almost equivalent (i.e. 90%) to the sum rate achieved by the PF scheduler, while only requiring minimal exchange of information between nodes. At the same time, efficiency enhancements and its distributed nature render it fast and low-complexity enough to be implemented in a real-time wireless system.In this paper a distributed, low-complexity, fast and fair resource allocation algorithm for a multiuser, wireless LTE OFDMA channel is proposed. Based on the game theoretic concept of the Nash Bargaining Solution and by grouping users into coalitions of size 2, a cooperative solution to the problem of subcarrier allocation is achieved. The fairness that our algorithm provides matches that offered by the widely accepted Proportional Fair (PF) scheduler. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a sum rate that is almost equivalent (i.e. 90%) to the sum rate achieved by the PF scheduler, while only requiring minimal exchange of information between nodes. At the same time, efficiency enhancements and its distributed nature render it fast and low-complexity enough to be implemented in a real-time wireless system

The Temporal Stability of In-Group Favoritism Is Mostly Attributable to Genetic Factors

Twin studies of in-group favoritism have reported roughly equal influences of genetic and environmental factors. All, however, have solely relied on cross-sectional approaches, leaving open the question of whether genetic and environmental factors have similar roles on stability and change for in-group favoritism across time. While in-group favoritism is commonly perceived to reflect environmental influences, stable environmental effects are rare for psychological traits, thus suggesting that genetic influences may play the major role in the stability of favoritism. Here, we used addressed this issue using a 10-year (two waves) longitudinal twin design. In-group favoritism showed high rank-order stability ( r = .67). Seventy four percent of this rank-order stability was attributable to genes. A broadly similar pattern was observed for race, ethnic, and religious favoritism. By contrast, changes in favoritism almost entirely reflected nonshared environmental influences. These findings indicate that environmental influences underpin change in favoritism, while the stability of favoritism mostly reflects genetic influences. </jats:p

A Pragmatic Approach for the Semantic Description and Matching of Pervasive Resources

The increasing popularity of personal wireless devices has raised new demands for the efficient discovery of heterogeneous devices and services in pervasive environments. With the advancement of the electronic world, the diversity of available services is increasing rapidly. %This raises new demands for the efficient discovery and location of heterogeneous services and resources in dynamically changing environments. Traditional approaches for service discovery describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms available for these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome these limitations, there has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques to support effective service discovery. In this paper, we present a semantic matching approach to facilitate the discovery of device-based services in pervasive environments. The approach includes a ranking mechanism that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request during the matching process. The solution has been systematically evaluated for its retrieval effectiveness and the results have shown that the matcher results agree reasonably well with human judgement. Another important practical concern is the efficiency and the scalability of the semantic matching solution. Therefore, we have evaluated the scalability of the proposed solution by investigating the variation in matching time in response to increasing numbers of advertisements and increasing request sizes, and have presented the empirical results

Population Based Methods for Optimising Infinite Behaviours of Timed Automata

Timed automata are powerful models for the analysis of real time systems. The optimal infinite scheduling problem for double-priced timed automata is concerned with finding infinite runs of a system whose long term cost to reward ratio is minimal. Due to the state-space explosion occurring when discretising a timed automaton, exact computation of the optimal infinite ratio is infeasible. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of ant colony optimisation for approximating the optimal schedule for a given double-priced timed automaton. The application of ant colony optimisation to the corner-point abstraction of the automaton proved generally less effective than a random method. The best found optimisation method was obtained by formulating the choice of time delays in a cycle of the automaton as a linear program and utilizing ant colony optimisation in order to determine a sequence of profitable discrete transitions comprising an infinite behaviour