Good English Pronunciation Users and their Pronunciation Learning Strategies

The study investigates pronunciation learning strategies (PLS) deployed by those with good English pronunciation, as well as their beliefs concerning the variables that affect pronunciation competence. In order to collect data for analysis this study surveyed 61 participants who had learned English as a foreign language. They comprised 28 higher education teachers and scholars specialising in English phonetics and phonology, who were defined as good pronunciation users (GPU), and 33 EFL teacher training students, viewed as average pronunciation learners (APL). This cohort responded to a survey on pronunciation learning strategies and expressed their views on several aspects affecting the L2 pronunciation learning process. These aspects were: age of the first contact with L2 (age of onset), motivation, exposure to the target language, the teacher’s pronunciation model, and learning strategies. The study used both open- and close-ended question formats to collect data from both GPU and APL. The analyses of the data helped to create a tentative profile of a successful L2 pronunciation learner

Automatic composition of music by means of Grammatical Evolution

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in APL Quote Quad, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/604444.602249Proceedings of the 2002 conference on APL: array processing languages: lore, problems, and applications (Madrid)This work describes how grammatical evolution may be applied to the domain of automatic composition. Our goal is to test this technique as an alternate tool for automatic composition. The AP440 auxiliary processor will be used to play music, thus we shall use a grammar that generates AP440 melodies. Grammar evolution will use fitness functions defined from several well-known single melodies to automatically generate AP440 compositions that are expected to sound like those composed by human musicians.This paper has been sponsored by the Spanish Interdepartmental Commission of Science and Technology (CICYT), project numbers TEL1999-0181 and TIC2001-0685-C02-1

Cultural Values and Cross-cultural Video Consumption on YouTube

Video-sharing social media like YouTube provide access to diverse cultural products from all over the world, making it possible to test theories that the Web facilitates global cultural convergence. Drawing on a daily listing of YouTube's most popular videos across 58 countries, we investigate the consumption of popular videos in countries that differ in cultural values, language, gross domestic product, and Internet penetration rate. Although online social media facilitate global access to cultural products, we find this technological capability does not result in universal cultural convergence. Instead, consumption of popular videos in culturally different countries appears to be constrained by cultural values. Cross-cultural convergence is more advanced in cosmopolitan countries with cultural values that favor individualism and power inequality

Geometric Cross-Modal Comparison of Heterogeneous Sensor Data

In this work, we address the problem of cross-modal comparison of aerial data streams. A variety of simulated automobile trajectories are sensed using two different modalities: full-motion video, and radio-frequency (RF) signals received by detectors at various locations. The information represented by the two modalities is compared using self-similarity matrices (SSMs) corresponding to time-ordered point clouds in feature spaces of each of these data sources; we note that these feature spaces can be of entirely different scale and dimensionality. Several metrics for comparing SSMs are explored, including a cutting-edge time-warping technique that can simultaneously handle local time warping and partial matches, while also controlling for the change in geometry between feature spaces of the two modalities. We note that this technique is quite general, and does not depend on the choice of modalities. In this particular setting, we demonstrate that the cross-modal distance between SSMs corresponding to the same trajectory type is smaller than the cross-modal distance between SSMs corresponding to distinct trajectory types, and we formalize this observation via precision-recall metrics in experiments. Finally, we comment on promising implications of these ideas for future integration into multiple-hypothesis tracking systems.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, Proceedings of IEEE Aeroconf 201

Special Libraries, September 1976

Volume 67, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1976/1007/thumbnail.jp

Boston University Chamber Orchestra, Friday, October 30, 1998

This is the concert program of the Boston University Chamber Orchestra performance on Friday, October 30, 1998 at 8:00 p.m., at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Symphony No. 6 in C major D. 586 by Franz Schubert, Songs on poems by Friedrich Ruckert and from The Youth's Magic Horn by Gustav Mahler, and Overture to Coriolanus, Op. 62 by Ludwig van Beethoven. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Datapedia: a Yellow Brick Roadmap

This note lays out a roadmap to Datapedia: the goal is to share numbers with the same power and ease that the Wiki has delivered for documents. This would transform the quality and usability of economic data. The goal is a system which, by analogy with Wikipedia can establish a world resource for reliable data. The paper discusses a process by which data providers and users can evolve a new set os systems for exchanging, describing and interacting with data to bring this about. The proposal centres on the metadata – additional descriptive data – that is associated with numeric data, and suggests how, in two cases – World GDP and Creative Industry Employment – data could be mapped in such a way that viable Datawiki platforms can be built. The proposal also allows existing communities of users to start reshaping the way they exchange and handle data, to permit, and also to improve existing standards for collaborative use of data. The first step would be Datawiki: an opensource system for recording revisions, changes and sources of data, allowing users to compare different revisions and versions of data with each other. It would be a set of protocols, and simple web tools, to help data researchers pool, compare, scrutinise, and revise datasets from multiple sources. The first step towards Datawiki is Wikidata: rethinking the way that data itself is transmitted between people that collaborate on it a platform-independent standard for exchanging specifically numeric data. I show that the ubiquitous standard for exchanging data – the spreadsheet – is not up to the task of serving as a platform for Datawiki, and assess how alternatives can be developed.Creative Industries; Economic statistics; Datapedia; Wikipedia; Wikidata, wikipedia, creative industries, macroeconomics