1,024,779 research outputs found
DYNAMICS OF INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE IN ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION
The seriousness of environmental issue has been brought to the
fore, not only because of its significance to human sustainability
but also due to its degeneration to communal conflicts, as well as
emergence of miscreants and hoodlums who find expression of
their destructive tendencies in environmental problems. This
paper calls for a reappraisal of method of communicating
environmental messages in particular reference to the language of communication. It begins with identification of environmental problems, the goal that environmental communication is meant to achieve and the inappropriateness of the English language packaged messages to achieving the goals. It stresses the significance of indigenous language use in communicating environmental massages and rounds off with examples of indigenous language communication
Demographic growth and the distribution of language sizes
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is,
to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population
of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process
is proposed as a model for the population dynamics of individual languages, and
applied over a period spanning the last ten centuries. The model disregards
language birth and death. A straightforward fitting of the two parameters,
which statistically characterize the population growth rate, predicts a
distribution of language sizes in excellent agreement with empirical data.
Numerical simulations, and the study of the size distribution within language
families, validate the assumptions at the basis of the model.Comment: To appear in Int. J. Mod. Phys. C (2008
Language competition with bilinguals in social networks
Several models have been proposed to study the dynamics of competition between languages. Among them, and starting from the dynamics of endangered languages, recent approaches have addressed the issue of bilingualism. Along these lines we consider the dynamics of language use, allowing for bilingualism, within a social network in the case where the two languages are equivalent. Understanding this case is a first step to describe the case of an endangered language competing against a language with higher status. Local effects are analyzed, studying interface dynamics and growth laws of the system. Power laws for the decay of interface density and bilingual population density are obtained. A final state is reached, where one of the languages disappears. We also study the stability of bilingual communities, which suggests possible explanations for the difficulty of coexistence of languages in the long term.Complex systems, Language competition, social networks
An Intuitive Automated Modelling Interface for Systems Biology
We introduce a natural language interface for building stochastic pi calculus
models of biological systems. In this language, complex constructs describing
biochemical events are built from basic primitives of association, dissociation
and transformation. This language thus allows us to model biochemical systems
modularly by describing their dynamics in a narrative-style language, while
making amendments, refinements and extensions on the models easy. We
demonstrate the language on a model of Fc-gamma receptor phosphorylation during
phagocytosis. We provide a tool implementation of the translation into a
stochastic pi calculus language, Microsoft Research's SPiM
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