Column -- "Night And Day: Notes On Building Stories"

Building Stories? Take your time, and read it carefully. An obvious quality of the book/box is how its narrative spreads across its fourteen different pamphlets, posters and books, forcing the reader to choose where to begin and how to progress. Ware’s story/discourse manipulations aren’t limited to the relationships among the fourteen separate components of Building Stories. Even the discrete pieces of Ware’s box confound reader expectations, leaping forward in time or folding back on themselves in complex ways

The effect of word-initial glottalization on word monitoring in Slovak speakers of English

The study investigates the impact of glottal elements before word-initial vowels on the speed of processing of the phrases taken from natural continuous speech. In many languages a word beginning with a vowel can be preceded by a glottal stop or a short period of creaky voice. However, languages differ in the extent of use and functions of this glottalization: it may be used to mark the word boundary, for instance, or to add special prominence to the word. The aim of the experiment was to find out whether the presence of the glottal element can influence reaction times in a word-monitoring paradigm. Users of different languages - Slovak and Czech learners of English, as well as native speakers of English - were participating in perception testing so that the influence of the mother tongue could be determined. The results confirm the effect of both glottalization and the L1 of the listeners. In addition, a significant effect of test item manipulations was found. Although the phrases with added or deleted glottal stops displayed no obvious acoustic artefacts, they produced longer reaction times than items with naturally present or absent glottalizations. We believe that this finding underlines the importance of inherent stress patterns, whose alterations lead to the increase in processing load

Symbolic manipulation on a TI-92: New threat or hidden treasures?

The availability of hand held devices that can undertake symbolic manipulation is a recent phenomenon, potentially of great significance for both the algebra and calculus curriculum in the secondary and lower undergraduate years. The significance to date of symbolic manipulation for mathematics is described, and parallels drawn with the significance of arithmetic skills for the primary school. It is suggested that, while symbolic manipulation is central to mathematics, many students develop only a restricted competence with the associated mathematical ideas. The Texas Instruments TI-92 is used to suggest some potential beneficial uses of technology that involves symbolic manipulation

Restoring Trust: The Role of HR in Corporate Governance

Theories of knowledge-based competition focus on internal resources as the source of value creation. The HR architecture (Lepak & Snell, 1999) brought human resource management directly into this forum by developing a model of human capital allocation and management. We attempt to extend the HR architecture by introducing a framework of relational archetypes—entrepreneurial and cooperative—that are derived from unique combinations of three dimensions (cognitive, structural, and affective) that characterize internal and external relationships of core knowledge employees. Entrepreneurial archetypes facilitate value creation from external partnerships while cooperative archetypes facilitate value creation from internal partnerships. This paper identifies how each of these archetypes is managed by a corresponding HR configuration and how they together contribute to value creation by facilitating organizational learning via exploration and exploitation

Video Manipulation Techniques for the Protection of Privacy in Remote Presence Systems

Systems that give control of a mobile robot to a remote user raise privacy concerns about what the remote user can see and do through the robot. We aim to preserve some of that privacy by manipulating the video data that the remote user sees. Through two user studies, we explore the effectiveness of different video manipulation techniques at providing different types of privacy. We simultaneously examine task performance in the presence of privacy protection. In the first study, participants were asked to watch a video captured by a robot exploring an office environment and to complete a series of observational tasks under differing video manipulation conditions. Our results show that using manipulations of the video stream can lead to fewer privacy violations for different privacy types. Through a second user study, it was demonstrated that these privacy-protecting techniques were effective without diminishing the task performance of the remote user.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

The xiphoid process in clinical medicine

Few references are to be found in medical literature to the association of the xiphoid process with disease. The case reports of two patients are here presented. The first patient is especially interesting as she throws light on a centuries old Maltese medical custom, which is dying out and is now practiced in the more isolated villages in the Maltese islands. These two patients illustrate first of all the ease with which the role of the xiphoid process in the production of symptoms may be completely overlooked. An erroneous diagnosis such as gastritis or even peptic ulcer can easily be made by a busy doctor if a patient indicates with one finger the localisation of pain in the upper epigastric region. A wrong diagnosis would be all the more possible if the patient is fully clothed when describing the symptoms at the beginning of the interview. In essence, this paper is intended to draw the attention of medical colleagues to the psychiatric, medical and even surgical aspects associated with the xiphoid process, whether because of the manipulative customs described above or through accidental self-manipulation or palpation.peer-reviewe