Cappadocian in the social media era

Until very recently, Cappadocian Greek seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Linguists and dialectologists even believed it had become extinct altogether. However, one Cappadocian variety, Mišótika, is still spoken in some villages and towns in the decentralized administrations of Macedonia and Thrace, Epirus and Western Macedonia, and Thessaly and Central Greece. The dialect is undergoing attrition under the growing pressure of Standard Modern Greek and its regional varieties and is actually being re-Hellenized. Even the oldest speakers make free use of Greek instead of Misiótika words and expressions and attrition is noticeable in at the phonological, morphological and syntactic levels. As a result, there are now many semi- or even would-be speakers whose speech is located somewhere on a continuum from Mišótika with Standard or Regional Modern Greek elements in it to Standard or Regional Modern Greek with Mišótika elements in it - in both cases mostly words and phrases. Over the past ten years, we have witnessed a growing interest in Mišótika as a marker of (Mišótika) Cappadocian identity. Speakers feel more confident to speak their language in public, for instance at the annual Gavoustima, where theatrical plays in Mišótika are now regularly performed by the syllogos of Néo Agionéri (to the amusement and also to bewilderment of the audience). Remarkably and very fortunately, Mišótika is now also used in the Social Media. I will concentrate here on Facebook, especially on the page called Έναρξη Διδασκαλίας Εκµάθησης Μυστιώτικου Ιδιώµατος ( group 470281169768316 on FB). The title is identical with the subtitle of Thomas Fates’ book Χ͜ιογός α ας χαρίσ̌’, which is some sort of “Teach Yourself Mišótika” and in which, interestingly, a special orthography for Mišótika has been developed. I will discuss the kind of information found on the FB page: questions, questionnaires, explanations of words and short phrases, folktales and other short stories, audio & video clips etc. Particular attention will be paid to the problems of using the Greek alphabet to write Mišótika in relation to the ongoing phonological attrition and also to the insecurity when it comes to interpretation linguistic phenomena in Mišótika

Customary Law and the Nation: The Significance of Kanun in the Emergence and Development of Albanian Nationalist Discourse

Honors (Bachelor's)Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REES)University of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91824/1/eburda.pd

Artificial intelligence methods in process plant layout

The thesis describes "Plant Layout System" or PLS, an Expert System which automates all aspects of conceptual layout of chemical process plant, from sizing equipment using process data to deriving the equipment items' elevation and plan positions. PLS has been applied to a test process of typical size and complexity and which encompasses a wide range of layout issues and problems. The thesis presents the results of the tests to show that PLS generates layouts that are entirely satisfactory and conventional from an engineering viewpoint. The major advance made during this work is the approach to layout by Expert System of any kind of process plant. The thesis describes the approach in full, together with the engineering principles which it acknowledges. Plant layout problems are computationally complex. PLS decomposes layout into a sequence of formalised steps and uses a powerful and sophisticated technique to reduce plant complexity. PLS uses constraint propagation for spatial synthesis and includes propagation algorithms developed specifically for this domain. PLS includes a novel qualitative technique to select constraints to be relaxed. A conventional frame based representation was found to be appropriate, but with procedural knowledge recorded in complex forward chaining rules with novel features. Numerous examples of the layout engineer's knowledge are included to elucidate the epistemology of the domain

Artificial intelligence methods in process plant layout

The thesis describes "Plant Layout System" or PLS, an Expert System which automates all aspects of conceptual layout of chemical process plant, from sizing equipment using process data to deriving the equipment items' elevation and plan positions. PLS has been applied to a test process of typical size and complexity and which encompasses a wide range of layout issues and problems. The thesis presents the results of the tests to show that PLS generates layouts that are entirely satisfactory and conventional from an engineering viewpoint. The major advance made during this work is the approach to layout by Expert System of any kind of process plant. The thesis describes the approach in full, together with the engineering principles which it acknowledges. Plant layout problems are computationally complex. PLS decomposes layout into a sequence of formalised steps and uses a powerful and sophisticated technique to reduce plant complexity. PLS uses constraint propagation for spatial synthesis and includes propagation algorithms developed specifically for this domain. PLS includes a novel qualitative technique to select constraints to be relaxed. A conventional frame based representation was found to be appropriate, but with procedural knowledge recorded in complex forward chaining rules with novel features. Numerous examples of the layout engineer's knowledge are included to elucidate the epistemology of the domain