Location! Location! Location!: Reference Service in Non-Library Settings

The decline in the number of face-to-face reference transactions has implications that are of concern to librarians, as well as the faculty and students we serve. A strategy to address this is to take reference to locations that are “more convenient” for users – locations where they already work, study and gather. Three reference librarians shared their experiences with offering services in non-library settings, such as a faculty office building, a computer lab in a classroom, a student lounge, and a departmental library room. The objectives and experiences of these librarians vary, as do their specialized subject disciplines. This presentation detailed the spaces, scheduling, advertising, faculty/student relationships, evaluation/assessment strategy, and future plans unique to each locale. Handouts included a checklist of considerations for those planning mobile reference service, and a list of benefits and disadvantages from offering these services

Reference and the facilitation of search in spatial domains

This is a pre-final version of the article, whose official publication is expected in the winter of 2013-14.Peer reviewedPreprin

Probabilistic Model Checking for Energy Analysis in Software Product Lines

In a software product line (SPL), a collection of software products is defined by their commonalities in terms of features rather than explicitly specifying all products one-by-one. Several verification techniques were adapted to establish temporal properties of SPLs. Symbolic and family-based model checking have been proven to be successful for tackling the combinatorial blow-up arising when reasoning about several feature combinations. However, most formal verification approaches for SPLs presented in the literature focus on the static SPLs, where the features of a product are fixed and cannot be changed during runtime. This is in contrast to dynamic SPLs, allowing to adapt feature combinations of a product dynamically after deployment. The main contribution of the paper is a compositional modeling framework for dynamic SPLs, which supports probabilistic and nondeterministic choices and allows for quantitative analysis. We specify the feature changes during runtime within an automata-based coordination component, enabling to reason over strategies how to trigger dynamic feature changes for optimizing various quantitative objectives, e.g., energy or monetary costs and reliability. For our framework there is a natural and conceptually simple translation into the input language of the prominent probabilistic model checker PRISM. This facilitates the application of PRISM's powerful symbolic engine to the operational behavior of dynamic SPLs and their family-based analysis against various quantitative queries. We demonstrate feasibility of our approach by a case study issuing an energy-aware bonding network device.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

Introducing a corpus of conversational stories. Construction and annotation of the Narrative Corpus

Although widely seen as critical both in terms of its frequency and its social significance as a prime means of encoding and perpetuating moral stance and configuring self and identity, conversational narrative has received little attention in corpus linguistics. In this paper we describe the construction and annotation of a corpus that is intended to advance the linguistic theory of this fundamental mode of everyday social interaction: the Narrative Corpus (NC). The NC contains narratives extracted from the demographically-sampled sub-corpus of the British National Corpus (BNC) (XML version). It includes more than 500 narratives, socially balanced in terms of participant sex, age, and social class. We describe the extraction techniques, selection criteria, and sampling methods used in constructing the NC. Further, we describe four levels of annotation implemented in the corpus: speaker (social information on speakers), text (text Ids, title, type of story, type of embedding etc.), textual components (pre-/post-narrative talk, narrative, and narrative-initial/final utterances), and utterance (participation roles, quotatives and reporting modes). A brief rationale is given for each level of annotation, and possible avenues of research facilitated by the annotation are sketched out

A Bi-Polar Theory of Nominal and Clause Structure and Function

It is taken as axiomatic that grammar encodes meaning. Two key dimensions of meaning that get grammatically encoded are referential meaning and relational meaning. The key claim is that, in English, these two dimensions of meaning are typically encoded in distinct grammatical poles—a referential pole and a relational pole—with a specifier functioning as the locus of the referential pole and a head functioning as the locus of the relational pole. Specifiers and heads combine to form referring expressions corresponding to the syntactic notion of a maximal projection. Lexical items and expressions functioning as modifiers are preferentially attracted to one pole or the other. If the head of an expression describes a relation, one or more complements may be associated with the head. The four grammatical functions specifier, head, modifier and complement are generally adequate to represent much of the basic structure and function of nominals and clauses. These terms are borrowed from X-Bar Theory, but they are motivated on semantic grounds having to do with their grammatical function to encode referential and relational meaning

Software Implemented Fault-Tolerant (SIFT) user's guide

Program development for a Software Implemented Fault Tolerant (SIFT) computer system is accomplished in the NASA LaRC AIRLAB facility using a DEC VAX-11 to interface with eight Bendix BDX 930 flight control processors. The interface software which provides this SIFT program development capability was developed by AIRLAB personnel. This technical memorandum describes the application and design of this software in detail, and is intended to assist both the user in performance of SIFT research and the systems programmer responsible for maintaining and/or upgrading the SIFT programming environment

The expression of elevation in demonstratives of the Omotic-Lowland East Cushitic contact zone

International audienc

Community Responsibility for Runaway and Thrownaway Youth--Commentary

The following is a commentary on an article discussing homeless youth and the need for communities to address this issue. It is clear that research is needed to understand more about the extent, causes and consequences of youth homelessness whether the youth has run or been thrown away from home. Drawing on interviews conducted with homeless and runaway youth, this commentary calls for community responsibility directed at locating these youth, acknowledging their presence in communities across the U.S., and developing coordinated multijurisdictional responses that support youth development and build on the strengths that have helped them survive