Web Design Guidelines for Text Presentation for Older People: Empirical Evidence from Thailand and the UK

Numerous sets of web design guidelines for making websites more accessible for older people have been suggested, but there is little empirical evidence from studies with older people upon which to base their recommendations. In addition, the different web design guidelines often provide different recommendations. Finally, most of the web design guidelines are in English and relate to the use of the Latin alphabet. Currently, there are no web design guidelines for the Thai language or for Thai older people. The objective of this research is to investigate the recommendations from web design guidelines for Thai and UK older people, especially the recommendations related to the presentation of text for reading web pages. These are the variables investigated: line spacing, text justification, font type, font size, text colour and background colour. The recommendations were investigated with a series of empirical studies that asked both younger and older people to read web pages presented in different ways. The first study investigated the effect of line spacing and text justification. The results of this experiment found that 1.5 or double line spacing were preferred by both younger and older people in the UK and Thailand. For the UK web readers, both left justification and left - right justification were preferred. For Thai web readers, left - right justification was preferred. As interesting issues about the task emerged in the first experiment, the second study explored the range and appropriateness of a variety of tasks for research about reading web pages. The results of the experiment indicated the use of skimming reading as an appropriate task in the further experiments. The third study investigated the effect of font type and size on skim reading web pages. The experiment found that UK web users preferred Arial font type in comparison to Times New Roman, however Thai web users preferred a Thai conservative font type, which is closely related to serif. On font size, 14 point or larger was preferred by both the UK and Thai younger adults. For both the UK and Thai older adults, 16 point was preferred. The fourth study investigated the effect of text and background colour on skim reading web pages. Black text on white background and sepia text on off-white were preferred by all participants. Based on results of the experiment in this programme of research, an evidence-based set of web design guidelines for the presentation of text for older people in both Thailand and the UK was developed

Tablet computers for older people in Thailand and the UK: usability and effects of different text presentations

As there is a sharp increase in the older population in Thailand, the UK and worldwide and the older population will continue to grow worldwide in the next two decades. The use of personal technologies such as tablet computers has also rapidly increased in both Thailand and the UK. Although the number of older people using tablet computers has increased, some older people still have issues in using tablet computers. Thus the usability and acceptability of tablet computers for older people is still an issue and there is little research about how to best present text on tablet computers on tablets for older people in English and none for the Thai language. Therefore this programme of research investigated usability issues in using tablet computers and attitudes toward tablet computers for older people in Thailand and the United Kingdom. In addition, it investigated a number of aspects of text presentation for tablet computers in Thai and English with both younger and older people. Study 1 focused on older people’s attitudes to and use of the tablet computers and another three studies focused on the effects of text presentation on tablets. Study 2 investigated font types and font sizes, Study 3 investigated text and background colours, and Study 4 investigated column format and text justification. Key findings included that Thai and UK older people had positive attitudes toward tablets, although some encountered usability problems such as text which was too small and not resizable. In addition, tapping and zooming on the tablet were generally easy for older people, but tapping is still a problem for some of them. On text presentation, on the basis of the findings in these studies, 18 point text in a Sans Serif typeface for English and a Serif typeface for Thai are recommended for text presentation on tablets. Black text on a white background is the best for readers in both countries. Finally, a format of two columns with left justification is recommended for both English and Thai, when tablets are used in landscape orientation

Exploring Metacognitive Online Reading Strategies of Non-Native English-Speaking Translation Students

International students, a growing population in US universities, need to possess excellent reading skills in order to succeed. American universities also benefit from admitting students who do not require remedial English classes. Reading online has become an integrated part of college education, which requires students to have additional skills. Awareness and usage of online reading strategies, known as metacognitive online reading strategies, are proven tools to enhance reading skills in online environments. The purpose of this mixed-method study was to investigate the metacognitive online reading strategies employed by highly proficient non-native English-speaking graduate students of Translation, Interpretation and Language Education at Middlebury Institute of International Studies to find out the types of reading strategies students report using, and how they use them when reading an academic text online on a laptop. Two conceptual frameworks were employed to analyze the data: metacognition theory and metacognition model. Quantitative data were collected from 46 students through the Online Survey of Reading Strategies (OSORS). Qualitative data were obtained through recording think-aloud sessions with six volunteers who individually read a TOEFL practice passage and said what they thought as they read the passage. The quantitative findings revealed that students used most of OSORS strategies in the three categories or Global strategies, Problem-solving strategies, and Support strategies. They used problem-solving strategies the most and support strategies the least. The qualitative data analysis revealed that students used most of the strategies that were relevant to the reading task. Moreover, they gave precedence to focusing and maintaining a steady reading pace over other strategies, and bundled related strategies to understand difficult text. Strategies such as slowing the speed of reading, rereading, reading aloud, and guessing meanings were activated together. Data also showed that they students decided on using various computer skills depending on their reading needs, engaging in a parallel metacognitive processing to their reading. Finally, the participants valued reading as part of their career, and made comments on contents of the passage in relation with the real world. Thus, comprehension was not the last step in the metacognitive process, internalizing and remembering the new information was

Fermentation of Carcinus Maenas as a Method of Waste Stream Valorization

The European green crab, Carcinus maenas, is an aggressive invasive species of green crab that has had severe ecological and economic effects to the North American East Coast since the early 1800s. The green crab has disrupted entire ecosystems, particularly in the Gulf of Maine, due to its eating and uprooting of eel grass. The disruption of this plant reduces coastal habitats for bivalves and other coastal marine life. The green crabs have also been found to prey on juvenile lobsters and bivalve mollusks, disrupting both the ecosystem in the Gulf of Maine and the seafood economy dependent on lobsters and soft-shell clams. With the changing climate and consistent increases in the ocean temperature, the number of crabs killed by the cold, winter temperatures has been steadily decreasing. The establishment of a green crab fishery for the sale of soft-shell crabs has been identified as a method to control the growing population since the crabs are too small for hard-shell culinary use. However, most crabs fished cannot be sold as soft-shell, creating a large amount of biomass. The biomass can currently only be sold to lowvalorization waste streams such as compost, bait, or animal feed. In order to sustain green crab fisheries, a high-value waste stream valorization needs to be established. Fish sauce is a clear, brown, fish-flavored condiment that is traditionally spontaneously fermented from under-utilized fish species and salt. Fish sauce originated in Asia, but has been fermented in many places throughout the world including Rome, South America, and Africa with slight variations to the formulation depending on location and starting material. Since this fermentation is spontaneous it relies on the proteolytic activity of endogenous enzymes and proteolytic bacteria to break down proteins into amino acids. One of the most common fish species used for the fermentation of fish sauce is the anchovy, which has a protein content of about 20%. Green crabs have a protein content of about 17%, indicating that green crabs could be used instead of anchovies to produce a similar condiment. The data from this work showed that when fermented at a temperature of 24°C at a salt content of 20-30%, a green crab fermented condiment can be produced that is chemically comparable to commercially available fish sauce products. Fermentation temperatures of 30°C, 37°C, and 50°C were investigated to provide guidance for temperature control. A temperature of 30-37°C with a salt content of 20% and a 90 day fermentation time was suggested based on this data, but a temperature of 24°C or 50°C will still produce a viable product. The most abundant families of bacteria throughout the course of the fermentation, regardless of fermentation temperature or time, were Rhodobacteracea, Saprospiraceae, and Hyphomonadaceae, all of which contain salt-tolerant proteolytic genera isolated from marine sources. The creation of a viable fermented crab sauce product creates a high-value waste stream for green crab fishers, thus opening the doors to start economical large-scale fishing of green crabs on the North American East Coast

Strategies to increase the critical reading skills of secondary students

This paper will examine what research has revealed about reading and learning in the areas of word recognition, scaffolding to develop understanding, metacognition and application of new knowledge in real world situations. The study then will go on to link what is known about learning to strategies that have already been developed by secondary teachers to increase critical reading skills

The Time Is Now: Embodiments of the Hyper-Present in Contemporary American Literature

For many years, writers have argued the predominant temporality of contemporary experience is an intensified present. David Harvey and Fredric Jameson argued that such an intense emphasis on the present was one of postmodernism’s principle features. Harvey argued that new communication technologies resulted in a time-space compression” that created the sense that “the present is all there is.” Similarly, Jameson argued that postmodernism reflected the logic of late capitalism, resulting in a society that “has begun to live in a perpetual present” that obliterates one’s awareness of the past or future. Although many consider we have moved beyond postmodernism, our experience of the present has only become more intensified. The omnipresence of online connectivity today through communications technologies, such as smart phones and social media, means almost everything can be addressed in the present moment. In order to better understand this phenomenon, this dissertation examines this intensified experience of the present, what I call the hyper-present, as it is embodied in four different literary texts. Chapters are devoted to The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski, Save the Date by Chris Cornell, and Queers in Love at the End of the World by Anna Anthropy. Although the form of each of these texts is significantly different, they each thrust the reader into a hyper-present reading experience. I argue that these texts challenge the pessimistic attitude that most theorists have towards the hyper-present. Although the hyper-present can present a number of important hurdles for contemporary life, it can also help us better recognize the significance of material objects, ecological threats, the limits of narrative tropes, and affectivity. Additionally, this study highlights the value of synthesizing literary and digital studies. This dissertation examines two print-based novels and two digital games. In the process it highlights both how digitality has profoundly shaped contemporary print media and how traditional literary studies has shaped digital media. Rather than being at odds, it shows how the perspectives and methodologies of literary and digital studies prove valuable regardless of media and how each approach highlights the need for and value of the other

Natural Language Processing for Technology Foresight Summarization and Simplification: the case of patents

Technology foresight aims to anticipate possible developments, understand trends, and identify technologies of high impact. To this end, monitoring emerging technologies is crucial. Patents -- the legal documents that protect novel inventions -- can be a valuable source for technology monitoring. Millions of patent applications are filed yearly, with 3.4 million applications in 2021 only. Patent documents are primarily textual documents and disclose innovative and potentially valuable inventions. However, their processing is currently underresearched. This is due to several reasons, including the high document complexity: patents are very lengthy and are written in an extremely hard-to-read language, which is a mix of technical and legal jargon. This thesis explores how Natural Language Processing -- the discipline that enables machines to process human language automatically -- can aid patent processing. Specifically, we focus on two tasks: patent summarization (i.e., we try to reduce the document length while preserving its core content) and patent simplification (i.e., we try to reduce the document's linguistic complexity while preserving its original core meaning). We found that older patent summarization approaches were not compared on shared benchmarks (making thus it hard to draw conclusions), and even the most recent abstractive dataset presents important issues that might make comparisons meaningless. We try to fill both gaps: we first document the issues related to the BigPatent dataset and then benchmark extractive, abstraction, and hybrid approaches in the patent domain. We also explore transferring summarization methods from the scientific paper domain with limited success. For the automatic text simplification task, we noticed a lack of simplified text and parallel corpora. We fill this gap by defining a method to generate a silver standard for patent simplification automatically. Lay human judges evaluated the simplified sentences in the corpus as grammatical, adequate, and simpler, and we show that it can be used to train a state-of-the-art simplification model. This thesis describes the first steps toward Natural Language Processing-aided patent summarization and simplification. We hope it will encourage more research on the topic, opening doors for a productive dialog between NLP researchers and domain experts.Technology foresight aims to anticipate possible developments, understand trends, and identify technologies of high impact. To this end, monitoring emerging technologies is crucial. Patents -- the legal documents that protect novel inventions -- can be a valuable source for technology monitoring. Millions of patent applications are filed yearly, with 3.4 million applications in 2021 only. Patent documents are primarily textual documents and disclose innovative and potentially valuable inventions. However, their processing is currently underresearched. This is due to several reasons, including the high document complexity: patents are very lengthy and are written in an extremely hard-to-read language, which is a mix of technical and legal jargon. This thesis explores how Natural Language Processing -- the discipline that enables machines to process human language automatically -- can aid patent processing. Specifically, we focus on two tasks: patent summarization (i.e., we try to reduce the document length while preserving its core content) and patent simplification (i.e., we try to reduce the document's linguistic complexity while preserving its original core meaning). We found that older patent summarization approaches were not compared on shared benchmarks (making thus it hard to draw conclusions), and even the most recent abstractive dataset presents important issues that might make comparisons meaningless. We try to fill both gaps: we first document the issues related to the BigPatent dataset and then benchmark extractive, abstraction, and hybrid approaches in the patent domain. We also explore transferring summarization methods from the scientific paper domain with limited success. For the automatic text simplification task, we noticed a lack of simplified text and parallel corpora. We fill this gap by defining a method to generate a silver standard for patent simplification automatically. Lay human judges evaluated the simplified sentences in the corpus as grammatical, adequate, and simpler, and we show that it can be used to train a state-of-the-art simplification model. This thesis describes the first steps toward Natural Language Processing-aided patent summarization and simplification. We hope it will encourage more research on the topic, opening doors for a productive dialog between NLP researchers and domain experts

Culinary Linguistics

Language and food are universal to humankind. Language accomplishes more than a pure exchange of information, and food caters for more than mere subsistence. Both represent crucial sites for socialization, identity construction, and the everyday fabrication and perception of the world as a meaningful, orderly place. This volume contains an introduction to the study of food and an extensive overview of the literature focusing on its role in interplay with language. It is the only publication fathoming the field of food and food-related studies from a linguistic perspective. The research articles assembled here encompass a number of linguistic fields, ranging from historical and ethnographic approaches to literary studies, the teaching of English as a foreign language, psycholinguistics, and the study of computer-mediated communication, making this volume compulsory reading for anyone interested in genres of food discourse and the linguistic connection between food and culture