Foreign Vowel Acquisition: The Emotional Approach of Teaching British English Vowels

The aim of the article is to present results of the research that was performed with 57 second- and third-year Persian students of English Translation. The purpose of the research was to examine how conscious manipulation of facial expressions aids acquisition of foreign vowels by learners, regardless of their native language and the culture they have been brought up in. Taking advantage of achievements derived from such disciplines as psychology of emotions and phonetics depicted as a physical process, an attempt is made to find a tool that improves teaching/learning of foreign vowels, that is to say an effort is put in search of a useful method to make the phonetic process faster and more accurat

Causative alternation in Persian complex predicates: a frame-based analysis

In this paper, a frame-based description of verbal polysemy is used to answer some questions concerning syntactic behavior and argument structures associated with complex predicates in Persian. In Persian a number of CPs consisting of a light verb (LV) and a preverb (PV) participate in causative alternation. The causative variant is formed with the LV ændaxtæn 'cause to fall' and the anti-causative variant is formed with oftadæn 'fall'. In some contexts these verbs do not participate in causative alternatioin. In other words they do not have an anti-causative variant in such context

Graph theoretical approaches for the characterization of damage in hierarchical materials

We discuss the relevance of methods of graph theory for the study of damage in simple model materials described by the random fuse model. While such methods are not commonly used when dealing with regular random lattices, which mimic disordered but statistically homogeneous materials, they become relevant in materials with microstructures that exhibit complex multi-scale patterns. We specifically address the case of hierarchical materials, whose failure, due to an uncommon fracture mode, is not well described in terms of either damage percolation or crack nucleation-and-growth. We show that in these systems, incipient failure is accompanied by an increase in eigenvector localization and a drop in topological dimension. We propose these two novel indicators as possible candidates to monitor a system in the approach to failure. As such, they provide alternatives to monitoring changes in the precursory avalanche activity, which is often invoked as a candidate for failure prediction in materials which exhibit critical-like behavior at failure, but may not work in the context of hierarchical materials which exhibit scale-free avalanche statistics even very far from the critical load.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Experimentation and Characterization of Mobile Broadband Networks

The Internet has brought substantial changes to our life as the main tool to access a large variety of services and applications. Internet distributed nature and technological improvements lead to new challenges for researchers, service providers, and network administrators. Internet traffic measurement and analysis is one of the most trivial and powerful tools to study such a complex environment from different aspects. Mobile BroadBand (MBB) networks have become one of the main means to access the Internet. MBB networks are evolving at a rapid pace with technology enhancements that promise drastic improvements in capacity, connectivity, and coverage, i.e., better performance in general. Open experimentation with operational MBB networks in the wild is currently a fundamental requirement of the research community in its endeavor to address the need for innovative solutions for mobile communications. There is a strong need for objective data relating to stability and performance of MBB (e.g., 2G, 3G, 4G, and soon-to-come 5G) networks and for tools that rigorously and scientifically assess their performance. Thus, measuring end user performance in such an environment is a challenge that calls for large-scale measurements and profound analysis of the collected data. The intertwining of technologies, protocols, and setups makes it even more complicated to design scientifically sound and robust measurement campaigns. In such a complex scenario, the randomness of the wireless access channel coupled with the often unknown operator configurations makes this scenario even more challenging. In this thesis, we introduce the MONROE measurement platform: an open access and flexible hardware-based platform for measurements on operational MBB networks. The MONROE platform enables accurate, realistic, and meaningful assessment of the performance and reliability of MBB networks. We detail the challenges we overcame while building and testing the MONROE testbed and argue our design and implementation choices accordingly. Measurements are designed to stress performance of MBB networks at different network layers by proposing scalable experiments and methodologies. We study: (i) Network layer performance, characterizing and possibly estimating the download speed offered by commercial MBB networks; (ii) End users’ Quality of Experience (QoE), specifically targeting the web performance of HTTP1.1/TLS and HTTP2 on various popular web sites; (iii) Implication of roaming in Europe, understanding the roaming ecosystem in Europe after the "Roam like Home" initiative; and (iv) A novel adaptive scheduler family with deadline is proposed for multihomed devices that only require a very coarse knowledge of the wireless bandwidth. Our results comprise different contributions in the scope of each research topic. To put it in a nutshell, we pinpoint the impact of different network configurations that further complicate the picture and hopefully contribute to the debate about performance assessment in MBB networks. The MBB users web performance shows that HTTP1.1/TLS is very similar to HTTP2 in our large-scale measurements. Furthermore, we observe that roaming is well supported for the monitored operators and the operators using the same approach for routing roaming traffic. The proposed adaptive schedulers for content upload in multihomed devices are evaluated in both numerical simulations and real mobile nodes. Simulation results show that the adaptive solutions can effectively leverage the fundamental tradeoff between the upload cost and completion time, despite unpredictable variations in available bandwidth of wireless interfaces. Experiments in the real mobile nodes provided by the MONROE platform confirm the findings

Illusion Mechanisms with Cylindrical Metasurfaces: A General Synthesis Approach

We explore the use of cylindrical metasurfaces in providing several illusion mechanisms including scattering cancellation and creating fictitious line sources. We present the general synthesis approach that leads to such phenomena by modeling the metasurface with effective polarizability tensors and by applying boundary conditions to connect the tangential components of the desired fields to the required surface polarization current densities that generate such fields. We then use these required surface polarizations to obtain the effective polarizabilities for the synthesis of the metasurface. We demonstrate the use of this general method for the synthesis of metasurfaces that lead to scattering cancellation and illusion effects, and discuss practical scenarios by using loaded dipole antennas to realize the discretized polarization current densities. This study is the first fundamental step that may lead to interesting electromagnetic applications, like stealth technology, antenna synthesis, wireless power transfer, sensors, cylindrical absorbers, etc.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure