Characterizing intonation deficit in motor speech disorders : an autosegmental-metrical analysis of spontaneous speech in hypokinetic dysarthria, ataxic dysarthria and foreign accent syndrome

The autosegmental-metrical (AM) framework represents an established methodology for intonational analysis in unimpaired speaker populations but has found little application in describing intonation in motor speech disorders (MSDs). This study compared the intonation patterns of unimpaired participants (CON) and those with Parkinson's disease (PD), ataxic dysarthria (AT), and foreign accent syndrome (FAS) to evaluate the approach's potential for distinguishing types of MSDs from each other and from unimpaired speech. Spontaneous speech from 8 PD, 8 AT, 4 FAS, and 10 CON speakers were analyzed in relation to inventory and prevalence of pitch patterns, accentuation, and phrasing. Acoustic-phonetic baseline measures (maximum-phonation-duration, speech rate, and F0-variability) were also performed. Results: The analyses yielded differences between MSD and CON groups and between the clinical groups in regard to prevalence, accentuation, and phrasing. AT and FAS speakers used more rising and high pitch accents than PD and CON speakers. The AT group used the highest number of pitch accents per phrase, and all 3 MSD groups produced significantly shorter phrases than the CON group. The study succeeded in differentiating MSDs on the basis of intonational performances by using the AM approach, thus, demonstrating its potential for charting intonational profiles in clinical populations

Whatever Next? Women's Rights in Sáenz de Heredia's Los derechos de la mujer(1962)

This article examines José Luis Sáenz de Heredia's film Los derechos de la mujer (1962), which raises questions about empowering women within the legal arena and mediates historical and cultural anxieties that circulated in more general terms after the legal changes of 1958 and 1961. It looks at this relatively early representation of filmic female lawyers, produced at a time when women were entering a traditionally male sphere and access to the legal profession itself was one of the main issues. It is theoretically informed by Cynthia Lucia's book entitled Framing Female Lawyers which examines female lawyers as catalysts of patriarchal crisis and argues that cultural representations of the female lawyer as a figure with access to the law most often entails that she herself will be interrogated and put on trial. Finally, it asks to what degree this early example of female lawyer films constructs the subjectivity of its female protagonist in the way that law constructs its female subjects at the time, namely as eternas menores with limited legal capacities who consequently activate their own mechanisms of containment. The film challenges, yet ultimately restores, patriarchal power through the action of the female lawyer; in that sense both law and the female lawyer are instruments of a male-dominated world

Spectral tail processes and max-stable approximations of multivariate regularly varying time series

A regularly varying time series as introduced in Basrak and Segers (2009) is a (multivariate) time series such that all finite dimensional distributions are multivariate regularly varying. The extremal behavior of such a process can then be described by the index of regular variation and the so-called spectral tail process, which is the limiting distribution of the rescaled process, given an extreme event at time 0. As shown in Basrak and Segers (2009), the stationarity of the underlying time series implies a certain structure of the spectral tail process, informally known as the "time change formula". In this article, we show that on the other hand, every process which satisfies this property is in fact the spectral tail process of an underlying stationary max-stable process. The spectral tail process and the corresponding max-stable process then provide two complementary views on the extremal behavior of a multivariate regularly varying stationary time series

Sahlberg, P. (2011). Finnish lessons: what can the world learn from educational change in Finland?. New York: Teachers College Press. [Book review]

Book review of: Sahlberg, P. (out in November 2011). Finnish lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland?. New York: Teachers College Press. ISBN 978-080-775-257-9

Sector-specific corporate responsibility in the United Kingdom

The economy of the United Kingdom (UK) is dominated by services and particularly financial services industries, and it was thus hard hit by the financial crisis. The UK has a long tradition of free trade, and its politics over at least the last 30 years have been characterised by a market orientation. UK governments have, on the whole, favoured light-touch regulation and voluntary rather than mandatory approaches to encouraging businesses to work in the public interest. The idea of corporate responsibility (CR) has a longer tradition in the UK than in other European countries. Likewise, government encouragement of CR has been on the agenda for several decades now. There are a number of initiatives aimed at specific industry sectors. These initiatives take a variety of forms and administrative arrangements. A voluntary CR approach to achieving public goods is generally favoured by industry, and such initiatives can have good industry responses. However, in the light of the financial crisis and stringent cutbacks in the public sector spending, the future of such initiatives is unclear. The chapter gives an overview of public policy CR initiatives in the United Kingdom and discusses three sector specific initiatives in detail: The Courtauld Commitment, aimed at reducing waste in the food and drinks manufacturing and retail industries; the Strategy for Sustainable Construction, a high-level strategy aiming to bring together a range of separate sustainability initiatives for the construction sector; and Treating Customers Fairly, a regulatory initiative aimed at improving customer care in financial services