Adaptation of a Vocabulary Test from British Sign Language to American Sign Language

This study describes the adaptation process of a vocabulary knowledge test for British Sign Language (BSL) into American Sign Language (ASL) and presents results from the first round of pilot testing with twenty deaf native ASL signers. The web-based test assesses the strength of deaf children’s vocabulary knowledge by means of different mappings of phonological form and meaning of signs. The adaptation from BSL to ASL involved nine stages, which included forming a panel of deaf/hearing experts, developing a set of new items and revising/replacing items considered ineffective, and piloting the new version. Results provide new evidence in support of the use of this methodology for assessing sign language, making a useful contribution toward the availability of tests to assess deaf children’s signed language skills

Towards an ‘ordinary’ cosmopolitanism in everyday academic practice in higher education

In this article, we explore what cosmopolitanism looks like in particular institutional contexts in higher education and the sorts of conditions and pedagogic practices which nurture and sustain this within the overall running and administration of the institution. Cosmopolitanism is sometimes popularly assumed to refer to the global and the culturally diverse, rather as if encounters with different cultures and ethnicities from different geographical locations could add up to a cosmopolitan perspective. Our view of cosmopolitanism and our concern start from local and everyday occurrences or ‘ordinary cosmopolitanism’ in the context of higher education. We develop an understanding of cosmopolitanism as embedded practice in the particularities of local institutional contexts and administration and what cosmopolitanism means in the ‘local’. Small illustrative sketches are drawn on to exemplify aspects of ‘ordinary cosmopolitanism’ – what it is, why it is important and its enactment in everyday academic practice in higher education

Can YouTube save the planet?

Scientist21925

Environment. The burning issue.

Science (New York, N.Y.)3165823376

Cryptic species as a window on diversity and conservation

10.1016/j.tree.2006.11.004Trends in Ecology and Evolution223148-155TREE

Formal Program Optimization in Nuprl Using Computational Equivalence and Partial Types

Abstract. This paper extends the proof methods used by the Nuprl proof assistant to reason about the computational behavior of its untyped programs. We have implemented new methods to prove non-trivial bisim-ulations between programs and have successfully applied these methods to formally optimize distributed programs such as our synthesized and verified version of Paxos, a widely used protocol to achieve software based replication. We prove new results about the basic computational equality relation on terms, and we extend the theory of partial types as the ba-sis for stating internal results about the computation system that were previously treated only in the meta theory of Nuprl. All the lemmas presented in this paper have been formally proved in Nuprl.