Cross-cultural pragmatics of refusal to invitation among Malays and Germans

This present study on cross-cultural pragmatics aims to investigate the pragmatic behaviours through the refusal speech act uttered by the Malay and German native speakers when receiving invitations from different levels of interlocutors. In this particular study, 15 native speakers of Malay and 15 native speakers of German were asked to refuse invitations made by an interlocutor. The study employed methodology from the combination of the refusal taxonomies proposed by Beebe et al., (1990) and Al-Issa (2003). The data was then collected via a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The results showed that both Malays and Germans used several similar strategies when refusing invitations; however, both cultures also exhibited differences in term of the type and frequency of refusal strategies employed in each situation. This study is esteemed to not only contribute to the widened corpus of cross-cultured refusal behaviour’s literature, yet it is also counted to the literature on pragmatic behaviour specifically between Malays and Germans’ language and culture

SPS Impedance

For many years several measurements of the beam coupling impedance have been performed each year in both longitudinal and transverse planes of the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron to keep track of the evolution of its hardware. Copious types of equipments had to be modified or added in the past to allow the SPS to produce the nominal LHC beam. The next challenge would be the operation of the SPS with higher intensity for the LHC luminosity upgrade, which requires a good knowledge of the machine impedance and in particular of its major contributors. The current understanding of the measurements performed over the last few years is presented in this paper. In particular, this analysis reveals that the longitudinal impedance is reasonably well understood, while the situation is less satisfactory in the transverse planes, where about half of the measured impedance still needs to be identified

PERIUNGUAL BASAL CELL CARCINOMA: A CASE REPORT WITH REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Basal cell carcinomas (BCCs) are considered to be uncommon around the nail plate. An indolent lesion of this region should arouse suspicion of potential malignancy and a skin biopsy should be undertaken without delay. Early diagnosis can enable the physician to render simpler nondestructive modalities of treatment. In this article, we describe such a case of longstanding BCC of this region mimicking a traumatic ulcer. The nature of the ailment was finally discovered on biopsy and the carcinoma was initially treated with topical Imiquimod