Community-Based Online Language Teaching as an “Act of Linguistic Citizenship”

‘Şexbizinî’ is mainly the designation of a Kurdish tribal confederation and has recently more and more become a designation of its language. This language is linguistically not described and, at the same time, endangered. Even in the main settlement area of Central Anatolia, it is only spoken by the generation of parents and grandparents. Nevertheless, there is a growing interest in the language by its speakers manifested in social media. This contribution investigates Facebook groups with a thematical connection to Şexbizinî. The main questions concern the function of the virtual space for the linguistic community, the development of communicative practices that can combat a language shift, and the codification of the language. The analysis is based on an online ethnography, the data consisting of a corpus of wall events, that is analyzed with regard to language use, the discursive position of Şexbizinî within the Kurdish languages, and the function of the groups with respect to social cohesion in the context of migration, as well as a questionnaire and a focus group which aimed to embed the results in a wider sociolinguistic context.‚Şexbizinî‘ ist primär die Bezeichnung einer kurdischen Stammeskonföderation; in den letzten Jahren ist Şexbizinî jedoch auch mehr und mehr zur Bezeichnung ihrer Sprache geworden. Diese ist immer noch kaum erforscht und zudem als gefährdete Sprache zu bezeichnen – denn selbst im Hauptsiedlungsgebiet Zentralanatolien wird Şexbizinî nur mehr von der Eltern- und Großelterngeneration gesprochen. Gleichzeitig ist von Seiten der SprecherInnen das Interesse am Şexbizinî neu erwacht, artikuliert unter anderem in sozialen Medien und Netzwerken. Der vorliegende Beitrag hat es sich deshalb zum Ziel gesetzt, Facebook-Gruppen näher zu betrachten, die die kurdische Sprache Şexbizinî zum Inhalt haben. Die zentrale Frage dabei ist, inwieweit sich in diesen Gruppen kommunikative Praktiken etablieren, die dem drohenden Sprachverlust begegnen. Die Analyse der Facebook-Daten basiert auf einer Online-Ethnographie, die bestimmte Userpostings (sog. ‚wall events‘) untersucht. Die Relevanz der Postings besteht erstens in der Sprachverwendung und Sprachwahl der Facebook-UserInnen, zweitens in der Art und Weise, wie das Şexbizinî innerhalb der kurdischen Sprachen diskursiv verortet wird, und drittens in der Funktion der untersuchten Facebook-Gruppen in Bezug auf sozialen Zusammenhalt in der Migration bzw. Diaspora. Zusätzlich werden von UserInnen ausgefüllte Fragebögen und eine Fokusgruppe herangezogen, um die Ergebnisse in einen weiteren soziolinguistischen Kontext einzubetten.Peer Reviewe

Listening-Mode-Centered Sonification Design for Data Exploration

Grond F. Listening-Mode-Centered Sonification Design for Data Exploration. Bielefeld: Bielefeld University; 2013.From the Introduction to this thesis: Through the ever growing amount of data and the desire to make them accessible to the user through the sense of listening, sonification, the representation of data by using sound has been subject of active research in the computer sciences and the field of HCI for the last 20 years. During this time, the field of sonification has diversified into different application areas: today, sound in auditory display informs the user about states and actions on the desktop and in mobile devices; sonification has been applied in monitoring applications, where sound can range from being informative to alarming; sonification has been used to give sensory feedback in order to close the action and perception loop; last but not least, sonifications have also been developed for exploratory data analysis, where sound is used to represent data with unknown structures for hypothesis building. Coming from the computer sciences and HCI, the conceptualization of sonification has been mostly driven by application areas. On the other hand, the sonic arts who have always contributed to the community of auditory display have a genuine focus on sound. Despite this close interdisciplinary relation of communities of sound practitioners, a rich and sound- (or listening)-centered concept about sonification is still missing as a point of departure for a more application and task overarching approach towards design guidelines. Complementary to the useful organization along fields of applications, a conceptual framework that is proper to sound needs to abstract from applications and also to some degree from tasks, as both are not directly related to sound. I hence propose in this thesis to conceptualize sonifications along two poles where sound serves either a normative or a descriptive purpose. In the beginning of auditory display research, a continuum between a symbolic and an analogic pole has been proposed by Kramer (1994a, page 21). In this continuum, symbolic stands for sounds that coincide with existing schemas and are more denotative, analogic stands for sounds that are informative through their connotative aspects. (compare Worrall (2009, page 315)). The notions of symbolic and analogic illustrate the struggle to find apt descriptions of how the intention of the listener subjects audible phenomena to a process of meaning making and interpretation. Complementing the analogic-symbolic continuum with descriptive and normative purposes of displays is proposed in the light of the recently increased research interest in listening modes and intentions. Similar to the terms symbolic and analogic, listening modes have been discussed in auditory display since the beginning usually in dichotomic terms which were either identified with the words listening and hearing or understood as musical listening and everyday listening as proposed by Gaver (1993a). More than 25 years earlier, four direct listening modes have been introduced by Schaeffer (1966) together with a 5th synthetic mode of reduced listening which leads to the well-known sound object. Interestingly, Schaeffer’s listening modes remained largely unnoticed by the auditory display community. Particularly the notion of reduced listening goes beyond the connotative and denotative poles of the continuum proposed by Kramer and justifies the new terms descriptive and normative. Recently, a new taxonomy of listening modes has been proposed by Tuuri and Eerola (2012) that is motivated through an embodied cognition approach. The main contribution of their taxonomy is that it convincingly diversifies the connotative and denotative aspects of listening modes. In the recently published sonification handbook, multimodal and interactive aspects in combination with sonification have been discussed as promising options to expand and advance the field by Hunt and Hermann (2011), who point out that there is a big need for a better theoretical foundation in order to systematically integrate these aspects. The main contribution of this thesis is to address this need by providing alternative and complementary design guidelines with respect to existing approaches, all of which have been conceived before the recently increased research interest in listening modes. None of the existing contributions to design frameworks integrates multimodality, and listening modes with a focus on exploratory data analysis, where sonification is conceived to support the understanding of complex data potentially helping to identify new structures therein. In order to structure this field the following questions are addressed in this thesis: • How do natural listening modes and reduced listening relate to the proposed normative and descriptive display purposes? • What is the relationship of multimodality and interaction with listening modes and display purposes? • How can the potential of embodied cognition based listening modes be put to use for exploratory data sonification? • How can listening modes and display purposes be connected to questions of aesthetics in the display? • How do data complexity and Parameter-mapping sonification relate to exploratory data analysis and listening modes

Phase Estimation from Atom Position Measurements

We study the measurement of the position of atoms as a means to estimate the relative phase between two Bose-Einstein condensates. First, we consider $N$ atoms released from a double-well trap, forming an interference pattern, and show that a simple least-squares fit to the density gives a shot-noise limited sensitivity. The shot-noise limit can instead be overcome by using correlation functions of order $\sqrt{N}$ or larger. The measurement of the $N\mathrm{th}$-order correlation function allows to estimate the relative phase at the Heisenberg limit. Phase estimation through the measurement of the center-of-mass of the interference pattern can also provide sub-shot-noise sensitivity. Finally, we study the effect of the overlap between the two clouds on the phase estimation, when Mach-Zehnder interferometry is performed in a double-well.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figure

A Study of School Costs in the Bryant Independent School District from 1949-1959

Good business practices have long been recognized for the public schools in South Dakota. It is necessary for efficient operation of school systems. The purpose of this study was to compare a local public school, Bryant Public School, with national, state and city norms as far as total school expenditures are concerned and in percentages with that of other schools. It was also important to determine what percent each character classification reveals itself. It was hoped that this would help for better budgeting procedures and give an overall view of school operations for the preceding ten year school period. The author also attempted to show what the trend of the operational costs are and to compare it with other schools and state norms. People have long been interested in school and where the tax dollar goes. It is with that purpose in mind that this study was made. This study revealed that the Bryant Public School was operating in line with national averages

Beacon

The Beacon has been the student newspaper of Northwestern College since September 1928, when Northwestern transitioned from being an academy into a junior college. Another publication, The Monitor, existed briefly for a few years in the 1920s before The Beacon. As the student newspaper, The Beacon serves both as a chronicle of events that happened at Northwestern and a reflection of what ideas, issues, and events were important to students. It documents student life at this institution. Northwestern College is a Christian college, and the newspaper shows the religious identity of the campus. Collectively, The Beacon provides a longitudinal student perspective on the institution, its culture, and its people

Theora England Scrapbooks

The Theora England Scrapbooks Collection documents the origins and development of the theatre and speech program at Northwestern College during her tenure. The materials cover theatre performances, Choral Readers and Alpha Psi Omega, the theatre student organization. The books include playbills, photographs, newspaper articles, brochures, posters, personal correspondence and ephemera. The books also include wedding invitations, birth announcements, reception napkins and other materials from events in theatre students’ personal lives. Collectively, these scrapbooks also provide evidence for the resolve and forcefulness needed by a woman seeking to establish a new program in an institution and local community where women’s leadership was not the norm

Mach-Zehnder interferometry with interacting trapped Bose-Einstein condensates

We theoretically analyze a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with trapped condensates, and find that it is surprisingly stable against the nonlinearity induced by inter-particle interactions. The phase sensitivity, which we study for number squeezed input states, can overcome the shot noise limit and be increased up to the Heisenberg limit provided that a Bayesian or Maximum-Likelihood phase estimation strategy is used. We finally demonstrate robustness of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer in presence of interactions against condensate oscillations and a realistic atom counting error.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, minor revision