1,003 research outputs found
Speech act theory and Gricean pragmatics: A review
This paper entitled “Speech Act Theory and Gricean Pragmatics: A Review” appreciates the language of action words since pragmatic strategies are applied in order to bring out features of speeches. Pragmatic strategies such as entailment, presupposition, implicatures, context of situation, speech acts among others were used in this paper. The paper is also anchored on the pragmatic theory which is a speech act theory. This theory deals with utterances and how they are used to express actions. The examples used in this study were utterances used by some scholars in their research work and some extemporaneous examples given by the authors of this paper. These utterances served as our data in this paper. The study concludes that speech act captures an action performed by someone through his words. Also the central aspect of the Speech Act Theory is that an utterance is part of an action within the framework of social institution and conventions. J. L. Austin proposed three levels of speech acts: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act which were dissected in this paper
Opportunities and Challenges in a Changing Beef Industry: Results of a Statewide Needs Assessment in Iowa
The U.S. beef industry is poised for growth following increased contraction over the past decade that has resulted in the lowest cattle inventory in over 60 years. However, sustainable, long term growth of the industry is dependent upon early identification of issues that may inhibit profitability. A series of seven listening sessions conducted across Iowa in November and December of 2013 by the Iowa Beef Center identified land access, farm transition, production efficiency, marketing, genetics, data management, feedstuffs, and animal health as “mega-issues” facing producers. Specific issues under each of these overarching categories will guide future extension programming efforts within the Iowa Beef Center
GAN Augmentation: Augmenting Training Data using Generative Adversarial Networks
One of the biggest issues facing the use of machine learning in medical
imaging is the lack of availability of large, labelled datasets. The annotation
of medical images is not only expensive and time consuming but also highly
dependent on the availability of expert observers. The limited amount of
training data can inhibit the performance of supervised machine learning
algorithms which often need very large quantities of data on which to train to
avoid overfitting. So far, much effort has been directed at extracting as much
information as possible from what data is available. Generative Adversarial
Networks (GANs) offer a novel way to unlock additional information from a
dataset by generating synthetic samples with the appearance of real images.
This paper demonstrates the feasibility of introducing GAN derived synthetic
data to the training datasets in two brain segmentation tasks, leading to
improvements in Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of between 1 and 5 percentage
points under different conditions, with the strongest effects seen fewer than
ten training image stacks are available
Cosmic homogeneity demonstrated with luminous red galaxies
We test the homogeneity of the Universe at with the Luminous Red
Galaxy (LRG) spectroscopic sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. First, the
mean number of LRGs within completely surveyed LRG-centered spheres of
comoving radius is shown to be proportional to at radii greater than
. The test has the virtue that it does not rely
on the assumption that the LRG sample has a finite mean density; its results
show, however, that there \emph{is} such a mean density. Secondly, the survey
sky area is divided into 10 disjoint solid angular regions and the fractional
rms density variations of the LRG sample in the redshift range
among these () regions is found to be 7
percent of the mean density. This variance is consistent with typical biased
\lcdm models and puts very strong constraints on the quality of SDSS
photometric calibration.Comment: submitted to Ap
Average Infrared Galaxy Spectra From Spitzer Flux Limited Samples
The mid-infrared spectroscopic analysis of a flux-limited sample of galaxies
with fv(24um) > 10 mJy is presented. Sources observed are taken from the
Spitzer First Look Survey (FLS) catalog and from the NOAO Deep Wide-Field
Survey region in Bootes (NDWFS). The spectroscopic sample includes 60 of the
100 sources in these combined catalogs having fv(24um) > 10 mJy. New spectra
from the Spitzer Infrared Spectrograph are presented for 25 FLS sources and for
11 Bootes AGN; these are combined with 24 Bootes starburst galaxies previously
published to determine the distribution of mid-infrared spectral
characteristics for the total 10 mJy sample. Sources have 0.01 < z < 2.4 and
41.8 < log vLv(15um) < 46.2 (ergs/s). Average spectra are determined as a
function of luminosity; lower luminosity sources (log vLv(15um) < 44.0) are
dominated by PAH features and higher luminosity sources (log vLv(15um) > 44.0)
are dominated by silicate absorption or emission. We find that a rest frame
equivalent width of 0.4um for the 6.2um PAH emission feature provides a well
defined division between lower luminosity, "pure" starbursts and higher
luminosity AGN or composite sources. Using the average spectra, fluxes fv(24um)
which would be observed with the Spitzer MIPS are predicted as a function of
redshift for sources with luminosities that correspond to the average spectra.
AGN identical to those in this 10 mJy sample could be seen to z = 3 with
fv(24um) > 1 mJy, but starbursts fall to fv(24um) < 1 mJy by z ~ 0.5. This
indicates that substantial luminosity evolution of starbursts is required to
explain the numerous starbursts found in other IRS results having fv(24um) > 1
mJy and z ~ 2.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa
2006 SQ372: A Likely Long-Period Comet from the Inner Oort Cloud
We report the discovery of a minor planet (2006 SQ372) on an orbit with a
perihelion of 24 AU and a semimajor axis of 796 AU. Dynamical simulations show
that this is a transient orbit and is unstable on a timescale of 200 Myrs.
Falling near the upper semimajor axis range of the scattered disk and the lower
semimajor axis range of the Oort Cloud, previous membership in either class is
possible. By modeling the production of similar orbits from the Oort Cloud as
well as from the scattered disk, we find that the Oort Cloud produces 16 times
as many objects on SQ372-like orbits as the scattered disk. Given this result,
we believe this to be the most distant long-period comet ever discovered.
Furthermore, our simulation results also indicate that 2000 OO67 has had a
similar dynamical history. Unaffected by the "Jupiter-Saturn Barrier," these
two objects are most likely long-period comets from the inner Oort Cloud
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