Discriminatory language in the workplace: unmasking prejudices and stereotypes

The link between language, communication and open discrimination has been the focus of numerous studies. For many years, language has been a vehicle of prejudice and negative stereotypes. However, in the last few years, overt verbal aggressions have diminished thanks to the implementation of equality policies and awareness-raising initiatives. Despite that, negative attitudes against protected groups might not have disappeared and may instead be transmitted subtly, such as through uncivil language. The goal of this research is to study the relation between language and subtle discrimination against lesbian and gay (LG) workers. With this goal in mind, 39 in-depth interviews were conducted. The analysis showed that LG people are victims of subtle discrimination and that language is one of the most common vehicles of prejudice and negative stereotypes. Jokes, inappropriate comments and questions are the expression of negative attitudes, which are probably present at an implicit level. Due to the ambiguity of these expressions and the settings where they have been studied — the workplace — these acts could be defined as uncivil behaviours. Practical implications, limitations and directions for future research are discussed.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Information filtering via Iterative Refinement

With the explosive growth of accessible information, expecially on the Internet, evaluation-based filtering has become a crucial task. Various systems have been devised aiming to sort through large volumes of information and select what is likely to be more relevant. In this letter we analyse a new ranking method, where the reputation of information providers is determined self-consistently.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures. Accepted for publication on Europhysics Letter

Trends in Cancer Mortality in 15 Industrialized Countries, 1969-1986

Background: Assessing trends in cancer provides a means for gauging progress against the disease, estimating future demands for care and treatment, and suggesting clues about shifting causal factors that may account for the more recent changes. Purpose: This study was designed to evaluate trends in the major sites of cancer associated with high mortality rates in 15 industrialized countries. To highlight differences among regions, we grouped these countries into six geographic areas: United States, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, East Asia, Oceania, and Nordic countries. In addition, cancer mortality trends in these regions were compared with incidence patterns in the United States. Methods: Data provided by the World Health Organization were used to evaluate age-specific mortality trends from 1969 through 1986 for lung, breast, prostate, stomach, and colorectal cancers and for all other sites considered as a group. We also assembled and analyzed data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program of the National Cancer Institute for the same sites and age groups from 1973 through 1986. Results: Over the period 1969 through 1986, recorded cancer mortality in persons aged 45 years and older in the six regions studied has increased for lung, breast, and prostate cancers in most age groups, while the decline in stomach cancer mortality is substantial. The increase in lung cancer deaths in men aged 45-54 years has slowed greatly or reversed in all areas except Eastern Europe and East Asia. Trends for intestinal cancer vary by age and region. For all other sites considered as a group, increases have occurred for persons older than 64 years in most regions. In Eastern Europe, there are disturbingly high rates and rapid increases for several of the major forms of cancer in persons aged 45-54 years. In general, trends for cancer incidence in the United States parallel those for mortality. For intestinal cancer, however, incidence has increased while mortality has declined. Conclusions: The trends we report cannot be explained solely by changes in cigarette smoking or aging. Other causes of changes in cancer incidence and mortality need to be determined. Implications: The increasing and decreasing trends in mortality from and incidence of cancer that we found are important for health care planning and may also suggest opportunities for research in cancer prevention. [J Natl Cancer Inst 84: 313-320, 1992

The Ehrenfest urn revisited: Playing the game on a realistic fluid model

The Ehrenfest urn process, also known as the dogs and fleas model, is realistically simulated by molecular dynamics of the Lennard-Jones fluid. The key variable is Delta z, i.e. the absolute value of the difference between the number of particles in one half of the simulation box and in the other half. This is a pure-jump stochastic process induced, under coarse graining, by the deterministic time evolution of the atomic coordinates. We discuss the Markov hypothesis by analyzing the statistical properties of the jumps and of the waiting times between jumps. In the limit of a vanishing integration time-step, the distribution of waiting times becomes closer to an exponential and, therefore, the continuous-time jump stochastic process is Markovian. The random variable Delta z behaves as a Markov chain and, in the gas phase, the observed transition probabilities follow the predictions of the Ehrenfest theory.Comment: Accepted by Physical Review E on 4 May 200

Tritium Atmospheric Transport and Deposition Following Acute Releases: Comparisons With a Simple Transport Model

During 35 years of operation of the Savannah River Site (SRS) there have been a small number of inadvertent tritium releases to the atmosphere. After detection of the releases by stack monitors, field crews were dispatched to determine the concentration of tritium in the environment. The objective of the measurement was to verify environmental concentrations calculated by dose assessment models. Air samples were used to verify the concentration levels and tritium forms during the plume passage. It was not feasible to take enough samples in the plume path to determine the two dimensional distribution of tritium concentration in the plume. However, the ground level distribution was very well reflected vegetation samples. Therefore, it is unusually possible to determine plume shape, plume width, and the relative maximum concentration as the plume moves downwind from the vegetation samples. In eight of the nine releases studied, the monitoring data allowed comparison with atmospheric transport models

Performance analysis of MIMO-SESS with Alamouti scheme over Rayleigh fading channels

Las unidades fraseológicas han estado presentes en los repertorios desde los comienzos de la lexicografía. Y no solamente en los diccionarios generales, sino también en las catalogaciones especializadas, tanto de naturaleza monolingüe como bilingüe. No obstante, siempre ha existido dificultad terminológica para la categorización de los diferentes fenómenos del discurso repetido. Si bien esto no ha sido un inconveniente para que se hayan publicado numerosas compilaciones, sobre todo de refranes en un principio, ya que en la actualidad, fundamentalmente, gracias al auge de los estudios teóricos sobre fraseología, han proliferado otras obras (algunas aplicadas a la glosodidáctica, dada su importancia hoy en día) en las que se da cabida con mayor frecuencia a enunciados de valor específico y a locuciones; en unas ocasiones, ahondando en el origen que les dio entidad y, en otras, estableciendo etiquetados precisos que hasta el momento solían estar ausentes, pero con la finalidad, al fin y al cabo, de desentrañar el sentido, dada la escasa deducibilidad que presentan estas secuencias fijadas por la simple suma de sus elementos constitutivos. Un análisis de estos repertorios a través de los siglos, es, por tanto, el objetivo de este trabajo.Since the beginning of lexicography, phraseological units have been included in repertoires; not only in general dictionaries, but also in monolingual and bilingual specialized catalogues. However, there have always been terminological difficulties for classifying various phenomena of repeated speech. Although this has not been inconvenient for publishing many compilations of sayings, especially at the beginning, because nowadays they frequently include utterances with precise value and idioms, mainly due to the rise of theoretical studies on phraseology (some applied to ASL Linguistics, given its importance today). In them, sometimes, the origin of the phraseological unit is included and, in others, accurate labels that were absent before are determined in order, finally and ultimately, to unravel the meaning, given the reduced deductibility that these sequences present from the simple sum of their constituent elements. The objective of this work is, therefore, an analysis of these repertories throughout the centuries