Gender-specific English language use of Malaysian blog authors

Gender-based research on the language use in blogs has its roots in the long-standing notion that men and women speak and write differently. This paper reports an empirical study on the use of English in a blog context involving Malaysian blog authors. Specifically, the study aimed to identify gender-specific English use among Malaysian blog authors and determine the differences in the language use. Using an ensemble text analysis approach, Malaysian female blog authors are more inclined towards using more verbs, adverbs and pronouns than their male counterpart, with a significant difference, while the males are inclined towards using more adjectives, nouns, determiners and prepositions/subordinating conjunctions than the females, with a significant difference. There are also differences between females and males in terms of the function words, neologisms/blog words as well as use of tag questions and adverbs initiating sentences. However, there are minimal differences between the females and males in terms of length of sentences and that the use of intensifiers, hedges, empty adjectives and emotions, thus concluding that they are not necessarily gender-specific differences. The findings can serve as useful language markers that can benefit the applied linguistics and particularly gender-based and forensic linguistic research

Application of a Multi-Criteria Integrated Portfolio Model for Quantifying South Africa’s Crude Oil Import Risk

e availability of secure energy resources at sustainable quantities and affordable prices is fundamental to South Africa’s current objective of enhancing and sustaining its current growth trajectory. Economic reforms, since the early 1990s, have led to the economy growing at an average rate of almost 5% per annum. A major consequence of this strong growth is the rapid increase in domestic demand for oil energy. With small amounts of proven oil reserves, the rise in oil demand as an essential energy source has prompted an increasing reliance on external sources for domestic crude oil supplies. High oil prices, the extent of proven oil reserves, instability in major oil producing regions and the rise in ‘oil-nationalism’ have raised serious concerns about the security of South Africa’s oil supplies. In this context, a comprehensive understanding of oil import security risks is critical as it will guide in the formulation of energy policy framework aimed at alleviating the impact of oil import risks. This study utilises portfolio theory to provide quantitative measures of systematic and specific risks of South Africa’s crude oil imports over the period 1994 to 2007. It explains the relationship between supply sources diversification and oil energy security risks, and highlights the impact of different crude oil import policy adjustment strategies on the total crude oil import risk for South Africa. The results for the adjustment strategies show that: (a) a policy of having the same quantity of oil imported every month or a constant quantity of oil imported from the supply regions reduces both systematic and specific risks of oil import portfolio, and (b) a reduction in specific risks of South Africa’s oil imports can be achieved if some of the Middle Eastern supplies can be diversified to less risk regions of Europe, North America and Russia.Oil Import Risks, Portfolio Theory, Analytical Hierarchy Process

Visual speech encoding based on facial landmark registration

Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) related studies largely ignore the use of state of the art approaches in facial landmark localization, and are also deficit of robust visual features and its temporal encoding. In this work, we propose a visual speech temporal encoding by integrating state of the art fast and accurate facial landmark detection based on ensemble of regression trees learned using gradient boosting. The main contribution of this work is in proposing a fast and simple encoding of visual speech features derived from vertically symmetric point pairs (VeSPP) of facial landmarks corresponding to lip regions, and demonstrating their usefulness in temporal sequence comparisons using Dynamic Time Warping. VSR can be either speaker dependent (SD) or speaker independent (SI), and each of them poses different kind of challenges. In this work, we consider the SD scenario, and obtain 82.65% recognition accuracy on OuluVS database. Unlike recent research in VSR which makes use of auxiliary information such as audio, depth and color channels, our approach does not impose such constraints

A 'long-fuse domestication' of the horse? Tooth shape suggests explosive change in modern breeds compared with extinct populations and living Przewalski's horses

Archaeological and molecular data suggest that horses were domesticated comparatively recently, the genetic evidence indicating that this was from several maternal haplotypes but only a single paternal one. However, although central to our understanding of how humans and environmental conditions shaped animals during domestication, the phenotypic changes associated with this idiosyncratic domestication process remain unclear. Using geometric morphometrics on a sample of horse teeth including Pleistocene wild horses, modern Icelandic and Thoroughbred domestic horses, Przewalski’s wild horses of recent age and domestic horses of different ages through the Holocene, we show that, despite variations in size likely related to allometry (changes to bone size in proportion to body size), natural and artificial selective pressures and geographic and temporal heterogeneity, the shape of horse teeth has changed surprisingly little over thousands of years across Eurasia: the shapes of the premolars of prehistoric and historic domestic horses largely resemble those of Pleistocene and recent wild horses. However, this changed dramatically after the end of the Iron Age with an explosive increase in the pace and scale of variation in the past two millennia, ultimately resulting in a twofold jump in the magnitude of shape divergence in modern breeds. Our findings indicate that the pace of change during domestication may vary even within the same structure with shape, but not size, suggesting a ‘long-fuse’ model of phenotypic modification, where an initial lengthy period of invariance is followed by an explosive increase in the phenotypic change. These observations support a testable model that is applicable to other traits and species and add a new layer of complexity to the study of interactions between humans and the organisms they domesticated. Funding was provided to GB from the Leverhulme Trust project grant scheme (F/09 757/B) and to KS and AC from the Lang Fund for Human-Environmental Anthropology, Department of Anthropology, Stanford.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Sage via http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/095968361663843

Engaging postgraduate students in preparing research proposals

Both foreign and local postgraduate candidates of Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia come from diverse backgrounds and experiences. These students face several problems especially in writing the research proposals. Hence, to facilitate the process of writing a proposal, they are required to enrol in Research Methodology, a course that is made compulsory for all postgraduate students. This article presents a report on an action research that investigates the research skills of English as a Second Language postgraduates and their research journey while undergoing the Research Methodology course. Data was collected from their weekly journal entries and the interviews conducted on them. This data is also supported with the feedback by the Research Methodology course instructors during the proposal defense sessions. The findings suggest that although the students seemed enthusiastic when writing their proposals, they were not ready when faced with questions about research problems and approaches. It is found that these students did not read extensively to identify the gaps in their research and this hence, resulted in them facing difficulties to write a clear statement of the problem. This also led to poor formulation of their research questions. The findings will be beneficial for instructors and potential supervisors who aim to be better at teaching and supervising potential postgraduate students

TARI RONGGENG IBING DALAM UPACARA HAJAT BUMI DI KECAMATAN LAKBOK KABUPATEN CIAMIS

Upacara hajat bumi di Kecamatan Lakbok Kabupaten Ciamis merupakan Upacara rutin yang dilaksanakan satu tahun sekali tepatnya pada bulan Muharam. Hajat bumi adalah cicing diluar wangunan bari teu sare sapeuting jeput, utamana dina tempat anu aya karamatan nu dilaksanakeun dina bulan Muharam ( dalam bahasa Indonesia artinya diam diluar bangunan dengan tidak tidur semalaman terutama di tempat yang dikeramatkan yang dilaksanakan pada bulan Muharam). Judul yang diambil dalam penelitian ini adalah “Tari ronggeng ibing dalam upacara hajat bumi di Kecamatan Lakbok Kabupaten Ciamis”. Adapun permasalahan yang diangkat dalam penelitian, antaralain: 1) Bagaimana struktur penyajian upacara hajat bumi di Kecamatan Lakbok Kabupaten Ciamis? 2) Bagaimana fungsi ronggeng ibing dalam upacara hajat bumi dalam upacara hajat bumi di Kecamatan Lakbok? 3) Bagaimana koreografi tari ronggeng ibing ? tujuan yang ingin dicapai dalam penelitian ini adalah mendeskripsikan struktur upacara hajat bumi di Kecamatan Lakbok, untuk mengetahui fungsi dan koreografi ronggeng ibing dalam upacara hajat bumi. Metode yang digunakan yaitu metode deskriptif analisis dengan menggunakan pendekatan studies performance. Teknik pengumpulan data, peneliti menggunakan observasi, wawancara, studi dokumen dan studi pustaka. Teori yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah teori pertunjukan dan fungsi. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian, diperoleh sebuah temuan bahwa upacara hajat bumi di Kecamatan Lakbok Kabupaten Ciamis telah mengalami beberapa pergeseran, baik dalam waktu pelaksanaan maupun susunan upacara hajat bumi. Upacara hajat bumi masih memberlakukan hari terpilih, tempat terpilih, pemain terpilih serta masih adanya sesaji. Namun waktu dalam pelaksanaan upacara hajat bumi pada saat ini lebih singkat. Pada awalnya fungsi ronggeng dalam upacara hajat bumi itu bermacam-macam dengan syarat dan tahapan yang telah dipenuhi oleh seorang rongggeng berbeda dengan sekarang ronggeng hanya berfungsi sebagai hiburan semi ritual. Secara keseluruhan dapat disimpulkan bahwa pada awalnya upacara hajat bumi merupakan upacara ritual penuh, saat ini telah mengalami pergeseran fungsi menjadi semi ritual. Dengan demikian fungsi tari ronggeng ibing saat ini sebagai penghibur dalam upacara hajat bumi yang semi ritual.;---Earth Hajar ceremony in District Lakbok Ciamis Regency is a routine ceremon held once a year exactly in Muharam month. Hajat earth is cicing outside wangunan bari teu sare sapeuting jeput, utamana dina place anu aya karamatan nu dilaksanakeun dina month Muharam (in the Indonesian language means silent outside the building by not sleeping overnight especially in the sacred place held in Muharam). The title taken in this research is "Ronggeng ibing dance in the ceremony of the earth in the District of Lakbok Ciamis". The problems raised in the study, antaralain: 1) How is the structure of the presentation of earth lavatory ceremony in District Lakbok Ciamis Regency? 2) What is the function of ronggeng ibing in the ceremony of the earth's shaft in the ceremony of the earth in the District of Lakbok? 3) How is ronggeng ibing dance choreography? The goal to be achieved in this research is to describe the structure of ceremony of earth liver in District of Lakbok, to know the function and choreography of ronggeng ibing in the ceremony of the earth. The method used is descriptive method of analysis by using the study performance approach. Data collection techniques, researchers used observation, interviews, document studies and literature study. The theory used in this research is the theory of performance and function. Based on the results of the research, it was found that the ceremony of the earth in the District of Lakbok Ciamis Regency has experienced some shifts, both in the execution time and the arrangement of the ceremony of the earth. The ceremonies of the earth are still enacting the elected day, the elected place, the elected players and still offerings. But the time in the implementation of the ceremony of the lunar earth at this time is shorter. Initially the function of ronggeng in the ceremony of the earth's lust varies with the terms and stages that have been met by a rongggeng different from now ronggeng only serves as semi-ritual entertainment. Overall, it can be concluded that at first the ceremony of the earth was a full ritual ceremony, now it has undergone a functional shift to semi ritual. Thus the function of ronggeng ibing dance today as an entertainer in the ceremony

Effect of Wave Steepness on Yaw Motions of a Weathervaning Floating Platform

Experimental studies were carried out at the Institute for Ocean Technology, Canada, in collaboration with UWA to assess the response of a 1:60 scaled Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) model in complex sea states. The model was moored by means of four instrumented mooring lines attached to an internal turret. As part of these experiments a series of model tests in regular waves were conducted. Numerical computations for linear motion response of the FPSO were conducted using well established boundary element packages. It is found that the model deviated significantly from linear behaviour in cases where there were involuntary heading changes. These changes were further understood by looking at the phasing between surge and sway accelerations

CFD simulation of wave run-up on a spar cylinder

A spar is essentially a large cylindrical deep draft floating facility which is promising technology for deep sea platforms because of its excellent sea keeping characteristics and its ability to support either rigid or flexible risers. However one of the most important factors in keeping the spar platform stable is to accurately determine the required air gap (region between the mean water level and the freeboard). A Reynolds Averaged Navier Strokes (RANS) based model is presented to model the wave run-up around the spar cylinder. The model enables one to calculate the maximum wave heights that an offshore platform may face. Results, presented for a typical spar cylinder compare well with the expected results of past empirical methods found in the literature