On factors of 4-connected claw-free graphs

We consider the existence of several different kinds of factors in 4-connected claw-free graphs. This is motivated by the following two conjectures which are in fact equivalent by a recent result of the third author. Conjecture 1 (Thomassen): Every 4-connected line graph is Hamiltonian, i.e. has a connected 2-factor. Conjecture 2 (Matthews and Sumner): Every 4-connected claw-free graph is hamiltonian. We first show that Conjecture 2 is true within the class of hourglass-free graphs, i.e. graphs that do not contain an induced subgraph isomorphic to two triangles meeting in exactly one vertex. Next we show that a weaker form of Conjecture 2 is true, in which the conclusion is replaced by the conclusion that there exists a connected spanning subgraph in which each vertex has degree two or four. Finally we show that Conjecture 1 and 2 are equivalent to seemingly weaker conjectures in which the conclusion is replaced by the conclusion that there exists a spanning subgraph consisting of a bounded number of paths. \u

The Demo/Kemo corpus: A principled approach to the study of cross-cultural differences in the vocal expression and perception of emotion

This paper presents the Demo / Kemo corpus of Dutch and Korean emotional speech. The corpus has been specifically developed for the purpose of cross-linguistic comparison, and is more balanced than any similar corpus available so far: a) it contains expressions by both Dutch and Korean actors as well as judgments by both Dutch and Korean listeners; b) the same elicitation technique and recording procedure was used for recordings of both languages; c) the same nonsense sentence, which was constructed to be permissible in both languages, was used for recordings of both languages; and d) the emotions present in the corpus are balanced in terms of valence, arousal, and dominance. The corpus contains a comparatively large number of emotions (eight) uttered by a large number of speakers (eight Dutch and eight Korean). The counterbalanced nature of the corpus will enable a stricter investigation of language-specific versus universal aspects of emotional expression than was possible so far. Furthermore, given the carefully controlled phonetic content of the expressions, it allows for analysis of the role of specific phonetic features in emotional expression in Dutch and Korean

Korean lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops: Effect of place of articulation on acoustic realization

Unlike most of the world's languages, Korean distinguishes three types of voiceless stops, namely lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops. All occur at three places of articulation. In previous work, acoustic measurements are mostly collapsed over the three places of articulation. This study therefore provides acoustic measurements of Korean lenis, fortis, and aspirated stops at all three places of articulation separately. Clear differences are found among the acoustic characteristics of the stops at the different places of articulatio

SOCIAL MEDIA AS BEAT: Tweets as news source during the 2010 British and Dutch elections

While the newspaper industry is in crisis and less time and resources are available for newsgathering, social media turn out to be a convenient and cheap beat for (political) journalism. This article investigates the use of Twitter as a source for newspaper coverage of the 2010 British and Dutch elections. Almost a quarter of the British and nearly half of the Dutch candidates shared their thoughts, visions, and experiences on Twitter. Subsequently, these tweets were increasingly quoted in newspaper coverage. We present a typology of the functions tweets have in news reports: they were either considered newsworthy as such, were a reason for further reporting, or were used to illustrate a broader news story. Consequently, we will show why politicians were successful in producing quotable tweets. While this paper, which is part of a broader project on how journalists (and politicians) use Twitter, focuses upon the coverage of election campaigns, our results indicate a broader trend in journalism. In the future, the reporter who attends events, gathers information face-to-face, and asks critical questions might instead aggregate information online and reproduce it in journalism discourse thereby altering the balance of power between journalists and sources

Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Journalism Students' Interpretive Repertoires for a Changing Occupation

Amid ongoing disruption, discourse about journalism increasingly emphasizes innovation within the newsroom and the rise of entrepreneurial initiatives outside it. This article uses the concept of interpretive repertoires to explore how students enrolled in journalism programmes in Britain and the Netherlands understand innovation and entrepreneurialism in relation to changing industry circumstances and long-standing conceptualizations of occupational norms and behaviours. We find shared repertoires that embrace technological change, but generally within an acceptance of traditional normative practice

Evaluating dictation task measures for the study of speech perception

This paper shows that the dictation task, a well- known testing instrument in language education, has untapped potential as a research tool for studying speech perception. We describe how transcriptions can be scored on measures of lexical, orthographic, phonological, and semantic similarity to target phrases to provide comprehensive information about accuracy at different processing levels. The former three measures are automatically extractable, increasing objectivity, and the middle two are gradient, providing finer-grained information than traditionally used. We evaluate the measures in an English dictation task featuring phonetically reduced continuous speech. Whereas the lexical and orthographic measures emphasize listeners’ word identification difficulties, the phonological measure demonstrates that listeners can often still recover phonological features, and the semantic measure captures their ability to get the gist of the utterances. Correlational analyses and a discussion of practical and theoretical considerations show that combining multiple measures improves the dictation task’s utility as a research tool