The Sound Manifesto

Computing practice today depends on visual output to drive almost all user interaction. Other senses, such as audition, may be totally neglected, or used tangentially, or used in highly restricted specialized ways. We have excellent audio rendering through D-A conversion, but we lack rich general facilities for modeling and manipulating sound comparable in quality and flexibility to graphics. We need co-ordinated research in several disciplines to improve the use of sound as an interactive information channel. Incremental and separate improvements in synthesis, analysis, speech processing, audiology, acoustics, music, etc. will not alone produce the radical progress that we seek in sonic practice. We also need to create a new central topic of study in digital audio research. The new topic will assimilate the contributions of different disciplines on a common foundation. The key central concept that we lack is sound as a general-purpose information channel. We must investigate the structure of this information channel, which is driven by the co-operative development of auditory perception and physical sound production. Particular audible encodings, such as speech and music, illuminate sonic information by example, but they are no more sufficient for a characterization than typography is sufficient for a characterization of visual information.Comment: To appear in the conference on Critical Technologies for the Future of Computing, part of SPIE's International Symposium on Optical Science and Technology, 30 July to 4 August 2000, San Diego, C

Using learner corpora to redesign university-level EFL grammar education

This paper outlines the developing work in the TREACLE project, which is using learner corpora to inform the redesign of English grammar curricula in Spanish University contexts. The paper outlines the two components of the annotation: manual error analysis and automatic syntactic analysis, which together provide information as to what syntactic structures require attention at each proficiency level, and with what degree of attention. The degree of usage of a syntactic feature compared to native usage is often used to judge the criticality of the syntactic feature for learners at each proficiency level, but we argue for an alternative metric: onset of use, which measures how many of the learners at each level use the feature at all. This measure provides a clearer measure of how critical the feature is to the particular group. We finish the paper with proposed extension of the project to complement classroom teaching with intelligent online learning informed by the learner corpora.Este artículo presenta el trabajo que se está realizando en el proyecto TREACLE, que utiliza un corpus de aprendices para informar el diseño curricular de gramática inglesa en el contexto de universidades españolas. En este artículo se describen los dos componentes de la anotación: análisis manual de errores y análisis sintáctico automático, que, juntos, proporcionan información sobre qué estructuras sintácticas requieren atención, y cuánta atención, en cada nivel de competencia. A menudo se utiliza la frecuencia de uso de una estructura sintáctica en comparación con el uso nativo para determinar hasta qué punto esa estructura es crítica en el nivel de competencia de los aprendices. Sin embargo, aquí mantenemos que este enfoque presenta deficiencias. En su lugar, se propone una medida que llamamos inicio de uso, que mide cuántos de los estudiantes de cada nivel utilizan esa estructura sintáctica en algún momento. Se argumenta que el inicio de uso constituye una medida más clara de la importancia de esa estructura para un grupo determinado de aprendices. Por último, proponemos una extensión del proyecto para complementar la enseñanza en el aula con un sistema inteligente de aprendizaje en línea informado por corpus de aprendices

Assessing the suitability of highly filled energetic composites for additive manufacture

There is currently significant interest in the development of additive manufacturing (AM) techniques suitable for various energetic materials, such as explosives and propellants. One potential approach in this application space is to use extrusion-based techniques, such as Direct Ink Writing (DIW), to print highly solids filled pastes based upon uncured polymer bonded explosives (PBXs) or composite propellants. In supporting the development of these techniques, it will be important to develop an understanding of how the rheological properties of the materials affect their overall printability, which can be defined as their suitability for a particular AM approach. Such an understanding could enable rapid selection and optimisation of suitable technologies or formulations based upon measurable parameters.This paper reviews the printability of energetic materials in extrusion-based systems, and considers applicable approaches, rheological models and experimental techniques. The design, assembly and testing of custom apparatus for assessing the extrusion properties of an energetic paste are also discussed.Defence Science and Technology Laborator