Noises and nuisances in Balto-Slavic and Indo-European linguistics

It is gratifying to see that Jay Jasanoff has now (2004) adopted my theory that "the Balto-Slavic acute was a kind of stød or broken tone" (p. 172), which I have been advocating since 1973. Unfortunately, his acceptance of my view is not based on an evaluation of the comparative evidence (for which see Kortlandt 1985a) but on his desire to derive Balto-Slavic “acute” and "circumflex" syllables from the "bimoric" and "trimoric" long vowels which he assumes for Proto-Germanic as the reflexes of the Indo-European "acute" and "circumflex" tones of the neogrammarians. Since the original "circumflex" was limited to Indo-European VHV-sequences, Jasanoff proposes a whole series of additional lengthenings yielding "hyperlong" vowels in Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, which still do not suffice to eliminate the counter-evidence (cf. Kortlandt 2004b: 14). The reason for this failure is his unwillingness to recognize that lengthened grade vowels are circumflex in Balto-Slavic (cf. Kortlandt 1997a)

Project-based assessment for graduate coursework in physics

Project-based assessment, in the form of take-home exams, was trialed in an honours/masters level electromagnetic theory course. This assessment formed an integral part of the learning experience of the students, and students felt that this was effective method of learning.Comment: 5 pages, no figures, presented at 17th AIP Congress, Brisbane, 200

Argotario: Computational Argumentation Meets Serious Games

An important skill in critical thinking and argumentation is the ability to spot and recognize fallacies. Fallacious arguments, omnipresent in argumentative discourse, can be deceptive, manipulative, or simply leading to `wrong moves' in a discussion. Despite their importance, argumentation scholars and NLP researchers with focus on argumentation quality have not yet investigated fallacies empirically. The nonexistence of resources dealing with fallacious argumentation calls for scalable approaches to data acquisition and annotation, for which the serious games methodology offers an appealing, yet unexplored, alternative. We present Argotario, a serious game that deals with fallacies in everyday argumentation. Argotario is a multilingual, open-source, platform-independent application with strong educational aspects, accessible at www.argotario.net.Comment: EMNLP 2017 demo paper. Source codes: https://github.com/UKPLab/argotari

Alarm system for insect migration using weather radars

The pilot system for forecasting insect migrations to next two days will be operated during May and June 2008. Forecasts are concentrating on two major pests; namely diamond-back moth and bird cherry aphid. Five to ten pilot users will get automatic SMS warning messages and are able to study the situation more thoroughly via specific web pages. The pilot users report to the study team about their findings and the usefulness of the service. The validity of the service will be tested using field traps

Monte Carlo simulation of electron and proton irradiation of carbon nanotube and graphene transistors

Carbon-based nanotechnology electronics can provide high performance, low-power and low-weight solutions, which are very suitable for innovative aerospace applications. However, its application in the space environment where there is a radiation hazard, requires an assessment of the response of such electronic products to the background irradiance. To explore the potential of carbon-based nanotechnology, Monte Carlo simulations of radiation interacting with a gate-all-around carbon nanotube (GAACNFET) and a top-gated graphene FET are presented. Geant4 is used to calculate the energy deposited into the dielectric layers and the displacement damage in the nanosemiconductors under proton and electron irradiation. Both an unshielded and two cases with 250 μm thick NiFe and Pb shielding are tested at a fluence of 1015 m-2. The energy range of the particles considered is 10-2 – 102 MeV for the unshielded and 1 – 103 MeV for the shielded case. The results indicate that the graphene transistor is more susceptible to displacement damage than the CNT-based syste

Improved Social Interaction by Children With Autism by Training of Peers

Peer-mediated intervention is seen as promising to facilitate development of both social and cognitive skills in children with autism. However, peers have great difficulty in social interaction with children with autism, presumably diminishing the effect of the intervention. This difficulty does not lie with the children with autism alone - the inability of peers to understand social cues and behaviour of children with autism contributes. Therefore, we designed a peer training program to better enable the peers to interact. Typically developing children acted as peer play partners for children with autism. Following initial play sessions to measure the pre-training levels of cognitive play and social interaction, half of the peers underwent the peer training program, and the effect of the training on cognitive play and social interaction were measured, with the untrained peers as controls. No improvement in social interaction was shown by the untrained peers - experience alone was not enough. Trained peers showed large, and statistically significant, improvements. Clearly, such a peer training program could be of great benefit in inclusive education as well as in peer-mediated intervention. Apart from the observation that the program was effective and necessary, motivation of peers is an important, but difficult, issue. Finally, we note that the level of cognitive play shown by children with autism, which is often used as a measure of success of an intervention, appears to be an extremely unreliable metric of performance

"Hybrid" T-Matrix Methods

The T-matrix method is widely used for the calculation of scattering by particles of sizes on the order of the illuminating wavelength. Although the extended boundary condition method (EBCM) is the most commonly used technique for calculating the T-matrix, a variety of methods can be used. Because the T-matrix depends only on the properties of the scatterer and the wavelength and not on other properties of the incident field, the T-matrix method is especially well-suited to repeated calculations involving varying illumination. Thus, it can be highly desirable to express the scattering properties of a given arbitrary particle as a T-matrix. However, the standard EBCM is only applicable to homogeneous scatterers, necessitating the use of other, more general methods. We consider some general principles of "hybrid" T-matrix methods - calculating T-matrices using other techniques for calculating scattering - and consider some specific methods. In particular, we discuss the application of time-domain methods which offer the possibility of simultaneous multiple-wavelength or multiple-size calculations