A COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH TO THE TEACIDNG OF LATIN

INTRODUCTION At the University of the Western Cape (UWC) there is a large number of students (about 300) who enrol for the introductory Latin course. Most of these students hope to become lawyers. It is with this in mind that one of the major aims of the UWC Latin course is to enable students to read with comprehension simple Latin texts e.g. 1he Institutes of Gaius, (cf. Kriel 1982). The prescribed handbook is Legal Latin - A Basic Course by Scholtemeijer and Hasse. There are, however, formidable obstacles in the way of enabling students to achieve the aim of reading Latin with confidence. Some of these are constraints faced by most universities, such as not more than 26 weeks of actual teaching time per year, large groups (80-120 students per group), some apathy because Latin is seen as a compulsory requirement, and often a very genuine fear of Latin as a very difficult subject to pass. At UWC yet another factor has become increasingly important over the past few years. A growing percentage of students are studying Latin through the medium of English while English is not their first language. (At the moment we have one: Afrikaans medium group, who are not similarly handicapped). This paper describes how we attempted during 1992 to make learning Latin a meaningful experience for our students; it also draws some conclusions based on the performance of the students and on feedback obtained from them by means of questionnaires about the course. The first section deals with problems generally experienced by students, the second with the methodology adopted to deal with these problems and finally there is an evaluation of the procedure and an indication of the road ahead. Contact time comprised two eighty minute lectures per week dealing with grammar and related experiences, and a weekly tutorial of 40 minutes for which students were divided into groups of approximately 20. There were approximately 15 tutorial groups, and each group maintained their tutor throughout the year. Students were required to write a weekly practical test for which they had to study the grammar and vocabulary introduced during the previous week. They could also practise their vocabulary and paradigms, and later in the year their setwork comprehension, on the CONSENSUS computer programme

Transverse-longitudinal HBT correlations in proton-antiproton collisions at root(s) = 630 GeV

Correlations of like-sign pion pairs emerging from proton-antiproton collisions are analysed in the two-dimensional (q_L,q_T) decomposition of the three-momentum difference q. While the data cannot be adequately represented by gaussian, exponential, power-law or Edgeworth parametrisations, more elaborate ones such as Levy and an exponential with a cross term do better. A two-scale model using a hard cut to separate small and large scales may indicate a core that is more prolate than the halo. Consideration not only of the interference peak at small (q_L,q_T), but also of the shape of the correlation distribution at intermediate momentum differences is crucial to understanding the data.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, uses elsart.cl

The Bits of Silence : Redundant Traffic in VoIP

Human conversation is characterized by brief pauses and so-called turn-taking behavior between the speakers. In the context of VoIP, this means that there are frequent periods where the microphone captures only background noise – or even silence whenever the microphone is muted. The bits transmitted from such silence periods introduce overhead in terms of data usage, energy consumption, and network infrastructure costs. In this paper, we contribute by shedding light on these costs for VoIP applications. We systematically measure the performance of six popular mobile VoIP applications with controlled human conversation and acoustic setup. Our analysis demonstrates that significant savings can indeed be achievable - with the best performing silence suppression technique being effective on 75% of silent pauses in the conversation in a quiet place. This results in 2-5 times data savings, and 50-90% lower energy consumption compared to the next better alternative. Even then, the effectiveness of silence suppression can be sensitive to the amount of background noise, underlying speech codec, and the device being used. The codec characteristics and performance do not depend on the network type. However, silence suppression makes VoIP traffic network friendly as much as VoLTE traffic. Our results provide new insights into VoIP performance and offer a motivation for further enhancements, such as performance-aware codec selection, that can significantly benefit a wide variety of voice assisted applications, as such intelligent home assistants and other speech codec enabled IoT devices.Peer reviewe

Chikungunya as a cause of acute febrile illness in southern Sri Lanka

10.1371/journal.pone.0082259PLoS ONE812-POLN

Host Cell Transcriptome Profile during Wild-Type and Attenuated Dengue Virus Infection

10.1371/journal.pntd.0002107PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases73

A blood RNA transcriptome signature for COVID-19.

BACKGROUND: COVID-19 is a respiratory viral infection with unique features including a more chronic course and systemic disease manifestations including multiple organ involvement; and there are differences in disease severity between ethnic groups. The immunological basis for disease has not been fully characterised. Analysis of whole-blood RNA expression may provide valuable information on disease pathogenesis. METHODS: We studied 45 patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection within 10 days from onset of illness and a control group of 19 asymptomatic healthy volunteers with no known exposure to COVID-19 in the previous 14 days. Relevant demographic and clinical information was collected and a blood sample was drawn from all participants for whole-blood RNA sequencing. We evaluated differentially-expressed genes in COVID-19 patients (log2 fold change ≥ 1 versus healthy controls; false-discovery rate  0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The whole-blood transcriptome of COVID-19 has overall similarity with other respiratory infections but there are some unique pathways that merit further exploration to determine clinical relevance. The approach to a disease score may be of value, but needs further validation in a population with a greater range of disease severity