Unruly intonation

In this paper we call into question the value of ‘rules’ concerning intonation to the learner of English. Are there predictive rules of sufficient generality and power to make them worth learning explicitly, or would learners’ time be better spent on habit-forming drills of common patterns? Examining a typical test passage for advanced students, we show that in all three systems of tonality, tonicity and tone, known ‘rules’ account only for a proportion of the ‘right’ or expected answers. There are plentiful instances where competent native speakers agree over the selection of a pattern, though no rule seems to guide their choice. We recommend that the utility of ‘rules’ should be evaluated in relation to the frequency of occurrence of the structures to which they apply, in the relevant types of discourse; that more attention be given to idiomatic expressions, and the prosodic patterns associated with particular lexical items; and that learners should be equipped with simple practical heuristics (e.g., for using punctuation as a guide to intonation when reading aloud)

A Preliminary Study of Written Intonation

Authors, poets, journalists, academics and even private individuals are often at pains to ensure their readers make the judgement about focus and ‘tone of voice’ that their chosen words are intended to convey. We find this in a wide range of published and unpublished (published and unpublished) writings in English. These italics not only demonstrate how a highlighted word on the printed page can be used to correspond to the intonational nucleus in speech. The nucleus, of course, draws the whole word (and possibly more) into focus, not just the literal syllable on which the pitch movement begins (and as a trained phonetician, my instinct would be to have written published and unpublished here) but can possibly also tell us something about the phonetically untrained native-speaker’s intuitions about intonation. This paper begins a study of intonation in the written text. I have called this ‘written intonation’

Accuracy of gravitational physics tests using ranges to the inner planets

A number of different types of deviations from Kepler's laws for planetary orbits can occur in nonNewtonian metric gravitational theories. These include secular changes in all of the orbital elements and in the mean motion, plus additional periodic perturbations in the coordinates. The first order corrections to the Keplerian motion of a single planet around the Sun due to the parameterized post Newtonian theory parameters were calculated as well as the corrections due to the solar quadrupole moment and a possible secular change in the gravitational constant. The results were applied to the case of proposed high accuracy ranging experiments from the Earth to a Mercury orbiting spacecraft in order to see how well the various parameters can be determined

Theory of magnetic oscillations in Weyl semimetals

Weyl semimetals are a new class of Dirac material that posses bulk energy nodes in three dimensions. In this paper, we study a Weyl semimetal subject to an applied magnetic field. We derive expressions for the density of states, electronic specific heat, and the quantum oscillations of the magnetization, DC conductivity, and thermal conductivity. We find phase shifts in the quantum oscillations that distinguish the Weyl semimetal from conventional three dimensional Schr\"odinger Fermions.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

SCRAM: Software configuration and management for the LHC Computing Grid project

Recently SCRAM (Software Configuration And Management) has been adopted by the applications area of the LHC computing grid project as baseline configuration management and build support infrastructure tool. SCRAM is a software engineering tool, that supports the configuration management and management processes for software development. It resolves the issues of configuration definition, assembly break-down, build, project organization, run-time environment, installation, distribution, deployment, and source code distribution. It was designed with a focus on supporting a distributed, multi-project development work-model. We will describe the underlying technology, and the solutions SCRAM offers to the above software engineering processes, while taking a users view of the system under configuration management.Comment: Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics, La Jolla, California, March 24-28, 2003 1 tar fil