Personal Attribution in English and Spanish Scientific Texts

Scientific discourse is usually thought to be impersonal. In fact, most style manuals encourage academics to use impersonal constructions in order to avoid making explicit their authorial presence in the texts. However, recent research has shown that in scientific writing the choice to announce the writer’s presence in the discourse, mainly by means of the use of first person pronouns, is a rhetorical strategy frequently used by the members of the international English-speaking community for promotion and gaining accreditation for research claims. In this study, I have analysed the distribution and frequency of occurrence of first person pronouns in research article abstracts written in English and Spanish in the social sciences disciplines, in an attempt to reveal whether there is cross-linguistic variation in the use of personal attribution in the texts. I have also examined the possible semantic references and different socio-pragmatic functions that these pronouns may perform. The results showed a high tendency to impersonality in both languages. This indicates that most academics in English and Spanish favour strategies of depersonalisation: the use of agentless passive and impersonal constructions, which function as hedging devices that diminish the author’s presence in the texts, avoiding personal responsibility for their claims

Impact of Gamma Radiation on Dynamic RDSON Characteristics in AlGaN/GaN Power HEMTs

GaN high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) are promising next-generation devices in the power electronics field which can coexist with silicon semiconductors, mainly in some radiation-intensive environments, such as power space converters, where high frequencies and voltages are also needed. Its wide band gap (WBG), large breakdown electric field, and thermal stability improve actual silicon performances. However, at the moment, GaN HEMT technology suffers from some reliability issues, one of the more relevant of which is the dynamic on-state resistance (RON_dyn) regarding power switching converter applications. In this study, we focused on the drain-to-source on-resistance (RDSON) characteristics under 60Co gamma radiation of two different commercial power GaN HEMT structures. Different bias conditions were applied to both structures during irradiation and some static measurements, such as threshold voltage and leakage currents, were performed. Additionally, dynamic resistance was measured to obtain practical information about device trapping under radiation during switching mode, and how trapping in the device is affected by gamma radiation. The experimental results showed a high dependence on the HEMT structure and the bias condition applied during irradiation. Specifically, a free current collapse structure showed great stability until 3.7 Mrad(Si), unlike the other structure tested, which showed high degradation of the parameters measured. The changes were demonstrated to be due to trapping effects generated or enhanced by gamma radiation. These new results obtained about RON_dyn will help elucidate trap behaviors in switching transistors

Scientific Writing: A Universal or a Culture-Specific Type of Discourse?

Studies of cross-cultural rhetorical variation, and how the influence of the cul- ture and the linguistic and structural aspects of a person's L1 may affect his/her writing in an L2, are often labelled Contrastive Rhetoric research. This paper reviews the field of Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) with a special focus on academic/scientific and professional contexts. A revision of Kaplan's (1966) pio- neering work in CR, and the subsequent criticism it has received, is followed by a comprehensive overview of how this area of research has evolved in recent years, and by a survey of the latest variables which are being considered in contemporary CR research. On the basis of the results obtained in these CR studies, this paper discusses the issue of whether scientific discourse is universal or whether it is culture-specific, i.e. governed by socio-cultural factors.

The teaching of academic writing to English as a second language students: A functional genre-based approach

This paper reviews how genre-based pedagogy has been conceived by researchers in the different scholarly traditions, and offers a particular view of genre-driven pedagogy and its practical applications in the English as a Second Language student classroom. This view of a genre-based teaching approach largely consists in a prior discussion with students of the socio-cultural context in which a particular academic genre occurs. This discovery process of the social circumstances that surround a genre can help students understand more readily the communicative purpose of a specific genre. A second complementary stage should be the explicit teaching of functions and language structures of typical academic texts, with a special emphasis on cross-cultural variation. By making learners aware of the similarities and differences in the rhetorical strategies preferred by the members of different disciplinary communities, L2 writers may feel more confident about the rhetorical options they can choose depending on the context and type of audience they are addressing.

On the effects of firing memory in the dynamics of conjunctive networks

Boolean networks are one of the most studied discrete models in the context of the study of gene expression. In order to define the dynamics associated to a Boolean network, there are several \emph{update schemes} that range from parallel or \emph{synchronous} to \emph{asynchronous.} However, studying each possible dynamics defined by different update schemes might not be efficient. In this context, considering some type of temporal delay in the dynamics of Boolean networks emerges as an alternative approach. In this paper, we focus in studying the effect of a particular type of delay called \emph{firing memory} in the dynamics of Boolean networks. Particularly, we focus in symmetric (non-directed) conjunctive networks and we show that there exist examples that exhibit attractors of non-polynomial period. In addition, we study the prediction problem consisting in determinate if some vertex will eventually change its state, given an initial condition. We prove that this problem is {\bf PSPACE}-complete

Discurso pronunciado por Pedro Martín y Martín ..., en la grandiosa asamblea preparatoria de la constitución de la Confederación Hidrográfica del Duero, celebrada el día 20 de marzo de 1927 en el Teatro de Calderón, de Valladolid...

Copia digital. Valladolid : Junta de Castilla y León. Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, 2009-201