Contained Entity of an Educational Innovation: The Realities of Micropolitics

This study was about a single case of educational innovation and excellence in educational technology in a secondary school in Ontario. The researcher explored the question of how the innovation resulted from an individual effort and attainment remained a “contained entity” after its decade-long existence. From the lenses of multiple realities, the researcher critically interpreted how micropolitics including gender and power dynamics and teacher resistance could create complexities for the institutionalization of the innovation. The district was urged to consider the lack of time and professional development issues raised by teachers. Further research was required to address the conspicuous absence of gender gap in this study.Cette étude porte sur un cas unique d’innovation et d’excellence en matière de technologie éducative dans une école secondaire en Ontario. Le chercheur s’est penché sur l’origine de l’innovation (elle a découlé d’un effort individuel) et sur les résultats qu’elle a donnés (après dix ans d’existence, elle demeurait toujours une ‘entité confinée’. Partant de divers optiques, le chercheur a entrepris une interprétation critique de la mesure dans laquelle la micropolitique, y compris la dynamique du genre et du pouvoir et la résistance des enseignants, pouvait rendre plus complexe l’institutionnalisation de l’innovation. L’on a encouragé le district de tenir compte des problèmes soulevés par les enseignants relatifs au manque de temps et au perfectionnement professionnel. L’absence bien évidente de fossé entre les genres doit faire l’objet de recherches supplémentaires

Modelling CO formation in the turbulent interstellar medium

We present results from high-resolution three-dimensional simulations of turbulent interstellar gas that self-consistently follow its coupled thermal, chemical and dynamical evolution, with a particular focus on the formation and destruction of H2 and CO. We quantify the formation timescales for H2 and CO in physical conditions corresponding to those found in nearby giant molecular clouds, and show that both species form rapidly, with chemical timescales that are comparable to the dynamical timescale of the gas. We also investigate the spatial distributions of H2 and CO, and how they relate to the underlying gas distribution. We show that H2 is a good tracer of the gas distribution, but that the relationship between CO abundance and gas density is more complex. The CO abundance is not well-correlated with either the gas number density n or the visual extinction A_V: both have a large influence on the CO abundance, but the inhomogeneous nature of the density field produced by the turbulence means that n and A_V are only poorly correlated. There is a large scatter in A_V, and hence CO abundance, for gas with any particular density, and similarly a large scatter in density and CO abundance for gas with any particular visual extinction. This will have important consequences for the interpretation of the CO emission observed from real molecular clouds. Finally, we also examine the temperature structure of the simulated gas. We show that the molecular gas is not isothermal. Most of it has a temperature in the range of 10--20 K, but there is also a significant fraction of warmer gas, located in low-extinction regions where photoelectric heating remains effective.Comment: 37 pages, 15 figures; minor revisions, matches version accepted by MNRA

Students' Heterogeneity and Multiple Worlds: Revisiting the Changing Student Poulations in Ontario

Abstract This qualitative study is designed to examine how the 8 university students (from 8 different secondary schools) define their high school experiences. The study focuses on how the 8 study participants’ unique identities shape their experiences of secondary schooling. The three paradigms, students’ heterogeneity, multiple worlds, and identity conceptually framed the study. Through the focus group interactions and two sets of individual interviews, each student’s unique identity and agency were revealed; both individual-social-collective entities that were developed in relations to others. The other sources of data were school websites, relevant media reports on schools and their communities, and policy documents on academic and international baccalaureate programs; finally, field notes were also taken. In so doing, the research critically explores participants’ voices on heterogeneity, multiple worlds of family, neighbourhood, peers,cultural and multicultural identities. Finally, the 8 young people also reflect on their 8 schools, their academic programs, overall educational experience, and particularly, how young people articulate their belonging in high schools. Findings of the study suggest that participants’ identities of who they were often echoed their class, race, and ethnicity, and in turn, affected their academic engagement and identity. Despite the public invitation of all schools on their websites for students to participate in the school communities, the participants painted an altogether different picture; not all adolescents had equal access to schooling. The study makes recommendations for policy-makers, schools, and their districts which address the issues of inequity raised in this study. Specifically, schools need to be aware of the cultural,socioeconomic, and ethnic issues and the challenges that are in the way of minority adolescents’ progress so that secondary schools can extend their support to low income and immigrant students.Ph

From Voice Quality to Tone: Multilingualism in Northeast Thailand and Shifting Cue Weights

How do neighboring languages come to resemble one another, regardless of their genetic affinity? The literature is rife with examples of areas all over the world where languages have converged and share multiple features, but what are the exact mechanisms by which these large-scale effects come about? This dissertation integrates viewpoints from phonetics, phonology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, language contact, and multilingualism to investigate this question. Ultimately, the effects that we see from language contact are a form of language change involving influence from other languages. However, as languages cannot directly influence one another, the question cannot be answered without analyzing what individuals are actually doing in language contact situations. Naturally, these situations entail that they are speaking and listening to multiple languages, and so it is the production and perception of language that this dissertation will probe.Previous work on language contact has acknowledged bilingualism as a prerequisite for contact-related changes that permeate beyond the lexicon and derives language contact effects as deriving from processes of imposition of one language's grammar onto another within bilinguals; however, much of this work tends to be restricted to theorizing these processes from the surface outcomes of language contact. On the other end, there is a wealth of experimental literature exploring how bilinguals use cues in their first and second languages; however, much of this work is focused on the question of what bilinguals do, without expanding to the broader context of how the results may have implications for understanding contact effects on language change. As such, this dissertation seeks to unify these two bodies of literature.The sound change of interest is tonogenesis, the emergence of contrastive tone, which is well-known to arise from segmental contrasts through a combination of articulatory and perceptual factors involving co-occurring phonetic cues in phonological contrasts. The existence of co-occurring cues in a phonological contrast is of particular interest from the language contact/multilingualism angle, as the informativity of a cue may be influenced by the informativity of that cue in another language spoken by the multilingual. As a case study, I examine the realization of phonological register in a quadrilingual Kuy community in Northeast Thailand as a case study. Members of this community speak two non-tonal languages, Kuy and Khmer, and two tonal ones, Lao and Thai. As pitch is a cue common to both register and tonal contrasts, I explore how Kuy speakers' usage of pitch aligns with their usage of these languages by carrying out a production and perception study and analyzing the results in the context of sociolinguistic data. I hypothesize that greater usage of tonal languages will correlate to greater usage of f0 (fundamental frequency) in the Kuy register contrast. I also discuss how these language patterns arise against the background of increasing pressures to use Standard Thai, due to a combination of changing schooling patterns, greater mobility between provinces, and an overall higher degree of centralization.Chapter 1 provides the relevant sociolinguistic background and language contact situation of the quadrilingual situation in the Kuy community and review literature related to sound change, language contact, and multilingualism. Chapter 2 explains the context in which I carried out linguistic fieldwork and the methods I used to process and analyze the sociolinguistic and phonetic data from the studies. Chapter 3 describes the production experiment I carried out. Participants embedded target Kuy words differing minimally in register in a carrier sentence. The results show stark gender differences, with female speakers showing a positive correlation between usage of tonal languages and usage of f0 in production of the Kuy register contrast, and male speakers lacking any correlation. The relationship between usage of tonal languages and usage of voice quality was more complicated, including a mix of positive, negative, and null correlations. Chapter 4 describes the perception experiment I carried out. Participants listened to perceptual stimuli of Kuy minimal pairs manipulated for f0 and voice quality and identified the register of each stimulus in a forced-choice task. The results show a positive correlation between usage of tonal languages and usage of f0 in perception of the Kuy register contrast for both female and male listeners. There was no relationship found between usage of tonal languages and usage of voice quality.Chapter 5 explores the relationship between the production and perception results by examining the results in tandem in participants who partook in both studies. The results show a positive correlation between usage of tonal languages and usage of f0 overall and no significant relationship with usage of voice quality. This chapter discusses potential explanations for asymmetries in the findings with regards to gender and for differences in the production and perception results. I also analyze and discuss the usage of f0 in the register contrast in the context of three other ongoing sound changes that may also be linked to contact with Thai and Lao.Finally, in Chapter 6, I summarize the findings and expand on the broader implications and propose that language contact effects can potentially be understood as the enhancement of preexisting features in a language due to the informativity of those features in another language. While this dissertation focuses on understanding how sound change can be shaped by language contact, changes at any level of language can be understood under the same framework. The results of these studies suggest that large-scale changes in social situations shift individual language patterns and trigger micro-level shifts in cue usage in a linguistic contrast. These shifts can bias languages to change in certain directions and set the stage for the macro-level language contact effects that we see over time

Automated locality optimization based on the reuse distance of string operations

Abstract—String operations such as memcpy, memset and memcmp account for a nontrivial amount of Google datacenter resources. String operations hurt processor cache efficiency when the data accessed is not reused shortly thereafter. Such cache pollution can be avoided by using nontemporal memory access to bypass L2/L3 caches. As reuse distance varies greatly across different memcpy static call contexts in the same program, an efficient solution needs to be call context sensitive. We propose a novel solution to this problem using the page protection mechanism to measure reuse distance and the GCC feedback directed optimization mechanism to generate nontemporal memory access instructions at the appropriate static code contexts. First, the compiler inserts instrumentation for calls to string operations. Then a run time library measures reuse distance using the page protection mechanism during a representative profiling run. The compiler finally generates calls to specialized string operations that use nontemporal operations for the arguments with large reuse distance. We present a full implementation and initial results including speedup on large datacenter applications. Index Terms—memcpy; nontemporal; reuse distance I

Unifying Initial Geminates and Fortis Consonants via Laryngeal Specification: Three case studies from Dunan, Pattani Malay, and Salentino

Initial Geminates (IGs) are often assumed to differ from singletons mainly in duration, while fundamental frequency (f0) and intensity are described as secondary, variable cues. Accordingly, IGs are phonologically represented with a [+long] feature or by associating the consonant to two timing units. On the other hand, more recent work on IGs has suggested that the boundary between IGs and fortis stops is tenuous. To further support this claim, we present converging evidence from 3 understudied languages, Dunan (Japonic), Pattani Malay (PM, Austronesian), and Salentino (Indo-European), suggesting that IGs may also be reliably cued by intensity, possibly as a byproduct of longer closure duration, and f0 throughout the following vowel. Reliance on these acoustic cues is strongly reminiscent of fortis stops in, e.g., Korean. Accordingly, we propose that languages prototypically described as having IG contrasts should be phonologically represented with a distinct laryngeal specification that takes into account the constellation of acoustic cues at play