Amusement park crisis management and its effect on the crisis news life cycle

The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate whether effective amusement park crisis management can shorten the crisis news life cycle. Twenty-two in-depth interviews with seasoned media, amusement park public relations practitioners, and park PR practitioners who formerly worked in media were conducted and analyzed through content analysis. Coverage of an amusement ride incident was analyzed through content analysis to support interview findings. Numerous strategies are identified to build a foundation for effective crisis management, and to shorten the duration of crisis news coverage. Differences in managing print media versus television media are discussed. The thesis identifies amusement park incident criteria that either indicate one-day crisis coverage, or high volume and frequency of coverage and the likelihood of continuing crisis coverage. The identified strategies and crisis criteria can help amusement park public relations practitioners manage crises and shorten the news life cycle

Measurement of Gluten in Food Products: Proficiency‐Testing Rounds as a Measure of Precision and Applicability

In 2008, Codex Alimentarius endorsed the R5 Enzyme‐Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) method as Method Type 1 for gluten measurement in gluten‐free foods. The most recognized R5 ELISA test kit is the RIDASCREEEN® Gliadin (R7001; manufacturer R‐Biopharm). Beside collaborative tests that led to several international approved methods of this test kit, proficiency‐testing (PT) rounds are regularly performed in Europe by different PT providers. Results from these rounds were analyzed regarding the number of participating labs with acceptable results for the RIDASCREEN® Gliadin. All PT rounds document the excellent consistency and comparability of results. The data show that the RIDASCREEN® Gliadin R5 ELISA is also applicable to cake mix, oat‐based foodstuff, infant soya formula, cookies, canned boiled sausage, gravy thickener, pasta, and potato dumpling. These rounds also included the analysis of blank matrices. It was found that more than 95% of all participating laboratories correctly detected these samples as negative. Other gluten test kit manufacturers were analyzed as well, but due to the low number of participants using these test kits results were often only analyzed in a qualitative manner questioning the comparability of these kits to the RIDASCREEN® Gliadin R5 ELISA

Dimethyltitanocen-katalysierte intermolekulare Hydroaminierung von Alkinen : ein synthetisches Werkzeug zum gezielten Aufbau stickstoffhaltiger Strukturmotive

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Influências interlinguísticas na mente multilíngue : perspectivas psicolinguísticas e (psico)tipológicas

Orientador: Prof. Dr. Michael Alan WatkinsAutor não autorizou a divulgação do arquivo digitalTese (doutorado) - Universidade Federal do Paraná, Setor de Ciências Humanas, Letras e Artes, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras. Defesa: Curitiba, 30/09/2011Bibliografia: fls. 176-202Resumo: Na última década houve um crescimento no interesse pelo multilinguismo individual e pelo seu fomento, buscando-se desvendar o processamento concomitante de diversas línguas na mente do aprendiz, e estabelecer as semelhanças e diferenças entre a aprendizagem de uma segunda língua e a aprendizagem de uma terceira língua ou posterior. Os estudos que envolvem sujeitos multilíngues não apenas oferecem a oportunidade de investigar a aprendizagem e o processamento mental de pessoas que representam a condição linguística da maioria da população mundial, mas também oferecem novas perspectivas acerca da aquisição de línguas em geral. A proposta de nossa pesquisa consiste na investigação das influências interlinguísticas nas mentes multilíngues e suas relações com fatores (psico)tipológicos. A partir de uma perspectiva psicolinguística, analisamos o uso que aprendizes de alemão, vivendo na Alemanha, fazem do seu conhecimento das línguas anteriormente aprendidas enquanto tentam compreender o significado de vocábulos desconhecidos na língua em estudo. Utilizamos como instrumentos de coleta de dados, além de questionários e entrevistas semi-estruturadas, o protocolo verbal concorrente, como forma de ter acesso aos processos mentais dos sujeitos durante suas tentativas de inferenciação. Os protocolos verbais são uma técnica de observação participante que envolve o sujeito externando o que está pensando enquanto realiza uma tarefa. Foram observados, gravados e transcritos os processos inferenciais realizados, durante atividades de leitura de textos e palavras, por vinte aprendizes da língua alemã. Nove participantes aprendem o alemão como terceira língua, oito como sua quarta, dois como sua quinta, e um como sua nona língua. Como língua materna, o inglês se apresenta para dois participantes, o espanhol para onze, e o português para sete deles. Durante a leitura de textos na língua em estudo, que incluíam palavras desconhecidas aos sujeitos, observamos a utilização de pistas interlinguísticas. Procuramos verificar também a relação entre a ativação das informações nas línguas específicas e a genealogia linguística, contrastando-a com a noção de psicotipologia, conforme apresentada por Kellerman (1983), a partir das percepções individuais dos participantes, entrevistados acerca da distância ou proximidade percebida entre as suas línguas. A esta pesquisa relaciona-se a tese de que o processo de inferenciação é influenciado pelo conhecimento linguístico prévio, da(s) língua(s) materna(s) e de outras ínguas estrangeiras, mesmo as consideradas geneticamente distantes. Apesar de termos encontrado um número reduzido de evidências de influência interlinguística durante as atividades de inferenciação de significados, nossos resultados apontam para o fato de que, apesar dos fatores genéticos, tipológicos e psicotipológicos restringirem as manifestações de influências interlinguísticas, aprendizes multilíngues comparam e utilizam todas as suas línguas, de maneiras diferentes, sejam elas formalmente relacionadas ou não.Abstract: In the last decade there was a growing interest on individual multilingualism and its promotion, in search of uncovering the concurrent processing of several languages in the learner's mind, and establishing the similarities and the differences between the learning of a second language and the learning of a third or further language. The research involving multilingual individuals offers not only the opportunity to investigate the people who represent the linguistic condition of the majority of the world population, but also new perspectives regarding language acquisition in general. Our research proposal is aimed at investigating the cross-linguistic influence in multilingual minds, and its relation to (psycho)typological factors. From a psycholinguistic perspective, we intend to analyze how learners of German, living in Germany, make use of their previous linguistic knowledge while trying to understand the meaning of unknown words in the target language. Questionnaires and semistructured interviews were used as data collecting instruments, as well as concurrent think-aloud protocols, as a way to gain insight into the participants' thoughts during their inference attempts. Think-aloud protocols are a participant observation technique which involves the subjects externalizing what they are thinking while performing a task. The inferential processes made, during activities in reading words and texts, by twenty learners of German were observed, taped, and transcribed. Nine participants were learning German as their third language, eight as their fourth, two as their fifth, and one as his ninth language. As mother tongues two of them had English, eleven had Spanish, and seven had Portuguese. We focused on their use of interlingual clues while reading texts in German, which included words unknown to them. We also aimed at examining the elationship between the activation of information in specific languages and language genealogy, contrasting it with the notion of psychotypology, as presented by Kellerman (1983), considering the subjects' individual perceptions about the distances between their own languages. Our proposal is that the inference process is influenced by previous linguistic knowledge, from the mother tongue(s) and other foreign languages, even by the ones considered genetically unrelated. We were able to detect little evidence for cross-linguistic influence during the tasks of meaning inferencing. Despite that, our results point to the fact that, even though genetic, typological, and psychotypological factors restrict manifestations of cross-linguistic influence, multilingual learners compare and use all their languages, in different ways, whether they are formally related or not

The promotion of multilingual competence at school: encouraging possibilities

In this article, I approach the predominance of multilingualism in the world, and the concern with the development of individual multilingualism at school. From a psycholinguistic perspective, I present the proposal of multilingual didactics (Meissner &amp; Reinfried, 1998) – as developed in theory and practice by Franz-Joseph Meissner, a German linguist – and its contribution to foreign language teaching.Key words: multilingualism, multilingual didactics, foreign language teaching.</p