179,232 research outputs found

    Identity and ethnicity in /t/ in Glasgow-Pakistani high-school girls

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    This paper presents an acoustic phonetic analysis of Glasgow Asian syllable-initial /t/, in speech data collected from Pakistani-Muslim girls in a Glasgow high school after a long-term participant observation into their shared and differing social practices. The results show differences in spectral energy and shape according to following phonetic segment, and to membership in two contrasting Communities of Practice, more conservative girls maintaining traditional cultural practices, and more rebellious girls whose behaviour challenges such norms. The findings demonstrate that ethnicity is integrally linked with locally-salient identity, and hence that fine phonetic variation which indexes ethnicity is in fact indexical of local ethnic identity

    Improving Statistical Language Model Performance with Automatically Generated Word Hierarchies

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    An automatic word classification system has been designed which processes word unigram and bigram frequency statistics extracted from a corpus of natural language utterances. The system implements a binary top-down form of word clustering which employs an average class mutual information metric. Resulting classifications are hierarchical, allowing variable class granularity. Words are represented as structural tags --- unique nn-bit numbers the most significant bit-patterns of which incorporate class information. Access to a structural tag immediately provides access to all classification levels for the corresponding word. The classification system has successfully revealed some of the structure of English, from the phonemic to the semantic level. The system has been compared --- directly and indirectly --- with other recent word classification systems. Class based interpolated language models have been constructed to exploit the extra information supplied by the classifications and some experiments have shown that the new models improve model performance.Comment: 17 Page Paper. Self-extracting PostScript Fil

    Ice formation on a smooth or rough cold surface due to the impact of a supercooled water droplet

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    Ice accretion is considered in the impact of a supercooled water droplet on a smooth or rough solid surface, the roughness accounting for earlier icing. In this theoretical investigation the emphasis and novelty lie in the full nonlinear interplay of the droplet motion and the growth of the ice surface being addressed for relatively small times, over a realistic range of Reynolds numbers, Froude numbers, Weber numbers, Stefan numbers and capillary underheating parameters. The Prandtl number and the kinetic under-heating parameter are taken to be order unity. The ice accretion brings inner layers into play forcibly, affecting the outer flow. (The work includes viscous effects in an isothermal impact without phase change, as a special case, and the differences between impact with and without freezing.) There are four main findings. First, the icing dynamically can accelerate or decelerate the spreading of the droplet whereas roughness on its own tends to decelerate spreading. The interaction between the two and the implications for successive freezings are found to be subtle. Second, a focus on the dominant physical effects reveals a multi-structure within which restricted regions of turbulence are implied. The third main finding is an essentially parabolic shape for a single droplet freezing under certain conditions. Fourth is a connection with a body of experimental and engineering work and with practical findings to the extent that the explicit predictions here for ice-accretion rates are found to agree with the experimental range.

    Theoretical versus pragmatic design in qualitative research

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    For many years, discussions of the relative merits of generic and theoretical approaches to qualitative research have divided researchers while overshadowing the need to focus on addressing clinical questions. Drawing on the challenges of designing a study that explored parents’ experiences of living with children with hydrocephalus, the authors of this paper argue that over-adherence to, and deliberations about, the philosophical origins of qualitative methods is undermining the contributions qualitative research could make to evidence-based health care and suggest qualitative methods should stand alone

    Study of payload sensor contamination

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    Epoxy/glass test specimens representing Scout fourth and fifth stage motor casings were prepared and studied in a test program designed to determine the relative contamination contributed to payload sensors located near the motor casings. The relative contamination detected in the test program was dependent on several factors, including: (1) distance of test specimen to sensor, (2) sensor temperature, (3) geometric position of the sensor (relative to test specimen), (4)test specimen temperature, (5) chemical composition of the test specimen, (6) sensor function, and (7) additional materials (such as adhesive-backed aluminum tape) added to the test specimens. The thermal characteristics and the decomposition and outgassing products were determined. These data were used to better understand the relative contamination data from the remote sensor testing
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