Digital lace:a collision of responsive technologies

Designing with properties such as colour-change and light using electronics and digital control brings new challenges within art and design, and a range of new possibilities for aesthetics, tactility and functionality. Heimtextil 2014 (accessed April 2014) promotes emerging materials and technologies as one of four trends which highlight the increasing demand for unique products utilizing novel material properties and digital making. However, there is still limited insight into the creative potential of these materials that are fundamental to the exploitation of 'smart' material properties, the development of new 'smart' surfaces and digital tools that facilitate designing with colour-change and light-emitting properties specific to textiles. This submission to the Fiber arts category presents new material concepts as Digital Lace: a novel, multifaceted textile which will be presented as an interactive table runner for a digitally manufactured console table. Digital Lace explicitly pools together the digital-craft skills base and disparate expertise of printed textile practitioner and thermochromic specialist, Sara Robertson (SR) and constructed textile practitioner and light-emitting optical fibre specialist, Sarah Taylor (ST). Within the context of 'smart', material development and experimentation, Digital lace exploits and amalgamates the responsive technologies of dye and fibre with digital-control

Household Debt and Financial Assets: Evidence from Great Britain, Germany and the United States

We explore the determinants of debt and financial asset accumulation at the household level using survey data for Great Britain, Germany and the United States (US). Given that debt and assets are both components of a household’s financial portfolio, we explore the degree of inter-dependence between households’ assets and liabilities by jointly modelling these two aspects of the portfolio. Indeed, our empirical findings for both countries support a high degree of inter-dependence between debt and asset holding. Furthermore, the nature of this inter-dependence varies across income ranges and age groups with the weakest correlation between financial assets and debt being found for the lowest income groups in Great Britain, suggesting that such groups may be particularly vulnerable to adverse financial shocks. Evidence supporting inter-dependence between assets and debt no longer remains, however, once we focus on debtors which suggests that households in debt may potentially face difficulties following adverse changes in their financial situation.Debt; Financial Assets; Household Financial Portfolio; Random Effects; Tobit Estimator

Religion and Education: Evidence from the National Child Development Study

In this paper, we explore the determinants of one aspect of religious behaviour – church attendance – at the individual level using British data derived from the National Child Development Study (NCDS). To be specific, we focus on the relationship between education and church attendance, which has attracted some attention in the existing literature. In contrast to the previous literature in this area, our data allows us to explore the dynamic dimension to religious activity since the NCDS provides information on church attendance at three stages of an individual’s life cycle. The findings from our cross-section and panel data analysis, which treats education as an endogenous variable, support a positive association between education and church attendance. In addition, our findings suggest that current participation in religious activities is positively associated with past religious activities. Furthermore, our findings suggest that levels of religious activity tend to vary less over time suggesting that factors such as habit formation may be important.Church Attendance; Education; Human Capital; Religion.

The Saving Behaviour of Children: Analysis of British Panel Data

We explore the influences on the saving behaviour of children aged 11 to 15 using panel data drawn from the British Household Panel Survey Youth Questionnaire. Our empirical findings suggest that parental allowances/pocket money exert a moderating influence on the probability that a child will save, whilst hours of paid work undertaken by the child are positively associated with the probability that a child will save. The saving behaviour of parents, however, does not appear to influence the saving behaviour of their offspring. In contrast, financial optimism on the part of parents does appear to lower the probability that their children will save. In addition, our empirical analysis reveals some interesting differences relating to the determinants of the saving behaviour of boys and girls as well as evidence of state dependence in the saving behaviour of children.household finances, intergenerational analysis, panel data, saving

Reservation Wages, Expected Wages and the Duration of Unemployment: Evidence from British Panel Data

In this paper we analyse the role of wage expectations in an empirical model of incomplete spells of unemployment and reservation wages. To be specific, we model the duration of unemployment, reservation wages and expected wages simultaneously for a sample of individuals who are not in work, where wage expectations are identified via an exogenous policy shock based upon the introduction of Working Family Tax Credits (WFTC) in the UK. The results from the empirical analysis, which is based on the British Household Panel Survey, suggest that WFTC eligibility served to increase expected wages and that expected wages are positively associated with reservation wages. In addition, incorporating wage expectations into the econometric framework was found to influence the magnitude of the key elasticities: namely the elasticity of unemployment duration with respect to the reservation wage and the elasticity of the reservation wage with respect to unemployment duration.unemployment duration, reservation wages, expected wages

The Effect of Speaking Rate on Audio and Visual Speech

The speed that an utterance is spoken affects both the duration of the speech and the position of the articulators. Consequently, the sounds that are produced are modified, as are the position and appearance of the lips, teeth, tongue and other visible articulators. We describe an experiment designed to measure the effect of variable speaking rate on audio and visual speech by comparing sequences of phonemes and dynamic visemes appearing in the same sentences spoken at different speeds. We find that both audio and visual speech production are affected by varying the rate of speech, however, the effect is significantly more prominent in visual speech

A Mouth Full of Words: Visually Consistent Acoustic Redubbing

This paper introduces a method for automatic redubbing of video that exploits the many-to-many mapping of phoneme sequences to lip movements modelled as dynamic visemes [1]. For a given utterance, the corresponding dynamic viseme sequence is sampled to construct a graph of possible phoneme sequences that synchronize with the video. When composed with a pronunciation dictionary and language model, this produces a vast number of word sequences that are in sync with the original video, literally putting plausible words into the mouth of the speaker. We demonstrate that traditional, one-to-many, static visemes lack flexibility for this application as they produce significantly fewer word sequences. This work explores the natural ambiguity in visual speech and offers insight for automatic speech recognition and the importance of language modeling

On Modelling the Social Interaction of Couples

In this paper we contribute to the existing microeconomic literature on social interaction, which has generally focused on social interaction from an individual’s perspective. Given that decisions regarding social interaction are often made within the context of a couple or family, we explore the potential interdependence between the social interaction of husbands and wives from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. We develop a theoretical framework based on an extension of Becker (1974) to include factors which characterise aspects of a couple’s decision-making in relation to social interaction and show that these factors support a tendency towards a positive correlation between the husband’s and wife’s levels of social interaction. Indeed, our empirical findings suggest such a positive association between the social interaction of husbands and wives as measured by active club membership and the frequency of the social interaction activities. In addition, we find that this positive association is particularly pronounced across the same types of club membership or social activities.Couples; Panel Data; Social Interaction