Afrikaans and Dutch as closely-related languages: A comparison to West Germanic languages and Dutch dialects

Following Den Besten‟s (2009) desiderata for historical linguistics of Afrikaans, this article aims to contribute some modern evidence to the debate regarding the founding dialects of Afrikaans. From an applied perspective (i.e. human language technology), we aim to determine which West Germanic language(s) and/or dialect(s)  would be best suited for the purposes of recycling speech resources for the benefit of developing speech  technologies for Afrikaans. Being recognised as a West Germanic language, Afrikaans is first compared to  Standard Dutch, Standard Frisian and Standard German. Pronunciation distances are measured by means of  Levenshtein distances. Afrikaans is found to be closest to Standard Dutch. Secondly, Afrikaans is compared to 361 Dutch dialectal varieties in the Netherlands and North-Belgium, using material from the Reeks  Nederlandse Dialectatlassen, a series of dialect atlases compiled by Blancquaert and Pée in the period  1925-1982 which cover the Dutch dialect area. Afrikaans is found to be closest to the South-Holland dialectal variety of Zoetermeer; this largely agrees with the findings of Kloeke (1950). No speech resources are  available for Zoetermeer, but such resources are available for Standard Dutch. Although the dialect of  Zoetermeer is significantly closer to Afrikaans than Standard Dutch is, Standard Dutch speech resources might be a good substitute.Keywords: human language technologies, speech resources, Afrikaans, Dutch, acoustic distanc

Optical effects of spacecraft-environment interaction Spectrometric observations by the DE-B satellite

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/76162/1/AIAA-1983-2657-139.pd

Removal of fluoride from rural drinking water sources using geomaterials from Ghana

This paper presents preliminary findings on the fluoride removal capability of some Ghanaian geomaterials and their potentials of being used to develop, design replicable easy-to-manage rural community based fluoride removal system. Batch experiments were performed on geomaterials (laterite and bauxite tailings) with raw fluoride-contaminated water (10.31 mg/l) from a borehole to determine their potentiality of removing excess fluoride from rural drinking water supplies. The raw bauxite tailings showed the higher removal capacity. Further experiments were conducted using heat-treated bauxite tailings. The results indicate that optimum fluoride removal is attained when the bauxite is heated to 600oC but removal capacity decreases with increased heating temperature. XRF analyses to determine chemical composition indicated Al2O3, Fe2O3 and SiO2 (silica) to be the most dominant compounds in that order

Ablation of Long-standing Persistent Atrial Fibrillation

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most commonly encountered arrhythmia in the clinical setting affecting nearly 6 million people in United States and the numbers are only expected to rise as the population continues to age. Broadly it is classified into paroxysmal, persistent and longstanding persistent AF. Electrical, structural and autonomic remodeling are some of the diverse pathophysiological mechanisms that contribute to the persistence of AF. Our review article emphasizes particularly on long standing persistent atrial fibrillation (LSPAF) aspect of the disease which poses a great challenge for electrophysiologists. While pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) has been established as a successful ablation strategy for paroxysmal AF, same cannot be said for LSPAF owing to its long duration, complexity of mechanisms, multiple triggers and substrate sites that are responsible for its perpetuation. The article explains different approaches currently being adopted to achieve freedom from atrial arrhythmias. These mainly include ablation techniques chiefly targeting complex fractionated atrial electrograms (CFAE), rotors, linear lesions, scars and even considering hybrid approaches in a few cases while exploring the role of delayed enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (deMRI) in the pre-procedural planning to improve the overall short and long term outcomes of catheter ablation

Optical effects of spacecraft-environment interaction Spectrometric observations of the DE-2 satellite

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/76678/1/AIAA-25728-876.pd