Estimating the Effects of the Terminal Area Productivity Program

The report describes methods and results of an analysis of the technical and economic benefits of the systems to be developed in the NASA Terminal Area Productivity (TAP) program. A runway capacity model using parameters that reflect the potential impact of the TAP technologies is described. The runway capacity model feeds airport specific models which are also described. The capacity estimates are used with a queuing model to calculate aircraft delays, and TAP benefits are determined by calculating the savings due to reduced delays. The report includes benefit estimates for Boston Logan and Detroit Wayne County airports. An appendix includes a description and listing of the runway capacity model

New insights into the trend towards English as a medium of instruction in European higher education through transdisciplinary participation

The drive towards English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) in universities in non-English-dominant countries can generate heated debates, yet the drivers of EMI are still not fully understood. This position paper argues for transdisciplinary participation in order to shed new light on the drivers of EMI. Transdisciplinary participation is conceptualized as engaging with theories, methodologies and practices in other disciplines in order to approach a topical issue in a new way. We exemplify transdisciplinary participation as bringing together applied linguists and those involved in academic governance to re-theorize the rise of EMI as linked to steering at a distance governance reforms that have swept across the European higher education sector since the 1980s. Showcasing three cases from across Europe, we argue that steering at a distance may shed new light on the drivers of EMI. At a more general level, we highlight how disciplinary positioning shapes the creation of knowledge

Gene Expression Patterns in Peripheral Blood Correlate with the Extent of Coronary Artery Disease

Systemic and local inflammation plays a prominent role in the pathogenesis of atherosclerotic coronary artery disease, but the relationship of whole blood gene expression changes with coronary disease remains unclear. We have investigated whether gene expression patterns in peripheral blood correlate with the severity of coronary disease and whether these patterns correlate with the extent of atherosclerosis in the vascular wall

Academic lexical coverage in TED talks and academic lectures

The coverage of academic lexis is compared in a TED talk corpus (2,483 talks, 5,068,781 words) and a corpus of Yale University lectures (708 lectures, 5,523,791 words). Academic lexis is defined by the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000), the Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davies, 2014), and the Academic Spoken Word List (Dang et al., 2017). In all cases Mann–Whitney U tests found lectures had significantly higher coverage, with small effect sizes for lexis. This difference was smaller for academic tagged TED talks (n = 1379). When like-for-like disciplines were compared, lectures typically had greater coverage than their TED talk counterparts. An analysis of the cumulative coverage of types demonstrated a lower representation of the less frequent academic types in TED talks. A combined ratio and minimum frequency measure identified academic types which distinguish the genres. Pedagogical implications are discussed

Measuring the frequency of the academic formulas list across corpora: A case study based in TED talks and Yale lectures

Measuring lists of lexis across corpora is a well-established method in corpus linguistics. This article takes a novel approach and measures the frequency of occurrence of the Academic Formulas List (AFL; Simpson-Vlach and Ellis, 2010) across academic lectures (OYCLC) and an academic-adjacent corpus of TED talks (TTC). Frequency of occurrence is measured at three levels: overall inter- and intra-corpus variation; the composition of representation, to see which formulas are represented; and an investigation of the behaviour of formulas within texts. The corpora were found to be significantly different from each other in terms of overall representation with a medium effect size. The greatest difference concerned referential expressions and the smallest difference concerned stance expressions. In terms of intra-corpus variation the AFL was found to occur less often in the humanities and most often in the natural sciences for both corpora. The composition of coverage revealed Zipfian distributions for the AFL, with both corpora presenting a similar set of high frequency formulas within each group category. A combined ratio and minimum frequency measure identified salient formulas to each corpus. Concerning formula behaviour, differences were found between the corpora concerning the use of the same formulas. Pedagogic and methodological implications are discussed in the conclusion

How suitable are TED talks for academic listening?

To investigate the suitability of TED talks for academic listening in EAP contexts, this research paper compares Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) representation (Gardner & Davies, 2014), lexical density, and speech rate in a TED talk corpus and a lecture discourse corpus, which were both compiled for this study. 28 lecture series (727 lectures total) and 49 TED talks were analysed for AVL representation. TED talks were found to have lower AVL representation than the university lectures (t(75) = 4.95, p < 0.0001). 43 one-minute samples from the Lecture Discourse Corpus and 47 one-minute samples from the TED Talk Corpus were analysed for lexical density, where no differences were found; and speech rate, which was found to be significantly faster in TED talks, in terms of syllables per second (t(98) = 4.23, p < 0.0001) and words per minute (t(98) = 4.20, p < 0.0001). A negative correlation was found between lexical density and syllables per second in the lecture discourse corpus (r = −0.343, p < 0.05), where none was found in the TED talk corpus (r = −0.031, ns), perhaps due to TED talks being a scripted genre. It is concluded that TED talk variation enables a range of academic listening applications

Narrative discourse in TED Talks

This article investigates the extent to which TED talks can be considered a narrative register. This study analyses ‘narrative versus non-narrative discourse’ (Biber 1988) in a corpus of TED talks (n = 2483). TED talks were found to be typically non-narrative (−2.47 mean). However, there was a great degree of variation, with approximately 10% of talks (n = 257) classified as narrative. When TED talks were compared to registers in prior studies they were close to academic prose and presented a similar pattern in terms of disciplinary variation, with ‘soft’ disciplines closer to narratives. When textual data was examined, the average TED talk was found to weave narrative and descriptive elements, but were found to be more descriptive overall

Multi-Dimensional Exploratory Factor Analysis of TED talks

This article conducts Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) on a corpus of TED talks (2463 talks, across 427 topic tags) to create a new Multi-Dimensional model. The resultant model contained seven dimensions: i. ‘Spontaneous involved versus edited informational discourse’, ii. ‘Abstract informational versus narrative discourse’, iii. ‘Human-world oriented versus object-oriented discourse’, iv. ‘Subjective perspectives’, v. ‘Persuasive stance’, vi. ‘Expert elaboration’, and vii. ‘Change and inspiration’. When the model was compared to prior research, similarity with MD models based in academic texts was observed. However, some dimensions were found to be indicative of the unique nature of TED talks, such as expert elaboration and change and inspiration. When the EFA model was mapped onto the TED corpus’s subcorpora (defined by topic tags), individual disciplines were characterised in terms of the dimensions and some traditional academic groups were observed