How Does Wind Project Performance Change with Age in the United States?

Wind-plant performance declines with age, and the rate of decline varies between regions. The rate of performance decline is important when determining wind-plant financial viability and expected lifetime generation. We determine the rate of age-related performance decline in the United States wind fleet by evaluating generation records from 917 plants. We find the rate of performance decline to be 0.53%/year for older vintages of plants and 0.17%/year for newer vintages of plants on an energy basis for the first 10 years of operation, which is on the lower end of prior estimates in Europe. Unique to the United States, we find a significant drop in performance by 3.6% after 10 years, as plants lose eligibility for the production tax credit. Certain plant characteristics, such as the ratio of blade length to nameplate capacity, influence the rate of performance decline. These results indicate that the performance decline rate can be partially managed and influenced by policy

Course of Study in General Metal in the Senior High School, Bristow, Oklahoma

The report was made because the author recognized the need to formulate a desirable industrial arts program in the senior high school of Bristow, Oklahoma. The study also reveals the safety rules that should be used in the course of study. The ways of determing grades in the industrial arts classes were listed. Industrial arts is not as new a field as most people think. Records show that industrial arts has been used for many years. The general shop was first used in the junior high school, but is changing very rapidly to the senior high school. One of the main disadvantages of the general shop at first was finding qualified teachers who could teach the several units that are sometimes required. A general shop will be very successful on any school level if well organized and if administered correctly. A general education curriculum is not complete without a well organized industrial arts program. To help organize the industrial arts program, a survey was taken to decide the courses that were needed and would best suit the needs of the comm.unity. Ins true tional uni ts are prepared in the course of study for: Sheet Metal, Arc-Welding, Oxy-Acetylene Welding, and Machine Shop.Industrial Engineering and Managemen

The Error in Trial and Error: Exercises on Phrasal Verbs

An analysis of 44 commercially available EFL textbooks found that it is common for textbooks to present learners with exercises on phrasal verbs without first providing relevant input to help them. In these cases, the learners are likely to resort to trial-and-error and are then expected to learn from feedback. We report an experiment conducted with Japanese EFL students (N=140) in which we compare the effectiveness of such a trial-and-error method with a retrieval procedure in which students first study a set of phrasal verbs and then complete an exercise. Scores on both an immediate and a one-week delayed post-test suggest superiority of retrieval over the trial-and-error procedure, where, despite the provision of feedback, 25% of the wrong exercise responses were reproduced in the delayed post-test

Contrastive focus and emphasis

The paper puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví-Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as involving the introduction and subsequent exclusion of alternatives. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-semantic notions like ‘hearer expectation’ or ‘discourse expectability’ of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected the focus content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark the focus constituent by means of special grammatical devices, thus giving rise to emphasis

Do online resources give satisfactory answers to questions about meaning and phraseology?

In this paper we explore some aspects of the differences between printed paper dictionaries and online dictionaries in the ways in which they explain meaning and phraseology. After noting the importance of the lexicon as an inventory of linguistic items and the neglect in both linguistics and lexicography of phraseological aspects of that inventory, we investigate the treatment in online resources of phraseology – in particular, the phrasal verbs wipe out and put down – and we go on to investigate a word, dope, that has undergone some dramatic meaning changes during the 20th century. In the course of discussion, we mention the new availability of corpus evidence and the technique of Corpus Pattern Analysis, which is important for linking phraseology and meaning and distinguishing normal phraseology from rare and unusual phraseology. The online resources that we discuss include Google, the Urban Dictionary (UD), and Wiktionary

Notions and subnotions in information structure

Three dimensions can be distinguished in a cross-linguistic account of information structure. First, there is the definition of the focus constituent, the part of the linguistic expression which is subject to some focus meaning. Second and third, there are the focus meanings and the array of structural devices that encode them. In a given language, the expression of focus is facilitated as well as constrained by the grammar within which the focus devices operate. The prevalence of focus ambiguity, the structural inability to make focus distinctions, will thus vary across languages, and within a language, across focus meanings

Review Article: Rethinking Holder

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68947/2/10.1177_096394709800700104.pd

The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments

Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a wh-phrase in front of a syntactically “superior” wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions, e.g., What did who buy? More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e.g., Which toys did which parents buy? Evidence from acceptability and self-paced reading experiments demonstrates that (i) judgments and processing times for Superiority violations vary in parallel, as determined by the kind of wh-phrases they contain, (ii) judgments increase with exposure, while processing times decrease, (iii) reading times are highly predictive of acceptability judgments for the same items, and (iv) the effects of the complexity of the wh-phrases combine in both acceptability judgments and reading times. This evidence supports the conclusion that D-linking effects are likely reducible to independently motivated cognitive mechanisms whose effects emerge in a wide range of sentence contexts. This in turn suggests that Superiority effects, in general, may owe their character to differential processing difficulty