Girls and guys, ghetto and bougie: Metapragmatics, ideology and the management of social identities 1

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75117/1/j.1467-9841.2006.00297.x.pd

Curricular Approaches to Linguistic Diversity: Code-Switching, Register-Shifting and Academic Language.

For several decades, some sociolinguists have argued that students—particularly those students who speak nonstandard varieties of English—would benefit from educational approaches grounded in linguistic principles. While studies have supported the claims that linguistically informed curricula can be educationally beneficial, such curricula have not yet been routinely adopted by educators, with a few exceptions. For a linguistically informed curriculum to be more generally implementable, it must articulate a coherent approach to dialect and academic language issues. Such articulation requires attention to existing educational processes and goals, which includes attention to the register features of academic writing. Additionally, a curriculum’s design must mitigate teachers’ lack of experience with linguistic content and a common ambivalence toward grammar. A linguistically informed curriculum must be accessible to teachers and students, relevant to their learning objectives and integrable into an existing classroom ecology. This study addresses these issues, first, by designing a secondary-level curriculum that combines techniques of contrastive analysis, which compare the grammatical features of one language variety to another, and systemic functional linguistics, which explicate the syntactic and rhetorical structures of specific linguistic practices—in this case, of academic registers. The study also addresses some of the barriers to adoption and scalability by designing a curriculum that provides teachers with the necessary information and resources to be managed by non-experts. The qualitative analysis of the curricular implementation at a high school in Washington, D.C. demonstrates how the participating teacher and her students are able to negotiate content that introduces new ways of understanding and making meaning with language. The study evidences important changes in the metalinguistic awareness of the teacher and her students—development that can promote students’ academic achievement. In addition, the study debunks the oft-repeated claim that grammar is boring. The high levels of student participation during the lessons illustrate the curiosity that many students have about language. Furthermore, the participating teacher sees the linguistic content as relevant to established goals and presents it to students that way. The study, therefore, demonstrates both the challenges and the possibilities of fashioning linguistic content into usable, accessible and relevant curricula.Ph.D.English & EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61797/1/browndw_1.pd

A Weakly Supervised Classifier and Dataset of White Supremacist Language

We present a dataset and classifier for detecting the language of white supremacist extremism, a growing issue in online hate speech. Our weakly supervised classifier is trained on large datasets of text from explicitly white supremacist domains paired with neutral and anti-racist data from similar domains. We demonstrate that this approach improves generalization performance to new domains. Incorporating anti-racist texts as counterexamples to white supremacist language mitigates bias.Comment: ACL 2023 shor

Instanton--anti-instanton pair induced contributions to Re+e−→hadronsR_{e^+e^-\to hadrons} and Rτ→hadronsR_{\tau \to hadrons}

The instanton--anti-instanton pair induced asymptotics of perturbation theory expansion for the cross section of electron--positron pair annihilation to hadrons and hadronic width of $\tau$-lepton was found. For $N_f = N_c$ the nonperturbative instanton contribution is finite and may be calculated without phenomenological input. The instanton induced peturbative asymptotics was shown to be enhanced as $(n+10)!$ and in the intermediate region $n<15$ may exceed the renormalon contribution. Unfortunately, the analysis of $\sim 1/n$ corrections shows that for $n \sim 10$ the obtained asymptotic expressions are at best only the order of magnitude estimate. The asymptotic series for $R_{e^+ e^- \rightarrow hadrons}$ , though obtained formally for $N_f =N_c$, is valid up to energies $\sim 15$Gev. The instanton--anti-instanton pair nonperturbative contribution to $R_{\tau \rightarrow hadrons}$ blows up. On the one hand, this means that instantons could not be considered {\it ab--initio} at such energies. On the other hand, this result casts a strong doubt upon the possibility to determine the $\alpha_s$ from the $\tau$--lepton width.Comment: 22 pages, latex, no figure

Identity Construction in a Misogynist Incels Forum

Online communities of involuntary celibates (incels) are a prominent source of misogynist hate speech. In this paper, we use quantitative text and network analysis approaches to examine how identity groups are discussed on incels.is, the largest black-pilled incels forum. We find that this community produces a wide range of novel identity terms and, while terms for women are most common, mentions of other minoritized identities are increasing. An analysis of the associations made with identity groups suggests an essentialist ideology where physical appearance, as well as gender and racial hierarchies, determine human value. We discuss implications for research into automated misogynist hate speech detection.Comment: Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH) 202

Relative effectiveness of a full versus reduced version of the ‘Smoke Free’ mobile application for smoking cessation: an exploratory randomised controlled trial [version 2; referees: 2 approved]

Background: Smartphone applications (apps) are popular aids for smoking cessation. Smoke Free is an app that delivers behaviour change techniques used in effective face-to-face behavioural support programmes. The aim of this study was to assess whether the full version of Smoke Free is more effective than the reduced version. Methods:  This was a two-arm exploratory randomised controlled trial. Smokers who downloaded Smoke Free were randomly offered the full or reduced version; 28,112 smokers aged 18+ years who set a quit date were included. The full version provided updates on benefits of abstinence, progress (days smoke free), virtual ‘badges’ and daily ‘missions’ with push notifications aimed at preventing and managing cravings. The reduced version did not include the missions. At baseline the app recorded users’: device type (iPhone or Android), age, sex, daily cigarette consumption, time to first cigarette of the day, and educational level. The primary outcome was self-reported complete abstinence from the quit date in a 3-month follow-up questionnaire delivered via the app. Analyses conducted included logistic regressions of outcome on to app version (full versus reduced) with adjustment for baseline variables using both intention-to-treat/missing-equals smoking (MES) and follow-up-only (FUO) analyses. Results: The 3-month follow-up rate was 8.5% (n=1,213) for the intervention and 6.5% (n=901) for the control. A total of 234 participants reported not smoking in the intervention versus 124 in the control, representing 1.6% versus 0.9% in the MES analysis and 19.3% versus 13.8% in the FUO analysis. Adjusted odds ratios were 1.90, 95%CI=1.53-2.37 (p<0.001) and 1.50, 95%CI=1.18-1.91 (p<0.001) in the MES and FUO analyses respectively. Conclusions: Despite very low follow-up rates using in-app follow up, both intention-to-treat/missing equals smoking and follow-up only analyses showed the full version of the Smoke Free app to result in higher self-reported 3-month continuous smoking abstinence rates than the reduced version

A potential setup for perturbative confinement

A few years ago, 't Hooft suggested a way to discuss confinement in a perturbative fashion. The original idea was put forward in the Coulomb gauge at tree level. In recent years, the concept of a nonperturbative short distance linear potential also attracted phenomenological attention. Motivated by these observations, we discuss how a perturbative framework, leading to a linear piece in the potential, can be developed in a manifestly gauge and Lorentz invariant manner, which moreover enjoys the property of being renormalizable to all orders. We provide an effective action framework to discuss the dynamical realization of the proposed scenario in Yang-Mills gauge theory.Comment: 11 pages. To appear in Physics Letters

White-light flares on cool stars in the Kepler Quarter 1 Data

We present the results of a search for white light flares on the ~23,000 cool dwarfs in the Kepler Quarter 1 long cadence data. We have identified 373 flaring stars, some of which flare multiple times during the observation period. We calculate relative flare energies, flare rates and durations, and compare these with the quiescent photometric variability of our sample. We find that M dwarfs tend to flare more frequently but for shorter durations than K dwarfs, and that they emit more energy relative to their quiescent luminosity in a given flare than K dwarfs. Stars that are more photometrically variable in quiescence tend to emit relatively more energy during flares, but variability is only weakly correlated with flare frequency. We estimate distances for our sample of flare stars and find that the flaring fraction agrees well with other observations of flare statistics for stars within 300 pc above the Galactic Plane. These observations provide a more rounded view of stellar flares by sampling stars that have not been pre-selected by their activity, and are informative for understanding the influence of these flares on planetary habitability.Comment: 42 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables; Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journa