The World War II Patriotic Mother

The archetypal good mother and the archetypal patriotic mother are important symbols in American culture. Both are rooted in maternal work but are separated by two conflicting assumptions. The good mother nurtures her children and protects them from harm, while the patriotic wartime mother remains silent when the government sends her child directly into harm\u27s way. This study explores how the World War II press positioned mothers of soldiers to sacrifice their children in support of the nation\u27s war effort. The findings point to the importance of understanding the role of archetypes in news narratives

Patriotic Motherhood and the Iraq War

She plays a familiar character in our nation\u27s war stories and she has a warm place in our nation\u27s heart. She is the patriotic mother, a cultural symbol of bravery and sacrifice, stoicism and silence. Her image may reflect our historical understanding of the mothers of combat soldiers, but the story the national press tells about the mothers of U.S. soldiers in the Iraq War does not quite match these cultural expectations

Combining vocal tract length normalization with hierarchial linear transformations

Recent research has demonstrated the effectiveness of vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) as a rapid adaptation technique for statistical parametric speech synthesis. VTLN produces speech with naturalness preferable to that of MLLR-based adaptation techniques, being much closer in quality to that generated by the original av-erage voice model. However with only a single parameter, VTLN captures very few speaker specific characteristics when compared to linear transform based adaptation techniques. This paper pro-poses that the merits of VTLN can be combined with those of linear transform based adaptation in a hierarchial Bayesian frame-work, where VTLN is used as the prior information. A novel tech-nique for propagating the gender information from the VTLN prior through constrained structural maximum a posteriori linear regres-sion (CSMAPLR) adaptation is presented. Experiments show that the resulting transformation has improved speech quality with better naturalness, intelligibility and improved speaker similarity. Index Terms — Statistical parametric speech synthesis, hidden Markov models, speaker adaptation, vocal tract length normaliza-tion, constrained structural maximum a posteriori linear regression 1

Urban hydrology and other environmental aspects of the Austin Area : Austin Geological Society fall field trip, December 8, 1979

UT Librarie

The Deaf & Law Enforcement Listening Though Deaf Eyes: A Grounded Theory Approach

This paper examines the perceived and practical schism between deaf society and the police when the deaf attempt to obtain police services. The paper challenges current police culture and operating procedures, which tend to marginalize deaf society and largely ignore the mandates contained in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This qualitative research project is focused upon perceived law enforcement practices and culture through a multi-layered study of police customs, law, policy, and standard operating procedures as experienced, perceived, and reported by deaf individuals. A constructivist grounded theory approach was used to examine the way law enforcement is perceived by the Deaf, Deaf-Blind, and Hard-of-Hearing community. Open-ended interviews were conducted to gather data. The data gathered will be shared in the hopes it will impact the criminal justice system’s approach to deaf individuals, culture, and issues. The data casts a critical light upon the limitations in policing and the lack of attention to historically important legislation

The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development--A New Departure in International Finance

Early in World War II, financial and economic experts of the Allied Nations concluded that if economic health was to return with the peace, the family of nations would have to forego the bad economic manners which had become commonplace between the wars. The conviction that a new and better economic household for the world had to be planned resulted in the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July, 1944, in which representatives of 44 nations participated. The Conference met to solve two major problems. The first of these grew out of the chaotic foreign\u27 exchange practices which had characterized the 1930\u27s. The Conference\u27s answer to it was the International Monetary Fund, a new international institution designed to stabilize international exchange, to hasten the removal of artificial barriers to international payments, and to provide short-term foreign exchange assistance to members to overcome temporary disequilibrium in their balance of payments. The Conference\u27s second problem was to find a way to revive the international capital investment which would be needed to help reconstruct what the war had destroyed and to accelerate an increase in productivity and in living standards in the undeveloped areas of the world. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (popularly known as the World Bank) was designed as the answer to that problem