Language attrition and lived experiences of attrition among Greek speakers in London

The purpose of this study was to investigate attrition effects in a group of L1-Greek–L2-English speakers and to explore their views on attrition and their feelings about their own use of both languages. The first part (n = 32) was a psycholinguistic study measuring semantic and formal verbal fluency which was part of a broader project. The second part (n = 14) was a sociolinguistic study of semi-structured interviews aiming to gain insights into participants’ lived experiences of attrition. In verbal fluency, monolinguals outperformed bilinguals in the number of correct responses in both semantic and formal fluency. The analysis of the interview transcripts suggested that attriters experience attrition negatively, as a loss of a competence they once had, with two types of negative experiences emerging more prominently: (a) the realisation that they have difficulties with lexical retrieval and (b) stigmatising and judgemental comments by (non)-attriters. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this study on attriters can give us unique insights into their lived experience of attrition

The fluctuations, under time reversal, of the natural time and the entropy distinguish similar looking electric signals of different dynamics

We show that the scale dependence of the fluctuations of the natural time itself under time reversal provides a useful tool for the discrimination of seismic electric signals (critical dynamics) from noises emitted from man made sources as well as for the determination of the scaling exponent. We present recent data of electric signals detected at the Earth's surface, which confirm that the value of the entropy in natural time as well as its value under time reversal are smaller than that of the entropy of a "uniform" distribution.Comment: 29 pages including 24 figure and 1 Tabl

Comment on "Effects of Thickness on the Spin Susceptibility of the Two Dimensional Electron Gas"

A comment on a recent paper (PRL {\bf 94}, 226405 (2005)) by S. De Palo, M. Botti, S. Moroni, and Gaetano Senatore

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

Natural entropy fluctuations discriminate similar looking electric signals emitted from systems of different dynamics

Complexity measures are introduced, that quantify the change of the natural entropy fluctuations at different length scales in time-series emitted from systems operating far from equilibrium. They identify impending sudden cardiac death (SD) by analyzing fifteen minutes electrocardiograms, and comparing to those of truly healthy humans (H). These measures seem to be complementary to the ones suggested recently [Phys. Rev. E {\bf 70}, 011106 (2004)] and altogether enable the classification of individuals into three categories: H, heart disease patients and SD. All the SD individuals, who exhibit critical dynamics, result in a common behavior.Comment: Published in Physical Review

Entropy of seismic electric signals: Analysis in natural time under time-reversal

Electric signals have been recently recorded at the Earth's surface with amplitudes appreciably larger than those hitherto reported. Their entropy in natural time is smaller than that, $S_u$, of a ``uniform'' distribution. The same holds for their entropy upon time-reversal. This behavior, as supported by numerical simulations in fBm time series and in an on-off intermittency model, stems from infinitely ranged long range temporal correlations and hence these signals are probably Seismic Electric Signals (critical dynamics). The entropy fluctuations are found to increase upon approaching bursting, which reminds the behavior identifying sudden cardiac death individuals when analysing their electrocardiograms.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, copy of the revised version submitted to Physical Review Letters on June 29,200