Access to recorded interviews: A research agenda

Recorded interviews form a rich basis for scholarly inquiry. Examples include oral histories, community memory projects, and interviews conducted for broadcast media. Emerging technologies offer the potential to radically transform the way in which recorded interviews are made accessible, but this vision will demand substantial investments from a broad range of research communities. This article reviews the present state of practice for making recorded interviews available and the state-of-the-art for key component technologies. A large number of important research issues are identified, and from that set of issues, a coherent research agenda is proposed

Investigating cross-language speech retrieval for a spontaneous conversational speech collection

Cross-language retrieval of spontaneous speech combines the challenges of working with noisy automated transcription and language translation. The CLEF 2005 Cross-Language Speech Retrieval (CL-SR) task provides a standard test collection to investigate these challenges. We show that we can improve retrieval performance: by careful selection of the term weighting scheme; by decomposing automated transcripts into phonetic substrings to help ameliorate transcription errors; and by combining automatic transcriptions with manually-assigned metadata. We further show that topic translation with online machine translation resources yields effective CL-SR

Alignment of spanish and english TREC topic descriptions

A technique is described for aligning TREC topic descriptions that is capable of producing a small multilingual test collection which can be used for cross-language ad-hoc and routing evaluations. Methods for measuring the degree of degradation induced by the necessary approximations are described and illustrated using examples from an evaluation of two cross-language routing techniques. Although the experiments were conducted on a relatively small test collection using existing TREC relevance judgments, the results suggest that cross-language routing is practical and that the investment required to produce a truly multilingual test collection for the TREC multilingual track would be justi ed.

Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech

The ACM SIGIR Workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech was held as part of the 2007 ACM SIGIR Conference in Amsterdam.\ud The workshop program was a mix of elements, including a keynote speech, paper presentations and panel discussions. This brief report describes the organization of this workshop and summarizes the discussions

Submarine Mass Flow Deposition of Pre-Pleistocene Ice-Age Deposits

Pre-Pleistocene ice ages, which are based on till-like rocks, challenge the Genesis Flood as the origin of sedimentary rocks. The first postulated ancient ice age was based on a miSinterpretation of a fanglomerate in England. The till-like layers exhibit several features that are contrary to recent or Pleistocene glaciation. Since 1950, mass flow has been shown to not only duplicate the till-like fabric of the rock, but also mimic many glacial diagnostic features. The best example of a pre-Pleistocene ice age, the late Paleozoic Dwyka \u27\u27tillite\u27\u27 from South Africa, will be evaluated. Submarine mass flow during the Genesis Flood is a more likely explanation for prePleistocene ice ages

The Evolution of Landscapes and Lineages in Pitcher Plants and Their Moths.

Pitcher plants and pitcher plant moths exhibit two prominent themes in the long evolutionary history between plants and insects. These themes are carnivory and herbivory. In pitcher plants, the leaf has been modified into an elegant pitfall trap enabling these plants to subsist at both the producer and consumer trophic levels. Of the numerous insect species intimately associated with pitcher plants, pitcher plant moths are the only inquilines which have evolved the capacity to disrupt both the carnivore and photosynthetic functions of the host plant. The carnivorous habit, considered an adaptation for nutrient deficient environments, has contributed to species radiations on three continents in the pitcher plant lineage and the allied insect trapping South African flybush lineage. In addition, pitcher plant moths display incipient host species specialization in larval feeding preference so that speciation in the moths may be a response to radiation in the pitcher plants. The focus of this study has been the elucidation of patterns of speciation in both the pitcher plant and moth lineages. In chapters two and four, molecular phylogenetic reconstructions based on DNA sequence data are derived for the pitcher plant and moth lineages respectively. The sequence of origination of genera in the pitcher plant lineage was also approached by cladistic analysis of morphological data (chapter three). Trends in the evolution of host plant use by the moths are examined in parallel with species radiation in the host in chapter four. Insights regarding landscape evolution gleaned from the palynological literature were then combined with laboratory investigations of biological evolution at the molecular level in order to derive speciation models for both the plant and moth lineages (chapter five). Levels of divergence were commiserate with Holocene age estimates of landscape evolution reported in the palynological literature

Bridging communities of practice: Emerging technologies for content-centered linking

The project fosters convergence between two communities by addressing complementary aspects of a shared opportunity. Digital humanists are at the forefront of developing ways to render cultural heritage metadata increasingly interoperable as linked open data in tandem with information professionals working in libraries, archives, and museums. Computer scientists are developing automated techniques for extracting linkable data from the content itself. Bringing these communities together offers transformational potential for the application of a critical infrastructure in humanities scholarship. Two workshops will be organized to seize this unique opportunity. The first will bring together humanities scholars and computer scientists to explore applications of new content linking technologies to dispersed and disparate material. In the second, a larger group of humanities scholars will identify specific content to which techniques described in the previous workshop will be applied

Evidence for Only One Gigantic Lake Missoula Flood

The Lake Missoula flood was rejected by scientists for 40 years because it seemed too “Biblical” in scale. After geologists carefully examined the Channeled Scabland of eastern Washington, they finally accepted that glacial Lake Missoula existed and created a gigantic flood through eastern Washington, the Columbia Gorge and the Willamette Valley of Oregon. The evidence for this flood and the controversy surrounding it will be briefly discussed. Once the idea of a gigantic flood caught on, researchers, starting with Bretz himself, thought they saw evidence for many floods. In the 1980s Richard Waitt postulated 40 floods based primarily on rhythmites from Burlingame Canyon in the Walla Walla Valley. It was the existence of a band of volcanic ash in these rhythmites that especially convinced Waitt. He was followed soon by Brian Atwater who claimed there were 89 or more floods from the Sanpoil River Valley, northeast of Grand Coulee Dam. This adds up to over 3000 years of periodic flooding near and after the peak of the last ice age. Starting in the 1990s, the number of floods has been scaled back by some researchers. John Shaw and colleagues have published evidence for only one Lake Missoula flood, coming full circle back to Bretz’s original idea. The evidence for one gigantic flood is compelling and will be presented. An alternative hypothesis for the deposition of the volcanic ash band during one flood will be developed. The Lake Missoula flood can be used as an imperfect analog for the Genesis Flood, especially for the formation of water and wind gaps

An Ice Age Within the Biblical Time Frame

The ice age is one of many physical processes believed by evolutionists to require much more time than the Bible allows. However, there Is evidence that the climatic consequences of Noah\u27s Flood caused a rapid Ice age. All uniformitarian ice age mechanisms, Including the astronomical theory, have serious scientific difficulties

The Evidence for Only One Ice Age

Evolutionists believe in many Late Cenozoic ice ages, each lasting a long time. Previously, I showed that one ice age can occur very rapidly. Generally accepted evidence from history, climate simulations, paleontology, and the till deposits themselves indicate that one ice age is much more probable than many