A History and Informal Assessment of the Slacker Astronomy Podcast

Slacker Astronomy is a weekly podcast that covers a recent astronomical news event or discovery. The show has a unique style consisting of irreverent, over-the-top humor combined with a healthy dose of hard science. According to our demographic analysis, the combination of this style and the unique podcasting distribution mechanism allows the show to reach audiences younger and busier than those reached via traditional channels. We report on the successes and challenges of the first year of the show, and provide an informal assessment of its role as a source for astronomical news and concepts for its approximately 15,500 weekly listeners.Comment: 14 page

The Impact of Preparing Agriculture Faculty to Influence Student Critical Thinking Disposition

This study examined the effect of agriculture faculty training in and practice of methodologies to explicitly teach critical thinking skills related to course content and subsequent change in student critical thinking disposition. Twelve instructors in 14 agriculture courses underwent a year–long program of instruction in effective critical thinking development. Students completed the University of Florida–Engagement, Maturity, and Innovativeness assessment (UF–EMI) at the beginning and the end of the semester. Pair–wise comparisons showed significant increases in all three critical thinking dispositions (i.e., engagement, cognitive maturity, and innovativeness). In addition, a step–wise regression on the data gathered at the end of the semester showed that grade point average was positively related to all three critical thinking dispositions and being in one\u27s first year of college was negatively related to each dimension. The 300 course level was negatively related to innovativeness and engagement. Being in the second and third year of college were also negatively related to engagement. This study supports the notion that instructors can influence students’ critical thinking disposition within the limited time of a college semester

Theories of Reference: What Was the Question?

The new theory of reference has won popularity. However, a number of noted philosophers have also attempted to reply to the critical arguments of Kripke and others, and aimed to vindicate the description theory of reference. Such responses are often based on ingenious novel kinds of descriptions, such as rigidified descriptions, causal descriptions, and metalinguistic descriptions. This prolonged debate raises the doubt whether different parties really have any shared understanding of what the central question of the philosophical theory of reference is: what is the main question to which descriptivism and the causal-historical theory have presented competing answers. One aim of the paper is to clarify this issue. The most influential objections to the new theory of reference are critically reviewed. Special attention is also paid to certain important later advances in the new theory of reference, due to Devitt and others

An active electrode for biopotential recording from small localized bio-sources

BACKGROUND: Laser bio-stimulation is a well-established procedure in Medical Acupuncture. Nevertheless there is still a confusion as to whether it works or the effect is just placebo. Although a plethora of scientific papers published, showing positive clinical results, there is still a lack of objective scientific proofs about the bio-stimulation effect of lasers used in Acupuncture. The objective of this work was to design and build a body surface electrode and an amplifier for biopotential recording from acupuncture points, considered here as small localized bio-sources (SLB). The design is aimed for studying SLB potentials provoked by laser stimulus, in search for objective proofs of the bio-stimulation effect of lasers used in Medical Acupuncture. METHODS: The active electrode presented features a new adjustable anchoring system and fractionation of the biopotential amplifier between the electrode and the cabinet's location. The new adjustable electrode anchoring system is designed to reduce the electrode-skin contact impedance, its variation and motion artifacts. That is achieved by increasing the electrode-skin tension and decreasing its relative movement. Additionally the sensing element provides local constant skin stretching thus eliminating the contribution of the skin potential artifact. The electrode is attached to the skin by a double-sided adhesive pad, where the sensing element is a stainless steel, 4 mm in diameter. The fractionation of the biopotential amplifier is done by incorporating the amplifier's front-end op-amps at the electrodes, thus avoiding the use of extra buffers. The biopotential amplifier features two selectable modes of operation: semi-AC-mode with a -3 dB bandwidth of 0.32–1000 Hz and AC-mode with a bandwidth of 0.16–1000 Hz. RESULTS: The average measured DC electrode-skin contact impedance of the proposed electrode was 450 kΩ, with electrode tension of 0.3 kg/cm(2 )on an unprepared skin of the inner forearm. The peak-to-peak noise voltage measured at the amplifier output, with input terminals connected to common, was 10 mV(p-p), or 2 μV(p-p )referred to the input. The common-mode rejection ratio of the amplifier was 96 dB at 50 Hz, measured with imbalanced electrodes' impedances. The prototype was also tested practically and sample records were obtained after a low intensity SLB laser stimulation. All measurements showed almost a complete absence of 50 Hz interference, although no electrolyte gel or skin preparation was applied. CONCLUSION: The results showed that the new active electrode presented significantly reduced the electrode-skin impedance, its variation and motion artifact influences. This allowed SLB signals with relatively high quality to be recorded without skin preparation. The design offers low noise and major reduction in parts, size and power consumption. The active electrode specifications were found to be better or at least comparable to those of other existing designs

What is Said?

It is sometimes argued that certain sentences of natural language fail to express truth conditional contents. Standard examples include e.g. Tipper is ready and Steel is strong enough. In this paper, we provide a novel analysis of truth conditional meaning using the notion of a question under discussion. This account explains why these types of sentences are not, in fact, semantically underdetermined, provides a principled analysis of the process by which natural language sentences can come to have enriched meanings in context, and shows why various alternative views, e.g. so-called Radical Contextualism, Moderate Contextualism, and Semantic Minimalism, are partially right in their respective analyses of the problem, but also all ultimately wrong. Our analysis achieves this result using a standard truth conditional and compositional semantics and without making any assumptions about enriched logical forms, i.e. logical forms containing phonologically null expression

Compositionality in Truth Conditional Pragmatics

In the past decade various linguists and philosophers (e.g. Pagin, Pelletier, Recanati, Westerståhl, Lasersohn) have proposed a weakening of the standard interpretation of compositionality for propositional content. Their move is motivated by the desire to accommodate radical forms of context sensitivity within a systematic account of natural languages. In this paper I argue against weakening compositionality in the way proposed by them. I argue that weak compositionality fails to provide some of the expected benefits of compositionality. First, weak compositionality fails to provide systematic meaning-rules which can handle forms of context-sensitivity that are not amenable to explanation in terms of a fixed and limited set of contextual parameters. Secondly, I argue that weak-compositionality fails to play any role in explaining speakers’ ability to calculate the semantic values of complex expressions. I conclude that weak compositionality is not a viable alternative to standard interpretations of compositionality, and that it doesn’t offer an acceptable way to accommodate radical forms of context-sensitivity within a systematic account of natural languages. Given the central role that weak-compositionality plays in recent approaches to natural language (e.g. in truth-conditional pragmatics) this also casts doubt on the viability of these projects

Regional pragmatic variation in the use of the discourse marker pues in informal talk among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile) and Seville (Spain)

The discourse marker pues in spoken Spanish has been studied extensively in Peninsular Spanish (cf. Fuentes Rodríguez 1987; Portolés 1989; Garcés Gómez 1992). There is also a growing body of studies on pues in Latin American varieties of Spanish (cf. Zavala 2001; Travis 2005; Vázquez Carranza 2013). Less attention, however, has been given to this discourse marker in Chilean and Ecuadorian Spanish (cf. Poblete 1998; Olbertz 2013). Taking a variational pragmatics perspective (Schneider and Barron 2008; Placencia 2011; Schneider and Placencia forthcoming), this paper examines the impact of region in the use of pues among university students in Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile) and Seville (Spain). It is based on a corpus of 60 role-play interactions within each location eliciting advice-giving and complaint talk in –SD (social distance) –P (power) scenarios. The paper looks at variation in relation to form, position and distribution relating to turns and sections of the conversations. It also looks at the function of pues across data sets, noting its use as both a connector and an operator (Fuentes Rodríguez 2003, 2009), and thus highlighting the close interconnection between position and discursive function. Some shared features as well as features of variation were observed. Concerning function, for example, pues was found to occur as both a connector and an operator across varieties; however, we found a clear preponderance of pues as an operator in Quito and Santiago, and of pues as a connector in Seville