Investigating an open methodology for designing domain-specific language collections

With this research and design paper, we are proposing that Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open Access (OA) publications give increasing access to high quality online educational and research content for the development of powerful domain-specific language collections that can be further enhanced linguistically with the Flexible Language Acquisition System (FLAX, http://flax.nzdl.org). FLAX uses the Greenstone digital library system, which is a widely used open-source software that enables end users to build collections of documents and metadata directly onto the Web (Witten, Bainbridge, & Nichols, 2010). FLAX offers a powerful suite of interactive text-mining tools, using Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence designs, to enable novice collections builders to link selected language content to large pre-processed linguistic databases. An open methodology trialed at Queen Mary University of London in collaboration with the OER Research Hub at the UK Open University demonstrates how applying open corpus-based designs and technologies can enhance open educational practices among language teachers and subject academics for the preparation and delivery of courses in English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP)

Singular Behaviour of the Potts Model in the Thermodynamic Limit

The self-duality transformation is applied to the Fisher zeroes near the critical point in the thermodynamic limit in the q>4 state Potts model in two dimensions. A requirement that the locus of the duals of the zeroes be identical to the dual of the locus of zeroes (i) recovers the ratio of specific heat to internal energy discontinuity at criticality and the relationships between the discontinuities of higher cumulants and (ii) identifies duality with complex conjugation. Conjecturing that all zeroes governing ferromagnetic critical behaviour satisfy the latter requirement, the full locus of Fisher zeroes is shown to be a circle. This locus, together with the density of zeroes is shown to be sufficient to recover the singular form of all thermodynamic functions in the thermodynamic limit.Comment: Contribution to Lattice 97, LaTeX, 3 pages, 0 figure