Gender differences in the ICT profile of University students : a quantitative analysis

This study responds to a call for research on how gender differences emerge in young generations of computer users. A large-scale survey involving 1138 university students in Flanders (Belgium) was conducted to examine the relationship between gender, computer access, attitudes, and uses in both learning and everyday activities of university students. The results show that women have a less positive attitude towards computers in general. However, their attitude towards computers for educational purposes does not differ from men’s. In the same way, being female is negatively related to computer use for leisure activities, but no relationship was found between gender and study-related computer use. Based on the results, it could be argued that computer attitudes are context-dependent constructs and that when dealing with gender differences, it is essential to take into account the context-specific nature of computer attitudes and uses

Інформативні можливості церковної періодики щодо вивчення групи "Малоросійських козаків" ХІХ ст. (на матеріалах "Черниговских епархиальных известий" та "Полтавских епархиальных ведомостей"

В статье рассматривается вопрос об информативных возможностях исследования социальной и бытовой истории, экономики, воспитания и образования группы “малороссийских казаков” в ХІХ ст., изучения их особенностей в сравнении с другими категориями населения Левобережной Украины по материалам “Черниговских епархиальных известий” и “Полтавских епархиальных ведомостей”.This article at the fi st time in historiography recognized information possibilities of Chernigiv’s and Poltava’s “Eparhialnye Vedomosti” in the theme of history, ethnography of the social group named “malorosian cosacks” in XIX century

Normalization of nonlinearly time-dynamic vowels

This study compares 16 vowel-normalization methods for purposes of sociophonetic research. Most of the previous work in this domain has focused on the performance of normalization methods on steady-state vowels. By contrast, this study explicitly considers dynamic formant trajectories, using generalized additive models to model these nonlinearly. Normalization methods were compared using a hand-corrected dataset from the Flemish-Dutch Teacher Corpus, which contains 160 speakers from 8 geographical regions, who spoke regionally accented versions of Netherlandic/Flemish Standard Dutch. Normalization performance was assessed by comparing the methods' abilities to remove anatomical variation, retain vowel distinctions, and explain variation in the normalized F0-F3. In addition, it was established whether normalization competes with by-speaker random effects or supplements it, by comparing how much between-speaker variance remained to be apportioned to random effects after normalization. The results partly reproduce the good performance of Lobanov, Gerstman, and Nearey 1 found earlier and generally favor log-mean and centroid methods. However, newer methods achieve higher effect sizes (i.e., explain more variance) at only marginally worse performances. Random effects were found to be equally useful before and after normalization, showing that they complement it. The findings are interpreted in light of the way that the different methods handle formant dynamics

Minority language rights to education in international, regional, and domestic regulations and practices: the case of Frisian in the Netherlands

This paper examines minority language education in the Dutch province of Fryslân from a rights-based approach. To conduct the analysis, we employed a qualitative (legal) content analysis. We explored minority language rights at different levels to answer the following question: To what extent are international and regional standards on minority-language education applied domestically to education in Frisian and through the medium of the Frisian language? We discuss the historical trends in the international community regarding minority-language education and elaborate specifically on the Netherlands’ shifting approach on the matter. Our analysis of international, regional, and domestic regulations shows that the issue of exemptions and the reduction in the Frisian core objectives have weakened the position of Frisian in education. Owing to the lack of proper implementation of the current regulations, the Netherlands has been deficient in fulfilling the right to mother-tongue education in Frisian primary schools. The analysis further shows that the Netherlands do not treat Frisian education as a right. Legal solutions to remedy this situation are discussed

PoS Tagging, Lemmatization and Dependency Parsing of West Frisian

We present a lemmatizer/POS-tagger/dependency parser for West Frisian using a corpus of 44,714 words in 3,126 sentences that were annotated according to the guidelines of Universal Dependency version 2. POS tags were assigned to words by using a Dutch POS tagger that was applied to a literal word-by-word translation, or to sentences of a Dutch parallel text. Best results were obtained when using literal translations that were created by using the Frisian translation program Oersetter. Morphologic and syntactic annotations were generated on the basis of a literal Dutch translation as well. The performance of the lemmatizer/tagger/annotator when it was trained using default parameters was compared to the performance that was obtained when using the parameter values that were used for training the LassySmall UD 2.5 corpus. A significant improvement was found for `lemma'. The Frisian lemmatizer/PoS tagger/dependency parser is released as a web app and as a web service.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 6 table