Negotiating textual talk : conversation analysis, pedagogy, and the organisation of online asynchronous discourse

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to investigate the ways in which participants in an online asynchronous postgraduate reading group managed and negotiated their contributions within the discussion. Using the conversation analytic concerns with sequential organisation, adjacency pairs and topicality, this article shows the analytic insights that this perspective can bring to the examination of written asynchronous discourse. The paper shows that in the section of the discussion analysed here, the discourse displayed remarkable similarities to the ways in which face-to-face conversation has been seen to operate in terms of the organisation of conversational turns, the application of specific interactional rights, the lineal development of topics of conversation, and the structural use of question-answer turn pairs. The paper concludes by showing how this form of analysis can relate to the formation of reflexive pedagogy in which course design can be created to take account of such findings. It shows how a detailed understanding of how pedagogy is played out in interaction is fundamental for reflecting on the relationship between pedagogic aims and educational practice

Litter on Wheels: An Ocean Garbage Art Car

In the Fall term of 2018, Gettysburg College seniors Bill LeConey and Will Gibson created the world\u27s first Ocean Garbage Art Car, by covering an old Ford truck with plastic bottles (and other trash commonly found in our oceans), to raise awareness about anthropogenic pollution in our seas. Since the 1950’s, plastics have been an essential and ubiquitous commodity in nearly every society on the planet. Plastics find their way into just about every aspect of our lives - from water bottles and cell phone cases, to even advanced medical equipment and space shuttles - it’s no secret how prevalent plastic is. Unfortunately, an overwhelming majority of the ≈450 million tons of plastic produced annually ends up in our oceans, posing a substantial threat to our aquatic life and the ecosystems they reside in. Much of this waste coalesces into gyres called garbage patches - some as large as countries - floating within the water column, and harming the tranquility of the environment they are intruding on. Several environmental art forms similar to our Ocean Garbage Art Car were studied and compared to give a more in depth background on our issue. Many other artists have utilized ocean trash, but ours is a one of a kind. An urgent call to action must take place to cleanup our oceans and to stop the excessive waste of plastic before irreversible repercussions occur. It is our hope that the Ocean Garbage Art Car created in the ES 400 seminar will help raise awareness about this dire issue threatening our planet as we know it

Unsupervised intralingual and cross-lingual speaker adaptation for HMM-based speech synthesis using two-pass decision tree construction

Hidden Markov model (HMM)-based speech synthesis systems possess several advantages over concatenative synthesis systems. One such advantage is the relative ease with which HMM-based systems are adapted to speakers not present in the training dataset. Speaker adaptation methods used in the field of HMM-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) are adopted for this task. In the case of unsupervised speaker adaptation, previous work has used a supplementary set of acoustic models to estimate the transcription of the adaptation data. This paper firstly presents an approach to the unsupervised speaker adaptation task for HMM-based speech synthesis models which avoids the need for such supplementary acoustic models. This is achieved by defining a mapping between HMM-based synthesis models and ASR-style models, via a two-pass decision tree construction process. Secondly, it is shown that this mapping also enables unsupervised adaptation of HMM-based speech synthesis models without the need to perform linguistic analysis of the estimated transcription of the adaptation data. Thirdly, this paper demonstrates how this technique lends itself to the task of unsupervised cross-lingual adaptation of HMM-based speech synthesis models, and explains the advantages of such an approach. Finally, listener evaluations reveal that the proposed unsupervised adaptation methods deliver performance approaching that of supervised adaptation

Fiscal and monetary policy: opportunities and problems

Monetary policy ; Fiscal policy

Protecting Homebuilding from Restrictive Credit Conditions

macroeconomics, homebuilding, credit

Academic Dress in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published to great acclaim in 2004, contains over 50,000 biographical articles of men and women who have contributed to the history of Britain. The printed edition runs to sixty volumes and has 60,000 pages; it was written by 10,000 specialist contributors and was a multimillion- pound project funded by the British Academy and Oxford University Press. It took over thirteen years to complete, replaces the Victorian DNB and the online edition has all the links and connections to the National Portrait Gallery and other sites you would expect of a major academic resource. But, for Burgon Society members, the question is: what does it say about academic dress? [Excerpt]

The Regulation of Undergraduate Academic Dress at Oxford and Cambridge, 1660–1832

Throughout the ‘long’ eighteenth century undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge were differentiated into four principal classes: noblemen; gentlemen commoners (at Cambridge fellow-commoners); scholars (including pensioners at Cambridge); and servitors (sometimes known at Cambridge as sizars and also at Oxford as battelers.) At Oxford there was an additional group, commoners, between scholars and servitors. Each of these classes of undergraduates was entitled to a different form of dress. [Excerpt]

The Miracle Worker (April 28-May 7, 1978)

Program for The Miracle Worker (April 28-May 7, 1978)

‘The remembrance whereof is pleasant’: A Note on Walter Pope’s Role in the Attempt to Abolish Academic Dress during the Commonwealth

In Hargreaves-Mawdsley’s history of academic dress, there is a short paragraph on the attempt to abolish academic dress at Oxford during the Commonwealth in Britain. Hargreaves-Mawdsley noted that John Evelyn saw academic dress still in use in Oxford in 1654 but also indicated that, by 1658, there was a serious attempt by the Puritan authorities in the University to abolish academic robes. Hargreaves-Mawdsley mentioned that it was the proctor, Walter Pope, who averted the abolition. However he fails to give the account which lies behind the failed attempt at abolition. The purpose of this brief article is to recount Walter Pope’s own colourful narrative of the resistance to the attempt to abolish academic dress at Oxford. [Excerpt]