Factors Influencing Smoking In Adolescents

Adolescents\u27 use of tobacco products is an ever-growing sector of today\u27s society. Adolescents continue to smoke cigarettes at an alarming rate. Early adolescent cigarette smoking between the ages of 11 and 13 years was found to be related to peer pressure and family role-modeling. Another influence cited was the use of media catering to adolescents. The ease at which adolescents acquire cigarettes is evidence that further restrictions need to be applied to those who sell to adolescents. The purpose of this study was to further explore influencing factors to adolescent smoking. The research question was what are the factors that influence an adolescent to cigarette smoking experimentation? Two theories were utilized to guide this study : Erickson, Tomlin, and Swain\u27s Modeling and Role-Modeling Theory and Erickson\u27s psychosocial development stages. Subjects included the seventh- and eighth-grade students at a rural county school in south Mississippi. Data were compiled using a researcherdeveloped questionnaire. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, percentages, and frequencies. Findings supported earlier research as males were identified as the strongest influence of these seventhand eighth-grade boys and girls. Despite the male influence, 84% of the sample acquired their cigarettes from peers. Peers were identified as the strongest overall influence. Adolescent smoking programs must be offered at an earlier age through age-specific program development

Beyond the Ancestral Code: Towards a Model for Sociolinguistic Language Documentation

Most language documentation efforts focus on capturing lexico-grammatical information on individual languages. Comparatively little effort has been devoted to considering a language’s sociolinguistic contexts. In parts of the world characterized by high degrees of multilingualism, questions surrounding the factors involved in language choice and the relationship between ‘communities’ and ‘languages’ are clearly of interest to documentary linguistics, and this paper considers these issues by reporting on the results of a workshop held on sociolinguistic documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Over sixty participants from Africa and elsewhere discussed theoretical and methodological issues relating to the documentation of language in its social context. Relevant recommendations for projects wishing to broaden into the realm of sociolinguistic language documentation include: a greater emphasis on conversational data and the documentation of naturally occurring conversation; developing metadata conventions to allow for more nuanced descriptions of socio-cultural settings; encouraging teamwork and interdisciplinary collaboration in order to extend the scope of sociolinguistic documentation; collecting sociolinguistic data which can inform language planning and policy; and creating opportunities for training in sociolinguistic documentation. Consideration of sociolinguistic language documentation also raises significant questions regarding the ways in which Western language ideologies, which have been especially prominent in shaping documentary agendas, may be unduly influencing documentary practice in other parts of the world.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Sustainable Pedagogy

As faculty at a STEM university, each of us honor our commitment to sustainability in unique ways. While the juxtaposition of humanities and engineering may seem odd, the two fields are in fact deeply related and deeply committed to sustainable pedagogy. In this panel, each professor discusses her/his classroom space as a place of sustainable practices. For Dr. Brown and Dr. Mitchell, their honors course series introduces students to some of the key sustainability concerns societies are facing today, the various interpretations and applications of sustainability, the role of technology in addressing sustainability issues, and the ethical principles relevant for attending to these concerns. As future engineers, scientists, resource managers, designers, and professionals, the class asks students to take seriously the development and application of technology and the need to routinely make decisions that have ethical implications for the health and welfare of others, society, and the natural environment. In Dr. Silverman’s Environmental Communication course, students study the sustainability of our current food production system. By examining topics such as meat production, food waste, local food, and food deserts, students come to understand food is not just an issue of the physical environment but also a political, economic, and social issue that effects the sustainability of humanity as a whole. Throughout the semester, students participate in community engagement projects and learn first-hand how they can be part of the change needed and what that change looks like

Beyond the Ancestral Code: Towards a Model for Sociolinguistic Language Documentation

Most language documentation efforts focus on capturing lexico-grammatical information on individual languages. Comparatively little effort has been devoted to considering a language’s sociolinguistic contexts. In parts of the world characterized by high degrees of multilingualism, questions surrounding the factors involved in language choice and the relationship between ‘communities’ and ‘languages’ are clearly of interest to documentary linguistics, and this paper considers these issues by reporting on the results of a workshop held on sociolinguistic documentation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Over sixty participants from Africa and elsewhere discussed theoretical and methodological issues relating to the documentation of language in its social context. Relevant recommendations for projects wishing to broaden into the realm of sociolinguistic language documentation include: a greater emphasis on conversational data and the documentation of naturally occurring conversation; developing metadata conventions to allow for more nuanced descriptions of socio-cultural settings; encouraging teamwork and interdisciplinary collaboration in order to extend the scope of sociolinguistic documentation; collecting sociolinguistic data which can inform language planning and policy; and creating opportunities for training in sociolinguistic documentation. Consideration of sociolinguistic language documentation also raises significant questions regarding the ways in which Western language ideologies, which have been especially prominent in shaping documentary agendas, may be unduly influencing documentary practice in other parts of the world

Extrapolation in NLP

We argue that extrapolation to examples outside the training space will often be easier for models that capture global structures, rather than just maximise their local fit to the training data. We show that this is true for two popular models: the Decomposable Attention Model and word2vec

PERISCOPE: PERIapsis Subsurface Cave Optical Explorer

The PERISCOPE study focuses primarily on lunar caves, due to the potential for being imaged in orbital scenarios. In the intervening years, from 2012-2015, scientists developed further rationales and interest in the scientific value of lunar caves. It does not appear that they are likely to be sinks for water-ice due to the relatively warm temperatures(~-20 degrees Celsius) in the caves leading to geologically-rapid migration of unbound water due to sublimation, and inevitable loss through any skylights. However, the skylights themselves reveal apparent complex layering, which may speak to a more complex multi-stage evolution of mare flood basalts than previously considered, and so their examination may provide even more insight into the lunar mare, which in turn provide a primary record of early solar system crustal formal and evolution processes. Further extrapolation of these insights can be found within the exoplanet community of researchers,who find the information useful for calibrating star formation and planetary evolution models. In addition, catalogues of lunar and martian skylights, "caves" or "atypical pit craters" have been developed, with numbers for both bodies now in the low hundreds thanks to additional high resolution surveys and revisiting the existing image databases

Behavior Analysis of NLI Models: Uncovering the Influence of Three Factors on Robustness

Natural Language Inference is a challenging task that has received substantial attention, and state-of-the-art models now achieve impressive test set performance in the form of accuracy scores. Here, we go beyond this single evaluation metric to examine robustness to semantically-valid alterations to the input data. We identify three factors - insensitivity, polarity and unseen pairs - and compare their impact on three SNLI models under a variety of conditions. Our results demonstrate a number of strengths and weaknesses in the models' ability to generalise to new in-domain instances. In particular, while strong performance is possible on unseen hypernyms, unseen antonyms are more challenging for all the models. More generally, the models suffer from an insensitivity to certain small but semantically significant alterations, and are also often influenced by simple statistical correlations between words and training labels. Overall, we show that evaluations of NLI models can benefit from studying the influence of factors intrinsic to the models or found in the dataset used.Comment: Accepted at NAACL 201