The Diversity of State Benefit Dependent Lone Mothers: the Use of Type Categories As an Analytical Tool

This article provides an empirical examination of how lone mothers who receive state benefits in Germany and Britain create meaning with regards to mothering and state dependency. It uses the concept of individualisation as it requires women to negotiate their own lives. But the concept of individualisation is limited as it insinuates a convergence in men's and women's work identities and aspirations and is in danger of reducing women's identity to their 'family-work' preferences that does not encompass the complexity of their lives. The article has both a methodological claim and a substantive claim: Methodologically, it explores how new type categories can be used as an analytical tool to help us understand how lone mothers create meaning and to make sense of the differences between the mothers' complex identities. Substantively, these type categories demonstrate that there are great variations and dynamics in mothers' identities despite their state dependency. Based on lone mothers' perceived choices and constraints they are categorised as pioneers, copers or strugglers. The pioneers view their situation as an opportunity to construct their lives actively in non-traditional ways. In contrast, the coper and the struggler types perceive a lack of choices and tend to have traditional gender role values. While copers view their situation as temporary and improvable, strugglers feel overwhelmed by constraints and perceive themselves to have no choices at all. This article discusses the construction and the characteristics of these categories while detailed case studies bring each type category to life and give them more substance. The data analysis also shows that besides values, lone mothers' structural background as well as the number and age of their children seems to be related to lone mothers' creation of meaning.Choices/constraints, Individualisation, Lone Motherhood, Type Categories, Sense of Coherence Concept, Structural Background

Combining dependency parsing with PP attachment

Prepositional phrase (PP) attachment is one of the major sources for errors in traditional statistical parsers. The reason for that lies in the type of information necessary for resolving structural ambiguities. For parsing, it is assumed that distributional information of parts-of-speech and phrases is sufficient for disambiguation. For PP attachment, in contrast, lexical information is needed. The problem of PP attachment has sparked much interest ever since Hindle and Rooth (1993) formulated the problem in a way that can be easily handled by machine learning approaches: In their approach, PP attachment is reduced to the decision between noun and verb attachment; and the relevant information is reduced to the two possible attachment sites (the noun and the verb) and the preposition of the PP. Brill and Resnik (1994) extended the feature set to the now standard 4-tupel also containing the noun inside the PP. Among many publications on the problem of PP attachment, Volk (2001; 2002) describes the only system for German. He uses a combination of supervised and unsupervised methods. The supervised method is based on the back-off model by Collins and Brooks (1995), the unsupervised part consists of heuristics such as ”If there is a support verb construction present, choose verb attachment”. Volk trains his back-off model on the Negra treebank (Skut et al., 1998) and extracts frequencies for the heuristics from the ”Computerzeitung”. The latter also serves as test data set. Consequently, it is difficult to compare Volk’s results to other results for German, including the results presented here, since not only he uses a combination of supervised and unsupervised learning, but he also performs domain adaptation. Most of the researchers working on PP attachment seem to be satisfied with a PP attachment system; we have found hardly any work on integrating the results of such approaches into actual parsers. The only exceptions are Mehl et al. (1998) and Foth and Menzel (2006), both working with German data. Mehl et al. report a slight improvement of PP attachment from 475 correct PPs out of 681 PPs for the original parser to 481 PPs. Foth and Menzel report an improvement of overall accuracy from 90.7% to 92.2%. Both integrate statistical attachment preferences into a parser. First, we will investigate whether dependency parsing, which generally uses lexical information, shows the same performance on PP attachment as an independent PP attachment classifier does. Then we will investigate an approach that allows the integration of PP attachment information into the output of a parser without having to modify the parser: The results of an independent PP attachment classifier are integrated into the parse of a dependency parser for German in a postprocessing step

Parsing coordinations

The present paper is concerned with statistical parsing of constituent structures in German. The paper presents four experiments that aim at improving parsing performance of coordinate structure: 1) reranking the n-best parses of a PCFG parser, 2) enriching the input to a PCFG parser by gold scopes for any conjunct, 3) reranking the parser output for all possible scopes for conjuncts that are permissible with regard to clause structure. Experiment 4 reranks a combination of parses from experiments 1 and 3. The experiments presented show that n- best parsing combined with reranking improves results by a large margin. Providing the parser with different scope possibilities and reranking the resulting parses results in an increase in F-score from 69.76 for the baseline to 74.69. While the F-score is similar to the one of the first experiment (n-best parsing and reranking), the first experiment results in higher recall (75.48% vs. 73.69%) and the third one in higher precision (75.43% vs. 73.26%). Combining the two methods results in the best result with an F-score of 76.69

Aerospace engineering educational program

The principle goal of the educational component of NASA CORE is the creation of aerospace engineering options in the mechanical engineering program at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. To accomplish this goal, a concerted effort during the past year has resulted in detailed plans for the initiation of aerospace options in both the BSME and MSME programs in the fall of 1993. All proposed new courses and the BSME aerospace option curriculum must undergo a lengthy approval process involving two cirriculum oversight committees (School of Engineering and University level) and three levels of general faculty approval. Assuming approval is obtained from all levels, the options will officially take effect in Fall '93. In anticipation of this, certain courses in the proposed curriculum are being offered during the current academic year under special topics headings so that current junior level students may graduate in May '94 under the BSME aerospace option. The proposed undergraduate aerospace option curriculum (along with the regular mechanical engineering curriculum for reference) is attached at the end of this report, and course outlines for the new courses are included in the appendix

El docente de lenguas extranjeras y su relación con la política lingüística

Sabido es que los grandes lineamientos de las políticas lingüísticas de nuestro país son fijados por las autoridades educativas ministeriales de la Nación luego de procesos de consenso en el que intervienen actores variados que van desde los representantes provinciales hasta comisiones integradas por docentes y autoridades de instituciones de enseñanza (Bein, 2010). Sin embargo en este trabajo no abordaremos aspectos relativos a las decisiones oficiales o la situación actual de la glotopolíticaen nuestro país, en términos de Arnoux (2011: 37). Nos proponemos mostrar cómo el docente dentro y fuera del aula toma decisiones ?políticas? en su quehacer cotidiano, es decir, realiza actos que lo conciernen y que están impregnados de una ideología no imputable a estamentos de jerarquía superior. Pertenecer a una asociación profesional que defiende los intereses político-lingüísticos de sus miembros, escoger tal o cual variedad lingüística en el aula o, finalmente, desentrañar las representaciones sociales de los aprendientes sobre la lengua extranjera (Castelotti y Moore, 2002: 10 y Klett, 2002: 333) son algunos ejemplos del quehacer docente vinculados con la política lingüística. Esto demostraría que siempre existe un margen de maniobra para un profesor creativo y poseedor de imprescindible apoyatura teórica. Se explorará el campo de las acciones del docente ejemplificando la postura expuesta. Responderemos a algunos interrogantes que surgen de nuestros propios planteo

Electroweak Symmetry Breaking by Condensates of Fermions in High Color Representations

In this thesis we investigate fundamental features of a mechanism that attempts to explain the origin of the electroweak scale by the condensation of fermions in high color representations. Since chiral symmetry in the new fermion sector is dynamically broken due to non-perturbative effects of the running strong coupling this mechanism provides a natural explanation for the scale of the condensate by dimensional transmutation. Electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) could then be triggered indirectly via a singlet scalar mediator which couples to the Standard Model Higgs boson and the new fermion sector. In our analysis particular focus is put to the impact of the representation on the condensate and the significance of vector-like fermion masses which explicitly break chiral symmetry. In doing so, we solve the Dyson-Schwinger equation for the fermion propagator within the rainbow-approximation and analyze the behavior of the dynamical mass. In the chiral limit, we find a comparatively larger expectation value (EV) of the condensate for fermions in high representations than for the fundamental representation. A property reflecting the larger Casimir invariants of higher representations. For massive fermions, we propose a method to isolate the non-perturbative contributions to the propagator from the perturbative ones and calculate a lower bound for the EV of the condensate. Our result suggests that in absolute numbers the EV of the condensate increases with mass, while its relative contribution to the dynamical mass diminishes. On the basis of these results, we believe the condensation of a high color fermion with an explicit mass of the order ~10TeV could successfully create the scale of EWSB

Graphic Means Campaign

For this Honors project, the student designed promotional material for the documentary, Graphic Means: A History of Graphic Design Production which was shown at Parkland College on November 17, 2017. The campaign included posters, tickets, postcards, newspaper ads, and minor event signage as displayed here in PDF and images