Étude des genres Actinotaenium (Näg.) Teiling et Cosmarium Corda ex Ralfs,/i> (Desmidiaceae/Chlorophyta) dans les mares temporaires des régions du Centre, de l’Est et du Nord du Burkina Faso

De nombreux travaux de systématique des micro-algues faits auparavant, ont concerné les genres Actinotaenium et Cosmarium dans certaines régions d’Afrique, particulièrement en Afrique centrale et de l’ouest. Au Burkina Faso, les travaux précédents sur la systématique des micro-algues ont généralement concerné l’ensemble des genres de chlorophyta prenant en compte les genres Cosmarium et Actinotaenium. Cependant, il n’y a pas encore eu d’études sur les micro-algues de mares temporaires. Une observation d’échantillons de phytoplancton récoltés dans des mares du centre, de l’est (zone soudanienne) et nord (zone sahélienne) du Burkina Faso en période hivernale de 2007, 2008 et 2009 a permis de rencontrer 39 espèces des genres Actinotaenium et Cosmarium dont 23 nouvelles pour le Burkina Faso. La description des taxons donnée permet de compléter la connaissance de la microflore dulçaquicole de l’Afrique de l’Ouest en général et du Burkina Faso en particulier. Les espèces nouvelles s’ajoutent à environ 67 taxons de Cosmarium et 641 de tous les genres confondus et qui avaient été déjà répertoriés au Burkina Faso avant ce travail. Parmi les espèces, les formes cosmopolites sont dominantes. Elles se rencontrent dans des étangs caractérisés par des eaux acides, alcalines et oligotrophes

A CONTRASTIVE RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF PHILIPPINE AND SRI LANKAN ENGLISH NEWS COMMENTARIES

Newspaper commentaries constitute a part of media discourse, which is a significant area of inquiry in intercultural rhetoric analysis. Through conducting a contrastive textual analysis of newspaper commentaries culled from the English newspapers in the Philippines and Sri Lanka, this paper explored the notions of genre and micro-genre on the 2015 papal visit in the two countries. To set a tertium comparationisin examining the genre-newspaper commentaries on the papal visit, the timeframe was set during the two-week duration of the visit. To investigate the micro-genres employed by the writers, two sets of 15 newspaper commentaries on the visit respectively in the Philippines and Sri Lanka were selected and analyzed. Findings revealed that both Filipino and Sinhalese writers in English newspaper commentaries tended to employ the micro-genre of “media explanatory exposition” more often than other micro-genres, and in terms of rhetorical structures, both of these writers tended to show variation, dynamism, and individuality. Implications for ESL (English as a second language) and EFL (English as a foreign language) teaching are provided in the light of these findings.

Audio-Visual Sentiment Analysis for Learning Emotional Arcs in Movies

Stories can have tremendous power -- not only useful for entertainment, they can activate our interests and mobilize our actions. The degree to which a story resonates with its audience may be in part reflected in the emotional journey it takes the audience upon. In this paper, we use machine learning methods to construct emotional arcs in movies, calculate families of arcs, and demonstrate the ability for certain arcs to predict audience engagement. The system is applied to Hollywood films and high quality shorts found on the web. We begin by using deep convolutional neural networks for audio and visual sentiment analysis. These models are trained on both new and existing large-scale datasets, after which they can be used to compute separate audio and visual emotional arcs. We then crowdsource annotations for 30-second video clips extracted from highs and lows in the arcs in order to assess the micro-level precision of the system, with precision measured in terms of agreement in polarity between the system's predictions and annotators' ratings. These annotations are also used to combine the audio and visual predictions. Next, we look at macro-level characterizations of movies by investigating whether there exist `universal shapes' of emotional arcs. In particular, we develop a clustering approach to discover distinct classes of emotional arcs. Finally, we show on a sample corpus of short web videos that certain emotional arcs are statistically significant predictors of the number of comments a video receives. These results suggest that the emotional arcs learned by our approach successfully represent macroscopic aspects of a video story that drive audience engagement. Such machine understanding could be used to predict audience reactions to video stories, ultimately improving our ability as storytellers to communicate with each other.Comment: Data Mining (ICDM), 2017 IEEE 17th International Conference o

Gaming techniques and the product development process : commonalities and cross-applications

The use of computer-based tools is now firmly embedded within the product development process, providing a wide range of uses from visualisation to analysis. However, the specialisation required to make effective use of these tools has led to the compartmentalisation of expertise in design teams, resulting in communication problems between individual members. This paper therefore considers how computer gaming techniques and strategies could be used to enhance communication and group design activities throughout the product design process

Code-switching ‘in site’ for fantasizing identities: A case study of conventional uses of London Greek Cypriot

Sociolinguistic studies of minority languages and bilingualism have increasingly moved away from a singular emphasis on issues of ethnicity that poses direct links between the use of a language and an ethnic or cultural identity towards exploring the construction of identities that are not firmly located in category-bound descriptions. In this paper, we draw on these latest insights to account for processes of identity construction in a bilingual (in Greek Cypriot and English) youth organization group based in North London. Our main data consist of the audio-recorded interactional data from a socialization outing after one of the groups meeting but we also bring in insights from the groups ethnographic study and a larger study of the North London Cypriot community that involved interviews and questionnaires. In the close analysis of our main data, we note a conventional association between the London Greek Cypriot (henceforth LGC) variety that is switched to from English as the main interactional frame and a set of genres (in the sense of recurrent evolving responses to social practices) that are produced and taken up as humorous discourse: These include narrative jokes, ritual insults, hypothetical scenarios, and metalinguistic instances of mock Cypriot. We will suggest that the use of LGC demonstrates a relationship of ambivalence, a partly ours partly theirs status, with the participants carving out a different, third space for themselves that transcends macro-social categories (e.g. the Cypriots, the Greek-Cypriot community). At the same time, we will show how the discursive process of choosing language from a bi- or multi-lingual repertoire does not only create identities in the sense of socially and culturally derived positions but also identities (sic (dis)-identifications) in the sense of desiring and fantasizing personas

Hybrids and Fragments: Music, Genre, Culture and Technology

Technologies are fundamental to music and its marketing and dissemination, as is the categorisation of music by genre. In this research we examine the relationship between musical genre and technology by examining genre proliferation, fragmentation and hybridity. We compare the movement of musical artists between genres in various technological eras, and evaluate the connections between the dissemination of music and its categorisation. Cultural hybridity and fragmentation is thought to be the norm in the globalised era by many scholars, and the online music environment appears to be populated by hybrid genres and micro-genres. To examine this we study the representation of musical genre on the Internet. We acquire data from three main sources: The Echo Nest, a music-intelligence system, and two collectively constructed knowledge-bases, Wikidata and MusicBrainz. We discover geographical and commercial biases. We calculate genre inception dates in order to examine category proliferation, and construct networks from these data, using the relationships between artists and genres to establish structure. Using network analyses to quantify genre hybridity we find increasing hybridisation, peaking at various periods in different datasets. Statistical analyses, comparing hybridity within our various data, validates our method and reveals a relationship between the activity of editing music information and the movement of musical artists between musical genres. We also find evidence for the fragmentation of genre and the appearance of micro- genres. We consider artists that are invisible in mainstream systems using data from three alternative platforms, Bandcamp, CD Baby and SoundCloud, and examine rapid genre proliferation in Spotify. We then discuss hybridity and fragmentation in relation to postmodernity, hypermodernity and unimodernity, music and genre within society, and the ways genre intersects with technology

The Act of Fictional Communication in a Hermeneutic Pragmatics

This paper is concerned with fictional communication, as the act of an author in relation to a reader. Fictional discourse exhibits certain complexities that are not observable in other forms of discourse. For example, the author’s act is mediated for the reader by that set of persons called characters. This fact generates a range of relations, firstly the triad of author-reader, author-character, and reader-character. But closer observation reveals that this mediation may be such that it gives way to another, deeper set of relations. At the deepest level one may postulate reader’s relation to author’s self-relating and author’s relation to reader’s self-relating. These questions are explored with view to deriving a revisionist notion of pragmatics that is open to agenc