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Pipelined Parallelogram Tiling and Loop Restructuring Using Chapel Iterators
No full textWe are often interested in improving the performance of our programs in any way we can. Loop reconstruction is a common tool for improving performance. There are many different types of loop restructuing techniques depending on the problem that is given. We attempt to look at how to implement some of these techniques in Chapel. Specifically using Chapel's iterator method. After implementation we will attempt to test to see how efficient these implementations were in improving performance. Also we will attempt to see if Chapel is as fast, in terms of performance, as the current benchmarks in C when implementing similar code
Quantitative Methods
No full textThis course is an introduction to the use of quantitative data in sociology. The emphasis of the course is on understanding how researchers use such data to make sociological arguments. In order to appreciate this it is necessary to not only review some of the statistical methods used to analyze data, but also conduct such research using actual data. For this reason the assignments \ud
focus primarily on data analysis. The aim of the course is to show you how to understand the uses of different types of quantitative data in sociology, and to create and analyze simple and multivariate statistics using statistical software
Russian Purists Against Western Loanwords: Shared Characteristics Through Time
No full textThe following analyzes the opinions of Russian language purists, those who wish\ud
to preserve Russian language from change, and their opinions on loanwords from\ud
Western Europe and America. It compares the logic of purists from various time periods\ud
before the fall of the Soviet Union to that of purists writing after 1991 to the present day.\ud
In each previous time period, Pre-Revolutionary Russia, the Early Soviet Period, and the\ud
Mid-Soviet Period, the main arguments against loanwords correspond to arguments used\ud
against loanwords today.\ud
Purist opinions arise in times of sizable social change and increased levels of\ud
loanword creation. In the Imperial Period (1682-1917), the reforms of Peter the Great\ud
forced upper class Russians to conform to European norms in order to make Russian\ud
culture appear more civilized in the eyes of Western Europe. Many loanwords entered\ud
the language at this time, the majority of which became part of the educated dialect.\ud
Purists of the time dismissed loanwords as unnecessary and incomprehensible. In some\ud
cases the loanwords had a synonym of Russian-origin, like the more Russian sounding\ud
mokrostupy "galoshes" instead of the foreign galosy "galoshes". Purists of the time\ud
pushed for the use of the Russian word over the foreign equivalent.\ud
In the Early Soviet Period (1917-1929), the Bolshevik govermnent made language\ud
policy decisions that resulted in the increased use of new social, political, and economic\ud
loanwords amongst the educated elite. The loanwords, such as privilegia "privilege",\ud
were used frequently in the newspapers, which caused frustration amongst the\ud
uneducated population, who did not understand them. There was a less monumental\ud
purist movement in this time period due to the fact that the govermnent ignored their\ud
complaints about the new language and forced the uneducated to learn these new words.\ud
In the Mid-Soviet Period (1940s-1960s) there appeared a subculture called the\ud
stilyagi, a group of young people who valued individualism over the Soviet ideal of\ud
communalism. This manifested itself in conduct that the mainstream Soviet would not\ud
approve of, such as wild dancing, jazz music, and eccentric clothing all based on\ud
perceptions of American culture. The stilyagi's slang mostly consisted of loanwords, and\ud
Soviet purists feared that their slang was permeating too far into the speech of the\ud
educated populations.\ud
Modern language purists are those who write after the fall of the Soviet Union.\ud
This time period is marked by the increased influence of Western culture on Russia after\ud
the drawing of the Iron Curtain. Along with the plethora of loanwords that have come\ud
into Russian language there are many arguments against their use. Purists today also\ud
argue on the subject of the harm of using loanwords when there is a Russian equivalent,\ud
of the incomprehensibility of loanwords, and of slang being used in formal situations.\ud
Even though these movements are separated by time, they are not unique and\ud
show a pattern of how nationalists react to language changes, and therefore cultural\ud
changes
The Mandarin Chinese de as a Type <e,t> Nominal Proform: A Syntax-Semantics Approach
No full textIn this paper, it is argued that the Mandarin Chinese particle de is analogous to the\ud
English pronoun one/ones. Initial evidence of this can be seen in the English sentence he\ud
likes red ones (as in, I like green shirts, he likes red ones), which translates word for\ud
word to ta xihuan hongse de (lit. 'he like red DE'). At least superficially de and one\ud
appear to function identically\ud
This analysis, though, is not so simple to assert. Syntactic and semantic analysis\ud
of nominal modification in Chinese has long been complicated by the presence, or\ud
occasional lack thereof, of de. For example, one can say zang yifu, 'dirty clothes', and\ud
yet, one cannot say hen zang yifu 'very dirty clothes.' The correct form of the latter is hen\ud
zang de yfiu. The connection between de and one in these situations is not immediately\ud
evident. This analysis suggests, however, that such cases are actually examples of\ud
adjunction of the de-phrase onto the classifier phrase containing the rightmost noun.\ud
This process makes hen zang de yifu more directly analogous to the English\ud
'clothes, dirty ones', as in he brought me lots of clothes, dirty ones or give me those\ud
clothes, the dirty ones. It will be argued that in English this construction is the result of\ud
adjunction of the NP headed by one, or the DP that contains that NP, to the DP that\ud
contains clothes.\ud
The question of why Chinese would employ this adjunction strategy for adjectival\ud
modification still remains. An answer can be found using a modified version of the\ud
schema for de found in Huang (2006). Noting that simple adjectives like zang 'dirty'\ud
could not serve as sentence predicates, but complex adjectives, such as those proceeded\ud
by hen 'very', as in hen zang 'very dirty' could serve as sentence predicates. Huang\ud
argues that Chinese simple adjectives are type e and Chinese complex adjectives are type\ud
<e,t<. Noting that most nouns in Chinese are known to be type e, Huang then proposes a\ud
type-matching constraint on modification. Thus, the simple adjectives could directly\ud
modify nouns, as they are both type e, but the complex adjectives could not. To resolve\ud
this mismatch, Huang proposes that Chinese has a type-shifting operation «e,t<,e<, that\ud
she identified with the particle de itself. In this paper, that analysis is adjusted slightly: de\ud
is a type <e,t< noun, which is what allows it to be directly modified by type <e,t<\ud
elements. It is then able to act as a modifier at the N' level, or higher if it is moved from\ud
that position. Further, it can be shown that there is a cross linguistic "specificity\ud
constraint" on such modification structures which forces the phrase resulting from that\ud
modification to be of type e, which accounts for several facts about the distribution of\ud
specific and non-specific indefinites in both Chinese and English.\ud
Finally, just as Huang (2006)'s schema for de applied not only to occurrence of de\ud
between complex adjectives and nouns, this paper argues that the analysis described\ud
above can be extended to many occurrences of de in Chinese, including several which\ud
cannot be analyzed under Huang's original proposal
Improving Langscape's Text-based Language Identification Tool
No full textText-based language identification (LID) is the task of determining the language a piece of text\ud
is written in. Although modem LID tools achieve high accuracy using the widely-accepted\ud
n-gram method, there are several areas of LID that remain more difficult, particularly the task\ud
of distinguishing between closely related languages. Langscape, a project of the University\ud
of Maryland's Language Science Center, has an LID tool that uses a variation on the n-gram\ud
method. In this thesis, 1 propose and test a modification to Langscape's LID tool to improve its\ud
ability to distinguish between closely related languages
Problems in Bantawa Phonology and a Statistically Driven Approach to Vowels
No full textThis thesis examines several aspects of the phonology of Bantawa, an endangered\ud
and fairly understudied Tibeto-Burman language of N epa!. I provide a brief review\ud
of the major literature on Bantawa to date and discuss two particular phonological\ud
controversies: one concerning the presence of retroflex consonants, and one\ud
concerning the vowel inventory, specifically whether there are six or seven vowel\ud
phonemes. I draw on data I recorded from a native speaker to address each of these\ud
issues. With regard to the latter, I also provide an in-depth acoustic analysis of my\ud
consultant's 477 vowels and consider several types of statistical models to help\ud
address the issue of the number of vowel contrasts. My main conclusions, based on\ud
the data from my consultant, are first, that there is evidence based on minimal pairs\ud
for a contrast between retroflex and alveolar stops, and second, that there is no\ud
clear evidence for a seven-vowel system in Bantawa. With regard to the latter point,\ud
additional avenues of research would still be needed to explore the possibility of\ud
allophonic variation and/or individual speaker differences
Puerto Rican Immigration, Barrio Life Addressed by Filmmaker at Swarthmore College
No full textSwarthmore College News announcing program by Frances Negrón-Muntaner, filmmaker and writer, entitled 'Puerto Rican Film: Immigration and Barrio Life
A Journey in Understanding the End: An Analysis of Stream of Consciousness, Emotion, and Repetition in The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
No full textMedicinal Bioinorganic Chemistry
No full textThe role of metal ions in biology is often underappreciated, but metals are essential for survival. This class will look at the unique properties of metals and how they function in the body, with an emphasis on medical applications. The use of metals in medicine has resulted in several clinical successes and allows for the introduction of properties that cannot be achieved by use of organic compounds alone, but also introduces new challenges that can be addressed by a careful understanding of the principles of inorganic chemistry. Toward this end, the unique structural and coordination chemistry, as well as the reactivity of metals, has been used to design novel classes of therapeutic and diagnostic agents