362 research outputs found
Supplemental Material - Collective wisdom in polarized groups
No full textSupplemental Material for Collective wisdom in polarized groups by Joseph B Bak-Coleman, Christopher K Tokita, Dylan H Morris, Daniel I Rubenstein and Iain D Couzin in Collective Intelligence</p
Code and data for "Asynchrony between virus diversity and antibody selection limits influenza virus evolution"
No full textCode and data for reproducing results and figures from the Morris et al study of asynchrony between influenza virus diversity and antibody selectio
From technical to teachable: Phonetics and phonology
No full textAs linguists, we value our jargon and training since they allow us to make precise, explicit characterizations of linguistic phenomena. However, it is easy to recognize that this same jargon prevents non-linguists, community members and teachers in particular, from engaging with the literature in a useful way (see, e.g. Penfield & Tucker 2011). Based on workshops given at the Oklahoma Breath of Life (Author 2014) and the Annual Symposium on the American Indian (Author 2012), I discuss specific activities that can be used in the classroom/workshop to make linguistic knowledge from the highly technical sub-fields of phonetics and phonology more accessible to language teachers and language users.
This paper consists of three parts. First, since highlighting L1-L2 similarities can have a positive effect on L2 comprehension and production (Ringbom 1987, 1992, 2007), I provide a list of IPA sounds that can be illustrated in terms of English phonemes and allophones (which could be extended straightforwardly to other languages). For example, English does not have a palatal stop phoneme /c/, but [c] appears as an allophone at the beginning of words like key (Ladefoged & Johnson 2010), and having participants contrast that with the sound at the beginning of car can help them distinguish [c] from [k].
Second, I provide a technique for motivating language teachers, students, and language users to ‘buy in’ to the need for learning at least some phonetics jargon. The thumbnail version of the exercise is: give an explanation for a sound like [p] and then ask participants to describe a number of other sounds such as [t, k, b, g, m, n…]. Having participants think about how to describe a sound helps them see the value of some jargon – for example, agreeing on precise labels for different parts of the vocal tract.
Third, I provide an illustration for how to discuss and explain the phoneme vs. allophone distinction in phonology without ever using the terms phoneme or allophone. The guiding principle is that these concepts can be made accessible to non-specialists when recast in more common but less precise terms and illustrated repeatedly with concrete examples from languages they know or study.
In sum, by actively de-jargoning linguistic material and giving up a small amount of precision and technical detail, linguistic knowledge can be made much more usable in language learning environments, and this, in turn, can result in higher quality language instruction in the community.
REFERENCES
Author. 2014. Phonetics II: More Sounds and how to read them. Presented at the 2014 Breath of Life Workshop and Documentation Project. Sam Noble Museum, Norman, Oklahoma. May 18-23rd.
Author. 2012. Teaching the unique sounds of your language. Presented at the 40th Annual Symposium on the American Indian. Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, OK. April 9-14th.
Ladefoged, P. & K. Johnson. 2010. A Course in Phonetics, 6th edition. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth.
Penfield, S.D. & Tucker, B.V. 2011. From Documenting to Revitalizing an Endangered Language: Where do Applied Linguists Fit? Language and Education, 25: 291-305.
Ringbom, H. 1987. The role of the first language in foreign language learning. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Ringbom, H. 1992. On L1 transfer in L2 comprehension and L2 production. Language Learning 42: 85-112.
Ringbom, H. 2007. Cross-linguistic similarity in foreign language learning. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters
‘This is what Salvation must be like after a While’: Bob Dylan’s Critical Utopia
No full textBob Dylan’s work has frequently been the object of discussion, debate and scholarly research. It has been commented on in terms of interpretation of the lyrics of his songs, of their musical treatment, and of the distinctiveness of Dylan’s performance style, while Dylan himself has been treated both as an important figure in the world of popular music, and also as an artist, as a significant poet. In his prolific output Dylan deals with a number of recurring themes, which he constantly revisits and develops. One of these themes is the perpetual search for salvation, which runs throughout his entire work, while at the same time taking significantly different forms.
I argue in this dissertation that Dylan’s search for salvation takes place within a distinct range of different contexts, which include the longing for social salvation, the striving towards individual fulfilment, the desire for salvation through romantic relationships, and the constant journey towards an idealized place that will bring about a sense of salvation and redemption, while at the same time the idea of religious salvation in a more general sense can also be seen as hovering over all of these more specific contexts.
I aim to demonstrate that Dylan’s search for salvation has a strongly utopian character, a search for something characterized by hope, but which, however close it might seem to be, is nevertheless not achieved in reality. Drawing on approaches derived in part from the critical theorist Ernst Bloch and also on more recent writers on the concept of Utopia, I argue that it is through this utopian dimension that Dylan’s work also functions as critique. Dylan, in showing the world’s situation as it should be shows us simultaneously the way it actually is, and it is the gulf between these two that functions as critique
Story-enabled hypothetical reasoning
No full textThesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 63-64).Story understanding is a central competence that illuminates all other aspects of human intelligence. In this work, I demonstrate how our story understanding ability sheds light on our ability to think in terms of hypothetical situations. Using the Genesis story understanding system as a substrate, I develop a story-enabled hypothetical reasoning system that models several high-level human abilities, including judging actions in terms of moral alternatives, contextualizing stories by considering what could have otherwise happened, and deliberating about personality to decide what characters will do next. In developing this system, I built many new computational mechanisms and representations, including a program for answering what-if questions, a side-by-side story comparator, rules for making presumptive inferences, heuristics for evaluating personality fit, and a problem-solving approach for evaluating moral character. Together, they take Genesis's story understanding capabilities to another level and advance our understanding of human intelligence.by Dylan Alexander Holmes.S.M
Effectiveness of N95 Respirator Decontamination and Reuse against SARS-CoV-2 Virus
No full textCode and data for the paper "Assessment of N95 respirator decontamination and re-use for SARS-CoV-2
Wild hummingbirds discriminate nonspectral colors
No full textCode and data for the paper "Wild hummingbirds discriminate nonspectral colors" (Stoddard et al., PNAS
dylanhmorris/heat-inactivation: Published version
No full textCode and data underlying the published version of the paper
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