1,390 research outputs found
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
Against the Odds: Insights from a Statistician with Dyscalculia
No full textStudents with dyscalculia are typically thought of by both researchers and educators as having deficits. The deficit language permeates studies of dyscalculia as well as assessments and documentation of students in schools. In this paper, we offer an alternative to the dominant narrative. We understand disabilities, and dyscalculia specifically, as resulting from cognitive differences—not deficits—which lead to issues of access. We provide a case study of Dylan (second author), an individual with dyscalculia who decided to major in statistics at University of California, Berkeley and become a statistician. Although she experienced significant issues of access—both in the standard tools used to do mathematics, and in navigating the structures at the university—she developed systems to enable her to compensate. She collaborated in this research enterprise in order to share with researchers, teachers, parents, and students her experiences with dyscalculia and how she was able to succeed in higher level mathematics. Informed by previous empirical work, we collected video recordings of Dylan’s deliberate efforts to share insights and strategies with another student with dyscalculia. In this work, Dylan challenges dominant and problematic myths about ability and mathematics
Disentangling time constant and time dependent hidden state in time series with variational Bayesian inference
No full textThis electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 85-86).In this thesis, we design and explore a new model architecture called a Variational Bayes Recurrent Neural Network (VBRNN) for modelling time series. The VBRNN contains explicit structure to disentangle time constant and time dependent dynamics for use with compatible time series, such as those that can be modelled by differential equations with time constant parameters and time dependent state. The model consists of a Variational Bayes (VB) layer to infer time constant state, as well as a conditioned-RNN to model time dependent dynamics. The VBRNN is explored through various synthetic datasets and problems, and compared to conventional methods on these datasets. This approach demonstrates effective disentanglement, motivating future work to explore the efficacy of this mo del in real word datasets.by Dylan Emanuel Centeno Grullon.M. Eng.M.Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienc
Journeys Into Night: Agewise Cinematic Constructions in Cas and Dylan and Our Souls at Night
No full textAshton Applewhite, American writer, activist, blogger and expert on ageism, the author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism (2016), remarked in her 2017 TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) series lecture “Let’s End Ageism” that today when the aged population is, according to the United Nations statistics, at its highest level in human history, in most societies, including developing and the developed countries alike, “people are living longer and societies are getting grayer; you read and hear about it on all media platforms and outside of them.” This essay will be about a slice of these platforms tackling cultural narratives involving longevity and ageing―and their subsequently increased visibility on the silver screen. In order to investigate ageing as a marker of life course identities in two cinematic matching and mismatching journeys into ageing, I have chosen two North American movies presented in the past five years, the Canadian-made Cas and Dylan (2013) directed by Jason Priestley and with Richard Dreyfuss and Tatiana Maslany in leading roles, and the US-produced Our Souls at Night (2017), directed by Ritesh Batra, featuring in the main roles Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. I am interested to see the ways in which the representation of senior citizens―in the above-mentioned movies all being members of the North American Baby Boomers generation―is challenging the cultural myths of aging through various acts of performativity
Safe Policies for Factored Partially Observable Stochastic Games
No full textWe study planning problems where a controllable agent operates under partial observability and interacts with an uncontrollable opponent, also referred to as the adversary. The agent has two distinct objectives: To maximize an expectedvalue and to adhere to a safety specification. Multi-objective partially observable stochastic games (POSGs) formally model such problems. Yet, even for a single objective, the task of computing suitable policies for POSGs is theoretically hard and computationally intractable in practice. Using a factored state-space representation, we define a decoupling scheme for the POSG state space that—under certain assumptions on the observability and the reward structure—separates the state components relevant for the reward from those relevant for safety. This decoupling affects the possibility to compute provably safe and reward-optimal policies in a tractable two-stage approach. In particular, on the fully observable components related to safety, we exactly compute the set of policies that captures all possible safe choices against the opponent. We restrict the agent’s behavior to these safe policies and project the POSG to a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Anyreward-maximal policy for the POMDP is then guaranteed to be safe and reward-maximal for the POSG. We showcase our approach’s feasibility using high-fidelity simulations of two case studies that concern UAV path planning and autonomous driving. Moreover, to demonstrate the practical applicability, we design a physical experiment involving a robot decision making problemunder energy constraints that is motivated by a paired helicopter with NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.Algorithmic
Towards an Active Predictive Relation by Reconceptualizing a Vacuum Robot: Research on the Transparency and Acceptance of the Predictive Behaviors
No full textWith the development of Artificial intelligence, the connected objects are extended with the predictive capabilities and the character of things can change to “things that predict”. If a connected device is able to embrace a predictive system that not only profiles for scripted behavior but could also use the knowledge co-created by all the other similar devices and their users that encounter similar situations, the predictions can be generated based on that. In this case, a new type of interplay between humans and things called “predictive relation” is created. However, before this future takes place, it is required to find out appropriate patterns to address challenges such as the transparency and users’ acceptance of predictive behaviors of connected products. The research in this article takes a vacuum robot as a reference product for the study. The research starts by collecting users’ daily practice with vacuum robots through 4-day diary booklets. And then the booklets serve as sensitizing tools to envision the possible predictive capabilities and lead the discussion on the acceptance and transparency of general predicting things. From the creative sessions we propose 1) design qualities for the acceptance of the predicting things, and 2) a model of generating predictive behavior that enhances the transparency. Eventually, we also propose the idea of “Designers as the facilitators of the human-robot collaboration”.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Human Information Communication Desig
Sex-biased gene expression and evolution of candidate reproductive transcripts in adult stages of salmon lice ( Lepeophtheirus salmonis )
No full textA negative-norm least-squares method for time-harmonic Maxwell equations
No full textThis paper presents and analyzes a negative-norm least-squares finite element discretization method for the dimension-reduced time-harmonic Maxwell equations in the case of axial symmetry. The reduced equations are expressed in cylindrical coordinates, and the analysis consequently involves weighted Sobolev spaces based on the degenerate radial weighting. The main theoretical results established in this work include existence and uniqueness of the continuous and discrete formulations and error estimates for simple finite element functions. Numerical experiments confirm the error estimates and efficiency of the method for piecewise constant coefficients. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.The author thanks Prof. Joseph E. Pasciak for helpful discussions in developing the theory for this work. This publication is based on work supported by Award No. KUS-C1-016-04, made by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
Study of effective particle shape-dependent magnetization behavior of soft magnetic polymeric composites
No full textThis reports an investigation of the effect of magnetic particles with same chemical composition but different aspect ratios on the effective magnetization response of magnetorheological elastomers (MREs). MREs are composites that consist of magnetically permeable particles dispersed in a non-magnetic polymeric matrix. These materials are known for the tunability of their magnetoelastic properties. When subjected to an externally applied magnetic field, changes occur in their mechanical properties such as stiffness; this is the so-called magnetorheological (MR) effect. This is usually attributed to the magnetic interactions between the magnetic filler particles. Several factors significantly influence the MR effect. These are the polymer matrix, volume fraction, size, and shape of the magnetic particles. In this study, based on continuum formulation theory, microscale modeling using a finite element analysis (FEA) was used to determine the effect of the latter on the macroscopic magnetization of MREs. Using Jiles-Atherton hysteresis model parameters, the hysteresis loops of MRE were numerically resolved in the FEA software COMSOL Multiphysics. The model calculations were performed for randomly oriented (unaligned) and aligned microstructures with constant particle-volume fraction (φ= ∼20%) and varying particle-aspect ratios (AR=1, 2.5, 5 and 7.5). A computational homogenization scheme was used to relate the microscopic behavior to the macroscopic properties of these composites. From the analysis, it was found that for unaligned MRE the effective magnetization increased with increase in the particle aspect ratio, particularly in the linear region, while the saturation magnetization is seen to be independent of the particle shape. The effect is much more noticeable for particles aligned with the applied field, while for particles aligned perpendicular to the applied field an opposite effect is seen, where increasing aspect ratio results in decreased magnetization relative to the applied field.This article is published as Kiarie, Winnie M., Dylan Sitarski, and David C. Jiles. "Study of effective particle shape-dependent magnetization behavior of soft magnetic polymeric composites." AIP Advances 12, no. 3 (2022): 035115. DOI: 10.1063/9.0000344. Copyright 2022 The Author(s). Attribution 3.0 International (CC BY 3.0). Posted with permission
Analysing different Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and its solutions in SDN
No full textSoftware-Defined Networks are an exciting network paradigm that brings many advantages to its users. However, its architecture also makes it vulnerable to attacks. Distributed Denial of Service attacks are one of those attacks that canexploit the weaknesses of an SDN. This paper explains the weaknesses that can be exploited and the consequences of a DDoS attack. State-of-the-art machine learning and statistical solutions to this problem are presented and evaluated. Thelimitations of each solution are analysed, and a new system is proposed that eliminates the mentioned flaws.CSE3000 Research ProjectComputer Science and Engineerin
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