Performing "Up The Shore": a stylistic analysis of Newfoundland Irish English vowels in the Ferryland dinner theatre

This study is a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of two speech styles, performance and interview, of a dinner theatre troupe in Ferryland on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland. Five actors and ten of their characters are analyzed to test if their vowels change across styles. The study adopts a variationist framework with a Community of Practice model, drawing on Bell’s audience and referee design to argue that the performers’ stage conventions and identity construction are influenced by a third person referee: the Idealized Authentic Newfoundlander (IAN). Under this view the goal of the performer is to both communicate with and entertain the audience, which requires different tactics when speaking. These tactics manifest phonetically and are discussed in a quantitative, statistical analysis of the acoustic measurements of the vowel tokens [variables FACE, KIT, LOT/PALM and GOAT lexical sets with Newfoundland Irish English (NIE) variants] and a qualitative discussion.

Modeling the distribution of crossovers and interference with mice DNA data

Chiasma and crossover are two related biological processes of great importance in the understanding genetic variation. The study of these processes is straightforward in organisms where all products of meiosis are recovered and can be observed. This is not the case in mammals. Our understanding of these processes depends on our ability to model them. In this study I describe the biological processes that underline chiasma and crossover as well as the two main inference problems associated with these processes: i) in mammals we only recover one of the four products of meiosis and, ii) in general, we do not observe where the crossovers actually happen, but we find an interval containing type-2 censored information. NPML estimate was proposed and used in this work and used to compare chromosome length and chromosome expansion through the crosses.