Construction of Francophone families’ health literacy in a linguistic minority situation

With the increase in international mobility, healthcare systems should no longer be ignoring language barriers. In addition to the benefit of reducing long‐term costs, immigrant‐friendly organizations should be concerned with mitigating the way language barriers increase individuals’ social vulnerabilities and inequities in health care and health status. This paper reports the findings of a qualitative, exploratory study of the health literacy of 28 Francophone families living in a linguistic‐minority situation in Canada. Analysis of interviews revealed that participants’ social vulnerability, mainly due to their limited social and informational networks, influenced the construction of family health literacy. Disparities in access to healthcare services could be decreased by having health professionals’ work in alliance with Francophone community groups and by hiring bilingual health professionals. Linguistic isolation and lack of knowledge about local cultural organizations among Francophone immigrants were two important findings of this study

Probability analysis of machine angle stability with non-gaussian wind power input

The security of power transfer across a given transmission link is typically a steady state assessment. This paper develops tools to assess machine angle stability as affected by a combination of faults and uncertainty of wind power using probability analysis. The paper elaborates on the development of the theoretical assessment tool and demonstrates its efficacy using single machine infinite bus system.

The pedagogical, linguistic and content features of popular English language learning websites in China : a framework for analysis and design

As increasing numbers of Chinese language learners choose to learn English online (CNNIC, 2012), there is a need to investigate popular websites and their language learning designs. This paper reports on the first stage of a study that analysed the pedagogical, linguistic and content features of 25 Chinese English Language Learning (ELL) websites ranked according to their value and importance to users. The website ranking was undertaken using a system known as PageRank. The aim of the study was to identify the features characterising popular sites as opposed to those of less popular sites for the purpose of producing a framework for ELL website design in the Chinese context. The study found that a pedagogical focus with developmental instructional materials accommodating diverse proficiency levels was a major contributor to website popularity. Chinese language use for translations and teaching directives and intermediate level English for learning materials were also significant features. Content topics included Anglophone/Western and non-Anglophone/Eastern contexts. Overall, popular websites were distinguished by their mediation of access to and scaffolded support for ELL.

Input-orientated data envelopment analysis framework for measuring and decomposing economic, environmental and ecological efficiency : an application to OECD agriculture

This paper presents an input-orientated data envelopment analysis (DEA) framework which allows the measurement and decomposition of economic, environmental and ecological efficiency levels in agricultural production across different countries. Economic, environmental and ecological optimisations search for optimal input combinations that minimise total costs, total amount of nutrients, and total amount of cumulative exergy contained in inputs respectively. The application of the framework to an agricultural dataset of 30 OECD countries revealed that (i) there was significant scope to make their agricultural production systemsmore environmentally and ecologically sustainable; (ii) the improvement in the environmental and ecological sustainability could be achieved by being more technically efficient and, even more significantly, by changing the input combinations; (iii) the rankings of sustainability varied significantly across OECD countries within frontier-based environmental and ecological efficiency measures and between frontier-based measures and indicators.

The effects of linguistic factors on student performance on economics multiple choice questions

This paper proposes a framework to analyse performance on multiple choice questions with the focus on linguistic factors. Item Response Theory (IRT) is deployed to estimate ability and question difficulty levels. A logistic regression model is used to detect Differential Item Functioning questions. Probit models testify relationships between performance and linguistic factors controlling the effects of question construction and students’ background. Empirical results have important implications. The lexical density of stems affects performance. The use of non-Economics specialised vocabulary has differing impacts on the performance of students with different language backgrounds. The IRT-based ability and difficulty help explain performance variations.

On the impact of the "linguistic turn" on research in information systems

The linguistic turn within philosophy has recently gained increased attention within social sciences. It can be seen as an attempt to investigate traditional philosophical problems by analysing the linguistic expressions used for these investigations. More generally, the phenomenon of language itself must be considered because of its (constitutional) impact on the investigation of phenomena in social sciences. In order to understand the consequences of the linguistic turn, its origins in philosophy are important and will be discussed. Within social sciences the linguistic turn already had significant impact. As an example, we will therefore discuss what directions the linguistic turn enabled for organizational analysis. Information Systems as a discipline must face the consequences of the linguistic turn as well. We will discuss how the linguistic framework introduced impacts the development of knowledge management and that of managerial and organizational support systems. This example shows what different perspectives the linguistic turn can provide for investigations within Information Systems. In addition, we will briefly outline the impact of the linguistic turn with respect to methodologies in Information Systems research.

Automatic query expansion : a structural linguistic perspective

A user’s query is considered to be an imprecise description of their information need. Automatic query expansion is the process of reformulating the original query with the goal of improving retrieval effectiveness. Many successful query expansion techniques ignore information about the dependencies that exist between words in natural language. However, more recent approaches have demonstrated that by explicitly modeling associations between terms significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness can be achieved over those that ignore these dependencies. State-of-the-art dependency-based approaches have been shown to primarily model syntagmatic associations. Syntagmatic associations infer a likelihood that two terms co-occur more often than by chance. However, structural linguistics relies on both syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations to deduce the meaning of a word. Given the success of dependency-based approaches and the reliance on word meanings in the query formulation process, we argue that modeling both syntagmatic and paradigmatic information in the query expansion process will improve retrieval effectiveness. This article develops and evaluates a new query expansion technique that is based on a formal, corpus-based model of word meaning that models syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations. We demonstrate that when sufficient statistical information exists, as in the case of longer queries, including paradigmatic information alone provides significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness across a wide variety of data sets. More generally, when our new query expansion approach is applied to large-scale web retrieval it demonstrates significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness over a strong baseline system, based on a commercial search engine.

Term associations in query expansion : a structural linguistic perspective

Many successful query expansion techniques ignore information about the term dependencies that exist within natural language. However, researchers have recently demonstrated that consistent and significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness can be achieved by explicitly modelling term dependencies within the query expansion process. This has created an increased interest in dependency-based models. State-of-the-art dependency-based approaches primarily model term associations known within structural linguistics as syntagmatic associations, which are formed when terms co-occur together more often than by chance. However, structural linguistics proposes that the meaning of a word is also dependent on its paradigmatic associations, which are formed between words that can substitute for each other without effecting the acceptability of a sentence. Given the reliance on word meanings when a user formulates their query, our approach takes the novel step of modelling both syntagmatic and paradigmatic associations within the query expansion process based on the (pseudo) relevant documents returned in web search. The results demonstrate that this approach can provide significant improvements in web re- trieval effectiveness when compared to a strong benchmark retrieval system.

English in the urban environment : resources for 21st century readers

Where teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) once observed a paucity of authentic language input, public displays of written English are now proliferating. Ideas for capitalising on this abundance can be drawn from two strands of pedagogic thought: a psycholinguistic approach to conventional literacy long established in foreign, second and first language education (e.g., Teng, 2009), and a more recent and critical approach informed by diverse theoretical understandings of the ‘linguistic landscape’ (e.g., Rowland, 2013). In this paper I draw from these two approaches to suggest ways of helping EFL learners use environmental print to develop knowledge and skills required of English readers in the twenty-first century: (1) fluency in breaking the codes of English and other languages of publicly displayed text; (2) facility with making meaning as the English of these texts becomes ever more diverse in cultural, historical and contextual implication; (3) use of environmental English in contexts that range from the local to the transnational; and (4) critique of the presence of English and attendant worldviews in the urban environment (Chern & Dooley, forthcoming). The psychological concept of motivation and the complementary sociological concept of investment are at the heart of my deliberations here: realisation of the pedagogic potential of environmental print to develop literate resources requires consideration of sources of motivation in the classroom learning situation (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2011), as well as learner investment in literate practices in English (Norton, 2010).

Metacognitive instruction : global and local shifts in considering listening input

A key shift of thinking for effective learning and teaching of listening input has been seen and organized in education locally and globally. This study has probed whether metacognitive instruction through a pedagogical cycle shifts high-intermediate students' English language learning and English as a second language (ESL) teacher's teaching focus on listening input. Twenty male Iranian students with an age range of 18 to 24 received a guided methodology including metacognitive strategies (planning, monitoring, and evaluation) for a period of three months. This study has used the strategies and probed the importance of metacognitive instruction through interviewing both the teacher and the students. The results have shown that metacognitive instruction helped both the ESL teacher's and the students' shift of thinking about teaching and learning listening input. This key shift of thinking has implications globally and locally for classroom practices of listening input.

Input from the amygdala to the rat nucleus accumbens : its relationship with tyrosine hydroxylase immunoreactivity and identified neurons.

Both tyrosine hydroxylase-positive fibres from the mesolimbic dopamine system and amygdala projection fibres from the basolateral nucleus are known to terminate heavily in the nucleus accumbens. Caudal amygdala fibres travelling dorsally via the stria terminalis project densely to the nucleus accumbens shell, especially in the dopamine rich septal hook. The amygdala has been associated with the recognition of emotionally relevant stimuli while the mesolimbic dopamine system is implicated with reward mechanisms. There is behavioural and electrophysiological evidence that the amygdala input to the nucleus accumbens is modulated by the mesolimbic dopamine input, but it is not known how these pathways interact anatomically within the nucleus accumbens. Using a variety of neuroanatomical techniques including anterograde and retrograde tracing, immunocytochemistry and intracellular filling, we have demonstrated convergence of these inputs on to medium-sized spiny neurons. The terminals of the basolateral amygdala projection make asymmetrical synapses predominantly on the heads of spines which also receive on their necks or adjacent dendrites, symmetrical synaptic input from the mesolimbic dopamine system. Some of these neurons have also been identified as projection neurons, possibly to the ventral pallidum. We have shown a synaptic level how dopamine is positioned to modulate excitatory limbic input in the nucleus accumbens.

Effect of input power and gas pressure on the roughening and selective etching of SiO2/Si surfaces in reactive plasmas

We report on the application low-temperature plasmas for roughening Si surfaces which is becoming increasingly important for a number of applications ranging from Si quantum dots to cell and protein attachment for devices such as "laboratory on a chip" and sensors. It is a requirement that Si surface roughening is scalable and is a single-step process. It is shown that the removal of naturally forming SiO2 can be used to assist in the roughening of the surface using a low-temperature plasma-based etching approach, similar to the commonly used in semiconductor micromanufacturing. It is demonstrated that the selectivity of SiO2 /Si etching can be easily controlled by tuning the plasma power, working gas pressure, and other discharge parameters. The achieved selectivity ranges from 0.4 to 25.2 thus providing an effective means for the control of surface roughness of Si during the oxide layer removal, which is required for many advance applications in bio- and nanotechnology.