Ventilation in a street canyon under diurnal heating conditions

To study the thermal effects on airflow in a street canyon under real heating conditions (due to diurnal solar radiation), a one-way static approach combining an urban canopy model and CFD is proposed in this paper. An urban canopy model was developed to calculate the individual temperatures of surfaces in the street canyon. The calculated surface temperature may be used as a thermal boundary for CFD simulation. The reliability of this model was validated against a field experiment in Harbin, China. Using the coupling calculation method, the wind flow and air exchange process inside an idealized street canyon was studied. The simulation results show that the thermal effect has significant impacts on the transfer process in the street canyon, especially when the approaching wind is weak. Under a real diurnal thermal forcing, the flow structure within the street canyon changes from one primary vortex to two counter-rotating vortices. The change of transfer process, induced by the buoyancy force, was determined by the thermal condition of all surfaces rather than a single one. Key words: thermal effect, street canyon, numerical simulation, transfer process, diurnal heating.

The effects of word exposure frequency and elaboration of word processing on incidental L2 vocabulary acquisition through reading

Research on incidental second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition through reading has claimed that repeated encounters with unfamiliar words and the relative elaboration of processing these words facilitate word learning. However, so far both variables have been investigated in isolation. To help close this research gap, the current study investigates the differential effects of the variables ‘word exposure frequency’ and ‘elaboration of word processing’ on the initial word learning and subsequent word retention of advanced learners of L2 English. Whereas results showed equal effects for both variables on initial word learning, subsequent word retention was more contingent on elaborate processing of form–meaning relationships than on word frequency. These results, together with those of the studies reviewed, suggest that processing words again after reading (input–output cycles) is superior to reading-only tasks. The findings have significant implications for adaptation and development of teaching materials that enhance L2 vocabulary learning.

Task design and second language performance: the effect of narrative type on learner output

This article reports on a detailed empirical study of the way narrative task design influences the oral performance of second-language (L2) learners. Building on previous research findings, two dimensions of narrative design were chosen for investigation: narrative complexity and inherent narrative structure. Narrative complexity refers to the presence of simultaneous storylines; in this case, we compared single-story narratives with dual-story narratives. Inherent narrative structure refers to the order of events in a narrative; we compared narratives where this was fixed to others where the events could be reordered without loss of coherence. Additionally, we explored the influence of learning context on performance by gathering data from two comparable groups of participants: 60 learners in a foreign language context in Teheran and 40 in an L2 context in London. All participants recounted two of four narratives from cartoon pictures prompts, giving a between-subjects design for narrative complexity and a within-subjects design for inherent narrative structure. The results show clearly that for both groups, L2 performance was affected by the design of the task: Syntactic complexity was supported by narrative storyline complexity and grammatical accuracy was supported by an inherently fixed narrative structure. We reason that the task of recounting simultaneous events leads learners into attempting more hypotactic language, such as subordinate clauses that follow, for example, while, although, at the same time as, etc. We reason also that a tight narrative structure allows learners to achieve greater accuracy in the L2 (within minutes of performing less accurately on a loosely structured narrative) because the tight ordering of events releases attentional resources that would otherwise be spent on finding connections between the pictures. The learning context was shown to have no effect on either accuracy or fluency but an unexpectedly clear effect on syntactic complexity and lexical diversity. The learners in London seem to have benefited from being in the target language environment by developing not more accurate grammar but a more diverse resource of English words and syntactic choices. In a companion article (Foster & Tavakoli, 2009) we compared their performance with native-speaker baseline data and see that, in terms of nativelike selection of vocabulary and phrasing, the learners in London are closing in on native-speaker norms. The study provides empirical evidence that L2 performance is affected by task design in predictable ways. It also shows that living within the target language environment, and presumably using the L2 in a host of everyday tasks outside the classroom, confers a distinct lexical advantage, not a grammatical one.

Community engagement and social organization: introducing concepts, policy and practical applications

This chapter provides an introductory overview of how the term ‘community’ has been conceptualized in sociological literatures, noting that there remains considerable uncertainty with regard to the way in which communities could or should be defined. The chapter examines the salience of underlying concepts of social organization that can shape and influence the extent to which programmes of engagement are likely to be successful. Drawing on recent empirical work some of the key opportunities and challenges for local government in translating the concepts into practice are considered.

Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia

The search for ever deeper relationships among the World’s languages is bedeviled by the fact that most words evolve too rapidly to preserve evidence of their ancestry beyond 5,000 to 9,000 y. On the other hand, quantitative modeling indicates that some “ultraconserved” words exist that might be used to find evidence for deep linguistic relationships beyond that time barrier. Here we use a statistical model, which takes into account the frequency with which words are used in common everyday speech, to predict the existence of a set of such highly conserved words among seven language families of Eurasia postulated to form a linguistic superfamily that evolved from a common ancestor around 15,000 y ago. We derive a dated phylogenetic tree of this proposed superfamily with a time-depth of ∼14,450 y, implying that some frequently used words have been retained in related forms since the end of the last ice age. Words used more than once per 1,000 in everyday speech were 7- to 10-times more likely to show deep ancestry on this tree. Our results suggest a remarkable fidelity in the transmission of some words and give theoretical justification to the search for features of language that might be preserved across wide spans of time and geography.

'Eden Cinema' by Marguerite Duras

Duras’s theatre work has been profoundly neglected by UK theatre academics and practitioners, and Eden Cinema has almost no performance history in Britain. My project asked three interconnected research questions: how developing the performance contributes to understanding Duras’s theatre and specifically Eden Cinema’s problems of performability; how multimedia performance emphasising mediated sound and the live body reconfigures memory, autobiography, storytelling, gender and racial identity; how to locate a performance style appropriate for Durasian narratives of displacement and death which reflect the discontinuous and mutable form of Duras’s ‘texte/film/théâtre’. Drawing on my research interests in gender, post-colonial hybridity and performed deconstruction, I focused my staging decisions on the discontinuities and ambivalences of the text. I addressed performability by avoiding the temptation to resolve the strange ellipses in the text and instead evoked the text’s imperfect and fragmented memories, and its uncertain spatial and temporal locations, by means of a fluid theatrical form. The mise-en-scène represented imagined and remembered spaces simultaneously, and co-existing historical moments. The performance style counterpointed live and mediated action and audio-visual forms. A complex through-composed soundscape, comprising voice-over, sound and music, became a key means for evoking overlapping temporalities, interconnected narratives and fragmented memories that were dispersed across the performance. The disempowerment of the mother figure and the silent indigenous servant in the text was demonstrated through their spatial centrality but physical stillness. The servant’s colonial subaltern identity was paralleled and linked with the mother’s disenfranchisement through their proxemic relationships. I elicited a performance style which evoked ‘characters’, whose being was deferred across different regimes of reality and who ‘haunted’ the stage rather than inhabited it. I developed the project further in the additional written outcomes and presentations, and the subsequent performance of Savannah Bay where problems of performability intensify until embodiment is almost erased except via voice.

The competition–performance relation: a meta-analytic review and test of the opposing processes model of competition and performance

What is the relation between competition and performance? The present research addresses this important multidisciplinary question by conducting a meta-analysis of existing empirical work and by proposing a new conceptual model—the opposing processes model of competition and performance. This model was tested by conducting an additional meta-analysis and 3 new empirical studies. The first meta-analysis revealed that there is no noteworthy relation between competition and performance. The second meta-analysis showed, in accord with the opposing processes model, that the absence of a direct effect is the result of inconsistent mediation via achievement goals: Competition prompts performance-approach goals which, in turn, facilitate performance; and competition also prompts performance-avoidance goals which, in turn, undermine performance. These same direct and mediational findings were also observed in the 3 new empirical studies (using 3 different conceptualizations of competition and attending to numerous control variables). Our findings provide both interpretational clarity regarding past research and conceptual guidance regarding future research on the competition–performance relation.

Broadly speaking: vocabulary in semantic dementia shifts towards general, semantically diverse words

One of the cardinal features of semantic dementia (SD) is a steady reduction in expressive vocabulary. We investigated the nature of this breakdown by assessing the psycholinguistic characteristics of words produced spontaneously by SD patients during an autobiographical memory interview. Speech was analysed with respect to frequency and imageability, and a recently-developed measure called semantic diversity. This measure quantifies the degree to which a word can be used in a broad range of different linguistic contexts. We used this measure in a formal exploration of the tendency for SD patients to replace specific terms with more vague and general words, on the assumption that more specific words are used in a more constrained set of contexts. Relative to healthy controls, patients were less likely to produce low-frequency, high-imageability words, and more likely to produce highly frequent, abstract words. These changes in the lexical-semantic landscape were related to semantic diversity: the highly frequent and abstract words most prevalent in the patients' speech were also the most semantically diverse. In fact, when the speech samples of healthy controls were artificially engineered such that low semantic diversity words (e.g., garage, spanner) were replaced with broader terms (e.g., place, thing), the characteristics of their speech production came to closely resemble that of SD patients. A similar simulation in which low-frequency words were replaced was less successful in replicating the patient data. These findings indicate systematic biases in the deterioration of lexical-semantic space in SD. As conceptual knowledge degrades, speech increasingly consists of general terms that can be applied in a broad range of linguistic contexts and convey less specific information.

Urban retrofitting: identifying disruptive and sustaining technologies using performative and foresight techniques

Cities, which are now inhabited by a majority of the world's population, are not only an important source of global environmental and resource depletion problems, but can also act as important centres of technological innovation and social learning in the continuing quest for a low carbon future. Planning and managing large-scale transitions in cities to deal with these pressures require an understanding of urban retrofitting at city scale. In this context performative techniques (such as backcasting and roadmapping) can provide valuable tools for helping cities develop a strategic view of the future. However, it is also important to identify ‘disruptive’ and ‘sustaining’ technologies which may contribute to city-based sustainability transitions. This paper presents research findings from the EPSRC Retrofit 2050 project, and explores the relationship between technology roadmaps and transition theory literature, highlighting the research gaps at urban/city level. The paper develops a research methodology to describe the development of three guiding visions for city-regional retrofit futures, and identifies key sustaining and disruptive technologies at city scale within these visions using foresight (horizon scanning) techniques. The implications of the research for city-based transition studies and related methodologies are discussed.

Selecting valuable information to remember: age-related differences and similarities in self-regulated learning

It is often necessary to selectively attend to important information, at the expense of less important information, especially if you know you cannot remember large amounts of information. The present study examined how younger and older adults select valuable information to study, when given unrestricted choices about how to allocate study time. Participants were shown a display of point values ranging from 1–30. Participants could choose which values to study, and the associated word was then shown. Study time, and the choice to restudy words, was under the participant's control during the 2-minute study session. Overall, both age groups selected high value words to study and studied these more than the lower value words. However, older adults allocated a disproportionately greater amount of study time to the higher-value words, and age-differences in recall were reduced or eliminated for the highest value words. In addition, older adults capitalized on recency effects in a strategic manner, by studying high-value items often but also immediately before the test. A multilevel mediation analysis indicated that participants strategically remembered items with higher point value, and older adults showed similar or even stronger strategic process that may help to compensate for poorer memory. These results demonstrate efficient (and different) metacognitive control operations in younger and older adults, which can allow for strategic regulation of study choices and allocation of study time when remembering important information. The findings are interpreted in terms of life span models of agenda-based regulation and discussed in terms of practical applications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)(journal abstract)

Achievement goals

In this chapter, we describe the achievement goal construct's origin and highlight noteworthy developments in the literature. We then use this historical overview to provide the context for several key theoretical and empirical issues surrounding the current achievement goal approach, including the precise definition of achievement goals, the possible inclusion of additional goals into the achievement goal approach, the measurement of achievement goals, the debates surrounding performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals, contextual effects on achievement goals, and the consideration of methodological expansion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)(chapter)

The description of stencilling by Gilles Filleau des Billettes: transcription and translation

This article presents the description of stencilling by Gilles Filleau des Billettes. The description sets out a method for stencilling letters, words, and texts, and specifies equipment for doing the work; it forms the basis for a reconstruction of the equipment and method, which is presented in a parallel article in this volume of Typography papers (see E. Kindel, 'A reconstruction of stencilling based on the description by Gilles Filleau des Billettes', Typography papers, 9, pp. 28–65). The original French text, approximately 10,000 words in length, is here transcribed and accompanied by a parallel English translation. Introductory notes on the preparation of both texts are provided; images of stencil letters found among the papers of Sébastien Truchet, Des Billettes’s colleague, are shown in an appendix.

From Rio to Copenhagen: multilateral agreements, disagreements and situated actions

Governing climate change is arguably one of the most complex problems, environmental or otherwise, that the global community has had to contend with. This chapter highlights the innovations in governance that have characterized the global climate change regime as it sought to respond to and manage these complexities, political imperatives and competing interests. We suggest that the key contestations and innovations within climate governance can be understood in terms of four themes/questions all of which relate to issues of justice and equity.

Concessionary nature of public-private partnerships in Russia and Kazakhstan: a critical review

This article provides a critical overview of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in Russia and Kazakhstan and examines the rationale underpinning such partnerships. The analysis discusses the reasons why governments in Russia and Kazakhstan focus principally on concessions as a form of PPP and goes on to provide a critical assessment of the key approaches and situational factors relating to concessions in these two countries. The article finds that external globalization impulses pressed Russia and Kazakhstan to align their policies and institutions with western orthodoxy and perceived international best practice. An ever-increasing emphasis on use of PPPs has been a key feature of this alignment. However, the governments of Russia and Kazakhstan have increasingly resorted to concessions as progress with the development and implementation of Western style PPP models has stalled. This article concludes that the governments of Russia and Kazakhstan have demonstrated an overly optimistic approach to PPP and as a result may have substantially understated their overall concessional risks and costs. Features of Russian and Kazakhstani PPP arrangements such as ambiguity in output specification and extensive reliance on government subsidies, combined with lack of expertise of private partners, may significantly decrease concession benefits.

Effective interventions: 25 years outside the mainstream

25 years ago when the Durham conferences were in full swing, I presented results of investigations on language and behaviour in autism. I tentatively proposed that early language in autism might tell us about the cognitive skills of people with ASD and the behaviour might lead to greater understanding of which brain systems might be affected. In this presentation, I will update these topics and present a summary of other work I have been involved with in attempting to improve the lives of people with autism and their families. Data on three people with autism at the early stages of speech development showed an unusual pattern of learning colour and number names early. One possibility was that this skill represented a sign of weak central coherence – they only attended to one dimension. Colleagues of mine were equally puzzled so we tried to find out if my results could be replicated – they were not (see Schafer, Williams & Smith, 2014). Instead we found this pattern was also seen in Down Syndrome, but that early vocabulary in autism was associated with low Colorado Meaningfulness at least in comprehension. The Colorado Meaningfulness of a word is a measure of how many words can be associated with it and often involve extensive use of context. Our data suggest that the number of contexts in which a particular word can appear has a role in determining vocabulary in ASD which is consistent with the weak central coherence theory of autism. In the course of this work I also came across a group of young people with autism who appeared to have a written vocabulary but not a spoken one. It seems possible that print might be a medium of communication when speech is not. Repetitive behaviour in autism remains a mystery. We can use functional analysis to determine why the behaviour occurs, but a worryingly large percentage of behaviours are described as being internally driven or sensory reinforced. What does that mean in terms of brain activity – could it be system analogous to epilepsy, where brain activity becomes inappropriately synchronised? At the moment I cannot claim to have solved this problem, but if sensation is a driver then sensory interventions should make a difference. Data from a recent study will be presented to suggest that for some individuals this is the case. Social behaviour remains the key however, and it remains to be seen whether it is possible for social behaviour to be aided. One route that has potential is direct teaching of skills through drama and working with others who do not have social difficulties of the same type. The picture is complicated by changes in social skills with age and experience, but the failure of people with ASD to interact when in settings of social contact is little researched.