Txtng as a replacement for standard written English : an attitude survey based on Age and Gender

Text messaging is a new form of writing, brought about by technological development in the last couple of decades. Mobile phone usage has increased rapidly worldwide and texting is now part of many people's everyday communcation. A large number of users send or receive texts which include some abbreviations and shortenings, commonly referred to as textspeak. This novel linguistic phenomenon is perceived by some with indifference and by others with aggravation. The following study examines attitudes towards this linguistic change from a gender and age perspective. The comparison between two groups show that the most conservative and least positive to change are young women. The analysis and discussion around this focuses on power, prestige and patterns.

The Concept of ’Selling/Buying’ in the Russian Linguistic Picture of the World : from standard to sub-standard

The thesis belongs to the field of lexical semantics studies, associated with describing the Russian linguistic world-image. The research focuses on the universal situation of purchase and sale as reflected in the Russian lexical standard and sub-standard. The work deals also with subjects related to the sphere of social linguistics: the social stratification of the language, the structure of sub-standard, etc. The thesis is a contribution to the description of the Russian linguistic world-image as well as to the further elaboration of the conceptional analysis method. The results are applicable in teaching Russian as a foreign language, particularly in lexis and Russian culture and mentality studies.

First-principle data-driven models for assessment of motor disorders in Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is an increasing neurological disorder in an aging society. The motor and non-motor symptoms of PD advance with the disease progression and occur in varying frequency and duration. In order to affirm the full extent of a patient’s condition, repeated assessments are necessary to adjust medical prescription. In clinical studies, symptoms are assessed using the unified Parkinson’s disease rating scale (UPDRS). On one hand, the subjective rating using UPDRS relies on clinical expertise. On the other hand, it requires the physical presence of patients in clinics which implies high logistical costs. Another limitation of clinical assessment is that the observation in hospital may not accurately represent a patient’s situation at home. For such reasons, the practical frequency of tracking PD symptoms may under-represent the true time scale of PD fluctuations and may result in an overall inaccurate assessment. Current technologies for at-home PD treatment are based on data-driven approaches for which the interpretation and reproduction of results are problematic.  The overall objective of this thesis is to develop and evaluate unobtrusive computer methods for enabling remote monitoring of patients with PD. It investigates first-principle data-driven model based novel signal and image processing techniques for extraction of clinically useful information from audio recordings of speech (in texts read aloud) and video recordings of gait and finger-tapping motor examinations. The aim is to map between PD symptoms severities estimated using novel computer methods and the clinical ratings based on UPDRS part-III (motor examination). A web-based test battery system consisting of self-assessment of symptoms and motor function tests was previously constructed for a touch screen mobile device. A comprehensive speech framework has been developed for this device to analyze text-dependent running speech by: (1) extracting novel signal features that are able to represent PD deficits in each individual component of the speech system, (2) mapping between clinical ratings and feature estimates of speech symptom severity, and (3) classifying between UPDRS part-III severity levels using speech features and statistical machine learning tools. A novel speech processing method called cepstral separation difference showed stronger ability to classify between speech symptom severities as compared to existing features of PD speech. In the case of finger tapping, the recorded videos of rapid finger tapping examination were processed using a novel computer-vision (CV) algorithm that extracts symptom information from video-based tapping signals using motion analysis of the index-finger which incorporates a face detection module for signal calibration. This algorithm was able to discriminate between UPDRS part III severity levels of finger tapping with high classification rates. Further analysis was performed on novel CV based gait features constructed using a standard human model to discriminate between a healthy gait and a Parkinsonian gait. The findings of this study suggest that the symptom severity levels in PD can be discriminated with high accuracies by involving a combination of first-principle (features) and data-driven (classification) approaches. The processing of audio and video recordings on one hand allows remote monitoring of speech, gait and finger-tapping examinations by the clinical staff. On the other hand, the first-principles approach eases the understanding of symptom estimates for clinicians. We have demonstrated that the selected features of speech, gait and finger tapping were able to discriminate between symptom severity levels, as well as, between healthy controls and PD patients with high classification rates. The findings support suitability of these methods to be used as decision support tools in the context of PD assessment.

A simplified heat pump model for use in solar plus heat pump system simulation studies

Solar plus heat pump systems are often very complex in design, with sometimes special heat pump arrangements and control. Therefore detailed heat pump models can give very slow system simulations and still not so accurate results compared to real heat pump performance in a system. The idea here is to start from a standard measured performance map of test points for a heat pump according to EN 14825 and then determine characteristic parameters for a simplified correlation based model of the heat pump. By plotting heat pump test data in different ways including power input and output form and not only as COP, a simplified relation could be seen. By using the same methodology as in the EN 12975 QDT part in the collector test standard it could be shown that a very simple model could describe the heat pump test data very accurately, by identifying 4 parameters in the correlation equation found. © 2012 The Authors.