Typing your mind away. Comparing keylogged tasks with the Task Segment Framework

One of the main process features under study in Cognitive Translation & Interpreting Studies (CTIS) is the chronological unfolding of the tasks. The analyses of time spans in translation have been conceived in two ways: (1) studying those falling between text units of different sizes: words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs; (2) setting arbitrary time span thresholds to explore where do they fall in the text, whether between text units or not. Writing disfluencies may lead to comprehensive insights into the cognitive activities involved in typing while translating. Indeed, long time spans are often taken as hints that cognitive resources have been subtracted from typing and devoted to other activities, such as planning, evaluating, etc. This exploratory, pilot study combined both approaches to seek potential general tendencies and contrasts in informants’ inferred mental processes when performing different writing tasks, through the analysis of their behaviors, as keylogged. The study tasks were retyping, monolingual free writing, translation, revision and a multimodal task—namely, monolingual text production based on an infographic leaflet. Task logs were chunked, and shorter time spans, including those within words, were analyzed following the Task Segment Framework (Muñoz & Apfelthaler, in press). Finally, time span analysis was combined with the analysis of the texts as to their lexical density, type-token ratio and word frequency. Several previous results were confirmed, and some others were surprising. Time spans in free writing were longer between paragraphs and sentences, possibly hinting at planning and, in translation, between clauses and words, suggesting more cognitive activities at these levels. On the other hand, the infographic was expected to facilitate the writing process, but most time spans were longer than in both free writing and translation. Results of the multimodal task and some other results suggest venues for further research.

Comparison of the seismic performances of a steel frame building equipped with different geometrical configurations of Crescent Shaped Braces

The Crescent Shaped Brace (CSB) is a new simple steel hysteretic device proposed to be used as an enhanced diagonal brace in framed structures. The CSB allows the practical designer to choose the lateral stiffness independently from the yield strength of the device, due to its peculiar ad-hoc shape. In the present thesis, a complete study referring to different CSB configurations has been presented. After the validation of the hysteretic capacities of the Crescent Shaped Braces, the seismic concept of the "enhanced first story isolation" system has been proposed within the PBSD. It relies on the total separation between the Vertical Resisting System (VRS) and the Horizontal Resisting System (HRS) in order to attain a certain objective curve of the structure. An applicative example has been studied following this concept and exploiting the advantages of the CSBs as seismic dissipative devices used for the HRS. Then several geometrical configurations called Single CSB system, Single 2 CSB system, Double CSB system, Coupled CSB system, Coupled with high length CSB system, and the final one was Cross bracing system have been introduced and modelled with SAP2000 and the results have been compared.