Authority in the classroom: dictionaries and corpora, COBUILD and the Bank of English

Language learners ask a variety of questions about words and their meanings and uses: “What does X mean? What is the word for X in English? Can you say X? When do you use X and when do you use Y (e.g. synonyms, grammatical structures, prepositional choices, variant phrases, etc)?”

The science and technology of corpus, and corpus for science and technology

Corpus Linguistics is a young discipline. The earliest work was done in the 1960s, but corpora only began to be widely used by lexicographers and linguists in the late 1980s, by language teachers in the late 1990s, and by language students only very recently. This course in corpus linguistics was held at the Departamento de Linguistica Aplicada, E.T.S.I. de Minas, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid from June 15-19 1998. About 45 teachers registered for the course. 30% had PhDs in linguistics, 20% in literature, and the rest were doctorandi or qualified English teachers. The course was designed to introduce the use of corpora and other computational resources in teaching and research, with special reference to scientific and technological discourse in English. Each participant had a computer networked with the lecturer’s machine, whose display could be projected onto a large screen. Application programs were loaded onto the central server, and telnet and a web browser were available. COBUILD gave us permission to access the 323 million word Bank of English corpus, Mike Scott allowed us to use his Wordsmith Tools software, and Tim Johns gave us a copy of his MicroConcord program.

The knowledge competitiveness of regional economies: conceptualisation and measurement

Whereas the competitive advantage of firms can arise from size and position within their industry as well as physical assets, the pattern of competition in advanced economies has increasingly come to favour those firms that can mobilise knowledge and technological skills to create novelty in their products. At the same time, regions are attracting growing attention as an economic unit of analysis, with firms increasingly locating their functions in select regions within the global space. This article introduces the concept of knowledge competitiveness, defined as an economy’s knowledge capacity, capability and sustainability, and the extent to which this knowledge is translated into economic value and transferred into the wealth of the citizens. The article discusses the way in which the knowledge competitiveness of regions is measured and further introduces the World Knowledge Competitiveness Index, which is the first composite and relative measure of the knowledge competitiveness of the globe’s best performing regions.

A mean field theory of coded CDMA systems

We present a mean field theory of code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems with error-control coding. On the basis of the relation between the free energy and mutual information, we obtain an analytical expression of the maximum spectral efficiency of the coded CDMA system, from which a mean field description of the coded CDMA system is provided in terms of a bank of scalar Gaussian channels whose variances in general vary at different code symbol positions. Regular low-density parity-check (LDPC)-coded CDMA systems are also discussed as an example of the coded CDMA systems.

The extent and impact of outsourcing:evidence from Germany

The authors use data from several sources, including plant-level data from the manufacturing sector in Germany, to expand the literature on outsourcing. They find that, in Germany, the extent of outsourcing among manufacturing industries is higher than among service industries and that the outsourcing intensity of these industries did not change much between 1995 and 2005. They also find a statistically significantly positive impact of industry-level outsourcing intensity on German plant-level labor productivity for both 2000 and 2005. The estimated economic impact of outsourcing on plant-level productivity is also fairly significant.