Is it all tough talking at the top? A post-structuralist analysis of the construction of gendered speaker identities of British business leaders within interview narratives

This paper uses a feminist post-structuralist approach to examine the gendered identities of a sample of British business leaders in Britain. While recent national surveys offer many material reasons why women are acutely under-represented as business leaders, the role of language is rarely addressed. This paper explores the ways in which ten senior women and men construct their sense of leadership identities through the medium of interview narratives. Drawing upon two poststructuralist models of analysis (Derrida’s 1987 theory of deconstruction and Bakhtin’s 1927/1981 concept of double-voiced discourse), the paper shows how both females and males are able to shift pragmatically between interwoven corporate discourses, which demand competing cultural allegiances from one moment to the next, allegiances constantly tested by the rapid change and uncertainty that characterise global business. While male leaders experience a relative freedom of movement between different cultural discourses, female leaders are circumscribed by negative and reductive representations of female speech and behaviour. In sum, senior women are required constantly to observe, review, police and repair their use of leadership language, which potentially undermines their confidence and authority as leaders.

Vibration analysis of a printed circuit board

The reliability of the printed circuit board assembly under dynamic environments, such as those found onboard airplanes, ships and land vehicles is receiving more attention. This research analyses the dynamic characteristics of the printed circuit board (PCB) supported by edge retainers and plug-in connectors. By modelling the wedge retainer and connector as providing simply supported boundary condition with appropriate rotational spring stiffnesses along their respective edges with the aid of finite element codes, accurate natural frequencies for the board against experimental natural frequencies are obtained. For a PCB supported by two opposite wedge retainers and a plug-in connector and with its remaining edge free of any restraint, it is found that these real supports behave somewhere between the simply supported and clamped boundary conditions and provide a percentage fixity of 39.5% more than the classical simply supported case. By using an eigensensitivity method, the rotational stiffnesses representing the boundary supports of the PCB can be updated effectively and is capable of representing the dynamics of the PCB accurately. The result shows that the percentage error in the fundamental frequency of the PCB finite element model is substantially reduced from 22.3% to 1.3%. The procedure demonstrated the effectiveness of using only the vibration test frequencies as reference data when the mode shapes of the original untuned model are almost identical to the referenced modes/experimental data. When using only modal frequencies in model improvement, the analysis is very much simplified. Furthermore, the time taken to obtain the experimental data will be substantially reduced as the experimental mode shapes are not required.In addition, this thesis advocates a relatively simple method in determining the support locations for maximising the fundamental frequency of vibrating structures. The technique is simple and does not require any optimisation or sequential search algorithm in the analysis. The key to the procedure is to position the necessary supports at positions so as to eliminate the lower modes from the original configuration. This is accomplished by introducing point supports along the nodal lines of the highest possible mode from the original configuration, so that all the other lower modes are eliminated by the introduction of the new or extra supports to the structure. It also proposes inspecting the average driving point residues along the nodal lines of vibrating plates to find the optimal locations of the supports. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate its validity. By applying to the PCB supported on its three sides by two wedge retainers and a connector, it is found that a single point constraint that would yield maximum fundamental frequency is located at the mid-point of the nodal line, namely, node 39. This point support has the effect of increasing the structure's fundamental frequency from 68.4 Hz to 146.9 Hz, or 115% higher.

Interlingual Identifiers of an L1 German speaker writing in English

Master of Arts dissertation

Speaker positioning in interpreter-mediated press conferences

This article investigates potential effects which (the recontextualisation of) interpreted discourse can have on the positioning of participants. The discursive event which forms the basis of the analysis are international press conferences which bring politicians and journalists together. The dominant question addressed is: (How) do interpreter-mediated encounters influence the positioning of participants and thus the construction of interactional and social roles? The article illustrates that methods of (critical) discourse analysis can be used to identify positioning strategies which are employed by participants in such triadic exchanges. The data come from press conferences which involve English, German, and French as source and target languages.

3D printed sensing patches with embedded polymer optical fibre Bragg gratings

The first demonstration of a polymer optical fibre Bragg grating (POFBG) embedded in a 3-D printed structure is reported. Its cyclic strain performance and temperature characteristics are examined and discussed. The sensing patch has a repeatable strain sensitivity of 0.38 pm/μepsilon. Its temperature behaviour is unstable, with temperature sensitivity values varying between 30-40 pm/°C.

Handwritten and machine-printed text discrimination using a template matching approach

We propose a novel template matching approach for the discrimination of handwritten and machine-printed text. We first pre-process the scanned document images by performing denoising, circles/lines exclusion and word-block level segmentation. We then align and match characters in a flexible sized gallery with the segmented regions, using parallelised normalised cross-correlation. The experimental results over the Pattern Recognition & Image Analysis Research Lab-Natural History Museum (PRImA-NHM) dataset show remarkably high robustness of the algorithm in classifying cluttered, occluded and noisy samples, in addition to those with significant high missing data. The algorithm, which gives 84.0% classification rate with false positive rate 0.16 over the dataset, does not require training samples and generates compelling results as opposed to the training-based approaches, which have used the same benchmark.

Embedding silica and polymer fibre Bragg gratings (FBG) in plastic 3D-printed sensing patches

This paper reports the first demonstration of a silica fibre Bragg grating (SOFBG) embedded in an FDM 3-D printed housing to yield a dual grating temperature-compensated strain sensor. We also report the first ever integration of polymer fibre Bragg grating (POFBG) within a 3-D printed sensing patch for strain or temperature sensing. The cyclic strain performance and temperature characteristics of both devices are examined and discussed. The strain sensitivities of the sensing patches were 0.40 and 0.95 pm/μϵ for SOFBG embedded in ABS, 0.38 pm/μμ for POFBG in PLA, and 0.15 pm/μμ for POFBG in ABS. The strain response was linear above a threshold and repeatable. The temperature sensitivity of the SOFBG sensing patch was found to be up to 169 pm/°C, which was up to 17 times higher than for an unembedded silica grating. Unstable temperature response POFBG embedded in PLA was reported, with temperature sensitivity values varying between 30 and 40 pm/°C.