Fifield faces a hard road to bring Australia’s media regulations into the 21st century

With his feet barely under the desk, Communications Minister Mitch Fifield has flagged a renewed attempt to change Australia’s media laws. Given his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull’s long-standing interest in the field – dating all the way back to his work with Kerry Packer in the 1980s – Fifield can expect the new prime minister’s backing. Fifield is set to meet with media bosses as early as next week.

Identifying relevant information for emergency services from twitter in response to natural disaster

This project proposes a framework that identifies high‐value disaster-based information from social media to facilitate key decision-making processes during natural disasters. At present it is very difficult to differentiate between information that has a high degree of disaster relevance and information that has a low degree of disaster relevance. By digitally harvesting and categorising social media conversation streams automatically, this framework identifies highly disaster-relevant information that can be used by emergency services for intelligence gathering and decision-making.

How talk and interaction unfold in a digitally enabled preschool classroom

The use of mobile digital devices, such as laptops and tablets, has implications for how teachers interact with young students within the institutional context of educational settings. This article examines language and participation in a digitally enabled preschool classroom as students engage with teachers and peers. Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis are used to explicate video-recorded episodes of students (aged 3-5 years) interacting while using a laptop and a tablet. Attending to the sequential organization (when, how) and the context relevance (where) of talk and interaction, analysis shows how the intersection of interactions involving the teacher, students and digital devices, shape the ways that talk and interactions unfold. Analysis found that the teacher-student interactions were jointly arranged around a participation framework that included: 1) the teacher’s embodied action that mobilizes an accompanying action by a student, 2) allocation of turn-taking and participation while using a digital device and, 3) the affordances of the digital device in relation to the participants’ social organization. In this way, it is possible to understand not just what a digital device is or does, but the affordances of what it makes possible in constituting teachers’ and students’ social and learning relationships.

Teaching pragmatics in an EFL context: Implications for coursebook design, teaching and learning

This case study examined the use of global English language teaching coursebooks by five teachers to teach English language use to students in Thailand where English is a foreign language. Despite the complexities of English language use in Thailand, the coursebook and teachers emphasised sets of decontextualised linguistic structures to teach speaking and conversation. The students interpreted and applied the structures in different ways with varied awareness of the effects of their linguistic choices. Teachers were constrained by the coursebook, their understandings of culture, and knowledge of how to teach pragmatics highlighting implications for teacher education and coursebook design.

Identifying and addressing equivocal trouble in understanding within classroom interaction

Maintaining intersubjectivity is crucial for accomplishing coordinated social action. Although conversational repair is a recognised defence of intersubjectivity and routinely used to address ostensible sources of trouble in social interaction, it is less clear how people address more equivocal trouble. This study uses conversation analysis to examine preschool classroom interaction, focusing on practices used to identify and address such trouble. Repair is found to be a recurrent frontline practice for addressing equivocal trouble, occasioning space for further information that might enable identifying a specific trouble source. Where further information is forthcoming, a range of strategies are subsequently employed to address the trouble. Where this is not possible or does not succeed, a secondary option is to progress a broader activity-in-progress. This allows for the possibility of another opportunity to identify and address the trouble. Given misunderstandings can jeopardise interactants’ ability to mutually accomplish courses of action, these practices defend intersubjectivity against the threat of equivocal trouble.

Influence of road traffic environment and mobile phone distraction on the speed selection behaviour of young drivers

Travel speed is one of the most critical parameters for road safety; the evidence suggests that increased vehicle speed is associated with higher crash risk and injury severity. Both naturalistic and simulator studies have reported that drivers distracted by a mobile phone select a lower driving speed. Speed decrements have been argued to be a risk compensatory behaviour of distracted drivers. Nonetheless, the extent and circumstances of the speed change among distracted drivers are still not known very well. As such, the primary objective of this study was to investigate patterns of speed variation in relation to contextual factors and distraction. Using the CARRS-Q high-fidelity Advanced Driving Simulator, the speed selection behaviour of 32 drivers aged 18-26 years was examined in two phone conditions: baseline (no phone conversation) and handheld phone operation. The simulator driving route contained five different types of road traffic complexities, including one road section with a horizontal S curve, one horizontal S curve with adjacent traffic, one straight segment of suburban road without traffic, one straight segment of suburban road with traffic interactions, and one road segment in a city environment. Speed deviations from the posted speed limit were analysed using Ward’s Hierarchical Clustering method to identify the effects of road traffic environment and cognitive distraction. The speed deviations along curved road sections formed two different clusters for the two phone conditions, implying that distracted drivers adopt a different strategy for selecting driving speed in a complex driving situation. In particular, distracted drivers selected a lower speed while driving along a horizontal curve. The speed deviation along the city road segment and other straight road segments grouped into a different cluster, and the deviations were not significantly different across phone conditions, suggesting a negligible effect of distraction on speed selection along these road sections. Future research should focus on developing a risk compensation model to explain the relationship between road traffic complexity and distraction.

Australian court holds Google is responsible for linking to defamatory website

The South Australian Supreme Court this week found that Google is legally responsible when its search results link to defamatory content on the web. In this long-running case, Dr Janice Duffy has been trying for more than six years to clear her name and remove links to defamatory material when people search for her using Google. The main culprit is the US based website Ripoff Reports, where people have posted negative reviews of Dr Duffy. Under United States law, defamation is very hard to prove, and US websites are not liable for comments made by their users. Since it was not possible to get harmful or abusive comments removed from the source, Dr Duffy instead asked Google to remove the links from its search results. Google removed some of these links, but only from its Australian domain (google.com.au), and it left many of them active. This latest court decision is a big win for Dr Duffy. The court found that once Google was alerted to the defamatory material, it was then under an obligation to act to censor its search results and prevent further harm to Dr Duffy’s reputation.

We need to fund more than just science priorities for Australia’s future

Australia's Science and Research Priorities focus on activating STEM researchers (science, technology, engineering, maths). In this article in The Conversation, Professor Marcus Foth argues that we need to fund more than just science priorities for Australia’s future.

Boiler room scams destroy lives yet police blame victims

The Queensland Organised Crime Commission of Inquiry recently handed down its findings examining how organised crime has been policed in recent years. While media attention has been focused on the implications for child sexual exploitation and paedophilia, the report also made some substantial findings related to financial crimes such as investment fraud (commonly known as boiler rooms scams). Quite disturbingly, the report notes a strong victim blaming mentality that police expressed towards individuals who invested in fraudulent companies and who subsequently lost money in these boiler room scams. The attitude of the police towards boiler room victims was largely one of apathy towards the likelihood of any investigation, and of blame towards victims for not doing what was perceived to be “due diligence”. This finding illustrates several myths which are argued to exist around investment fraud victims, particularly around the concept of “due diligence”. It also feeds into the idea that victims are greedy/naïve and financially illiterate/not investment savvy. These are both problematic and largely inaccurate. Drawing on examples from my own research with fraud victims, the article will illustrate the complexity and sophistication of many boiler room schemes and demonstrate the difficulties in identifying fraudulent investment opportunities.

Les formes d’adresse dans un corpus de films français et leur traduction en finnois

The use of forms of address in French films and their Finnish translations The use of forms of address constitutes an integral part of speakers’ communicative competence. In fact, they are not only used to assign to whom the speech is addressed, but also to construct the relationship between speakers. However, the choice of a suitable form is not necessarily evident in modern, pluralistic society. By the notion form of address, I refer to pronouns of address (tu vs. vous) and different nouns of address like names, titles (Monsieur, Madame, Mademoiselle), kinship terms, occupational terms, terms of endearment and insults. The purpose of the present thesis is, first, to study the semantic and pragmatic values of forms of address in dialogues of modern French films, and, second, their translation in Finnish subtitles. It is evident that film language is not spontaneous, but only a representation of authentic speech, and that subtitles are a written version of the original spoken language. Consequently, this thesis studies spoken fictive dialogues and their written translations. The methods applied in the study are the Interactional and Pragmatic Approach as well as Translatology. The role of forms of address in an interpersonal relationship is studied with dimensions of distance and power (Brown and Gilman 1960, Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1992), whereas the pragmatic dimension permits studying in particular the use of forms of address in speech acts (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2001). The translation strategies are studied with the help of Venuti’s (1995) notions of foreignizing and domesticating strategies. The results of the thesis suggest that the pronoun use in the studied films is usually reciprocal. However, the relations of power have not disappeared, but are expressed in a more discrete manner with nouns of address (for instance vous + Docteur vs. vous + Anita). The use of the pronoun of address vous seems still to be common, but increased intimacy is expressed by accompanying familiar nouns of address like first names. The nominal forms of address accompany different speech acts, but not in a systematic manner. In a dialogue they appear usually in the first speech act, and more rarely in the response, but not in both. In addition, they have an important role in the mechanics of conversation. The translators here face multiple demands, and their translations seem mostly to be a compromise between foreignizing and domesticating strategies.

La contextualisation du discours radiophonique par des moyens prosodiques. L’exemple de cinq grands philosophes français du XXe siècle

"Radiodiskurssin kontekstualisointi prosodisin keinoin. Esimerkkinä viisi suurta ranskalaista 1900-luvun filosofia" Väitöskirja käsittelee puheen kontekstualisointia prosodisin keinoin. Toisin sanottuna työssä käsitellään sitä, miten puheen prosodiset piirteet (kuten sävelkulku, intensiteetti, tauot, kesto ja rytmi) ohjaavat puheen tulkintaa vanhastaan enemmän tutkittujen sana- ja lausemerkitysten ohella. Työssä keskitytään seitsemään prosodisesti merkittyyn kuvioon, jotka koostuvat yhden tai usean parametrin silmiinpistävistä muutoksista. Ilmiöitä käsitellään sekä niiden akustisten muotojen että tyypillisten esiintymisyhteyksien ja diskursiivisten tehtävien näkökulmasta. Aineisto koostuu radio-ohjelmista, joissa puhuu viisi suurta ranskalaista 1900-luvun filosofia: Gaston Bachelard, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty ja Jean-Paul Sartre. Ohjelmat on lähetetty eri radiokanavilla Ranskassa vuosina 1948–1973. Väitöskirjan tulokset osoittavat, että prosodisesti merkityt kuviot ovat moniulotteisia puheen ilmiöitä, joilla on keskeinen rooli sanotun kontekstualisoinnissa: ne voivat esimerkiksi nostaa tai laskea sanotun informaatioarvoa, ilmaista puhujan voimakasta tai heikkoa sitoutumista sanomaansa, ilmaista rakenteellisen kokonaisuuden jatkumista tai päättymistä, jne. Väitöskirja sisältää myös kontrastiivisia osia, joissa ilmiöitä verrataan erääseen klassisessa pianomusiikissa esiintyvään melodiseen kuvioon sekä erääseen suomen kielen prosodiseen ilmiöön. Tulokset viittaavat siihen, että tietynlaista melodista kuviota käytetään samankaltaisena jäsentämiskeinona sekä puheessa että klassisessa musiikissa. Lisäksi tulokset antavat viitteitä siitä, että tiettyjä melodisia muotoja käytetään samankaltaisten implikaatioiden luomiseen kahdessa niinkin erilaisessa kielessä kuin suomessa ja ranskassa. Yksi väitöskirjan osa käsittelee pisteen ja pilkun prosodista merkitsemistä puheessa. Tulosten mukaan pisteellä ja pilkulla on kummallakin oma suullinen prototyyppinsä: piste merkitään tyypillisesti sävelkulun laskulla ja tauolla, ja pilkku puolestaan sävelkulun nousulla ja tauolla. Merkittävimmät tulokset koskevat kuitenkin tapauksia, joissa välimerkki tulkitaan prosodisesti epätyypillisellä tavalla: sekä pisteellä että pilkulla vaikuttaisi olevan useita eri suullisia vastaavuuksia, ja välimerkkien tehtävät voivat muotoutua hyvin erilaisiksi niiden prosodisesta tulkinnasta riippuen.

Recipient v russkom razgovore : o raspredelenii funkcij mezhdu otvetami da, nu i tak

The study investigates actions by recipients in spontaneous Russian conversations by focusing on DA, NU and TAK, when they are used as responses to the main speaker's larger on-going turn. The database for the study consists of some 7 hours of spontaneous conversations. The participants of the conversations come from different parts of Russia. The use of DA, NU and TAK was analyzed by applying the method of ethnomethodological conversation analysis from the point of view of the type of the context, the sequential placement of the response and its manner of production. The particles were analyzed both in contexts in which they responded to an informing and in affective contexts. The particles NU and TAK were used by the speakers almost exclusively in informing contexts, whereas DA was the central response type in affective contexts. DA was also the most common response to information with affective implications. The information, to which the particle NU provided as response, was often unspesific and projected a spesification or explanation by its speaker as the next action. DA and TAK, by contrast, treated the information as one that could be followed and was sufficient in its local context. As a response to parenthetical information NU responded to information that was only loosely connected with the mainline of talk. The particle DA, by contrast, was used as a response to such parenthetical information, which was more crucial for the larger on-going activity. Only NU was used as a response that invited the main speaker to continue a turn that she or he had offered as possibly complete. NU was also used by the recipient after her or his own contribution as a continuer. In affective contexts, DA expressed, depending on its more spesific context, not only agreement but also other functions, such as giving up arguing or prior knowledge on the topic being discussed. In addition DA responses were used to display empathy and identification with the state of affairs expressed by the co-participant. NU, by contrast, was seldom used as a response to a turn that expressed affect. When it was used in affective contexts, it displayed agreement with the co-participant or just registered an assessment by her or him.

Intermediate Past BE : A Paradigm Reshaped With Data Drawn From HARES

In this paper, I look into a grammatical phenomenon found among speakers of the Cambridgeshire dialect of English. According to my hypothesis, the phenomenon is a new entry into the past BE verb paradigm in the English language. In my paper, I claim that the structure I have found complements the existing two verb forms, was and were, with a third verb form that I have labelled ‘intermediate past BE’. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first section, I introduce the theoretical ground for the study of variation, which is founded on empiricist principles. In variationist linguistics, the main claim is that heterogeneous language use is structured and ordered. In the last 50 years of history in modern linguistics, this claim is controversial. In the 1960s, the generativist movement spearheaded by Noam Chomsky diverted attention away from grammatical theories that are based on empirical observations. The generativists steered away from language diversity, variation and change in favour of generalisations, abstractions and universalist claims. The theoretical part of my paper goes through the main points of the variationist agenda and concludes that abandoning the concept of language variation in linguistics is harmful for both theory and methodology. In the method part of the paper, I present the Helsinki Archive of Regional English Speech (HARES) corpus. It is an audio archive that contains interviews conducted in England in the 1970s and 1980s. The interviews were done in accordance to methods used generally in traditional dialectology. The informants are mostly elderly male people who have lived in the same region throughout their lives and who have left school at an early age. The interviews are actually conversations: the interviewer allowed the informant to pick the topic of conversation to induce a maximally relaxed and comfortable atmosphere and thus allow the most natural dialect variant to emerge in the informant’s speech. In the paper, the corpus chapter introduces some of the transcription and annotation problems associated with spoken language corpora (especially those containing dialectal speech). Questions surrounding the concept of variation are present in this part of the paper too, as especially transcription work is troubled by the fundamental problem of having to describe the fluctuations of everyday speech in text. In the empirical section of the paper, I use HARES to analyse the speech of four informants, with special focus on the emergence of the intermediate past BE variant. My observations and the subsequent analysis permit me to claim that my hypothesis seems to hold. The intermediate variant occupies almost all contexts where one would expect was or were in the informants’ speech. This means that the new variant is integrated into the speakers’ grammars and exemplifies the kind of variation that is at the heart of this paper.

The SCOTS corpus and TEFL: Discovering and Using Strategies of Spoken English in Finnish Upper Secondary Schools

Suomen koulutuspolitiikasta vastaavat viranomaiset ovat reagoineet kansainvälisten kommunikaatiotarpeiden asettamiin haasteisiin ja muuttaneet yhden lukion A-tasoisen vieraan kielen kurssin sisällön vastaamaan suullisen viestinnän tarpeita. Tutkimuksessa selvitetään, miten englannin puhestrategioita voi opettaa suomalaisille lukiolaisille ja mitä metodeja on käytettävissä puhestrategioiden oppimisen arvioimiseksi. Vastaan asettamiini kysymyksiin aikaisemman tutkimuskirjallisuuden ja englannin kielen lukio-opetuksesta keräämäni aineiston avulla. Keskeisiä elementtejä tutkielmassa ovat erityisesti pragmaattinen kompetenssi ja kolme yleisen tason puhestrategiaa (keskustelun aloittaminen, oman puheenvuoron säilyttäminen sekä keskustelun ylläpitäminen). Aineistossa on mukana 65 ensimmäisen vuosiluokan lukiolaista (luokka A ja B) Helsingistä ja Espoosta. Opetusmateriaalina on käytetty SCOTS korpusta; tarkemmin määriteltynä puhetiedosto nimeltä Conversation 20: Four secondary school girls in the North East. Tiedostossa esille tulleet, kolmeen puhestrategiaan liittyvät fraasit, sanat ja rakenteet havainnollistettiin opiskelijoille mm. AntConc - konkordanssiohjelman avulla. Opiskelijat tekivät myös kirjallisia ja suullisia harjoituksia, jotka liittyivät puhestrategioihin. Neljälle vapaaehtoiselle opiskelijalle suunnattu toinen suullinen tehtävätyyppi vapaamuotoisine keskusteluineen äänitettiin, transkriboitiin ja tuloksia arvioitiin mm. eurooppalaisen viitekehyksen avulla. Lisäksi B - luokka vastasi kyselylomakkeeseen, jossa kysyttiin heidän mielipiteitään esim. hyödyllisimmästä testioppitunnista sekä heidän osallistumishalukkuudestaan uudelle pitkän englannin kahdeksannelle syventävälle kurssille. Tutkimustulokset ovat kannustavia ja osoittavat, että puhestrategioita on mahdollista opettaa jo lukiotasolla. Vaikka tutkimuksessa käytetty lähestymistapa oli opiskelijoille osittain uusi, valtaosa heistä myönsi oppineensa uutta englannin kielen keskustelurakenteista. Lisäksi vapaaehtoisten opiskelijoiden äänitetyt ja transkriboidut keskustelut tarjoavat hyvän lähtökohdan mahdolliselle jatkotutkimukselle.

The story of … the military jacket

Fashion and war don’t seem an obvious pairing, but the military jacket is a fashion staple. It may take the form of a double-breasted dress uniform with brass buttons and epaulettes, trimmed in rock star braid, or it may be a khaki combat jacket, worn with Doc Martens and a scowl. Here I explore how these two forms of the military jacket were frogmarched into fashion...