A Closer Look at the Factors that Affect Misdemeanor Offenders

This study examines the common belief that misdemeanor offences are usually committed by individuals from lower socio-economic classes. 1 suggest that this is a misconception and that individuals from all classes commit misdemeanors. The data are from the Monitoring the Future: A Continuing Study of American Youth (12thGrade Survey), 2000-2008 (University of Michigan. Institute for Social Research Survey Research Center). I will focus on 12th grade students from the years 2000 to 2008. For the purposes of this study, a misdemeanor is less severe than a felony and includes such crimes as disorderly conduct, shoplifting, public drunkenness, or minor assault. In addition, conviction for a misdemeanor usually results in a fine or imprisonment in a jail for less than a year. I will examine evidence tor the common belief about the characteristics of misdemeanor offenders and explore other influences on those who commit misdemeanors. This research shows that family relationships, the importance of religion to the respondent, and race have an effect on whether an individual commits a misdemeanor. The results of this study »"~'-10'."""'~ that other factors, besides social class, may be important for understanding misdemeanor activity.

The History of the German-Russian Colony in Lincoln

Standing at the corner of Tenth and O streets in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, any week-day morning between 7:30 and 8 o'clock, you may see pass by you from ten to twenty women with little black woolen shawls on their heads. Ask any citizen who they are, and ninety-nine times in one hundred he will tell you they are "Russians" who live down on the bottoms, that they are going out into the offices and homes to wash and scrub and clean house, and that their husbands are street laborers or work for the railroad. He may then grow confidential and tell you that he "has no use for these people", that "they are only half human", and that he "would just as soon see the Chinese come here as those people". As a matter of fact the greater part of his information is incorrect, partly through race prejudice but chiefly through ignorance of their history. These people, of whom there are about 4,000 in the city (Including "beet fielders"), are Germans, not Russians: they are Teutons, not Slavs; they are Lutheran and Reformed, not Greek Catholics. To be sure they and their ancestors lived in Russia for over one hundred years and they came here directly from the realm of the Czar whoso bona fide citizens they were—but they never spoke the Russian language, never embraced the Greek religion, never intermarried with the Russians, and many of their children never saw a Russian until they left their native village for the new home in America. They despise being called "Russians" just as an Italian resents "Dago"; a Jew, "Sheeny"; and a German, "Dutchman". Ask them where they came from and most of the children and not a few of the grown people will say, "Germany". If you pursue your questioning as to what part of Germany, they will tell you "Saratov" or "Samara" - two governments in the eastern part of Russia on the lower course of the Volga river. The misconceptions concerning the desirability of these German-Russians as citizens arise from their unprogressiveness as compared with those Germans who come to us directly from the mother country. During their century's sojourn in Russia they have been out of the main current of civilization, a mere eddy in the stream of progress. They present a concrete example of arrested development, The characteristics which differentiate them from other Germans are not due to an inherent lack of capacity but to different environment. Notwithstanding this, the German- Russians have some admirable qualities. They bring us large stores of physical energy and an almost unlimited capacity for work. The majority of them are literate although the amount of their education is limited. They are thrifty and independent, almost never applying for public aid. They are law abiding, their chief offenses being those which are traceable to their communal life in Russia. They are extremely religious, all their social as well as spiritual life being bound up in the church which they support right royally. To be sure, the saloon gets their vote (the prohibition vote among them is increasing); but "was not the first miracle that Christ performed the turning of water into wine? If they would shut up the shows (theaters), they wouldn't need to shut up the saloons". The object of this paper is to give the historical setting in which the German-Russians have lived as one means to a better understanding and appreciation of them by our own citizens.

Speech Graphs Provide a Quantitative Measure of Thought Disorder in Psychosis

Background: Psychosis has various causes, including mania and schizophrenia. Since the differential diagnosis of psychosis is exclusively based on subjective assessments of oral interviews with patients, an objective quantification of the speech disturbances that characterize mania and schizophrenia is in order. In principle, such quantification could be achieved by the analysis of speech graphs. A graph represents a network with nodes connected by edges; in speech graphs, nodes correspond to words and edges correspond to semantic and grammatical relationships. Methodology/Principal Findings: To quantify speech differences related to psychosis, interviews with schizophrenics, manics and normal subjects were recorded and represented as graphs. Manics scored significantly higher than schizophrenics in ten graph measures. Psychopathological symptoms such as logorrhea, poor speech, and flight of thoughts were grasped by the analysis even when verbosity differences were discounted. Binary classifiers based on speech graph measures sorted schizophrenics from manics with up to 93.8% of sensitivity and 93.7% of specificity. In contrast, sorting based on the scores of two standard psychiatric scales (BPRS and PANSS) reached only 62.5% of sensitivity and specificity. Conclusions/Significance: The results demonstrate that alterations of the thought process manifested in the speech of psychotic patients can be objectively measured using graph-theoretical tools, developed to capture specific features of the normal and dysfunctional flow of thought, such as divergence and recurrence. The quantitative analysis of speech graphs is not redundant with standard psychometric scales but rather complementary, as it yields a very accurate sorting of schizophrenics and manics. Overall, the results point to automated psychiatric diagnosis based not on what is said, but on how it is said.

Mini-Mental State Examination sentence writing among community-dwelling elderly adults in Brazil: text fluency and grammar complexity

Background: In normal aging, the decrease in the syntactic complexity of written production is usually associated with cognitive deficits. This study was aimed to analyze the quality of older adults' textual production indicated by verbal fluency (number of words) and grammatical complexity (number of ideas) in relation to gender, age, schooling, and cognitive status. Methods: From a probabilistic sample of community-dwelling people aged 65 years and above (n = 900), 577 were selected on basis of their responses to the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) sentence writing, which were submitted to content analysis; 323 were excluded as they left the item blank or performed illegible or not meaningful responses. Education adjusted cut-off scores for the MMSE were used to classify the participants as cognitively impaired or unimpaired. Total and subdomain MMSE scores were computed. Results: 40.56% of participants whose answers to the MMSE sentence were excluded from the analyses had cognitive impairment compared to 13.86% among those whose answers were included. The excluded participants were older and less educated. Women and those older than 80 years had the lowest scores in the MMSE. There was no statistically significant relationship between gender, age, schooling, and textual performance. There was a modest but significant correlation between number of words written and the scores in the Language subdomain. Conclusions: Results suggest the strong influence of schooling and age over MMSE sentence performance. Failing to write a sentence may suggest cognitive impairment, yet, instructions for the MMSE sentence, i.e. to produce a simple sentence, may limit its clinical interpretation.

Advérbios modalizadores discursivos, advérbios de comentário avaliativos ou palavras modais?: um estudo comparativo das descrições gramaticais do item lexical advérbio em português e alemão

Este artigo apresenta contrastivamente os diferentes tipos de categorização gramatical do item lexical advérbio em uma gramática brasileira e em duas alemãs. O objetivo é apontar a complexidade de descrição do advérbio em uma classe única. A característica heterogeneidade do advérbio é exemplificada por três tipos de advérbio: advérbios modalizadores discursivos (CASTILHO 2010), advérbios de comentário (DUDEN 2006) e palavras modais (HELBIG & BUSCHA 2001).

The secrets of publishing your article in Journal of Geophysical Research (Oceans)

[EN] The editorial and review processes along the road to publication are described in general terms. The construction of a well-prepared article and the manner in which authors may maximise the chances of success at each stage of the process towards final publication are explored. The most common errors and ways of avoiding them are outlined. Typical problems facing an author writing in English as a second language, including the need for grammatical precision and appropriate style, are discussed. Additionally, the meaning of plagiarism, self-plagiarism and duplicate publication is explored. Critical steps in manuscript preparation and response to reviews are examined. Finally, the relation between writing and reviewing is outlined, and it is shown how becoming a good reviewer helps in becoming a successful author

¿Cuán gramaticalmente complejos son los títulos de los artículos científicos en las ciencias naturales?

[EN]This paper examines a corpus of 150 titles of research articles published between 2010 and 2013 in Anglo-American natural sciences journals (physics, chemistry and biology) in order to determine their lexical density and grammatical and morphosyntactic features. Towards that end, the frequency of present and past participles, prepositions, coordinating and subordinate conjunctions, and the frequency and length of compound words was recorded in each title. The total number of content and function words was also recorded so as to determine title lexical density. ANOVA tests were applied in order to assess whether statistically significant differences in the frequency of the above mentioned variables were detected within and across disciplines and in the whole corpus.

Frecuencia de los formantes de las vocales medias en sílaba final de palabra con elisión de -/s/: un estudio con materiales de la norma culta de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

[ES]El propósito de este artículo es comprobar si la supresión de -/s/ final de palabra condiciona la articulación de las vocales medias pronunciadas por hablantes con estudios universitarios de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Para ello, no solo se calculan las frecuencias de los formantes de /e/ y /o/ y se establecen sus campos de dispersión, sino que, además, se examina si la información gramatical de la consonante elidida o los factores sexo y edad pueden influir en la altura frecuencial de los formantes.

CLIL materials in Secondary Education: focusing on the language of instruction in the subject area of Mathematics

[EN]Applying a CLIL methodological approach marks a shift in emphasis from language learning based on linguistic form and grammatical progression to a more ‘language acquisition’ one which takes account language functions. In this article we will study the elements of the “language of instruction” of the area of Maths in Secondary Education, by focusing on the analysis of the communicative functions, and the lexical and the cultural items present in the textbook in use. Our aim is to present the CLIL teacher with the linguistic and didactic implications that he or she should take into consideration when implementing the bilingual syllabuses with their students. In order to do that, we will present our conclusions emphasizing the need for coordination in different content areas, linguistic and communicative contents, between the foreign language teacher and the CLIL subject one.

Language and Embodiment: sensory-motor and linguistic-social experience. Evidence on sentence comprehension

In this work I address the study of language comprehension in an “embodied” framework. Firstly I show behavioral evidence supporting the idea that language modulates the motor system in a specific way, both at a proximal level (sensibility to the effectors) and at the distal level (sensibility to the goal of the action in which the single motor acts are inserted). I will present two studies in which the method is basically the same: we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: hand action vs. foot action vs. mouth action) and the effector by which participants had to respond (hand vs. foot vs. mouth; dominant hand vs. non-dominant hand). Response times analyses showed a specific modulation depending on the kind of sentence: participants were facilitated in the task execution (sentence sensibility judgment) when the effector they had to use to respond was the same to which the sentences referred. Namely, during language comprehension a pre-activation of the motor system seems to take place. This activation is analogous (even if less intense) to the one detectable when we practically execute the action described by the sentence. Beyond this effector specific modulation, we also found an effect of the goal suggested by the sentence. That is, the hand effector was pre-activated not only by hand-action-related sentences, but also by sentences describing mouth actions, consistently with the fact that to execute an action on an object with the mouth we firstly have to bring it to the mouth with the hand. After reviewing the evidence on simulation specificity directly referring to the body (for instance, the kind of the effector activated by the language), I focus on the specific properties of the object to which the words refer, particularly on the weight. In this case the hypothesis to test was if both lifting movement perception and lifting movement execution are modulated by language comprehension. We used behavioral and kinematics methods, and we manipulated the linguistic stimuli (the kind of sentence: the lifting of heavy objects vs. the lifting of light objects). To study the movement perception we measured the correlations between the weight of the objects lifted by an actor (heavy objects vs. light objects) and the esteems provided by the participants. To study the movement execution we measured kinematics parameters variance (velocity, acceleration, time to the first peak of velocity) during the actual lifting of objects (heavy objects vs. light objects). Both kinds of measures revealed that language had a specific effect on the motor system, both at a perceptive and at a motoric level. Finally, I address the issue of the abstract words. Different studies in the “embodied” framework tried to explain the meaning of abstract words The limit of these works is that they account only for subsets of phenomena, so results are difficult to generalize. We tried to circumvent this problem by contrasting transitive verbs (abstract and concrete) and nouns (abstract and concrete) in different combinations. The behavioral study was conducted both with German and Italian participants, as the two languages are syntactically different. We found that response times were faster for both the compatible pairs (concrete verb + concrete noun; abstract verb + abstract noun) than for the mixed ones. Interestingly, for the mixed combinations analyses showed a modulation due to the specific language (German vs. Italian): when the concrete word precedes the abstract one responses were faster, regardless of the word grammatical class. Results are discussed in the framework of current views on abstract words. They highlight the important role of developmental and social aspects of language use, and confirm theories assigning a crucial role to both sensorimotor and linguistic experience for abstract words.

The notion of equivalence and lexical cohesion in the translation of political speeches

Abstract This dissertation investigates the notion of equivalence with particular reference to lexical cohesion in the translation of political speeches. Lexical cohesion poses a particular challenge to the translators of political speeches and thus preserving lexical cohesion elements as one of the major elements of cohesion is undoubtedly crucial to their translation equivalence. We rely on Halliday’s (1994) classification of lexical cohesion which comprises: repetition, synonymy, antonymy, meronymy and hyponymy. Other traditional models of lexical cohesion are examined. We include Grammatical Parallelism for its role in creating textual semantic unity which is what cohesion is all about. The study shed light on the function of lexical cohesion elements as rhetorical device. The study also deals with lexical problems resulting from the transfer of lexical cohesion elements from the SL into the TL, which is often beset by many problems that most often result from the differences between languages. Three key issues are identified as being fundamental to equivalence and lexical cohesion in the translation of political speeches: sociosemiotic approach, register analysis, rhetoric, and poetic function. The study also investigates the lexical cohesion elements in the translation of political speeches from English into Arabic, Italian and French in relation to ideology, and its control, through bias and distortion. The findings are discussed, implications examined and topics for further research suggested.

Numeralklassifikatoren im Thai

Wie viele andere Sprachen Ost- und Südostasiens ist das Thai eine numerusneutrale Sprache, in der ein Nomen lediglich das Konzept benennt und keinen Hinweis auf die Anzahl der Objekte liefert. Um Nomina im Thai zählen zu können, ist der Klassifikator (Klf) nötig, der die Objekte anhand ihrer semantischen Schlüsseleigenschaft herausgreift und individualisiert. Neben der Klassifikation stellt die Individualisierung die Hauptfunktion des Klf dar. Weitere Kernfunktionen des Klf außerhalb des Zählkontextes sind die Markierung der Definitheit, des Numerus sowie des Kontrasts. Die wichtigsten neuen Ergebnisse dieser Arbeit, die sowohl die Ebenen der Grammatik und Semantik als auch die der Logik und Pragmatik integriert, sind folgende: Im Thai kann der Klf sowohl auf der Element- als auch auf der Mengenebene agieren. In der Verbindung mit einem Demonstrativ kann der Klf auch eine pluralische Interpretation hervorrufen, wenn er auf eine als pluralisch präsupponierte Gesamtmenge referiert oder die Gesamtmenge in einer Teil-Ganzes-Relation individualisiert. In einem Ausdruck, der bereits eine explizite Zahlangabe enthält, bewirkt die Klf-Demonstrativ-Konstruktion eine Kontrastierung von Mengen mit gleichen Eigenschaften. Wie auch der Individualbegriff besitzt der Klf Intension und Extension. Intension und Extension von Thai-Klf verhalten sich umgekehrt proportional, d.h. je spezifischer der Inhalt eines Klf ist, desto kleiner ist sein Umfang. Der Klf signalisiert das Schlüsselmerkmal, das mit der Intension des Nomens der Identifizierung des Objekts dient. Der Klf individualisiert das Nomen, indem er Teilmengen quantifiziert. Er kann sich auf ein Objekt, eine bestimmte Anzahl von Objekten oder auf alle Objekte beziehen. Formal logisch lassen sich diese Funktionen mithilfe des Existenz- und des Allquantors darstellen. Auch die Nullstelle (NST) läßt sich formal logisch darstellen. Auf ihren jeweiligen Informationsgehalt reduziert, ergeben sich für Klf und NST abhängig von ihrer Positionierung verschiedene Informationswerte: Die Opposition von Klf und NST bewirkt in den Fragebögen ausschließlich skalare Q-Implikaturen, die sich durch die Informationsformeln in Form einer Horn-Skala darstellen lassen. In einem sich aufbauenden Kontext transportieren sowohl Klf als auch NST in der Kontextmitte bekannte Informationen, wodurch Implikaturen des M- bzw. I-Prinzips ausgelöst werden. Durch die Verbindung der Informationswerte mit den Implikaturen des Q-, M- und I-Prinzips lässt sich anhand der Positionierung direkt erkennen, wann der Klf die Funktion der Numerus-, der Definitheits- oder der Kontrast-Markierung erfüllt.

Machine-learning methods for structure prediction of β-barrel membrane proteins

Different types of proteins exist with diverse functions that are essential for living organisms. An important class of proteins is represented by transmembrane proteins which are specifically designed to be inserted into biological membranes and devised to perform very important functions in the cell such as cell communication and active transport across the membrane. Transmembrane β-barrels (TMBBs) are a sub-class of membrane proteins largely under-represented in structure databases because of the extreme difficulty in experimental structure determination. For this reason, computational tools that are able to predict the structure of TMBBs are needed. In this thesis, two computational problems related to TMBBs were addressed: the detection of TMBBs in large datasets of proteins and the prediction of the topology of TMBB proteins. Firstly, a method for TMBB detection was presented based on a novel neural network framework for variable-length sequence classification. The proposed approach was validated on a non-redundant dataset of proteins. Furthermore, we carried-out genome-wide detection using the entire Escherichia coli proteome. In both experiments, the method significantly outperformed other existing state-of-the-art approaches, reaching very high PPV (92%) and MCC (0.82). Secondly, a method was also introduced for TMBB topology prediction. The proposed approach is based on grammatical modelling and probabilistic discriminative models for sequence data labeling. The method was evaluated using a newly generated dataset of 38 TMBB proteins obtained from high-resolution data in the PDB. Results have shown that the model is able to correctly predict topologies of 25 out of 38 protein chains in the dataset. When tested on previously released datasets, the performances of the proposed approach were measured as comparable or superior to the current state-of-the-art of TMBB topology prediction.

Catálogo y estudio de las gramáticas de italiano para hispanohablantes: siglos XVIII y XIX

El objetivo de la presente investigación, el catálogo y estudio de las gramáticas de italiano destinadas a hispanohablantes de los siglos XVIII y XIX, se encuadra en el macrosector gramaticográfico de la historiografía lingüística, en el cual el estudio de las gramáticas de las lenguas dirigidas a hablantes nativos y a hablantes extranjeros, con los consiguientes cruces y trasvases de tradiciones gramaticales, es de significativo interés como destacan: (i) las tesis doctorales defendidas en los últimos quince años; (ii) los proyectos de investigación dirigidos y coordinados por prestigiosos estudiosos del sector; (iii) los congresos organizados para destacar y compartir las principales actualizaciones en torno a los estudios gramaticográficos; y (iv) las publicaciones que surgen de los tres puntos anteriores. El estudio presenta dos partes centrales: la primera (constituida por los capítulos 2 y 3) es la de catálogo y estudio de las diecinueve gramáticas que conforman el corpus en base a ocho áreas descriptivas (1. información catalográfica, 2. autor, 3. editor, 4. hiperestructura, 5. elementos peritextuales, gramaticales y didácticos, 6. variedad de textos y su secuencia didáctica, 7. caracterización, fuentes e influencias, y 8. localización); la segunda (capítulo 4) es la de estudio gramaticográfico de conjunto de los datos más relevantes de las areas de estudio utilizadas en las dos primeras partes. De este modo, daremos un panorama de conjunto sobre (i) la cronología de las obras y sus ediciones y rempresiones; (ii) la nacionalidad, profesión, condición religiosa, etc. de autores; (iii) la geografía de ediciones y editores; (iv) la descripción hiperestructural de las obras; (v) la estructura de los elementos peritextuales; (vi) las partes gramaticales y elementos que las componen; (vii) el verbo: definiciones y paradigma verbal; (vii) los elementos didácticos; (viii) las líneas de descripción gramatical; (ix) la localización de las gramáticas en las bibliotecas españolas.

Traduzione tecnica e internazionalizzazione d'impresa: Il caso di Technologica S.r.l.

This dissertation is part of the Language Toolkit project which is a collaboration between the School of Foreign Languages and Literature, Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna, Forlì campus, and the Chamber of Commerce of Forlì-Cesena. This project aims to create an exchange between translation students and companies who want to pursue a process of internationalization. The purpose of this dissertation is demonstrating the benefits that translation systems can bring to businesses. In particular, it consists of the translation into English of documents supplied by the Italian company Technologica S.r.l. and the creation of linguistic resources that can be integrated into computer-assisted translation (CAT) software, in order to optimize the translation process. The latter is claimed to be a priority with respect to the actual translation products (the target texts), since the analysis conducted on the source texts highlighted that the company could streamline and optimize its English language communication thanks to the use of open source CAT tools such as OmegaT. The work consists of five chapters. The first introduces the Language Toolkit project, the company (Technologica S.r.l ) and its products. The second chapter provides some considerations about technical translation, its features and some misconceptions about it. The difference between technical translation and scientific translation is then clarified and an overview is offered of translation aids such as those used for computer-assisted translation, machine translation, termbases and translation memories. The third chapter contains the analysis of the texts commissioned by Technologica S.r.l. and their categorization. The fourth chapter describes the translation process, with particular attention to terminology extraction and the creation of a bilingual glossary based on a specialized corpus. The glossary was integrated into the OmegaT software in order to facilitate the translation process both for the present task and for future applications. The memory deriving from the translation represents a sort of hybrid resource between a translation memory and a glossary. This was found to be the most appropriate format, given the specific nature of the texts to be translated. Finally, in chapter five conclusions are offered about the importance of language training within a company environment, the potentialities of translation aids and the benefits that they would bring to a company wishing to internationalize itself.