O uso de operadores argumentativos em produções textuais na escola básica

Esta pesquisa tem como foco observar como alunos de escola básica utilizam os operadores argumentativos como recurso de coesão textual em uma redação dissertativo-argumentativa, modelo Enem. As produções foram constituídas durante o ano letivo de 2014, por alunos do 2 ano do ensino médio de uma escola pública. O trabalho foi desenvolvido à luz da Teoria da Argumentação, da Linguística Textual bem como das concepções de texto e gênero textual. O corpus analisado é constituído de 20 produções textuais de 10 alunos de uma escola básica. São 10 redações produzidas no início do ano e 10 no final do ano letivo mencionado. Com base nessas produções, foi possível estabelecer uma comparação no que diz respeito ao uso de operadores argumentativos como recurso coesivo. Constatou-se que esses elementos são utilizados tanto na primeira redação produzida quanto na segunda. Entretanto a ênfase no uso e na diversidade desses recursos foi maior nas produções do 2 semestre. Esses resultados foram apresentados de forma qualitativa e quantitativa, por meio de gráficos, para uma melhor visualização dos resultados. As reflexões acerca de leitura e produção de textos, problemas discursivos, textuais e linguísticos desenvolvidas durante o ano letivo, com o grupo de alunos que produziu os textos-corpus, são fatores que concorrem para esse resultado.

A representação da saúde: uma análise crítica do discurso da revista Womens Health Brasil

Este estudo foi concebido com o intuito de preencher uma lacuna na área de Linguística, pois lida com o tratamento do tema da saúde e bem-estar em uma revista feminina brasileira, especificamente voltada para tal assunto. A presente dissertação objetiva discutir como o tema saúde e bem estar é apresentado na revista Womens Health Brasil, a qual apregoa em sua missão ser voltada para a saúde e bem estar da mulher moderna. A constatação inicial que se faz é que o tópico saúde e bem estar são produtos discursivamente comodificados, ou seja, é tratado como uma espécie de mercadoria. Tal constatação suscitou a necessidade de investigar de que formas esse processo ocorria. Adotou-se como embasamento teórico a perspectiva da Análise Crítica do Discurso (Fairclough, 1992), uma teoria e método de análise que compatibiliza análise de material linguístico e considerações sobre o uso social da linguagem e seus impactos no componente discursivo da identidade pessoal. Foram analisadas as edições de março e abril de 2015, bem como a edição online, com vistas ao preenchimento dos três níveis de análise propostos por Fairclough. Primeiramente, foram encontradas evidências micro e macro linguísticas (padrões lexicais, sintáticos e discursivos) que apontam para a existência de papéis sociais atribuídos à mulher e a relações de poder pautadas pela revista. Por terem sido transformados em um produto, saúde e bem estar são vendidos a um público especifico de mulheres, cuja identidade é projetada e construída discursivamente em termos de assimetria em relação à revista. O segundo nível estudado foi o da prática discursiva, em que se analisou a intertextualidade, que se apresenta como uma estratégia de ratificação dos valores transmitidos pela revista. Finalmente, identificou-se que existe uma formação identitária da leitora que tende a retratá-la como alguém desprovidas das informações necessárias para ser a mulher idealizada pela revista. O nível do discurso como prática social mostra que linguagem e sociedade colocam-se lado a lado no processo de formação de conceitos e valores que, frequentemente, tornam-se cristalizados, a exemplo do que ocorre no discurso da revista. As conclusões do trabalho apontam para a objetificação da saúde por meio de um discurso que induz ao consumo, à insatisfação pessoal e à uma falsa relação de parceria entre revista e leitora. Esta relação articula-se principalmente através da tentativa de vender uma série de produtos, dos quais a saúde é o principal pretexto.

Modulação por Sucupira (Pterodon polygalaeflorus, Benth) da distribuição de Linfócitos T ativados e T de memória em linfonodos (LN) de camundongos com Artrite Induzida por Colágeno tipo II (CIA) e da mielopoiese em baços de camundongos primados com Adjuvante Completo de Freund (AFC)

Sementes de árvores do gênero Pterodon, conhecidas principalmente pelo nome Sucupira, são utilizadas popularmente para o tratamento de doenças reumáticas. Na presente dissertação, temos como objetivo estudar a possível ação do extrato hidroalcoólico de sementes de Pterodon polygalaeflorus (EHPp) no tratamento de Artrite Induzida por Colágeno tipo II (CIA) em camundongos DBA/1J. Verificou-se a distribuição de Linfócitos T CD4+ com fenótipo de memória em linfonodos de animais com CIA; a possível interferência do tratamento no segundo aumento de células mielóides (Mac-1+) esplênicas gerado pela segunda injeção de colágeno tipo II (CII) para indução da CIA e confirmou-se o fenótipo granulocítico dessas células mielóides. Além disso, através de outro modelo experimental de 10 dias de duração, objetivou-se estudar as células mielóides Mac-1+: se o tratamento com EHPp interfere na mielopoese esplênica induzida somente pela injeção de Adjuvante de Freund Completo (AFC) em camundongos DBA1/J e avaliar uma eventual diferença entre o grau de ativação dessas células em animais primados com AFC tratados ou não com EHPp. A CIA foi induzida em camundongos DBA/1J machos, por injeção intradérmica (i.d.) de CII em AFC com reforço intraperitonial de CII três semanas após a primeira injeção. O tratamento oral, diário, com EHPp por cerca de 30 dias foi iniciado no dia do reforço com CII. No modelo de curta duração, com o intuito de verificar o possível aumento de células Mac-1+ no baço, os animais foram tratados oralmente com EHPp, por 9 dias, sendo o AFC injetado, i.d., no 5o dia do tratamento e os animais sacrificados no 10o. Os resultados obtidos foram: o tratamento com EHPp interfere na distribuição de Linfócitos T com fenótipo de memória em animais com indução de CIA; resultados preliminares sugerem que o tratamento com EHPp não interfere no segundo aumento de células mielóides no baço no modelo CIA; a maioria das células mielóides presentes no baço de animais sadios ou de animais com CIA apresenta fenótipo granulocítico (GR.1+); o tratamento com EHPp reduz significantemente a mielopoese esplênica induzida pela injeção de AFC; a fração significante de células Mac-1+ no baço de animais primados com AFC apresenta aumento de produção de Espécies Reativas de Oxigênio em relação aos animais sadios ou tratados com EHPp. Em conjunto, estes resultados permitem identificar uma possível ação anti-inflamatória do EHPp ao impedir o aumento de células inflamatórias no baço de animais primados com AFC, bem como uma atividade imunossupressora, evidenciada pela redução de Linfócitos com perfil de recém ativação e de Linfócitos com perfil de memória nos LNs em relação aos animais com CIA, sugerindo o seu envolvimento nos processos de ativação e de migração linfocitários.

Report of the ICSF-BOBLME India (East Coast) workshop: implementing the FAO voluntary guidelines for securing sustainable small-scale fisheries in the context of food security and poverty eradication (SSF guidelines), 6-7 March 2015, Chennai, India

The workshop titled, ICSF-BOBLME India (East Coast) Workshop on Implementing the FAO Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-scale fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines) was organized by ICSFin collaboration with BOBLME project.The workshop was the third in a series of consultations held in 2015 across the globe to promote the ownership of the SSF Guidelines among different stakeholders. In the run –up to the workshop, ICSF, with support from BOBLME conducted six consultation meetings with fishworkers and fishworker organizations along the east coast of India in January and February 2015. One hundred participants from India’s eastern coastal states of West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, including women fishworkers, representatives of fishworker organizations, representatives from Department of Fisheries and other concerned departments at state and central level, Multilateral agencies, Inter-governmental organizations, Research Institutions met at Chennai, 6-7 March, 2015. The workshop was structured to facilitate active interaction and discussion among participants, taking into account linguistic diversity and the contextual differences of the marine and inland sectors. This publication—the proceedings of the Chennai workshop—will be useful for fishworker organizations, researchers, policymakers, members of civil society and anyone interested in fisheries and livelihoods.

Paternal genetic affinity between western Austronesians and Daic populations

Background: Austronesian is a linguistic family spread in most areas of the Southeast Asia, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. Based on their linguistic similarity, this linguistic family included Malayo-Polynesians and Taiwan aborigines. The lingui

KLAIR: A virtual infant for spoken language acquisition research

Recent research into the acquisition of spoken language has stressed the importance of learning through embodied linguistic interaction with caregivers rather than through passive observation. However the necessity of interaction makes experimental work into the simulation of infant speech acquisition difficult because of the technical complexity of building real-time embodied systems. In this paper we present KLAIR: a software toolkit for building simulations of spoken language acquisition through interactions with a virtual infant. The main part of KLAIR is a sensori-motor server that supplies a client machine learning application with a virtual infant on screen that can see, hear and speak. By encapsulating the real-time complexities of audio and video processing within a server that will run on a modern PC, we hope that KLAIR will encourage and facilitate more experimental research into spoken language acquisition through interaction. Copyright © 2009 ISCA.

Investigation of acoustic units for LVCSR systems

One important issue in designing state-of-the-art LVCSR systems is the choice of acoustic units. Context dependent (CD) phones remain the dominant form of acoustic units. They can capture the co-articulatory effect in speech via explicit modelling. However, for other more complicated phonological processes, they rely on the implicit modelling ability of the underlying statistical models. Alternatively, it is possible to construct acoustic models based on higher level linguistic units, for example, syllables, to explicitly capture these complex patterns. When sufficient training data is available, this approach may show an advantage over implicit acoustic modelling. In this paper a wide range of acoustic units are investigated to improve LVCSR system performance. Significant error rate gains up to 7.1% relative (0.8% abs.) were obtained on a state-of-the-art Mandarin Chinese broadcast audio recognition task using word and syllable position dependent triphone and quinphone models. © 2011 IEEE.

Tracing the Origins of Hakka and Chaoshanese by Mitochondrial DNA Analysis

Hakka and Chaoshanese are two unique Han populations residing in southern China but with northern Han (NH) cultural traditions and linguistic influences. Although most of historical records indicate that both populations migrated from northern China in the last two thousand years, no consensus on their origins has been reached so far. To shed more light on the origins of Hakka and Chaoshanese, mitochondrial DNAs (mtDNAs) of 170 Hakka from Meizhou and 102 Chaoshanese from Chaoshan area, Guangdong Province, were analyzed. Our results show that some southern Chinese predominant haplogroups, e.g. B, F, and M7, have relatively high frequencies in both populations. Although median network analyses show that Hakka/Chaoshanese share some haplotypes with NH, interpopulation comparison reveals that both populations show closer affinity with southern Han (SH) populations than with NH. In consideration of previous results from nuclear gene (including Y chromosome) research, it is likely that matrilineal landscapes of both Hakka and Chaoshanese have largely been shaped by the local people during their migration southward and/or later colonization in southern China, and factors such as cultural assimilation, patrilocality, and even sex-bias in the immigrants might have played important roles during the process. Am J Phys Anthropol 141:124-130, 2010. (C) 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Population structure and history in East Asia

Archaeological, anatomical, linguistic, and genetic data have suggested that there is an old and significant boundary between the populations of north and south China. We use three human genetic marker systems and one human-carried virus to examine the north/south distinction. We find no support for a major north/south division in these markers; rather, the marker patterns suggest simple isolation by distance.

Application of encapsulated nisin and sodium citrate for shelf life increasing of Rainbow trout (Onchorhynchus mykiss) fillet packaged with MAP and their effect on Staphylococcus aureus

Nisin is a widely used naturally occurring antimicrobial effective against many pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms. It has been proposed that reduced efficacy of nisin in foods can be improved by technologies such as encapsulation to protect it from interferences by food matrix components. The aim of this study was using of spray dried encapsulated nisin with zein in concentration of (0.15 and 0.25 g/kg) and sodium citrate (1.5 and 2.5%) and treatments with both of them to extent the shelf life of filleted trouts packaged by Modified Atmosphere Packaging (45% CO2, 50% N2 ,5% O2) and stored at 4±1 °C for 20 days. Furthermore, to evaluate the antimicrobial efficiency of encapsulated nisin and soudium citrate the trouts fillets was inoculated with Staphylococcus aureus as an index pathogenic bacteria. Assessment of chemical spoilage indexes such as (Proxide value, Thiobarbituric acid, total volatile base nitrogen and pH) , microbial parameters (Total Plate Count, Psychrotrophic count, Lactic acid bacteria count), Staphylococcus aureus cont in treatments which were inoculated with 5 logcfu/g of this bacteria and sensory evaluation of fillets including (smell, color, texture and total acceptability) was carried out in days of 0, 4, 8, 12, 16 and 20. The results revealed that treatment with both exposure of nisin and sodium citrate showed significantly lower chemical spoilage indexes in comparison with controls (vaccum packed and MAP) (P<0.05). Furthermore, (nisin 0.25 g/kg sodium citrate 2.5%) treatment which was exposed to the maximal level used of both materials was significantly the lowest treatment with (Proxide value, Thiobarbituric acid, total volatile base nitrogen and pH) of 9.95 (meq O2/kg) , 1.55 (mgMA/kg), 29.65 (mgN/100g) and 6.65 , respectively and according to the maximal recommended level of this indices , shelf life of fillets in this treatment was esstimated 20 days.The control (vaccum packed) treatment was significantly the highest treatment with (Proxide value, Thiobarbituric acid, total volatile base nitrogen and pH) of 15.17 (meq O2/kg), 3.03 (mgMA/kg), 38.4 (mgN/100g) and 6.95 , respectively and according to the maximal recommended level of this indices , shelf life of fillets in this treatment was estimated 11 days. Also, in microbial point of view (nisin 0.25 g/kg- sodium citrate 2.5%) treatment was the lowest treatment with Total Plate Count, Psychrotrophic count, Lactic acid bacteria count and Staphylococcus aureus count of 6.7, 6.83, 5.25 and 6.04 logcfu/g respectively, and conrol (vaccum packed) treatment was the highest treatment with 9.15, 9.41, 7.7 and 9.01 logcfu/g respectively. According to the lower results of chemical and microbial indices and higher sensory evaluated scores assessed in this research for encapsulated nisin in comparison with free nisin , it was concluded that encapsulation of nisin with zein capsules may improve the efficiency of nisin. The measuremented values of Mass yield, Total solids content of capsules, Encapsulation efficiency, In vitro release kinetics in 200 hour for encapsulated nisin in this study was 49.89, 62, 98.31 and 69% respectively and Encapsulated particle size was lower than 674.21 μm for 90% of particles. As a consequence, nisin , in particular encapsulated nisin, and sodium citrate alone or together with and Modified Atmosphere packaging might be considered as effective tools in preventing the quality degradation of the fillets, resulting in an extension of their shelf life.

Unsupervised intra-lingual and cross-lingual speaker adaptation for HMM-based speech synthesis using two-pass decision tree construction

Hidden Markov model (HMM)-based speech synthesis systems possess several advantages over concatenative synthesis systems. One such advantage is the relative ease with which HMM-based systems are adapted to speakers not present in the training dataset. Speaker adaptation methods used in the field of HMM-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) are adopted for this task. In the case of unsupervised speaker adaptation, previous work has used a supplementary set of acoustic models to estimate the transcription of the adaptation data. This paper first presents an approach to the unsupervised speaker adaptation task for HMM-based speech synthesis models which avoids the need for such supplementary acoustic models. This is achieved by defining a mapping between HMM-based synthesis models and ASR-style models, via a two-pass decision tree construction process. Second, it is shown that this mapping also enables unsupervised adaptation of HMM-based speech synthesis models without the need to perform linguistic analysis of the estimated transcription of the adaptation data. Third, this paper demonstrates how this technique lends itself to the task of unsupervised cross-lingual adaptation of HMM-based speech synthesis models, and explains the advantages of such an approach. Finally, listener evaluations reveal that the proposed unsupervised adaptation methods deliver performance approaching that of supervised adaptation.

Syllable language models for Mandarin speech recognition: exploiting character language models.

Mandarin Chinese is based on characters which are syllabic in nature and morphological in meaning. All spoken languages have syllabiotactic rules which govern the construction of syllables and their allowed sequences. These constraints are not as restrictive as those learned from word sequences, but they can provide additional useful linguistic information. Hence, it is possible to improve speech recognition performance by appropriately combining these two types of constraints. For the Chinese language considered in this paper, character level language models (LMs) can be used as a first level approximation to allowed syllable sequences. To test this idea, word and character level n-gram LMs were trained on 2.8 billion words (equivalent to 4.3 billion characters) of texts from a wide collection of text sources. Both hypothesis and model based combination techniques were investigated to combine word and character level LMs. Significant character error rate reductions up to 7.3% relative were obtained on a state-of-the-art Mandarin Chinese broadcast audio recognition task using an adapted history dependent multi-level LM that performs a log-linearly combination of character and word level LMs. This supports the hypothesis that character or syllable sequence models are useful for improving Mandarin speech recognition performance.

An example of the use of neural computing techniques in materials science - The modelling of fatigue thresholds in Ni-base superalloys

Two adaptive numerical modelling techniques have been applied to prediction of fatigue thresholds in Ni-base superalloys. A Bayesian neural network and a neurofuzzy network have been compared, both of which have the ability to automatically adjust the network's complexity to the current dataset. In both cases, despite inevitable data restrictions, threshold values have been modelled with some degree of success. However, it is argued in this paper that the neurofuzzy modelling approach offers real benefits over the use of a classical neural network as the mathematical complexity of the relationships can be restricted to allow for the paucity of data, and the linguistic fuzzy rules produced allow assessment of the model without extensive interrogation and examination using a hypothetical dataset. The additive neurofuzzy network structure means that redundant inputs can be excluded from the model and simple sub-networks produced which represent global output trends. Both of these aspects are important for final verification and validation of the information extracted from the numerical data. In some situations neurofuzzy networks may require less data to produce a stable solution, and may be easier to verify in the light of existing physical understanding because of the production of transparent linguistic rules. © 1999 Elsevier Science S.A.

Fano resonance in Raman scattering of graphene

Fano resonances and their strong doping dependence are observed in Raman scattering of single-layer graphene (SLG). As the Fermi level is varied by a back-gate bias, the Raman G band of SLG exhibits an asymmetric line shape near the charge neutrality point as a manifestation of a Fano resonance, whereas the line shape is symmetric when the graphene sample is electron or hole doped. However, the G band of bilayer graphene (BLG) does not exhibit any Fano resonance regardless of doping. The observed Fano resonance can be interpreted as interferences between the phonon and excitonic many-body spectra in SLG. The absence of a Fano resonance in the Raman G band of BLG can be explained in the same framework since excitonic interactions are not expected in BLG. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A solid-phase microextraction fiber coated with diglycidyloxycalix[4]arene yields very high extraction selectivity and sensitivity during the analysis of chlorobenzenes in soil

A novel fiber coated with novel sol-gel (5,11,17,23-tetra-tert-butyl-25,27-dihydroxy-26,28-diglycidyloxycalix[4]arene/hydroxy-terminated silicone oil; diglycidyloxy-C[4]/OH-TSO) was prepared for use with headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) combined with gas chromatography (GC) and electron capture detection (ECD), which was applied in order to determine nine chlorobenzenes in soil matrices. Due to the improved fiber preparation, which increases the percentage of calixarene in the coating, the new calixarene fiber exhibits very high extraction selectivity and sensitivity to chlorine-substituted compounds. Various parameters affecting the extraction efficiency were optimized in order to maximize the sensitivity during the chlorobenzene analysis. Interferences from different soil matrices with different characteristics were investigated, and the amount extracted was strongly influenced by the matrix. Therefore, a standard addition protocol was performed on the real soil samples. The linear ranges of detection for the chlorobenzenes tested covered three orders of magnitude, and correlation coefficients > 0.9976 and relative standard deviations (RSD) < 8% were observed. The detection limits were found at sub-ng/g of soil levels, which were about an order of magnitude lower than those given by the commercial poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) coating for most of the compounds. The recoveries ranged from 64 to 109.6% for each analyte in the real kaleyard soil matrix when different concentration levels were determined over the linear range, which confirmed the reliability and feasibility of the HS-SPME/GC-ECD approach using the fiber coated with diglycidyloxy-C[4]/OH-TSO for the ultratrace analysis of chlorobenzenes in complex matrices.