bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Developing conversational competence through language awareness and multimodality: the use of DVDs
Authors: Jaén María Moreno , Basanta Carmen Pérez 
Published: August 2009

AbstractThe argument for a pedagogy of input oriented learning for the development of speaking competence (Sharwood-Smith, 1986; Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury, 2004; Eslami-Rasekh, 2005) has been of increasing interest in Applied Linguistics circles. It has also been argued that multimedia applications, in particular DVDs, provide language learners with multimodal representations that may help them ‘to gain broad access to oral communication both visually and auditory’ (Tschirner, 2001: 305). Thus this paper focuses on an exploratory study of teaching oral interaction through input processing by means of multimodal texts.The paper is divided into a number of interconnected sections. First, we outline briefly what teaching conversation implies and examine the important role of oral comprehension in the development of conversational interaction. In fact, it has been suggested that effective speaking depends very much on successful understanding (Oprandy, 1994). In this paper we pay special attention to the crucial role of context in understanding oral interactions. Therefore, we outline the theory of context in English Language Teaching (ELT). The discussion draws on approaches to teaching conversation and it also offers a brief reflection about the need for materials which might convey the sociocultural and semiotic elements of oral communication through which meaning is created.We then discuss the decisions taken to propose a new multimodal approach to teaching conversation from a three-fold perspective: (a) the selection of texts taken from films, and the benefits of using DVDs (digital versatile disc); (b) the development of a multimodal analysis of film clips for the design of activities; and (c) the promotion of a conversation awareness methodology through a bank of DVD clips to achieve an understanding of how native speakers actually go about the process of constructing oral interactions.In sum, the main thrust of this paper is to pinpoint the advantages of using multimodal materials taken from DVDs, as they provide learners with broad access to oral communication, both visual and auditory, making classroom conditions similar to the target cultural environment (Tschirner, 2001).
Speed bumps for authentic listening material
Authors: Meinardi Marty 
Published: August 2009

AbstractThis article investigates whether authentic native speaker (NS) to NS speech can be made available to the learner listener through the use of a novel slow-down tool. Results from various preliminary tests seem to indicate that the use of a slow-down algorithm in many cases, and in particular in samples with a higher speed rate and word count, leads to an improvement in subjects’ ability to perceive and understand what was being uttered in the samples. Tests revealed that even NS listeners, as opposed to non-native (NN) listeners, prefer to hear authentic NS speech which is either unscripted or is influenced by regional accent, at a slowed down speed. It also seems that ‘unexpected’ words (such as words with high contextual value, but which cannot be processed in a top-down fashion because of the size of the sound snippet) are initially not understood at the original speed of delivery, even in a scripted and carefully pronounced pedagogic sample. Samples containing chunks or formulaic sequences, however, appear to be easily understood at 100% by the majority of NS listeners due to the holistic processing of these language units.
Discussing course literature online: analysis of macro speech acts in an asynchronous computer conference
Authors: Kosunen Riitta 
Published: August 2009

AbstractThis paper presents a macro speech act analysis of computer-mediated conferencing on a university course on language pedagogy. Students read scholarly articles on language learning and discussed them online, in order to make sense of them collaboratively in preparation for a reflective essay. The study explores how the course participants made use of computer-mediated conferencing for such collaborative text processing. A discussion thread with 97 messages was analyzed for itsmacro speech acts. The conference messages were treated as pragmatic macrostructures where micro-level speech act sequences can be mapped onto a higher-level, global speech act or textual function. The discussion turned out to be reader-centred and practice-oriented. Approximately two thirds of the messages were concerned with interpreting theory from a practical point of view, expressing the students’ personal experience, opinion or idea about a certain issue related to the article. In comparison, only one tenth dealt with checking the explicit propositional content of the article. The results are interpreted in terms of the distinction between a narrative and paradigmatic/expository discourse.
Complete congenital obstruction of a scimitar vein in an infant with severe respiratory failure
Authors: Bauch Alexandra , Lee Kyong-Jin , Yoo Shi-Joon 
Published: August 2009

AbstractWe report an infant of 3 1/2 months with complete obstruction of the venous component of the scimitar syndrome, a large atrial septal defect within the oval fossa, a common left pulmonary vein, and pulmonary hypertension. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first description of complete congenital obstruction of a scimitar vein.
Apollo 11 Mission Commemorated
Authors: Showstack Randy 
Published: August 2009

On 24 July 1969, 4 days after Apollo 11 Mission Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module Eagle Pilot Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin had become the first people to walk on the Moon, they and Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot Michael Collins peered through a window of the Mobile Quarantine Facility on board the U.S.S. Hornet following splashdown of the command module in the central Pacific as U.S. President Richard Nixon told them, “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation.”Forty years later, the Apollo 11 crew and other Apollo‐era astronauts gathered at several events in Washington, D.C., to commemorate and reflect on the Apollo program, that mission, and the future of manned spaceflight. “I don't know what the greatest week in history is,” Aldrin told Eos. “But it was certainly a pioneering opening the door. With the door open when we touched down on the Moon, that was what enabled humans to put many more footprints on the surface of the Moon.”
Fiftieth Anniversary of the First Incoherent Scatter Radar Experiment
Authors: Robinson Robert M. , van Eyken Anthony , Farley Donald 
Published: August 2009

In the 11 November 2008 issue of Eos (89(46), 458), Henry Rishbeth asked whether the years 2008–2010 feature any important anniversaries in solar‐terrestrial physics other than those he mentioned. One such milestone is the fiftieth anniversary of the first incoherent scatter radar (ISR) experiment.At a Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.) departmental seminar in the spring of 1958, William Gordon showed that a powerful radar system could detect the uncorrelated and extremely weak scattered signals from individual ionospheric electrons. This process is called incoherent scatter, and studying the properties of the resulting radar echoes can reveal information about the density, temperature, and velocity of ionospheric particles. Gordon discussed this idea with Ken Bowles, a recent Ph.D. graduate of Cornell, and in a few weeks Bowles built a large but inexpensive antenna array that he connected to an existing transmitter near Havana, Ill. Using this crude radar (the data processing consisted of taking a time exposure photograph of the signal amplitude displayed on an oscilloscope), Bowles successfully measured an incoherently scattered signal on 21 October 1958. By a happy coincidence, 21 October was also the day that Gordon gave his first formal talk on the ISR concept at an International Union of Radio Science (URSI) conference at Pennsylvania State University. After calling Bowles for an update on his experiment, Gordon presented his research and added the dramatic and newsworthy note to the end of his talk on the success of the first ISR experiment!
Understanding Variability and Climate Impacts of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation: First U.S. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) Annual Workshopsemi; Annapolis, Maryland, 4–6 May 2009
Authors: Legler David , Lozier M. Susan 
Published: August 2009

The new U.S. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) program, with its international partners, aims to further develop abilities to observe, understand, and simulate the AMOC as well as characterize its potential impacts on climate (see http://www.atlanticmoc.org for program details). Its first workshop included contributions from more than 100 U.S. and international participants on a range of topics, including the current state of the AMOC, its coherence and connectivity, the influence of AMOC on climate and related impacts, and AMOC observing system requirements.Presenters at the meeting described a number of significant, but disparate, AMOC observational efforts currently under way. Of these, only the U.K./U.S. RAPID/MOCHA (Rapid Climate Change/Meridional Overturning Circulation and Heatflux Array) mooring array at 26°N, which spans the basin at full depth, has provided direct measures of the AMOC. Results from this array have revealed significant intra‐annual variability in the heat and mass fluxes at this latitude, causing a reexamination of previous estimates of AMOC changes.
Phenoscape: Ontologies for Large Multi-species Phenotype Datasets
Authors: Midford Peter , Mabee Paula , Vision Todd , Lapp Hilmar , Balhoff Jim , Dahdul Wasila , Kothari Cartik , Lundberg John , Westerfield Monte 
Published: August 2009

AbstractThe Phenoscape project is developing ontologies and tools to integrate morphological and genomic data to address comparative questions in evolutionary biology. We are currently curating 81 publications describing ~5000 phenotypic characters in 4,000 species of Ostariophysian fishes, and will be making our database of ontology-based annotations concurrently with this meeting via a web-based interface at "http://kb.phenoscape.org":http://kb.phenoscape.org.
The plural of anecdote is not data: Rigorously testing a boreal forest chronosequence
Authors: Bond-Lamberty Ben , Wang Chuankuan , Gower Stith 
Published: August 2009

Abstract"Forests appear stable because the ecologists who study them die." The chronosequence, with its space-for-time substitution, is a widely-employed workaround for a difficult problem: many interesting ecosystem processes occur at much longer time scales than researchers can afford to spend studying them. But their use is problematic, particularly for vegetation succession but also for biogeochemical cycling: having sites of different ages is only a necessary, and not a sufficient, condition. How do we test the validity and representativeness of a chronosequence, particularly given ecosystem variability in time and space? Here we use data from an intensively-studied group of stands in northern Manitoba, Canada, to assess the spatial and temporal variability of carbon fluxes in this boreal forest, and examine the suitability of a chronosequence study design for making larger-scale (in space and time) generalizations. This ecosystem is well suited for examining this question, being floristically simple, frequently disturbed by wildfire, and thus generally composed of even-aged forests of known origin. A number of techniques can be brought to bear: re-visiting chronosequence sites after a significant period converts single-point measurements into data vectors; measurements that integrate fluxes over longer time periods (e.g., tree ring cores) provide a similar capability, extending our observation window; replication of the chronosequence stands extends the spatial domain; process modeling may indicate site selection errors. We can also examine data at local, regional and global scales to ask, for any particular pool or flux, if replication in time or space is more useful. For example, global soil respiration studies indicate that spatial and interannual variability are of roughly equal magnitude; in contrast, boreal tree ring data suggest that carbon sequestration is more variable year-to-year than it is site-to-site, after controlling for forest age and soil drainage. Different sampling strategies may thus be appropriate for each flux; historical records such as databases of wildfire occurrence also help constrain this problem. We conclude that while unreplicated chronosequences provide anecdotes, not data, extending measurements in space and time lets us quantifiably assess their performance.
Assemblage-structuring force of species interactions varies spatially and temporally: Co-occurrence analysis of canopy arthropod distributions
Authors: Lau Matthew , Hagenauer Laura , Whitham Thomas 
Published: August 2009

Abstract
*Background/Question/Methods*
Understanding how interactions amongst species contribute to their distribution is central to community ecology. However, it is not understood how these processes may change under different environmental conditions. In this study, we present evidence that suggests interactions amongst canopy arthropods contribute to assemblage structure, depending on both the sampling time and location. We sampled canopy arthropod species abundances on individual trees in three adjacent, monospecific stands of Populus fremontii (Fremont cottonwood), which differ in planting year (2000, 2002, 2005). We then conducted null-model based co-occurrence analysis using the freely available software EcoSim (Kesey-Bear and Acquired Intelligence, Inc.) to test for patterns suggestive of interactions influencing assemblage structure. Environmental heterogeneity amongst trees is low within stands; therefore environmental gradients are most likely not contributing to co-occurrence patterns. Also, all stands were planted recently and closely enough such that evolutionary processes (e.g. allopatric speciation) have not occurred. For the analyses of each stand at each sampling date we used a fixed-row, equiprobable-column matrix permutation algorithm in order to simulate presence-absence matrices in which species co-occurrences are effectively random with respect to species interactions. We chose to use the C-score index of co-occurence because of its robustness to Type I Errors when used with this simulation algorithm. P-values and standardized effect sizes (SES) were based on 5000 simulated matrixes.

*Results/Conclusions*
We found significant variation in SES values across both sampling dates and stands; and three main patterns emerged. 1) The SES values in the youngest stand (2005) were all near zero and none were statistically significant. This could be the result of unresolved species interactions, meaning that species interactions have not had sufficient time to produce consistent distributional patterns. 2) The SES values were primarily negative, indicating a dominating force of facilitative interactions. 3) The 2000 and 2002 stands varied in the size and significance of their SES values with the oldest (2000) stand switching from positive to negative as the season progressed, suggesting a switch from competitive to facilitative interactions driving structure. These results suggest that species interactions are indeed important in structuring canopy arthropod communities, but that the efficacy of these forces can vary across both space and time.
The impact of puerperal diseases in sows on their fertility and health up to next farrowing
Authors: Hoy S. 
Published: August 2009

AbstractInvestigations utilizing a total number of 3998 farrowings from 1558 sows on two farms have shown a frequency of puerperal diseases (periparturient hypogalactia syndrome=PHS) of 32·7% and 27·0% respectively with significant differences between gilts and sows. Sows without PHS after farrowing (farm A) had a lower frequency of animals without oestrus after weaning of the piglets (0·3 V. 1·1%), a lower rate of late onset of oestrus (3·4% V. 5·9%,P<0·05), fewer sows had abortions (0·9 V. 2·3%,P<0·05) and a lower mortality rate (1·2 V. 4·1%,P<0·05) compared with sows which contracted puerperal diseases. The return rate was significantly lower in sows without PHS (12·4%, 16·1% in herds A and B) when compared with sows with puerperal diseases (15·8%, 21·7%,P<0·05). Also, the litter size of live born piglets was lower in sows with PHS when compared with healthy sows (farm A: 10·42 V. 10·66,P>0·05; farm B: 10·44 V. 10·80,P<0·05)
The effect of hot season and nutrition on the oxidative status and metabolic profile in dairy goats during mid lactation
Authors: Di Trana A. , Celi P. , Claps S. , Fedele V. , Rubino R. 
Published: August 2009

AbstractThe aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of the hot season and nutrition on the oxidative status and metabolic profile of lactating goats during mid lactation. Twenty-four Red Syrian goats were allocated into three groups that were offered the following diets: natural pasture (P), pasture+500 g/h per day of concentrate (PC) and hay plus 500 g/h per day of concentrate (HC). Blood samples were taken in spring (85±7 days in milk (DIM)) and summer (120±7 DIM) and assayed for reactive oxygen metabolites (ROMs), α-tocopherol, glucose, triglycerides, cholesterol, non-esterified fatty acids, total protein, albumin and globulin concentrations and glutathione peroxidase (GHS-Px) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activities. Milk yield and milk composition were also measured. SOD, GSH-Px and ROMs levels increased during summer when temperature humidity index values were high. The increase in ROMs in the PC and HC groups could be ascribed to the improved nutritional regime and to their higher production level. The markers of the oxidative status and of the metabolic profile measured in this study indicate that goats may have experienced moderate oxidative stress. It seems that, seasonal rather than nutritional factors have a more pronounced effect on oxidative status markers. Concentrate supplementation sustained milk yield and may represent a useful means to extend the lactation period in dairy goats during late spring and summer.
Growth, carcass characteristics and meat quality of rabbits given maize ears or maize plant
Authors: Pla M. , Martínez M. , Cervera C. 
Published: August 2009

AbstractThree hundred young rabbits were divided into three groups at weaning and given ad libitum a control diet (C), or an experimental diet in which 0·20 of control diet was substituted by maize ear (E) or by whole maize plant (P) in order to examine their effects on fattening rabbits performance, carcass characteristics and meat quality. No significant differences were found in live-weight gain (45 g/day) or in food intake between diets but food conversion ratio was higher in the P group (2·4 g dry matter (DM) per g gain) than in E group (2·2 g DM per g gain). The rate of mortality was similar in the three groups. No differences between groups on live weight (2152 g) or in the digestive tract weight (437 g) were found and the dressing yield was similar in the three groups. At constant carcass weight, the carcasses of rabbits of the P group had lesser lumbar circumference and higher length to circumference ratio (P<0·0001) than of the C or E groups. No differences were found in the weights of liver or thoracic viscera, but kidneys of rabbits of P group were lighter than of the C or E groups. No differences between groups were found in the weights of scapular fat, perirenal fat, forelegs or thoracic cage, but the loin of rabbits of P group was heavier (291 v. 286 g) than in the other groups. Meat of rabbits P had higher L* and b* parameters of colour and higher water-holding capacity (P=0·003) but the meat of rabbits of the control group had less lipids (31 v. 36 g/kg meat) and more moisture (739 v. 735 g/kg meat) than of the experimental groups. The proportion of protein was higher in E group than in P group. Intra and intermuscular fat of hind leg meat from rabbits ‘maize’ substituted was more monounsaturated than control rabbits (34·2 v. 32·5 g·100 g lipids) and had lesser saturated: monounsaturated ratio (1·2 v. 1·3) indicating a more desirable meat from a nutritional point of view, but had less n-3 fatty acid content. Loin meat of the rabbits given E and P diets seems more tender than one fed conventionally (10·4 v. 11·4 kg) and meat of the rabbits ‘whole maize plant’ had more grass flavour (P=0·009) which is a positive factor for acceptability of consumers.
Soya-bean agglutinin induced both direct and cholecystokinin-mediated pancreatic enzyme synthesis in rats
Authors: Zang J. J. , Li D. F. , Wang J. R. , Tang S. S. , Li X. L. , Guo P. F. 
Published: August 2009

AbstractThis study was conducted to examine the relationship between soya-bean agglutinin and cholecystokinin in stimulating pancreatic enzyme synthesis in rats. In experiment 1, 30 rats were given daily gastric infusions of 0, 3·5, 7·0, 10·5, or 14·0 mg of soya-bean agglutinin (no.=6) for 14 days. Compared with the control group, soya-bean agglutinin reduced weight gains, enhanced absolute and relative dry pancreatic weights, elevated serum cholecystokinin levels, and stimulated cholecystokinin mRNA expression in the intestine (P<0·001). Pancreatic nucleic acid composition and the pancreatic activities of the enzymes amylase, trypsin and chymotrypsin all increased in response to increasing levels of soya-bean agglutinin (P<0·001). In experiment 2, duodenal cells obtained from two rats were incubated at 37°C with either saline, 100 μg/ml soya-bean agglutinin, or a mixture of 100 μg/ml soya-bean agglutinin and 10 mmol/m of the L-type, calcium channel antagonist verapamil. Soya-bean agglutinin stimulated cholecystokinin mRNA expression and cholecystokinin release from small intestinal mucosal cells, and the effect was attenuated by verapamil. In experiment 3, pancreatic acinar cells, obtained from three rats, were incubated at 37 °C with either saline, or cholecystokinin (100 fmol/ml) and soya-bean agglutinin (1000 fmol/ml), either alone or in combination. Amylase, trypsin, and chymotrypsin activities from both culture media and acini cells were stimulated by both the soya-bean agglutinin and the cholecystokinin treatments. Enzyme activities, when the two factors were incubated in combination, were intermediate to those obtained when the factors were incubated alone. This suggesting that soya-bean agglutinin may depress the action of cholecystokinin on pancreatic enzymatic activities. In summary, soya-bean agglutinin appears to stimulate pancreatic enzyme synthesis both directly and also through a cholecystokinin-mediated pathway.