title: Laying the tracks: Investigating the potential benefits for autistic children of a model railway initiative

authors: Gedye, Jacob

abstract: This study described a model railway programme in terms of its benefits for autistic children and their families/communities. A non-experimental mixed-method design was conducted, in which an observation schedule was designed to determine whether behaviours which are associated with language development were facilitated by the programme. Interviews with parents/caregivers were conducted to collect qualitative data about the programme, to better understand how it is perceived by visitors and what draws them to attend. Individual case studies with children and their parents/caregivers were done to build a clearer picture of what can be seen at an individual level. Finally, a focus group was arranged with members of the railway modeller’s club to find out their point of view and broaden the qualitative scope of the data. Findings suggest potential utility in this programme for autistic children and future research implications are discussed.

text: Laying the tracks: Investigating the potential benefits for autistic children of a model railway initiative This study described a model railway programme in terms of its benefits for autistic children and their families/communities. A non-experimental mixed-method design was conducted, in which an observation schedule was designed to determine whether behaviours which are associated with language development were facilitated by the programme. Interviews with parents/caregivers were conducted to collect qualitative data about the programme, to better understand how it is perceived by visitors and what draws them to attend. Individual case studies with children and their parents/caregivers were done to build a clearer picture of what can be seen at an individual level. Finally, a focus group was arranged with members of the railway modeller’s club to find out their point of view and broaden the qualitative scope of the data. Findings suggest potential utility in this programme for autistic children and future research implications are discussed.

year: 2025

title: Software for the rest of the world

authors: Yeo, Alvin

subjects: computer science

abstract: A survey is made of facets of the process of providing software across national and cultural boundaries. Internationalisation (i18n), localisation (1 10n) and globalisation (g11n) are identified as three descriptors for recent Information Technology developments in this field. Current practice and advice for successfully providing software in places other than countries and cultures of origin is reported. Suggestions for further work are made in the light of the survey.

text: Software for the rest of the world A survey is made of facets of the process of providing software across national and cultural boundaries. Internationalisation (i18n), localisation (1 10n) and globalisation (g11n) are identified as three descriptors for recent Information Technology developments in this field. Current practice and advice for successfully providing software in places other than countries and cultures of origin is reported. Suggestions for further work are made in the light of the survey.

year: 1996-02

title: A hybrid architecture for labelling bilingual Māori-English tweets

authors: Trye, David

subjects: borrowing

abstract: Most large-scale language detection tools perform poorly at identifying Māori text. Moreover, rule-based and machine learning-based techniques devised specifically for the Māori-English language pair struggle with interlingual homographs. We develop a hybrid architecture that couples Māori-language orthography with machine learning models in order to annotate mixed Māori-English text. This architecture is used to label a new bilingual Twitter corpus at both the token (word) and tweet (sentence) levels. We use the collected tweets to show that the hybrid approach outperforms existing systems with respect to language detection of interlingual homographs and overall accuracy. We also evaluate its performance on out-of-domain data. Two interactive visualisations are provided for exploring the Twitter corpus and comparing errors across the new and existing techniques. The architecture code and visualisations are available online, and the corpus is available on request.

text: A hybrid architecture for labelling bilingual Māori-English tweets Most large-scale language detection tools perform poorly at identifying Māori text. Moreover, rule-based and machine learning-based techniques devised specifically for the Māori-English language pair struggle with interlingual homographs. We develop a hybrid architecture that couples Māori-language orthography with machine learning models in order to annotate mixed Māori-English text. This architecture is used to label a new bilingual Twitter corpus at both the token (word) and tweet (sentence) levels. We use the collected tweets to show that the hybrid approach outperforms existing systems with respect to language detection of interlingual homographs and overall accuracy. We also evaluate its performance on out-of-domain data. Two interactive visualisations are provided for exploring the Twitter corpus and comparing errors across the new and existing techniques. The architecture code and visualisations are available online, and the corpus is available on request.

year: 2022