Generalising Personalised Exploration and Organisation of Sonic Spaces: Metacultural Approaches

The current cross‐cultural education still faces problems such as low awareness and ability in cross‐cultural education, low cultural sensitivity, shallow awareness of cross‐cultural differences and poor cross‐cultural ability to cooperate with others. The significance of this study lies in enhancing awareness and abilities in cross‐cultural education to improve the current state of cross‐cultural education and promote cross‐cultural communication and understanding. The paper used Unity to build a virtual scene, and then selected 120 college students as research subjects and divided them into three classes: virtual reality immersive experience group (Class 1); traditional learning group (Class 2); and flipped classroom group (Class 3). A comparative experiment was designed. The research results found that the average scores of cultural differences and cultural conflict sensitivity among students in Class 1 reached 89.33 and 91.54, respectively. The average scores of cultural differences and cultural conflict sensitivity among students in Class 2 were 73.68 and 76.26, respectively. The average scores of cultural differences and cultural conflict sensitivity among students in Class 3 were 78.05 and 77.00, respectively. In addition, the cognitive depth and adaptability to cross‐cultural cooperation of Class 1 students who use immersive virtual reality experiences are significantly better than those of the other two classes. The research results indicate that using immersive virtual reality experiences for cross‐cultural education can help improve students' awareness and ability in cross‐cultural education, increase their cultural sensitivity, enhance their cognitive level of cultural differences and enhance their cross‐cultural cooperation ability.

This paper, using a mixed method, designed the college English Flipped Classroom from the perspective of curriculum, and examined the students’ cognitive adaptation, engagement and application skills. It was found that the students differed in cognitive adaption (students good at listening and speaking performed better), and their listening and speaking were improved. Moreover, speaking significantly correlated with in-class interaction and group collaboration. Finally, it was suggested that based on the level of speaking and listening, stratified teaching could be carried out to provide pre-class, in-class and post-class facilitation respectively.

300M steel is a basic structural material used in Air Force and commercial systems. Exhibiting deep hardenability, this alloy is typically used in aircraft landing gear assemblies as well as crankshafts, connecting rods and gearboxes for automotive, industrial and agricultural applications. Improved wear resistance and overall durability of components produced from 300M steel can be realized when surface hardening is achieved while maintaining high ductility throughout the bulk of the material. This paper describes the processing method developed to use laser energy to increase the surface hardness of 300M steel. A study was conducted by the Laser Hardening Materials Evaluation Laboratory (LHMEL) located at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, to produce an understanding ofthe interaction of CO2 laser energy with 300M steel. Optical energy coupling efficiency data was matched with the thermal conductance properties of 300M steel to develop a processing method resulting in surface hardening. Surface hardness measurements of 60 Rc are reported with processed region thickness extending to a depth of 1mm. The yield strength, ultimate tensile strength and elongation of the laser hardened test bars were measured and compared to untreated and traditionally hardened specimens. The laser hardening process is described and comparisons made between standard surface treatment methods.300M steel is a basic structural material used in Air Force and commercial systems. Exhibiting deep hardenability, this alloy is typically used in aircraft landing gear assemblies as well as crankshafts, connecting rods and gearboxes for automotive, industrial and agricultural applications. Improved wear resistance and overall durability of components produced from 300M steel can be realized when surface hardening is achieved while maintaining high ductility throughout the bulk of the material. This paper describes the processing method developed to use laser energy to increase the surface hardness of 300M steel. A study was conducted by the Laser Hardening Materials Evaluation Laboratory (LHMEL) located at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, to produce an understanding ofthe interaction of CO2 laser energy with 300M steel. Optical energy coupling efficiency data was matched with the thermal conductance properties of 300M steel to develop a processing method resulting in surface hardening. Surface hard...

Cognitive structure learning model for hierarchical multi-label text classification

The Social Anthropology course plays a crucial role in social work education by fostering students' cultural sensitivity, cross-cultural communication, and social observation skills. However, current teaching practices face challenges such as unclear positioning, vague objectives, and outdated methods. This paper addresses these issues by clarifying the academic value and practical significance of Social Anthropology in social work education. It proposes a SMART-based framework for designing cognitive, skill-based, and affective learning objectives, alongside the integration of blended teaching methods, including case studies, fieldwork, flipped classrooms, and simulated scenarios. Practical results indicate that these reforms enhance students' theoretical analysis and practical competencies while strengthening their cultural sensitivity and social responsibility. Future recommendations include adopting more flexible and hybrid teaching approaches to further integrate theory and practice.

Phronesis Knowledge As Enabler of Intuitive Decision Making

Editor’s Note: Sounding the Break: Music Studies and the Political

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2009) Toward a dynamical interpretation of hierarchical linguistic structure Sam Tilsen 1. Introduction Hierarchy is one of the most important concepts in the scientific understanding of language. From early structuralist approaches of the mid-1800s, through the paradigm shift to generative grammar in the mid-1900s, and onward to the present, connected-object (“branching”) schemas have been used to represent hierarchical constituency relations between linguistic units. Syntactic trees are the most prominent instantiation of such schemas, but similar arboreal schemas have been applied extensively in nearly all domains of linguistic theory. Recently, an alternative conception of hierarchical structure has arisen, which is based upon interactions between waves, or coupled oscillatory systems. This paper presents a synthesis and extension of such approaches, with the aim of advancing a general wave theory of linguistic structure. This wave theory provides a coherent conceptualization of diverse linguistic phenomena, is cognitively plausible, and is a parsimonious theory. Many syntactic and phonological patterns in language can be understood to arise from general principles of wave interaction. Section 1.1 will consider how hierarchy has traditionally been conceptualized and represented in linguistics, and section 1.2 will describe some previous research which leads the way to a wave-based, dynamical systems perspective on linguistic structure. Section 2 will introduce some general principles regarding how hierarchical structure can be conceptualized with dynamical systems, beginning with systems of two waves, then treating systems of three waves, which can be generalized to more complex systems. This is followed in section 3 by several applications of the theory to phonological and syntactic patterns. These include an examination of how segments interact with syllables and how stress interacts with words, as well as a proposal for dynamical modeling of recursive syntactic patterns and syntactic dislocation phenomena. Section 4 concludes with a discussion of the cognitive plausibility of this approach, and delineates some issues to guide further development of the theory. 1.1 Hierarchical Structure In this paper we are interested in a structural notion of hierarchy, in which concepts of ranking, relation, and containment play important roles. In order to organize our

The production and perception of English vowels and consonants were measured for Chinese college students who started their English education from 9 to 13 years old. In the production experiment, 12 English vowels were recorded in the /hVd/ context and twenty one English consonants were recorded in /aCa/ context for each participant. In the perception experiment, participants were asked to identify English vowels in /hVd/ and English consonants in /aCa/ that were produced by a young female American English native speaker. In both production and perception, vowels were markedly more challenging than consonants with vowel production and perception scores around 60% and consonant production and perception approximately 90%. Moreover, there was a significant correlation between consonant production and perception, but not between vowel production and perception. These results indicate that Chinse college students’ main difficulty in English phonetic production and perception are vowels rather than consonants at simple phonetic contexts like /VCV/ and /CVC/ structures. The second language learning models will be discussed to interpret these findings. [Work supported by the Open Project Fund from the National Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning at Beijing Normal University, China, and University of Texas at Austin Research Grant.]

In this thesis a data-driven and linguistically interpretable intonation model for the automatic analysis and synthesis of fundamental frequency (F0) contours was developed. The intonation model: The model can be characterised as parametric, contour-based, and superpositional. F0 contours are treated as a superposition of global and local components. These components are anchored in a hierarchic prosodic structure defined by global and local segments which correspond roughly to intonation phrases and accent groups respectively. The stylisation of the F0 contours is carried out as follows: Within each global segment a linear F0 base contour is fitted. After the subtraction of this global baseline a third order polynomial is fitted to the F0 residual within each local segment. Subsequently, a symbolic description of the intonation inventory in form of global and local contour classes is derived by polynomial coefficient clustering. On the phonetic level, linear regression models adjust these abstract units to the respective prosodic context. As to the parametric and contour-based description, the model stands in the tradition of Fujisaki (1987), Mohler (1998b) and Taylor (2000). As to superposition, it stands in the tradition of Fujisaki (1987). As in Mohler und Conkie (1998) stylisation parameter clustering is carried out. Regarding the following aspects the approach chosen here provides additional benefit to intonation research: (1) The requirements for data preprocessing are comparably low. F0 stylisation was carried out in F0 sections at syllable nuclei, rendering an exact syllable segmentation unnecessary. The extraction of the prosodic structure is restricted to prosodic phrase boundaries guided by signal pauses, punctuation and partof-speech information. Pitch accent localisation and classification is not needed. Due to this a complete automation of the preprocessing steps with acceptable quality is achieved, so that there is no need for a manual data preparation by experts. This property allows for a fast adaptation of the model to new speech data and avoids inconsistencies caused by incomplete inter-labeller agreement. Due to the partly text-based definition of prosodic structure, automatic preprocessing includes a signal-text alignment needed for subsequent linguistic interpretation. (2) In contrast to the more complex stylisation functions of the models mentioned above, the polynomial stylisation chosen in this study guarantees an analytic approximation and thus a biunique relation between the F0 to be modelled and its abstraction. This property is essential to partition the F0 stylisations into intonation classes based on their contour similarity as well as for later linguistic interpretation. At the same time the chosen polynomial order is capable of capturing F0-coded prominence and boundary behaviour. Linguistic interpretation: The linguistic interpretability of local contour classes was examined for the concepts significance, informational novelty, and utterance finality. The approach chosen here can be described as follows: first, by automatic linguistic corpus analyses hypotheses about possible relations between contour classes and linguistic concepts are generated. These hypotheses are subsequently tested by perception experiments. By these means a systematic linguistic anchoring of the model was achieved in form of a decision tree to predict the linguistically appropriate contour class. The adequacy of its predictions was assured by a further perception test. Conclusion: It has been shown, that it is possible to build a perceptually acceptable and linguistically interpretable representation of intonation in a purely data-driven manner. This bottom-up approach guarantees consistency and easy adaptability of the model to new data. Due to its simultaneous signal proximity and linguistic anchoring, it covers the entire chain from text to signal and therefore can be used for intonation analysis and generation on a linguistic as well as on a phonetic-acoustic level. It is qualified for employment in speech technology applications as well as in phonetic fundamental research to automatically analyse raw speech data.

Effect of using silica fume as a partial replacement of cement in concrete

of UO/sub 3/ in UO/sub 2/SO/sub 4/ and UO/sub 2/F/sub 2/ solutions, s ystem UO/sub 2/SO/sub 4/-- H/sub 2/SO/sub 4/-H/sub 2/O, corrosion inhibitors), and met allurgy of Ti. (W.L.H.) 2l36 An investigation of the materials for use in the watermoderated and cooled Army Package Power Reactor (APPR) operating at about 5OO deg F was made. The available literature was analyzed, and the results of the different investigators were compared and averaged. Twenty different materiais, including stainless steels, nickel alloys, Stellites and others, were investigated from the point of view of physical properties, susceptibiliiy te radiation damage, and corrosion resistance. Corrosion rates were established for all the materials under various conditions, such as irradiation, flow, weld, stress, and various water conditions. Type-304 stainless steel was selected as the basic structural material. Operating conditions, to maintain minimum corrosion, were established also. (auth)

Elastoacoustic coupling coefficients (EACCs) are links between acoustic parameters and mechanical stresses during their determination by the acoustoelasticity method. The magnitudes of the EACCs of a structural material can be calculated if its elasticity constants of the second and third orders are known or determined experimentally for a known stress state of a material. Unfortunately, the calculation variant is little used practically because not all moduli of nonlinear elasticity of even basic structural materials are known with sufficient accuracy. Here, the results are given of the experimental determination of the magnitudes of EACCs for three grades of low-alloy structural steels with different magnitudes of proper acoustic anisotropy, which is determined by the anisotropy of the elastic properties of a material. During the mechanical tests, samples were subjected to uniaxial tension at stepped load magnitudes. They were cut from longitudinal welded tubes of the K60 strength class, which are applied in the mounting of a linear section of gas-main pipelines. Experiments were carried out using an acoustic bench (based on an I2-26 off-the-shelf device) and an IN-5101A automated device that was developed by the ENCOTES Engineering firm, which use the ultrasonic echo method for nondestructive testing. The results of the acoustomechanical tests showed that during the calculation of biaxial stresses according to the data of precise ultrasonic measurements in pipe steels with a magnitude of greater than 3% for the proper acoustic anisotropy, computational algorithms that take the differences of the magnitudes of EACCs into account for stresses that work along and across the direction of the rolling of pipe steel should be used, i.e., along and across the longitudinal axis of the pipe.

of UO/sub 3/ in UO/sub 2/SO/sub 4/ and UO/sub 2/F/sub 2/ solutions, s ystem UO/sub 2/SO/sub 4/-- H/sub 2/SO/sub 4/-H/sub 2/O, corrosion inhibitors), and met allurgy of Ti. (W.L.H.) 2l36 An investigation of the materials for use in the watermoderated and cooled Army Package Power Reactor (APPR) operating at about 5OO deg F was made. The available literature was analyzed, and the results of the different investigators were compared and averaged. Twenty different materiais, including stainless steels, nickel alloys, Stellites and others, were investigated from the point of view of physical properties, susceptibiliiy te radiation damage, and corrosion resistance. Corrosion rates were established for all the materials under various conditions, such as irradiation, flow, weld, stress, and various water conditions. Type-304 stainless steel was selected as the basic structural material. Operating conditions, to maintain minimum corrosion, were established also. (auth)

Civil engineering uses steel as one of the basic structural materials. Sheets play an important role among the steel products. Although steel sheets are relatively cheap and have good mechanical and technological properties, low resistance against corrosion poses a fundamental weakness. A solution to this problem is the use of galvanised or organic-coated steel sheets. Galvanising can be carried out by hot dipping (single structural parts) or continuous galvanising: electrolytic and hot-dip galvanising (sheets and strips or long products, such as: wires or pipes).In the paper steel sheets used in the civil engineering as structural parts or wall and roof cladding are discussed. A special attention is paid to corrosion resistance of the steel sheets. Some results of corrosion tests is presented. The tests were aimed at determination the corrosion resistance of hot-dip and electrolytic galvanised sheets. The influence of the galvanising technology and the relationship between the degree of material deformation and susceptibility to corrosion are given. Coating thickness and kind of the applied galvanising technology is pointed as the key factors affecting the corrosion resistance of galvanised sheets. It is highlighted that during the forming process of galvanised sheets (bending, sheet-metal forming) the zinc coating deforms more than the steel base, so its thickness decreases, and therefore the corrosion resistance of the final product decreases, too.