Usage Items Research Articles

‘To be avoided by every correct Writer’: George Harris’s Observations upon the English Language and the first English usage guide

ABSTRACT Robert Baker is generally acknowledged to have written the first English usage guide in 1770, but in 1752, George Harris published a short pamphlet called Observations upon the English Language in a Letter to Friend that shares many features of a usage guide. Though smaller than Baker’s book, Harris’s pamphlet nonetheless collects some 66–126 usage items (depending on how one counts categories and instances) and pronounces his preference for one of the variants within each item. Harris’s Observations upon the English Language starts out mainly as a proposal for respelling several words in English, but ends up also prescribing variants for pronunciation, grammar, word meaning, and phrasing. Harris seems to have taken his impetus from an earlier pamphlet published in 1724 (The Many Advantages of a Good Language to Any Nation) that calls for just such codifying of usage issues. In many ways Harris’s Observations upon the English Language looks at least like a precursor to the English usage guide and may be a usage guide itself.

Exploring Digital Technology Usage among English Language Instructors at a Saudi Higher Education Institution and Validating a Hierarchical Structure of Usage Based on the SAMR Model

This study examined the usage of digital technology among English language instructors at a public university in Saudi Arabia as perceived by their students and tested the notion that such usage could be ranked in hierarchical levels. The SAMR model, developed by Puentedura (2014), was employed to categorise and rank technology usage into four incremental levels, i.e., Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition, with Substitution being the most rudimentary level and Redefinition being the highest and most sophisticated usage. A 32-item questionnaire rated on a 5-point Likert scale measuring how frequently English language instructors used technology at the four SAMR levels was developed by the authors, content-validated by six instructional technology experts and pilot-tested with 63 students prior to its use in the actual survey. Data were gathered from a survey sample of 535 Saudi learners studying English in their foundation year programme and analysed using three statistical procedures, i.e., descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The descriptive results pointed to instructors' technology usage revolving around the Substitution level of the SAMR model, indicating a predominant tendency among instructors to merely replace traditional teaching tools with digital alternatives. The EFA procedure (via Principal Axis Factoring with Promax rotation) produced conflicting results. While the extracted factor structure supported only two levels of usage, the scree plot suggested the existence of four usage levels consistent with the SAMR model. This was addressed by the subsequent CFA procedure performed on the data that confirmed the four SAMR levels, with the fit statistics indicating a good-fitting technology usage model; χ2(98) = 268.73; χ2/df = 2.74; CFI = .94; RMSEA = .078, CI: .067, .090. Sixteen out of the 32 technology usage items were successfully extracted and confirmed as the indicators SAMR’s four levels. The results corroborated previous findings that technology utilisation among English instructors is pervasive but rudimentary. They also supported the theoretical notion that technology usage can be categorised, ranked, and understood in hierarchical levels as purported by the SAMR model.

Medical Cannabis Patients Report Improvements in Health Functioning and Reductions in Opiate Use

Purpose: Opioid use rates have dropped as North American patients gain access to medical cannabis, indicating a harm reduction role, yet health outcomes remain mostly unexplored. This study presents self-reported medical cannabis use, perceptions of health functioning, and changes in opioid pain medication use in Florida medical cannabis patients. Methods: Patients (n = 2,183) recruited from medical dispensaries across Florida completed a 66-item cross-sectional survey that included demographic, health, and medication usage items, along with items from the Medical Outcomes Survey (SF-36) to assess health functioning before and after cannabis initiation. Results: Most participants were between the ages of 20 and 70 years of age (95%), over 54% were female, 47% were employed, and most (85%) were white. Commonly reported ailment groups were Pain and Mental Health combined (47.92%), Mental Health (28.86%) or Pain (9.07%). Health domains of bodily pain, physical functioning, and social functioning improved while limitations due to physical and emotional problems were unchanged. Most patients rated medical cannabis as being important to their quality of life. Many (60.98%) reported using pain medications prior to medical cannabis, 93.36% of these reported a change in pain medication after medical cannabis. The majority of participants (79%) reported either cessation or reduction in pain medication use following initiation of medical cannabis and 11.47% described improved functioning. Conclusions: The findings suggest that some medical cannabis patients decreased opioid use without harming quality of life or health functioning, soon after the legalization of medical cannabis. The public health implications of medical cannabis as an alternative pain medication are discussed.

A roadmap to improve usage items to enhance the operational effectiveness of occupational safety and health management expense in Korean construction.

Occupational safety and health management expense (OSHE) in construction industry is a statutory expense used for the purpose of preventing occupational accident and health disorders for construction workers, and the detailed usage standard is stipulated in the law and regulations governed by the Ministry of Employment and Labor in Korea. Previous studies focused on improvement of the accounting rate of OSHE and institutional improvement to secure usage transparency, but analysis showed that the review of improvement directions for usage items was insufficient. Considering recent trends, such as the increase in industrial demand to improve existing usage items and the introduction of various smart safety products incorporating the Fourth Industrial Revolution technology, it is expected that it will be necessary to review ways to improve the usage items to enhance the operational efficiency of OSHE. Accordingly, this study collected opinions from various stakeholders, and presented a roadmap to improve usage items of OSHE through importance-performance analysis (IPA) based on the data. This study is expected to meet the needs demanded by industry, and to be utilized as a reference for policy preparation to enhance the safety of construction sites.

Understanding lockdown experience and its relationship with psychological well-being in young married adults: an exploratory study during nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic

Since its outbreak in December, 2019, the novel coronavirus has wreaked a havoc across the world. Stringent measures such as lockdown and self-isolation were imposed in various nations to curb the transmission of the life-threatening virus. India had been under a complete lockdown from 25th March, 2020 to 3rd May,2020, compelling its citizens to stay indoors for an unprecedented amount of time. The ‘stay at home orders’ had serious implications on the mental health of the people. In light of the on-going pandemic, the current study aims to understand the lockdown experience of young married adults and its relationship with their psychological well-being. Also, with a spike in the digital habits of young adults during the Covid-19 lockdown, we intended to explore the impact of technology on the psychological well-being of its users. A convenience sample of 140 married, young adults (20 to 40 years old), staying with their partners in different parts of the country, was selected for the study. A single administration of WHO QOL BREF and self-constructed Lockdown Experience Scale was carried out. A separate list of technology usage items was also presented to the participants. Due to lockdown, the questionnaires were administered through Google forms. Results indicate that Lockdown Experience (Quality of Partner Relationship, sharing of household responsibilities, Personal Space) correlated significantly with Psychological Well Being as well as with Technology Use. Implications and suggestions for future research have been given.

Kayseri Selçuklu Uygarlığı Müzesinde Bulunan Bir Grup Kemer Tokası

Küçük objeler arasında yer alan kemer tokaları, üzerinde oldukça naif ve etkileyici sanatların bulunduğu kullanım eşyalarındandır. Herhangi bir kemer tokasının malzemesi işleniş niteliği ve figür repertuvarı bize dönemin sanatına, sosyoekonomik durumuna ve dini hayatına kadar ışık tutmaktadır. Kayseri Selçuklu Uygarlığı Müzesi’nde sergilenen kemer tokalarından incelediğimiz altı eser üzerinde aslan, pegasus, grifon, birbirine dolanmış çift ejder, hayvan mücadele sahnesi ve tavus kuşu figürleri yer almaktadır. Eserlerin yapımında döküm tekniği, süslemelerde ise kazıma tekniği kullanılmıştır. İncelenen kemer tokalarının hammaddesi bronz olup, dikdörtgen formdadır. Kemer tokalarının kemerleri günümüze ulaşamamıştır. Ayrıca kemer tokalarının bulunma yerleri, ustaların isimleri ve dönemleri hakkında bilgi bulunmamaktadır. Kemer tokaları küçük nesnelerdir. Bu nedenle kolaylıkla taşınabilirler. Ek olarak, kemer tokalarının üzerine genel olarak herhangi bir bilgi yazılmamaktadır. Tüm bu nedenlerden dolayı eserlerin tarihsel arka planı hakkında kesin bir yargıya varmak mümkün değildir. Yapılan bu çalışmada eserlerin genel özellikleri hakkında bilgi verilerek benzer eserler ile form, bezeme, malzeme, figür ve kompozisyon açısından karşılaştırılmıştır. Tüm bu bilgiler ışığında da yaklaşık bir dönem tespitine gidilmiştir.

Design and Implementation of Smart Cart using Labview

In this present generation most of the people prefer to visit supermarkets and hypermarkets to buy the products of their needs right from the food products to the household usage items. In general these hypermarkets and supermarkets provide trolleys to their customers to have a hand free convenient shopping. Though the entire shopping goes well most of the customers get stressed out by seeing those long queues and hours of waiting near the bill counters. Even after coming up with some temporary solutions for this highly time consuming problem like increasing the man power in bill counters it didn’t bring a big difference. The aim of the paper is to overcome this problem with a permanent solution. Here we introduce a new system called “SMART CART” where we can most probably eliminate the time taking process at the counters. This ultimately leads to the customer satisfaction from the starting of the shopping till the end point. And also adds benefits like reduction of man power requirement and high efficiency with low expenses. In this competitive world of technology this brings a drastic change benefiting both customers and also retail industries by the usage of automated devices. The idea is implemented using LabVIEW software and hardware MyRIO.

Effects of derivatives usage and financial statement items on capital market risk measures of Bank stocks: evidence from India

This paper examines the impact of off-balance sheet derivatives usage by banks combined with financial statement items on their capital market risk measures. Financial markets liberalization policies in the 1990s, led to a surge in investment in Indian banks’ stocks, and therefore, understanding capital market risk is of critical interest to domestic and foreign investors in bank stocks, as well as to bank managers. Using panel data analysis of publicly listed private and public sector banks, our findings indicate that bank size, core capital-to-risk adjusted asset ratio, and interest spread of banks are significantly related to the total return risk of bank stocks. The market risk of bank stocks is significantly positively related to the amount of derivatives usage and to the return on asset ratio of banks. Also, the firm-specific risk component of bank stocks is significantly affected by the volume of total assets, interest spread, and their core capital-to-asset ratio. The interest rate risk exposure of bank stocks is significantly related to the core capital-to-asset ratio, and the interest spread. The off-balance sheet derivatives exposure, bank size, and the core capital to risk adjusted asset ratios are seen to have a significant effect on the overall systematic risk component of the bank stocks. The bank ownership structure, i.e., private versus public sector banks do not have any significant effect on the capital market risk measures.

Language guardian BBC? Investigating the BBC's language advice in its 2003 News Styleguide

ABSTRACTIn this paper, the BBC's stance on English language use is investigated by analysing its language guidelines provided in the 2003 BBC News Styleguide. Before the analysis is tackled, a brief discussion of the use of language and style guides in the media is given to illustrate its complexities and effects on news providers. In order to assess how prescriptive or descriptive the BBC's language advice is, a comparison is made with two usage guides, Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) and Burchfield's The New Fowler's Modern English Usage (1996). This comparison, based on a selection of disputed usage items, requires a differentiation of style and usage guides as text types. By compiling three mini-corpora containing the selected disputed usage items a more in-depth analysis is made by identifying keywords and analysing keywords in context. The study concludes that the BBC attempts to balance prescriptive and descriptive views on language to satisfy its audience, which is illustrated by two specific usage problems (concede and data).

Validation of a Parent-Reported Experience Measure of Integrated Care.

The objectives of this study were to design and validate a survey measuring the parents' and caregivers' experiences of integration of their child's care across providers. After review of the literature on care coordination and integration, we solicited input regarding care experiences from focus groups of families with children with chronic conditions. These data informed a 95-item pilot survey that included elements from a care integration measure designed for adult care experiences. The survey was then administered to parents of children who had had at least 1 primary care appointment and 2 specialty care appointments in the previous 12 months. Psychometric analyses were used to establish scales through exploratory factor analysis, internal consistency using Cronbach's α, test-retest reliability using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, and known-group validity according to χ2 tests. All research activities were institutional review board approved. The pilot survey was completed as either a Web or mail survey by 255 participants. After excluding nonrating or screening questions and items not applicable to a large percentage of participants, 26 experience items were included in the exploratory factor analysis. The final survey contained 19 experience items in 5 scales: access, communication, family impact, care goal creation, and team functioning. Psychometric analyses supported these 5 scales. This project developed and validated a survey with 19 experience items, plus additional demographic and health needs and usage items. The Pediatric Integrated Care Survey can be used in quality improvement efforts to measure family-reported experience of pediatric care integration.

Usage Guides and Usage Trends in Australian and British English

This paper presents a mini-diachronic investigation into the question of whether usage guides (prescriptive or descriptive) affect the evolution of standard written English, using the notions of codification, standardization and hyperstandardization. It examines the commentaries on three variable usage items (-ise/-ize spellings, alright v. all right, and data in singular/plural agreement) in dictionaries, style manuals and usage guides published in Australia and Britain from 1966 to 1995. The treatment of each usage item in terms of prescription/proscription or acceptance is then compared with quantitative evidence of actual usage, using (a) a set of standard corpora (Australian and British) from 1966 to 1995, and (b) twenty-first century data from the internet (Google searches of Australian and UK sites). Changes in relative frequencies of the variants for each pair are then analysed as reflections of the standardization process and/or the putative hyperstandardizing influence of usage commentaries. Despite markedly different treatments in Australian and British references, the trends for the three variable usage items in twenty-first century English are found to be much the same. Hyperstandardization may be seen where prescribed spellings replace the alternatives previously available; but the outcomes for the other variable items suggest they are rationalized by common usage sooner or later, whether the local usage commentary is prescriptive or descriptive.

Multiagent Systems and its Development Tools

The paper presents practical usage items of multiagent technology. It includes description of agent-based system specific features determining an area of their practical application and successful examples of agent-based approach usage for decision of some important practical tasks. The main attention of the paper is paid to the problem of interaction of agents with environment. In this relation description of some multiagent systems’ environments is given. As well the paper includes description of MASDK tool supporting completed life cycle of multiagent systems’ development. Taking into account the focus of the paper the main attention of the tool description is paid to presentation of decisions that are used for realization of interaction agents with environment.

Studying attitudes to English usage

Attitudes to English Usageis the title of a book published in 1970 by W. H. Mittins, Mary Salu, Mary Edminson and Sheila Coyne from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne that reported on an enquiry held among some 450 informants concerning the acceptability of 55 usage items. These items had been selected because they were at the time ‘subject to variation in practice and dispute in theory’ (Mittins et al., 1970: 4), and they include sentences likeHe refused to even think about it,It looked like it will rainandEveryone has their off-days. In each case the offensive feature had been highlighted so that informants would know what they had to comment on:to even think(a split infinitive), the use oflikeforas if, and oftheirwith a singular antecedent (everyone). For fifty sentences the informants had to indicate acceptability in informal speech, informal writing, formal speech and formal writing, and for the remaining five only for informal and formal writing, since usage of these items was believed to be restricted to writing (1970: 4). The sentences were subsequently ranged from highest general acceptability (did not doaswell as) to lowest (veryunique), and correlations were calculated with the occupation of the informants (students, teachers, lecturers, examiners and non-educationists), while the items were also classified as colloquial (pretty reliable), etymological (data is), grammatical (did it quicker) and lexical/semantic (inferred/implied), or as language myths, ‘where the censorious tend to invoke a prescription of dubious authority’ (dangling participles) (1970: 15). The main part of the book dealt with the individual constructions, analysing the reasons for their status as debated usage items and providing further historical context in the process.

Problematic internet usage in US college students: a pilot study

BackgroundInternet addiction among US college students remains a concern, but robust estimates of its prevalence are lacking.MethodsWe conducted a pilot survey of 307 college students at two US universities. Participants completed the Internet Addiction Test (IAT) as well as the Patient Health Questionnaire. Both are validated measures of problematic Internet usage and depression, respectively. We assessed the association between problematic Internet usage and moderate to severe depression using a modified Poisson regression approach. In addition, we examined the associations between individual items in the IAT and depression.ResultsA total of 224 eligible respondents completed the survey (73% response rate). Overall, 4% of students scored in the occasionally problematic or addicted range on the IAT, and 12% had moderate to severe depression. Endorsement of individual problematic usage items ranged from 1% to 70%. In the regression analysis, depressive symptoms were significantly associated with several individual items. Relative risk could not be estimated for three of the twenty items because of small cell sizes. Of the remaining 17 items, depressive symptoms were significantly associated with 13 of them, and three others had P values less than 0.10. There was also a significant association between problematic Internet usage overall and moderate to severe depression (relative risk 24.07, 95% confidence interval 3.95 to 146.69; P = 0.001).ConclusionThe prevalence of problematic Internet usage among US college students is a cause for concern, and potentially requires intervention and treatment amongst the most vulnerable groups. The prevalence reported in this study is lower than that which has been reported in other studies, however the at-risk population is very high and preventative measures are also recommended.

Online recreation: The relationship between loneliness, Internet self-efficacy and the use of the Internet for entertainment purposes

In this study, 150 undergraduates answered questions about their Internet usage and completed a loneliness and an Internet self-efficacy questionnaire. A factor analysis of the Internet usage items revealed three facets of online recreation, including, using the Internet for: computer-based entertainment, to facilitate offline entertainment, and for information about the entertainment world. Those who scored higher on loneliness were more likely to use the Internet for computer-based entertainment, as well as, use the Internet to obtain information about the entertainment world. Individuals higher in Internet self-efficacy were more likely to use the Internet for computer-based entertainment and to facilitate offline entertainment. Implications for the study of the psychological influences of the Internet are discussed in this paper.

Cross-selling through database marketing: a mixed data factor analyzer for data augmentation and prediction

An important aspect of the new orientation on customer relationship marketing is the use of customer transaction databases for the cross-selling of new services and products. In this study, we propose a mixed data factor analyzer that combines information from a survey with data from the customer database on service usage and transaction volume, to make probabilistic predictions of ownership of services with the service provider and with competitors. This data-augmentation tool is more flexible in dealing with the type of data that are usually present in transaction databases. We test the proposed model using survey and transaction data from a large commercial bank. We assume four different types of distributions for the data: Bernoulli for binary service usage items, rank-order binomial for satisfaction rankings, Poisson for service usage frequency, and normal for transaction volumes. We estimate the model using simulated likelihood (SML). The graphical representation of the weights produced by the model provides managers with the opportunity to quickly identify cross-selling opportunities. We exemplify this and show the predictive validity of the model on a hold-out sample of customers, where survey data on service usage with competitors is lacking. We use Gini concentration coefficients to summarize power curves of prediction, which reveals that our model outperforms a competing latent trait model on the majority of service predictions.

Annex cache: a cache assist to implement selective caching

Efficient instruction and data caches are extremely important for achieving good performance from modern high performance processors. Conventional cache architectures exploit locality, but do so rather blindly. By forcing all references through a single structure, the cache's effectiveness on many references is reduced. This paper presents a selective caching scheme for improving cache performance, implemented using a cache assist namely the annex cache. Except for filling a main cache at cold start, all entries come to the cache via the annex cache. A block from the annex cache gets swapped with a main cache block only if it has been referenced twice after the conflicting main cache block was referenced. Essentially, low usage items are not allowed to create conflict misses in the main cache. Items referenced only rarely will be excluded from the main cache, eliminating several conflict misses and swaps. The basic premise is that an item deserves to be in the main cache only if it can prove its right to exist in the main cache by demonstrating locality. The annex cache has some of the features of a victim cache (N.P. Jouppi, Improving direct-mapped cache performance by the addition of a small fully associative cache and buffers, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture, 1990, pp. 364–373) but the processor can access annex cache entries directly, i.e. annex cache entries can bypass the main cache. Thus it combines the features of victim caches and cache exclusion schemes. Extensive simulation studies for annex and victim caches using a variety of SPEC programs are presented in this paper. Annex caches were observed to be significantly better than conventional caches, better than victim caches in certain cases, and comparable to victim caches in other cases.

Gauging prescriptivism in writing handbooks

Although handbooks (those often used as references in business and industry) tend to adhere to traditional usage prescriptions, it is clear that they cannot possibly all display the same degree of prescriptivism. Likewise, people who select handbooks, whether they are writing instructors or professional writers, differ in how much importance they invest in following traditional prescriptions. What is needed, then, is a method to match handbooks to users, enabling writing professionals to select a reference that reflects their views on the importance of adhering to traditional rules. Toward this end, this article describes a study of the level of prescriptiveness of 14 handbooks and provides a method based on this study for gauging the prescriptiveness of other handbooks. This study supports W.E. Meyers' (1995) findings in that it suggests prescriptive usage entries are still prevalent in handbooks. However, handbooks do display some variation in their prescriptiveness, and their prescriptiveness can be gauged by analyzing a sample of ten usage items.

Taking the G-r-r-r Out of Grammar

linguistics revolution that displaced traditional prescriptive with the more modern, structural and transformational-generative grammars. The title doesn't reveal that the course also came into the statutes under back-to-basics pressure: legislators may have thought they were remediating a lack of knowledge of correctness on the part of teachers-you know, the mythical progressive teachers who don't mark errors and approve of anything that students spel or rite. Although the descriptive grammar course at our university is intellectually much more respectable than a mere correctness course, students don't always come to it bubbling with enthusiasm over the prospect of learning the intricacies of syntax (whatever that is). Moreover, because the course has, in the past, been taught mostly by university linguists who presented a detailed and technical transformational-generative perspective, students have questioned the usefulness of the course and its applications in teaching. Still, when our students begin their first teaching assignments, they often report coming face-to-face with teachers committed to a traditional approach to grammar. Sometimes pressure for parts-of-speech grammar comes from community demands for basics; sometimes it comes from teachers who remain convinced that, despite research to the contrary, grammar is somehow vital in teaching writing; too often the grammar pressure comes about simply because that's what's covered in the standard-issue textbook. Whatever the causes, our students have often perceived that their descriptive grammar course failed to give them the tools they needed to cope with studentor first-year teaching. Let us begin by saying that we believe in grammar. We even speak and write it! But we've studied the research and know that presenting traditional parts of speech and drilling away at usage items is no way to teach children to read, write, listen, and speak. We are also convinced that teachers should have a solid understanding of syntactic systems and structures-the rules, laws, circumstances, and conventions that govern how we use language. In the summer of 1995, we decided to team teach the descriptive grammar course and to take a whack at revising it. Specifically, we wanted to make the course a bit more

Vocal Abuse Behaviors in Young Children

To determine if use of specific vocal behaviors was perceived to change across age, parents of 834 children, aged 3 to 7 years, rated 16 voice usage items for frequency of occurrence. Results of the data analysis indicated that parental perception of voice usage was directly related to a child's age. Specifically, as the child's age increased, voice usage became more conservative. Frequency tables for vocal behaviors across age were developed.