Notes for the summer school Symbolic dynamics and homeomorphisms of the Cantor set,

Lectures given at the summer school " Applications of random matrices in physics " , Les Houches, June 2004.

The ESSLLI course material has been compiled by Balder ten Cate and David Gabelaia. Unless otherwise mentioned, the copyright lies with the individual authors of the material. Balder ten Cate and David Gabelaia declare that they have obtained all necessary permissions for the distribution of this material. ESSLLI 2008 and its organizers take no legal responsibility for the contents of this book...

We document ethnic segregation in secondary schools in England in 2001 in order to contribute to the debate on the degree of ethnic group social integration. We use indices of dissimilarity and isolation to compare the patterns of segregation across nine ethnic groups. We find that levels of ethnic segregation in England’s schools are high, with considerable variation both across LEAs and acros...

Definition 2 A typed family of sets D is a collection of sets Dα indexed by types α ∈ T . A typed family of nonempty sets D is a typed family of sets such that Dα is nonempty for each α ∈ T . Given two typed families of sets D and D, a typed function f : D → D is a collection of functions fα : Dα → D α indexed by types α ∈ T . We use FT (D,D ) to denote the set of typed functions from a typed f...

This paper reports on a course whose aim is to introduce Formal Language Theory to students with little formal background (mostly linguistics students). The course was first taught at the European Summer School for Logic, Language and Information to a mixed audience of students, undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate, with various backgrounds. The challenges of teaching such a course include ...

Productive areas in the Canadian Arctic seasonally provide top predators with accessible and often predictable sources of energy. Arctic cod (Boreogadus saida) aggregate in shallow bays during the summer and are exploited by seabirds and marine mammals. Information concerning how prey is presented to predatory seabirds, and the cues seabirds use to optimize foraging potential, is limited. Hydro...

A dialogue game is presented that enables us to generate coherent elementary conversational sequences at the speech act level. Central to the approach is that the cognitive states of players change as a result of the interpretation of speech acts and that these changes provoke the production of a subsequent speech act. It will be shown that the structure and the coherence of conversational unit...

PURPOSE To evaluate possible seasonal variations in myopia progression and ocular elongation in school children. METHODS Seventy-one children who were enrolled in a clinical trial of bifocals were examined every 6 months for 30 months. Three 6-month intervals ("winters") included none of the summer vacation from school, and two intervals ("summers") included all of the summer vacation. Myopia...