This paper investigates the need for applying English prosody when synthesising English portions of mixed English/German texts using a German-based polyglot text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system. The polyglot system is based on a monolingual German TTS system, which uses a phone mapping from English to German to synthesise English texts. Two systems with varying degrees of assimilation to Engli...

This study is the first to explore the relationship between cohabitation and U.S. adult mortality using a nationally representative sample. Using data from the National Health Interview Survey-Longitudinal Mortality Follow-up files 1997 – 2004 (N = 193,851), the authors found that divorced, widowed, and never-married White men had higher mortality rates than cohabiting White men, and never-marr...

The integration of CSCL tools inside larger platforms like Virtual Campuses is often impossible. To overcome this problem, our general assumption is that they need a common theoretical framework for their design. In this context and turning our interest into the Activity Theory, we aim at providing new systems foundations supporting large varieties of learning modes, trying to capture the contr...

Businesses and pro-business interest groups have often claimed that the litigation environment in the states influences their decisions about where and how to do business. However, very little empirical evidence exists to suggest that these claims are anything more than anecdotal. This study attempts to fill that void. I employ a triple-differences identification strategy in which businesses in...

Remark 2 Differences are really huge. For example, in 2000, GDP (or income) per capita in the United States was over $33000.1 In contrast, income per capita is much lower in many other countries: less than $9000 in Mexico, less than $4000 in China, less than $2500 in India, and only about $700 in Nigeria, and much much lower in some other sub-Saharan African countries such as Chad, Ethiopia, an...

We describe a method of correcting noisy output of a machine translation system. Our idea is to consider di erent phrases of a given sentence, and nd appropriate replacements of some of these from the frequently occurring similar phrases in the monolingual corpus. The frequent phrases in the monolingual corpus are indexed by a search engine. When looking for similar phrases we consider phrases ...

Introduction: An extensive body of literature deals with the complexity of providing integrated care to frail patients. However, theoretical fragmentation and a lack of substantial knowledge about success factors still abound. Aim: To identify environmental conditions and configurations of factors associated with service delivery success in integrated care initiatives. Theory and methods: Build...

Who would you choose to write a book about the history of the Math Wars, a topic surely familiar by now to almost all readers of the Notices (if not, see [1])? A mathematics educator? Probably not, since most such are biased toward the progressive school of mathematics education. A mathematician? Again, probably not, since most of them are avid exponents of the traditional view of mathematics e...

In this paper we describe the development of an improved spelling checker for Afrikaans. We compare two currently available spelling checkers and discuss their shortcomings. The existing applications are restricted in their suggestion capabilities, as well as their precision and recall, mainly because they cannot treat morphologically complex words correctly. Here, we will mainly focus on impro...

In this study, we compared brain activation patterns in men and women during performance of a fine motor task, in order to investigate the influence of motor task complexity upon asymmetries of hemispheric recruitment. Thirty-three right-handed participants (17 males, 16 females) performed a self-paced finger-tapping task comprising three conditions of increasing complexity with both the domina...