Understanding Language Death in Czech-Moravian Texas

Based on several decades of personal interaction with Texas speakers of Czech, the author's article attempts to correlate social change with some specific stages of language obsolescence and language death. Many instances of language change in that community, as well as cultural and social change, may be explained by the linguistic model known as the wave theory. One hundred and fifty years passed between the introduction of Czech and the death of that language in Texas. From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, the Czech-Moravians represented a closed community in which individuals defined their identity primarily by the Czech language, ethnicity, and culture. In the final five decades of the twentieth century, as the social template representing Texas speakers of Czech disintegrated, spoken Czech ceased to function as a living language, and much of the ancestral culture connected with the language was lost. Today some among the elderly, described as semi-speakers, terminal speakers, or "rememberers" of language, retain a limited knowledge, but the ancestral language now has only a symbolic function

Retail fees of depository institutions, 1994-99

Under legislative mandate, the Federal Reserve Board has for many years sponsored annual surveys of the retail fees charged by depository institutions. Analysis of the data for the most recent six years (1994-99) shows that for the most common types of depository accounts surveyed, few of the fees and minimum balances changed by a statistically significant amount. However, the most common types of ATM fees and the fees for certain special actions, such as stop-payment orders, increased significantly and by more than the rate of consumer price inflation over the period. In addition, for almost all of the fees charged for seven common services and special actions, banks that were part of multistate banking organizations on average charged significantly higher fees than single-state banks, and large banks charged significantly more than small banks. Although they narrowed, the differences remained statistically significant after analyses that controlled for the general location of the institutions, for size (in the case of the multistate versus single-state comparison), and for multistate operations (in the case of the large versus small comparison).Banks and banking - Service charges

The battle for energy independence: how much of a good thing?

Energy development - United States

Reasoning with Partial Knowledge

We investigate how sociological argumentation differs from the classical first-order logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: adding premises does not overturn conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge. We identify meta-principles that appear to guide the observed sociological argumentation patterns, and we formalize a semantics to represent them. This semantics yields a new kind of logical consequence relation. We demonstrate that this new logic can reproduce the results of informal sociological theorizing and lead to new insights. It allows us to unify existing theory fragments and paves the way towards a complete classical theory.logic of theory building;non-monotonicity;organizational mortality respectively;social science methodology

A Cloud-based RFID Authentication Protocol with Insecure Communication Channels

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has becomea widespread technology to automatically identify objects and withthe development of cloud computing, cloud-based RFID systemsattract more research these days. Several cloud-based RFIDauthentication protocols have been proposed to address privacyand security properties in the environment where the cloudprovider is untrusted therefore the tag’s data are encrypted andanonymously stored in the cloud database. However, most of thecloud-based RFID authentication protocols assume securecommunication channels between the reader and the cloud server.To protect data transmission between the reader and the cloudserver without any help from a third party, this paper proposes acloud-based RFID authentication protocol with insecurecommunication channels (cloud-RAPIC) between the reader and the cloud server. The cloud-RAPIC protocol preserves tag privacyeven when the tag does not update its identification. The cloudRAPIC protocol has been analyzed using the UPriv model andAVISPA verification tool which have proved that the protocolpreserves tag privacy and protects data secrecy

A Smart Game for Data Transmission and Energy Consumption in the Internet of Things

The current trend in developing smart technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) has motivated a lot of research interest in optimizing data transmission or minimizing energy consumption, but with little evidence of proposals for achieving both objectives in a single model. Using the concept of game theory, we develop a new MAC protocol for IEEE 802.15.4 and IoT networks in which we formulate a novel expression for the players' utility function and establish a stable Nash equilibrium (NE) for the game. The proposed IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol is modeled as a smart game in which analytical expressions are derived for channel access probability, data transmission probability, and energy used. These analytical expressions are used in formulating an optimization problem (OP) that maximizes data transmission and minimizes energy consumption by nodes. The analysis and simulation results suggest that the proposed scheme is scalable and achieves better performance in terms of data transmission, energy-efficiency, and longevity, when compared with the default IEEE 802.15.4 access mechanism.Peer reviewe