The Ethnonym Geordie in North East England

AbstractWhat are the origins and history of the ethnonym Geordie in North East England? How does this history — which according to some authorities has never adequately been explained — help us to understand its current usage and meanings? I attempt to answer these questions by drawing on evidence from a range of sources (including newly available material in the British Newspaper Archive).</jats:p

Mam or mum? Sociolinguistic Awareness and Language-ideological Debates Online

The technological advances associated with Web 2.0 allow people to interact in online ‘communities’ built around shared interests and concerns. So far, research in language attitudes and folk linguistics has made only limited use of naturally-occurring discourse in these environments. This article examines an online messageboard virtually located in North East England, and explores the ways in which participants’ beliefs about and attitudes towards sociolinguistic variation emerge through discourse. I focus on a single ‘conversation’, revealing the language ideologies which inform the sociolinguistic awareness of participants, and conclude by using the concept of ‘late modernity’ as an ‘interpretive frame’ (Harris 2011) to help understand what is happening as people appropriate a global technology for local social action.</jats:p

Non-destructive plant health sensing using absorption spectroscopy

The sensor group of the 1988 EGM 4001 class, working on NASA's Controlled Ecological Life Support Systems (CELSS) project, investigated many different plant health indicators and the technologies used to test them. The project selected by the group was to measure chlorophyll levels using absorption spectroscopy. The spectrometer measures the amount of chlorophyll in a leaf by measuring the intensity of light of a specific wavelength that is passed through a leaf. The three wavelengths of light being used corresponded to the near-IR absorption peaks of chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, and chlorophyll-free structures. Experimentation showed that the sensor is indeed measuring levels of chlorophyll a and b and their changes before the human eye can see any changes. The detector clamp causes little damage to the leaf and will give fairly accurate readings on similar locations on a leaf, freeing the clamp from having to remain on the same spot of a leaf for all measurements. External light affects the readings only slightly so that measurements may be taken in light or dark environments. Future designs and experimentation will concentrate on reducing the size of the sensor and adapting it to a wider range of plants

Expanded microchannel heat exchanger: design, fabrication and preliminary experimental test

This paper first reviews non-traditional heat exchanger geometry, laser welding, practical issues with microchannel heat exchangers, and high effectiveness heat exchangers. Existing microchannel heat exchangers have low material costs, but high manufacturing costs. This paper presents a new expanded microchannel heat exchanger design and accompanying continuous manufacturing technique for potential low-cost production. Polymer heat exchangers have the potential for high effectiveness. The paper discusses one possible joining method - a new type of laser welding named "forward conduction welding," used to fabricate the prototype. The expanded heat exchanger has the potential to have counter-flow, cross-flow, or parallel-flow configurations, be used for all types of fluids, and be made of polymers, metals, or polymer-ceramic precursors. The cost and ineffectiveness reduction may be an order of magnitude or more, saving a large fraction of primary energy. The measured effectiveness of the prototype with 28 micron thick black low density polyethylene walls and counterflow, water-to-water heat transfer in 2 mm channels was 72%, but multiple low-cost stages could realize the potential of higher effectiveness

Efficient information collection on portfolios

This paper tackles the problem of efficiently collecting data to learn a classifier, or mapping, from each task to the best performing tool, where tasks are described by continuous features and there is a portfolio of tools to choose from. A typical example is selecting an optimization algorithm from a portfolio of algorithms, based on some features of the problem instance to be solved. Information is collected by testing a tool on a task and observing its (possibly stochastic) performance. The goal is to minimize the opportunity cost of the constructed mapping, where opportunity cost is the difference between the performance of the true best tool for each task, and the performance of the tool chosen by the constructed mapping, summed over all tasks. We propose several fully sequential information collection policies based on Bayesian statistics and Gaussian Process models. In each step, they myopically sample the (task, tool) pair that promises the highest value of the information collected. We prove optimality under certain conditions and empirically demonstrate that our methods significantly outperform standard approaches on a set of synthetic benchmark problems

On imprimitive rank 3 permutation groups

A classification is given of rank 3 group actions which are quasiprimitive but not primitive. There are two infinite families and a finite number of individual imprimitive examples. When combined with earlier work of Bannai, Kantor, Liebler, Liebeck and Saxl, this yields a classification of all quasiprimitive rank 3 permutation groups. Our classification is achieved by first classifying imprimitive almost simple permutation groups which induce a 2-transitive action on a block system and for which a block stabiliser acts 2-transitively on the block. We also determine those imprimitive rank 3 permutation groups $G$ such that the induced action on a block is almost simple and $G$ does not contain the full socle of the natural wreath product in which $G$ embeds.Comment: updated after revision

Whether it's M-learing or E-learning, it must be ME learning: a case study of mobile learning in Higher Education

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