Search results for: language and politics

Authors: Yaxuan Wang

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It has long been a mystery that why the Mongolian possessive suffix, which is constrained by Condition A of binding theory, has the ability to probe a potential antecedent outside of its binding domain. This squib argues that binding theory alone is not sufficient to explain the linguistic facts and proposes an analysis adopting the Agree operation. The current analysis correctly predicts all the possible and impossible structures, with an additional hypothesis that Mongolian possessive suffixes serve as an antecedent for PROs in adjunct. The findings thus provide insights into how Agree operates in Mongolian language.

Keywords: syntax, Mongolian, agreement, possessive particles

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Authors: Dato Surmanidze, Dato Antadze, Tornike Partenadze

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Public online services in Georgia are concentrated on main target segments: public administration, business, population, non-governmental and other interested organizations. Therefore, the strategy of digital Georgia is focused on providing G2C, G2B/B2G, G2NGO and G2G services. In G2C framework sophisticated and high-technological online services have been developed in order to provide passports, identity cards, documentations concerning residence and civil acts (birth, marriage, divorce, child adoption, change of name and surname, death, etc) as well as other services. Websites like my.gov.ge and sda.gov.ge have distance services like electronic application, processing and decision making. In line with international standards automatic services like electronic tenders, product catalogues, invoices and payment have been developed. This creates better investment climate for foreign companies in Georgia in the framework of G2B politics. The website mybusiness.gov.ge creates better conditions for local business. Among electronic services is e-NRMS (electronic system for national resource management) which was introduced by the Ministry of Finance of Georgia. The system was created in order to ensure management of national resources by state and business organizations. It is integrated with bank services and provides G2C, G2B and B2G representatives with electronic services. Also a portal meteo.gov.ge was created which gives electronic services concerning air, geological, environmental and pollution issues. Also worknet.gov.ge should be mentioned which is an electronic hub of information management for employers and employees. The information portal of labor market will facilitate receipt of information, its analysis and delivery to interested people like employers and employees. However, nowadays it’s been two years that only employees portal is activated. Therefore, awareness about the portal, its competitiveness and success is undermined.

Keywords: electronic services, public administration, information technology, information society

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Authors: Dinnah Feye H. Andal, Ann Laurice V. Salonga

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The paper investigates the flooding event that was experienced by Marikina City residents during the onslaught of Tropical Storm Ondoy on September 26, 2009 and during the heavy downpour caused by the southwest monsoon (Habagat) on August 1-8, 2012. Typhoon Ketsana, locally known as Tropical Storm Ondoy, devastated the whole of Marikina City, displacing a lot of people from their homes and damages properties as well, as flood rose at a very short period of time. Meanwhile, the massive amount of rain water brought by the southwest monsoon lasted for a week that also caused flooding to different parts of Metro Manila including Marikina City. This paper examines how the respondents’ experiences of the flooding caused by Tropical Storm Ondoy informed the coping strategies that the households in Barangay Tumana and Provident Village employed during the flooding brought by the southwest monsoon rains. Specifically, the research compares the coping strategies to flood hazards between residents of Barangay Tumana and Provident Village before, during and after the flooding caused by the southwest monsoon rains. Both study sites have relatively low elevation and are located along rivers and creeks which make them highly susceptible to flood. Interviews with affected residents were undertaken to understand how a household's coping strategies contribute to the development of community coping strategies at the respective neighborhood level. Based from the findings, income levels, local politics, religion and social relations between and among neighbors affect the way household and community coping strategies differ in the two case study sites.

Keywords: community coping strategies, Habagat, Marikina, Ondoy

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Authors: Zsolt Szabolcsi

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Political communication in Hungary has undergone a significant change in the 2010s. One element of the transformation is the Flashnews. This media product was launched in March 2015 and since then 40-50 blocks are broadcasted, daily, on 5 channels. Flashnews blocks are condensed news sessions, containing the summary of political narratives. It starts with the introduction of the narrator, then, usually four news topics are presented and, finally, the narrator concludes the block. The block lasts only one minute and, therefore, it provides a blink session into the main narratives of political communication at the time. Beyond its rapid pace, what makes its avoidance difficult is that these blocks are always in the first position in the commercial break of a non-political media product. Although it is only one minute long, its significance is high. The content of the Flashnews reflects the main governmental narratives and, therefore, the Flashnews is part of the agenda-setting capacity of political communication. It reaches media consumers who have limited knowledge and interest in politics, and their use of media products is not politically related. For this audience, the Flashnews pops up in the same way as commercials. Due to its structure and appearance, the impact of Flashnews seems to be similar to commercials, imbedded into the break of media products. It activates existing knowledge constructs, builds up associational links and maintains their presence in a way that the recipient is not aware of the phenomenon. The research aims to examine the extent to which the Flashnews and the main news narratives are identical in their content. This aim is realized with the content analysis of the two news products by examining the Flashnews and the evening news during main sport events from 2016 to 2018. The initial hypothesis of the research is that Flashnews is a contribution to the news management technique for an effective articulation of political narratives in public service media channels.

Keywords: flashnews, political communication, political marketing, news management

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Authors: Yukiko Sasaki Alam, Shahid Alam

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Syntactic parsing is vital for semantic treatment by many applications related to natural language processing (NLP), because form and content coincide in many cases. However, it has not yet reached the levels of reliable performance. By manually examining and analyzing individual machine translation output errors that involve syntax as well as semantics, this study attempts to discover what is required for improving syntactic and semantic parsing.

Keywords: syntactic parsing, error analysis, machine translation, deep parsing

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Authors: Ren Boyuan

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This study focuses on how the Character and Citizenship Education textbook in Singapore primary schools deliver preferred and desired qualities to students and therefore reveals how discourse in textbooks can facilitate and perpetuate certain social practices. In this way, this study also serves to encourage the critical thinking of textbook writers and school educators by unveiling the nuanced message through language use that facilitates the perpetuation of social practices in a society. In Singapore, Character and Citizenship Education is a compulsory subject for primary school students. Under the framework of 21st Century Competencies, Character and Citizenship Education in Singapore aims to help students thrive in this fast-changing world. The Singapore government is involved in the development of CCE curriculum in schools from primary schools to pre-university. Inevitably, the CCE curriculum is not free from ideological influences. This qualitative study utilizes Fairclough’s three-dimensional theory and his framework of three assumptions to analyze the Character and Citizenship Education textbook for Primary 1 and to reveal ideologies in this textbook. Data for the analysis in this study are the textual parts of the whole textbook for Primary 1 students as this book is used at the beginning of citizenship education in primary schools. It is significant because it promotes messages about CCE to the foundation years of a child's education. The findings of this study show that the four revealed ideologies, namely pragmatism, communitarianism, nationalism, and multiculturalism, are not only dated back in the national history but also updated and explained by the current demands for Singapore’s thriving and prosperity in a sustainable term. This study ends with a discussion of the implications of this study. By pointing out the ideologies in this textbook and how they are embedded in the discourse, this study may help teachers and textbook writers realize the possible political involvement in the book and therefore develop their recognition of the implicit influence of lexical choice on their teaching and writing. In addition, by exploring the ideologies in this book and comparing them with ideologies in past textbooks, this study helps researchers in this area on how language influences readers and reflects certain social demands.

Keywords: citizenship education, critical discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, textbook analysis

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Authors: Kyoko Tominaga

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Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs), Social Enterprises and other actors play an important role in political decisions in governments at the international levels. Especially, such organizations’ and activists’ network in civil society is quite important to effect to the global politics. To solve the complex social problems in global era, diverse actors should corporate each other. Moreover, network of protesters is also contributes to diffuse tactics, information and other resources of social movements. Based on the findings from the study of International Trade Fairs (ITFs), the author analyzes the network of activists in anti-globalism movement. This research focuses the transition of 54 activists’ whole network in the “protest event” against 2008 G8 summit in Japan. Their network is examined at the three periods: Before protest event phase, during protest event phase and after event phase. A mixed method is used in this study: the author shows the hypothesis from social network analysis and evaluates that with interview data analysis. This analysis gives the two results. Firstly, the more protesters participate to the various events during the protest event, the more they build the network. After that, active protesters keep their network as well. From interview data, we can understand that the active protesters can build their network and diffuse the information because they communicate with other participants and understand that diverse issues are related. This paper comes to same conclusion with previous researches: protest events activate the network among the political activists. However, some participants succeed to build their network, others do not. “Networked” activists are participated in the various events for short period of time and encourage the diffusion of information and tactics of social movements.

Keywords: social movement, global justice movement, tactics, diffusion

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Authors: Aruna Ramani Grover

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In 1857 the British army in Bengal rose in mutiny. The outcome of a yearlong stifle was the abolition of the East India Company and establishment of Crown rule in 1958. Despite being a political democracy back home, with the declaration of Queen Victoria as Empress of India, the British established themselves as imperialistic successors to the Mughals in India. With the institution of the Crown role in the sub-continent, there was a serious endeavour for systematic governance. This led to infrastructure development and creation of institutions as well. The outcome was many public buildings like courts, railway- stations and headquarters, senates, post offices, banks, libraries, memorial halls, museums, memorials, theatres, government colleges, residential-schools and clock towers. These were built in the old and emerging urban settlements of the sub-continents. In the realm of architecture, like all political masters of the past, the British architects too encountered the living tradition of the sub-continent. A bewildering plethora of buildings in various climatic zones, using local materials and crafted with tools and techniques of the region by local craftsmen had to be understood and assimilated. The19th century British architects who built in India, designed institutional buildings which were functional and responded to the need of the user. In visual terms however, it was a completely different story. Using the manifest elements of the complex and layered indigenous tradition, they fashioned buildings to create an architecture of reconciliation. Treating the traditional architecture as a pattern book, finished buildings was served up to the local population coloured by their understanding of tradition. This paper will discuss a series of building some of which are the Senate House and Law courts at Madras, the Municipal Building and Gateway of India in Bombay, the Muir college in Allahabad, Mayo college Ajmer, the Mubarak Mahal in Jaipur to demonstrate how a visual language of reconciliation was created.

Keywords: infrastructure, British architects, tradition, pattern book, reconciliation

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Authors: Athanasios Raftopoulos

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In this paper, an attempt is made to explain the evolution or development of human’s representational arsenal from its humble beginnings to its modern abstract symbols. Representations are physical entities that represent something else. To represent a thing (in a general sense of “thing”) means to use in the mind or in an external medium a sign that stands for it. The sign can be used as a proxy of the represented thing when the thing is absent. Representations come in many varieties, from signs that perceptually resemble their representative to abstract symbols that are related to their representata through conventions. Relying the distinction among indices, icons, and symbols, it is explained how symbolic representations gradually emerged from indices and icons. To understand the development or evolution of our representational arsenal, the development of the cognitive capacities that enabled the gradual emergence of representations of increasing complexity and expressive capability should be examined. The examination of these factors should rely on a careful assessment of the available empirical neuroscientific and paleo-anthropological evidence. These pieces of evidence should be synthesized to produce arguments whose conclusions provide clues concerning the developmental process of our representational capabilities. The analysis of the empirical findings in this paper shows that Homo Erectus was able to use both icons and symbols. Icons were used as external representations, while symbols were used in language. The first step in the emergence of representations is that a sensory-motor purely causal schema involved in indices is decoupled from its normal causal sensory-motor functions and serves as a representation of the object that initially called it into play. Sensory-motor schemes are tied to specific contexts of the organism-environment interactions and are activated only within these contexts. For a representation of an object to be possible, this scheme must be de-contextualized so that the same object can be represented in different contexts; a decoupled schema loses its direct ties to reality and becomes mental content. The analysis suggests that symbols emerged due to selection pressures of the social environment. The need to establish and maintain social relationships in ever-enlarging groups that would benefit the group was a sufficient environmental pressure to lead to the appearance of the symbolic capacity. Symbols could serve this need because they can express abstract relationships, such as marriage or monogamy. Icons, by being firmly attached to what can be observed, could not go beyond surface properties to express abstract relations. The cognitive capacities that are required for having iconic and then symbolic representations were present in Homo Erectus, which had a language that started without syntactic rules but was structured so as to mirror the structure of the world. This language became increasingly complex, and grammatical rules started to appear to allow for the construction of more complex expressions required to keep up with the increasing complexity of social niches. This created evolutionary pressures that eventually led to increasing cranial size and restructuring of the brain that allowed more complex representational systems to emerge.

Keywords: mental representations, iconic representations, symbols, human evolution

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Authors: Slah Eddine Ben Fadhel

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Despite the development of new pedagogic methods, current teaching practices put more emphasis on the learning products than on the processes learners deploy. In school syllabi, for instance, very little time is devoted to both the explanation and analysis of strategies aimed at resolving problems by means of targeting students’ metacognitive procedures. Within a cognitive framework, teaching/learning contexts are conceived of in terms of cognitive, metacognitive and affective activities intended for the treatment of information. During these activities, learners come to develop an array of knowledge and strategies which can be subsumed within an active and constructive process. Through the investigation of strategies and metacognition concepts, the purpose is to reflect upon the modalities at the heart of the learning process and to demonstrate, similarly, the inherent significance of a cognitive approach to learning. The scope of this paper is predicated on a study where the population is a group of 76 primary school pupils who experienced difficulty with learning French. The population was divided into two groups: the first group was submitted during three months to a strategy-based training to learn French. All through this phase, the teachers centred class activities round making learners aware of the strategies the latter deployed and geared them towards appraising the steps these learners had themselves taken by means of a variety of tools, most prominent among which is the logbook. The second group was submitted to the usual learning context with no recourse whatsoever to any strategy-oriented tasks. The results of both groups point out the improvement of linguistic competences in the French language in the case of those pupils who were trained by means of strategic procedures. Furthermore, this improvement was noted in relation with the native language (Arabic), a fact that tends to highlight the importance of the interdisciplinary investigation of (meta-)cognitive strategies. These results show that strategic learning promotes in pupils the development of a better awareness of their own processes, which contributes to improving their general linguistic competences.

Keywords: constructive approach, cognitive strategies, metacognition, learning

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Authors: Birendra Mahato, Shiva Narayan Chaudhary

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Tharus are indigenous inhabitants of the Tarai, the narrow strip of flat and fertile land that lies at the foothills of the Himalayas. They have unique rituals, festivals, and music, while their clothes and ornaments are similar to some ethnic groups of India. After the control of malaria in the Terai between 1955 to 1965, (with the help of the U.S. Government, the WHO and the government of Nepal) the rate of in-migration skyrocketed, particularly of Nepal’s hill people, whose culture, along with the use of the Western education system, was gradually adopted by the Tharus. Among the many challenges, the Tharus face is their assimilation into the dominant Nepali culture. .The Tharus are thus under threat of slowly losing their ethnic identity and cultural values. In order to preserve the indigenous Tharu Culture, Tharu Cultural Museum, and Research Center. It is a community based non-governmental and non-profitable museum established in 2005 by Tharu intellectuals, traditional leaders and youths. The main goal of the museum is to preserve Tharu culture through different activities with direct and indirect involvement of community people. It aims to preserve arts, culture, handicrafts, and artifacts related to Indigenous Tharu People. Similarly, the museum displays an exhibition about the Tharu histories, lives, culture, and their indigenous knowledge and skills. The paper aims to demonstrate that community museums can be one of the key hubs for the preservation of culture with the collection and promotion of cultural objects, artifacts, and intangible cultural heritages. The preservation of culture not only has contributed to establishing their ethnic identity but also has contributed to establishing their recognition of their political space in the mainstream politics - the constitution of Nepal has recognized Tharus to provide reservation for the political space.

Keywords: community museum, tharu, , identity, culture

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Authors: Vishal Raj, Noorhan Abbas

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Ambiguity in NLP (Natural language processing) refers to the ability of a word, phrase, sentence, or text to have multiple meanings. This results in various kinds of ambiguities such as lexical, syntactic, semantic, anaphoric and referential am-biguities. This study is focused mainly on solving the issue of Lexical ambiguity. Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is an NLP technique that aims to resolve lexical ambiguity by determining the correct meaning of a word within a given context. Most WSD solutions rely on words for training and testing, but we have used lemma and Part of Speech (POS) tokens of words for training and testing. Lemma adds generality and POS adds properties of word into token. We have designed a novel method to create an affinity matrix to calculate the affinity be-tween any pair of lemma_POS (a token where lemma and POS of word are joined by underscore) of given training set. Additionally, we have devised an al-gorithm to create the sense clusters of tokens using affinity matrix under hierar-chy of POS of lemma. Furthermore, three different mechanisms to predict the sense of target word using the affinity/similarity value are devised. Each contex-tual token contributes to the sense of target word with some value and whichever sense gets higher value becomes the sense of target word. So, contextual tokens play a key role in creating sense clusters and predicting the sense of target word, hence, the model is named Contextual SenSe Model (CSM). CSM exhibits a noteworthy simplicity and explication lucidity in contrast to contemporary deep learning models characterized by intricacy, time-intensive processes, and chal-lenging explication. CSM is trained on SemCor training data and evaluated on SemEval test dataset. The results indicate that despite the naivety of the method, it achieves promising results when compared to the Most Frequent Sense (MFS) model.

Keywords: word sense disambiguation (wsd), contextual sense model (csm), most frequent sense (mfs), part of speech (pos), natural language processing (nlp), oov (out of vocabulary), lemma_pos (a token where lemma and pos of word are joined by underscore), information retrieval (ir), machine translation (mt)

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Authors: Zoaib Mirza

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Pakistan is an Islamic country that got its partition from India in 1947 so that the people could practice the religion of Islam. The ideology of Pakistan was based on the notion that sovereignty only belonged to God Almighty (in Arabic, God means “Allah”), and Muslims will live in accordance with Islam principles. The Quran (Holy Book) and Sunnah (authentic practices of Prophet Mohammad, Peace Be Upon Him, that explains the application of the Quran) are foundations of the Islamic principles. It has been over 75 years, but unfortunately, Pakistan, due to its own political, social, and economic mistakes, is responsible for not being able to become a true Islamic nation to justify its partition from India. The rationale for writing this paper is to analyze the factors that led to changes in the democratic movements impacting the country's political, social, and economic growth. The methodology to examine the historical and political context of Pakistan’s history is by referencing the scholarly work of Israr Ahmed, a Pakistani Islamic theologian, philosopher, and Islamic scholar. While from a Western perspective, Karl Marx, Mar Weber, Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, Paulo Freire, and Jacques Ranciere's philosophies specific to totalitarianism, politics, military rule, religion, capitalism, and superpower are used as the framework to analyze Pakistan’s democracy. The study's findings conclude that Pakistan's democracy is unstable and has been impacted by military and civilian governance, which led to political, social, and economic downfall. To improve the current situation, the citizens of Pakistan have to realize that the success of a nation is only dependent on the level of consciousness of the leader and not the political system. Therefore, it is the responsibility of every citizen to be conscious of how they select their leader and take responsibility for the current situation in Pakistan.

Keywords: Pakistan, Islam, democracy, totalitarianism, military, religion, capitalism

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Authors: Eve-Andree Laramee

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The aesthetics and ethics of the Nuclear Anthropocene are explored through artists responses to the impact of radioactive materials on ecological systems, global issues, energy policies and ourselves. This presentation tracks and reveals the invisible traces of the nuclear weapons complex and the nuclear energy industry, in relation to environmental justice. Radioactive pollution transgresses international borders, boundaries between land and water, contaminating ecological systems. Radioactive waste is never disposed of; it is dispositioned, placed out of sight and out of mind. These materials leave behind an invisible toxic legacy lasting millions of years. As we are learning post-Fukushima, when climate change occurs and vulnerability spectrums shift, nuclear sites and the life forms surrounding them are at increased risk. By visualizing this contamination through art installations, videos, and social-sculpture interventions, information is shared with the public, raising awareness, and activating community participation in remediation and nonproliferation efforts. The emerging Ecological Art genre proposes paradigms sustainable with the life forms and resources of our planet. It is comprised of artists, scientists, philosophers and activists devoted to these. EcoArt is distinguished by a focus on systems and interrelationships within our environment: the ecological, geographic, political, biological and cultural. This presentation will cover artworks addressing the recent Fukushima meltdowns, weapons proliferation, climate change, radioactive waste disposal and environmental justice. Possibilities for art-and-science collaborations will be discussed as projects that sharpen our ethics and politics in our behaviors and social interactions. The presentation will consist of a PowerPoint talk (paper presentation) accompanied by images and video clips.

Keywords: art, ecology, environment, anthropocene, nuclear

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Authors: Khadiza Akter, Tammy Greer, Raegan Bishop

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An in-depth study of the psycho-social effects of gynecological health disparities among immigrant women in the USA is the goal of this integrative review paper. Immigrant women frequently encounter unique obstacles that have severe psycho-social repercussions when it comes to receiving high-quality gynecological treatment. The review investigates the interaction of psychological, sociological, and health factors that affect the psycho-social effects that immigrant women experience in recognition of the significance of addressing these imbalances. The difficulties that immigrant women face in providing high-quality gynecological treatment in the USA are examined in this study. These difficulties are caused by a variety of psychological issues, including acculturation stress and stigma, as well as by social problems like prejudice, language hurdles, and cultural norms. Additionally, variations in healthcare access and affordability have a role. This study highlights the particular challenges that immigrant women have in receiving high-quality gynecological treatment in the United States. These difficulties are caused by both social problems like language obstacles, cultural norms, and biases, as well as psychological ones like acculturation stress and stigma. Additionally, variations in gynecological care for immigrant women are greatly influenced by variances in healthcare availability and price. To find pertinent research looking at the psychological effects of gynecological health disparities among immigrant women in the USA, a thorough search of numerous databases was done. Numerous approaches, including mixed, quantitative, and qualitative ones, were used in the studies. The important findings from various investigations were extracted and synthesized after they underwent a careful evaluation. In order to lessen these discrepancies and enhance the overall well-being of immigrant women, healthcare professionals, legislators, and researchers must collaborate to create specialized treatments, regulations, and health system reforms.

Keywords: cultural barriers, gynecological health disparities, health care access, immigrant women, mental health, psycho-social consequences, social stigma

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Authors: James Beringer

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Switzerland’s ability to forge a strong national identity across linguistic barriers has long been of interest to nationalism scholars. This begs the question of how this has been achieved, given that traditional explanations of luck or exceptionalism appear highly reductionist. This paper evaluates the theory that successful Swiss management of linguistic diversity stems from the strong integration of multilingualism into Swiss national identity. Using archival analysis of Swiss government records, historical accounts of prominent Swiss citizens, as well as secondary literature concerning the fundamental aspects of Swiss national identity, this paper charts the historical evolution of Swiss national identity. It explains how multilingualism was deliberately and successfully integrated into Swiss national identity as a response to political fragmentation along linguistic lines during the First World War. Its primary conclusions are the following. Firstly, the earliest foundations of Swiss national identity were purposefully removed from any association with a single national language. This produced symbols, myths, and values -such as a strong commitment to communalism, the imagery of the Swiss natural landscape, and the use of Latin expressions, which can be adopted across Swiss linguistic groups. Secondly, the First World War triggered a turning point in the evolution of Swiss national identity. The fundamental building blocks proved insufficient in preventing political fractures amongst linguistic lines, as each Swiss linguistic group gravitated towards its linguistic neighbours within Europe. To avoid a repeat of such fragmentation, a deliberate effort was made to fully integrate multilingualism as a fundamental aspect of Swiss national identity. Existing natural symbols, such as the St Gotthard Mountains, were recontextualized in order to become associated with multilingualism. The education system was similarly reformed to reflect the unique multilingual nature of the Swiss nation. The successful result of this process can be readily observed in polls and surveys, with large segments of the Swiss population highlighting multilingualism as a uniquely Swiss characteristic, indicating the symbiotic connection between multilingualism and the Swiss nation.

Keywords: language's role in identity formation, multilingualism in nationalism, national identity formation, Swiss national identity history

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Authors: Tiberiu Boros, Angela Ionita, Maria Visan

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Wildfires are one of the frequent and uncontrollable phenomena that currently affect large areas of the world where the climate, geographic and social conditions make it impossible to prevent and control such events. In this paper we introduce the ground concepts that lie behind the SIAFIM (Satellite Image Analysis for Fire Monitoring) project in order to create a context and we introduce a set of newly created tools that are external to the project but inherently in interventions and complex decision making based on geospatial information and spatial data infrastructures.

Keywords: wildfire, forest fire, natural language processing, mobile applications, communication, GPS

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Authors: Paula Higa

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This paper briefly examines age and its impact on a dancer’s performance career. An investigation into the possible reasons why audiences don’t regularly see veteran dancers on stage (termed as the Gray Dancer) supports the research. This analysis reflects some of the social dynamics that shape perceptions of the aging body in the U.S., as well as the correlation between the meaning of old and decay in Western culture. The primary question addressed in this research asks, who has the prerogative to determine when a dancer should stop dancing - society or the dancer themselves The aging process can significantly shorten a performer's professional career. The body has less endurance and is more susceptible to injuries, fatigue, etc. It also becomes less flexible and loses muscular strength and tone. A reduction in physical skills may usher gray dancers to embrace an ideology of shorter careers. However, in today’s age of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the realm of dance performance should reflect the times in which it is rooted; a multi-generational environment where people interact and participate in all of life's events. Overall, this study champions the inclusion of gray dancers as representations of mastery and wisdom akin to those traits associated with age and experience across various professions. Dance is an art form that transcends the assumptions of youthful beauty and physical ability. It serves as a conduit for conveying a lifetime of experiences, emotions, and ideas through the expressive vehicle of the body. Furthermore, it presents audiences with a medium to perceive and comprehend both themselves and life itself, echoing Noverre's insightful contemplation. The essay underscores the importance of valuing, sensing, and appreciating the richness that gray dancers bring to the stage by delving into segments of dance history and analyzing the possible influence of curators, directors, audiences, and society in general on ageism in dance.

Keywords: dance, ageism, politics in dance, curatorial process

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Authors: Vangmayee. V. Subban, Somashekara H. S, Shwetha Prabhu, Jayashree S. Bhat

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Introduction and Need: Phonological processing is critical in learning to read alphabetical and non-alphabetical languages. However, its role in learning to read Kannada an alphasyllabary is equivocal. The literature has focused on the developmental role of phonological awareness on reading. To the best of authors knowledge, the role of phonological memory and phonological naming has not been addressed in alphasyllabary Kannada language. Therefore, there is a need to evaluate the comprehensive role of the phonological processing skills in Kannada on word decoding skills during the early years of schooling. Aim and Objectives: The present study aimed to explore the phonological processing abilities and their role in learning to decode pseudowords in children learning to read the Kannada language during initial years of formal schooling between 5.6 to 8.6 years. Method: In this cross sectional study, 60 typically developing Kannada speaking children, 20 each from Grade I, Grade II, and Grade III between the age range of 5.6 to 6.6 years, 6.7 to 7.6 years and 7.7 to 8.6 years respectively were selected from Kannada medium schools. Phonological processing abilities were assessed using an assessment tool specifically developed to address the objectives of the present research. The assessment tool was content validated by subject experts and had good inter and intra-subject reliability. Phonological awareness was assessed at syllable level using syllable segmentation, blending, and syllable stripping at initial, medial and final position. Phonological memory was assessed using pseudoword repetition task and phonological naming was assessed using rapid automatized naming of objects. Both phonological awareneness and phonological memory measures were scored for the accuracy of the response, whereas Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) was scored for total naming speed. Results: The mean scores comparison using one-way ANOVA revealed a significant difference (p ≤ 0.05) between the groups on all the measures of phonological awareness, pseudoword repetition, rapid automatized naming, and pseudoword reading. Subsequent post-hoc grade wise comparison using Bonferroni test revealed significant differences (p ≤ 0.05) between each of the grades for all the tasks except (p ≥ 0.05) for syllable blending, syllable stripping, and pseudoword repetition between Grade II and Grade III. The Pearson correlations revealed a highly significant positive correlation (p=0.000) between all the variables except phonological naming which had significant negative correlations. However, the correlation co-efficient was higher for phonological awareness measures compared to others. Hence, phonological awareness was chosen a first independent variable to enter in the hierarchical regression equation followed by rapid automatized naming and finally, pseudoword repetition. The regression analysis revealed syllable awareness as a single most significant predictor of pseudoword reading by explaining the unique variance of 74% and there was no significant change in R² when RAN and pseudoword repetition were added subsequently to the regression equation. Conclusion: Present study concluded that syllable awareness matures completely by Grade II, whereas the phonological memory and phonological naming continue to develop beyond Grade III. Amongst phonological processing skills, phonological awareness, especially syllable awareness is crucial for word decoding than phonological memory and naming during initial years of schooling.

Keywords: phonological awareness, phonological memory, phonological naming, phonological processing, pseudo-word decoding

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Authors: Ruben Peralta, Sam Thomas, Nazia Hirani, Ayman El-Menyar, Hassan Al-Thani, Mohammed Al-Thani, Mohammed Al-Hajjaj, Rafael Consunji

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Moderate to severe work-related injuries [WRI's] are a leading cause of trauma admission in Qatar but information on risk factors for their incidence are lacking. This study aims to document and analyze the predictive characteristics for WRI to inform the creation of targeted interventions to improve worker safety in Qatar. This study was conducted as part of the NPRP grant # 7 - 1120 - 3 - 288, titled "A Unified Registry for Occupational Injury Prevention in Qatar”. 266 workers were interviewed using a standard questionnaire, during ‘World Day for Safety and Health at Work’, a Ministry of Public Health event, none refused interview. Nurses and doctors from the Hamad Trauma Center conducted the interviews. Questions were translated into the worker’s native language when it was deemed necessary. Standard information on epidemiologic characteristics and incidence of work-related injury were collected and compared between nationalities and those injured versus those not injured. 262 males and 4 females were interviewed. 17 [6.4%] reported a WRI in the last 24 months. More than half of the injured worked in construction [59%] followed by water supply [11.8%]. Factors significantly associated with recent injury were: Working for a company with > 500 employees and speaking Hindi. Protective characteristics included: Being from the Philippines or Sri Lanka, speaking Arabic, working in healthcare, an office or trading and company size between 100-500 employees. Years of schooling and working in Qatar were not predictive factor for WRI. The findings from this survey should guide future research that will better define worker populations at an increased risk for WRI and inform recruiters and sending countries. A focus on worker language skills, interventions in the construction industry and occupational safety in large companies is needed.

Keywords: occupational injury, prevention, safety, trauma, work related injury

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Authors: Elyce Cardonick, Shistri Dhar, Linsdey Seidman

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Background: When breast cancer is diagnosed during pregnancy, the prognosis is comparable to non-pregnant women matched for prognostic indicators when pregnant women receive treatment without delay. Chemotherapy, including taxanes, can be given during pregnancy with normal neonatal development in exposed fetuses. Methods: Cases of primary breast cancer were extracted from the Cancer and Pregnancy Registry and longitudinal study at Cooper Medical School, which collects cases of pregnant women diagnosed and treated for cancer into a single database. Obstetrical, oncology and pediatric records were reviewed, including annual neonatal developmental, behavioral and medical assessments. Results: 270 pregnant women were diagnosed with primary breast cancer at a mean gestational age of 14.7+9weeks. Mean maternal age at diagnosis 34.5+4.5 years. Receptor status is comparable to non-pregnant women of reproductive age. Forty-nine women were advised to terminate. Two hundred two women underwent surgery;244 women received chemotherapy in pregnancy after the first trimester; the majority of Doxorubucin/Cytoxan; 81 of the cases included a taxane. At a mean of 90 months, follow up obtained on 255 newborns.192/255 newborns are meeting developmental milestones. Respiratory illnesses, including asthma, and bronchiolitis, were reported in 64 newborns, the most common medical condition reported. Thirty-one children are undergoing treatment for GERD, 11 for urinary tract infections, and 7 are undergoing treatment for anemia. Twenty-six children with expressive or articulation language delays, 21/26 are mild. Eleven children with gross/ 7 with fine motor delays. Eight children are treated for ADHD, 4 for anxiety and 4 have social skill impairment. The majority of children with developmental, language or motor delays were born preterm. Conclusion: After chemotherapy exposure in utero for breast cancer, the majority of newborns are meeting developmental milestones and are medically healthy. The goal for treating pregnant women with breast cancer is to aim for delivery close to the term.

Keywords: breast cancer, pregnancy, chemotherapy, newborn

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Authors: F. Abdelhamid

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Algeria is a multilingual speech community where individuals constantly mix between codes in spoken discourse. Code is used as a cover term to refer to the existing languages and language varieties which include, among others, the mother tongue of the majority Algerian Arabic, the official language Modern Standard Arabic and the foreign languages French and English. The present study explores whether Algerians mix between these codes in online communication as well. Facebook is the selected platform from which data is collected because it is the preferred social media site for most Algerians and it is the most used one. Adopting the notion of translanguaging, this study attempts explaining how users of Facebook use multilingual messages to communicate meaning. Accordingly, multilingual interactions are not approached from a pejorative perspective but rather as a creative linguistic behavior that multilingual utilize to achieve intended meanings. The study is intended as a contribution to the research on multilingualism online because although an extensive literature has investigated multilingualism in spoken discourse, limited research investigated it in the online one. Its aim is two-fold. First, it aims at ensuring that the selected platform for analysis, namely Facebook, could be a source for multilingual data to enable the qualitative analysis. This is done by measuring frequency rates of multilingual instances. Second, when enough multilingual instances are encountered, it aims at describing and interpreting some selected ones. 120 posts and 16335 comments were collected from two Facebook pages. Analysis revealed that third of the collected data are multilingual messages. Users of Facebook mixed between the four mentioned codes in writing their messages. The most frequent cases are mixing between Algerian Arabic and French and between Algerian Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic. A focused qualitative analysis followed where some examples are interpreted and explained. It seems that Algerians mix between codes when communicating online despite the fact that it is a conscious type of communication. This suggests that such behavior is not a random and corrupted way of communicating but rather an intentional and natural one.

Keywords: Algerian speech community, computer mediated communication, languages in contact, multilingualism, translanguaging

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Authors: Shantanu Majumder

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This paper attempts to explain the factors contribute in attracting and engaging rural women in Bangladesh toward political Islam that in many cases manifests itself in the form of violent extremism (VE). Bangladesh, the fourth largest Muslim majority country in the world, has been confronting the problem of VE in the name of Islam since a long. The political Islamists, explaining the events like military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, anti-Muslim politics in neighboring India and Myanmar, Islamophobia in the West, and several other issues in their own way, have become to a vast extent successful in creating a high level of emotion, anger and a feeling of being oppressed worldwide among the ordinary Muslims masses. Half-hearted role of public intellectuals and political expediency of liberal political forces in explaining these events in a secular democratic way also facilitate the extremists to earn political dividend. VE was perceived as an all-male activism of the political Islamists’ in the past in Bangladesh. However, evidence in the recent times shows that there are sympathizers, recruiters, and perpetrators as well among the womenfolk in favor of VE-based political Islam. The first section in this paper sheds light on the way the political Islamists build rapport with and win over the heart of target women in countryside under the camouflage of preaching authentic Islam. This section also describes the role of family in involvement of women in VE. The second section discusses wide-ranging use of websites, facebook, laptop, mobile phones and several other means in the way to motivate and radicalize women. How the involvement with political Islamists brings changes in thinking process, lifestyle and family life of motivated women has been focused in the third section. The final section deals briefly with the way out relying on the argument that law and order forces alone cannot tackle this problem.

Keywords: Bangladesh, political Islam, violent extremism, women

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Authors: Mariana Anaya Villafana

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The sudden change of a significant percentage of the Latino community in the United States elections towards a Republican political orientation was reflected during the 2016 presidential election. This moment represented a radical change that is happening inside the Latino community in the United States, the support they have given to Trump's campaign only demonstrates their support for new anti-immigration regulations and conservative values, which are causing a division of ideologies inside the Latino community. One of the main goals of the following research is to understand the whole phenomenon 'Why would people join their own oppressor?' Align themselves with the politics that prevent many of their relatives to come to the United States and made the assimilation process difficult for their parents. It is important to prove that a change in the identity has happened, through the use of power relations and the attachment to the desired object. A group of Hispanics/Latinos have decided to vote for Trump in order to belong to a society that hasn’t been able to fully include them within it, an action that can result on the non-intentional harm of the values and aims of the rest of the Latino/Hispanic community. In order to understand their new political beliefs, it is necessary to use the method of discourse analysis to comprehend those comments and interviews that are published on web sites such as: 'Latinos for Trump' and 'GOP Hispanic Division'. Among the results that the research has shown, the notion of the 'American Dream' can be considered as a determinant object for the construction of a new identity that is rooted in hard work and legality. One that is proud of the Latino heritage but still wants to maintain the boundaries between legality and illegality in relation to the immigrants. This discourse results on a contradiction to most of the cases because they mention that their families came to the U.S. as immigrants; the only difference is that they work hard to obtain legal citizenship.

Keywords: populism, identity, Latino Community, migration

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Authors: Saied Farham-Nia, Alireza Ghaffari-Hadigheh

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Game theory is a mathematical tool to study the behaviors of a rational and strategic decision-makers, that analyze existing equilibrium in interest conflict situation and provides an appropriate mechanisms for cooperation between two or more player. Game theory is applicable for any strategic and interest conflict situation in politics, management and economics, sociology and etc. Real worlds’ decisions are usually made in the state of indeterminacy and the players often are lack of the information about the other players’ payoffs or even his own, which leads to the games in uncertain environments. When historical data for decision parameters distribution estimation is unavailable, we may have no choice but to use expertise belief degree, which represents the strength with that we believe the event will happen. To deal with belief degrees, we have use uncertainty theory which is introduced and developed by Liu based on normality, duality, subadditivity and product axioms to modeling personal belief degree. As we know, the personal belief degree heavily depends on the personal knowledge concerning the event and when personal knowledge changes, cause changes in the belief degree too. Uncertainty theory not only theoretically is self-consistent but also is the best among other theories for modeling belief degree on practical problem. In this attempt, we primarily reintroduced Expected Utility Function in uncertainty environment according to uncertainty theory axioms to extract payoffs. Then, we employed Nash Equilibrium to investigate the solutions. For more practical issues, Stackelberg leader-follower Game and Bertrand Game, as a benchmark models are discussed. Compared to existing articles in the similar topics, the game models and solution concepts introduced in this article can be a framework for problems in an uncertain competitive situation based on experienced expert’s belief degree.

Keywords: game theory, uncertainty theory, belief degree, uncertain expected value, Nash equilibrium

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Authors: Iqra Raza

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This paper attempts to conceptualize the (de)humanization of the Muslim subject in Karen J. Greenberg and Janet Hamlin’s transmedia Sketching Guantanamo through a close study of the aesthetics and semiotics of the text. The Muslim experience, the paper shall argue, is mediated through a (de)humanization confined and incarcerated within the chains of artistic representation. Hamlin’s reliance on the distortions offered by stereotypes is reminiscent of the late Victorian epistemology on criminality, as evidenced most starkly in the sketch of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. The position of the white artist thus becomes suspect in the enterprise of neo-Victorian ethnography. The visual stories of movement from within Guantanamo become potent; the paper shall argue, especially in juxtaposition with the images of stillness that came out from the detention centers, which portrayed the enactment of violence on individual bodies with a deliberate erasure of faces. So, while art becomes a way for reclaiming subjectivity or humanizing these identifiable bodies, the medium predicates itself on their objectification. The paper shall explore various questions about what it means for the (criminal?) subjects to be rendered into art rather than being photographed. Does art entail a necessary departure from the assumed objectivity of the photographic images? What makes art the preferred medium for (de)humanization of the violated Muslim bodies? What happens when art is produced without a recognition of the ‘precariousness’ of the life being portrayed? Rendering the detainees into art becomes a slippery task complicated by Hamlin’s privileged position outside the glass walls of the court. The paper shall adjourn analysis at the many dichotomies that exist in the text viz. between the White men and the brown, the Muslims and the Christians, Occident and the Orient problematized by Hamlin’s politics, that of a ‘neutral outsider’ which quickly turns on its head and becomes complicity in her deliberate erasure of the violence that shaped and still shapes Guantanamo.

Keywords: Abu Ghraib, Derrida, Guantanamo, graphic journalism, Muslimness, orient, spectrality

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Authors: M. Regina Carreira-Lopez

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Lightweight ontologies seek to concrete union relationships between a parent node, and a secondary node, also called "child node". This logic relation (L) can be formally defined as a triple ontological relation (LO) equivalent to LO in ⟨LN, LE, LC⟩, and where LN represents a finite set of nodes (N); LE is a set of entities (E), each of which represents a relationship between nodes to form a rooted tree of ⟨LN, LE⟩; and LC is a finite set of concepts (C), encoded in a formal language (FL). Mondoc enables more refined searches on semantic and classified facets for retrieving specialized knowledge about Atlantic migrations, from the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America (1776) and to the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939). The model looks forward to increasing documentary relevance by applying an inverse frequency of co-ocurrent hypernymy phenomena for a concrete dataset of textual corpora, with RMySQL package. Mondoc profiles archival utilities implementing SQL programming code, and allows data export to XML schemas, for achieving semantic and faceted analysis of speech by analyzing keywords in context (KWIC). The methodology applies random and unrestricted sampling techniques with RMySQL to verify the resonance phenomena of inverse documentary relevance between the number of co-occurrences of the same term (t) in more than two documents of a set of texts (D). Secondly, the research also evidences co-associations between (t) and their corresponding synonyms and antonyms (synsets) are also inverse. The results from grouping facets or polysemic words with synsets in more than two textual corpora within their syntagmatic context (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) state how to proceed with semantic indexing of hypernymy phenomena for subject-heading lists and for authority lists for documentary and archival purposes. Mondoc contributes to the development of web directories and seems to achieve a proper and more selective search of e-documents (classification ontology). It can also foster on-line catalogs production for semantic authorities, or concepts, through XML schemas, because its applications could be used for implementing data models, by a prior adaptation of the based-ontology to structured meta-languages, such as OWL, RDF (descriptive ontology). Mondoc serves to the classification of concepts and applies a semantic indexing approach of facets. It enables information retrieval, as well as quantitative and qualitative data interpretation. The model reproduces a triple tuple ⟨LN, LE, LT, LCF L, BKF⟩ where LN is a set of entities that connect with other nodes to concrete a rooted tree in ⟨LN, LE⟩. LT specifies a set of terms, and LCF acts as a finite set of concepts, encoded in a formal language, L. Mondoc only resolves partial problems of linguistic ambiguity (in case of synonymy and antonymy), but neither the pragmatic dimension of natural language nor the cognitive perspective is addressed. To achieve this goal, forthcoming programming developments should target at oriented meta-languages with structured documents in XML.

Keywords: hypernymy, information retrieval, lightweight ontology, resonance

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Authors: Barnali Saha

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Dalit writing is the interventionalist voice of the dispossessed subaltern in the cultural economy of the society. As such, Dalit writing, including Dalit poetry, considers the contradictions that permeate the socio-cultural structure historically allocated and religiously sanctioned in the Indian subcontinent. As an epicenter of all Dalit experiences of trauma and violence, the poetics the Dalit body is deeply rooted in the peripheral space socially assigned to it by anachronistic caste-based litigation. An appraisal of Dalit creative-critical work by writers like Sharan Kumar Limbale, Arjun Dangle, Namdeo Dhasal, Om Prakash Valmiki, Muktibodh and others underscore the conjunction of the physical, psychical and the psychological in their interpretation of Dalit consciousness. They put forward the idea that Dalit poetry is begotten by the trauma of societal oppression and therefore, Dalit language and its revitalization are two elements obdurately linked to Dalit poetics. The present research paper seeks to read the problematization of the Dalit agency through the conduit of the Dalit voice wherein the anatomical category of the mouth is closely related to the question of Dalit identity. Theoretically aligned to Heidegger’s notion of language as the house of being and Bachelard’s assertion of a house as an ideal metaphor of poetic imagination and Dylan Trigg’s view of the coeval existence of space and body, the paper examines a series of selected poems by Dalit poetic voices to examine how their distinct Dalit point of view underscores Dalit speech and directs our attention to the historical abstraction of it. The paper further examines how speech as a category in Dalit writing places the Dalit somatic entity as a site of contestation with the ‘Mouth’ as a loaded symbolic category inspiring rebellion and resistance. And as the quintessential purpose of Dalit literature is the unleashing of Dalit voice from the anti-verbal domain of social decrepitude, Dalit poetry needs to be critically read based on the experience of the mouth and the patois.

Keywords: Dalit, poetry, speech, mouth, subaltern, minority, exploitation, space

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Authors: Fadil Elmenfi, Ahmed Gaibani

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This study investigates the role of gender in influencing public speaking anxiety. Questionnaire survey was administered to the samples of the study. Technique of correlation and descriptive analysis will be further applied to the data collected to determine the relationship between gender and public speaking anxiety. This study could serve as a guide to identify the effects of gender differences on public speaking anxiety and provide necessary advice on how to design a way of coping with or overcoming public speaking anxiety.

Keywords: across culture, communication, English language competence, gender, postgraduate students, speaking anxiety

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Authors: Stephen Wagman

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This paper identifies three common structures in English sentences that are important for understanding academic texts, regardless of the characteristics or background of the readers or whether they are reading English as a second or a foreign language. Adapting a model from the Humanities, the explication of texts used in literary studies, the paper analyses sample sentences to reveal structures that enable the reader not only to decide which words are necessary for understanding the main ideas but to make the decision without knowing the meaning of the words. By their very syntax noun structures point to the key word for understanding them. As a rule, the key noun is followed by easily identifiable prepositions, relative pronouns, or verbs and preceded by single adjectives. With few exceptions, the modifiers are unnecessary for understanding the idea of the sentence. In addition, sentences are often structured by lists in which the items frequently consist of parallel groups of words. The principle of a list is that all the items are similar in meaning and it is not necessary to understand all of the items to understand the point of the list. This principle is especially important when the items are long or there is more than one list in the same sentence. The similarity in meaning of these items enables readers to reduce sentences that are hard to grasp to an understandable core without excessive use of a dictionary. Finally, the idea of subordination and the identification of the subordinate parts of sentences through connecting words makes it possible for readers to focus on main ideas without having to sift through the less important and more numerous secondary structures. Sometimes a main idea requires a subordinate one to complete its meaning, but usually, subordinate ideas are unnecessary for understanding the main point of the sentence and its part in the development of the argument from sentence to sentence. Moreover, the connecting words themselves indicate the functions of the subordinate structures. These most frequently show similarity and difference or reasons and results. Recognition of all of these structures can not only enable students to read more efficiently but to focus their attention on the development of the argument and this rather than a multitude of unknown vocabulary items, the repetition in lists, or the subordination in sentences are the one necessary element for comprehension of academic articles.

Keywords: development of the argument, lists, noun structures, subordination

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