Since the Web is getting bigger and bigger with a rapidly increasing number of heterogeneous Web pages, Web users often suffer from two problems: P1) irrelevant information and P2) information overload Irrelevant information indicates the weak relevance between the retrieved information and a user's information need. Information overload indicates that the retrieved information may contain 1) redundant information (e.g., common information between two retrieved Web pages) or 2) too much amount of information which cannot be easily understood by a user. We consider four major causes of those two problems P1) and P2) as follows; ??? Firstly, ambiguous query-terms. ??? Secondly, ambiguous terms in a Web page. ??? Thirdly, a query and a Web page cannot be semantically matched, because of the first and second causes. ??? Fourthly, the whole content of a Web page is a coarse context-boundary to measure the similarity between the Web page and a query. To answer those two problems P1) and P2), we consider that the meanings of words in a Web page and a query are primitive hints for understanding the related semantics of the Web page. Thus, in this dissertation, we developed three cooperative technologies: Word Sense Based Web Information Retrieval (WSBWIR), Subjective Segment Importance Model (SSIM) and Topic Focused Web Page Summarization (TFWPS). ??? WSBWIR allows for a user to 1) describe their information needs at senselevel and 2) provides one way for users to conceptually explore information existing within Web pages. ??? SSIM discovers a semantic structure of a Web page. A semantic structure respects not only Web page authors logical presentation structures but also a user specific topic interests on the Web pages at query time. ??? TFWPS dynamically generates extractive summaries respecting a user's topic interests. WSBWIR, SSIM and TFWPS technologies are implemented and experimented through several case-studies, classification and clustering tasks. Our experiments demonstrated that 1) the comparable effectiveness of exploration of Web pages using word senses, and 2) the segments partitioned by SSIM and summaries generated by TFWPS can provide more topically coherent features for classification and clustering purposes.

In the form of a potable spirit, an extract of grapefruit skin has been found to develop an attractive opalescence when diluted to below about 38 % ethanol (v/v). This phenomenon is analogous to the pastis effect, called louching, common in many drinks popular in some countries bordering the Mediterranean. The main objective of this research was to develop spirit liquor with commercial potential from grapefruit skin, largely a waste commercial product, as the dominant if not exclusive ingredient other than alcohol and water. This would require making extracts by distillation of undried skins, which would develop a dense opalescence significantly below 40 % v/v ethanol, the common alcoholic strength of spirits as sold in New Zealand. The product concept was thus a clear liquid which when poured over ice for example, would yield a cool opalescent drink with a characteristic grapefruit flavour. In the case of citrus, the chemical basis of louching is the greater solubility of citrus skin terpenes, principally limonene, in ethanol than in water. The louch point is synonymous with the chemical expression critical micelle concentration, detected here by light scattering at the arbitrary wavelength of 450 nm. Early results with an obvious opalescence showed that the alcohol concentration at which the terpenes ceased to be soluble in the grapefruit distillate was about 38 % (v/v). This point was similar to that for pastis (Pernod brand), where the principle louchable ingredient is anethole. However, the light scattering was much greater for pastis. Thus, a grapefruit spirit sold at 40 % ethanol with the louching intensity of pastis should require increasing the solubility of limonene in solutions with a lower ethanol concentration. This in turn should allow higher concentrations of limonene in true solution in 40 % ethanol, theoretically resulting in a more intense louch in the final drink. Thus, a broad range of hydrocolloids and surfactants was tested in an attempt to increase the solubility of limonene in lower ethanol concentrations. None of hydrocolloids or surfactants lowered the louch point of a standard limonene concentration in ethanol/water. The informal flavour assessment showed that the spirit flavour from grapefruit zest alone lacked intensity. It was then thought that better flavour might be obtained by using the whole grapefruit (zest, pith, and juice) rather than zest alone. The additional of pith or pith plus juice caused no significant change in the louch point or light scattering. However, the final flavour was informally judged to be more intense than that derived from zest alone. The problem still remained that the light scattering of grapefruit distillate was never as high as that achieved by pastis, even though it was found (by gas chromatography) that the concentration of limonene (w/w) in the grapefruit spirit was at least as high as that of anethole in pastis. The cause was due to the fact that as a louched compound, anethole was a solid with a flat crystal structure because the melting point (21.4C) is well above that of a cool drink (Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 1947). By contrast, limonene remains a liquid even in an iced drink because its melting point is far below 0C. Flat crystals would obviously scatter light far more than would a micelle containing a liquid, in this case limonene. Although such a grapefruit distillate did not louch as well as pastis, it could still have market potential on the basis that it would be made from the distinctive New Zealand cultivar of grapefruit. Thus a formal sensory assessment was conducted, using a focus group. The grapefruit distillates at 40 % ethanol were perceived by most panellists as refreshing, clean, fruity, and citrusy in aroma, but somewhat deficient in grapefruit flavour, and there was a common perception of strong chemical finish. At this stage of development a commercial proposition cannot be sensibly made.

The aim of the present study was to elucidate in a study with 4-, 6-, 8-, and 14-month-old German-learning children, when and how they may acquire the regularities which underlie Focus-to-Stress Alignment (FSA) in the target language, that is, how prosody is associated with specific communicative functions. Our findings suggest, that 14-month-olds have already found out that German allows for variable focus positions, after having gone through a development which goes from a predominantly prosodically driven processing of the input to a processing where prosody interacts more and more with the growing lexical and syntactic knowledge of the child.

The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis.

Womens roles in the work force have increased, however, womens positions in the household have not changed greatly (Lennon & Rosenfield, 1994). While paid work research has focused significantly on the qualities of roles, household work research has not (Janzen & Hellsten, 2007). As the few existing instruments that do measure the quality of household work roles lack psychometric evidence (Janzen & Hellsten, 2007), a new instrument assessing all aspects of the quality of household work roles and possessing evidence of validity and reliability is required. The first step in the instrument development process is the identification and definition of relevant constructs. Thus, the main purpose of the study was to identify household work themes. Four focus groups of triple role women were performed with a total of 20 participants. A snowball sampling technique was used to recruit participants. Thematic analysis of the transcripts identified eight themes: No End Result, Scheduling, Time Constraints, Psychological Strain, Equality in Work, Value, Money, and Reward. The results found women to enjoy certain aspects of household work, but that they lead busy and hectic lifestyles. The themes created in the study were placed into a table of specifications this is to guide future instrument development research in which items can be included for each of these eight themes.

Many of the pre-contact and early contact cultures of the Northern Plains have been the subjects of debate in archaeological circles. Mortlach and Vickers focus are no exception. One of the issues to date is the possible relationship between these two groups. A key to understanding this relationship lies in the Makotchi-Ded Dontipi locale in Manitobas Lauder Sandhills. This unique ecological island is home to a great number of sites (Hamilton and Nicholson1999), including neighboring Vickers focus and Mortlach sites.<p>This study offers the results of a comprehensive analysis of the pottery assemblages recovered from the Jackson, Vera, Twin Fawns, Schuddemat and Hollow B sites of the Makotchi-Ded Dontipi locale. In addition, it examines the prior cultural affiliation of these sites. Though in many ways different from eastern Vickers focus assemblages, Jackson and Vera assemblages should be considered Vickers focus. Many of the discrepancies are due to the changing nature of the sites over time in conjunction with contact with neighboring Mortlach groups. Schuddemat and Twin Fawns also differ from typical Mortlach assemblages. These differences can be attributed to their location on the eastern periphery of the Mortlach spatial distribution where they came in contact with, and were likely joined by Vickers focus people.<p>Mortlach, Vickers focus and Wascana ware are likely all a part of a larger phenomenon of eastern Woodlands migration onto the Canadian Plains. These cultures became distinct over time through interaction with neighboring groups and exploitation of territorial resource bases. Though distinct, they share a number of similarities reflecting common ancestors. These similarities culminate in the Makotchi-Ded Dontipi locale where interaction between Mortlach and Vickers focus people likely resulted in the amalgamation of Vickers focus into Mortlach. This amalgamation is reflected in the pottery assemblages of Twin Fawns and Schuddemat which seem to represent a Vickers variant of the Lake Midden subphase of Mortlach.

In this dissertation, I examine the marking of focus and givenness in Nte?kepmxcin (Thompson River Salish). The focus is, roughly, the answer to a wh-question, and is highlighted by the primary sentential accent in stress languages like English. This has been formalized as the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle. Given material is old information, and is de-accented in languages like English. Nte?kepmxcin is a stress language, but marks focus structurally. However, I argue that the structure has a prosodie motivation: the clause is restructured such that the focus is leftmost in the intonational phrase. It follows that Salish focus structures lack the special semantics that motivates the use of English structural focus (clefts). As a theoretical contribution, I show that the Stress-Focus Correspondence Principle does not account for focus marking in all stress languages, nor does the "distress-given" generalization account for the marking of given information. This is because focus surfaces leftmost, while the nuclear stress position is rightmost. Instead of "stress-focus", I propose that alignment with prosodie phrase edges is the universally common thread in focus marking. This mechanism enables listeners to rapidly recover the location of the focus, by identifying coarse-grained phonological categories (p-phrases and i-phrases). In Thompson River Salish, the focus is associated with the leftmost p-phrase in the matrix intonational phrase. The analysis unifies the marking of focus across languages by claiming that focus is always marked prosodically, by alignment to a prosodie category. The study combines syntactic analysis of focus utterances with their phonetic realization and semantic characteristics. As such, this dissertation is a story about the interfaces. This research is based on a corpus of conversational data as well as single sentence elicitations, all of which are original data collected during fieldwork. The second contribution of this dissertation is thus methodological: I have developed various fieldwork techniques for collecting both spontaneous and scripted conversational discourses. The empirical contribution that results is a collection of conversational discourses, to add to the single speaker traditional texts already recorded for Nte?kepmxcin.

The aim of this research is to do a comparison between students’ view of equality in secondary school and in gymnasium. The research begins with four focus groups, two on each grade to conduct material. The focus groups with girls and boys were separated from each other. With help from the researcher, acting as a moderator in the focus groups, the students have discussed advertisement and what message it convey. The students have also discussed their view of femininity and masculinity. With its starting point in separate maintenance and hierarchy, the theory of gender was discussed and connected to the result of the research. The conducted material was further on analyzed to be able to find out if the school can affect the students’ thoughts about equality. The conducted material from the focus groups was compared between boys and girls and also between the two grades.

No description available.

Many of the pre-contact and early contact cultures of the Northern Plains have been the subjects of debate in archaeological circles. Mortlach and Vickers focus are no exception. One of the issues to date is the possible relationship between these two groups. A key to understanding this relationship lies in the Makotchi-Ded Dontipi locale in Manitobas Lauder Sandhills. This unique ecological island is home to a great number of sites (Hamilton and Nicholson1999), including neighboring Vickers focus and Mortlach sites.<p>This study offers the results of a comprehensive analysis of the pottery assemblages recovered from the Jackson, Vera, Twin Fawns, Schuddemat and Hollow B sites of the Makotchi-Ded Dontipi locale. In addition, it examines the prior cultural affiliation of these sites. Though in many ways different from eastern Vickers focus assemblages, Jackson and Vera assemblages should be considered Vickers focus. Many of the discrepancies are due to the changing nature of the sites over time in conjunction with contact with neighboring Mortlach groups. Schuddemat and Twin Fawns also differ from typical Mortlach assemblages. These differences can be attributed to their location on the eastern periphery of the Mortlach spatial distribution where they came in contact with, and were likely joined by Vickers focus people.<p>Mortlach, Vickers focus and Wascana ware are likely all a part of a larger phenomenon of eastern Woodlands migration onto the Canadian Plains. These cultures became distinct over time through interaction with neighboring groups and exploitation of territorial resource bases. Though distinct, they share a number of similarities reflecting common ancestors. These similarities culminate in the Makotchi-Ded Dontipi locale where interaction between Mortlach and Vickers focus people likely resulted in the amalgamation of Vickers focus into Mortlach. This amalgamation is reflected in the pottery assemblages of Twin Fawns and Schuddemat which seem to represent a Vickers variant of the Lake Midden subphase of Mortlach.