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When linear arrays of unrelated letters (e.g., 'sfdthnc') are presented tachistoscopically centred across a fixation point, letters presented at exterior positions (e.g., 's----c') aregenerally reported more accurately than letters presented in interior positions. This "exterior-letter advantage" suggests that processing is more efficient for exterior letters than for interior letters. Previous researchers have argued that the exterior-letter advantage can be fully accounted for by the influences of lateral interference and mask configuration. However, the processes responsible for the exterior-letter advantage are far from resolved, despite the robustness of the phenomenon and its occurrence in numerous investigations into visual information processing. The experiments reported in this study investigated the role of lateral interference and backward pattern masking in the exterior-letter advantage. To investigate the role of lateral interference, performance was compared across complete 7-letter arrays and arrays in which the presence and proximity of flanking letters was varied by (i) presenting only exterior letters and their immediately flanking interior letter, (ii) varying the number blank letter-spaces by which these letter-pairs were separated, (iii) varying the nature of the characters presented in these displays, and (iv) presenting each exterior/interior letter-pair in isolation. The role of backward pattern masking was investigated (i) using different mask configurations which either matched or exceeded the left and right boundaries of complete letter arrays, and (ii) using masks which overlay only the positions of each exterior/interior letter-pair. The findings indicate that while lateral interference and mask configuration each played a part, neither an imbalance in the number of immediately flanking letters for interior and exterior letters nor mask configuration can entirely account for the exterior-letter advantage.

With the demand for recorded lectures to be made available as soon as possible, the University of Cape Town (UCT) needs to find innovative ways of removing bottlenecks in lecture capture workflow and thereby improving turn-around times from capture to publication. UCT utilises Opencast, which is an open source system to manage all the steps in the lecture-capture process. One of the steps involves manual trimming of unwanted segments from the beginning and end of video before it is published. These segments generally contain student chatter. The trimming step of the lecture-capture process has been identified as a bottleneck due to its dependence on staff availability. In this study, we investigate the potential of audio classification to automate this step. A classification model was trained to detect 2 classes: speech and non-speech. Speech represents a single dominant voice, for example, the lecturer, and non-speech represents student chatter, silence and other environmental sounds. In conjunction with the classification model, the first and last instances of the speech class together with their timestamps are detected. These timestamps are used to predict the start and end trim points for the recorded lecture. The classification model achieved a 97.8% accuracy rate at detecting speech from non-speech. The start trim point predictions were very positive, with an average difference of -11.22s from gold standard data. End trim point predictions showed a much greater deviation, with an average difference of 145.16s from gold standard data. Discussions between the lecturer and students, after the lecture, was predominantly the reason for this discrepancy.

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Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document. / Dissertation (M Eng (Electronic Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / unrestricted

This thesis explores the different patterns of history presented in the fiction of the three major contemporary Chinese avant-garde writers Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei as well as their respective views of history. Based on detailed case studies of the three writers, the thesis examines the complicated and intertwined relationships of contemporary Chinese avant-garde fiction with previous Chinese traditions—Confucian, the May Fourth, and Communist—and with foreign influences. It also assesses the overall literary achievement of Chinese avant-garde fiction, its position in the history of modern Chinese literature, and its impact on the Chinese writers of later generations. Unlike most previous research on this subject, which overemphasizes the "alien" nature of Chinese avant-garde fiction or its discontinuity with Chinese tradition, this thesis aims at a more balanced investigation. Not only is the "newness" of Chinese avant-garde fiction deeply explored, its "Chineseness" or its profound continuity with Chinese literary and cultural conventions is also carefully examined. By comparison, the thesis attaches more importance to the "Chineseness" of Chinese avant-garde fiction. My analysis demonstrates that, while Su Tong aims at the total subversion of the Communist interpretation of the Chinese revolution and history, while Yu Hua attemptsto transcend the Maoist materialistic view of history through reincorporating subjectivity into historical interpretation, Ge Fei totally rejects the conceptualization of history and the underlying rationalistic assumption of human experience as a perceptible and understandable unity. / Arts, Faculty of / Asian Studies, Department of / Graduate

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