Faces of English explores the phenomenon of increasing dialects, varieties, and creoles, even as the spread of globalization supports an apparently growing uniformity among nations. The book's chapters supply descriptions of Jamaican English in Toronto, English as an L2 in a South African mining township, Chinese and English contact in Singapore, unexpected, emergent variants in Canadian English, and innovations in the English of West Virginia. Further, the book offers some perspective on internet English as well as on abiding uniformities in the lexicon and grammar of standard varieties. In the analyses of this heterogeneous growth such considerations as speakers' sociolinguistic profiles, phonological, morpho-syntactic, and lexical variables, frequencies, and typological patterns provide ample insight in the current status of English both in oral and electronic communities. The opening chapter presents a theoretical framework that argues for linguistic typology as conceptually resourceful in accommodating techniques of analysis and in distinguishing the wide arrays of English found throughout the globe. One clear function for Faces of English is that of a catalyst: to spur studies of diversities in English (and in other languages), to suggest approaches to adapt, to invite counterargument and developments in analysis.

Computers are currently used in a variety of critical applications, including systems for nuclear reactor control, flight control (both aircraft and spacecraft), and air traffic control. Moreover, experience has shown that the dependability of such systems is particularly sensitive to that of its software components, both the system software of the embedded computers and the application software they support. Software Performability: From Concepts to Applications addresses the construction and solution of analytic performability models for critical-application software. The book includes a review of general performability concepts along with notions which are peculiar to software performability. Since fault tolerance is widely recognized as a viable means for improving the dependability of computer system (beyond what can be achieved by fault prevention), the examples considered are fault-tolerant software systems that incorporate particular methods of design diversity and fault recovery. Software Performability: From Concepts to Applications will be of direct benefit to both practitioners and researchers in the area of performance and dependability evaluation, fault-tolerant computing, and dependable systems for critical applications. For practitioners, it supplies a basis for defining combined performance-dependability criteria (in the form of objective functions) that can be used to enhance the performability (performance/dependability) of existing software designs. For those with research interests in model-based evaluation, the book provides an analytic framework and a variety of performability modeling examples in an application context of recognized importance. The material contained in this book will both stimulate future research on related topics and, for teaching purposes, serve as a reference text in courses on computer system evaluation, fault-tolerant computing, and dependable high-performance computer systems.

Polymer Microscopy, 3rd Edition, is a comprehensive and practical guide to the study of the microstructure of polymers, and is the result of the authors' many years of academic and industrial experience. To address the needs of students and professionals from a variety of backgrounds, introductory chapters deal with the basic concepts of both polymer morphology and processing and microscopy and imaging theory. The core of the book is more applied, with many examples of specimen preparation and image interpretation leading to materials characterization.Microscopy is applied to the characterization of a wide range of polymer systems, including fibers, films, engineering resins and plastics, composites, nanocomposites, polymer blends, emulsions and liquid crystaline polymers. Light microscopy, atomic force microscopy, scanning and transmission electron microscopy techniques are all considered, as are emerging techniques such as compositional mapping in which microscopy is combined with spectroscopy. This extensively updated and revised third edition closes with a problem solving guide, which gives a systematic framework for deciding on suitable approaches to the characterization of

Inaccuracies in Children's Testimony combines the literature on obedience to authority with that on suggestibility to create a third literature. This book examines children's testimony from several perspectives and gives you insightful suggestions for increasing children's abilities to testify accurately about traumatic things that have happened to them. In doing so, you'll learn how to ensure that those who abuse or sexually exploit children are brought to justice while those falsely accused are adequately protected.How children are questioned to learn what they have witnessed is crucial due to the effects the questioning sessions may have on their testimonies--improper questioning may lead to inaccurate answers. This is just one of the many areas of children's testimony covered in Inaccuracies in Children's Testimony. In each of the chapters you'll discover new ways for increasing the accuracy and dependability of children's testimony as you read about: factors that affect children's testimonies suggestibility--definition and research, including sources of suggestibility how obedience to authority can explain children's behavior as witnesses children's memory in the courtroom and what they are able to remember how children's involvement in the courts can be problematic free versus prompted recall--which is more accurate and why the "worst" method is often used with children Milgram's theory of obedience to authority tied to children as witnesses review of the literature on the effects of stress, prompting, and imagination on children's recall ideas for future researchExperts in the field of legal testimony, legal personnel, child counselors, psychologists, social workers, and faculty and students of related courses will find Inaccuracies in Children's Testimony an essential resource for understanding the importance of making the child victim/witness more believable and reliable.

Inaccuracies in Children's Testimony combines the literature on obedience to authority with that on suggestibility to create a third literature. This book examines children's testimony from several perspectives and gives you insightful suggestions for increasing children's abilities to testify accurately about traumatic things that have happened to them. In doing so, you'll learn how to ensure that those who abuse or sexually exploit children are brought to justice while those falsely accused are adequately protected.How children are questioned to learn what they have witnessed is crucial due to the effects the questioning sessions may have on their testimonies--improper questioning may lead to inaccurate answers. This is just one of the many areas of children's testimony covered in Inaccuracies in Children's Testimony. In each of the chapters you'll discover new ways for increasing the accuracy and dependability of children's testimony as you read about: factors that affect children's testimonies suggestibility--definition and research, including sources of suggestibility how obedience to authority can explain children's behavior as witnesses children's memory in the courtroom and what they are able to remember how children's involvement in the courts can be problematic free versus prompted recall--which is more accurate and why the "worst" method is often used with children Milgram's theory of obedience to authority tied to children as witnesses review of the literature on the effects of stress, prompting, and imagination on children's recall ideas for future researchExperts in the field of legal testimony, legal personnel, child counselors, psychologists, social workers, and faculty and students of related courses will find Inaccuracies in Children's Testimony an essential resource for understanding the importance of making the child victim/witness more believable and reliable.

Accretion disks in astrophysics represent the characteristic flow by which compact bodies accrete mass from their environment. Their intrinsically high luminosity, and recent progress in observational accessibility at all wavelength bands, have led to rapidly growing awareness of their importance and made them the object of intense research on widely different scales, ranging from binary stars to young stellar objects and active galactic nuclei. This book contains the proceedings of the NATO Advanced Workshop on Theory of Accretion Disks 2' for which some of the most active researchers in the different fields came together at the Max-Planck-Institut for Astrophysics in Garching in March, 1993. Its reviews and contributions give an up-to-date account of the present status of our understanding and provide a stimulating challenge in discussions of open questions in a rapidly developing field.

Apposition in Contemporary English is the first full-length treatment of apposition. It provides detailed discussion of its linguistic characteristics and of its usage in various kinds of speech and writing, derived from the data of British and American computer corpora. Charles Meyer demonstrates the inadequacies of previous studies and argues that apposition is a grammatical relation realized by constructions having particular syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics, of which certain are dominant. The language of press reportage, fiction, learned writing and spontaneous conversation is analyzed.

This step-by-step guide to creating and analyzing linguistic corpora discusses the role that corpus linguistics plays in linguistic theory. It demonstrates that corpora have proven to be very useful resources for linguists who believe that their theories and descriptions of English should be based on real rather than contrived data. The author shows how to collect and computerize data for inclusion in a corpus and how to annotate and conduct a linguistic analysis once the corpus has been created.

This collection of essays sheds new light on the verb in English. The authors illustrate that verbs can only be properly understood if studied from both a theoretical and descriptive perspective. In Part One, the authors explore topics such as the terminological problems of classification, verb complementation, the semantics and pragmatics of verbs and verbal combinations, and the notions of tense, aspect, voice and modality. In Part Two, computer corpora are used to study various types of verb complements and collocations, to trace the development in English of certain verb forms, and to detail the usage of verbs in different varieties and genres of English.

Are you looking for a genuine introduction to the linguistics of English that provides a broad overview of the subject that sustains students' interest and avoids excessive detail? Introducing English Linguistics accomplishes this goal in two ways. First, it takes a top-down approach to language, beginning with the largest unit of linguistic structure, the text, and working its way down through successively smaller structures (sentences, words, and finally speech sounds). The advantage of presenting language this way is that students are first given the larger picture - they study language in context - and then see how the smaller pieces of language are a consequence of the larger goals of linguistic communication. Second, the book does not contain invented examples, as is the case with most comparable texts, but instead takes its sample materials from the major computerised databases of spoken and written English, giving students a more realistic view of language.

Are you looking for a genuine introduction to the linguistics of English that provides a broad overview of the subject that sustains students' interest and avoids excessive detail? Introducing English Linguistics accomplishes this goal in two ways. First, it takes a top-down approach to language, beginning with the largest unit of linguistic structure, the text, and working its way down through successively smaller structures (sentences, words, and finally speech sounds). The advantage of presenting language this way is that students are first given the larger picture - they study language in context - and then see how the smaller pieces of language are a consequence of the larger goals of linguistic communication. Second, the book does not contain invented examples, as is the case with most comparable texts, but instead takes its sample materials from the major computerised databases of spoken and written English, giving students a more realistic view of language.

Accretion disks in astrophysics represent the characteristic flow by which compact bodies accrete mass from their environment. Their intrinsically high luminosity, and recent progress in observational accessibility at all wavelength bands, have led to rapidly growing awareness of their importance and made them the object of intense research on widely different scales, ranging from binary stars to young stellar objects and active galactic nuclei. This book contains the proceedings of the NATO Advanced Workshop on `Theory of Accretion Disks 2' for which some of the most active researchers in the different fields came together at the Max-Planck-Institut for Astrophysics in Garching in March, 1993. Its reviews and contributions give an up-to-date account of the present status of our understanding and provide a stimulating challenge in discussions of open questions in a rapidly developing field.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Second International Work ing Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications, sponsored by IFIP Working Group lOA and held in Tucson, Arizona on February 18-20, 1991. In keeping with the first such conference on this topic, which took place at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1989, this meeting was like wise concerned with an important basic question: Can we rely on Computers? In more precise terms, it addressed various aspects of computer system de pendability, a broad concept defined as th'e trustworthiness of computer service such that reliance can justifiably be placed on this service. Given that this term includes attributes such as reliability, availability, safety, and security, it is our hope that these papers will contribute to further integration of these ideas in the context of critical applications. The program consisted of 20 papers and three panel sessions. The papers were selected from a total of 61 submissions at a November 1990 meeting of the Program Committee in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We were very fortunate to have a broad spectrum of interests represented, with papers in the final program coming from seven different countries, representing work at universities, corporations, and government agencies. The process was greatly facilitated by the diligent work of the Program Committee and the quality of reviews provided by outside referees. In addition to the paper presentations, there were three panel sessions or ganized to examine particular topics in detail."

With the advent of space observatories and modern developments in ground based astronomy and concurrent progress in the theoretical understanding of these observations it has become clear that accretion of material on to compact objects is an ubiquitous mechanism powering very diverse astrophysical sources ranging in size and luminosity by many orders of magnitude. A problem common to these systems is that the material accreted must in general get rid of its angular momentum and this leads to the formation of an Accretion Disk which allows angular momentum re-distribution and converts potential energy into radiation with an efficiency which can be higher than the nuclear burning yield. These systems range in size from quasars and active galactic nuclei to accretion disks around forming stars and the early solar system and to compact binaries such as cataclysmic variables and low-mass X-ray binaries. Other objects that should be mentioned in this context are 88433, the black hole binary candidates, and possibly gamma-ray burst sources. Observations of these systems have provided important constraints for theoretical accretion disk models on widely differing scales, lumi nosities, mass-transfer rates and physical environments."

Computers are currently used in a variety of critical applications, including systems for nuclear reactor control, flight control (both aircraft and spacecraft), and air traffic control. Moreover, experience has shown that the dependability of such systems is particularly sensitive to that of its software components, both the system software of the embedded computers and the application software they support. Software Performability: From Concepts to Applications addresses the construction and solution of analytic performability models for critical-application software. The book includes a review of general performability concepts along with notions which are peculiar to software performability. Since fault tolerance is widely recognized as a viable means for improving the dependability of computer system (beyond what can be achieved by fault prevention), the examples considered are fault-tolerant software systems that incorporate particular methods of design diversity and fault recovery. Software Performability: From Concepts to Applications will be of direct benefit to both practitioners and researchers in the area of performance and dependability evaluation, fault-tolerant computing, and dependable systems for critical applications. For practitioners, it supplies a basis for defining combined performance-dependability criteria (in the form of objective functions) that can be used to enhance the performability (performance/dependability) of existing software designs. For those with research interests in model-based evaluation, the book provides an analytic framework and a variety of performability modeling examples in an application context of recognized importance. The material contained in this book will both stimulate future research on related topics and, for teaching purposes, serve as a reference text in courses on computer system evaluation, fault-tolerant computing, and dependable high-performance computer systems.

Apposition in Contemporary English is the first full-length treatment of apposition. It provides detailed discussion of its linguistic characteristics and of its usage in various kinds of speech and writing, derived from the data of British and American computer corpora. Charles Meyer demonstrates the inadequacies of previous studies and argues that apposition is a grammatical relation realized by constructions having particular syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics, of which certain are dominant. The language of press reportage, fiction, learned writing and spontaneous conversation is analyzed.

This collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field sheds new light on the verb in English. The central concern of the volume is to illustrate that verbs can only be adequately and properly understood if studied from both a theoretical and descriptive perspective. In part one, theoretical topics are explored: terminological problems of classifying verbs and verb-related elements, the 'determining' properties of verbs, verb complementation, the semantics and pragmatics of verbs and verbal combinations, and the notions of tense, aspect, voice and modality. In part two, computer corpora are used to study various types of verb complements and collocations, to trace the development in English of certain verb forms and to detail the usage of verbs in different varieties and genres of English.

Mathematical morphology has developed a powerful methodology for segmenting images, based on connected filters and watersheds. We have chosen the abstract framework of node- or edge-weighted graphs for an extensive mathematical and algorithmic description of these tools. Volume 1 is devoted to watersheds. The topography of a graph appears by observing the evolution of a drop of water moving from node to node on a weighted graph, along flowing paths, until it reaches regional minima. The upstream nodes of a regional minimum constitute its catchment zone. The catchment zones may be constructed independently of each other and locally, in contrast with the traditional approach where the catchment basins have to be constructed all at the same time. Catchment zones may overlap, and thus, a new segmentation paradigm is proposed in which catchment zones cover each other according to a priority order. The resulting partition may then be corrected, by local and parallel treatments, in order to achieve the desired precision.

Martin F. Meyer untersucht die Entwicklung des lebenswissenschaftlichen Denkens von den fruhsten Anfangen bis zur Geburt der wissenschaftlichen Biologie bei Aristoteles. Der Autor zeigt im ersten Teil, wie sich zentrale biologische Begriffe (Leben, Lebewesen, Mensch, Tier, Pflanze) im fruhgriechischen Denken, bei den Vorsokratikern und in der sogenannten Hippokratischen Medizin entwickelt haben. Im zweiten Teil beleuchtet er die Ziele, Methoden und die Systematik der von Aristoteles begrundeten Biologie im Kontext seines naturwissenschaftlichen Programms.