Production studies have shown that speakers of languages with larger phoneme inventories expand their acoustic space relative to languages with smaller inventories [Bradlow, A. (1995). A comparative acoustic study of English and Spanish vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97(3), 1916–1924; Jongman, A., Fourakis, M., & Sereno, J. (1989). The acoustic vowel space of Modern Greek...

Phonology is the study of sound patterns of the world’s languages. In all spoken languages, we find sound patterns characterizing the composition of words and phrases. These patterns include overall properties of contrastive sound inventories (e.g. vowel inventories, consonant inventories, tone inventories), as well as patterns determining the distribution of sounds or contrastive features of s...

Developing countries face the challenge of migrating their health systems data from disjoint, standalone information sources to modern web-based databases. We study this issue in the domain of immunization logistics by looking at the problem of maintaining a national vaccine cold chain inventory. We present modular components that can be composed to create a migration path from existing spreads...

Production studies have shown that speakers of languages with larger phoneme inventories expand their acoustic space relative to languages with smaller inventories [Bradlow, A. (1995). A comparative acoustic study of English and Spanish vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97(3), 1916-1924; Jongman, A., Fourakis, M., & Sereno, J. (1989). The acoustic vowel space of Modern Greek...

Efforts to assess forest ecosystem carbon stocks, biodiversity, and fire hazards have spurred the need for comprehensive assessments of forest ecosystem dead wood (DW) components around the world. Currently, information regarding the prevalence, status, and methods of DW inventories occurring in the world's forested landscapes is scattered. The goal of this study is to describe the status, DW c...

The early eighteenth century in England, before the first published Medical Register of 1779, is for historians a great mystery in many crucial aspects of medical practice. Who practised where is fairly difficult to discover, while a man's patients, fees, possessions, books and equipment are even further hidden after over two centuries. What a physician, surgeon or apothecary was worth at death...

Understanding the sources of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is essential for ground-level ozone and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) abatement measures. We made VOC measurements at 27 sites and online observations at an urban site in Beijing from July 2009 to January 2012. Based on these measurement data, we determined the spatial and temporal distribution of VOCs, estimated their annual emis...

One source of asymmetry in phonology derives from the contrastive function of features. I assume that feature specifications are driven by considerations of contrast. In order to distinguish between contrastive and redundant specifications, it is necessary to specify the relative scope, or ordering, of each feature. This ordering determines a contrastive hierarchy. Different contrastive hierarc...