This article describes the preparation, recording and orthographic transcription of a new speech corpus, the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual French (NCCFr). The corpus contains a total of over 36 hours of recordings of 46 French speakers engaged in conversations with friends. Casual speech was elicited during three different parts, which together provided around ninety minutes of speech from every pa...

Every language manifests casual speech processes, and hence every second language too. This study examined how listeners deal with second-language casual speech processes, as a function of the processes in their native language. We compared a match case, where a second-language process (/t/-reduction) is also operative in native speech, with a mismatch case, where a second-language process (/r/...

Determinants of intended condom use with steady and casual sex partners were examined among Dutch HIV-positive men who have sex with men (MSM) (N = 296). Given the proposition that safer sex behavior among HIV-positive people is a form of prosocial behavior, the present study extended the general framework of the Theory of Planned Behavior with Schwartz's norm-activation theory and tested the a...

OBJECTIVES To assess the role of ambulatory blood pressure (BP) monitoring in the diagnosis of hypertension in general practice. BACKGROUND Hypertension is usually diagnosed by means of casual office BP readings. However, ambulatory BP monitoring has shown that a significant proportion of patients diagnosed as hypertensive do not in fact have hypertension. METHOD Sixty-four Indian patients ...

An "infection," understood here in a very broad sense, can be propagated through the network of social contacts among individuals. These social contacts include both "close" contacts and "casual" encounters among individuals in transport, leisure, shopping, etc. Knowing the first through the study of the social networks is not a difficult task, but having a clear picture of the network of casua...

Linked Data use has expanded rapidly in recent years; however there is still a lack of support for casual users to create complex queries over this Web of Data. Until this occurs, the real benefits of having such rich metadata available will not be realised by the general public. This paper introduces an approach to supporting casual users discover relevant information across multiple Linked Da...

This  paper  presents  an attempt  to use Agnew’s General Strain Theory ( GST) (1992) for explanation of the  criminal behavior  differences between  young males and females in Babol, a city in northern part of Iran. General Strain Theory (GST) is essentially regarded as a set of ideas formulated to explain the occurrence of crime as a result of the strain in social life. This study explores th...

This paper describes the development and testing of a system that provides casual and novice users with simple yet powerful tools to manipulate statistical data from external sources. The prototype combines Multi-Dimensional Databases and Online Analytical Processing tools to produce a generic Web-based interface compatible with a wide variety of types of statistical data. The prototype has per...

Public-works programs in developing countries have recently attracted a lot of attention as anti-poverty initiatives. This paper analyzes the labor-market impacts of the largest public-works program in the world, the Indian NREGS, using information about its rollout in a regression-discontinuity design. The results suggest that the overall employment and casual wage impacts are small, although ...