F or a century and a half, from the Napoleonic Wars to World War II, the British Empire was the greatest power in the world. At the core of that power was the Royal Navy, the greatest and most advanced naval force in the world. For decades, the distinctive nature, the power and the glory, of the empire and the Royal Navy shaped the character and provided the identity of the British nation. Toda...

There is substantial within-industry variation in the prices that plants pay for their material inputs. Using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I explore the consequences and sources of this variation in materials prices. For a sample of industries with relatively homogeneous products, the standard deviation of plant-level productivity would be 7% smaller if all plants faced the sam...

Market-based theories predict that differences in CEO skills lead to potentially large differences in pay, but it is challenging to quantify the CEO skill premium in pay. In a first step toward overcoming this empirical challenge, we code detailed biographical information on a large sample of CEOs for a panel of S&P 1,500 firms between 1993 and 2005 to identify specific reputational, career, an...

Proper names, whether English or non-English, have several different spellings when transliterated from a non-English source language into English. Knowing the different variations can significantly improve the results of name-searches on various source texts, especially when recall is important. In this paper we propose two novel phonetic models to generate numerous candidate variant spellings...

Hand gestures are examples of fast and complex motions. Computers fail to track these in fast video, but sleight of hand fools humans as well: what happens too quickly we just cannot see. We show a 3D tracker for these types of motions that relies on the recognition of familiar configurations in 2D images (classification), and fills the gaps in-between (interpolation). We illustrate this idea w...

This paper incorporates a detailed analysis of existing work on Hindi to Urdu transliteration systems and finds the enhancements they required. It lists the issues that are beyond the scope of character by character mapping. The issues include multiple same sound Urdu characters against one Hindi character. Moreover, it deals with the issues when the same word or words are written in two differ...

This paper presents the newly released Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC), a Chinese match for the FLOB and Frown corpora of British and American English. We first discuss the major decisions we took when building the corpus. These relate to sampling, text collection, mark-up, and annotation. Following from this we use the corpus to study aspect marking in Chinese and British/American ...

Previous research [9] suggests that Dutch learners of (British) English are not able to express sarcasm prosodically in their L2. The present study investigates whether explicit training on the prosodic markers of sarcasm in English can improve learners’ realisation of sarcasm. Sarcastic speech was elicited in short simulated telephone conversations between Dutch advanced learners of English an...

This study investigated whether and how imitation of sentences spoken in Liverpool English (LE) and Standard Southern British English (SSBE), affected attitudes related to these accents. LE has low prestige and low social attractiveness, while SSBE has high prestige and high attractiveness. A previous study showed that imitation positively affects social attractiveness, but not prestige, for an...