Jargon in Military: A Comparative Analysis of English Varieties in Pakistan based on Hallidiyan’s Functional Perspective

Pakistani English is (also known as Paklish or Pinglish) is the group of English language varieties that are spoken or written in Pakistan. It was recognized in terms of different varieties and forms first time in the 1970s and 1980s. This paper elucidated the phenomenon of transition that Pakistani English was undergoing in the current scenario because of its contact with other Pakistani languages in general, Urdu and Punjabi in particular. This study attempted to explore and interpret the varieties of Pakistani English in the Military at two different levels i.e. Officers to Officers Communication and Officers to Rank (Soldier). These constantly diverging forms and functions of English may not have reached stability and recognition among its users probably bilinguals or multi-linguals as Pakistan is a multi-lingual state. This study endeavored to use a Qualitative approach and data will be collected through observation from Pakistani English varieties used in the Military. This paper aimed to apply Halliday’s (1960) theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to conduct a comparative study of varieties of English to describe, interpret and explain the forms and functions of Pakistani English at two different levels. The findings revealed that the variations of Military language were unique and distinct from all other varieties of English. In addition, these variations were acceptable by the whole language community shared by individuals in the Military.

Introducing Tables to Second-Grade Elementary Students in an Algebraic Thinking Context

In this study, we adopted a functional perspective on algebra. Our focus was on tables and how they were first used by second-grade elementary school students (7- and 8-year-olds) when working with functions. This qualitative, exploratory, and descriptive study consisted of five classroom sessions and two semi-structured interviews, one group and one individual, two weeks apart, focused on tasks involving different functions and uses of tables, with and without labels for headings. In this study, we ask the following research questions: How do children organise values in tables with or without (a priori) labels for headings? What are the regularities (structures) identified by students? Our data revealed that students were able to organise the values of variables by listing them in columns and labelling the headings (i.e., identifying the variables involved). The ways in which children organised the data in tables enabled us to identify the structures they identified as regularities between the variables involved in the functions. More structures were correctly identified in the second interview compared to the first.

The Lens of “Thingness”

Environmental medicine and related fields have developed from a structural perspective that assigns a static, anatomical “thingness” to our physiology and our environment. This viewpoint arises from a reductionist school of thought and foundational biomedical discoveries such as the discovery that human organs are made up of cells organized as tissues or that our DNA is the source “code” for the building blocks of life. As a consequence of these discoveries and their perceived importance, medical sciences have organized the study of the human body into the study of component parts. Attempts to incorporate time into existing structural perspectives have often taken the form of multiple structural analyses laced together as a circuit operating in a series of connections. Such approaches ignore that humans and their environment are temporally dynamic processes. Environmental Biodynamics argues for a functional perspective that rejects the reductionist view of human physiology and the human environment. In stark contrast to the prevalent structural paradigms, this approach places temporal dynamics at its core.

The Shape of Change

Chapter 3 introduce the first central principle of Environmental Biodynamics—that complex systems cannot interact directly, nor exist in isolation. It also introduces the corollary principle that although the interface is composed of constant change (i.e., processes) it retains a quantifiable topography—the shape of change—driven by stochastic, deterministic, or chaotic processes. The implication of this, from the perspective of environmental medicine, is that the environment and human physiology are integrated via an interface. An interface emerges wherever the measurement of one system’s state intrinsically includes inputs from another system. And thus, to understand how the environment influences us, and vice versa, environmental medicine must adopt a functional perspective that focuses on the organization of system dynamics and complexity. This is achieved by characterizing the deterministic, stochastic, and chaotic processes that shape environmental homeostasis.

Non-synaptic interactions between olfactory receptor neurons, a possible key feature of odor processing in flies

When flies explore their environment, they encounter odors in complex, highly intermittent plumes. To navigate a plume and, for example, find food, they must solve several challenges, including reliably identifying mixtures of odorants and their intensities, and discriminating odorant mixtures emanating from a single source from odorants emitted from separate sources and just mixing in the air. Lateral inhibition in the antennal lobe is commonly understood to help solving these challenges. With a computational model of the Drosophila olfactory system, we analyze the utility of an alternative mechanism for solving them: Non-synaptic (“ephaptic”) interactions (NSIs) between olfactory receptor neurons that are stereotypically co-housed in the same sensilla. We find that NSIs improve mixture ratio detection and plume structure sensing and do so more efficiently than the traditionally considered mechanism of lateral inhibition in the antennal lobe. The best performance is achieved when both mechanisms work in synergy. However, we also found that NSIs decrease the dynamic range of co-housed ORNs, especially when they have similar sensitivity to an odorant. These results shed light, from a functional perspective, on the role of NSIs, which are normally avoided between neurons, for instance by myelination.

Romanian Slavonic in Unicode: problems and solutions

Editors of Slavonic and Slavonic–Romanian text can make use of a large variety of tools (fonts, physical and virtual keyboard layouts, word processors, operating systems) for transcribing and digitizing these texts in a uniform manner. The uniformity of the transcripts is based on Unicode standardization. Our study aims at explaining the place of Slavonic in Unicode and at briefly describing the most accessible tools. To this end, we shall describe the working tools from a historical and functional perspective and then provide examples in which those tools can be or have already been used to obtain a more accurate transcript. The user can choose from the existing methods and tools according to his/her purposes, needs and means. A better understanding of technical data can reduce the working time, improve transcription, accelerate learning times and generally make an editor’s work much easier.

From sequences to enzymes: heterologous expression of genes from marine microbes

Heterologous expression is an easy and broadly applicable experimental approach widely used to investigate protein functions without the need to genetically manipulate the original host. The approach is used to obtain large quantities of the desired protein, which can be further analyzed from a biochemical, structural and functional perspective. The expression system consists of three main components: i) a foreign DNA sequence coding for the protein of interest; ii) a suitable expression vector; iii) a suitable host (bacterial, yeast or mammalian cells) which does not encode or express the protein of interest. Here we show how to apply an Escherichia coli-based expression system to overexpress protein encoding genes from marinemicrobes.

Connector-link-part-based disassembly sequence planning

Under the trend of concurrent engineering, the correspondence between functions and physical structures in product design is gaining importance. Between the functions and parts, connectors are the basic unit for engineers to consider. Moreover, the relationship between connector-liaison-part will help accomplish the integration of information. Such efforts will help the development of the Knowledge Intensive CAD (KICAD) system. Therefore, we proposed a Connector-liaison-part-based disassembly sequence planning (DSP) in this study. First, the authors construct a release diagram through an interference relationship to express the priority of disassembly between parts. The release diagram will allow designers to review the rationality of product disassembly planning. Then, the cost calculation method and disassembly time matrix are established. Last, the greedy algorithm is used to find an appropriate disassembly sequence and seek suggestions for design improvement. Through the reference information, the function and corresponding modules are improved, from which the disassembly value of a product can be reviewed from a functional perspective. In this study, a fixed support holder is used as an example to validate the proposed method. The discussion of the connector-liaison-part will help the integration of the DSP and the functional connector approach.

Detecting the function of finance through history.

This special review article profiles the work of Joost Jonker, who retires from his chair at the University of Amsterdam in 2021. We situate Joost’s work in the international literature on the financing of governments, businesses and households, showing how his contributions to the field of financial history mirror wider trends. We focus on Joost’s preferred methodology (the analytic narrative) and his preferred theory (the functional perspective). We conclude with a discussion of possible future developments in the field of financial history. Our intention is for this article to become a useful resource for new scholars entering the field of financial history, particularly on topics relating to the Low Countries.