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Notions of research quality are contextual in many respects: they varybetween fields of research, between review contexts and between policy contexts.Yet, the role of these co-existing notions in research, and in research policy, ispoorly understood. In this paper we offer a novel framework to study and understandresearch quality across three key dimensions. First, we distinguish betweenquality notions that originate in research fields (Field-type) and in research policyspaces (Space-type). Second, drawing on existing studies, we identify three attributes(often) considered important for ‘good research’: its originality/novelty, plausibility/reliability, and value or usefulness. Third, we identify five different sites wherenotions of research quality emerge, are contested and institutionalised: researchersthemselves, knowledge communities, research organisations, funding agencies andnational policy arenas. We argue that the framework helps us understand processesand mechanisms through which ‘good research’ is recognised as well as tensionsarising from the co-existence of (potentially) conflicting quality notions. QC 20201130

Decades of gradual advances in speech synthesis have recently culminated in exponential improvements fuelled by deep learning. This quantum leap has the potential to finally deliver realistic, controllable, and robust synthetic stimuli for speech experiments. In this article, we discuss these and other implications for phonetic sciences. We substantiate our argument by evaluating classic rule-based formant synthesis against state-of-the-art synthesisers on a) subjective naturalness ratings and b) a behavioural measure (reaction times in a lexical decision task). We also differentiate between text-to-speech and speech-to-speech methods. Naturalness ratings indicate that all modern systems are substantially closer to natural speech than formant synthesis. Reaction times for several modern systems do not differ substantially from natural speech, meaning that the processing gap observed in older systems, and reproduced with our formant synthesiser, is no longer evident. Importantly, some speech-to-speech methods are nearly indistinguishable from natural speech on both measures.

The long legacy of colonization that is rooted in how plants are known is mostly out of sight. But at times the colonial legacy of botany becomes all too apparent. This article draws upon ethnograhic field work in Cape Town, South Africa, over several years to contribute knoweldge how colonial and imperial forms of science and colonial management influenced urban botany and later urban ecology. But it points towards a more general argument that is often forgotten when the history of urban ecology and “urban nature knowledge” is written up. This works to decenter or on-stage what has often been silenced in the now taken-for-granted "success" story of the growth of modern urban ecology. What are the colonial remains within urban ecology and urban environmental knowledge today? Visual Environmental Humanities QC 20201105

In this paper we combine infrastructure studies and black radical traditions to foreground how imperial remains deeply inform the logics that bring forth contemporary large-scale infrastructures in Africa. The objective, prompted by the ongoing avid promotion of such architectures on the continent, is to contribute to an analysis that centres race in these projects. Our argument is that these initiatives have to be understood in relation to inherited material and discursive scaffoldings that remain from the colonial period, through what we refer to as imperial remains and imperial invitations. These remains and invitations demonstrate how recent mega infrastructures inhere, in their planning, financing and implementation, a colonial racialism, despite rhetorical claims to the opposite. Empirically, we draw, principally, on China built and financed infrastructure projects from Kenya, and theoretically upon black radical traditions in order to foreground a longer genealogy of black pathologizing and resistance to it on the continent. Grounding and Worlding Urban Infrastructures (GROWL) QC 20200220

A spoonerism is a sentence in some natural language where the swapping of two letters results in a new sentence with a different meaning. In this paper, we give some efficient algorithms for deciding whether a given sentence, made up from words of a given dictionary, is a spoonerism or not. EPSRC EP/D062012/1 VEGA 1/3106/06 QC 20120111

The multi-generation book project "The Peoples of Siberia" enabled a group of Leningrad-based scholars to reshape their museum into a Soviet ethnographic community. This article analyses the face-to-face performances, the legalistic stenographic documentation, the collective crafting of a single authoritative style, and a unique temporal frame as an important background to understand a hallmark volume in Siberian studies. The authors argue that the published volume indexes nearly thirty years of scholarly debates as much as it indexes the peoples it represents. The article concludes with a critical discussion of how this volume was translated and received by a Euro-American readership influencing the perception of Siberian peoples internationally. It also links the volume to contemporary post-Soviet publication projects which seem to retrace the same path. The article is based on extensive archival work and references collections recently discovered and which are presented for publication here for the first time. QC 20171106

Much contemporary debate on the nature of mechanisms centers on the issue of modulating negative causes. One type of negative causability, which I refer to as “causation by absence,” appears difficult to incorporate into modern accounts of mechanistic explanation. This paper argues that a recent attempt to resolve this problem, proposed by Benjamin Barros, requires improvement as it overlooks the fact that not all absences qualify as sources of mechanism failure. I suggest that there are a number of additional types of effects caused by absences that need to be incorporated to account for the diversity of causal connections in the biological sciences. Furthermore, it is argued that recognizing natural variability in mechanisms, such as attenuation, leads to some interesting line-drawing issues for contemporary philosophy of mechanisms. QC 20150311