• Other research productsclose
• Lecture close
• CA close

We estimate a collective household model with survey data on financial satisfaction from the European Community Household Panel. Our estimates suggest that cohabitating individuals enjoy returns to scale in consumption that are towards the larger end of the range of estimates reported in the literature. They also suggest that the share of household income provided by the female partner is a significant determinant of her share of household consumption in most countries of the countries we study.

Smiling during talking yields speech with higher formants, and hence larger formant dispersion. Previous studies have shown that motor resonance during perception of words related to smiling can activate muscles responsible for the smiling action. If word perception causes smiling activation for such smile-related words, then this motor resonance may occur also during production, resulting in larger formant dispersion in these smile-related words. This paper reports on formant measurements from tokens of the Corpus of Spoken Dutch. Formant values of smile-related word tokens were compared to semantically different but phonetically similar word tokens. Results suggest that formant dispersion is indeed larger in smile-related words than in control words, although the predicted difference was observed only for female speakers. These findings suggest that motor resonance originating from a word's meaning may affect the articulatory and acoustic realization of affective spoken words. Female speakers tend to produce the word "smile" with a smile.

Problems with bedtime resistance and night-waking are common among 2-5-year-old children. Learn how sleep problems relate to children's emotional and behavioral adjustment, and how parents can help their children get to sleep and stay asleep. Dr. Graham Reid is an associate professor of psychology, family medicine, and paediatrics at Western, and a scientist with the Children's Health Research Institute.

Music professor, Jay Hodgson, discusses the role George Martin, known as the “fifth Beatle,” played in shaping the band’s sound. By examining records such as "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "I Am The Walrus,” Hodgson shows Martin did much more than simply translate Beatles' songs into recorded realities.

The Big, Bad Wolf blew down a straw house in the popular fairy tale, but brick houses can be damaged almost as easily by tornadoes or severe wind storms. Greg Kopp, Canada Research Chair in Wind Engineering, will discuss research at Western focused on extreme weather damage to homes in Canada and what we can do about it.

Due to significant changes in the Canadian copyright system, universities are seeking new ways to address the use of copyrighted works within their institutions. While the law provides quite a bit of leeway for use of copyrighted materials for educational and research purposes, the response by Canadian universities and related associations has not been to fully embrace their legal rights – rather, they have taken an approach that places emphasis on risk avoidance rather than maximizing use of materials, unlike their American counterparts. In the U.S., where educational fair use is arguably less flexible in application than fair dealing, there is a higher level of copyright advocacy among professional associations, and several sets of best practices have been created to guide the application of copyright to educational use of materials. Canada is lagging behind the U.S. in this respect, placing Canadian universities at a relative disadvantage. The goal of this study is to lay the foundation for the development of policies and guidelines in the use of copyrighted works, and the provision of copyright literacy education in universities. The research will be undertaken from a critical perspective, with the goal of promoting fair dealing and other exceptions as user rights within the institution, and a reduction in risk aversion. The methodology employed is both qualitative and quantitative and includes legal analysis, content analysis of policies and guidelines, and collection of survey data.