Dialect Test
The Dialect Test was created by A.J. Ellis in February 1879, and was used in the fieldwork for his work "On Early English Pronunciation". It stands as one of the earliest methods of identifying vowel sounds and features of speech. The aim was to capture the main vowel sounds of an individual dialect by listening to the reading of a short passage. All the categories of West Saxon words and vowels were included in the test so that comparisons could be made with the historic West Saxon speech as well as with various other dialects.
Balancing domain decomposition method
In numerical analysis, the balancing domain decomposition method (BDD) is an iterative method to find the solution of a symmetric positive definite system of linear algebraic equations arising from the finite element method. In each iteration, it combines the solution of local problems on non-overlapping subdomains with a coarse problem created from the subdomain nullspaces. BDD requires only solution of subdomain problems rather than access to the matrices of those problems, so it is applicable to situations where only the solution operators are available, such as in oil reservoir simulation by mixed finite elements. In its original formulation, BDD performs well only for 2nd order problems, such elasticity in 2D and 3D. For 4th order problems, such as plate bending, it needs to be modified by adding to the coarse problem special basis functions that enforce continuity of the solution at subdomain corners, which makes it however more expensive. The BDDC method uses the same corner basis functions as, but in an additive rather than multiplicative fashion. The dual counterpart to BDD is FETI, which enforces the equality of the solution between the subdomain by Lagrange multipliers. The base versions of BDD and FETI are not mathematically equivalent, though a special version of FETI designed to be robust for hard problems has the same eigenvalues and thus essentially the same performance as BDD.