This paper describes a corpus of unscripted, task-oriented dialogues which has been designed, digitally recorded, and transcribed to support the study of spontaneous speech on many levels. The corpus uses the Map Task (Brown, Anderson, Yule, and Shillcock, 1983) in which speakers must collaborate verbally to reproduce on one participant's map a route printed on the other's. In all, the corpus includes four conversations from each of 64 young adults and manipulates the following variables: familiarity of speakers, eye contact between speakers, matching between landmarks on the participants' maps, opportunities for contrastive stress, and phonological characteristics of landmark names. The motivations for the design are set out and basic corpus statistics are presented.

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One-dimensional photonic band gap structures have been studied for applications in many branches of physics. Numerical and experimental studies of wave scattering and interference inside one-dimensional photonic band gap structures based on a rectangular waveguide filled with a double-sided corrugated dielectric are presented. The experimental data and theoretical predictions obtained are compared and discussed. It is shown experimentally that variation of the relative phase of the one-dimensional perturbations with respect to each other results in a change of the band gap parameters in accordance with the predictions

The missing‐data‐residue technique is a method of recovering the scatter intensity curve at low‐Q values from small‐angle scattering data. The effect on the missing‐data‐residue technique of the addition of varying degrees of noise to truncated analytical particles is investigated, with the noise levels varying from 0 to ±10%. The effects of smoothing of the data prior to the application of the technique are also investigated. The results for nonsmoothed data are shown to degrade in proportion to the noise level and it is shown that an estimate of the noise level gives an estimate of the potential error on the result. The five‐point moving‐average smoothing used is shown to improve the variance of the returned zero‐angle scatter intensity but at the expense of potentially introducing a small error. Results for both smoothed and nonsmoothed data are compared and it is shown that smoothing of the data is preferable, even at relatively low noise levels. For both smoothed and nonsmoothed data, a correlation is shown to exist between the error on the first known I(Q) data point and the returned I(0).