Drawing on an ethnographic pilot study carried out in a refugee residence in Hamburg in 2017/18, this paper explores the relationship between smartphone usage and multilingual repertoires among refugee families from Syria and Afghanistan who arrived in Germany since 2015. The data includes nine semi-directed interviews, in which the informants report on their media and language choices for various purposes and to various types of addressees, ethnographic field notes, and video demonstrations of smartphone usage by some of the informants. Analysis focuses on a comparison of the mediational repertoires in two families, originating in Syria and Afghanistan. We explore the relevance of various factors, such as literacy, type of social contact, and purpose of digital media use, to the informants’ linguistic choices from their repertoire. Both families rely on a wide range on languages and smartphone applications in their everyday life at the residence. In both families, mediational repertoires differ by generation. The paper also discusses sources and strategies for smartphone-based language-learning. The findings suggest that media literacy and Internet access are highly relevant to the process of social integration, including language learning, among refugees.
The purpose of the study is to increase uniformity of sowing of difficult-to-flow seeds by substantiating the design parameters of the torsion-pin sowing machine. Sowing is crucial technological operation in ensuring high yields of agricultural crops. Concurrently, sowing of legumes is associated with certain difficulties due to increased requirements of these crops to the amount of moisture at initial stage of development. One of the most effective ways to eliminate moisture deficiency is pre-sowing soaking. However, the existing sowing machines are not capable of sowing soaked seed materials with high quality parameters. To solve the problem of sowing difficult-to-flow seeds of legumes, a torsion-pin sowing machine was developed. Laboratory studies of the developed sowing machine were carried out to assess the influence of its design parameters on uniformity of longitudinal distribution of seeds. The results of experimental studies on assessing the quality of seeding of hard-to-flow seeds of legumes with a torsion-pin sowing machine showed that uniformity of longitudinal distribution of seeds increased in case of installing movable pins. Under these circumstances, the highest uniformity of seed sowing, both of sweet clover and sainfoin, amounted respectively to 39...46% and 45...51%, of the variation coefficient in the mass of seeds in one-centimeter cells, the highest uniformity was obtained in case of equipping the sowing machine with four torsion-pin groups with three movable 15 mm high pins.
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