WorldWideScience

Sample records for montana speakers dr

  1. Revitalizing Indigenous Languages, Cultures, and Histories in Montana, across the United States and around the Globe

    Science.gov (United States)

    Carjuzaa, Jioanna

    2017-01-01

    Many educators have sung the praises of Indian Education for All, Montana's constitutional mandate, and heard the successes of Montana's Indigenous language revitalization efforts which reverberate around the globe. Teaching Indigenous languages is especially, challenging since there are limited numbers of fluent speakers and scarce resources…

  2. Enrico Fermi Awards Ceremony for Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus and Dr. Burton Richter, May 2012 (Presentations, including remarks by Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu)

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Chu, Steven

    2012-01-01

    The Fermi Award is a Presidential award and is one of the oldest and most prestigious science and technology honors bestowed by the U.S. Government. On May 7, 2012 it was conferred upon two exceptional scientists: Dr. Mildred Dresselhaus, 'for her scientific leadership, her major contributions to science and energy policy, her selfless work in science education and the advancement of diversity in the scientific workplace, and her highly original and impactful research,' and Dr. Burton Richter, 'for the breadth of his influence in the multiple disciplines of accelerator physics and particle physics, his profound scientific discoveries, his visionary leadership as SLAC Director, his leadership of science, and his notable contributions in energy and public policy.' Dr. John Holder, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, opened the ceremony, and Dr. Bill Brinkman, Director of DOE's Office of Science introduced the main speaker, Dr. Steven Chu, U.S. Energy Secretary.

  3. The ammonoids from the Three Forks Shale (Late Devonian of Montana

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    D. Korn

    2006-08-01

    Full Text Available The ammonoid fauna from the Late Devonian Three Forks Shale of Montana is revised. Six taxa were recognised, which belong to the genera Tornoceras, Pernoceras, Raymondiceras, Platyclymenia, Pleuroclymenia, and Carinoclymenia. The ammonoid assemblage suggests a stratigraphic position within the middle Famennian, most probably the Platyclymenia annulata Zone. The ammonoids display extreme septal crowding in intermediate as well as adult growth stages, which can be regarded as evidence for instable palaeoecological conditions during lifetime of the animals. Die Ammonoideenfauna aus dem oberdevonischen Three Forks Shale von Montana wird revidiert. Sechs Taxa werden unterschieden; sie gehören zu den Gattungen Tornoceras, Pernoceras, Raymondiceras, Platyclymenia, Pleuroclymenia und Carinoclymenia. Die Ammonoideen-Vergesellschaftung spricht für eine stratigraphische Position im mittleren Famennium, wahrscheinlich in der Platyclymenia annulata Zone. Die Ammonoideen zeigen auffällige Drängung der Septen in intermediären und adulten Wachstumsstadien, die als Hinweis auf instabile Lebensbedingungen für die Tiere gewertet werden kann. doi:10.1002/mmng.200600008

  4. Speaker segmentation and clustering

    OpenAIRE

    Kotti, M; Moschou, V; Kotropoulos, C

    2008-01-01

    07.08.13 KB. Ok to add the accepted version to Spiral, Elsevier says ok whlile mandate not enforced. This survey focuses on two challenging speech processing topics, namely: speaker segmentation and speaker clustering. Speaker segmentation aims at finding speaker change points in an audio stream, whereas speaker clustering aims at grouping speech segments based on speaker characteristics. Model-based, metric-based, and hybrid speaker segmentation algorithms are reviewed. Concerning speaker...

  5. Speaker Recognition

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Mølgaard, Lasse Lohilahti; Jørgensen, Kasper Winther

    2005-01-01

    Speaker recognition is basically divided into speaker identification and speaker verification. Verification is the task of automatically determining if a person really is the person he or she claims to be. This technology can be used as a biometric feature for verifying the identity of a person...

  6. Case Study of a Service-Learning Partnership: Montana Tech and the Montana State Prison.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Amtmann, John; Evans, Roberta; Powers, Jack

    2002-01-01

    As a service learning project, Montana Tech students deliver a wellness program for older inmates in Montana State Prison. Outcomes identified in student interviews included improved interpersonal skills (tact, diplomacy, communication, assertiveness) and opportunities to apply knowledge. Students recognized the value of the program for…

  7. A Report on Traffic Safety and Montana's Children. 1999 Montana Special Report No. 1.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies--The Montana Coalition, Helena.

    This brief Kids Count report looks at major problems, available data, and some solutions for Montana's children as passengers in and drivers of vehicles on Montana's roads and highways. The report also presents information about adults' roles and responsibilities for preventing traffic accidents and protecting children. Facts presented in the…

  8. Some biological compounds, radical scavenging capacities and antimicrobial activities in the seeds of Nepeta italica L. and Sideritis montana L. sub sp. montana from Turkey

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Emre, I.; Kursat, M.; Yilmaz, O.; Erecevit, P.

    2011-07-01

    This study determined some biological compounds (fatty acid compositions, lipid-soluble vitamins, sterols, flavonoids), radical scavenging capacities and antimicrobial activities in the seeds of Nepeta italica L. and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana. It was found that palmitic acid (C16:0; 8.54+-0.13-3.05+-0.04%), oleic acid (C18:1 n9, 22.41+-0.8-18.83+-0.1%) and a-inolenic acid were the dominant fatty acids in both Nepeta italica L. and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana. It was concluded that both Nepeta italica L. and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana contained stigmasterol and ergosterol as well as beta-sitosterol. The present findings show that Nepeta italica L. contains morin, catechin, naringin and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana contains morin, naringenin as major flavonoids. It was also determined that methanol extracts of Nepeta italica L. and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana were most effective against DPPH radicals. The results of the present study show that the vitamins, flavonoids and fatty acid extracts in the seeds of N. italica L. and S. montana L. subsp. montana prevented the growth of the microorganisms used in the tests at different ratios. (Author).

  9. Speaker Authentication

    CERN Document Server

    Li, Qi (Peter)

    2012-01-01

    This book focuses on use of voice as a biometric measure for personal authentication. In particular, "Speaker Recognition" covers two approaches in speaker authentication: speaker verification (SV) and verbal information verification (VIV). The SV approach attempts to verify a speaker’s identity based on his/her voice characteristics while the VIV approach validates a speaker’s identity through verification of the content of his/her utterance(s). SV and VIV can be combined for new applications. This is still a new research topic with significant potential applications. The book provides with a broad overview of the recent advances in speaker authentication while giving enough attention to advanced and useful algorithms and techniques. It also provides a step by step introduction to the current state of the speaker authentication technology, from the fundamental concepts to advanced algorithms. We will also present major design methodologies and share our experience in developing real and successful speake...

  10. Methods of Speakers\\' Effects on the Audience

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    فریبا حسینی

    2010-09-01

    Full Text Available Methods of Speakers' Effects on the Audience    Nasrollah Shameli *   Fariba Hosayni **     Abstract   This article is focused on four issues. The first issue is related to the speaker's external appearance including the beauty of face, the power of his voice, moves and signals by hand, the stick and eyebrow as well as the height. Such characteristics could have an important effect on the audience. The second issue is related to internal features of the speaker. These include the ethics of the preacher , his/her piety and intention on the speakers based on their personalities, habits and emotions, knowledge and culture, and speed of learning. The third issue is concerned with the appearance of the lecture. Words should be clear enough as well as being mixed with Quranic verses, poetry and proverbs. The final issue is related to the content. It is argued that the subject of the talk should be in accordance with the level of understanding of listeners as well as being new and interesting for them.   3 - A phenomenon rhetoric: It was noted in this section How to give words and phrases so that these words and phrases are clear, correct, mixed in parables, governance and Quranic verses, and appropriate their meaning.   4 - the content of Oratory : It was noted in this section to the topic of Oratory and say that the Oratory should be the theme commensurate with the minds of audiences and also should mean that agree with the case may be, then I say: that the rhetoric if the theme was innovative and new is affecting more and more on the audience.     Key words : Oratory , Preacher , Audience, Influence of speech     * Associate Professor, Department of Arabic Language and Literature, University of Isfahan E-mail: Dr-Nasrolla Shameli@Yahoo.com   * * M.A. in Arabic Language and Literature from Isfahan University E-mail: faribahosayni@yahoo.com

  11. Some Biological Compounds, Radical Scavenging Capacities and Antimicrobial Activities in the seeds of Nepeta italica L. and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana from Turkey

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Erecevit, Pınar

    2011-03-01

    Full Text Available This study determined some biological compounds (fatty acid compositions, lipid-soluble vitamins, sterols, flavonoids, radical scavenging capacities and antimicrobial activities in the seeds of Nepeta italica L. and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana. It was found that palmitic acid (C16:0; 8.54±0.13- 3.05±0.04%, oleic acid (C18:1 n9, 22.41±0.8-18.83±0.1% and α-linolenic acid (C18:3 n3;39.56±0.67-77.04±2.07% were the dominant fatty acids in both Nepeta italica L. and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana. It was concluded that both Nepeta italica L. and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana contained stigmasterol (630.07±1.81µg/g, 80.74±0.71µg/g, respectively and ergosterol (1.11±0.14µg/g, 161.32±0.63µg/g respectively as well as beta-sitosterol (2.93±0.03 µg/g. The present findings show that Nepeta italica L. contains morin (37.79±1.09μg/g, catechin (124.39±2.23µg/g, naringin (475.96±3.57µg/g and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana contains morin (188.41±2.53µg/g, catechin (64.14±1.86μg/g, naringenin (38.34±1.78μg/g as major flavonoids. It was also determined that methanol extracts of Nepeta italica L. and Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana were most effective against DPPH radicals. The results of the present study show that the vitamins, flavonoids and fatty acid extracts in the seeds of N. italica L. and S. montana L. subsp. montana prevented the growth of the microorganisms used in the tests at different ratios.Este estudio ha determinado algunos compuestos biológicos (ácidos grasos, vitaminas liposolubles, esteroles y flavonoides, capacidad atrapadora de radicales libres, y actividades antimicrobianas de las semillas de Nepeta italica L. y Sideritis montana L. subsp. montana. Se encontró que el ácido palmítico (C16:0; 8.54±0.13-3.05±0.04%, ácido oleico (C18:1 n9, 22.41±0.8-18.83±0.1% y α-linolénico (C18:3 n 3;39.56±0.67-77.04±2.07% eran mayoritarios en ambas semillas de Nepeta italica L. y Sideritis

  12. Animal-vehicle collisions and habitat connectivity along Montana Highway 83 in the Seeley-Swan Valley, Montana: a reconnaissance.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2006-02-01

    "Montana Highway 83 in northwestern Montana, USA, is known for its great number of animal-vehicle collisions, : mostly with white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). This document reports on the first phase of an effort to produce : an effective im...

  13. Working with Speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pestel, Ann

    1989-01-01

    The author discusses working with speakers from business and industry to present career information at the secondary level. Advice for speakers is presented, as well as tips for program coordinators. (CH)

  14. On the optimization of a mixed speaker array in an enclosed space using the virtual-speaker weighting method

    Science.gov (United States)

    Peng, Bo; Zheng, Sifa; Liao, Xiangning; Lian, Xiaomin

    2018-03-01

    In order to achieve sound field reproduction in a wide frequency band, multiple-type speakers are used. The reproduction accuracy is not only affected by the signals sent to the speakers, but also depends on the position and the number of each type of speaker. The method of optimizing a mixed speaker array is investigated in this paper. A virtual-speaker weighting method is proposed to optimize both the position and the number of each type of speaker. In this method, a virtual-speaker model is proposed to quantify the increment of controllability of the speaker array when the speaker number increases. While optimizing a mixed speaker array, the gain of the virtual-speaker transfer function is used to determine the priority orders of the candidate speaker positions, which optimizes the position of each type of speaker. Then the relative gain of the virtual-speaker transfer function is used to determine whether the speakers are redundant, which optimizes the number of each type of speaker. Finally the virtual-speaker weighting method is verified by reproduction experiments of the interior sound field in a passenger car. The results validate that the optimum mixed speaker array can be obtained using the proposed method.

  15. Hannah Montana som nissemor

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Pedersen, Peder Holm

    2010-01-01

    Pædagoger skal lægge deres angst for computerspil, nymodens legetøj og mediernes kulturelleunivers på hylden og omfavne både Spiderman og Hannah Montana, hvis børns frie leg og kreativitettil fulde skal udfoldes i børnehaven. Sådan lyder opfordringen fra legeforsker Stine Liv Johansen.......Pædagoger skal lægge deres angst for computerspil, nymodens legetøj og mediernes kulturelleunivers på hylden og omfavne både Spiderman og Hannah Montana, hvis børns frie leg og kreativitettil fulde skal udfoldes i børnehaven. Sådan lyder opfordringen fra legeforsker Stine Liv Johansen....

  16. Flouting maxim by sherlock holmes and dr. Watson in tv series Of sherlock season

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Lina Affifatusholihah

    2017-04-01

    In running daily activities, people will always meet and interact with other people, and language is a medium that is used by humans to interact with each other. In a conversation or discussion, everyone should pay attention to the four maxims in order that there are no errors in communication. However, it is not uncommon that the four rules above are breached by the speakers. This is called non-observance of the maxims, and one of a non-observance of the maxims that often occurs in is flouting maxim. The aims of this paper are to describe types of maxims that are flouted by Sherlock Holmes and dr. Watson as well as to describe how the maxims are flouted in Sherlock TV series season 1. This research used qualitative descriptive method. The researcher classifies the utterances to know what kind of maxim which are flouted, categorizes those into the category based on the Grice’s theory of Cooperative Principle, namely: maxim of quantity, quality, relation and manner. The research procedure begin by searching the script in the internet, matching the utterances in the script and in film and sorting the utterances between Sherlock Holmes and dr. Watson as well observing every word or sentence which are flouted by the main characters. The findings find that all kinds of maxims are flouted by Sherlock and dr. Watson. The result of analysis shows that the maxim flouted when the speakers say something irrelevant; something roguishness or lied to hide the truth in the form of rhetorical question; the information becomes more or too informative than what is required; and something obscurity of expression, ambiguity, or unnecessary prolixity.

  17. Supervised and Unsupervised Speaker Adaptation in the NIST 2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation

    National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

    Hansen, Eric G; Slyh, Raymond E; Anderson, Timothy R

    2006-01-01

    Starting in 2004, the annual NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE) has added an optional unsupervised speaker adaptation track where test files are processed sequentially and one may update the target model...

  18. Flacourtia montana

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Admin

    Flacourtia montana Graham, referred to as Indian plum or mountain sweet thorn is restricted only to the evergreen and semi-evergreen forests of the Western Ghats. It belongs to the willow family, i.e., Salicaceae. The tree trunk at its base bears several long, sharp thorns. In the dry season the plant produces scarlet colored, ...

  19. Faculty Handbook -- 1974-1976. Montana State University, Bozeman.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Montana State Univ., Bozeman.

    The Montana State University's 1974 faculty handbook outlines the history and scope of the university within the Montana state higher education system. The document details the administrative organization; the faculty organization and operation; personnel policies including appointments, tenure, rank and titles, faculty review, promotions,…

  20. 76 FR 9049 - Notice of Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-02-16

    ... Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting AGENCY: Bureau of Land Management... 1972 (FACA), the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Eastern Montana... Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council will be held on Mar. 24, 2011 in Miles City, Montana. The...

  1. 75 FR 67393 - Notice of Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-11-02

    ... Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting AGENCY: Bureau of Land Management... 1972 (FACA), the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Eastern Montana... Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council will be held on Dec. 2, 2010 in Billings, Montana. The meeting...

  2. When speaker identity is unavoidable: Neural processing of speaker identity cues in natural speech.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tuninetti, Alba; Chládková, Kateřina; Peter, Varghese; Schiller, Niels O; Escudero, Paola

    2017-11-01

    Speech sound acoustic properties vary largely across speakers and accents. When perceiving speech, adult listeners normally disregard non-linguistic variation caused by speaker or accent differences, in order to comprehend the linguistic message, e.g. to correctly identify a speech sound or a word. Here we tested whether the process of normalizing speaker and accent differences, facilitating the recognition of linguistic information, is found at the level of neural processing, and whether it is modulated by the listeners' native language. In a multi-deviant oddball paradigm, native and nonnative speakers of Dutch were exposed to naturally-produced Dutch vowels varying in speaker, sex, accent, and phoneme identity. Unexpectedly, the analysis of mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitudes elicited by each type of change shows a large degree of early perceptual sensitivity to non-linguistic cues. This finding on perception of naturally-produced stimuli contrasts with previous studies examining the perception of synthetic stimuli wherein adult listeners automatically disregard acoustic cues to speaker identity. The present finding bears relevance to speech normalization theories, suggesting that at an unattended level of processing, listeners are indeed sensitive to changes in fundamental frequency in natural speech tokens. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  3. Similar speaker recognition using nonlinear analysis

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Seo, J.P.; Kim, M.S.; Baek, I.C.; Kwon, Y.H.; Lee, K.S.; Chang, S.W.; Yang, S.I.

    2004-01-01

    Speech features of the conventional speaker identification system, are usually obtained by linear methods in spectral space. However, these methods have the drawback that speakers with similar voices cannot be distinguished, because the characteristics of their voices are also similar in spectral space. To overcome the difficulty in linear methods, we propose to use the correlation exponent in the nonlinear space as a new feature vector for speaker identification among persons with similar voices. We show that our proposed method surprisingly reduces the error rate of speaker identification system to speakers with similar voices

  4. Montana's forest products industry and timber harvest, 2004

    Science.gov (United States)

    Timothy P. Spoelma; Todd A. Morgan; Thale Dillon; Alfred L. Chase; Charles E. Keegan; Larry T. DeBlander

    2008-01-01

    This report traces the flow of Montana's 2004 timber harvest through the primary wood-using industries; provides a description of the structure, capacity, and condition of Montana's primary forest products industry; and quantifies volumes and uses of wood fiber. Historical wood products industry changes are discussed, as well as changes in harvest, production...

  5. Preliminary assessment report for Fort William Henry Harrison, Montana Army National Guard, Helena, Montana

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    DuWaldt, J.; Meyer, T.

    1993-07-01

    This report presents the results of the preliminary assessment (PA) conducted by Argonne National Laboratory at a Montana Army National Guard (MTARNG) property near Helena, Montana. Preliminary assessments of federal facilities are being conducted to compile the information necessary for completing preremedial activities and to provide a basis for establishing corrective actions in response to releases of hazardous substances. The principal objective of the PA is to characterize the site accurately and determine the need for further action by examining site activities, quantities of hazardous substances present, and potential pathways by which contamination could affect public health and the environment. This PA satisfies, for the Fort William Henry Harrison property, requirements of the Department of Defense Installation Restoration Program

  6. Grammatical Planning Units during Real-Time Sentence Production in Speakers with Agrammatic Aphasia and Healthy Speakers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lee, Jiyeon; Yoshida, Masaya; Thompson, Cynthia K.

    2015-01-01

    Purpose: Grammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia…

  7. The 2016 NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation

    Science.gov (United States)

    2017-08-20

    impact on system performance. Index Terms: NIST evaluation, NIST SRE, speaker detection, speaker recognition, speaker verification 1. Introduction NIST... self -reported. Second, there were two training conditions in SRE16, namely fixed and open. In the fixed training condition, par- ticipants were only

  8. Arctic Visiting Speakers Series (AVS)

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fox, S. E.; Griswold, J.

    2011-12-01

    The Arctic Visiting Speakers (AVS) Series funds researchers and other arctic experts to travel and share their knowledge in communities where they might not otherwise connect. Speakers cover a wide range of arctic research topics and can address a variety of audiences including K-12 students, graduate and undergraduate students, and the general public. Host applications are accepted on an on-going basis, depending on funding availability. Applications need to be submitted at least 1 month prior to the expected tour dates. Interested hosts can choose speakers from an online Speakers Bureau or invite a speaker of their choice. Preference is given to individuals and organizations to host speakers that reach a broad audience and the general public. AVS tours are encouraged to span several days, allowing ample time for interactions with faculty, students, local media, and community members. Applications for both domestic and international visits will be considered. Applications for international visits should involve participation of more than one host organization and must include either a US-based speaker or a US-based organization. This is a small but important program that educates the public about Arctic issues. There have been 27 tours since 2007 that have impacted communities across the globe including: Gatineau, Quebec Canada; St. Petersburg, Russia; Piscataway, New Jersey; Cordova, Alaska; Nuuk, Greenland; Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania; Oslo, Norway; Inari, Finland; Borgarnes, Iceland; San Francisco, California and Wolcott, Vermont to name a few. Tours have included lectures to K-12 schools, college and university students, tribal organizations, Boy Scout troops, science center and museum patrons, and the general public. There are approximately 300 attendees enjoying each AVS tour, roughly 4100 people have been reached since 2007. The expectations for each tour are extremely manageable. Hosts must submit a schedule of events and a tour summary to be posted online

  9. Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of the Residential Provisions of the 2015 IECC for Montana

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Mendon, Vrushali V. [Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States); Zhao, Mingjie [Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States); Taylor, Zachary T. [Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States); Poehlman, Eric A. [Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)

    2016-02-15

    The 2015 IECC provides cost-effective savings for residential buildings in Montana. Moving to the 2015 IECC from the 2014 Montana State Code base code is cost-effective for residential buildings in all climate zones in Montana.

  10. Hybrid Speaker Recognition Using Universal Acoustic Model

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nishimura, Jun; Kuroda, Tadahiro

    We propose a novel speaker recognition approach using a speaker-independent universal acoustic model (UAM) for sensornet applications. In sensornet applications such as “Business Microscope”, interactions among knowledge workers in an organization can be visualized by sensing face-to-face communication using wearable sensor nodes. In conventional studies, speakers are detected by comparing energy of input speech signals among the nodes. However, there are often synchronization errors among the nodes which degrade the speaker recognition performance. By focusing on property of the speaker's acoustic channel, UAM can provide robustness against the synchronization error. The overall speaker recognition accuracy is improved by combining UAM with the energy-based approach. For 0.1s speech inputs and 4 subjects, speaker recognition accuracy of 94% is achieved at the synchronization error less than 100ms.

  11. Baxter v. Montana, libertarianism, and end-of-life: the ripe time for a paradigm shift.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ruble, James H

    2010-09-01

    Baxter v. Montana (2009 WL 5155363 [Mont. 2009]) is a recent decision from the Montana Supreme Court that provides new legal insight into the societal issue of aid in dying. This case involves interests of persons with terminal illness, medical practitioners, law enforcement, legislative and judicial bodies, as well as the citizens of Montana. A summary judgment ruling at the Montana district court level was based almost entirely on a constitutional fundamental rights analysis. In contrast, the Montana Supreme Court affirming decision was based almost entirely on a statutory rights analysis. Both rulings from the Montana courts support the position that licensed prescribers in Montana who provide aid in dying assistance to terminally ill patients have some immunity from criminal prosecution. Each side in the case argued what they believed to be the intents and purposes of the people of Montana. Baxter v. Montana illustrates different methods to determine the will of the people concerning aid in dying and public policy. This case very subtly suggests a paradigm shift may be occurring in aid in dying policy.

  12. Developing a Climate Change Boundary Organization: the Montana Adaptation Exchange

    Science.gov (United States)

    Whitlock, C. L.; Brooks, S.; Armstrong, T.; Bryan, B.

    2016-12-01

    Small-population large-area states like Montana are often challenged by a need to offer timely and relevant climate-change information that addresses diverse and widely dispersed stakeholder groups. In Montana, filling the gap between science and various types of decision-makers has motivated development of the first Montana Climate Assessment (MCA1), to be released in 2017 with a focus on climate-change impacts for agricultural, water and forestry sectors. To sustain and build on the MCA1 effort, we are also in the process of creating a Boundary Organization (defined by the National Academy of Sciences) called the Montana Adaptation Exchange (the Exchange); this entity will facilitate the flow of information across the boundaries between science, knowledge and implementation. In Montana, the Exchange brings scientists and practitioners together to seek solutions related to climate-change adaptation and other pressing environmental and social-economic challenges. The Montana Adaptation Exchange (1) is a collaborative partnership of members from the science and practitioner communities under a shared governance and participatory model; (2) presents research that has been vetted by the scientific community at large and represents the current state of knowledge; (3) allows for revision and expansion of assessments like the MCA; (4) communicates relevant, often technical, research and findings to a wide variety of resource managers and other stakeholders; (5) develops and maintains an extensive online database that organizes, regularly updates, and makes research data products readily available; and (6) offers an online portal and expert network of affiliated researchers and climate adaptation specialists to provide effective customer support. Boundary organizations, such as the Montana Adaptation Exchange, offer a scalable path to effectively move from "science to knowledge to action" while also allowing stakeholder needs to help inform research agendas.

  13. Impacts of invasive nonnative plant species on the rare forest herb Scutellaria montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sikkema, Jordan J.; Boyd, Jennifer N.

    2015-11-01

    Invasive plant species and overabundant herbivore populations have the potential to significantly impact rare plant species given their increased risk for local extirpation and extinction. We used interacting invasive species removal and grazer exclusion treatments replicated across two locations in an occurrence of rare Scutellaria montana (large-flowered skullcap) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, to assess: 1) competition by invasive Ligustrum sinense (Chinese privet) and Lonicera japonica (Japanese honeysuckle) and 2) the role of invasive species in mediating Oedocoilus virginianus (white-tailed deer) grazing of S. montana. Contrary to our hypothesis that invasive species presence would suppress S. montana directly via competition, S. montana individuals experienced a seasonal increase in stem height when invasive species were intact but not when invasive species were removed. Marginally significant results indicated that invasive species may afford S. montana protection from grazers, and we suggest that invasive species also could protect S. montana from smaller herbivores and/or positively influence abiotic conditions. In contrast to growth responses, S. montana individuals protected from O. virginianus exhibited a decrease in flowering between seasons relative to unprotected plants, but invasive species did not affect this variable. Although it has been suggested that invasive plant species may negatively influence S. montana growth and fecundity, our findings do not support related concerns. As such, we suggest that invasive species eradication efforts in S. montana habitat could be more detrimental than positive due to associated disturbance. However, the low level of invasion of our study site may not be representative of potential interference in more heavily infested habitat.

  14. 75 FR 42125 - Notice of Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-20

    ... Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting AGENCY: Bureau of Land Management... Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council (RAC) will meet as indicated below. DATES: The next regular meeting of the Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council will be...

  15. 75 FR 3489 - Notice of Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-21

    ... Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting AGENCY: Bureau of Land Management... Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council (RAC), will meet as indicated below. DATES: The next regular meeting of the Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council will be...

  16. Karyomorphometric analysis of Fritillaria montana group in Greece

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sofia Samaropoulou

    2016-12-01

    Full Text Available Fritillaria Linnaeus, 1753 (Liliaceae is a genus of geophytes, represented in Greece by 29 taxa. Most of the Greek species are endemic to the country and/or threatened. Although their classical cytotaxonomic studies have already been presented, no karyomorphometric analysis has ever been given. In the present study, the cytological results of Fritillaria montana Hoppe ex W.D.J. Koch, 1832 group, which includes F. epirotica Turrill ex Rix, 1975 and F. montana are statistically evaluated for the first time. Further indices about interchromosomal and intrachromosomal asymmetry are given. A new population of F. epirotica is also investigated, while for F. montana, a diploid individual was found in a known as triploid population. Paired t-tests and PCoA analysis have been applied to compare the two species.

  17. Karyomorphometric analysis of Fritillaria montana group in Greece.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Samaropoulou, Sofia; Bareka, Pepy; Kamari, Georgia

    2016-01-01

    Fritillaria Linnaeus, 1753 (Liliaceae) is a genus of geophytes, represented in Greece by 29 taxa. Most of the Greek species are endemic to the country and/or threatened. Although their classical cytotaxonomic studies have already been presented, no karyomorphometric analysis has ever been given. In the present study, the cytological results of Fritillaria montana Hoppe ex W.D.J. Koch, 1832 group, which includes Fritillaria epirotica Turrill ex Rix, 1975 and Fritillaria montana are statistically evaluated for the first time. Further indices about interchromosomal and intrachromosomal asymmetry are given. A new population of Fritillaria epirotica is also investigated, while for Fritillaria montana , a diploid individual was found in a known as triploid population. Paired t-tests and PCoA analysis have been applied to compare the two species.

  18. 77 FR 42507 - Notice of Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-07-19

    ... Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting AGENCY: Bureau of Land Management... Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council (RAC) will meet as indicated below. DATES: The next regular meeting of the Eastern Montana RAC will be held on September 19...

  19. 77 FR 70807 - Notice of Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-11-27

    ... Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting AGENCY: Bureau of Land Management... Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council (RAC) will meet as indicated below. DATES: The next regular meeting of the Eastern Montana RAC will be held on December 6, 2012...

  20. 77 FR 42760 - Notice of Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-07-20

    ... Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting AGENCY: Bureau of Land Management... Interior, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council (RAC) will meet as indicated below. DATES: The next regular meeting of the Eastern Montana RAC will be held on September 19...

  1. Bioacoustic investigations and taxonomic considerations on the Cicadetta montana species complex (Homoptera: Cicadoidea: Tibicinidae

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Matija Gogala

    2004-06-01

    Full Text Available Recent bioacoustic investigations have shown that Cicadetta montana Scopoli 1772 is a complex of morphologically similar sister species that are best characterized by their song patterns. At the type locality of C. montana, only mountain cicadas with simple, long lasting song phrases were heard, recorded and collected. Therefore, we have good reasons to suggest that this type of song is characteristic for C. montana s. str. Boulard described a song of C. montana from France with phrases composed of a long and a short echeme; this type of song is characteristic for cicadas morphologically corresponding to C. montana var. brevipennis Fieber 1876; we suggest to raise this taxon to species level. On the basis of specific song, Puissant and Boulard described C. cerdaniensis from Pyrénées. A similar case was the discovery and description of C. montana macedonica Schedl 1999 from Macedonia; since these Macedonian cicadas are sympatric with at least two other cryptic species in the C. montana group and molecular investigations showed substantial genetic differences between C. macedonica and C. montana or C. brevipennis, we conclude that this taxon should also be raised to species level. Songs of closely related C. podolica and Korean mountain cicada are presented as well.Pesquisas recentes de bioacústica mostraram que Cicadetta montana Scopoli 1772 é um complexo de espécie-irmãs morfologicamente semelhantes e melhor caracterizadas por seus padrões de canto. Na localidade-tipo de C. montana somente cigarras serranas de longas frases de canto foram ouvidas, gravadas e coletadas. Portanto, temos boas razões para propor este tipo de canto como característico de C. montana s. str. Boulard descreveu um canto de C. montana da França com frases compostas de uma estridulação longa e uma curta; este tipo de canto é característico das cigarras correspondendo morfologicamente a C. montana var. brevipennis Fieber 1876; sugerimos elevar este táxon ao n

  2. Multimodal Speaker Diarization.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Noulas, A; Englebienne, G; Krose, B J A

    2012-01-01

    We present a novel probabilistic framework that fuses information coming from the audio and video modality to perform speaker diarization. The proposed framework is a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) that is an extension of a factorial Hidden Markov Model (fHMM) and models the people appearing in an audiovisual recording as multimodal entities that generate observations in the audio stream, the video stream, and the joint audiovisual space. The framework is very robust to different contexts, makes no assumptions about the location of the recording equipment, and does not require labeled training data as it acquires the model parameters using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. We apply the proposed model to two meeting videos and a news broadcast video, all of which come from publicly available data sets. The results acquired in speaker diarization are in favor of the proposed multimodal framework, which outperforms the single modality analysis results and improves over the state-of-the-art audio-based speaker diarization.

  3. Montana Department of Transportation - a fine feathered friend

    OpenAIRE

    Wambach, Deborah A.; Traxler, Mark A.; Eakin, Kirk W.

    2001-01-01

    Funding Source: Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Total Budget: $1000 - $5000 per project Project Period: Ongoing Since 1995 In Montana, across the nation, and around the world, highway construction activities often come into direct conflict with migratory and other nesting bird species, frequently resulting in habitat loss, the interruption of breeding and rearing activities, or even mortality. The Montana Department of Transportation (MDT) has considered this issue under the permitting...

  4. Wolf Point Substation, Roosevelt County, Montana

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1991-05-01

    The Western Area Power Administration (Western), an agency of the United States Department of Energy, is proposing to construct the 115-kV Wolf Point Substation near Wolf Point in Roosevelt County, Montana (Figure 1). As part of the construction project, Western's existing Wolf Point Substation would be taken out of service. The existing 115-kV Wolf Point Substation is located approximately 3 miles west of Wolf Point, Montana (Figure 2). The substation was constructed in 1949. The existing Wolf Point Substation serves as a ''Switching Station'' for the 115-kV transmission in the region. The need for substation improvements is based on operational and reliability issues. For this environmental assessment (EA), the environmental review of the proposed project took into account the removal of the old Wolf Point Substation, rerouting of the five Western lines and four lines from the Cooperatives and Montana-Dakota Utilities Company, and the new road into the proposed substation. Reference to the new proposed Wolf Point Substation in the EA includes these facilities as well as the old substation site. The environmental review looked at the impacts to all resource areas in the Wolf Point area. 7 refs., 6 figs

  5. English Speakers Attend More Strongly than Spanish Speakers to Manner of Motion when Classifying Novel Objects and Events

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kersten, Alan W.; Meissner, Christian A.; Lechuga, Julia; Schwartz, Bennett L.; Albrechtsen, Justin S.; Iglesias, Adam

    2010-01-01

    Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual…

  6. Publishing Your Music Education Research: A Seminar for Future Authors--A Summary of the 2009 Ohio Music Education Association Research Forum Presented By Dr. Wendy Sims

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schatt, Matthew D.

    2009-01-01

    The Ohio Music Education Association (OMEA) Research Committee annually hosts a Graduate Research Forum in conjunction with the OMEA's Professional Development Conference. In 2009, the guest speaker was Dr. Wendy Sims, Director of Music Education at the University of Missouri--Columbia and Editor of the Journal of Research in Music Education. An…

  7. Utterance Verification for Text-Dependent Speaker Recognition

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Kinnunen, Tomi; Sahidullah, Md; Kukanov, Ivan

    2016-01-01

    Text-dependent automatic speaker verification naturally calls for the simultaneous verification of speaker identity and spoken content. These two tasks can be achieved with automatic speaker verification (ASV) and utterance verification (UV) technologies. While both have been addressed previously...

  8. The Speaker Gender Gap at Critical Care Conferences.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mehta, Sangeeta; Rose, Louise; Cook, Deborah; Herridge, Margaret; Owais, Sawayra; Metaxa, Victoria

    2018-06-01

    To review women's participation as faculty at five critical care conferences over 7 years. Retrospective analysis of five scientific programs to identify the proportion of females and each speaker's profession based on conference conveners, program documents, or internet research. Three international (European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, International Symposium on Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine, Society of Critical Care Medicine) and two national (Critical Care Canada Forum, U.K. Intensive Care Society State of the Art Meeting) annual critical care conferences held between 2010 and 2016. Female faculty speakers. None. Male speakers outnumbered female speakers at all five conferences, in all 7 years. Overall, women represented 5-31% of speakers, and female physicians represented 5-26% of speakers. Nursing and allied health professional faculty represented 0-25% of speakers; in general, more than 50% of allied health professionals were women. Over the 7 years, Society of Critical Care Medicine had the highest representation of female (27% overall) and nursing/allied health professional (16-25%) speakers; notably, male physicians substantially outnumbered female physicians in all years (62-70% vs 10-19%, respectively). Women's representation on conference program committees ranged from 0% to 40%, with Society of Critical Care Medicine having the highest representation of women (26-40%). The female proportions of speakers, physician speakers, and program committee members increased significantly over time at the Society of Critical Care Medicine and U.K. Intensive Care Society State of the Art Meeting conferences (p gap at critical care conferences, with male faculty outnumbering female faculty. This gap is more marked among physician speakers than those speakers representing nursing and allied health professionals. Several organizational strategies can address this gender gap.

  9. Streamflow characteristics based on data through water year 2009 for selected streamflow-gaging stations in or near Montana: Chapter E in Montana StreamStats

    Science.gov (United States)

    McCarthy, Peter M.

    2016-04-05

    Chapter E of this Scientific Investigations Report documents results from a study by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, to provide an update of statewide streamflow characteristics based on data through water year 2009 for streamflow-gaging stations in or near Montana. Streamflow characteristics are presented for 408 streamflow-gaging stations in Montana and adjacent areas having 10 or more years of record. Data include the magnitude and probability of annual low and high streamflow, the magnitude and probability of low streamflow for three seasons (March–June, July–October, and November–February), streamflow duration statistics for monthly and annual periods, and mean streamflows for monthly and annual periods. Streamflow is considered to be regulated at streamflow-gaging stations where dams or other large-scale human modifications affect 20 percent or more of the contributing drainage basin. Separate streamflow characteristics are presented for the unregulated and regulated periods of record for streamflow-gaging stations with sufficient data.

  10. Physiological responses at short distances from a parametric speaker

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Lee Soomin

    2012-06-01

    Full Text Available Abstract In recent years, parametric speakers have been used in various circumstances. In our previous studies, we verified that the physiological burden of the sound of parametric speaker set at 2.6 m from the subjects was lower than that of the general speaker. However, nothing has yet been demonstrated about the effects of the sound of a parametric speaker at the shorter distance between parametric speakers the human body. Therefore, we studied this effect on physiological functions and task performance. Nine male subjects participated in this study. They completed three consecutive sessions: a 20-minute quiet period as a baseline, a 30-minute mental task period with general speakers or parametric speakers, and a 20-minute recovery period. We measured electrocardiogram (ECG photoplethysmogram (PTG, electroencephalogram (EEG, systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Four experiments, one with a speaker condition (general speaker and parametric speaker, the other with a distance condition (0.3 m and 1.0 m, were conducted respectively at the same time of day on separate days. To examine the effects of the speaker and distance, three-way repeated measures ANOVA (speaker factor x distance factor x time factor were conducted. In conclusion, we found that the physiological responses were not significantly different between the speaker condition and the distance condition. Meanwhile, it was shown that the physiological burdens increased with progress in time independently of speaker condition and distance condition. In summary, the effects of the parametric speaker at the 2.6 m distance were not obtained at the distance of 1 m or less.

  11. Audiovisual perceptual learning with multiple speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mitchel, Aaron D; Gerfen, Chip; Weiss, Daniel J

    2016-05-01

    One challenge for speech perception is between-speaker variability in the acoustic parameters of speech. For example, the same phoneme (e.g. the vowel in "cat") may have substantially different acoustic properties when produced by two different speakers and yet the listener must be able to interpret these disparate stimuli as equivalent. Perceptual tuning, the use of contextual information to adjust phonemic representations, may be one mechanism that helps listeners overcome obstacles they face due to this variability during speech perception. Here we test whether visual contextual cues to speaker identity may facilitate the formation and maintenance of distributional representations for individual speakers, allowing listeners to adjust phoneme boundaries in a speaker-specific manner. We familiarized participants to an audiovisual continuum between /aba/ and /ada/. During familiarization, the "b-face" mouthed /aba/ when an ambiguous token was played, while the "D-face" mouthed /ada/. At test, the same ambiguous token was more likely to be identified as /aba/ when paired with a stilled image of the "b-face" than with an image of the "D-face." This was not the case in the control condition when the two faces were paired equally with the ambiguous token. Together, these results suggest that listeners may form speaker-specific phonemic representations using facial identity cues.

  12. Speakers' choice of frame in binary choice

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Marc van Buiten

    2009-02-01

    Full Text Available A distinction is proposed between extit{recommending for} preferred choice options and extit{recommending against} non-preferred choice options. In binary choice, both recommendation modes are logically, though not psychologically, equivalent. We report empirical evidence showing that speakers recommending for preferred options predominantly select positive frames, which are less common when speakers recommend against non-preferred options. In addition, option attractiveness is shown to affect speakers' choice of frame, and adoption of recommendation mode. The results are interpreted in terms of three compatibility effects, (i extit{recommendation mode---valence framing compatibility}: speakers' preference for positive framing is enhanced under extit{recommending for} and diminished under extit{recommending against} instructions, (ii extit{option attractiveness---valence framing compatibility}: speakers' preference for positive framing is more pronounced for attractive than for unattractive options, and (iii extit{recommendation mode---option attractiveness compatibility}: speakers are more likely to adopt a extit{recommending for} approach for attractive than for unattractive binary choice pairs.

  13. Residential Energy Efficiency Potential: Montana

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Wilson, Eric J [National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)

    2017-11-22

    Energy used by Montana single-family homes that can be saved through cost-effective improvements. Prepared by Eric Wilson and Noel Merket, NREL, and Erin Boyd, U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Policy and Systems Analysis.

  14. Forest regions of Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stephen F. Arno

    1979-01-01

    In this paper, Montana is divided into eight geographic subdivisions called "forest regions," based on distributions of tree and undergrowth species and the relationship of these patterns to climate and topography. The regions serve as a geographic reference for describing patterns of forest vegetation across the State. Data on the distributions of plant...

  15. Speaker-dependent Dictionary-based Speech Enhancement for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Thomsen, Nicolai Bæk; Thomsen, Dennis Alexander Lehmann; Tan, Zheng-Hua

    2016-01-01

    not perform well in this setting. In this work we compare the performance of different noise reduction methods under different noise conditions in terms of speaker verification when the text is known and the system is trained on clean data (mis-matched conditions). We furthermore propose a new approach based......The problem of text-dependent speaker verification under noisy conditions is becoming ever more relevant, due to increased usage for authentication in real-world applications. Classical methods for noise reduction such as spectral subtraction and Wiener filtering introduce distortion and do...... on dictionary-based noise reduction and compare it to the baseline methods....

  16. Apology Strategy in English By Native Speaker

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mezia Kemala Sari

    2016-05-01

    Full Text Available This research discussed apology strategies in English by native speaker. This descriptive study was presented within the framework of Pragmatics based on the forms of strategies due to the coding manual as found in CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Realization Project.The goals of this study were to describe the apology strategies in English by native speaker and identify the influencing factors of it. Data were collected through the use of the questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Test, which was distributed to 30 native speakers. Data were classified based on the degree of familiarity and the social distance between speaker and hearer and then the data of native will be separated and classified by the type of strategies in coding manual. The results of this study are the pattern of apology strategies of native speaker brief with the pattern that potentially occurs IFID plus Offer of repair plus Taking on responsibility. While Alerters, Explanation and Downgrading appear with less number of percentage. Then, the factors that influence the apology utterance by native speakers are the social situation, the degree of familiarity and degree of the offence which more complicated the mistake tend to produce the most complex utterances by the speaker.

  17. Methods for estimating peak-flow frequencies at ungaged sites in Montana based on data through water year 2011: Chapter F in Montana StreamStats

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sando, Roy; Sando, Steven K.; McCarthy, Peter M.; Dutton, DeAnn M.

    2016-04-05

    The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, completed a study to update methods for estimating peak-flow frequencies at ungaged sites in Montana based on peak-flow data at streamflow-gaging stations through water year 2011. The methods allow estimation of peak-flow frequencies (that is, peak-flow magnitudes, in cubic feet per second, associated with annual exceedance probabilities of 66.7, 50, 42.9, 20, 10, 4, 2, 1, 0.5, and 0.2 percent) at ungaged sites. The annual exceedance probabilities correspond to 1.5-, 2-, 2.33-, 5-, 10-, 25-, 50-, 100-, 200-, and 500-year recurrence intervals, respectively.Regional regression analysis is a primary focus of Chapter F of this Scientific Investigations Report, and regression equations for estimating peak-flow frequencies at ungaged sites in eight hydrologic regions in Montana are presented. The regression equations are based on analysis of peak-flow frequencies and basin characteristics at 537 streamflow-gaging stations in or near Montana and were developed using generalized least squares regression or weighted least squares regression.All of the data used in calculating basin characteristics that were included as explanatory variables in the regression equations were developed for and are available through the USGS StreamStats application (http://water.usgs.gov/osw/streamstats/) for Montana. StreamStats is a Web-based geographic information system application that was created by the USGS to provide users with access to an assortment of analytical tools that are useful for water-resource planning and management. The primary purpose of the Montana StreamStats application is to provide estimates of basin characteristics and streamflow characteristics for user-selected ungaged sites on Montana streams. The regional regression equations presented in this report chapter can be conveniently solved using the Montana StreamStats application.Selected results from

  18. A Study of Programs and Services: An Action Report. Montana State Dissemination Worksessions, Office of Public Instruction (Helena, Montana, November and December 1979 and January 1980).

    Science.gov (United States)

    Northwest Regional Educational Lab., Portland, OR.

    Input into the design, content, and development of a comprehensive resource tool--the Montana Educational Resources and Services notebook--was provided by the 16 members of a planning team made up of Office of Public Instruction (OPI) managers and consultants, selected Montana educators, and Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory Dissemination…

  19. Pitch Correlogram Clustering for Fast Speaker Identification

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Nitin Jhanwar

    2004-12-01

    Full Text Available Gaussian mixture models (GMMs are commonly used in text-independent speaker identification systems. However, for large speaker databases, their high computational run-time limits their use in online or real-time speaker identification situations. Two-stage identification systems, in which the database is partitioned into clusters based on some proximity criteria and only a single-cluster GMM is run in every test, have been suggested in literature to speed up the identification process. However, most clustering algorithms used have shown limited success, apparently because the clustering and GMM feature spaces used are derived from similar speech characteristics. This paper presents a new clustering approach based on the concept of a pitch correlogram that captures frame-to-frame pitch variations of a speaker rather than short-time spectral characteristics like cepstral coefficient, spectral slopes, and so forth. The effectiveness of this two-stage identification process is demonstrated on the IVIE corpus of 110 speakers. The overall system achieves a run-time advantage of 500% as well as a 10% reduction of error in overall speaker identification.

  20. 76 FR 59338 - Approval and Promulgation of Air Quality Implementation Plans; Montana; Revisions to the...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-09-26

    ... to other minor administrative changes to the Administrative Rules of Montana. The intended effect of... words EPA, we, us or our mean or refer to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. (iii) The... Promulgation of Air Quality Implementation Plans; Montana; Revisions to the Administrative Rules of Montana...

  1. Who spoke when? Audio-based speaker location estimation for diarization

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Dadvar, M.

    2011-01-01

    Speaker diarization is the process which detects active speakers and groups those speech signals which has been uttered by the same speaker. Generally we can find two main applications for speaker diarization. Automatic Speech Recognition systems make use of the speaker homogeneous clusters to adapt

  2. Performance of svm, k-nn and nbc classifiers for text-independent speaker identification with and without modelling through merging models

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yussouf Nahayo

    2016-04-01

    Full Text Available This paper proposes some methods of robust text-independent speaker identification based on Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM. We implemented a combination of GMM model with a set of classifiers such as Support Vector Machine (SVM, K-Nearest Neighbour (K-NN, and Naive Bayes Classifier (NBC. In order to improve the identification rate, we developed a combination of hybrid systems by using validation technique. The experiments were performed on the dialect DR1 of the TIMIT corpus. The results have showed a better performance for the developed technique compared to the individual techniques.

  3. Speaker-specific variability of phoneme durations

    CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

    Van Heerden, CJ

    2007-11-01

    Full Text Available The durations of phonemes varies for different speakers. To this end, the correlations between phonemes across different speakers are studied and a novel approach to predict unknown phoneme durations from the values of known phoneme durations for a...

  4. Peak-flow frequency analyses and results based on data through water year 2011 for selected streamflow-gaging stations in or near Montana: Chapter C in Montana StreamStats

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sando, Steven K.; McCarthy, Peter M.; Dutton, DeAnn M.

    2016-04-05

    Chapter C of this Scientific Investigations Report documents results from a study by the U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Montana Department of Transportation and the Montana Department of Natural Resources, to provide an update of statewide peak-flow frequency analyses and results for Montana. The purpose of this report chapter is to present peak-flow frequency analyses and results for 725 streamflow-gaging stations in or near Montana based on data through water year 2011. The 725 streamflow-gaging stations included in this study represent nearly all streamflowgaging stations in Montana (plus some from adjacent states or Canadian Provinces) that have at least 10 years of peak-flow records through water year 2011. For 29 of the 725 streamflow-gaging stations, peak-flow frequency analyses and results are reported for both unregulated and regulated conditions. Thus, peak-flow frequency analyses and results are reported for a total of 754 analyses. Estimates of peak-flow magnitudes for 66.7-, 50-, 42.9-, 20-, 10-, 4-, 2-, 1-, 0.5-, and 0.2-percent annual exceedance probabilities are reported. These annual exceedance probabilities correspond to 1.5-, 2-, 2.33-, 5-, 10-, 25-, 50-, 100-, 200-, and 500-year recurrence intervals.

  5. Unsupervised Speaker Change Detection for Broadcast News Segmentation

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Jørgensen, Kasper Winther; Mølgaard, Lasse Lohilahti; Hansen, Lars Kai

    2006-01-01

    This paper presents a speaker change detection system for news broadcast segmentation based on a vector quantization (VQ) approach. The system does not make any assumption about the number of speakers or speaker identity. The system uses mel frequency cepstral coefficients and change detection...

  6. 76 FR 46320 - Notice of Filing of Plats of Survey; Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-08-02

    ... survey of the lands described below in the BLM Montana State Office, Billings, Montana, on September 1... telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) may call the Federal Information Relay Service (FIRS) at 1-800-877-8339..., in front of section 30, and certain division of accretion and partition lines, the subdivision of...

  7. A New Database for Speaker Recognition

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Feng, Ling; Hansen, Lars Kai

    2005-01-01

    In this paper we discuss properties of speech databases used for speaker recognition research and evaluation, and we characterize some popular standard databases. The paper presents a new database called ELSDSR dedicated to speaker recognition applications. The main characteristics of this database...

  8. Speaker Segmentation and Clustering Using Gender Information

    Science.gov (United States)

    2006-02-01

    used in the first stages of segmentation forder information in the clustering of the opposite-gender speaker diarization of news broadcasts. files, the...AFRL-HE-WP-TP-2006-0026 AIR FORCE RESEARCH LABORATORY Speaker Segmentation and Clustering Using Gender Information Brian M. Ore General Dynamics...COVERED (From - To) February 2006 ProceedinLgs 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER Speaker Segmentation and Clustering Using Gender Information 5b

  9. (En)countering native-speakerism global perspectives

    CERN Document Server

    Holliday, Adrian; Swan, Anne

    2015-01-01

    The book addresses the issue of native-speakerism, an ideology based on the assumption that 'native speakers' of English have a special claim to the language itself, through critical qualitative studies of the lived experiences of practising teachers and students in a range of scenarios.

  10. 77 FR 7531 - Disapproval and Promulgation of Air Quality Implementation Plans; Montana; Revisions to the...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-02-13

    ... airborne pollutant, except lead,\\1\\ must obtain a Montana air quality permit except as provided in ARM 17.8... more than 15 tons per year of any airborne pollutant, other than lead, to obtain a Montana air quality permit. \\1\\ Facilities or emitting units that emit airborne lead must obtain a Montana air quality permit...

  11. Robust speaker recognition in noisy environments

    CERN Document Server

    Rao, K Sreenivasa

    2014-01-01

    This book discusses speaker recognition methods to deal with realistic variable noisy environments. The text covers authentication systems for; robust noisy background environments, functions in real time and incorporated in mobile devices. The book focuses on different approaches to enhance the accuracy of speaker recognition in presence of varying background environments. The authors examine: (a) Feature compensation using multiple background models, (b) Feature mapping using data-driven stochastic models, (c) Design of super vector- based GMM-SVM framework for robust speaker recognition, (d) Total variability modeling (i-vectors) in a discriminative framework and (e) Boosting method to fuse evidences from multiple SVM models.

  12. FPGA Implementation for GMM-Based Speaker Identification

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Phaklen EhKan

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available In today's society, highly accurate personal identification systems are required. Passwords or pin numbers can be forgotten or forged and are no longer considered to offer a high level of security. The use of biological features, biometrics, is becoming widely accepted as the next level for security systems. Biometric-based speaker identification is a method of identifying persons from their voice. Speaker-specific characteristics exist in speech signals due to different speakers having different resonances of the vocal tract. These differences can be exploited by extracting feature vectors such as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs from the speech signal. A well-known statistical modelling process, the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM, then models the distribution of each speaker's MFCCs in a multidimensional acoustic space. The GMM-based speaker identification system has features that make it promising for hardware acceleration. This paper describes the hardware implementation for classification of a text-independent GMM-based speaker identification system. The aim was to produce a system that can perform simultaneous identification of large numbers of voice streams in real time. This has important potential applications in security and in automated call centre applications. A speedup factor of ninety was achieved compared to a software implementation on a standard PC.

  13. A system of automatic speaker recognition on a minicomputer

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    El Chafei, Cherif

    1978-01-01

    This study describes a system of automatic speaker recognition using the pitch of the voice. The pre-treatment consists in the extraction of the speakers' discriminating characteristics taken from the pitch. The programme of recognition gives, firstly, a preselection and then calculates the distance between the speaker's characteristics to be recognized and those of the speakers already recorded. An experience of recognition has been realized. It has been undertaken with 15 speakers and included 566 tests spread over an intermittent period of four months. The discriminating characteristics used offer several interesting qualities. The algorithms concerning the measure of the characteristics on one hand, the speakers' classification on the other hand, are simple. The results obtained in real time with a minicomputer are satisfactory. Furthermore they probably could be improved if we considered other speaker's discriminating characteristics but this was unfortunately not in our possibilities. (author) [fr

  14. Speaker diarization system using HXLPS and deep neural network

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    V. Subba Ramaiah

    2018-03-01

    Full Text Available In general, speaker diarization is defined as the process of segmenting the input speech signal and grouped the homogenous regions with regard to the speaker identity. The main idea behind this system is that it is able to discriminate the speaker signal by assigning the label of the each speaker signal. Due to rapid growth of broadcasting and meeting, the speaker diarization is burdensome to enhance the readability of the speech transcription. In order to solve this issue, Holoentropy with the eXtended Linear Prediction using autocorrelation Snapshot (HXLPS and deep neural network (DNN is proposed for the speaker diarization system. The HXLPS extraction method is newly developed by incorporating the Holoentropy with the XLPS. Once we attain the features, the speech and non-speech signals are detected by the Voice Activity Detection (VAD method. Then, i-vector representation of every segmented signal is obtained using Universal Background Model (UBM model. Consequently, DNN is utilized to assign the label for the speaker signal which is then clustered according to the speaker label. The performance is analysed using the evaluation metrics, such as tracking distance, false alarm rate and diarization error rate. The outcome of the proposed method ensures the better diarization performance by achieving the lower DER of 1.36% based on lambda value and DER of 2.23% depends on the frame length. Keywords: Speaker diarization, HXLPS feature extraction, Voice activity detection, Deep neural network, Speaker clustering, Diarization Error Rate (DER

  15. Echinococcus granulosus in gray wolves and ungulates in Idaho and Montana, USA.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Foreyt, William J; Drew, Mark L; Atkinson, Mark; McCauley, Deborah

    2009-10-01

    We evaluated the small intestines of 123 gray wolves (Canis lupus) that were collected from Idaho, USA (n=63), and Montana, USA (n=60), between 2006 and 2008 for the tapeworm Echinococcus granulosus. The tapeworm was detected in 39 of 63 wolves (62%) in Idaho, USA, and 38 of 60 wolves (63%) in Montana, USA. The detection of thousands of tapeworms per wolf was a common finding. In Idaho, USA, hydatid cysts, the intermediate form of E. granulosus, were detected in elk (Cervus elaphus), mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), and a mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus). In Montana, USA, hydatid cysts were detected in elk. To our knowledge, this is the first report of adult E. granulosus in Idaho, USA, or Montana, USA. It is unknown whether the parasite was introduced into Idaho, USA, and southwestern Montana, USA, with the importation of wolves from Alberta, Canada, or British Columbia, Canada, into Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA, and central Idaho, USA, in 1995 and 1996, or whether the parasite has always been present in other carnivore hosts, and wolves became a new definitive host. Based on our results, the parasite is now well established in wolves in these states and is documented in elk, mule deer, and a mountain goat as intermediate hosts.

  16. Antiproliferative and antimicrobial activity of traditional Kombucha and Satureja montana L. Kombucha.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cetojevic-Simin, D D; Bogdanovic, G M; Cvetkovic, D D; Velicanski, A S

    2008-01-01

    To carry out a preliminary investigation of the biological activity of Kombucha beverages from Camellia sinensis L. (black tea) and Satureja montana L. (winter savory tea), that have consuming acidity. Cell growth effect was measured by sulforhodamine B colorimetric assay on HeLa (cervix epithelioid carcinoma), HT-29 (colon adenocarcinoma), and MCF-7 (breast adenocarcinoma). Antimicrobial activity to bacteria, yeasts and moulds was determined by agar-well diffusion method. Consuming Kombuchas had the most expressive antimicrobial activity against all investigated bacteria, except Sarcina lutea, while unfermented tea samples had no activity. Traditional Kombucha showed higher activity against Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli than acetic acid, while both neutralized Kombuchas had bacteriostatic activity on Salmonella enteritidis. Examined Kombuchas did not stimulate cell proliferation of the investigated cell lines. Antiproliferative activity of winter savory tea Kombucha was comparable to that of traditional Kombucha made from black tea. Furthermore, in HeLa cell line Satureja montana L. Kombucha induced cell growth inhibition by 20% (IC20) at lower concentration compared to the activity of water extract of Satureja montana L. obtained in our previous research. Presence of more active antiproliferative component(s) in Satureja montana L. Kombucha compared to Satureja montana L. water extract and antimicrobial component(s) other than acetic acid in both Kombuchas is suggested.

  17. State of Montana ITS/CVO business plan : intelligent transportation system commercial vehicle operations

    Science.gov (United States)

    1998-01-01

    This plans purpose is to encourage coordinated, efficient and safe commercial vehicle operations throughout Montana, and to promote inter-agency and regional cooperation as ITS/CVO projects are developed and deployed. The Plan discusses Montana...

  18. Dr Luigi Orlando, Dr Sergio Ceccuzzi, Dr. Armando Sbrana, Europa Metalli, Italy, Dr Albert Scherger, Member of KM Europa Metal AG, Osnabr ck, Germany, Prof. Filippo Menzinger, Scientific Attaché, Permanent Mission of Italy in Geneva

    CERN Multimedia

    Patrice Loïez

    2001-01-01

    Photo 01: Dr Lyn Evans and Dr Luigi Orlando Photo 04: L. to r.: Dr Lyn Evans, Dr Luigi Orlando, Prof. Luciano Maiani and Prof. Filippo Menzinger Photo 06: L. to r.: Prof. Philippo Menzinger, Dr Armando Sbrana, Prof. Luciano Maiani, Dr Albert Scherger, Dr Lyn Evans, Dr Luigi Orlando, Dr Sergio Ceccuzzi, visiting the LHC superconducting magnet test hall, SM18

  19. Learning speaker-specific characteristics with a deep neural architecture.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Ke; Salman, Ahmad

    2011-11-01

    Speech signals convey various yet mixed information ranging from linguistic to speaker-specific information. However, most of acoustic representations characterize all different kinds of information as whole, which could hinder either a speech or a speaker recognition (SR) system from producing a better performance. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural architecture (DNA) especially for learning speaker-specific characteristics from mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, an acoustic representation commonly used in both speech recognition and SR, which results in a speaker-specific overcomplete representation. In order to learn intrinsic speaker-specific characteristics, we come up with an objective function consisting of contrastive losses in terms of speaker similarity/dissimilarity and data reconstruction losses used as regularization to normalize the interference of non-speaker-related information. Moreover, we employ a hybrid learning strategy for learning parameters of the deep neural networks: i.e., local yet greedy layerwise unsupervised pretraining for initialization and global supervised learning for the ultimate discriminative goal. With four Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) benchmarks and two non-English corpora, we demonstrate that our overcomplete representation is robust in characterizing various speakers, no matter whether their utterances have been used in training our DNA, and highly insensitive to text and languages spoken. Extensive comparative studies suggest that our approach yields favorite results in speaker verification and segmentation. Finally, we discuss several issues concerning our proposed approach.

  20. Robustness-related issues in speaker recognition

    CERN Document Server

    Zheng, Thomas Fang

    2017-01-01

    This book presents an overview of speaker recognition technologies with an emphasis on dealing with robustness issues. Firstly, the book gives an overview of speaker recognition, such as the basic system framework, categories under different criteria, performance evaluation and its development history. Secondly, with regard to robustness issues, the book presents three categories, including environment-related issues, speaker-related issues and application-oriented issues. For each category, the book describes the current hot topics, existing technologies, and potential research focuses in the future. The book is a useful reference book and self-learning guide for early researchers working in the field of robust speech recognition.

  1. Montana Advanced Biofuels Great Falls Approval

    Science.gov (United States)

    This November 20, 2015 letter from EPA approves the petition from Montana Advanced Biofuels, LLC, Great Falls facility, regarding ethanol produced through a dry mill process, qualifying under the Clean Air Act for advanced biofuel (D-code 5) and renewable

  2. Montana University System Fact Book.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Montana Univ. System, Helena. Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education.

    This report contains numerous figures and tables providing data about the Montana University System. The report is divided into 11 sections, with some preceded by a brief text summary, followed by data tables and figures. Sections cover: (1) total funds, (2) state appropriated funds, (3) funding sources, (4) enrollment, (5) employment, (6) state…

  3. Real Time Recognition Of Speakers From Internet Audio Stream

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Weychan Radoslaw

    2015-09-01

    Full Text Available In this paper we present an automatic speaker recognition technique with the use of the Internet radio lossy (encoded speech signal streams. We show an influence of the audio encoder (e.g., bitrate on the speaker model quality. The model of each speaker was calculated with the use of the Gaussian mixture model (GMM approach. Both the speaker recognition and the further analysis were realized with the use of short utterances to facilitate real time processing. The neighborhoods of the speaker models were analyzed with the use of the ISOMAP algorithm. The experiments were based on four 1-hour public debates with 7–8 speakers (including the moderator, acquired from the Polish radio Internet services. The presented software was developed with the MATLAB environment.

  4. Dræb, dræb, dræb! Nej ... liiiige et øjeblik: De machiavelliske følelser i Game of Thrones

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Schubart, Rikke

    2013-01-01

    Blogindlæg om Machiavelliske følelser i HBO tv-serien Game of Thrones: "Dræb, dræb, dræb! Nej ... liiiige et øjeblik: De machiavelliske følelser i Game of Thrones"......Blogindlæg om Machiavelliske følelser i HBO tv-serien Game of Thrones: "Dræb, dræb, dræb! Nej ... liiiige et øjeblik: De machiavelliske følelser i Game of Thrones"...

  5. Accent Attribution in Speakers with Foreign Accent Syndrome

    Science.gov (United States)

    Verhoeven, Jo; De Pauw, Guy; Pettinato, Michele; Hirson, Allen; Van Borsel, John; Marien, Peter

    2013-01-01

    Purpose: The main aim of this experiment was to investigate the perception of Foreign Accent Syndrome in comparison to speakers with an authentic foreign accent. Method: Three groups of listeners attributed accents to conversational speech samples of 5 FAS speakers which were embedded amongst those of 5 speakers with a real foreign accent and 5…

  6. Comparison of Diarization Tools for Building Speaker Database

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Eva Kiktova

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available This paper compares open source diarization toolkits (LIUM, DiarTK, ALIZE-Lia_Ral, which were designed for extraction of speaker identity from audio records without any prior information about the analysed data. The comparative study of used diarization tools was performed for three different types of analysed data (broadcast news - BN and TV shows. Corresponding values of achieved DER measure are presented here. The automatic speaker diarization system developed by LIUM was able to identified speech segments belonging to speakers at very good level. Its segmentation outputs can be used to build a speaker database.

  7. An introduction to application-independent evaluation of speaker recognition systems

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Leeuwen, D.A. van; Brümmer, N.

    2007-01-01

    In the evaluation of speaker recognition systems - an important part of speaker classification [1], the trade-off between missed speakers and false alarms has always been an important diagnostic tool. NIST has defined the task of speaker detection with the associated Detection Cost Function (DCF) to

  8. Developing a Climate Change Boundary Organization: the Montana Adaptation Knowledge Exchange

    Science.gov (United States)

    Whitlock, C. L.; Brooks, S.; Armstrong, T.; Bryan, B.

    2017-12-01

    States, like Montana, with small populations and large areas, are challenged by a need to offer timely and relevant climate-science information that addresses diverse and widely dispersed stakeholder groups. In Montana, filling the gap between science and practice has motivated the first Montana Climate Assessment (MCA), released September 2017 with a focus on climate impacts on the agriculture, water and forestry sectors. The MCA is an outcome of a science-stakeholder partnership that has identified critical climate-change information and knowledge gaps for the state through listening sessions and questionnaires. From the initial feedback, it became clear that stakeholder groups were deeply concerned about the challenges posed by rising temperatures and wanted to know how recent and projected warming will affect Montana's natural and managed resources. As part of the next phase of the MCA project, we are now creating the Montana Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (MAKE), a "boundary organization" as described by the National Academy of Sciences. MAKE moves beyond information sharing by bringing scientists and practitioners together to seek solutions related to climate-change adaptation and other pressing environmental and socio-economic concerns. Through a collaborative partnership that involves Montana universities, state and federal agencies, businesses and non-governmental organizations, MAKE is designed to communicate current research findings and support revision and expansion of state-of-the-knowledge assessments like the MCA. Stakeholder partners will provide guidance to the science community to help prioritize research directions and activities of high importance. Significant, but often technical, scientific results will be translated and delivered to stakeholder groups through a variety of print, web, and mobile products. MAKE will support an extensive online database, host an online portal, gather a network of experts in respective fields, and maintain a

  9. Role of Speaker Cues in Attention Inference

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jin Joo Lee

    2017-10-01

    Full Text Available Current state-of-the-art approaches to emotion recognition primarily focus on modeling the nonverbal expressions of the sole individual without reference to contextual elements such as the co-presence of the partner. In this paper, we demonstrate that the accurate inference of listeners’ social-emotional state of attention depends on accounting for the nonverbal behaviors of their storytelling partner, namely their speaker cues. To gain a deeper understanding of the role of speaker cues in attention inference, we conduct investigations into real-world interactions of children (5–6 years old storytelling with their peers. Through in-depth analysis of human–human interaction data, we first identify nonverbal speaker cues (i.e., backchannel-inviting cues and listener responses (i.e., backchannel feedback. We then demonstrate how speaker cues can modify the interpretation of attention-related backchannels as well as serve as a means to regulate the responsiveness of listeners. We discuss the design implications of our findings toward our primary goal of developing attention recognition models for storytelling robots, and we argue that social robots can proactively use speaker cues to form more accurate inferences about the attentive state of their human partners.

  10. 75 FR 30850 - Final Supplementary Rules for Camping on Undeveloped Public Lands in Montana, North Dakota, and...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-06-02

    ... Supplementary Rules for Camping on Undeveloped Public Lands in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota AGENCY... personal property on undeveloped public lands managed by the BLM in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota... public lands throughout Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. These final supplementary rules will...

  11. Speaker and Observer Perceptions of Physical Tension during Stuttering.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tichenor, Seth; Leslie, Paula; Shaiman, Susan; Yaruss, J Scott

    2017-01-01

    Speech-language pathologists routinely assess physical tension during evaluation of those who stutter. If speakers experience tension that is not visible to clinicians, then judgments of severity may be inaccurate. This study addressed this potential discrepancy by comparing judgments of tension by people who stutter and expert clinicians to determine if clinicians could accurately identify the speakers' experience of physical tension. Ten adults who stutter were audio-video recorded in two speaking samples. Two board-certified specialists in fluency evaluated the samples using the Stuttering Severity Instrument-4 and a checklist adapted for this study. Speakers rated their tension using the same forms, and then discussed their experiences in a qualitative interview so that themes related to physical tension could be identified. The degree of tension reported by speakers was higher than that observed by specialists. Tension in parts of the body that were less visible to the observer (chest, abdomen, throat) was reported more by speakers than by specialists. The thematic analysis revealed that speakers' experience of tension changes over time and that these changes may be related to speakers' acceptance of stuttering. The lack of agreement between speaker and specialist perceptions of tension suggests that using self-reports is a necessary component for supporting the accurate diagnosis of tension in stuttering. © 2018 S. Karger AG, Basel.

  12. Evaluation of the Montana Department of Transportation's research project solicitation, prioritization, and selection process

    Science.gov (United States)

    2008-05-01

    The Montana Department of Transportation (MDT) contracted the Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Montana Missoula to conduct research to determine how other states solicit, prioritize, and select research problem statem...

  13. Forensic speaker recognition

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Meuwly, Didier

    2013-01-01

    The aim of forensic speaker recognition is to establish links between individuals and criminal activities, through audio speech recordings. This field is multidisciplinary, combining predominantly phonetics, linguistics, speech signal processing, and forensic statistics. On these bases, expert-based

  14. Data-Model Relationship in Text-Independent Speaker Recognition

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Stapert Robert

    2005-01-01

    Full Text Available Text-independent speaker recognition systems such as those based on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs do not include time sequence information (TSI within the model itself. The level of importance of TSI in speaker recognition is an interesting question and one addressed in this paper. Recent works has shown that the utilisation of higher-level information such as idiolect, pronunciation, and prosodics can be useful in reducing speaker recognition error rates. In accordance with these developments, the aim of this paper is to show that as more data becomes available, the basic GMM can be enhanced by utilising TSI, even in a text-independent mode. This paper presents experimental work incorporating TSI into the conventional GMM. The resulting system, known as the segmental mixture model (SMM, embeds dynamic time warping (DTW into a GMM framework. Results are presented on the 2000-speaker SpeechDat Welsh database which show improved speaker recognition performance with the SMM.

  15. Inferring speaker attributes in adductor spasmodic dysphonia: ratings from unfamiliar listeners.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Isetti, Derek; Xuereb, Linnea; Eadie, Tanya L

    2014-05-01

    To determine whether unfamiliar listeners' perceptions of speakers with adductor spasmodic dysphonia (ADSD) differ from control speakers on the parameters of relative age, confidence, tearfulness, and vocal effort and are related to speaker-rated vocal effort or voice-specific quality of life. Twenty speakers with ADSD (including 6 speakers with ADSD plus tremor) and 20 age- and sex-matched controls provided speech recordings, completed a voice-specific quality-of-life instrument (Voice Handicap Index; Jacobson et al., 1997), and rated their own vocal effort. Twenty listeners evaluated speech samples for relative age, confidence, tearfulness, and vocal effort using rating scales. Listeners judged speakers with ADSD as sounding significantly older, less confident, more tearful, and more effortful than control speakers (p < .01). Increased vocal effort was strongly associated with decreased speaker confidence (rs = .88-.89) and sounding more tearful (rs = .83-.85). Self-rated speaker effort was moderately related (rs = .45-.52) to listener impressions. Listeners' perceptions of confidence and tearfulness were also moderately associated with higher Voice Handicap Index scores (rs = .65-.70). Unfamiliar listeners judge speakers with ADSD more negatively than control speakers, with judgments extending beyond typical clinical measures. The results have implications for counseling and understanding the psychosocial effects of ADSD.

  16. 75 FR 61366 - Montana Regulatory Program

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-10-05

    ... and SMCRA, as amended, and to improve operational efficiency. This document gives the times and locations that the Montana program and proposed amendment to that program are available for your inspection... may review a copy of the amendment during regular business hours at the following locations: Jeffrey...

  17. Made in Montana: Entrepreneurial Home Economics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Goetting, Marsha A.; Muggli, Gayle Y.

    1988-01-01

    Reports results from a survey of 13 Montana home economists who each started a small business. Information is included on types of businesses the women had started, income, personal characteristics, reasons for starting a business, its impact on family concerns, marketing, obstacles to success, and resources. (CH)

  18. Speaker-dependent Multipitch Tracking Using Deep Neural Networks

    Science.gov (United States)

    2015-01-01

    sentences spoken by each of 34 speakers (18 male, 16 female). Two male and two female speakers (No. 1, 2, 18, 20, same as [30]), denoted as MA1, MA2 ...Engineering Technical Report #12, 2015 Speaker Pairs MA1- MA2 MA1-FE1 MA1-FE2 MA2 -FE1 MA2 -FE2 FE1-FE2 E T ot al 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 Jin and Wang Hu and...Pitch 1 Estimated Pitch 2 (d) Figure 6: Multipitch tracking results on a test mixture (pbbv6n and priv3n) for the MA1- MA2 speaker pair. (a) Groundtruth

  19. Joint Single-Channel Speech Separation and Speaker Identification

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Mowlaee, Pejman; Saeidi, Rahim; Tan, Zheng-Hua

    2010-01-01

    In this paper, we propose a closed loop system to improve the performance of single-channel speech separation in a speaker independent scenario. The system is composed of two interconnected blocks: a separation block and a speaker identiſcation block. The improvement is accomplished by incorporat......In this paper, we propose a closed loop system to improve the performance of single-channel speech separation in a speaker independent scenario. The system is composed of two interconnected blocks: a separation block and a speaker identiſcation block. The improvement is accomplished...... enhances the quality of the separated output signals. To assess the improvements, the results are reported in terms of PESQ for both target and masked signals....

  20. NASA Education Activity Training (NEAT): Professional Development for Montana K-12 Teachers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Williamson, Kathryn; McKenzie, D.; Des Jardins, A.; Key, J.; Kanode, C.; Willoughby, S.

    2012-05-01

    Piloted during the 2011-2012 academic year, the NASA Education Activity Training (NEAT) teacher workshop program has introduced five solar astronomy and space weather activities to over forty Montana K-12 teachers. Because many Montana schools are geographically isolated (40% of Montana students live more than 50 miles from a city) and/or serve traditionally underrepresented groups (primarily Native Americans), professional development for teachers can be costly and time consuming. However, with funding shared by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly EPO team and the Montana Space Grant Consortium, graduate student specialists are able to host the two-hour NEAT workshops on-site at the schools free of charge, and participating teachers earn two continuing education credits. Leveraging the existing catalogue of research-based NASA activities, the featured NEAT activities were chosen for their ease-of-use and applicability to Montana science standards. These include three advanced activities for older students, such as a paper plate activity for the June 5th, 2012 Transit of Venus, Kinesthetic Astronomy, and the Herschel Infrared experiment, along with two simpler activities for the younger students, such as Solar Cookies and the Electromagnetic War card game. Feedback surveys show that NEAT workshop participants were interested and engaged in the activities and planned on using the activities in their classrooms. With such positive responses, the NEAT program has been a huge success and can serve as a model for other institutions looking to increase their space public outreach and education.

  1. Optimization of multilayer neural network parameters for speaker recognition

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tovarek, Jaromir; Partila, Pavol; Rozhon, Jan; Voznak, Miroslav; Skapa, Jan; Uhrin, Dominik; Chmelikova, Zdenka

    2016-05-01

    This article discusses the impact of multilayer neural network parameters for speaker identification. The main task of speaker identification is to find a specific person in the known set of speakers. It means that the voice of an unknown speaker (wanted person) belongs to a group of reference speakers from the voice database. One of the requests was to develop the text-independent system, which means to classify wanted person regardless of content and language. Multilayer neural network has been used for speaker identification in this research. Artificial neural network (ANN) needs to set parameters like activation function of neurons, steepness of activation functions, learning rate, the maximum number of iterations and a number of neurons in the hidden and output layers. ANN accuracy and validation time are directly influenced by the parameter settings. Different roles require different settings. Identification accuracy and ANN validation time were evaluated with the same input data but different parameter settings. The goal was to find parameters for the neural network with the highest precision and shortest validation time. Input data of neural networks are a Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). These parameters describe the properties of the vocal tract. Audio samples were recorded for all speakers in a laboratory environment. Training, testing and validation data set were split into 70, 15 and 15 %. The result of the research described in this article is different parameter setting for the multilayer neural network for four speakers.

  2. Automatic Speaker Recognition for Mobile Forensic Applications

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mohammed Algabri

    2017-01-01

    Full Text Available Presently, lawyers, law enforcement agencies, and judges in courts use speech and other biometric features to recognize suspects. In general, speaker recognition is used for discriminating people based on their voices. The process of determining, if a suspected speaker is the source of trace, is called forensic speaker recognition. In such applications, the voice samples are most probably noisy, the recording sessions might mismatch each other, the sessions might not contain sufficient recording for recognition purposes, and the suspect voices are recorded through mobile channel. The identification of a person through his voice within a forensic quality context is challenging. In this paper, we propose a method for forensic speaker recognition for the Arabic language; the King Saud University Arabic Speech Database is used for obtaining experimental results. The advantage of this database is that each speaker’s voice is recorded in both clean and noisy environments, through a microphone and a mobile channel. This diversity facilitates its usage in forensic experimentations. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are used for feature extraction and the Gaussian mixture model-universal background model is used for speaker modeling. Our approach has shown low equal error rates (EER, within noisy environments and with very short test samples.

  3. Request Strategies in Everyday Interactions of Persian and English Speakers

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Shiler Yazdanfar

    2016-12-01

    Full Text Available Cross-cultural studies of speech acts in different linguistic contexts might have interesting implications for language researchers and practitioners. Drawing on the Speech Act Theory, the present study aimed at conducting a comparative study of request speech act in Persian and English. Specifically, the study endeavored to explore the request strategies used in daily interactions of Persian and English speakers based on directness level and supportive moves. To this end, English and Persian TV series were observed and requestive utterances were transcribed. The utterances were then categorized based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Pattern (CCSARP for directness level and internal and external mitigation devises. According to the results, although speakers of both languages opted for the direct level as their most frequently used strategy in their daily interactions, the English speakers used more conventionally indirect strategies than the Persian speakers did, and the Persian speakers used more non-conventionally indirect strategies than the English speakers did. Furthermore, the analyzed data revealed the fact that American English speakers use more mitigation devices in their daily interactions with friends and family members than Persian speakers.

  4. 76 FR 64045 - Montana Regulatory Program

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-10-17

    ... operational efficiency. This document gives the times and locations that the Montana program and proposed... program amendment is available for you to read at the locations listed above under ADDRESSES. III. Public... under FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT. We will arrange the location and time of the hearing with those...

  5. 76 FR 76111 - Montana Regulatory Program

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-12-06

    ... efficiency. This document gives the times and locations that the Montana program and proposed amendment to... is available for you to read at the locations listed above under ADDRESSES. III. Public Comment... CONTACT. We will arrange the location and time of the hearing with those persons requesting the hearing...

  6. THE USE OF EXPRESSIVE SPEECH ACTS IN HANNAH MONTANA SESSION 1

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Nur Vita Handayani

    2015-07-01

    Full Text Available This study aims to describe kinds and forms of expressive speech act in Hannah Montana Session 1. It belongs to descriptive qualitative method. The research object was expressive speech act. The data source was utterances which contain expressive speech acts in the film Hannah Montana Session 1. The researcher used observation method and noting technique in collecting the data. In analyzing the data, descriptive qualitative method was used. The research findings show that there are ten kinds of expressive speech act found in Hannah Montana Session 1, namely expressing apology, expressing thanks, expressing sympathy, expressing attitudes, expressing greeting, expressing wishes, expressing joy, expressing pain, expressing likes, and expressing dislikes. The forms of expressive speech act are direct literal expressive speech act, direct non-literal expressive speech act, indirect literal expressive speech act, and indirect non-literal expressive speech act.

  7. 78 FR 8102 - Kootenai National Forest; Buckhorn Planning Subunit; Lincoln County, Montana; Environmental...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2013-02-05

    ... National Forest, Lincoln County, Montana, and north of Troy, Montana. DATES: Comments concerning the scope... Hwy 2, Troy, MT 59935. Comments may also be sent via email to comments-northern-kootenai-three-rivers..., Project Team Leader, Three Rivers Ranger District, 12858 US Hwy 2, Troy, MT 59935. Phone: (406) 295-4693...

  8. Speaker Reliability Guides Children's Inductive Inferences about Novel Properties

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kim, Sunae; Kalish, Charles W.; Harris, Paul L.

    2012-01-01

    Prior work shows that children can make inductive inferences about objects based on their labels rather than their appearance (Gelman, 2003). A separate line of research shows that children's trust in a speaker's label is selective. Children accept labels from a reliable speaker over an unreliable speaker (e.g., Koenig & Harris, 2005). In the…

  9. Guest Speakers in School-Based Sexuality Education

    Science.gov (United States)

    McRee, Annie-Laurie; Madsen, Nikki; Eisenberg, Marla E.

    2014-01-01

    This study, using data from a statewide survey (n = 332), examined teachers' practices regarding the inclusion of guest speakers to cover sexuality content. More than half of teachers (58%) included guest speakers. In multivariate analyses, teachers who taught high school, had professional preparation in health education, or who received…

  10. Evaluation of antioxidant and cytoprotective activities of Arnica montana L. and Artemisia absinthium L. ethanolic extracts

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Craciunescu Oana

    2012-09-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Arnica montana L. and Artemisia absinthium L. (Asteraceae are medicinal plants native to temperate regions of Europe, including Romania, traditionally used for treatment of skin wounds, bruises and contusions. In the present study, A. montana and A. absinthium ethanolic extracts were evaluated for their chemical composition, antioxidant activity and protective effect against H2O2-induced oxidative stress in a mouse fibroblast-like NCTC cell line. Results A. absinthium extract showed a higher antioxidant capacity than A. montana extract as Trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity, Oxygen radical absorbance capacity and 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl free radical-scavenging activity, in correlation with its flavonoids and phenolic acids content. Both plant extracts had significant effects on the growth of NCTC cells in the range of 10–100 mg/L A. montana and 10–500 mg/L A. absinthium. They also protected fibroblast cells against hydrogen peroxide-induced oxidative damage, at the same doses. The best protection was observed in cell pre-treatment with 10 mg/L A. montana and 10–300 mg/L A. absinthium, respectively, as determined by Neutral red and lactate dehydrogenase assays. In addition, cell pre-treatment with plant extracts, at these concentrations, prevented morphological changes induced by hydrogen peroxide. Flow-cytometry analysis showed that pre-treatment with A. montana and A. absinthium extracts restored the proportion of cells in each phase of the cell cycle. Conclusions A. montana and A. absinthium extracts, rich in flavonoids and phenolic acids, showed a good antioxidant activity and cytoprotective effect against oxidative damage in fibroblast-like cells. These results provide scientific support for the traditional use of A. montana and A. absinthium in treatment of skin disorders.

  11. The Communication of Public Speaking Anxiety: Perceptions of Asian and American Speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Martini, Marianne; And Others

    1992-01-01

    Finds that U.S. audiences perceive Asian speakers to have more speech anxiety than U.S. speakers, even though Asian speakers do not self-report higher anxiety levels. Confirms that speech state anxiety is not communicated effectively between speakers and audiences for Asian or U.S. speakers. (SR)

  12. Individual- and population-level effects of Odocoileus virginianus herbivory on the rare forest herb Scutellaria montana

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Andrea R. Benson

    2014-08-01

    Full Text Available Odocoileus virginianus  (white-tailed deer grazing can impact rare plant species dramatically given their risk for local extirpation and extinction. To determine if O. virginianus management could aid conservation of federally threatened Scutellaria montana  (large-flowered skullcap, we conducted an exclosure experiment across a large occurrence of this rare species in Catoosa County, Georgia, USA. We aimed to: (1 quantify the effects of O. virginianus  grazing on S. montana  individuals, and (2 evaluate the potential of O. virginianus  to influence S. montana  populations. A lesser percentage of S. montana  individuals protected from O. virginianus  were grazed than plants accessible to grazers and additional protection from smaller grazers did not reduce grazing, suggesting that O. virginianus  primarily do graze S. montana. But grazing did not significantly influence S. montana  individuals as evidenced by changes in stem height or the number of leaves per plant assessed during two single growing seasons or across those growing seasons. At the population-level, grazing impacts were buffered by a lack of grazer preferences for specific plant life stages. Although mostly not significant, our findings are biologically interesting given the numerous ecological concerns associated with O. virginianus abundance, including their demonstrated and proposed impact on rare plants.

  13. Application of Native Speaker Models for Identifying Deviations in Rhetorical Moves in Non-Native Speaker Manuscripts

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Assef Khalili

    2016-06-01

    Full Text Available Introduction: Explicit teaching of generic conventions of a text genre, usually extracted from native-speaker (NS manuscripts, has long been emphasized in the teaching of Academic Writing inEnglish for Specific Purposes (henceforthESP classes, both in theory and practice. While consciousness-raising about rhetorical structure can be instrumental to non-native speakers(NNS, it has to be admitted that most works done in the field of ESP have tended to focus almost exclusively on native-speaker (NS productions, giving scant attention to non-native speaker (NNS manuscripts. That is, having outlined established norms for good writing on the basis of NS productions, few have been inclined to provide a descriptive account of NNS attempts at trying to produce a research article (RA in English. That is what we have tried to do in the present research. Methods: We randomly selected 20 RAs in dentistry and used two well-established models for results and discussion sections to try to describe the move structure of these articles and show the points of divergence from the established norms. Results: The results pointed to significant divergences that could seriously compromise the quality of an RA. Conclusion: It is believed that the insights gained on the deviations in NNS manuscripts could prove very useful in designing syllabi for ESP classes.

  14. Building Points - Montana Structures/Addresses Framework - Web Service

    Data.gov (United States)

    NSGIC State | GIS Inventory — Map service for the Montana Structures MSDI Framework. The service will only display at scales of 1:100,000 or larger. Structures are grouped into general categories...

  15. Speaker Clustering for a Mixture of Singing and Reading (Preprint)

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-03-01

    diarization [2, 3] which answers the ques- tion of ”who spoke when?” is a combination of speaker segmentation and clustering. Although it is possible to...focuses on speaker clustering, the techniques developed here can be applied to speaker diarization . For the remainder of this paper, the term ”speech...and retrieval,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 88, 2000. [2] S. Tranter and D. Reynolds, “An overview of automatic speaker diarization systems,” IEEE

  16. Human and automatic speaker recognition over telecommunication channels

    CERN Document Server

    Fernández Gallardo, Laura

    2016-01-01

    This work addresses the evaluation of the human and the automatic speaker recognition performances under different channel distortions caused by bandwidth limitation, codecs, and electro-acoustic user interfaces, among other impairments. Its main contribution is the demonstration of the benefits of communication channels of extended bandwidth, together with an insight into how speaker-specific characteristics of speech are preserved through different transmissions. It provides sufficient motivation for considering speaker recognition as a criterion for the migration from narrowband to enhanced bandwidths, such as wideband and super-wideband.

  17. Electrophysiology of subject-verb agreement mediated by speakers' gender.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hanulíková, Adriana; Carreiras, Manuel

    2015-01-01

    An important property of speech is that it explicitly conveys features of a speaker's identity such as age or gender. This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effects of social information provided by a speaker's gender, i.e., the conceptual representation of gender, on subject-verb agreement. Despite numerous studies on agreement, little is known about syntactic computations generated by speaker characteristics extracted from the acoustic signal. Slovak is well suited to investigate this issue because it is a morphologically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, case, and gender. Grammaticality of a sentence can be evaluated by checking a speaker's gender as conveyed by his/her voice. We examined how conceptual information about speaker gender, which is not syntactic but rather social and pragmatic in nature, is interpreted for the computation of agreement patterns. ERP responses to verbs disagreeing with the speaker's gender (e.g., a sentence including a masculine verbal inflection spoken by a female person 'the neighbors were upset because I (∗)stoleMASC plums') elicited a larger early posterior negativity compared to correct sentences. When the agreement was purely syntactic and did not depend on the speaker's gender, a disagreement between a formally marked subject and the verb inflection (e.g., the womanFEM (∗)stoleMASC plums) resulted in a larger P600 preceded by a larger anterior negativity compared to the control sentences. This result is in line with proposals according to which the recruitment of non-syntactic information such as the gender of the speaker results in N400-like effects, while formally marked syntactic features lead to structural integration as reflected in a LAN/P600 complex.

  18. Speakers of different languages process the visual world differently.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chabal, Sarah; Marian, Viorica

    2015-06-01

    Language and vision are highly interactive. Here we show that people activate language when they perceive the visual world, and that this language information impacts how speakers of different languages focus their attention. For example, when searching for an item (e.g., clock) in the same visual display, English and Spanish speakers look at different objects. Whereas English speakers searching for the clock also look at a cloud, Spanish speakers searching for the clock also look at a gift, because the Spanish names for gift (regalo) and clock (reloj) overlap phonologically. These different looking patterns emerge despite an absence of direct language input, showing that linguistic information is automatically activated by visual scene processing. We conclude that the varying linguistic information available to speakers of different languages affects visual perception, leading to differences in how the visual world is processed. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

  19. Multimodal Speaker Diarization

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Noulas, A.; Englebienne, G.; Kröse, B.J.A.

    2012-01-01

    We present a novel probabilistic framework that fuses information coming from the audio and video modality to perform speaker diarization. The proposed framework is a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) that is an extension of a factorial Hidden Markov Model (fHMM) and models the people appearing in an

  20. When reintroductions are augmentations: the genetic legacy of the fisher (Martes pennanti) in Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ray S. Vinkey; Michael K. Schwartz; Kevin S. McKelvey; Kerry R. Foresman; Kristine L. Pilgrim; Brian J. Giddings; Eric C. Lofroth

    2006-01-01

    Fishers (Martes pennanti) were purportedly extirpated from Montana by 1930 and extant populations are assumed to be descended from translocated fishers. To determine the lineage of fisher populations, we sequenced 2 regions of the mitochondrial DNA genome from 207 tissue samples from British Columbia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Montana. In...

  1. Montana Curriculum Guidelines for Distributive Education. Revised.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Harris, Ron, Ed.

    These distributive education curriculum guidelines are intended to provide Montana teachers with teaching information for 11 units. Units cover introduction to marketing and distributive education, human relations and communications, operations and control, processes involved in buying for resale, merchandise handling, sales promotion, sales and…

  2. Galande, Dr Sanjeev

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 2010 Section: General Biology. Galande, Dr Sanjeev Ph.D. (IISc). Date of birth: 20 September 1967. Specialization: Epigenetics, Chromatin Biology, Gene Regulation, Genomics and Proteomics Address: Centre for Excellence in Epigenetics, Indian Institute of Science Education, & Research, Dr Homi Bhabha Road, ...

  3. Gaia DR2 documentation

    Science.gov (United States)

    van Leeuwen, F.; de Bruijne, J. H. J.; Arenou, F.; Bakker, J.; Blomme, R.; Busso, G.; Cacciari, C.; Castañeda, J.; Cellino, A.; Clotet, M.; Comoretto, G.; Eyer, L.; González-Núñez, J.; Guy, L.; Hambly, N.; Hobbs, D.; van Leeuwen, M.; Luri, X.; Manteiga, M.; Pourbaix, D.; Roegiers, T.; Salgado, J.; Sartoretti, P.; Tanga, P.; Ulla, A.; Utrilla Molina, E.; Abreu, A.; Altmann, M.; Andrae, R.; Antoja, T.; Audard, M.; Babusiaux, C.; Bailer-Jones, C. A. L.; Barache, C.; Bastian, U.; Beck, M.; Berthier, J.; Bianchi, L.; Biermann, M.; Bombrun, A.; Bossini, D.; Breddels, M.; Brown, A. G. A.; Busonero, D.; Butkevich, A.; Cantat-Gaudin, T.; Carrasco, J. M.; Cheek, N.; Clementini, G.; Creevey, O.; Crowley, C.; David, M.; Davidson, M.; De Angeli, F.; De Ridder, J.; Delbò, M.; Dell'Oro, A.; Diakité, S.; Distefano, E.; Drimmel, R.; Durán, J.; Evans, D. W.; Fabricius, C.; Fabrizio, M.; Fernández-Hernández, J.; Findeisen, K.; Fleitas, J.; Fouesneau, M.; Galluccio, L.; Gracia-Abril, G.; Guerra, R.; Gutiérrez-Sánchez, R.; Helmi, A.; Hernandez, J.; Holl, B.; Hutton, A.; Jean-Antoine-Piccolo, A.; Jevardat de Fombelle, G.; Joliet, E.; Jordi, C.; Juhász, Á.; Klioner, S.; Löffler, W.; Lammers, U.; Lanzafame, A.; Lebzelter, T.; Leclerc, N.; Lecoeur-Taïbi, I.; Lindegren, L.; Marinoni, S.; Marrese, P. M.; Mary, N.; Massari, D.; Messineo, R.; Michalik, D.; Mignard, F.; Molinaro, R.; Molnár, L.; Montegriffo, P.; Mora, A.; Mowlavi, N.; Muinonen, K.; Muraveva, T.; Nienartowicz, K.; Ordenovic, C.; Pancino, E.; Panem, C.; Pauwels, T.; Petit, J.; Plachy, E.; Portell, J.; Racero, E.; Regibo, S.; Reylé, C.; Rimoldini, L.; Ripepi, V.; Riva, A.; Robichon, N.; Robin, A.; Roelens, M.; Romero-Gómez, M.; Sarro, L.; Seabroke, G.; Segovia, J. C.; Siddiqui, H.; Smart, R.; Smith, K.; Sordo, R.; Soria, S.; Spoto, F.; Stephenson, C.; Turon, C.; Vallenari, A.; Veljanoski, J.; Voutsinas, S.

    2018-04-01

    The second Gaia data release, Gaia DR2, encompasses astrometry, photometry, radial velocities, astrophysical parameters (stellar effective temperature, extinction, reddening, radius, and luminosity), and variability information plus astrometry and photometry for a sample of pre-selected bodies in the solar system. The data collected during the first 22 months of the nominal, five-year mission have been processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), resulting into this second data release. A summary of the release properties is provided in Gaia Collaboration et al. (2018b). The overall scientific validation of the data is described in Arenou et al. (2018). Background information on the mission and the spacecraft can be found in Gaia Collaboration et al. (2016), with a more detailed presentation of the Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) in Cropper et al. (2018). In addition, Gaia DR2 is accompanied by various, dedicated papers that describe the processing and validation of the various data products. Four more Gaia Collaboration papers present a glimpse of the scientific richness of the data. In addition to this set of refereed publications, this documentation provides a detailed, complete overview of the processing and validation of the Gaia DR2 data. Gaia data, from both Gaia DR1 and Gaia DR2, can be retrieved from the Gaia archive, which is accessible from https://archives.esac.esa.int/gaia. The archive also provides various tutorials on data access and data queries plus an integrated data model (i.e., description of the various fields in the data tables). In addition, Luri et al. (2018) provide concrete advice on how to deal with Gaia astrometry, with recommendations on how best to estimate distances from parallaxes. The Gaia archive features an enhanced visualisation service which can be used for quick initial explorations of the entire Gaia DR2 data set. Pre-computed cross matches between Gaia DR2 and a selected set of large surveys are

  4. Studies on inter-speaker variability in speech and its application in ...

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    tic representation of vowel realizations by different speakers. ... in regional background, education level and gender of speaker. A more ...... formal maps such as bilinear transform and its generalizations for speaker normalization. Since.

  5. Content-specific coordination of listeners' to speakers' EEG during communication.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kuhlen, Anna K; Allefeld, Carsten; Haynes, John-Dylan

    2012-01-01

    Cognitive neuroscience has recently begun to extend its focus from the isolated individual mind to two or more individuals coordinating with each other. In this study we uncover a coordination of neural activity between the ongoing electroencephalogram (EEG) of two people-a person speaking and a person listening. The EEG of one set of twelve participants ("speakers") was recorded while they were narrating short stories. The EEG of another set of twelve participants ("listeners") was recorded while watching audiovisual recordings of these stories. Specifically, listeners watched the superimposed videos of two speakers simultaneously and were instructed to attend either to one or the other speaker. This allowed us to isolate neural coordination due to processing the communicated content from the effects of sensory input. We find several neural signatures of communication: First, the EEG is more similar among listeners attending to the same speaker than among listeners attending to different speakers, indicating that listeners' EEG reflects content-specific information. Secondly, listeners' EEG activity correlates with the attended speakers' EEG, peaking at a time delay of about 12.5 s. This correlation takes place not only between homologous, but also between non-homologous brain areas in speakers and listeners. A semantic analysis of the stories suggests that listeners coordinate with speakers at the level of complex semantic representations, so-called "situation models". With this study we link a coordination of neural activity between individuals directly to verbally communicated information.

  6. Forensic Speaker Recognition Law Enforcement and Counter-Terrorism

    CERN Document Server

    Patil, Hemant

    2012-01-01

    Forensic Speaker Recognition: Law Enforcement and Counter-Terrorism is an anthology of the research findings of 35 speaker recognition experts from around the world. The volume provides a multidimensional view of the complex science involved in determining whether a suspect’s voice truly matches forensic speech samples, collected by law enforcement and counter-terrorism agencies, that are associated with the commission of a terrorist act or other crimes. While addressing such topics as the challenges of forensic case work, handling speech signal degradation, analyzing features of speaker recognition to optimize voice verification system performance, and designing voice applications that meet the practical needs of law enforcement and counter-terrorism agencies, this material all sounds a common theme: how the rigors of forensic utility are demanding new levels of excellence in all aspects of speaker recognition. The contributors are among the most eminent scientists in speech engineering and signal process...

  7. Modulation of TRAIL resistance in colon carcinoma cells: Different contributions of DR4 and DR5

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Geelen, Caroline MM van; Pennarun, Bodvael; Le, Phuong TK; Vries, Elisabeth GE de; Jong, Steven de

    2011-01-01

    rhTRAIL is a therapeutic agent, derived from the TRAIL cytokine, which induces apoptosis in cancer cells by activating the membrane death receptors 4 and 5 (DR4 and DR5). Here, we investigated each receptor's contribution to rhTRAIL sensitivity and rhTRAIL resistance. We assessed whether agonistic DR4 or DR5 antibodies could be used to circumvent rhTRAIL resistance, alone or in combination with various chemotherapies. Our study was performed in an isogenic model comprised of the SW948 human colon carcinoma cell line and its rhTRAIL resistant sub-line SW948-TR. Effects of rhTRAIL and agonistic DR4/DR5 antibodies on cell viability were measured using MTT assays and identification of morphological changes characteristic of apoptosis, after acridine orange staining. Sensitivity to the different death receptor ligands was stimulated using pretreatment with the cytokine IFN-gamma and the proteasome inhibitor MG-132. To investigate the mechanisms underlying the changes in rhTRAIL sensitivity, alterations in expression levels of targets of interest were measured by Western blot analysis. Co-immunoprecipitation was used to determine the composition of the death-inducing signalling complex at the cell membrane. SW948 cells were sensitive to all three of the DR-targeting agents tested, although the agonistic DR5 antibody induced only weak caspase 8 cleavage and limited apoptosis. Surprisingly, agonistic DR4 and DR5 antibodies induced equivalent DISC formation and caspase 8 cleavage at the level of their individual receptors, suggesting impairment of further caspase 8 processing upon DR5 stimulation. SW948-TR cells were cross-resistant to all DR-targeting agents as a result of decreased caspase 8 expression levels. Caspase 8 protein expression was restored by MG-132 and IFN-gamma pretreatment, which also re-established sensitivity to rhTRAIL and agonistic DR4 antibody in SW948-TR. Surprisingly, MG-132 but not IFN-gamma could also increase DR5-mediated apoptosis in SW948

  8. Modulation of TRAIL resistance in colon carcinoma cells: Different contributions of DR4 and DR5

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    de Vries Elisabeth GE

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background rhTRAIL is a therapeutic agent, derived from the TRAIL cytokine, which induces apoptosis in cancer cells by activating the membrane death receptors 4 and 5 (DR4 and DR5. Here, we investigated each receptor's contribution to rhTRAIL sensitivity and rhTRAIL resistance. We assessed whether agonistic DR4 or DR5 antibodies could be used to circumvent rhTRAIL resistance, alone or in combination with various chemotherapies. Methods Our study was performed in an isogenic model comprised of the SW948 human colon carcinoma cell line and its rhTRAIL resistant sub-line SW948-TR. Effects of rhTRAIL and agonistic DR4/DR5 antibodies on cell viability were measured using MTT assays and identification of morphological changes characteristic of apoptosis, after acridine orange staining. Sensitivity to the different death receptor ligands was stimulated using pretreatment with the cytokine IFN-gamma and the proteasome inhibitor MG-132. To investigate the mechanisms underlying the changes in rhTRAIL sensitivity, alterations in expression levels of targets of interest were measured by Western blot analysis. Co-immunoprecipitation was used to determine the composition of the death-inducing signalling complex at the cell membrane. Results SW948 cells were sensitive to all three of the DR-targeting agents tested, although the agonistic DR5 antibody induced only weak caspase 8 cleavage and limited apoptosis. Surprisingly, agonistic DR4 and DR5 antibodies induced equivalent DISC formation and caspase 8 cleavage at the level of their individual receptors, suggesting impairment of further caspase 8 processing upon DR5 stimulation. SW948-TR cells were cross-resistant to all DR-targeting agents as a result of decreased caspase 8 expression levels. Caspase 8 protein expression was restored by MG-132 and IFN-gamma pretreatment, which also re-established sensitivity to rhTRAIL and agonistic DR4 antibody in SW948-TR. Surprisingly, MG-132 but not IFN

  9. Dr. Wernher von Braun and Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger Sign Citizenship Certificates

    Science.gov (United States)

    1955-01-01

    The members of the Peenemuende team and their family members were awarded the United States citizenship on April 14, 1955. Pictured here is Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger (middle) and Dr. Wernher von Braun signing U.S. citizenship certificates. Martin Schilling is at left.

  10. Gricean Semantics and Vague Speaker-Meaning

    OpenAIRE

    Schiffer, Stephen

    2017-01-01

    Presentations of Gricean semantics, including Stephen Neale’s in “Silent Reference,” totally ignore vagueness, even though virtually every utterance is vague. I ask how Gricean semantics might be adjusted to accommodate vague speaker-meaning. My answer is that it can’t accommodate it: the Gricean program collapses in the face of vague speaker-meaning. The Gricean might, however, fi nd some solace in knowing that every other extant meta-semantic and semantic program is in the same boat.

  11. Effect of lisping on audience evaluation of male speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mowrer, D E; Wahl, P; Doolan, S J

    1978-05-01

    The social consequences of adult listeners' first impression of lisping were evaluated in two studies. Five adult speakers were rated by adult listeners with regard to speaking ability, intelligence, education, masculinity, and friendship. Results from both studies indicate that listeners rate adult speakers who demonstrate frontal lisping lower than nonlispers in all five categories investigated. Efforts to correct frontal lisping are justifiable on the basis of the poor impression lisping speakers make on the listener.

  12. The Usage of Loanwords by Japanese Learners and Their Background : case of English Native Speakers (Dedicated to the Memory of Dr. SASAKI Yoshinori)

    OpenAIRE

    堀切, 友紀子

    2010-01-01

    In the field of Teaching Japanese as a Second Language, the study of Japanese loanwords has focused on their acquisition, and Japanese loanwords tend to be an obstacle for Japanese learners. However, actual situations about loanword usage by English native speakers need to be identical. The purpose of this research is to understand the process involved in the cognition, emotion and usage of loanwords by Japanese learners. An investigatory interview was conducted with 11 Japanese learners who ...

  13. Consistency between verbal and non-verbal affective cues: a clue to speaker credibility.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gillis, Randall L; Nilsen, Elizabeth S

    2017-06-01

    Listeners are exposed to inconsistencies in communication; for example, when speakers' words (i.e. verbal) are discrepant with their demonstrated emotions (i.e. non-verbal). Such inconsistencies introduce ambiguity, which may render a speaker to be a less credible source of information. Two experiments examined whether children make credibility discriminations based on the consistency of speakers' affect cues. In Experiment 1, school-age children (7- to 8-year-olds) preferred to solicit information from consistent speakers (e.g. those who provided a negative statement with negative affect), over novel speakers, to a greater extent than they preferred to solicit information from inconsistent speakers (e.g. those who provided a negative statement with positive affect) over novel speakers. Preschoolers (4- to 5-year-olds) did not demonstrate this preference. Experiment 2 showed that school-age children's ratings of speakers were influenced by speakers' affect consistency when the attribute being judged was related to information acquisition (speakers' believability, "weird" speech), but not general characteristics (speakers' friendliness, likeability). Together, findings suggest that school-age children are sensitive to, and use, the congruency of affect cues to determine whether individuals are credible sources of information.

  14. Dr Math at your service

    CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

    Butgereit, L

    2012-10-01

    Full Text Available In this presentation the author explains how the Dr Math service works; how tutors are recruited to act as Dr Math; and how school pupils can reach Dr Math for help with their mathematics homework....

  15. Recognition of speaker-dependent continuous speech with KEAL

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mercier, G.; Bigorgne, D.; Miclet, L.; Le Guennec, L.; Querre, M.

    1989-04-01

    A description of the speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition system KEAL is given. An unknown utterance, is recognized by means of the followng procedures: acoustic analysis, phonetic segmentation and identification, word and sentence analysis. The combination of feature-based, speaker-independent coarse phonetic segmentation with speaker-dependent statistical classification techniques is one of the main design features of the acoustic-phonetic decoder. The lexical access component is essentially based on a statistical dynamic programming technique which aims at matching a phonemic lexical entry containing various phonological forms, against a phonetic lattice. Sentence recognition is achieved by use of a context-free grammar and a parsing algorithm derived from Earley's parser. A speaker adaptation module allows some of the system parameters to be adjusted by matching known utterances with their acoustical representation. The task to be performed, described by its vocabulary and its grammar, is given as a parameter of the system. Continuously spoken sentences extracted from a 'pseudo-Logo' language are analyzed and results are presented.

  16. Cost-Sensitive Learning for Emotion Robust Speaker Recognition

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Dongdong Li

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available In the field of information security, voice is one of the most important parts in biometrics. Especially, with the development of voice communication through the Internet or telephone system, huge voice data resources are accessed. In speaker recognition, voiceprint can be applied as the unique password for the user to prove his/her identity. However, speech with various emotions can cause an unacceptably high error rate and aggravate the performance of speaker recognition system. This paper deals with this problem by introducing a cost-sensitive learning technology to reweight the probability of test affective utterances in the pitch envelop level, which can enhance the robustness in emotion-dependent speaker recognition effectively. Based on that technology, a new architecture of recognition system as well as its components is proposed in this paper. The experiment conducted on the Mandarin Affective Speech Corpus shows that an improvement of 8% identification rate over the traditional speaker recognition is achieved.

  17. Cost-sensitive learning for emotion robust speaker recognition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Dongdong; Yang, Yingchun; Dai, Weihui

    2014-01-01

    In the field of information security, voice is one of the most important parts in biometrics. Especially, with the development of voice communication through the Internet or telephone system, huge voice data resources are accessed. In speaker recognition, voiceprint can be applied as the unique password for the user to prove his/her identity. However, speech with various emotions can cause an unacceptably high error rate and aggravate the performance of speaker recognition system. This paper deals with this problem by introducing a cost-sensitive learning technology to reweight the probability of test affective utterances in the pitch envelop level, which can enhance the robustness in emotion-dependent speaker recognition effectively. Based on that technology, a new architecture of recognition system as well as its components is proposed in this paper. The experiment conducted on the Mandarin Affective Speech Corpus shows that an improvement of 8% identification rate over the traditional speaker recognition is achieved.

  18. Young Children's Sensitivity to Speaker Gender When Learning from Others

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ma, Lili; Woolley, Jacqueline D.

    2013-01-01

    This research explores whether young children are sensitive to speaker gender when learning novel information from others. Four- and 6-year-olds ("N" = 144) chose between conflicting statements from a male versus a female speaker (Studies 1 and 3) or decided which speaker (male or female) they would ask (Study 2) when learning about the functions…

  19. 75 FR 3993 - Approval and Promulgation of Air Quality Implementation Plans; Montana; Revisions to the...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-26

    ... include minor editorial and grammatical changes, updates to the citations and references to federal and... otherwise. (ii) The words EPA, we, us or our mean or refer to the United States Environmental Protection... Promulgation of Air Quality Implementation Plans; Montana; Revisions to the Administrative Rules of Montana...

  20. Fluency profile: comparison between Brazilian and European Portuguese speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Castro, Blenda Stephanie Alves e; Martins-Reis, Vanessa de Oliveira; Baptista, Ana Catarina; Celeste, Letícia Correa

    2014-01-01

    The purpose of the study was to compare the speech fluency of Brazilian Portuguese speakers with that of European Portuguese speakers. The study participants were 76 individuals of any ethnicity or skin color aged 18-29 years. Of the participants, 38 lived in Brazil and 38 in Portugal. Speech samples from all participants were obtained and analyzed according to the variables of typology and frequency of speech disruptions and speech rate. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were performed to assess the association between the fluency profile and linguistic variant variables. We found that the speech rate of European Portuguese speakers was higher than the speech rate of Brazilian Portuguese speakers in words per minute (p=0.004). The qualitative distribution of the typology of common dysfluencies (pPortuguese speakers is not available, speech therapists in Portugal can use the same speech fluency assessment as has been used in Brazil to establish a diagnosis of stuttering, especially in regard to typical and stuttering dysfluencies, with care taken when evaluating the speech rate.

  1. Direct Speaker Gaze Promotes Trust in Truth-Ambiguous Statements.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kreysa, Helene; Kessler, Luise; Schweinberger, Stefan R

    2016-01-01

    A speaker's gaze behaviour can provide perceivers with a multitude of cues which are relevant for communication, thus constituting an important non-verbal interaction channel. The present study investigated whether direct eye gaze of a speaker affects the likelihood of listeners believing truth-ambiguous statements. Participants were presented with videos in which a speaker produced such statements with either direct or averted gaze. The statements were selected through a rating study to ensure that participants were unlikely to know a-priori whether they were true or not (e.g., "sniffer dogs cannot smell the difference between identical twins"). Participants indicated in a forced-choice task whether or not they believed each statement. We found that participants were more likely to believe statements by a speaker looking at them directly, compared to a speaker with averted gaze. Moreover, when participants disagreed with a statement, they were slower to do so when the statement was uttered with direct (compared to averted) gaze, suggesting that the process of rejecting a statement as untrue may be inhibited when that statement is accompanied by direct gaze.

  2. Key identifiers and spelling conventions in MXit-lingo as found in conversations with Dr Math

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Laurie Butgereit

    2012-07-01

    Full Text Available Different human languages look different from other human languages. To use a term from the computer industry, each human language has its own “look and feel”. European English speakers can easily recognise a phrase such as “Comment allez-vous?” as being written in French while the phrase “¿Habla usted español?” is written in Spanish. Each language has its own letter frequencies, word frequencies and other identifiers. This paper describes key identifiers in MXit lingo as found in Dr Math conversations. MXit is a mobile instant messaging system which originated in South Africa and is expanding to other countries. Dr Math is a mobile tutoring system which uses MXit as a communication protocol. Primary and secondary school pupils can receive help with the mathematics homework using the Dr Math tutoring system. The pupils use MXit on their cell phones and the tutors use traditional Internet workstations. After exploring how MXit lingo is written, this paper will briefly explore why MXit lingo is written the way it is. By identifying and describing the orthographic conventions visible in the spelling of MXit lingo, although with some theoretical support, insight into the purposeful and functional nature of written, mobile communication will be revealed. In highlighting spelling that is influenced by Black South African English, an attempt will be made to contribute to the empirical development of a field of study that explores the construction of words used in South African mobile communication. Keywords: MXit, Math, letters, writing, orthography Disciplines: Linguistics, mathematics, information technology

  3. Drømmejobbet

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Harrebye, Silas

    2012-01-01

    Medarbejdere vil i fremtiden også kunne arbejde, mens de sover. Virksomheder tilbyder snart deres ansatte interne kurser i ‘lucid dreaming’. Disse giver mulighed for, at man i sine drømme bliver bevidst om, at man drømmer og således kan manipulere dem. Det skal nu udnyttes. Management...

  4. SPANISH PEAKS PRIMITIVE AREA, MONTANA.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Calkins, James A.; Pattee, Eldon C.

    1984-01-01

    A mineral survey of the Spanish Peaks Primitive Area, Montana, disclosed a small low-grade deposit of demonstrated chromite and asbestos resources. The chances for discovery of additional chrome resources are uncertain and the area has little promise for the occurrence of other mineral or energy resources. A reevaluation, sampling at depth, and testing for possible extensions of the Table Mountain asbestos and chromium deposit should be undertaken in the light of recent interpretations regarding its geologic setting.

  5. A hybrid generative-discriminative approach to speaker diarization

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Noulas, A.K.; van Kasteren, T.; Kröse, B.J.A.

    2008-01-01

    In this paper we present a sound probabilistic approach to speaker diarization. We use a hybrid framework where a distribution over the number of speakers at each point of a multimodal stream is estimated with a discriminative model. The output of this process is used as input in a generative model

  6. Noise Reduction with Microphone Arrays for Speaker Identification

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Cohen, Z

    2011-12-22

    Reducing acoustic noise in audio recordings is an ongoing problem that plagues many applications. This noise is hard to reduce because of interfering sources and non-stationary behavior of the overall background noise. Many single channel noise reduction algorithms exist but are limited in that the more the noise is reduced; the more the signal of interest is distorted due to the fact that the signal and noise overlap in frequency. Specifically acoustic background noise causes problems in the area of speaker identification. Recording a speaker in the presence of acoustic noise ultimately limits the performance and confidence of speaker identification algorithms. In situations where it is impossible to control the environment where the speech sample is taken, noise reduction filtering algorithms need to be developed to clean the recorded speech of background noise. Because single channel noise reduction algorithms would distort the speech signal, the overall challenge of this project was to see if spatial information provided by microphone arrays could be exploited to aid in speaker identification. The goals are: (1) Test the feasibility of using microphone arrays to reduce background noise in speech recordings; (2) Characterize and compare different multichannel noise reduction algorithms; (3) Provide recommendations for using these multichannel algorithms; and (4) Ultimately answer the question - Can the use of microphone arrays aid in speaker identification?

  7. Understanding speaker attitudes from prosody by adults with Parkinson's disease.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Monetta, Laura; Cheang, Henry S; Pell, Marc D

    2008-09-01

    The ability to interpret vocal (prosodic) cues during social interactions can be disrupted by Parkinson's disease, with notable effects on how emotions are understood from speech. This study investigated whether PD patients who have emotional prosody deficits exhibit further difficulties decoding the attitude of a speaker from prosody. Vocally inflected but semantically nonsensical 'pseudo-utterances' were presented to listener groups with and without PD in two separate rating tasks. Task I required participants to rate how confident a speaker sounded from their voice and Task 2 required listeners to rate how polite the speaker sounded for a comparable set of pseudo-utterances. The results showed that PD patients were significantly less able than HC participants to use prosodic cues to differentiate intended levels of speaker confidence in speech, although the patients could accurately detect the politelimpolite attitude of the speaker from prosody in most cases. Our data suggest that many PD patients fail to use vocal cues to effectively infer a speaker's emotions as well as certain attitudes in speech such as confidence, consistent with the idea that the basal ganglia play a role in the meaningful processing of prosodic sequences in spoken language (Pell & Leonard, 2003).

  8. Large Customers (DR Sellers)

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Kiliccot, Sila [Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)

    2011-10-25

    State of the large customers for demand response integration of solar and wind into electric grid; openADR; CAISO; DR as a pseudo generation; commercial and industrial DR strategies; California regulations

  9. A Method to Integrate GMM, SVM and DTW for Speaker Recognition

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ing-Jr Ding

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available This paper develops an effective and efficient scheme to integrate Gaussian mixture model (GMM, support vector machine (SVM, and dynamic time wrapping (DTW for automatic speaker recognition. GMM and SVM are two popular classifiers for speaker recognition applications. DTW is a fast and simple template matching method, and it is frequently seen in applications of speech recognition. In this work, DTW does not play a role to perform speech recognition, and it will be employed to be a verifier for verification of valid speakers. The proposed combination scheme of GMM, SVM and DTW, called SVMGMM-DTW, for speaker recognition in this study is a two-phase verification process task including GMM-SVM verification of the first phase and DTW verification of the second phase. By providing a double check to verify the identity of a speaker, it will be difficult for imposters to try to pass the security protection; therefore, the safety degree of speaker recognition systems will be largely increased. A series of experiments designed on door access control applications demonstrated that the superiority of the developed SVMGMM-DTW on speaker recognition accuracy.

  10. Montana Integrated Carbon to Liquids (ICTL) Demonstration Program

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Fiato, Rocco A. [Accelergy Corporation, Houston, TX (United States); Sharma, Ramesh [Univ. of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND (United States). Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC); Allen, Mark [Accelergy Corporation, Houston, TX (United States). Integrated Carbon Solutions; Peyton, Brent [Montana State Univ., Bozeman, MT (United States); Macur, Richard [Montana State Univ., Bozeman, MT (United States). Dept. of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences; Cameron, Jemima [Australian Energy Company Ltd., Hovea (Australia). Australian American Energy Corporation (AAEC)

    2013-12-01

    Integrated carbon-to-liquids technology (ICTL) incorporates three basic processes for the conversion of a wide range of feedstocks to distillate liquid fuels: (1) Direct Microcatalytic Coal Liquefaction (MCL) is coupled with biomass liquefaction via (2) Catalytic Hydrodeoxygenation and Isomerization (CHI) of fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) or trigylceride fatty acids (TGFA) to produce liquid fuels, with process derived (3) CO2 Capture and Utilization (CCU) via algae production and use in BioFertilizer for added terrestrial sequestration of CO2, or as a feedstock for MCL and/or CHI. This novel approach enables synthetic fuels production while simultaneously meeting EISA 2007 Section 526 targets, minimizing land use and water consumption, and providing cost competitive fuels at current day petroleum prices. ICTL was demonstrated with Montana Crow sub-bituminous coal in MCL pilot scale operations at the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota (EERC), with related pilot scale CHI studies conducted at the University of Pittsburgh Applied Research Center (PARC). Coal-Biomass to Liquid (CBTL) Fuel samples were evaluated at the US Air Force Research Labs (AFRL) in Dayton and greenhouse tests of algae based BioFertilizer conducted at Montana State University (MSU). Econometric modeling studies were also conducted on the use of algae based BioFertilizer in a wheat-camelina crop rotation cycle. We find that the combined operation is not only able to help boost crop yields, but also to provide added crop yields and associated profits from TGFA (from crop production) for use an ICTL plant feedstock. This program demonstrated the overall viability of ICTL in pilot scale operations. Related work on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a Montana project indicated that CCU could be employed very effectively to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the MCL/CHI process. Plans are currently being made to conduct larger

  11. Inducing Cold-Sensitivity in the Frigophilic Fly Drosophila montana by RNAi.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Felipe M Vigoder

    Full Text Available Cold acclimation is a critical physiological adaptation for coping with seasonal cold. By increasing their cold tolerance individuals can remain active for longer at the onset of winter and can recover more quickly from a cold shock. In insects, despite many physiological studies, little is known about the genetic basis of cold acclimation. Recently, transcriptomic analyses in Drosophila virilis and D. montana revealed candidate genes for cold acclimation by identifying genes upregulated during exposure to cold. Here, we test the role of myo-inositol-1-phosphate synthase (Inos, in cold tolerance in D. montana using an RNAi approach. D. montana has a circumpolar distribution and overwinters as an adult in northern latitudes with extreme cold. We assessed cold tolerance of dsRNA knock-down flies using two metrics: chill-coma recovery time (CCRT and mortality rate after cold acclimation. Injection of dsRNAInos did not alter CCRT, either overall or in interaction with the cold treatment, however it did induced cold-specific mortality, with high levels of mortality observed in injected flies acclimated at 5°C but not at 19°C. Overall, injection with dsRNAInos induced a temperature-sensitive mortality rate of over 60% in this normally cold-tolerant species. qPCR analysis confirmed that dsRNA injection successfully reduced gene expression of Inos. Thus, our results demonstrate the involvement of Inos in increasing cold tolerance in D. montana. The potential mechanisms involved by which Inos increases cold tolerance are also discussed.

  12. LEARNING VECTOR QUANTIZATION FOR ADAPTED GAUSSIAN MIXTURE MODELS IN AUTOMATIC SPEAKER IDENTIFICATION

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    IMEN TRABELSI

    2017-05-01

    Full Text Available Speaker Identification (SI aims at automatically identifying an individual by extracting and processing information from his/her voice. Speaker voice is a robust a biometric modality that has a strong impact in several application areas. In this study, a new combination learning scheme has been proposed based on Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM and Learning vector quantization (LVQ for automatic text-independent speaker identification. Features vectors, constituted by the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC extracted from the speech signal are used to train the New England subset of the TIMIT database. The best results obtained (90% for gender- independent speaker identification, 97 % for male speakers and 93% for female speakers for test data using 36 MFCC features.

  13. Direct Speaker Gaze Promotes Trust in Truth-Ambiguous Statements.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Helene Kreysa

    Full Text Available A speaker's gaze behaviour can provide perceivers with a multitude of cues which are relevant for communication, thus constituting an important non-verbal interaction channel. The present study investigated whether direct eye gaze of a speaker affects the likelihood of listeners believing truth-ambiguous statements. Participants were presented with videos in which a speaker produced such statements with either direct or averted gaze. The statements were selected through a rating study to ensure that participants were unlikely to know a-priori whether they were true or not (e.g., "sniffer dogs cannot smell the difference between identical twins". Participants indicated in a forced-choice task whether or not they believed each statement. We found that participants were more likely to believe statements by a speaker looking at them directly, compared to a speaker with averted gaze. Moreover, when participants disagreed with a statement, they were slower to do so when the statement was uttered with direct (compared to averted gaze, suggesting that the process of rejecting a statement as untrue may be inhibited when that statement is accompanied by direct gaze.

  14. Visual speaker gender affects vowel identification in Danish

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Larsen, Charlotte; Tøndering, John

    2013-01-01

    The experiment examined the effect of visual speaker gender on the vowel perception of 20 native Danish-speaking subjects. Auditory stimuli consisting of a continuum between /muːlə/ ‘muzzle’ and /moːlə/ ‘pier’ generated using TANDEM-STRAIGHT matched with video clips of a female and a male speaker...

  15. 75 FR 63434 - Kootenai National Forest, Lincoln County, Montana; Grizzly Vegetation and Transportation...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-10-15

    ... Troy, Montana. The Notice of Availability of the Draft EIS for this project was published in the... analysis is Cami Winslow, Acting District Ranger, Three Rivers Ranger District, 12385 U.S. Hwy 2, Troy, MT... northeast of Troy, Montana, within all or portions of T34N, R32W-R33W, T35N, R32W-R33W, and T36N, R32W-R33W...

  16. Bilingual and Monolingual Children Prefer Native-Accented Speakers

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Andre L. eSouza

    2013-12-01

    Full Text Available Adults and young children prefer to affiliate with some individuals rather than others. Studies have shown that monolingual children show in-group biases for individuals who speak their native language without a foreign accent (Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke, 2007. Some studies have suggested that bilingual children are less influenced than monolinguals by language variety when attributing personality traits to different speakers (Anisfeld & Lambert, 1964, which could indicate that bilinguals have fewer in-group biases and perhaps greater social flexibility. However, no previous studies have compared monolingual and bilingual children’s reactions to speakers with unfamiliar foreign accents. In the present study, we investigated the social preferences of 5-year-old English and French monolinguals and English-French bilinguals. Contrary to our predictions, both monolingual and bilingual preschoolers preferred to be friends with native-accented speakers over speakers who spoke their dominant language with an unfamiliar foreign accent. This result suggests that both monolingual and bilingual children have strong preferences for in-group members who use a familiar language variety, and that bilingualism does not lead to generalized social flexibility.

  17. Bilingual and monolingual children prefer native-accented speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Souza, André L; Byers-Heinlein, Krista; Poulin-Dubois, Diane

    2013-01-01

    Adults and young children prefer to affiliate with some individuals rather than others. Studies have shown that monolingual children show in-group biases for individuals who speak their native language without a foreign accent (Kinzler et al., 2007). Some studies have suggested that bilingual children are less influenced than monolinguals by language variety when attributing personality traits to different speakers (Anisfeld and Lambert, 1964), which could indicate that bilinguals have fewer in-group biases and perhaps greater social flexibility. However, no previous studies have compared monolingual and bilingual children's reactions to speakers with unfamiliar foreign accents. In the present study, we investigated the social preferences of 5-year-old English and French monolinguals and English-French bilinguals. Contrary to our predictions, both monolingual and bilingual preschoolers preferred to be friends with native-accented speakers over speakers who spoke their dominant language with an unfamiliar foreign accent. This result suggests that both monolingual and bilingual children have strong preferences for in-group members who use a familiar language variety, and that bilingualism does not lead to generalized social flexibility.

  18. Differences in Sickness Allowance Receipt between Swedish Speakers and Finnish Speakers in Finland

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Kaarina S. Reini

    2017-12-01

    Full Text Available Previous research has documented lower disability retirement and mortality rates of Swedish speakers as compared with Finnish speakers in Finland. This paper is the first to compare the two language groups with regard to the receipt of sickness allowance, which is an objective health measure that reflects a less severe poor health condition. Register-based data covering the years 1988-2011 are used. We estimate logistic regression models with generalized estimating equations to account for repeated observations at the individual level. We find that Swedish-speaking men have approximately 30 percent lower odds of receiving sickness allowance than Finnish-speaking men, whereas the difference in women is about 15 percent. In correspondence with previous research on all-cause mortality at working ages, we find no language-group difference in sickness allowance receipt in the socially most successful subgroup of the population.

  19. On the improvement of speaker diarization by detecting overlapped speech

    OpenAIRE

    Hernando Pericás, Francisco Javier; Hernando Pericás, Francisco Javier

    2010-01-01

    Simultaneous speech in meeting environment is responsible for a certain amount of errors caused by standard speaker diarization systems. We are presenting an overlap detection system for far-field data based on spectral and spatial features, where the spatial features obtained on different microphone pairs are fused by means of principal component analysis. Detected overlap segments are applied for speaker diarization in order to increase the purity of speaker clusters an...

  20. Prava trećih država u gospodarskom pojasu obalne države

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Marina Vokić Žužul

    2003-12-01

    Full Text Available Predmet ovoga rada je analiza prava koja u gospodarskom pojasu obalne države mogu ostvarivati sve obalne i neobalne države. uz detaljan prikaz pravnog uređenja materije u odredbama Konvencije o pravu mora iz 1982., razmatraju se i vladajuća gledišta međunarodnopravne doktrine te rješenja u zakonodavstvima pojedinih zemalja. Posebna pozornost je posvećena ostvarivanju tuh prava u potencijalnom hrvatskom gospodarskom pojasu, prvenstveno mogućim zahtjevima od strane susjednih neobalnih država i država u nepovoljnom geografskom položaju. Sva pitanja razmatrana u ovom radu upućuju na zaključak da ispunjavanje dužnosti prema drugim državama u budućem gospodarskom pojasu RH ne bi trebalo imati utjecaja na donošenje odluke o njegovom proglašenju.

  1. The University of Montana's Blue Mountain Observatory

    Science.gov (United States)

    Friend, D. B.

    2004-12-01

    The University of Montana's Department of Physics and Astronomy runs the state of Montana's only professional astronomical observatory. The Observatory, located on nearby Blue Mountain, houses a 16 inch Boller and Chivens Cassegrain reflector (purchased in 1970), in an Ash dome. The Observatory sits just below the summit ridge, at an elevation of approximately 6300 feet. Our instrumentation includes an Op-Tec SSP-5A photoelectric photometer and an SBIG ST-9E CCD camera. We have the only undergraduate astronomy major in the state (technically a physics major with an astronomy option), so our Observatory is an important component of our students' education. Students have recently carried out observing projects on the photometry of variable stars and color photometry of open clusters and OB associations. In my poster I will show some of the data collected by students in their observing projects. The Observatory is also used for public open houses during the summer months, and these have become very popular: at times we have had 300 visitors in a single night.

  2. Monitoring biological control agents and leafy spurge populations along the Smith River in Montana, USA

    Science.gov (United States)

    J. Birdsall; G. Markin; T. Kalaris; J. Runyon

    2013-01-01

    The Smith River originates in west central Montana and flows north approximately 100 miles before joining the Missouri River. The central 60 miles of the river flows through a relatively inaccessible, forested, scenic limestone canyon famous for its trout fishing. Because of its popularity, the area was designated Montana's first and only controlled river, with...

  3. Comprehending non-native speakers: theory and evidence for adjustment in manner of processing.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lev-Ari, Shiri

    2014-01-01

    Non-native speakers have lower linguistic competence than native speakers, which renders their language less reliable in conveying their intentions. We suggest that expectations of lower competence lead listeners to adapt their manner of processing when they listen to non-native speakers. We propose that listeners use cognitive resources to adjust by increasing their reliance on top-down processes and extracting less information from the language of the non-native speaker. An eye-tracking study supports our proposal by showing that when following instructions by a non-native speaker, listeners make more contextually-induced interpretations. Those with relatively high working memory also increase their reliance on context to anticipate the speaker's upcoming reference, and are less likely to notice lexical errors in the non-native speech, indicating that they take less information from the speaker's language. These results contribute to our understanding of the flexibility in language processing and have implications for interactions between native and non-native speakers.

  4. Role of Speaker Cues in Attention Inference

    OpenAIRE

    Jin Joo Lee; Cynthia Breazeal; David DeSteno

    2017-01-01

    Current state-of-the-art approaches to emotion recognition primarily focus on modeling the nonverbal expressions of the sole individual without reference to contextual elements such as the co-presence of the partner. In this paper, we demonstrate that the accurate inference of listeners’ social-emotional state of attention depends on accounting for the nonverbal behaviors of their storytelling partner, namely their speaker cues. To gain a deeper understanding of the role of speaker cues in at...

  5. Speaker recognition through NLP and CWT modeling.

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Brown-VanHoozer, A.; Kercel, S. W.; Tucker, R. W.

    1999-06-23

    The objective of this research is to develop a system capable of identifying speakers on wiretaps from a large database (>500 speakers) with a short search time duration (<30 seconds), and with better than 90% accuracy. Much previous research in speaker recognition has led to algorithms that produced encouraging preliminary results, but were overwhelmed when applied to populations of more than a dozen or so different speakers. The authors are investigating a solution to the ''huge population'' problem by seeking two completely different kinds of characterizing features. These features are extracted using the techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). NLP extracts precise neurological, verbal and non-verbal information, and assimilates the information into useful patterns. These patterns are based on specific cues demonstrated by each individual, and provide ways of determining congruency between verbal and non-verbal cues. The primary NLP modalities are characterized through word spotting (or verbal predicates cues, e.g., see, sound, feel, etc.) while the secondary modalities would be characterized through the speech transcription used by the individual. This has the practical effect of reducing the size of the search space, and greatly speeding up the process of identifying an unknown speaker. The wavelet-based line of investigation concentrates on using vowel phonemes and non-verbal cues, such as tempo. The rationale for concentrating on vowels is there are a limited number of vowels phonemes, and at least one of them usually appears in even the shortest of speech segments. Using the fast, CWT algorithm, the details of both the formant frequency and the glottal excitation characteristics can be easily extracted from voice waveforms. The differences in the glottal excitation waveforms as well as the formant frequency are evident in the CWT output. More significantly, the CWT reveals significant

  6. Race in Conflict with Heritage: "Black" Heritage Language Speaker of Japanese

    Science.gov (United States)

    Doerr, Neriko Musha; Kumagai, Yuri

    2014-01-01

    "Heritage language speaker" is a relatively new term to denote minority language speakers who grew up in a household where the language was used or those who have a family, ancestral, or racial connection to the minority language. In research on heritage language speakers, overlap between these 2 definitions is often assumed--that is,…

  7. Are Cantonese-speakers really descriptivists? Revisiting cross-cultural semantics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lam, Barry

    2010-05-01

    In an article in Cognition [Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). Semantics cross-cultural style. Cognition, 92, B1-B12] present data which purports to show that East Asian Cantonese-speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while Western English-speakers tend to have causal-historical intuitions about proper names. Machery et al. take this finding to support the view that some intuitions, the universality of which they claim is central to philosophical theories, vary according to cultural background. Machery et al. conclude from their findings that the philosophical methodology of consulting intuitions about hypothetical cases is flawed vis a vis the goal of determining truths about some philosophical domains like philosophical semantics. In the following study, three new vignettes in English were given to Western native English-speakers, and Cantonese translations were given to native Cantonese-speaking immigrants from a Cantonese community in Southern California. For all three vignettes, questions were given to elicit intuitions about the referent of a proper name and the truth-value of an uttered sentence containing a proper name. The results from this study reveal that East Asian Cantonese-speakers do not differ from Western English-speakers in ways that support Machery et al.'s conclusions. This new data concerning the intuitions of Cantonese-speakers raises questions about whether cross-cultural variation in answers to questions on certain vignettes reveal genuine differences in intuitions, or whether such differences stem from non-intuitional differences, such as differences in linguistic competence. Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  8. Analysis of human scream and its impact on text-independent speaker verification.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hansen, John H L; Nandwana, Mahesh Kumar; Shokouhi, Navid

    2017-04-01

    Scream is defined as sustained, high-energy vocalizations that lack phonological structure. Lack of phonological structure is how scream is identified from other forms of loud vocalization, such as "yell." This study investigates the acoustic aspects of screams and addresses those that are known to prevent standard speaker identification systems from recognizing the identity of screaming speakers. It is well established that speaker variability due to changes in vocal effort and Lombard effect contribute to degraded performance in automatic speech systems (i.e., speech recognition, speaker identification, diarization, etc.). However, previous research in the general area of speaker variability has concentrated on human speech production, whereas less is known about non-speech vocalizations. The UT-NonSpeech corpus is developed here to investigate speaker verification from scream samples. This study considers a detailed analysis in terms of fundamental frequency, spectral peak shift, frame energy distribution, and spectral tilt. It is shown that traditional speaker recognition based on the Gaussian mixture models-universal background model framework is unreliable when evaluated with screams.

  9. Robust Digital Speech Watermarking For Online Speaker Recognition

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mohammad Ali Nematollahi

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available A robust and blind digital speech watermarking technique has been proposed for online speaker recognition systems based on Discrete Wavelet Packet Transform (DWPT and multiplication to embed the watermark in the amplitudes of the wavelet’s subbands. In order to minimize the degradation effect of the watermark, these subbands are selected where less speaker-specific information was available (500 Hz–3500 Hz and 6000 Hz–7000 Hz. Experimental results on Texas Instruments Massachusetts Institute of Technology (TIMIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, and Mobile Biometry (MOBIO show that the degradation for speaker verification and identification is 1.16% and 2.52%, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed watermark technique can provide enough robustness against different signal processing attacks.

  10. Northwest Montana Wildlife Mitigation Habitat Protection : Advance Design : Final Report.

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Wood, Marilyn A.

    1993-02-01

    This report summarizes the habitat protection process developed to mitigate for certain wildlife and wildlife habitat losses due to construction of Hungry Horse and Libby dams in northwestern Montana.

  11. Collaborative work between the West and Asia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hser, Yih-Ing; Bart, Gavin; Li, Li; Giang, Le Minh

    2013-12-01

    The "Collaborative Work between the West and Asia" session was chaired by Dr. Yih-Ing Hser and had three speakers. The speakers (and their topics) were: Dr. Gavin Bart (Collaborative Addiction Research in Asian Populations Home and Abroad), Dr. Li Li (Implementing Intervention Research Projects in Asia), and Dr. Le Minh Giang (Building Research Infrastructure for International Collaborative Studies on Substance Use Disorder and HIV: The Case of Hanoi Medical University/Vietnam).

  12. A Joint Approach for Single-Channel Speaker Identification and Speech Separation

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Mowlaee, Pejman; Saeidi, Rahim; Christensen, Mads Græsbøll

    2012-01-01

    ) accuracy, here, we report the objective and subjective results as well. The results show that the proposed system performs as well as the best of the state-of-the-art in terms of perceived quality while its performance in terms of speaker identification and automatic speech recognition results......In this paper, we present a novel system for joint speaker identification and speech separation. For speaker identification a single-channel speaker identification algorithm is proposed which provides an estimate of signal-to-signal ratio (SSR) as a by-product. For speech separation, we propose...... a sinusoidal model-based algorithm. The speech separation algorithm consists of a double-talk/single-talk detector followed by a minimum mean square error estimator of sinusoidal parameters for finding optimal codevectors from pre-trained speaker codebooks. In evaluating the proposed system, we start from...

  13. A Study on Metadiscoursive Interaction in the MA Theses of the Native Speakers of English and the Turkish Speakers of English

    Science.gov (United States)

    Köroglu, Zehra; Tüm, Gülden

    2017-01-01

    This study has been conducted to evaluate the TM usage in the MA theses written by the native speakers (NSs) of English and the Turkish speakers (TSs) of English. The purpose is to compare the TM usage in the introduction, results and discussion, and conclusion sections by both groups' randomly selected MA theses in the field of ELT between the…

  14. Speaker Recognition from Emotional Speech Using I-vector Approach

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    MACKOVÁ Lenka

    2014-05-01

    Full Text Available In recent years the concept of i-vectors become very popular and successful in the field of the speaker verification. The basic principle of i-vectors is that each utterance is represented by fixed-length feature vector of low-dimension. In the literature for purpose of speaker verification various recordings obtained from telephones or microphones were used. The aim of this experiment was to perform speaker verification using speaker model trained with emotional recordings on i-vector basis. The Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC, log energy, their deltas and acceleration coefficients were used in process of features extraction. As the classification methods of the verification system Mahalanobis distance metric in combination with Eigen Factor Radial normalization was used and in the second approach Cosine Distance Scoring (CSS metric with Within-class Covariance Normalization as a channel compensation was employed. This verification system used emotional recordings of male subjects from freely available German emotional database (Emo-DB.

  15. Segmentation of the Speaker's Face Region with Audiovisual Correlation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Yuyu; Sato, Yoichi

    The ability to find the speaker's face region in a video is useful for various applications. In this work, we develop a novel technique to find this region within different time windows, which is robust against the changes of view, scale, and background. The main thrust of our technique is to integrate audiovisual correlation analysis into a video segmentation framework. We analyze the audiovisual correlation locally by computing quadratic mutual information between our audiovisual features. The computation of quadratic mutual information is based on the probability density functions estimated by kernel density estimation with adaptive kernel bandwidth. The results of this audiovisual correlation analysis are incorporated into graph cut-based video segmentation to resolve a globally optimum extraction of the speaker's face region. The setting of any heuristic threshold in this segmentation is avoided by learning the correlation distributions of speaker and background by expectation maximization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can detect the speaker's face region accurately and robustly for different views, scales, and backgrounds.

  16. The TNO speaker diarization system for NIST RT05s meeting data

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Leeuwen, D.A. van

    2006-01-01

    The TNO speaker speaker diarization system is based on a standard BIC segmentation and clustering algorithm. Since for the NIST Rich Transcription speaker dizarization evaluation measure correct speech detection appears to be essential, we have developed a speech activity detector (SAD) as well.

  17. A fundamental residue pitch perception bias for tone language speakers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Petitti, Elizabeth

    A complex tone composed of only higher-order harmonics typically elicits a pitch percept equivalent to the tone's missing fundamental frequency (f0). When judging the direction of residue pitch change between two such tones, however, listeners may have completely opposite perceptual experiences depending on whether they are biased to perceive changes based on the overall spectrum or the missing f0 (harmonic spacing). Individual differences in residue pitch change judgments are reliable and have been associated with musical experience and functional neuroanatomy. Tone languages put greater pitch processing demands on their speakers than non-tone languages, and we investigated whether these lifelong differences in linguistic pitch processing affect listeners' bias for residue pitch. We asked native tone language speakers and native English speakers to perform a pitch judgment task for two tones with missing fundamental frequencies. Given tone pairs with ambiguous pitch changes, listeners were asked to judge the direction of pitch change, where the direction of their response indicated whether they attended to the overall spectrum (exhibiting a spectral bias) or the missing f0 (exhibiting a fundamental bias). We found that tone language speakers are significantly more likely to perceive pitch changes based on the missing f0 than English speakers. These results suggest that tone-language speakers' privileged experience with linguistic pitch fundamentally tunes their basic auditory processing.

  18. Montana Highway Safety Improvement Program : an RSPCB Peer Exchange

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-05-01

    This report provides a summary of a peer-to-peer (P2P) videoconference sponsored by the : Montana Department of Transportation (MDT) and the Federal Highway Administration : (FHWA) Office of Safety. The videoconference format provided a low-cost oppo...

  19. Inflammatory Process Modulation by Homeopathic Arnica montana 6CH: The Role of Individual Variation

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ana Paula Kawakami

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available The effects of Arnica montana 6cH on the individual modulation of acute inflammation kinetics in rats were evaluated. Adult male Wistar rats were inoculated with 1% carrageenan into the footpad and treated with Arnica montana 6cH, dexamethasone (4.0 mg/kg; positive control or 5% hydroalcoholic solution (negative control, per os, each 15 minutes, between 30 and 180 minutes after the irritant inoculation. Histopathological and immunohistochemistry procedures were done in order to get a panel of inflammatory positive cells for CD3 (T lymphocytes, CD45RA (B lymphocytes, CD18 (beta 2 integrin, CD163 (ED2 protein, CD54 (ICAM-1, and MAC 387 (monocytes and macrophages. The statistical treatment of data included a posteriori classification of animals from each group (N=20 in two subgroups presenting spontaneous precocious or late oedema. Animals that presented precocious oedema were less responsible to Arnica montana 6cH in relation to hemodynamic changes. Instead, rats that exhibited late oedema presented less intense oedema (P=.01, lower percentage of mast cell degranulation (P=.0001, and increase in lymphatic vessels diameter (P=.05. The data suggest an individually qualitative adjustment of inflammatory vascular events by Arnica montana 6cH.

  20. Internal request modification by first and second language speakers ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    This study focuses on the question of whether Luganda English speakers would negatively transfer into their English speech the use of syntactic and lexical down graders resulting in pragmatic failure. Data were collected from Luganda and Luganda English speakers by means of a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) ...

  1. Speaker Input Variability Does Not Explain Why Larger Populations Have Simpler Languages.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Atkinson, Mark; Kirby, Simon; Smith, Kenny

    2015-01-01

    A learner's linguistic input is more variable if it comes from a greater number of speakers. Higher speaker input variability has been shown to facilitate the acquisition of phonemic boundaries, since data drawn from multiple speakers provides more information about the distribution of phonemes in a speech community. It has also been proposed that speaker input variability may have a systematic influence on individual-level learning of morphology, which can in turn influence the group-level characteristics of a language. Languages spoken by larger groups of people have less complex morphology than those spoken in smaller communities. While a mechanism by which the number of speakers could have such an effect is yet to be convincingly identified, differences in speaker input variability, which is thought to be larger in larger groups, may provide an explanation. By hindering the acquisition, and hence faithful cross-generational transfer, of complex morphology, higher speaker input variability may result in structural simplification. We assess this claim in two experiments which investigate the effect of such variability on language learning, considering its influence on a learner's ability to segment a continuous speech stream and acquire a morphologically complex miniature language. We ultimately find no evidence to support the proposal that speaker input variability influences language learning and so cannot support the hypothesis that it explains how population size determines the structural properties of language.

  2. Alleloppathic effects and insecticidal activity of the aqueous extract of Satureja montana L.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Šućur Jovana

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available Extensive use of synthetic insecticides, herbicides and other pesticides has negative effects on the environment and on human and animal health. Therefore scientists are turning towards natural pesticides such as active components of plant extracts. Effect of two concentrations (0.1% and 0.2% of Satureja montana L. aqueous extract on lipid peroxidation process, as well as the activity of the antioxidant enzymes (SOD, GPX, PPX and CAT in leaves and roots of pepper and black nightshade seedlings were examined 24, 72 and 120h after the treatment. Our results showed that higher concentration of S. montana aqueous extract induced lipid peroxidation in black nightshade roots. Furthermore, significant increases of pyrogallol and guaiacol peroxidase were detected in black nightshade leaves treated with 0.2% S. montana aqueous extract. The second aim was to evaluate effectiveness of aqueous extract as contact toxicant against whitefly. It was observed that aqueous extract with concentration of 0.2% showed toxic effect with 68.33% mortality after 96h.

  3. Signal-to-Signal Ratio Independent Speaker Identification for Co-channel Speech Signals

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Saeidi, Rahim; Mowlaee, Pejman; Kinnunen, Tomi

    2010-01-01

    In this paper, we consider speaker identification for the co-channel scenario in which speech mixture from speakers is recorded by one microphone only. The goal is to identify both of the speakers from their mixed signal. High recognition accuracies have already been reported when an accurately...

  4. Does verbatim sentence recall underestimate the language competence of near-native speakers?

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Judith eSchweppe

    2015-02-01

    Full Text Available Verbatim sentence recall is widely used to test the language competence of native and non-native speakers since it involves comprehension and production of connected speech. However, we assume that, to maintain surface information, sentence recall relies particularly on attentional resources, which differentially affects native and non-native speakers. Since even in near-natives language processing is less automatized than in native speakers, processing a sentence in a foreign language plus retaining its surface may result in a cognitive overload. We contrasted sentence recall performance of German native speakers with that of highly proficient non-natives. Non-natives recalled the sentences significantly poorer than the natives, but performed equally well on a cloze test. This implies that sentence recall underestimates the language competence of good non-native speakers in mixed groups with native speakers. The findings also suggest that theories of sentence recall need to consider both its linguistic and its attentional aspects.

  5. 75 FR 50930 - Final Determination To Approve Alternative Final Cover Request for the Lake County, Montana Landfill

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-08-18

    ... Determination To Approve Alternative Final Cover Request for the Lake County, Montana Landfill AGENCY... VIII is making a final determination to approve an alternative final cover for the Lake County landfill, a municipal solid waste landfill (MSWLF) owned and operated by Lake County, Montana on the...

  6. Are Cantonese-Speakers Really Descriptivists? Revisiting Cross-Cultural Semantics

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lam, Barry

    2010-01-01

    In an article in "Cognition" [Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). "Semantics cross-cultural style." "Cognition, 92", B1-B12] present data which purports to show that East Asian Cantonese-speakers tend to have descriptivist intuitions about the referents of proper names, while Western English-speakers tend to have…

  7. Utilising Tree-Based Ensemble Learning for Speaker Segmentation

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Abou-Zleikha, Mohamed; Tan, Zheng-Hua; Christensen, Mads Græsbøll

    2014-01-01

    In audio and speech processing, accurate detection of the changing points between multiple speakers in speech segments is an important stage for several applications such as speaker identification and tracking. Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC)-based approaches are the most traditionally used...... for a certain condition, the model becomes biased to the data used for training limiting the model’s generalisation ability. In this paper, we propose a BIC-based tuning-free approach for speaker segmentation through the use of ensemble-based learning. A forest of segmentation trees is constructed in which each...... tree is trained using a sampled version of the speech segment. During the tree construction process, a set of randomly selected points in the input sequence is examined as potential segmentation points. The point that yields the highest ΔBIC is chosen and the same process is repeated for the resultant...

  8. Teaching Portuguese to Spanish Speakers: A Case for Trilingualism

    Science.gov (United States)

    Carvalho, Ana M.; Freire, Juliana Luna; da Silva, Antonio J. B.

    2010-01-01

    Portuguese is the sixth-most-spoken native language in the world, with approximately 240,000,000 speakers. Within the United States, there is a growing demand for K-12 language programs to engage the community of Portuguese heritage speakers. According to the 2000 U.S. census, 85,000 school-age children speak Portuguese at home. As a result, more…

  9. Speaker diarization system on the 2007 NIST rich transcription meeting recognition evaluation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sun, Hanwu; Nwe, Tin Lay; Koh, Eugene Chin Wei; Bin, Ma; Li, Haizhou

    2007-09-01

    This paper presents a speaker diarization system developed at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) for NIST Rich Transcription 2007 (RT-07) evaluation task. We describe in details our primary approaches for the speaker diarization on the Multiple Distant Microphones (MDM) conditions in conference room scenario. Our proposed system consists of six modules: 1). Least-mean squared (NLMS) adaptive filter for the speaker direction estimate via Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA), 2). An initial speaker clustering via two-stage TDOA histogram distribution quantization approach, 3). Multiple microphone speaker data alignment via GCC-PHAT Time Delay Estimate (TDE) among all the distant microphone channel signals, 4). A speaker clustering algorithm based on GMM modeling approach, 5). Non-speech removal via speech/non-speech verification mechanism and, 6). Silence removal via "Double-Layer Windowing"(DLW) method. We achieves error rate of 31.02% on the 2006 Spring (RT-06s) MDM evaluation task and a competitive overall error rate of 15.32% for the NIST Rich Transcription 2007 (RT-07) MDM evaluation task.

  10. CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY. EXAMPLE ROSIA MONTANA GOLD CORPORATION

    OpenAIRE

    Vasile Burja; Silvia – Stefania Mihalache

    2010-01-01

    Corporate Social Responsibility, a concept without a world accepted definition is starting to beused in Romania as well. This is the reason why in the present article we try to make a theoreticaldescription of the present concept and to exemplify it by presenting the responsible activities of acorporation in Romania, Rosia Montana Gold Corporation.

  11. In Memoriam: Dr. Frank John Fenner

    Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Podcasts

    This podcast reflects on one of the greatest pioneers in virology, Dr. Frank John Fenner. Dr. Frederick Murphy, a member of EID's editorial board and the Institute of Medicine, and professor of Pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, shares professional and personal stories of Dr. Frank Fenner.

  12. Phytochemical profile and anticholinesterase and antimicrobial activities of supercritical versus conventional extracts of Satureja montana.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Silva, Filipa V M; Martins, Alice; Salta, Joana; Neng, Nuno R; Nogueira, José M F; Mira, Delfina; Gaspar, Natália; Justino, Jorge; Grosso, Clara; Urieta, José S; Palavra, António M S; Rauter, Amélia P

    2009-12-23

    Winter savory Satureja montana is a medicinal herb used in traditional gastronomy for seasoning meats and salads. This study reports a comparison between conventional (hydrodistillation, HD, and Soxhlet extraction, SE) and alternative (supercritical fluid extraction, SFE) extraction methods to assess the best option to obtain bioactive compounds. Two different types of extracts were tested, the volatile (SFE-90 bar, second separator vs HD) and the nonvolatile fractions (SFE-250 bar, first and second separator vs SE). The inhibitory activity over acetyl- and butyrylcholinesterase by S. montana extracts was assessed as a potential indicator for the control of Alzheimer's disease. The supercritical nonvolatile fractions, which showed the highest content of (+)-catechin, chlorogenic, vanillic, and protocatechuic acids, also inhibited selectively and significantly butyrylcholinesterase, whereas the nonvolatile conventional extract did not affect this enzyme. Microbial susceptibility tests revealed the great potential of S. montana volatile supercritical fluid extract for the growth control and inactivation of Bacillus subtilis and Bacillus cereus, showing some activity against Botrytis spp. and Pyricularia oryzae. Although some studies were carried out on S. montana, the phytochemical analysis together with the biological properties, namely, the anticholinesterase and antimicrobial activities of the plant nonvolatile and volatile supercritical fluid extracts, are described herein for the first time.

  13. Forest succession on four habitat types in western Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stephen F. Arno; Dennis G. Simmerman; Robert E. Keane

    1985-01-01

    Presents classifications of successional community types on four major forest habitat types in western Montana. Classifications show the sequences of seral community types developing after stand-replacing wildfire and clearcutting with broadcast burning, mechanical scarification, or no followup treatment. Information is provided for associating vegetational response to...

  14. Speaker Introductions at Internal Medicine Grand Rounds: Forms of Address Reveal Gender Bias.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Files, Julia A; Mayer, Anita P; Ko, Marcia G; Friedrich, Patricia; Jenkins, Marjorie; Bryan, Michael J; Vegunta, Suneela; Wittich, Christopher M; Lyle, Melissa A; Melikian, Ryan; Duston, Trevor; Chang, Yu-Hui H; Hayes, Sharonne N

    2017-05-01

    Gender bias has been identified as one of the drivers of gender disparity in academic medicine. Bias may be reinforced by gender subordinating language or differential use of formality in forms of address. Professional titles may influence the perceived expertise and authority of the referenced individual. The objective of this study is to examine how professional titles were used in the same and mixed-gender speaker introductions at Internal Medicine Grand Rounds (IMGR). A retrospective observational study of video-archived speaker introductions at consecutive IMGR was conducted at two different locations (Arizona, Minnesota) of an academic medical center. Introducers and speakers at IMGR were physician and scientist peers holding MD, PhD, or MD/PhD degrees. The primary outcome was whether or not a speaker's professional title was used during the first form of address during speaker introductions at IMGR. As secondary outcomes, we evaluated whether or not the speakers professional title was used in any form of address during the introduction. Three hundred twenty-one forms of address were analyzed. Female introducers were more likely to use professional titles when introducing any speaker during the first form of address compared with male introducers (96.2% [102/106] vs. 65.6% [141/215]; p form of address 97.8% (45/46) compared with male dyads who utilized a formal title 72.4% (110/152) of the time (p = 0.007). In mixed-gender dyads, where the introducer was female and speaker male, formal titles were used 95.0% (57/60) of the time. Male introducers of female speakers utilized professional titles 49.2% (31/63) of the time (p addressed by professional title than were men introduced by men. Differential formality in speaker introductions may amplify isolation, marginalization, and professional discomfiture expressed by women faculty in academic medicine.

  15. Shhh… I Need Quiet! Children's Understanding of American, British, and Japanese-accented English Speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bent, Tessa; Holt, Rachael Frush

    2018-02-01

    Children's ability to understand speakers with a wide range of dialects and accents is essential for efficient language development and communication in a global society. Here, the impact of regional dialect and foreign-accent variability on children's speech understanding was evaluated in both quiet and noisy conditions. Five- to seven-year-old children ( n = 90) and adults ( n = 96) repeated sentences produced by three speakers with different accents-American English, British English, and Japanese-accented English-in quiet or noisy conditions. Adults had no difficulty understanding any speaker in quiet conditions. Their performance declined for the nonnative speaker with a moderate amount of noise; their performance only substantially declined for the British English speaker (i.e., below 93% correct) when their understanding of the American English speaker was also impeded. In contrast, although children showed accurate word recognition for the American and British English speakers in quiet conditions, they had difficulty understanding the nonnative speaker even under ideal listening conditions. With a moderate amount of noise, their perception of British English speech declined substantially and their ability to understand the nonnative speaker was particularly poor. These results suggest that although school-aged children can understand unfamiliar native dialects under ideal listening conditions, their ability to recognize words in these dialects may be highly susceptible to the influence of environmental degradation. Fully adult-like word identification for speakers with unfamiliar accents and dialects may exhibit a protracted developmental trajectory.

  16. 95 GHz methanol masers near DR 21 and DR 21(OH)

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Plambeck, R.L.; Menten, K.M.

    1990-01-01

    The BIMA array is used to map the 95-GHz 8(0) to 7 1A(+) transition of methanol and the 98-GHz J = 2-1 transition of CS toward the DR 21(OH) and DR 21 star-forming regions. Several strong methanol masers were found. The positions of the two brightest masers were measured with an accuracy of about + or - 0.3 arcsec. Toward DR 21(OH), the positions, velocities, and line shapes of the 95 GHz masers are in excellent agreement with those of the 84-GHz 5(-1) to 4 () methanol masers previously mapped by Batrla and Menten (1988), demonstrating that maser emission in both transitions originates from the same clumps of gas. The methanol masers are offset from CS emission peaks and from other known infrared and maser sources; they may possibly be clustered along the interface between outflows, traced by shock-excited H2 emission, and dense ambient gas, traced by CS emission. 25 refs

  17. Assessment of coal geology, resources, and reserves in the Montana Powder River Basin

    Science.gov (United States)

    Haacke, Jon E.; Scott, David C.; Osmonson, Lee M.; Luppens, James A.; Pierce, Paul E.; Gunderson, Jay A.

    2013-01-01

    The purpose of this report is to summarize geology, coal resources, and coal reserves in the Montana Powder River Basin assessment area in southeastern Montana. This report represents the fourth assessment area within the Powder River Basin to be evaluated in the continuing U.S. Geological Survey regional coal assessment program. There are four active coal mines in the Montana Powder River Basin assessment area: the Spring Creek and Decker Mines, both near Decker; the Rosebud Mine, near Colstrip; and the Absaloka Mine, west of Colstrip. During 2011, coal production from these four mines totaled approximately 36 million short tons. A fifth mine, the Big Sky, had significant production from 1969-2003; however, it is no longer in production and has since been reclaimed. Total coal production from all five mines in the Montana Powder River Basin assessment area from 1968 to 2011 was approximately 1.4 billion short tons. The Rosebud/Knobloch coal bed near Colstrip and the Anderson, Dietz 2, and Dietz 3 coal beds near Decker contain the largest deposits of surface minable, low-sulfur, subbituminous coal currently being mined in the assessment area. A total of 26 coal beds were identified during this assessment, 18 of which were modeled and evaluated to determine in-place coal resources. The total original coal resource in the Montana Powder River Basin assessment area for the 18 coal beds assessed was calculated to be 215 billion short tons. Available coal resources, which are part of the original coal resource remaining after subtracting restrictions and areas of burned coal, are about 162 billion short tons. Restrictions included railroads, Federal interstate highways, urban areas, alluvial valley floors, state parks, national forests, and mined-out areas. It was determined that 10 of the 18 coal beds had sufficient areal extent and thickness to be evaluated for recoverable surface resources ([Roland (Baker), Smith, Anderson, Dietz 2, Dietz 3, Canyon, Werner

  18. Dr Stanislaw Huskowski, Mayor of Wroclaw, Poland

    CERN Multimedia

    Patrice Loïez

    2002-01-01

    Dr Stanislaw Huskowski, Mayor of Wroclaw, Poland visiting the ATLAS magnet assembly hall, building 180 with Mr Carlo Lamprecht, State Councillor, Dr Stanislaw Huskowski and Dr Peter Jenni, ATLAS Spokesperson

  19. NPDES Permit for Crow Nation Water Treatment Plants in Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Under NPDES permit MT-0030538, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs is authorized to discharge from the Crow Agency water treatment plants via the wastewater treatment facility located in Bighorn County, Montana to the Little Bighorn River.

  20. Google Home: smart speaker as environmental control unit.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Noda, Kenichiro

    2017-08-23

    Environmental Control Units (ECU) are devices or a system that allows a person to control appliances in their home or work environment. Such system can be utilized by clients with physical and/or functional disability to enhance their ability to control their environment, to promote independence and improve their quality of life. Over the last several years, there have been an emergence of several inexpensive, commercially-available, voice activated smart speakers into the market such as Google Home and Amazon Echo. These smart speakers are equipped with far field microphone that supports voice recognition, and allows for complete hand-free operation for various purposes, including for playing music, for information retrieval, and most importantly, for environmental control. Clients with disability could utilize these features to turn the unit into a simple ECU that is completely voice activated and wirelessly connected to appliances. Smart speakers, with their ease of setup, low cost and versatility, may be a more affordable and accessible alternative to the traditional ECU. Implications for Rehabilitation Environmental Control Units (ECU) enable independence for physically and functionally disabled clients, and reduce burden and frequency of demands on carers. Traditional ECU can be costly and may require clients to learn specialized skills to use. Smart speakers have the potential to be used as a new-age ECU by overcoming these barriers, and can be used by a wider range of clients.

  1. Montana Rivers Information System : Edit/Entry Program User's Manual.

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    United States. Bonneville Power Administration; Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks

    1992-07-01

    The Montana Rivers Information System (MRIS) was initiated to assess the state`s fish, wildlife, and recreation value; and natural cultural, and geologic features. The MRIS is now a set of data bases containing part of the information in the Natural Heritage Program natural features and threatened and endangered species data bases and comprises of the Montana Interagency Stream Fisheries Database; the MDFWP Recreation Database; and the MDFWP Wildlife Geographic Information System. The purpose of this User`s Manual is to describe to the user how to maintain the MRIS database of their choice by updating, changing, deleting, and adding records using the edit/entry programs; and to provide to the user all information and instructions necessary to complete data entry into the MRIS databases.

  2. A general auditory bias for handling speaker variability in speech? Evidence in humans and songbirds

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Buddhamas eKriengwatana

    2015-08-01

    Full Text Available Different speakers produce the same speech sound differently, yet listeners are still able to reliably identify the speech sound. How listeners can adjust their perception to compensate for speaker differences in speech, and whether these compensatory processes are unique only to humans, is still not fully understood. In this study we compare the ability of humans and zebra finches to categorize vowels despite speaker variation in speech in order to test the hypothesis that accommodating speaker and gender differences in isolated vowels can be achieved without prior experience with speaker-related variability. Using a behavioural Go/No-go task and identical stimuli, we compared Australian English adults’ (naïve to Dutch and zebra finches’ (naïve to human speech ability to categorize /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ vowels of an novel Dutch speaker after learning to discriminate those vowels from only one other speaker. Experiment 1 and 2 presented vowels of two speakers interspersed or blocked, respectively. Results demonstrate that categorization of vowels is possible without prior exposure to speaker-related variability in speech for zebra finches, and in non-native vowel categories for humans. Therefore, this study is the first to provide evidence for what might be a species-shared auditory bias that may supersede speaker-related information during vowel categorization. It additionally provides behavioural evidence contradicting a prior hypothesis that accommodation of speaker differences is achieved via the use of formant ratios. Therefore, investigations of alternative accounts of vowel normalization that incorporate the possibility of an auditory bias for disregarding inter-speaker variability are warranted.

  3. 78 FR 65703 - Notice of Availability of the Idaho and Southwestern Montana Greater Sage-Grouse Draft Land Use...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2013-11-01

    ...] Notice of Availability of the Idaho and Southwestern Montana Greater Sage-Grouse Draft Land Use Plan... Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for managing Greater Sage- Grouse (GRSG) in the Idaho and Southwestern... Southwestern Montana Greater Sage-Grouse Draft LUP Amendments/Draft EIS by any of the following methods: Email...

  4. Presenting and processing information in background noise: A combined speaker-listener perspective.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bockstael, Annelies; Samyn, Laurie; Corthals, Paul; Botteldooren, Dick

    2018-01-01

    Transferring information orally in background noise is challenging, for both speaker and listener. Successful transfer depends on complex interaction between characteristics related to listener, speaker, task, background noise, and context. To fully assess the underlying real-life mechanisms, experimental design has to mimic this complex reality. In the current study, the effects of different types of background noise have been studied in an ecologically valid test design. Documentary-style information had to be presented by the speaker and simultaneously acquired by the listener in four conditions: quiet, unintelligible multitalker babble, fluctuating city street noise, and little varying highway noise. For both speaker and listener, the primary task was to focus on the content that had to be transferred. In addition, for the speakers, the occurrence of hesitation phenomena was assessed. The listener had to perform an additional secondary task to address listening effort. For the listener the condition with the most eventful background noise, i.e., fluctuating city street noise, appeared to be the most difficult with markedly longer duration of the secondary task. In the same fluctuating background noise, speech appeared to be less disfluent, suggesting a higher level of concentration from the speaker's side.

  5. Key-note speaker: Predictors of weight loss after preventive Health consultations

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Lous, Jørgen; Freund, Kirsten S

    2018-01-01

    Invited key-note speaker ved conferencen: Preventive Medicine and Public Health Conference 2018, July 16-17, London.......Invited key-note speaker ved conferencen: Preventive Medicine and Public Health Conference 2018, July 16-17, London....

  6. Dual enrollment as a factor for women transitioning into STEM majors in Montana two-year colleges

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jakes, Penny Jane

    The purpose of this non-experimental, descriptive, quantitative study was to describe the impact high school dual enrollment coursework has had on initial enrollment of women with STEM majors in Montana two-year colleges. The study was designed to find whether or not differences existed for access (initial enrollment), persistence (to third semester), and success (associate's degree, certificate, or transfer to a four-year institution within 150% of program length). The literature review highlighted the need for studies to address the issue of few women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations. One goal of dual enrollment in Montana is to ease transitions from high school to college, including underrepresented populations such as women in STEM fields. The scope of this study was to collect, organize, and interpret data to describe the effect of that effort for women enrolling in STEM majors at two-year colleges in Montana. Baseline information established the demographics of young women who participated in dual enrollment in Montana high schools during 2007-2009. Data analysis described results using attributes of gender, dual enrollment, access, persistence, and success for those enrolled in STEM fields. Results indicated more young women than young men take advantage of dual enrollment in high school and more women than men with dual-enrollment credit initially enroll in college. More men than women major in a STEM field and more men persist and graduate within the STEM fields. Data indicated that 221 students enrolled in a Montana two-year college with DE/DC credit during 2007-2009. Of those, eight women chose STEM majors, six persisted to the third semester, and two completed. It is recommended that a mixed-methods study be conducted to give a deeper level of understanding for enrollment trends and career choice. Longitudinal studies should also be conducted as dual enrollment grows within the state of Montana. Further studies

  7. Dr Stanislaw Huskowski, Mayor of Wroclaw, Poland

    CERN Multimedia

    Patrice Loïez

    2002-01-01

    Dr Stanislaw Huskowski, Mayor of Wroclaw, Poland visiting the ATLAS magnet assembly hall, building 180. From l to r: Mr Carlo Lamprecht, State Councillor, Dr Stanislaw Huskowski and Dr Peter Jenni, ATLAS Spokesperson

  8. Automaticity and stability of adaptation to a foreign-accented speaker

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Witteman, M.J.; Bardhan, N.P.; Weber, A.C.; McQueen, J.M.

    2015-01-01

    In three cross-modal priming experiments we asked whether adaptation to a foreign-accented speaker is automatic, and whether adaptation can be seen after a long delay between initial exposure and test. Dutch listeners were exposed to a Hebrew-accented Dutch speaker with two types of Dutch words:

  9. Dysprosody and Stimulus Effects in Cantonese Speakers with Parkinson's Disease

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ma, Joan K.-Y.; Whitehill, Tara; Cheung, Katherine S.-K.

    2010-01-01

    Background: Dysprosody is a common feature in speakers with hypokinetic dysarthria. However, speech prosody varies across different types of speech materials. This raises the question of what is the most appropriate speech material for the evaluation of dysprosody. Aims: To characterize the prosodic impairment in Cantonese speakers with…

  10. Profiles of an Acquisition Generation: Nontraditional Heritage Speakers of Spanish

    Science.gov (United States)

    DeFeo, Dayna Jean

    2018-01-01

    Though definitions vary, the literature on heritage speakers of Spanish identifies two primary attributes: a linguistic and cultural connection to the language. This article profiles four Anglo college students who grew up in bilingual or Spanish-dominant communities in the Southwest who self-identified as Spanish heritage speakers, citing…

  11. THE HUMOROUS SPEAKER: THE CONSTRUCTION OF ETHOS IN COMEDY

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Maria Flávia Figueiredo

    2016-07-01

    Full Text Available The rhetoric is guided by three dimensions: logos, pathos and ethos. Logos is the speech itself, pathos are the passions that the speaker, through logos, awakens in his audience, and ethos is the image that the speaker creates of himself, also through logos, in front of an audience. The rhetorical genres are three: deliberative (which drives the audience or the judge to think about future events, characterizing them as convenient or harmful, judiciary (the audience thinks about past events in order to classify them as fair or unfair and epidictic (the audience will judge any fact occurred, or even the character of a person as beautiful or not. According to Figueiredo (2014 and based on Eggs (2005, we advocate that ethos is not a mark left by the speaker only in rhetorical genres, but in any textual genre, once the result of human production, the simplest choices in textual construction, are able to reproduce something that is closely linked to speaker, thus, demarcating hir/her ethos. To verify this assumption, we selected a display of a video of the comedian Danilo Gentili, which will be examined in the light of Rhetoric and Textual Linguistics. So, our objective is to find, in the stand-up comedy genre, marks left by the speaker in the speech that characterizes his/her ethos. The analysis results show that ethos, discursive genre and communicational purpose amalgamate in an indissoluble complex in which the success of one of them interdepends on how the other was built.

  12. NPDES Permit for Soap Creek Associates Wastewater Treatment Facility in Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Under National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit number MT-0023183, Soap Creek Associates, Inc. is authorized to discharge from its wastewater treatment facility located in West, Bighorn County, Montana, to Soap Creek.

  13. Quantile Acoustic Vectors vs. MFCC Applied to Speaker Verification

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mayorga-Ortiz Pedro

    2014-02-01

    Full Text Available In this paper we describe speaker and command recognition related experiments, through quantile vectors and Gaussian Mixture Modelling (GMM. Over the past several years GMM and MFCC have become two of the dominant approaches for modelling speaker and speech recognition applications. However, memory and computational costs are important drawbacks, because autonomous systems suffer processing and power consumption constraints; thus, having a good trade-off between accuracy and computational requirements is mandatory. We decided to explore another approach (quantile vectors in several tasks and a comparison with MFCC was made. Quantile acoustic vectors are proposed for speaker verification and command recognition tasks and the results showed very good recognition efficiency. This method offered a good trade-off between computation times, characteristics vector complexity and overall achieved efficiency.

  14. Defining "Native Speaker" in Multilingual Settings: English as a Native Language in Asia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hansen Edwards, Jette G.

    2017-01-01

    The current study examines how and why speakers of English from multilingual contexts in Asia are identifying as native speakers of English. Eighteen participants from different contexts in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, India, Taiwan, and The Philippines, who self-identified as native speakers of English participated in hour-long interviews…

  15. Using Avatars for Improving Speaker Identification in Captioning

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vy, Quoc V.; Fels, Deborah I.

    Captioning is the main method for accessing television and film content by people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. One major difficulty consistently identified by the community is that of knowing who is speaking particularly for an off screen narrator. A captioning system was created using a participatory design method to improve speaker identification. The final prototype contained avatars and a coloured border for identifying specific speakers. Evaluation results were very positive; however participants also wanted to customize various components such as caption and avatar location.

  16. Dr Pugh: a poisoner?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Paull, J D; Morris, G M

    2012-07-01

    On 16 February 1845 the Reverend W. H. Browne, rector of St John's Church in Launceston, Van Diemen's Land, wrote in his journal, "My dear Wife died very suddenly almost immediately after and in consequence of taking a preparation of Hyd. Cyan. Acid prepared & supplied by Dr Pugh". This journal entry raises a number of questions. Was Dr Pugh treating a condition which he thought merited that treatment or was it a ghastly mistake? Was Caroline Browne suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis? Was hydrocyanic acid an accepted treatment at that time? Did Mrs Browne take the wrong dose? Was an incorrect concentration of the drug prepared by Dr Pugh? Did he use the wrong pharmacopoeia in preparing the hydrocyanic acid? Why was there no inquest? Only some of these questions can be answered.

  17. Digital Learning Compass: Distance Education State Almanac 2017. Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Seaman, Julia E.; Seaman, Jeff

    2017-01-01

    This brief report uses data collected under the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Fall Enrollment survey to highlight distance education data in the state of Montana. The sample for this analysis is comprised of all active, degree-granting…

  18. Sensitivity to phonological context in L2 spelling: evidence from Russian ESL speakers

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Dich, Nadya

    2010-01-01

    The study attempts to investigate factors underlying the development of spellers’ sensitivity to phonological context in English. Native English speakers and Russian speakers of English as a second language (ESL) were tested on their ability to use information about the coda to predict the spelling...... on the information about the coda when spelling vowels in nonwords. In both native and non-native speakers, context sensitivity was predicted by English word spelling; in Russian ESL speakers this relationship was mediated by English proficiency. L1 spelling proficiency did not facilitate L2 context sensitivity...

  19. An analysis of topics and vocabulary in Chinese oral narratives by normal speakers and speakers with fluent aphasia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Law, Sam-Po; Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Lai, Christy

    2018-01-01

    This study analysed the topic and vocabulary of Chinese speakers based on language samples of personal recounts in a large spoken Chinese database recently made available in the public domain, i.e. Cantonese AphasiaBank ( http://www.speech.hku.hk/caphbank/search/ ). The goal of the analysis is to offer clinicians a rich source for selecting ecologically valid training materials for rehabilitating Chinese-speaking people with aphasia (PWA) in the design and planning of culturally and linguistically appropriate treatments. Discourse production of 65 Chinese-speaking PWA of fluent types (henceforth, PWFA) and their non-aphasic controls narrating an important event in their life were extracted from Cantonese AphasiaBank. Analyses of topics and vocabularies in terms of part-of-speech, word frequency, lexical semantics, and diversity were conducted. There was significant overlap in topics between the two groups. While the vocabulary was larger for controls than that of PWFA as expected, they were similar in distribution across parts-of-speech, frequency of occurrence, and the ratio of concrete to abstract items in major open word classes. Moreover, proportionately more different verbs than nouns were employed at the individual level for both speaker groups. The findings provide important implications for guiding directions of aphasia rehabilitation not only of fluent but also non-fluent Chinese aphasic speakers.

  20. Revisiting vocal perception in non-human animals: a review of vowel discrimination, speaker voice recognition, and speaker normalization

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Buddhamas eKriengwatana

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available The extent to which human speech perception evolved by taking advantage of predispositions and pre-existing features of vertebrate auditory and cognitive systems remains a central question in the evolution of speech. This paper reviews asymmetries in vowel perception, speaker voice recognition, and speaker normalization in non-human animals – topics that have not been thoroughly discussed in relation to the abilities of non-human animals, but are nonetheless important aspects of vocal perception. Throughout this paper we demonstrate that addressing these issues in non-human animals is relevant and worthwhile because many non-human animals must deal with similar issues in their natural environment. That is, they must also discriminate between similar-sounding vocalizations, determine signaler identity from vocalizations, and resolve signaler-dependent variation in vocalizations from conspecifics. Overall, we find that, although plausible, the current evidence is insufficiently strong to conclude that directional asymmetries in vowel perception are specific to humans, or that non-human animals can use voice characteristics to recognize human individuals. However, we do find some indication that non-human animals can normalize speaker differences. Accordingly, we identify avenues for future research that would greatly improve and advance our understanding of these topics.

  1. Prevalence and reasons for initiating use of electronic cigarettes among adults in Montana, 2013.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schmidt, Lisa; Reidmohr, Alison; Harwell, Todd S; Helgerson, Steven D

    2014-11-20

    We used data from the 2013 Montana Adult Tobacco Survey to estimate the prevalence of electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) use and reasons for initiation among Montana adults. More than 1 in 10 (11.2%, 95% confidence interval [CI], 9.1%-13.2%) adults reported ever using e-cigarettes, and 1.3% (95% CI, 0.7%-1.9%) reported current use. Most respondents reported "trying something new" (64%) or "trying to quit or reduce cigarette use" (56%) as a reason for initiating use. Ongoing surveillance of these addictive products is needed.

  2. The Status of Native Speaker Intuitions in a Polylectal Grammar.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Debose, Charles E.

    A study of one speaker's intuitions about and performance in Black English is presented with relation to Saussure's "langue-parole" dichotomy. Native speakers of a language have intuitions about the static synchronic entities although the data of their speaking is variable and panchronic. These entities are in a diglossic relationship to each…

  3. Progress in the AMIDA speaker diarization system for meeting data

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Leeuwen, D.A. van; Konečný, M.

    2008-01-01

    In this paper we describe the AMIDA speaker dizarization system as it was submitted to the NIST Rich Transcription evaluation 2007 for conference room data. This is done in the context of the history of this system and other speaker diarization systems. One of the goals of our system is to have as

  4. Speaker and Accent Variation Are Handled Differently: Evidence in Native and Non-Native Listeners

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kriengwatana, Buddhamas; Terry, Josephine; Chládková, Kateřina; Escudero, Paola

    2016-01-01

    Listeners are able to cope with between-speaker variability in speech that stems from anatomical sources (i.e. individual and sex differences in vocal tract size) and sociolinguistic sources (i.e. accents). We hypothesized that listeners adapt to these two types of variation differently because prior work indicates that adapting to speaker/sex variability may occur pre-lexically while adapting to accent variability may require learning from attention to explicit cues (i.e. feedback). In Experiment 1, we tested our hypothesis by training native Dutch listeners and Australian-English (AusE) listeners without any experience with Dutch or Flemish to discriminate between the Dutch vowels /I/ and /ε/ from a single speaker. We then tested their ability to classify /I/ and /ε/ vowels of a novel Dutch speaker (i.e. speaker or sex change only), or vowels of a novel Flemish speaker (i.e. speaker or sex change plus accent change). We found that both Dutch and AusE listeners could successfully categorize vowels if the change involved a speaker/sex change, but not if the change involved an accent change. When AusE listeners were given feedback on their categorization responses to the novel speaker in Experiment 2, they were able to successfully categorize vowels involving an accent change. These results suggest that adapting to accents may be a two-step process, whereby the first step involves adapting to speaker differences at a pre-lexical level, and the second step involves adapting to accent differences at a contextual level, where listeners have access to word meaning or are given feedback that allows them to appropriately adjust their perceptual category boundaries. PMID:27309889

  5. Al-Dulimi and Montana Management Inc. v. Switzerland / Stefan Kadelbach

    Index Scriptorium Estoniae

    Kadelbach, Stefan

    2016-01-01

    Euroopa Inimõiguste Kohtu lahendist asjas Al-Dulimi ja Montana Management Inc vs. Šveits, mis puudutas ÜRO julgeolekunõukogu resolutsiooni, millega pandi riikidele kohustus külmutada viivitamatult ka Iraagi vanemametnikele või nende äriühingutele kuuluv vara

  6. Pathogenesis of Human Diffusely Adhering Escherichia coli Expressing Afa/Dr Adhesins (Afa/Dr DAEC): Current Insights and Future Challenges

    Science.gov (United States)

    2014-01-01

    SUMMARY The pathogenicity and clinical pertinence of diffusely adhering Escherichia coli expressing the Afa/Dr adhesins (Afa/Dr DAEC) in urinary tract infections (UTIs) and pregnancy complications are well established. In contrast, the implication of intestinal Afa/Dr DAEC in diarrhea is still under debate. These strains are age dependently involved in diarrhea in children, are apparently not involved in diarrhea in adults, and can also be asymptomatic intestinal microbiota strains in children and adult. This comprehensive review analyzes the epidemiology and diagnosis and highlights recent progress which has improved the understanding of Afa/Dr DAEC pathogenesis. Here, I summarize the roles of Afa/Dr DAEC virulence factors, including Afa/Dr adhesins, flagella, Sat toxin, and pks island products, in the development of specific mechanisms of pathogenicity. In intestinal epithelial polarized cells, the Afa/Dr adhesins trigger cell membrane receptor clustering and activation of the linked cell signaling pathways, promote structural and functional cell lesions and injuries in intestinal barrier, induce proinflammatory responses, create angiogenesis, instigate epithelial-mesenchymal transition-like events, and lead to pks-dependent DNA damage. UTI-associated Afa/Dr DAEC strains, following adhesin-membrane receptor cell interactions and activation of associated lipid raft-dependent cell signaling pathways, internalize in a microtubule-dependent manner within urinary tract epithelial cells, develop a particular intracellular lifestyle, and trigger a toxin-dependent cell detachment. In response to Afa/Dr DAEC infection, the host epithelial cells generate antibacterial defense responses. Finally, I discuss a hypothetical role of intestinal Afa/Dr DAEC strains that can act as “silent pathogens” with the capacity to emerge as “pathobionts” for the development of inflammatory bowel disease and intestinal carcinogenesis. PMID:25278576

  7. Assessment of undiscovered continuous oil and gas resources in the Heath Formation, central Montana and western North Dakota, 2016

    Science.gov (United States)

    Drake, Ronald M.; Schenk, Christopher J.; Klett, Timothy R.; Le, Phuong A.; Leathers, Heidi M.; Brownfield, Michael E.; Finn, Thomas M.; Gaswirth, Stephanie B.; Marra, Kristen R.; Tennyson, Marilyn E.

    2017-06-07

    Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated undiscovered, technically recoverable mean resources of 884 million barrels of oil and 106 billion cubic feet of gas in the North-Central Montana and Williston Basin Provinces of central Montana and western North Dakota.

  8. Children's Understanding That Utterances Emanate from Minds: Using Speaker Belief To Aid Interpretation.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mitchell, Peter; Robinson, Elizabeth J.; Thompson, Doreen E.

    1999-01-01

    Three experiments examined 3- to 6-year olds' ability to use a speaker's utterance based on false belief to identify which of several referents was intended. Found that many 4- to 5-year olds performed correctly only when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief. When the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance, many 3- to 6-year olds…

  9. Comparative Analysys of Speech Parameters for the Design of Speaker Verification Systems

    National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

    Souza, A

    2001-01-01

    Speaker verification systems are basically composed of three stages: feature extraction, feature processing and comparison of the modified features from speaker voice and from the voice that should be...

  10. The (TNO) Speaker Diarization System for NIST Rich Transcription Evaluation 2005 for meeting data

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Leeuwen, D.A. van

    2005-01-01

    Abstract. The TNO speaker speaker diarization system is based on a standard BIC segmentation and clustering algorithm. Since for the NIST Rich Transcription speaker dizarization evaluation measure correct speech detection appears to be essential, we have developed a speech activity detector (SAD) as

  11. Popular Public Discourse at Speakers' Corner: Negotiating Cultural Identities in Interaction

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    McIlvenny, Paul

    1996-01-01

    , religious and general topical 'soap-box' oration. However, audiences are not passive receivers of rhetorical messages. They are active negotiators of interpretations and alignments that may conflict with the speaker's and other audience members' orientations to prior talk. Speakers' Corner is a space...

  12. The Montana Wild Virus Hunt | NIH MedlinePlus the Magazine

    Science.gov (United States)

    ... on a combination of techniques from bioinformatics, genetics, biochemistry, and structural biology to understand the mechanisms that bacteria use to defend themselves from viral infection. What is the Montana Wild Virus Hunt? The aim of this project is to engage high school students and their ...

  13. Effectiveness of Written Materials in a Rehabilitative Program for Female Offenders: A Case Study at the Montana Women's Prison

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dillon, Laura; Colling, Kyle

    2010-01-01

    This case study of the Therapeutic Community Program at Montana Women's Prison investigates the relationship between inmate reading levels and the self-help materials used for rehabilitative purposes within prison settings. The Therapeutic Community Handbook, published by the Montana Department of Corrections, is used as the primary method of…

  14. Invasive Species Biology, Control, and Research. Part 1: Kudzu (Pueraria montana)

    National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

    Guertin, Patrick J; Denight, Michael L; Gebhart, Dick L; Nelson, Linda

    2008-01-01

    ..., and damage to equipment and structures. Of the 11 plant species (or groups) identified by installations as uncontrolled vegetation, six were invasive plants, of which the two invasive plants most commonly identified were Kudzu (Pueraria montana...

  15. From Mxit to Dr Math

    CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

    Botha, Adèle

    2013-02-01

    Full Text Available In 2007, Laurie Butgereit, a researcher at the CSIR Meraka Institute, started to use Mxit as a communication channel to tutor her son in mathematics. Her son and a number of his friends logged in, and Dr Math was born. At the inception of Dr Math...

  16. Pathogenesis of human diffusely adhering Escherichia coli expressing Afa/Dr adhesins (Afa/Dr DAEC): current insights and future challenges.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Servin, Alain L

    2014-10-01

    The pathogenicity and clinical pertinence of diffusely adhering Escherichia coli expressing the Afa/Dr adhesins (Afa/Dr DAEC) in urinary tract infections (UTIs) and pregnancy complications are well established. In contrast, the implication of intestinal Afa/Dr DAEC in diarrhea is still under debate. These strains are age dependently involved in diarrhea in children, are apparently not involved in diarrhea in adults, and can also be asymptomatic intestinal microbiota strains in children and adult. This comprehensive review analyzes the epidemiology and diagnosis and highlights recent progress which has improved the understanding of Afa/Dr DAEC pathogenesis. Here, I summarize the roles of Afa/Dr DAEC virulence factors, including Afa/Dr adhesins, flagella, Sat toxin, and pks island products, in the development of specific mechanisms of pathogenicity. In intestinal epithelial polarized cells, the Afa/Dr adhesins trigger cell membrane receptor clustering and activation of the linked cell signaling pathways, promote structural and functional cell lesions and injuries in intestinal barrier, induce proinflammatory responses, create angiogenesis, instigate epithelial-mesenchymal transition-like events, and lead to pks-dependent DNA damage. UTI-associated Afa/Dr DAEC strains, following adhesin-membrane receptor cell interactions and activation of associated lipid raft-dependent cell signaling pathways, internalize in a microtubule-dependent manner within urinary tract epithelial cells, develop a particular intracellular lifestyle, and trigger a toxin-dependent cell detachment. In response to Afa/Dr DAEC infection, the host epithelial cells generate antibacterial defense responses. Finally, I discuss a hypothetical role of intestinal Afa/Dr DAEC strains that can act as "silent pathogens" with the capacity to emerge as "pathobionts" for the development of inflammatory bowel disease and intestinal carcinogenesis. Copyright © 2014, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights

  17. Testing transferability of willingness to pay for forest fire prevention among three states of California, Florida and Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    John B. Loomis; Hung Trong Le; Armando Gonzalez-Caban

    2005-01-01

    The equivalency of willingness to pay between the states of California, Florida and Montana is tested. Residents in California, Florida and Montana have an average willingness to pay of $417, $305, and $382 for prescribed burning program, and $403, $230, and $208 for mechanical fire fuel reduction program, respectively. Due to wide confidence intervals, household WTP...

  18. In Memoriam: Dr. Frank John Fenner

    Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Podcasts

    2011-04-22

    This podcast reflects on one of the greatest pioneers in virology, Dr. Frank John Fenner. Dr. Frederick Murphy, a member of EID's editorial board and the Institute of Medicine, and professor of Pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, shares professional and personal stories of Dr. Frank Fenner.  Created: 4/22/2011 by National Center for Emerging Zoonotic and Infectious Diseases (NCEZID).   Date Released: 4/26/2011.

  19. Dr. von Braun Briefing Walt Disney

    Science.gov (United States)

    1965-01-01

    Dr. von Braun began his association with Walt Disney in the 1950s when the rocket scientist appeared in three Disney television productions related to the exploration of space. Years later, Dr. von Braun invited Disney and his associates to tour the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. This photograph is dated April 13, 1965. From left are R.J. Schwinghamer from the MSFC, Disney, B.J. Bernight, and Dr. von Braun.

  20. MONTANA PALLADIUM RESEARCH INITIATIVE

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Peters, John; McCloskey, Jay; Douglas, Trevor; Young, Mark; Snyder, Stuart; Gurney, Brian

    2012-05-09

    Project Objective: The overarching objective of the Montana Palladium Research Initiative is to perform scientific research on the properties and uses of palladium in the context of the U.S. Department of Energy's Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and Infrastructure Technologies Program. The purpose of the research will be to explore possible palladium as an alternative to platinum in hydrogen-economy applications. To achieve this objective, the Initiatives activities will focus on several cutting-edge research approaches across a range of disciplines, including metallurgy, biomimetics, instrumentation development, and systems analysis. Background: Platinum-group elements (PGEs) play significant roles in processing hydrogen, an element that shows high potential to address this need in the U.S. and the world for inexpensive, reliable, clean energy. Platinum, however, is a very expensive component of current and planned systems, so less-expensive alternatives that have similar physical properties are being sought. To this end, several tasks have been defined under the rubric of the Montana Palladium Research Iniative. This broad swath of activities will allow progress on several fronts. The membrane-related activities of Task 1 employs state-of-the-art and leading-edge technologies to develop new, ceramic-substrate metallic membranes for the production of high-purity hydrogen, and develop techniques for the production of thin, defect-free platinum group element catalytic membranes for energy production and pollution control. The biomimetic work in Task 2 explores the use of substrate-attached hydrogen-producing enzymes and the encapsulation of palladium in virion-based protein coats to determine their utility for distributed hydrogen production. Task 3 work involves developing laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) as a real-time, in situ diagnostic technique to characterize PGEs nanoparticles for process monitoring and control. The systems engineering work in task 4

  1. Using timing information in speaker verification

    CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

    Van Heerden, CJ

    2005-11-01

    Full Text Available This paper presents an analysis of temporal information as a feature for use in speaker verification systems. The relevance of temporal information in a speaker’s utterances is investigated, both with regard to improving the robustness of modern...

  2. Speaker Linking and Applications using Non-Parametric Hashing Methods

    Science.gov (United States)

    2016-09-08

    nonparametric estimate of a multivariate density function,” The Annals of Math- ematical Statistics , vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 1049–1051, 1965. [9] E. A. Patrick...Speaker Linking and Applications using Non-Parametric Hashing Methods† Douglas Sturim and William M. Campbell MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA...with many approaches [1, 2]. For this paper, we focus on using i-vectors [2], but the methods apply to any embedding. For the task of speaker QBE and

  3. Moving-Talker, Speaker-Independent Feature Study, and Baseline Results Using the CUAVE Multimodal Speech Corpus

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Patterson Eric K

    2002-01-01

    Full Text Available Strides in computer technology and the search for deeper, more powerful techniques in signal processing have brought multimodal research to the forefront in recent years. Audio-visual speech processing has become an important part of this research because it holds great potential for overcoming certain problems of traditional audio-only methods. Difficulties, due to background noise and multiple speakers in an application environment, are significantly reduced by the additional information provided by visual features. This paper presents information on a new audio-visual database, a feature study on moving speakers, and on baseline results for the whole speaker group. Although a few databases have been collected in this area, none has emerged as a standard for comparison. Also, efforts to date have often been limited, focusing on cropped video or stationary speakers. This paper seeks to introduce a challenging audio-visual database that is flexible and fairly comprehensive, yet easily available to researchers on one DVD. The Clemson University Audio-Visual Experiments (CUAVE database is a speaker-independent corpus of both connected and continuous digit strings totaling over 7000 utterances. It contains a wide variety of speakers and is designed to meet several goals discussed in this paper. One of these goals is to allow testing of adverse conditions such as moving talkers and speaker pairs. A feature study of connected digit strings is also discussed. It compares stationary and moving talkers in a speaker-independent grouping. An image-processing-based contour technique, an image transform method, and a deformable template scheme are used in this comparison to obtain visual features. This paper also presents methods and results in an attempt to make these techniques more robust to speaker movement. Finally, initial baseline speaker-independent results are included using all speakers, and conclusions as well as suggested areas of research are

  4. A simple optical method for measuring the vibration amplitude of a speaker

    OpenAIRE

    UEDA, Masahiro; YAMAGUCHI, Toshihiko; KAKIUCHI, Hiroki; SUGA, Hiroshi

    1999-01-01

    A simple optical method has been proposed for measuring the vibration amplitude of a speaker vibrating with a frequency of approximately 10 kHz. The method is based on a multiple reflection between a vibrating speaker plane and a mirror parallel to that speaker plane. The multiple reflection can magnify a dispersion of the laser beam caused by the vibration, and easily make a measurement of the amplitude. The measuring sensitivity ranges between sub-microns and 1 mm. A preliminary experim...

  5. On-site energy consumption at softwood sawmills in Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dan Loeffler; Nathaniel Anderson; Todd A. Morgan; Colin B. Sorenson

    2016-01-01

    Total on-site energy requirements for wood product manufacturing are generally not well understood or publicly available, particularly at subregional scales, such as the state level. This article uses a mail survey of softwood sawmills in Montana to develop a profile of all on-site energy consumption. Energy use is delineated by fuel type on a production basis...

  6. Coronal View Ultrasound Imaging of Movement in Different Segments of the Tongue during Paced Recital: Findings from Four Normal Speakers and a Speaker with Partial Glossectomy

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bressmann, Tim; Flowers, Heather; Wong, Willy; Irish, Jonathan C.

    2010-01-01

    The goal of this study was to quantitatively describe aspects of coronal tongue movement in different anatomical regions of the tongue. Four normal speakers and a speaker with partial glossectomy read four repetitions of a metronome-paced poem. Their tongue movement was recorded in four coronal planes using two-dimensional B-mode ultrasound…

  7. Intelligibility of Standard German and Low German to Speakers of Dutch

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Gooskens, C.S.; Kürschner, Sebastian; van Bezooijen, R.

    2011-01-01

    This paper reports on the intelligibility of spoken Low German and Standard German for speakers of Dutch. Two aspects are considered. First, the relative potential for intelligibility of the Low German variety of Bremen and the High German variety of Modern Standard German for speakers of Dutch is

  8. Speaker detection for conversational robots using synchrony between audio and video

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Noulas, A.; Englebienne, G.; Terwijn, B.; Kröse, B.; Hanheide, M.; Zender, H.

    2010-01-01

    This paper compares different methods for detecting the speaking person when multiple persons are interacting with a robot. We evaluate the state-of-the-art speaker detection methods on the iCat robot. These methods use the synchrony between audio and video to locate the most probable speaker. We

  9. Perception of English palatal codas by Korean speakers of English

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yeon, Sang-Hee

    2003-04-01

    This study aimed at looking at perception of English palatal codas by Korean speakers of English to determine if perception problems are the source of production problems. In particular, first, this study looked at the possible first language effect on the perception of English palatal codas. Second, a possible perceptual source of vowel epenthesis after English palatal codas was investigated. In addition, individual factors, such as length of residence, TOEFL score, gender and academic status, were compared to determine if those affected the varying degree of the perception accuracy. Eleven adult Korean speakers of English as well as three native speakers of English participated in the study. Three sets of a perception test including identification of minimally different English pseudo- or real words were carried out. The results showed that, first, the Korean speakers perceived the English codas significantly worse than the Americans. Second, the study supported the idea that Koreans perceived an extra /i/ after the final affricates due to final release. Finally, none of the individual factors explained the varying degree of the perceptional accuracy. In particular, TOEFL scores and the perception test scores did not have any statistically significant association.

  10. Evaluating acoustic speaker normalization algorithms: evidence from longitudinal child data.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kohn, Mary Elizabeth; Farrington, Charlie

    2012-03-01

    Speaker vowel formant normalization, a technique that controls for variation introduced by physical differences between speakers, is necessary in variationist studies to compare speakers of different ages, genders, and physiological makeup in order to understand non-physiological variation patterns within populations. Many algorithms have been established to reduce variation introduced into vocalic data from physiological sources. The lack of real-time studies tracking the effectiveness of these normalization algorithms from childhood through adolescence inhibits exploration of child participation in vowel shifts. This analysis compares normalization techniques applied to data collected from ten African American children across five time points. Linear regressions compare the reduction in variation attributable to age and gender for each speaker for the vowels BEET, BAT, BOT, BUT, and BOAR. A normalization technique is successful if it maintains variation attributable to a reference sociolinguistic variable, while reducing variation attributable to age. Results indicate that normalization techniques which rely on both a measure of central tendency and range of the vowel space perform best at reducing variation attributable to age, although some variation attributable to age persists after normalization for some sections of the vowel space. © 2012 Acoustical Society of America

  11. Do children go for the nice guys? The influence of speaker benevolence and certainty on selective word learning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bergstra, Myrthe; DE Mulder, Hannah N M; Coopmans, Peter

    2018-04-06

    This study investigated how speaker certainty (a rational cue) and speaker benevolence (an emotional cue) influence children's willingness to learn words in a selective learning paradigm. In two experiments four- to six-year-olds learnt novel labels from two speakers and, after a week, their memory for these labels was reassessed. Results demonstrated that children retained the label-object pairings for at least a week. Furthermore, children preferred to learn from certain over uncertain speakers, but they had no significant preference for nice over nasty speakers. When the cues were combined, children followed certain speakers, even if they were nasty. However, children did prefer to learn from nice and certain speakers over nasty and certain speakers. These results suggest that rational cues regarding a speaker's linguistic competence trump emotional cues regarding a speaker's affective status in word learning. However, emotional cues were found to have a subtle influence on this process.

  12. Effects of Language Background on Gaze Behavior: A Crosslinguistic Comparison Between Korean and German Speakers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Goller, Florian; Lee, Donghoon; Ansorge, Ulrich; Choi, Soonja

    2017-01-01

    Languages differ in how they categorize spatial relations: While German differentiates between containment (in) and support (auf) with distinct spatial words—(a) den Kuli IN die Kappe stecken (”put pen in cap”); (b) die Kappe AUF den Kuli stecken (”put cap on pen”)—Korean uses a single spatial word (kkita) collapsing (a) and (b) into one semantic category, particularly when the spatial enclosure is tight-fit. Korean uses a different word (i.e., netha) for loose-fits (e.g., apple in bowl). We tested whether these differences influence the attention of the speaker. In a crosslinguistic study, we compared native German speakers with native Korean speakers. Participants rated the similarity of two successive video clips of several scenes where two objects were joined or nested (either in a tight or loose manner). The rating data show that Korean speakers base their rating of similarity more on tight- versus loose-fit, whereas German speakers base their rating more on containment versus support (in vs. auf). Throughout the experiment, we also measured the participants’ eye movements. Korean speakers looked equally long at the moving Figure object and at the stationary Ground object, whereas German speakers were more biased to look at the Ground object. Additionally, Korean speakers also looked more at the region where the two objects touched than did German speakers. We discuss our data in the light of crosslinguistic semantics and the extent of their influence on spatial cognition and perception. PMID:29362644

  13. The Sound of Voice: Voice-Based Categorization of Speakers' Sexual Orientation within and across Languages.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Simone Sulpizio

    Full Text Available Empirical research had initially shown that English listeners are able to identify the speakers' sexual orientation based on voice cues alone. However, the accuracy of this voice-based categorization, as well as its generalizability to other languages (language-dependency and to non-native speakers (language-specificity, has been questioned recently. Consequently, we address these open issues in 5 experiments: First, we tested whether Italian and German listeners are able to correctly identify sexual orientation of same-language male speakers. Then, participants of both nationalities listened to voice samples and rated the sexual orientation of both Italian and German male speakers. We found that listeners were unable to identify the speakers' sexual orientation correctly. However, speakers were consistently categorized as either heterosexual or gay on the basis of how they sounded. Moreover, a similar pattern of results emerged when listeners judged the sexual orientation of speakers of their own and of the foreign language. Overall, this research suggests that voice-based categorization of sexual orientation reflects the listeners' expectations of how gay voices sound rather than being an accurate detector of the speakers' actual sexual identity. Results are discussed with regard to accuracy, acoustic features of voices, language dependency and language specificity.

  14. Popular Public Discourse at Speakers' Corner: Negotiating Cultural Identities in Interaction

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    McIlvenny, Paul

    1996-01-01

    In this paper I examine how cultural identities are actively negotiated in popular debate at a multicultural public setting in London. Speakers at Speakers' Corner manage the local construction of group affiliation, audience response and argument in and through talk, within the context of ethnic...... in which participant 'citizens' in the public sphere can actively struggle over cultural representation and identities. Using transcribed examples of video data recorded at Speakers' Corner my paper will examine how cultural identity is invoked in the management of active participation. Audiences...... and their affiliations are regulated and made accountable through the routines of membership categorisation and the policing of cultural identities and their imaginary borders....

  15. Proficiency in English sentence stress production by Cantonese speakers who speak English as a second language (ESL).

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ng, Manwa L; Chen, Yang

    2011-12-01

    The present study examined English sentence stress produced by native Cantonese speakers who were speaking English as a second language (ESL). Cantonese ESL speakers' proficiency in English stress production as perceived by English-speaking listeners was also studied. Acoustical parameters associated with sentence stress including fundamental frequency (F0), vowel duration, and intensity were measured from the English sentences produced by 40 Cantonese ESL speakers. Data were compared with those obtained from 40 native speakers of American English. The speech samples were also judged by eight native listeners who were native speakers of American English for placement, degree, and naturalness of stress. Results showed that Cantonese ESL speakers were able to use F0, vowel duration, and intensity to differentiate sentence stress patterns. Yet, both female and male Cantonese ESL speakers exhibited consistently higher F0 in stressed words than English speakers. Overall, Cantonese ESL speakers were found to be proficient in using duration and intensity to signal sentence stress, in a way comparable with English speakers. In addition, F0 and intensity were found to correlate closely with perceptual judgement and the degree of stress with the naturalness of stress.

  16. Speaker identification for the improvement of the security communication between law enforcement units

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tovarek, Jaromir; Partila, Pavol

    2017-05-01

    This article discusses the speaker identification for the improvement of the security communication between law enforcement units. The main task of this research was to develop the text-independent speaker identification system which can be used for real-time recognition. This system is designed for identification in the open set. It means that the unknown speaker can be anyone. Communication itself is secured, but we have to check the authorization of the communication parties. We have to decide if the unknown speaker is the authorized for the given action. The calls are recorded by IP telephony server and then these recordings are evaluate using classification If the system evaluates that the speaker is not authorized, it sends a warning message to the administrator. This message can detect, for example a stolen phone or other unusual situation. The administrator then performs the appropriate actions. Our novel proposal system uses multilayer neural network for classification and it consists of three layers (input layer, hidden layer, and output layer). A number of neurons in input layer corresponds with the length of speech features. Output layer then represents classified speakers. Artificial Neural Network classifies speech signal frame by frame, but the final decision is done over the complete record. This rule substantially increases accuracy of the classification. Input data for the neural network are a thirteen Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, which describe the behavior of the vocal tract. These parameters are the most used for speaker recognition. Parameters for training, testing and validation were extracted from recordings of authorized users. Recording conditions for training data correspond with the real traffic of the system (sampling frequency, bit rate). The main benefit of the research is the system developed for text-independent speaker identification which is applied to secure communication between law enforcement units.

  17. Articulatory Movements during Vowels in Speakers with Dysarthria and Healthy Controls

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yunusova, Yana; Weismer, Gary; Westbury, John R.; Lindstrom, Mary J.

    2008-01-01

    Purpose: This study compared movement characteristics of markers attached to the jaw, lower lip, tongue blade, and dorsum during production of selected English vowels by normal speakers and speakers with dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Parkinson disease (PD). The study asked the following questions: (a) Are movement…

  18. A Comparison of Coverbal Gesture Use in Oral Discourse Among Speakers With Fluent and Nonfluent Aphasia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Law, Sam-Po; Chak, Gigi Wan-Chi

    2017-01-01

    Purpose Coverbal gesture use, which is affected by the presence and degree of aphasia, can be culturally specific. The purpose of this study was to compare gesture use among Cantonese-speaking individuals: 23 neurologically healthy speakers, 23 speakers with fluent aphasia, and 21 speakers with nonfluent aphasia. Method Multimedia data of discourse samples from these speakers were extracted from the Cantonese AphasiaBank. Gestures were independently annotated on their forms and functions to determine how gesturing rate and distribution of gestures differed across speaker groups. A multiple regression was conducted to determine the most predictive variable(s) for gesture-to-word ratio. Results Although speakers with nonfluent aphasia gestured most frequently, the rate of gesture use in counterparts with fluent aphasia did not differ significantly from controls. Different patterns of gesture functions in the 3 speaker groups revealed that gesture plays a minor role in lexical retrieval whereas its role in enhancing communication dominates among the speakers with aphasia. The percentages of complete sentences and dysfluency strongly predicted the gesturing rate in aphasia. Conclusions The current results supported the sketch model of language–gesture association. The relationship between gesture production and linguistic abilities and clinical implications for gesture-based language intervention for speakers with aphasia are also discussed. PMID:28609510

  19. Gender Identification of the Speaker Using VQ Method

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Vasif V. Nabiyev

    2009-11-01

    Full Text Available Speaking is the easiest and natural form of communication between people. Intensive studies are made in order to provide this communication via computers between people. The systems using voice biometric technology are attracting attention especially in the angle of cost and usage. When compared with the other biometic systems the application is much more practical. For example by using a microphone placed in the environment voice record can be obtained even without notifying the user and the system can be applied. Moreover the remote access facility is one of the other advantages of voice biometry. In this study, it is aimed to automatically determine the gender of the speaker through the speech waves which include personal information. If the speaker gender can be determined while composing models according to the gender information, the success of voice recognition systems can be increased in an important degree. Generally all the speaker recognition systems are composed of two parts which are feature extraction and matching. Feature extraction is the procedure in which the least information presenting the speech and the speaker is determined through voice signal. There are different features used in voice applications such as LPC, MFCC and PLP. In this study as a feature vector MFCC is used. Feature mathcing is the procedure in which the features derived from unknown speakers and known speaker group are compared. According to the text used in comparison the system is devided to two parts that are text dependent and text independent. While the same text is used in text dependent systems, different texts are used in indepentent text systems. Nowadays, DTW and HMM are text dependent, VQ and GMM are text indepentent matching methods. In this study due to the high success ratio and simple application features VQ approach is used.In this study a system which determines the speaker gender automatically and text independent is proposed. The proposed

  20. Use of the BAT with a Cantonese-Putonghua Speaker with Aphasia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kong, Anthony Pak-Hin; Weekes, Brendan Stuart

    2011-01-01

    The aim of this article is to illustrate the use of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) with a Cantonese-Putonghua speaker. We describe G, who is a relatively young Chinese bilingual speaker with aphasia. G's communication abilities in his L2, Putonghua, were impaired following brain damage. This impairment caused specific difficulties in…

  1. Processing advantage for emotional words in bilingual speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ponari, Marta; Rodríguez-Cuadrado, Sara; Vinson, David; Fox, Neil; Costa, Albert; Vigliocco, Gabriella

    2015-10-01

    Effects of emotion on word processing are well established in monolingual speakers. However, studies that have assessed whether affective features of words undergo the same processing in a native and nonnative language have provided mixed results: Studies that have found differences between native language (L1) and second language (L2) processing attributed the difference to the fact that L2 learned late in life would not be processed affectively, because affective associations are established during childhood. Other studies suggest that adult learners show similar effects of emotional features in L1 and L2. Differences in affective processing of L2 words can be linked to age and context of learning, proficiency, language dominance, and degree of similarity between L2 and L1. Here, in a lexical decision task on tightly matched negative, positive, and neutral words, highly proficient English speakers from typologically different L1s showed the same facilitation in processing emotionally valenced words as native English speakers, regardless of their L1, the age of English acquisition, or the frequency and context of English use. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

  2. Modulation of TRAIL resistance in colon carcinoma cells : Different contributions of DR4 and DR5

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    van Geelen, Caroline M. M.; Pennarun, Bodvael; Le, Phuong T. K.; de Vries, Elisabeth G. E.; de Jong, Steven

    2011-01-01

    Background: rhTRAIL is a therapeutic agent, derived from the TRAIL cytokine, which induces apoptosis in cancer cells by activating the membrane death receptors 4 and 5 (DR4 and DR5). Here, we investigated each receptor's contribution to rhTRAIL sensitivity and rhTRAIL resistance. We assessed whether

  3. Gender parity trends for invited speakers at four prominent virology conference series.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kalejta, Robert F; Palmenberg, Ann C

    2017-06-07

    Scientific conferences are most beneficial to participants when they showcase significant new experimental developments, accurately summarize the current state of the field, and provide strong opportunities for collaborative networking. A top-notch slate of invited speakers, assembled by conference organizers or committees, is key to achieving these goals. The perceived underrepresentation of female speakers at prominent scientific meetings is currently a popular topic for discussion, but one that often lacks supportive data. We compiled the full rosters of invited speakers over the last 35 years for four prominent international virology conferences, the American Society for Virology Annual Meeting (ASV), the International Herpesvirus Workshop (IHW), the Positive-Strand RNA Virus Symposium (PSR), and the Gordon Research Conference on Viruses & Cells (GRC). The rosters were cross-indexed by unique names, gender, year, and repeat invitations. When plotted as gender-dependent trends over time, all four conferences showed a clear proclivity for male-dominated invited speaker lists. Encouragingly, shifts toward parity are emerging within all units, but at different rates. Not surprisingly, both selection of a larger percentage of first time participants and the presence of a woman on the speaker selection committee correlated with improved parity. Session chair information was also collected for the IHW and GRC. These visible positions also displayed a strong male dominance over time that is eroding slowly. We offer our personal interpretation of these data to aid future organizers achieve improved equity among the limited number of available positions for session moderators and invited speakers. IMPORTANCE Politicians and media members have a tendency to cite anecdotes as conclusions without any supporting data. This happens so frequently now, that a name for it has emerged: fake news. Good science proceeds otherwise. The under representation of women as invited

  4. Towards an Intelligent Acoustic Front End for Automatic Speech Recognition: Built-in Speaker Normalization

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Umit H. Yapanel

    2008-08-01

    Full Text Available A proven method for achieving effective automatic speech recognition (ASR due to speaker differences is to perform acoustic feature speaker normalization. More effective speaker normalization methods are needed which require limited computing resources for real-time performance. The most popular speaker normalization technique is vocal-tract length normalization (VTLN, despite the fact that it is computationally expensive. In this study, we propose a novel online VTLN algorithm entitled built-in speaker normalization (BISN, where normalization is performed on-the-fly within a newly proposed PMVDR acoustic front end. The novel algorithm aspect is that in conventional frontend processing with PMVDR and VTLN, two separating warping phases are needed; while in the proposed BISN method only one single speaker dependent warp is used to achieve both the PMVDR perceptual warp and VTLN warp simultaneously. This improved integration unifies the nonlinear warping performed in the front end and reduces simultaneously. This improved integration unifies the nonlinear warping performed in the front end and reduces computational requirements, thereby offering advantages for real-time ASR systems. Evaluations are performed for (i an in-car extended digit recognition task, where an on-the-fly BISN implementation reduces the relative word error rate (WER by 24%, and (ii for a diverse noisy speech task (SPINE 2, where the relative WER improvement was 9%, both relative to the baseline speaker normalization method.

  5. Towards an Intelligent Acoustic Front End for Automatic Speech Recognition: Built-in Speaker Normalization

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yapanel UmitH

    2008-01-01

    Full Text Available A proven method for achieving effective automatic speech recognition (ASR due to speaker differences is to perform acoustic feature speaker normalization. More effective speaker normalization methods are needed which require limited computing resources for real-time performance. The most popular speaker normalization technique is vocal-tract length normalization (VTLN, despite the fact that it is computationally expensive. In this study, we propose a novel online VTLN algorithm entitled built-in speaker normalization (BISN, where normalization is performed on-the-fly within a newly proposed PMVDR acoustic front end. The novel algorithm aspect is that in conventional frontend processing with PMVDR and VTLN, two separating warping phases are needed; while in the proposed BISN method only one single speaker dependent warp is used to achieve both the PMVDR perceptual warp and VTLN warp simultaneously. This improved integration unifies the nonlinear warping performed in the front end and reduces simultaneously. This improved integration unifies the nonlinear warping performed in the front end and reduces computational requirements, thereby offering advantages for real-time ASR systems. Evaluations are performed for (i an in-car extended digit recognition task, where an on-the-fly BISN implementation reduces the relative word error rate (WER by 24%, and (ii for a diverse noisy speech task (SPINE 2, where the relative WER improvement was 9%, both relative to the baseline speaker normalization method.

  6. Analysis of DR4 haplotypes in insulin dependent diabetes (IDD)

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Monos, D.S.; Radka, S.F.; Zmijewski, C.M.; Kamoun, M.

    1986-01-01

    Population studies indicate that HLA-DR4 is implicated in the susceptibility of IDD. However, biochemical characterization of the serologically defined DR4 haplotype from normal individuals revealed five DR4 and three DQW3 molecular forms. Hence, in this study, they investigated the heterogeneity of the DR4 haplotype, using B-lymphoblastoid cell lines (B-LCL) generated from patients with IDD and seropositive for DR4. Class II molecules, metabolically labeled with 35 S-methionine, were immunoprecipitated with monoclonal antibodies specific for DR(L243), DQ(N297), DQW3(IVD12) or DR and DQ(SG465) and analyzed by two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (2D-PAGE). The isoelectrofocusing (IEF) conditions employed in this study allow representation only of the DR4 haplotype from either DR3/4 or DR4/4 cell lines. The analysis of six different DR4 haplotypes from seven IDD patients, revealed the presence of two DR4 β and two DQW3 β chains. Three of the six DR4 β haplotypes analyzed shared the same DR4 β chain and three others shared a different one. Additionally five of the six haplotypes shared a different one. Additionally five of the six haplotypes shared the same DQW3 β chain and only one was carrying a different one. Different combinations of the two DR4 and two DQW3 β chains constitute three distinct patterns of DR4 haplotypes. These results suggest the prevalence of a DQW3 β chain in the small sample of IDD patients studied. Studies of a large number of patients should clarify whether IDD is associated with unique variants of DR4 or DQW3 β chains

  7. Language control in different contexts: the behavioural ecology of bilingual speakers

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    David William Green

    2011-05-01

    Full Text Available This paper proposes that different experimental contexts (single or dual language contexts permit different neural loci at which words in the target language can be selected. However, in order to develop a fuller understanding of the neural circuit mediating language control we need to consider the community context in which bilingual speakers typically use their two languages (the behavioural ecology of bilingual speakers. The contrast between speakers from code-switching and non-code switching communities offers a way to increase our understanding of the cortical, subcortical and, in particular, cerebellar structures involved in language control. It will also help us identify the non-verbal behavioural correlates associated with these control processes.

  8. Plant community variability on a small area in southeastern Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    James G. MacCracken; Daniel W. Uresk; Richard M. Hansen

    1984-01-01

    Plant communities are inherently variable due to a number of environmental and biological forces. Canopy cover and aboveground biomass were determined for understory vegetation in plant communities of a prairie grassland-forest ecotone in southeastern Montana. Vegetation units were described using polar ordination and stepwise discriminant analysis. Nine of a total of...

  9. Dr. von Braun and Dr. Stuhlinger With a Model of the Nuclear-Electric Vehicles

    Science.gov (United States)

    2004-01-01

    In this photo, taken at the Walt Disney Studios in California, Dr. Wernher von Braun and Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger are shown discussing the concepts of nuclear-electric spaceships designed to undertake the mission to the planet Mars. As a part of the Disney 'Tomorrowland' series on the exploration of space, the nuclear-electric vehicles were shown in the last three television films, entitled 'Mars and Beyond,' which first aired in December 1957.

  10. Artificially intelligent recognition of Arabic speaker using voice print-based local features

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mahmood, Awais; Alsulaiman, Mansour; Muhammad, Ghulam; Akram, Sheeraz

    2016-11-01

    Local features for any pattern recognition system are based on the information extracted locally. In this paper, a local feature extraction technique was developed. This feature was extracted in the time-frequency plain by taking the moving average on the diagonal directions of the time-frequency plane. This feature captured the time-frequency events producing a unique pattern for each speaker that can be viewed as a voice print of the speaker. Hence, we referred to this technique as voice print-based local feature. The proposed feature was compared to other features including mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) for speaker recognition using two different databases. One of the databases used in the comparison is a subset of an LDC database that consisted of two short sentences uttered by 182 speakers. The proposed feature attained 98.35% recognition rate compared to 96.7% for MFCC using the LDC subset.

  11. Chemical characteristics of the major thermal springs of Montana

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Mariner, R.H.; Presser, T.S.; Evans, W.C.

    1976-07-01

    Twenty-one thermal springs in western Montana were sampled for chemical, isotope, and gas compositions. Most of the springs issue dilute to slightly saline sodium-bicarbonate waters of neutral to slightly alkaline pH. A few of the springs issue sodium-mixed anion waters of near neutral pH. Fluoride concentrations are high in most of the thermal waters, up to 18 miligrams per litre, while F/Cl ratios range from 3/1 in the dilute waters to 1/10 in the slightly saline waters. Most of the springs are theoretically in thermodynamic equilibrium with respect to calcite and fluorite. Nitrogen is the major gas escaping from most of the hot springs; however, Hunters Hot Springs issue principally methane. The deuterium content of the hot spring waters is typical of meteoric water in western Montana. Geothermal calculations based on silica concentrations and Na-K-Ca ratios indicate that most of the springs are associated with low temperature aquifers (less than 100/sup 0/C). Chalcedony may be controlling the silica concentrations in these low temperature aquifers even in ''granitic'' terranes.

  12. Objective eye-gaze behaviour during face-to-face communication with proficient alaryngeal speakers: a preliminary study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Evitts, Paul; Gallop, Robert

    2011-01-01

    There is a large body of research demonstrating the impact of visual information on speaker intelligibility in both normal and disordered speaker populations. However, there is minimal information on which specific visual features listeners find salient during conversational discourse. To investigate listeners' eye-gaze behaviour during face-to-face conversation with normal, laryngeal and proficient alaryngeal speakers. Sixty participants individually participated in a 10-min conversation with one of four speakers (typical laryngeal, tracheoesophageal, oesophageal, electrolaryngeal; 15 participants randomly assigned to one mode of speech). All speakers were > 85% intelligible and were judged to be 'proficient' by two certified speech-language pathologists. Participants were fitted with a head-mounted eye-gaze tracking device (Mobile Eye, ASL) that calculated the region of interest and mean duration of eye-gaze. Self-reported gaze behaviour was also obtained following the conversation using a 10 cm visual analogue scale. While listening, participants viewed the lower facial region of the oesophageal speaker more than the normal or tracheoesophageal speaker. Results of non-hierarchical cluster analyses showed that while listening, the pattern of eye-gaze was predominantly directed at the lower face of the oesophageal and electrolaryngeal speaker and more evenly dispersed among the background, lower face, and eyes of the normal and tracheoesophageal speakers. Finally, results show a low correlation between self-reported eye-gaze behaviour and objective regions of interest data. Overall, results suggest similar eye-gaze behaviour when healthy controls converse with normal and tracheoesophageal speakers and that participants had significantly different eye-gaze patterns when conversing with an oesophageal speaker. Results are discussed in terms of existing eye-gaze data and its potential implications on auditory-visual speech perception. © 2011 Royal College of Speech

  13. Speaker Prediction based on Head Orientations

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Rienks, R.J.; Poppe, Ronald Walter; van Otterlo, M.; Poel, Mannes; Poel, M.; Nijholt, A.; Nijholt, Antinus

    2005-01-01

    To gain insight into gaze behavior in meetings, this paper compares the results from a Naive Bayes classifier, Neural Networks and humans on speaker prediction in four-person meetings given solely the azimuth head angles. The Naive Bayes classifier scored 69.4% correctly, Neural Networks 62.3% and

  14. 75 FR 41235 - National Register of Historic Places; Notification of Pending Nominations and Related Actions

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-07-15

    ... County Administrative Building, 800 University Dr, Maryville, 10000504 MONTANA Stillwater County United... Bexar County Toltec, The, 131 Taylor St, San Antonio, 10000498 Karnes County Karnes County Courthouse...

  15. Summary of geothermal studies in Montana, 1980 through 1983. DOE final report

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Sonderegger, J.L.

    1984-01-01

    The geology, hydrology, and surface manifestations of geothermal systems in Montana are described by area. Water-quality information, tables of inventory and water analysis data for springs and wells, and a geothermal resource map are included. (MHR)

  16. Dr. Yu Wang, Director, Natural Science Division, National Science Council, Taiwan

    CERN Document Server

    Patrice Loïez

    2001-01-01

    Photo 01: L. to r.: Dr. Philippe Bloch, CERN CMS ECAL Deputy Project Manager, Dr. Yu Wang, Dr. Etiennette Auffray, CERN, responsible of the CERN ECAL Regional Centre. Photo 02: L. to r.: Dr. Yu Wang, Dr. Philippe Bloch, Dr. Apollo GO, National Central University, Taiwan, Dr. Etiennette Auffray.

  17. The AMI speaker diarization system for NIST RT06s meeting data

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Leeuwen, D.A. van; Huijbregts, Marijn

    2006-01-01

    We describe the systems submitted to the NIST RT06s evaluation for the Speech Activity Detection (SAD) and Speaker Diarization (SPKR) tasks. For speech activity detection, a new analysis methodology is presented that generalizes the Detection Erorr Tradeoff analysis commonly used in speaker

  18. The AMI speaker diarization system for NIST RT06s meeting data

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    van Leeuwen, David A.; Huijbregts, M.A.H.

    2007-01-01

    We describe the systems submitted to the NIST RT06s evaluation for the Speech Activity Detection (SAD) and Speaker Diarization (SPKR) tasks. For speech activity detection, a new analysis methodology is presented that generalizes the Detection Erorr Tradeoff analysis commonly used in speaker detection

  19. An acoustic analysis of English vowels produced by speakers of seven different native-language backgrounds

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Heuven, van V.J.J.P.; Gooskens, C.

    2017-01-01

    We measured F1, F2 and duration of ten English monophthongs produced by American native speakers and by Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian and Chinese L2 speakers. We hypothesized that (i) L2 speakers would approximate the English vowels more closely as the phonological distance between

  20. Dr. David Syz, State Secretary for Economic Affairs, Switzerland

    CERN Multimedia

    Patrice Loïez

    2003-01-01

    Photo 01: Dr. David Syz (left) with Professor Roger Cashmore, Research Director for Collider Programmes.Photo 02: Dr. David Syz signing the VIP visitors' book, with Prof. Roger Cashmore.Photo 03: Dr. David Syz signing the VIP visitors' book.Photo 04: Handshake between Dr. David Syz (left) and Prof. Roger Cashmore.

  1. An Interview with Dr. Walter Lear

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    The Editors

    2009-03-01

    Full Text Available In this issue of the English version of Social Medicine we are publishing the first of several pamphlets loaned to us by the US Health Activism History Collection. To introduce this collection we travelled to Philadelphia on June 18, 2008 to interview Dr. Walter J. Lear. Dr Lear, born in 1923, is the person responsible for the collection. In a wide-ranging interview in his home Dr. Lear discussed his personal background, the origins and purpose of the collection, the impact of the McCarthy period on the US health left, as well as his vision for the future.

  2. HLA-DR expression and disease activity in ulcerative colitis

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Poulsen, L O; Elling, P; Sørensen, Flemming Brandt

    1986-01-01

    In 12 patients with active ulcerative colitis (UC) the rectal epithelial cells were analyzed for HLA-DR antigens by an immunohistochemical technique. The clinical, rectoscopic, and histologic stages were also determined. The investigations were carried out at the beginning of the study and 2 weeks...... and 3 months later. The rectal epithelial cells were HLA-DR-positive in all patients at the first two examinations. After 3 months five patients had changed to an HLA-DR-negative stage, whereas the other seven patients remained HLA-DR-positive. Closer analyses showed that expression/nonexpression of HLA-DR...... antigens on rectal epithelial cells of patients with UC could not be predicted from the clinical, rectoscopic, or histologic findings. HLA-DR expression is normally restricted to immunocompetent cells. The presence of HLA-DR antigens on epithelial cells may be a consequence of immunological reactions...

  3. HLA Dr beta 1 alleles in Pakistani patients with rheumatoid arthritis

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Naqi, N.; Ahmed, T.A.; Bashir, M.M.

    2011-01-01

    Objective: To determine frequencies of HLA DR beta 1 alleles in rheumatoid arthritis in Pakistani patients. Study Design: Cross sectional / analytical study. Place and Duration of Study: Department of Immunology, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Rawalpindi in collaboration with Rheumatology departments of Military Hospital, Rawalpindi and Fauji Foundation Hospital, Rawalpindi, from January 2009 to January 2010. Methodology: HLA DR beta 1 genotyping of one hundred Pakistani patients, diagnosed as having RA as per American College of Rheumatology revised criteria 1987, was done. HLA DR beta 1 genotyping was carried out at allele group level (DR beta 1*01-DR beta 1*16) by sequence specific primers in RA patients. Comparison of HLA DR beta 1 allele frequencies between patients and control groups was made using Pearson's chi-square test to find possible association of HLA DR?1 alleles with RA in Pakistani rheumatoid patients. Results: HLA DR beta 1*04 was expressed with significantly increased frequency in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (p <0.05). HLA DR?1*11 was expressed statistically significantly more in control group as compared to rheumatoid patients indicating a possible protective effect. There was no statistically significant difference observed in frequencies of HLA DR beta 1 allele *01, DR beta 1 allele *03, DR beta 1 allele *07, DR beta 1 allele *08, DR beta 1 allele *09, DR beta 1 allele *10, DR beta 1 allele *12, DR beta 1 allele *13, DR beta 1 allele *14, DR?1 allele *15 and DR beta 1 allele *16 between patients and control groups. Conclusion: The identification of susceptible HLA DR beta 1 alleles in Pakistani RA patients may help physicians to make early decisions regarding initiation of early intensive therapy with disease modifying anti rheumatic medicines and biological agents decreasing disability in RA patients. (author)

  4. FOREWORD: Dr Trevor J Hicks Dr Trevor J Hicks

    Science.gov (United States)

    Goossens, Darren

    2009-03-01

    This issue of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter has been assembled to recognize the valuable contribution of Dr Trevor J Hicks to the field of neutron scattering and magnetism. Trevor began his study of magnetism as a PhD student at Monash University in Melbourne in the early 1960s, working with Professor Jack Smith. From the very beginning magnetism in alloys, and disordered systems in general, became a key aspect of his career. After a postdoctoral position at Harwell working with Dr Graeme Low Trevor returned to Australia and took up a position with Monash. He soon became a key figure in developing the capability for neutron scattering using the HIFAR reactor at the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, now the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, ANSTO. The instrumentation was always developed to further his studies of magnetism. The development of polarization analysis measurements of diffuse magnetic scattering, first using iron filters and then his own design of supermirror benders for beam polarization, took place through the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s. Throughout this time, Trevor mentored a series of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, many of whom have contributed to this issue (and, indeed, guest edited it). As befits a scientist and university academic for whom teaching has always been important, Trevor has not only created a strong body of significant research, he has also made a major contribution to preparing several generations of neutron scattering scientists, and this issue reflects that. When I approached Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter with a proposal for an issue in honour of Trevor, the response was immediate and positive. It is with great pleasure that I present the result of that proposal. The great diversity of the content, all centred on neutron scattering and magnetism, reflects the breadth of Trevor's own career and of the scientists with whom he has interacted. Finally, I would like to make some

  5. Comparaison du Srōš Drōn avec le Drōn Yašt

    OpenAIRE

    Redard, Céline

    2015-01-01

    This paper draws a parallel between two texts having the same textual base: The Srōš Drōn, derived from the Long Liturgy and the Drōn Yašt, belonging to the short liturgies. The goal is to establish the similarities and the discrepancies between these two texts. Peer reviewed

  6. Association of differentiated thyroid carcinoma with HLA-DR7

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Sridama, V.; Hara, Y.; Fauchet, R.; DeGroot, L.J.

    1985-01-01

    Seventy-four American white thyroid cancer patients were typed for HLA-A, B, and DR antigens. A significant increase in HLA-DR7 was found in the nonradiation-associated thyroid cancer patients (42.5%, 20/47 cases), compared to 22.8% of 979 normal controls. The association is stronger in the follicular and mixed papillary-follicular subgroup (52.0%, 13/25 cases, P corrected less than 0.01). The occurrence of various malignancies in family members was found in 57.9% of HLA-DR7 positive patients, versus 20% of HLA-DR7 negative patients, in a retrospective record review. Although the frequency of HLA-DR7 was not increased in the radiation-associated thyroid cancer patients (22.2%, 6/27 cases), the interval from the irradiation date to the onset date of thyroid cancer was shorter in HLA-DR7 positive cases (17.3 +/- 6.2 years) than in HLA-DR7 negative patients (29.4 +/- 11.5 years). This data suggest that HLA-DR7 is associated with and may influence development of thyroid cancer

  7. The Acquisition of English Focus Marking by Non-Native Speakers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Baker, Rachel Elizabeth

    This dissertation examines Mandarin and Korean speakers' acquisition of English focus marking, which is realized by accenting particular words within a focused constituent. It is important for non-native speakers to learn how accent placement relates to focus in English because appropriate accent placement and realization makes a learner's English more native-like and easier to understand. Such knowledge may also improve their English comprehension skills. In this study, 20 native English speakers, 20 native Mandarin speakers, and 20 native Korean speakers participated in four experiments: (1) a production experiment, in which they were recorded reading the answers to questions, (2) a perception experiment, in which they were asked to determine which word in a recording was the last prominent word, (3) an understanding experiment, in which they were asked whether the answers in recorded question-answer pairs had context-appropriate prosody, and (4) an accent placement experiment, in which they were asked which word they would make prominent in a particular context. Finally, a new group of native English speakers listened to utterances produced in the production experiment, and determined whether the prosody of each utterance was appropriate for its context. The results of the five experiments support a novel predictive model for second language prosodic focus marking acquisition. This model holds that both transfer of linguistic features from a learner's native language (L1) and features of their second language (L2) affect learners' acquisition of prosodic focus marking. As a result, the model includes two complementary components: the Transfer Component and the L2 Challenge Component. The Transfer Component predicts that prosodic structures in the L2 will be more easily acquired by language learners that have similar structures in their L1 than those who do not, even if there are differences between the L1 and L2 in how the structures are realized. The L2

  8. Speaker transfer in children's peer conversation: completing communication-aid-mediated contributions.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Clarke, Michael; Bloch, Steven; Wilkinson, Ray

    2013-03-01

    Managing the exchange of speakers from one person to another effectively is a key issue for participants in everyday conversational interaction. Speakers use a range of resources to indicate, in advance, when their turn will come to an end, and listeners attend to such signals in order to know when they might legitimately speak. Using the principles and findings from conversation analysis, this paper examines features of speaker transfer in a conversation between a boy with cerebral palsy who has been provided with a voice-output communication aid (VOCA), and a peer without physical or communication difficulties. Specifically, the analysis focuses on turn exchange, where a VOCA-mediated contribution approach completion, and the child without communication needs is due to speak next.

  9. Comparing headphone and speaker effects on simulated driving.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nelson, T M; Nilsson, T H

    1990-12-01

    Twelve persons drove for three hours in an automobile simulator while listening to music at sound level 63dB over stereo headphones during one session and from a dashboard speaker during another session. They were required to steer a mountain highway, maintain a certain indicated speed, shift gears, and respond to occasional hazards. Steering and speed control were dependent on visual cues. The need to shift and the hazards were indicated by sound and vibration effects. With the headphones, the driver's average reaction time for the most complex task presented--shifting gears--was about one-third second longer than with the speaker. The use of headphones did not delay the development of subjective fatigue.

  10. The Story of Story Mill-A Montana Community Working to Restore Wetlands

    Science.gov (United States)

    Story Mill, a 55-acre site on the outskirts of Bozeman, Montana, has undergone several transformations in recent history. The place is virtually a “mill of stories” with respect to land use, but originally it was a wetland.

  11. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as Spiritual Leader

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Andrea Pierce

    2013-09-01

    Full Text Available The purpose of this paper is to explore Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s spiritual leadership through his “I Have a Dream” speech. The paper explores the three characteristics of spiritual leadership as posed by Fry’s (2003 spiritual leadership theory: vision, hope/faith and altruistic love. The research draws upon these characteristics through qualitative content analysis of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to illustrate Dr. King’s leadership as that of a spiritual leader. The research advances the spiritual leadership theory by establishing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a spiritual leader. Through the illustration of Dr. King’s spiritual leadership, the characteristics of a spiritual leader are given tangible understanding.

  12. Environmental Assessment: BRAC Construction and Operation of Armed Forces Reserve Center at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Great Falls, Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    2009-06-01

    east, and south by agricultural and pasture lands, with mixed commercial, industrial, residential, and open land uses to the west and northwest...southeast corner of the installation. Once the runoff reaches the stables, it disperses over horse pastures and any runoff exiting the installation...Environment Agriculture is the largest industry in Montana. Agricultural products grown in Montana include beef and dairy cattle, wheat and barley, sheep

  13. The DR-2 project

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Ølgaard, Povl Lebeck

    2003-01-01

    state of the reactor and to determine, which radionuclides remain where in the reactor in what amounts. The first part of the reactor to be investigated was the reactor tank. The lids at the reactor top wereremoved, air samples taken and smear test made in the tank. Then the control rods, the magnet....... At the start of the project the activity in DR-2 was about 45-50 GBq. Now it is about 5-10 GBq. Based on the results of the DR-2 project it is believed that the reactor can readily bedismantled and decommissioned....

  14. Speaker information affects false recognition of unstudied lexical-semantic associates.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Luthra, Sahil; Fox, Neal P; Blumstein, Sheila E

    2018-05-01

    Recognition of and memory for a spoken word can be facilitated by a prior presentation of that word spoken by the same talker. However, it is less clear whether this speaker congruency advantage generalizes to facilitate recognition of unheard related words. The present investigation employed a false memory paradigm to examine whether information about a speaker's identity in items heard by listeners could influence the recognition of novel items (critical intruders) phonologically or semantically related to the studied items. In Experiment 1, false recognition of semantically associated critical intruders was sensitive to speaker information, though only when subjects attended to talker identity during encoding. Results from Experiment 2 also provide some evidence that talker information affects the false recognition of critical intruders. Taken together, the present findings indicate that indexical information is able to contact the lexical-semantic network to affect the processing of unheard words.

  15. Using Reversed MFCC and IT-EM for Automatic Speaker Verification

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sheeraz Memon

    2012-01-01

    Full Text Available This paper proposes text independent automatic speaker verification system using IMFCC (Inverse/ Reverse Mel Frequency Coefficients and IT-EM (Information Theoretic Expectation Maximization. To perform speaker verification, feature extraction using Mel scale has been widely applied and has established better results. The IMFCC is based on inverse Mel-scale. The IMFCC effectively captures information available at the high frequency formants which is ignored by the MFCC. In this paper the fusion of MFCC and IMFCC at input level is proposed. GMMs (Gaussian Mixture Models based on EM (Expectation Maximization have been widely used for classification of text independent verification. However EM comes across the convergence issue. In this paper we use our proposed IT-EM which has faster convergence, to train speaker models. IT-EM uses information theory principles such as PDE (Parzen Density Estimation and KL (Kullback-Leibler divergence measure. IT-EM acclimatizes the weights, means and covariances, like EM. However, IT-EM process is not performed on feature vector sets but on a set of centroids obtained using IT (Information Theoretic metric. The IT-EM process at once diminishes divergence measure between PDE estimates of features distribution within a given class and the centroids distribution within the same class. The feature level fusion and IT-EM is tested for the task of speaker verification using NIST2001 and NIST2004. The experimental evaluation validates that MFCC/IMFCC has better results than the conventional delta/MFCC feature set. The MFCC/IMFCC feature vector size is also much smaller than the delta MFCC thus reducing the computational burden as well. IT-EM method also showed faster convergence, than the conventional EM method, and thus it leads to higher speaker recognition scores.

  16. Tribute to Dr Jacques Rogge

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Bourgois, Jan G; Dumortier, Jasmien; Callewaert, Margot

    2017-01-01

    'A tribute to Dr J. Rogge' aims to systematically review muscle activity and muscle fatigue during sustained submaximal quasi-isometric knee extension exercise (hiking) related to Olympic dinghy sailing as a tribute to Dr Rogge's merits in the world of sports. Dr Jacques Rogge is not only...... of invasive needle electromyography (EMG) during a specific sailing technique (hiking) on a self-constructed sailing ergometer. Hiking is a bilateral and multi-joint submaximal quasi-isometric movement which dinghy sailors use to optimize boat speed and to prevent the boat from capsizing. Large stresses...... are generated in the anterior muscles that cross the knee and hip joint, mainly employing the quadriceps at an intensity of 30-40% maximal voluntary contraction (MVC), sometimes exceeding 100% MVC. Better sailing level is partially determined by a lower rate of neuromuscular fatigue during hiking and for ≈60...

  17. [Litter decomposition and lignocellulose enzyme activities of Actinothuidium hookeri and Cys- topteris montana in alpine timberline ecotone of western Sichuan, China].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Ya-mei; He, Run-lian; Deng, Chang-chun; Yang, Wan-qin; Zhang, Jian; Yang, Lin; Liu, Yang

    2015-11-01

    The mass loss and lignocellulose enzyme activities of Actinothuidium hookeri residues and Cystopteris montana leaf litter in coniferous forest and timberline of western Sichuan, China were investigated. The results showed that both the mass loss rates of A. hookeri and C. Montana in timberline were higher than those in coniferous forest, while enzyme activities in timberline were lower than those in coniferous forest which was contrast with the hypothesis. The mass loss of two ground covers had significant differences in different seasons. The mass loss rate of A. hookeri in snow-covered season accounted for 69.8% and 83.0% of the whole year' s in timberline and coniferous forest, while that of C. montana in the growing season accounted for 82.6% and 83.4% of the whole year' s in timberline and coniferous forest, respectively. C. montana leaf litter decayed faster in the growing season, which was consistent with its higher cellulase activity in the growing season. The result illustrated that the enzymatic hydrolysis of cellulose and hemicellulose might be the main driving force for the early stage of litter decomposition. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that environmental factors and initial litter quality could explain 45.8%-85.1% variation of enzyme activity. The enzyme activities of A. hookeri and C. montana in the process of decomposition were mainly affected by the freeze-thaw cycle in snow-covered season.

  18. Chemical Composition and Cytotoxic and Antioxidant Activities of Satureja montana L. Essential Oil and Its Antibacterial Potential against Salmonella Spp. Strains

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Hanene Miladi

    2013-01-01

    Full Text Available The present study describes chemical composition as well as cytotoxic, antioxidant, and antimicrobial activities of winter savory Satureja montana L. essential oil (EO. The plant was collected from south France mountain, and its EO was extracted by hydrodistillation (HD and analysed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS. Thirty-two compounds were identified accounting for 99.85% of the total oil, where oxygenated monoterpenes constituted the main chemical class (59.11%. The oil was dominated by carvacrol (53.35%, γ-terpinene (13.54%, and the monoterpenic hydrocarbons p-cymene (13.03%. Moreover, S. montana L. EO exhibited high antibacterial activities with strong effectiveness against several pathogenic food isolated Salmonella spp. including S. enteritidis with a diameter of inhibition zones growth ranging from 21 to 51 mm and MIC and MBC values ranging from 0.39–1.56 mg/mL to 0.39–3.12 mg/mL, respectively. Furthermore, the S. montana L. EO was investigated for its cytotoxic and antioxidant activities. The results revealed a significant cytotoxic effect of S. montana L. EO against A549 cell line and an important antioxidant activity. These findings suggest that S. montana L. EO may be considered as an interesting source of components used as potent agents in food preservation and for therapeutic or nutraceutical industries.

  19. Study of audio speakers containing ferrofluid

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Rosensweig, R E [34 Gloucester Road, Summit, NJ 07901 (United States); Hirota, Y; Tsuda, S [Ferrotec, 1-4-14 Kyobashi, chuo-Ku, Tokyo 104-0031 (Japan); Raj, K [Ferrotec, 33 Constitution Drive, Bedford, NH 03110 (United States)

    2008-05-21

    This work validates a method for increasing the radial restoring force on the voice coil in audio speakers containing ferrofluid. In addition, a study is made of factors influencing splash loss of the ferrofluid due to shock. Ferrohydrodynamic analysis is employed throughout to model behavior, and predictions are compared to experimental data.

  20. NPDES Permit for Crow Municipal Rural & Industrial Pilot Water Treatment Plant in Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Under NPDES permit MT-0031827, the Crow Indian Tribe is authorized to discharge from the Crow Municipal Rural & Industrial (MR&I) Pilot Water Treatment Plant in Bighorn County, Montana to the Bighorn River.

  1. Designing, Modeling, Constructing, and Testing a Flat Panel Speaker and Sound Diffuser for a Simulator

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dillon, Christina

    2013-01-01

    The goal of this project was to design, model, build, and test a flat panel speaker and frame for a spherical dome structure being made into a simulator. The simulator will be a test bed for evaluating an immersive environment for human interfaces. This project focused on the loud speakers and a sound diffuser for the dome. The rest of the team worked on an Ambisonics 3D sound system, video projection system, and multi-direction treadmill to create the most realistic scene possible. The main programs utilized in this project, were Pro-E and COMSOL. Pro-E was used for creating detailed figures for the fabrication of a frame that held a flat panel loud speaker. The loud speaker was made from a thin sheet of Plexiglas and 4 acoustic exciters. COMSOL, a multiphysics finite analysis simulator, was used to model and evaluate all stages of the loud speaker, frame, and sound diffuser. Acoustical testing measurements were utilized to create polar plots from the working prototype which were then compared to the COMSOL simulations to select the optimal design for the dome. The final goal of the project was to install the flat panel loud speaker design in addition to a sound diffuser on to the wall of the dome. After running tests in COMSOL on various speaker configurations, including a warped Plexiglas version, the optimal speaker design included a flat piece of Plexiglas with a rounded frame to match the curvature of the dome. Eight of these loud speakers will be mounted into an inch and a half of high performance acoustic insulation, or Thinsulate, that will cover the inside of the dome. The following technical paper discusses these projects and explains the engineering processes used, knowledge gained, and the projected future goals of this project

  2. Data requirements for speaker independent acoustic models

    CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

    Badenhorst, JAC

    2008-11-01

    Full Text Available When developing speech recognition systems in resource-constrained environments, careful design of the training corpus can play an important role in compensating for data scarcity. One of the factors to consider relates to the speaker composition...

  3. Study of volatile oil and lipid content of Jasonia montana (vahl ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    The volatile oils, prepared by hydrodistillation from the aerial parts of three patches of Jasonia montana (vahl.) collected in May, August and November were subjected separately to GC/Ms analysis. Camphor, endoborneol, endobornyl acetate, intermedeol, 1, 8-cineole, 1-α-terpineol, and α-pinene, represented the major ...

  4. Human immune responsiveness to Lolium perenne pollen allergen Lol p III (rye III) is associated with HLA-DR3 and DR5.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ansari, A A; Freidhoff, L R; Meyers, D A; Bias, W B; Marsh, D G

    1989-05-01

    A well-characterized allergen of Lolium perenne (perennial rye grass) pollen, Lol p III, has been used as a model antigen to study the genetic control of the human immune response. Associations between HLA type and IgE or IgG antibody (Ab) responsiveness to Lol p III were studied in two groups of skin-test-positive Caucasoid adults (N = 135 and 67). We found by nonparametric and parametric analyses that immune responsiveness to Lol p III was significantly associated with HLA-DR3 and DR5. No association was found between any DQ type and immune responsiveness to Lol p III. Geometric mean IgE or IgG Ab levels to Lol p III were not different between B8+, DR3+ subjects and B8-, DR3+ subjects, showing that HLA-B8 had no influence on the association. Lol p III IgG Ab data obtained on subjects after grass antigen immunotherapy showed that 100% of DR3 subjects and 100% of DR5 subjects were Ab+. A comparison of all the available protein sequences of DRB gene products showed that the first hypervariable region of DR3 and DR5 (and DRw6), and no other region, contains the sequence Glu9-Tyr-Ser-Thr-Ser13. Our observations are consistent with the possibility that immune responsiveness to the allergen Lol p III is associated with this amino acid sequence in the first hypervariable region of the DR beta 1 polypeptide chain.

  5. During Threaded Discussions Are Non-Native English Speakers Always at a Disadvantage?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shafer Willner, Lynn

    2014-01-01

    When participating in threaded discussions, under what conditions might non¬native speakers of English (NNSE) be at a comparative disadvantage to their classmates who are native speakers of English (NSE)? This study compares the threaded discussion perspectives of closely-matched NNSE and NSE adult students having different levels of threaded…

  6. Weatherization is a Natural Choice for Montana: Weatherization Assistance Close-Up Fact Sheet

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    2001-01-01

    Montana demonstrates its commitment to technology and efficiency through the Weatherization Program. Weatherization uses advanced technologies and techniques to reduce energy costs for low-income families by increasing the energy efficiency of their homes

  7. Weatherization is a Natural Choice for Montana: Weatherization Assistance Close-Up Fact Sheet

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    D& R International

    2001-10-10

    Montana demonstrates its commitment to technology and efficiency through the Weatherization Program. Weatherization uses advanced technologies and techniques to reduce energy costs for low-income families by increasing the energy efficiency of their homes.

  8. Analysis of Acoustic Features in Speakers with Cognitive Disorders and Speech Impairments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Saz, Oscar; Simón, Javier; Rodríguez, W. Ricardo; Lleida, Eduardo; Vaquero, Carlos

    2009-12-01

    This work presents the results in the analysis of the acoustic features (formants and the three suprasegmental features: tone, intensity and duration) of the vowel production in a group of 14 young speakers suffering different kinds of speech impairments due to physical and cognitive disorders. A corpus with unimpaired children's speech is used to determine the reference values for these features in speakers without any kind of speech impairment within the same domain of the impaired speakers; this is 57 isolated words. The signal processing to extract the formant and pitch values is based on a Linear Prediction Coefficients (LPCs) analysis of the segments considered as vowels in a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based Viterbi forced alignment. Intensity and duration are also based in the outcome of the automated segmentation. As main conclusion of the work, it is shown that intelligibility of the vowel production is lowered in impaired speakers even when the vowel is perceived as correct by human labelers. The decrease in intelligibility is due to a 30% of increase in confusability in the formants map, a reduction of 50% in the discriminative power in energy between stressed and unstressed vowels and to a 50% increase of the standard deviation in the length of the vowels. On the other hand, impaired speakers keep good control of tone in the production of stressed and unstressed vowels.

  9. Evaluation of Speakers at a National Continuing Medical Education (CME Course

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jannette Collins, MD, MEd, FCCP

    2002-12-01

    Full Text Available Purpose: Evaluations of a national radiology continuing medical education (CME course in thoracic imaging were analyzed to determine what constitutes effective and ineffective lecturing. Methods and Materials: Evaluations of sessions and individual speakers participating in a five-day course jointly sponsored by the Society of Thoracic Radiology (STR and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA were tallied by the RSNA Department of Data Management and three members of the STR Training Committee. Comments were collated and analyzed to determine the number of positive and negative comments and common themes related to ineffective lecturing. Results: Twenty-two sessions were evaluated by 234 (75.7% of 309 professional registrants. Eighty-one speakers were evaluated by an average of 153 registrants (range, 2 – 313. Mean ratings for 10 items evaluating sessions ranged from 1.28 – 2.05 (1=most positive, 4=least positive; SD .451 - .902. The average speaker rating was 5.7 (1=very poor, 7=outstanding; SD 0.94; range 4.3 – 6.4. Total number of comments analyzed was 862, with 505 (58.6% considered positive and 404 (46.9% considered negative (the total number exceeds 862 as a “comment” could consist of both positive and negative statements. Poor content was mentioned most frequently, making up 107 (26.5% of 404 negative comments, and applied to 51 (63% of 81 speakers. Other negative comments, in order of decreasing frequency, were related to delivery, image slides, command of the English language, text slides, and handouts. Conclusions: Individual evaluations of speakers at a national CME course provided information regarding the quality of lectures that was not provided by evaluations of grouped presentations. Systematic review of speaker evaluations provided specific information related to the types and frequency of features related to ineffective lecturing. This information can be used to design CME course evaluations, design future CME

  10. Complimenting Functions by Native English Speakers and Iranian EFL Learners: A Divergence or Convergence

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ali Akbar Ansarin

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available The study of compliment speech act has been under investigation on many occasions in recent years. In this study, an attempt is made to explore appraisals performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners to find out how these two groups diverge or converge from each other with regard to complimenting patterns and norms. The participants of the study were 60 advanced Iranian EFL learners who were speaking Persian as their first language and 60 native English speakers. Through a written Discourse Completion Task comprised of eight different scenarios, compliments were analyzed with regard to topics (performance, personality, possession, and skill, functions (explicit, implicit, and opt-out, gender differences and the common positive adjectives used by two groups of native and nonnative participants. The findings suggested that native English speakers praised individuals more implicitly in comparison with Iranian EFL learners and native speakers provided opt-outs more frequently than Iranian EFL learners did. The analysis of data by Chi-square showed that gender and macro functions are independent of each other among Iranian EFL learners’ compliments while for native speakers, gender played a significant role in the distribution of appraisals. Iranian EFL learners’ complimenting patterns converge more towards those of native English speakers. Moreover, both groups favored explicit compliments. However, Iranian EFL learners were more inclined to provide explicit compliments. It can be concluded that there were more similarities rather than differences between Iranian EFL learners and native English speakers regarding compliment speech act. The results of this study can benefit researchers, teachers, material developers, and EFL learners.

  11. 7 CFR 247.13 - Provisions for non-English or limited-English speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-01-01

    ... 7 Agriculture 4 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Provisions for non-English or limited-English speakers... § 247.13 Provisions for non-English or limited-English speakers. (a) What must State and local agencies do to ensure that non-English or limited-English speaking persons are aware of their rights and...

  12. Fire ecology of Montana forest habitat types east of the Continental Divide

    Science.gov (United States)

    William C. Fischer; Bruce D. Clayton

    1983-01-01

    Provides information on fire as an ecological factor for forest habitat types occurring east of the Continental Divide in Montana. Identifies "Fire Groups" of habitat types based on fire's role in forest succession. Describes forest fuels and suggests considerations for fire management.

  13. 78 FR 47723 - Notice of Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council

    Science.gov (United States)

    2013-08-06

    ..., (406) 233-2831, [email protected] . Persons who use a telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD... variety of planning and management issues associated with public land management in Montana. At these... manager updates, Field Office Resource Management Planning updates, individual council member briefings...

  14. Implementing Python for DrRacket

    OpenAIRE

    Ramos, Pedro Palma; Leitão, António Menezes

    2014-01-01

    The Python programming language is becoming increasingly popular in a variety of areas, most notably among novice programmers. On the other hand, Racket and other Scheme dialects are considered excellent vehicles for introducing Computer Science concepts. This paper presents an implementation of Python for Racket and the DrRacket IDE. This allows Python programmers to use Racket libraries and vice versa, as well as using DrRacket's pedagogic features. In particular, it allows architects and d...

  15. Brahm Prakash, Dr

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 1972 Section: Engineering & Technology. Brahm Prakash, Dr Ph.D. (Panjab), FNA 1974-76. Date of birth: 21 August 1912. Date of death: 3 January 1984. Specialization: Metallurgy. YouTube; Twitter; Facebook; Blog ...

  16. Dr. David Syz, State Secretary for Economic Affairs, Switzerland

    CERN Multimedia

    Maximilien Brice

    2003-01-01

    Dr. David Syz, State Secretary for Economic Affairs, Switzerland, toured the assembly hall of the ATLAS experiment on a recent visit to CERN.Photos 01, 02: Dr. Peter Jenni, spokesperson for the ATLAS experiment (second from left), explains to Dr. David Syz (fourth from left) and accompanying visitors the process of integration of a 26-metre-long coil of the barrel toroid magnet system into its coil casing.Photo 03: Dr. Peter Jenni (extreme right) with Dr. David Syz (front row, fourth from right) behind a stack of 26-metre-long 'racetrack' coils awaiting integration into their coil casings.

  17. Analysis of Feature Extraction Methods for Speaker Dependent Speech Recognition

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Gurpreet Kaur

    2017-02-01

    Full Text Available Speech recognition is about what is being said, irrespective of who is saying. Speech recognition is a growing field. Major progress is taking place on the technology of automatic speech recognition (ASR. Still, there are lots of barriers in this field in terms of recognition rate, background noise, speaker variability, speaking rate, accent etc. Speech recognition rate mainly depends on the selection of features and feature extraction methods. This paper outlines the feature extraction techniques for speaker dependent speech recognition for isolated words. A brief survey of different feature extraction techniques like Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC, Linear Predictive Coding Coefficients (LPCC, Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP, Relative Spectra Perceptual linear Predictive (RASTA-PLP analysis are presented and evaluation is done. Speech recognition has various applications from daily use to commercial use. We have made a speaker dependent system and this system can be useful in many areas like controlling a patient vehicle using simple commands.

  18. Communication Interface for Mexican Spanish Dysarthric Speakers

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Gladys Bonilla-Enriquez

    2012-03-01

    Full Text Available La disartria es una discapacidad motora del habla caracterizada por debilidad o poca coordinación de los músculos del habla. Esta condición puede ser causada por un infarto, parálisis cerebral, o por una lesión severa en el cerebro. Para mexicanos con esta condición hay muy pocas, si es que hay alguna, tecnologías de asistencia para mejorar sus habilidades sociales de interacción. En este artículo presentamos nuestros avances hacia el desarrollo de una interfazde comunicación para hablantes con disartria cuya lengua materna sea el español mexicano. La metodología propuesta depende de (1 diseño especial de un corpus de entrenamiento con voz normal y recursos limitados, (2 adaptación de usuario estándar, y (3 control de la perplejidad del modelo de lenguaje para lograr alta precisión en el Reconocimiento Automático del Habla (RAH. La interfaz permite al usuario y terapéuta el realizar actividades como adaptación dinámica de usuario, adaptación de vocabulario, y síntesis de texto a voz. Pruebas en vivo fueron realizadas con un usuario con disartria leve, logrando precisiones de 93%-95% para habla espontánea.Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder due to weakness or poor coordination of the speechmuscles. This condition can be caused by a stroke, cerebral palsy, or by a traumatic braininjury. For Mexican people with this condition there are few, if any, assistive technologies to improve their social interaction skills. In this paper we present our advances towards the development of a communication interface for dysarthric speakers whose native language is Mexican Spanish. We propose a methodology that relies on (1 special design of a training normal-speech corpus with limited resources, (2 standard speaker adaptation, and (3 control of language model perplexity, to achieve high Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR accuracy. The interface allows the user and therapist to perform tasks such as dynamic speaker adaptation, vocabulary

  19. Hazarika, Dr Nabajit

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Hazarika, Dr Nabajit Ph.D. (Tezpur). Date of birth: 17 January 1986. Specialization: Remote Sensing, GIS Applications, Fluvial Geomorphology, Landuse Landcover Studies Address: Dept. of Environmental Science, Nagaland University, Lumami 798 627, Nagaland Contact: Residence: 94354 81256, 97066 71256

  20. Vocal caricatures reveal signatures of speaker identity

    Science.gov (United States)

    López, Sabrina; Riera, Pablo; Assaneo, María Florencia; Eguía, Manuel; Sigman, Mariano; Trevisan, Marcos A.

    2013-12-01

    What are the features that impersonators select to elicit a speaker's identity? We built a voice database of public figures (targets) and imitations produced by professional impersonators. They produced one imitation based on their memory of the target (caricature) and another one after listening to the target audio (replica). A set of naive participants then judged identity and similarity of pairs of voices. Identity was better evoked by the caricatures and replicas were perceived to be closer to the targets in terms of voice similarity. We used this data to map relevant acoustic dimensions for each task. Our results indicate that speaker identity is mainly associated with vocal tract features, while perception of voice similarity is related to vocal folds parameters. We therefore show the way in which acoustic caricatures emphasize identity features at the cost of loosing similarity, which allows drawing an analogy with caricatures in the visual space.

  1. Within-category variance and lexical tone discrimination in native and non-native speakers

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Hoffmann, C.W.G.; Sadakata, M.; Chen, A.; Desain, P.W.M.; McQueen, J.M.; Gussenhove, C.; Chen, Y.; Dediu, D.

    2014-01-01

    In this paper, we show how acoustic variance within lexical tones in disyllabic Mandarin Chinese pseudowords affects discrimination abilities in both native and non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Within-category acoustic variance did not hinder native speakers in discriminating between lexical

  2. The Acquisition of Clitic Pronouns in the Spanish Interlanguage of Peruvian Quechua Speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Klee, Carol A.

    1989-01-01

    Analysis of four adult Quechua speakers' acquisition of clitic pronouns in Spanish revealed that educational attainment and amount of contact with monolingual Spanish speakers were positively related to native-like norms of competence in the use of object pronouns in Spanish. (CB)

  3. "I May Be a Native Speaker but I'm Not Monolingual": Reimagining "All" Teachers' Linguistic Identities in TESOL

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ellis, Elizabeth M.

    2016-01-01

    Teacher linguistic identity has so far mainly been researched in terms of whether a teacher identifies (or is identified by others) as a native speaker (NEST) or nonnative speaker (NNEST) (Moussu & Llurda, 2008; Reis, 2011). Native speakers are presumed to be monolingual, and nonnative speakers, although by definition bilingual, tend to be…

  4. Prakash, Dr Vishweshwaraiah

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Prakash, Dr Vishweshwaraiah Ph.D. (Mysore), FNASc, FNAE, FRSC,FNAAS. Date of birth: 23 November 1951. Specialization: S&T Policy, Physical Biochemistry, Chemistry of Macromolecules, Biophysics of Proteins, Enzymes & Thermodynamics, Food Chemistry, Nutrition, Food Biotechnology and Food Science Address: ...

  5. Dikshit, Dr Madhu

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 2000 Section: Medicine. Dikshit, Dr Madhu Ph.D. (Kanpur), FNASc, FNA Council Service: 2016. Date of birth: 21 November 1957. Specialization: Redox Biology, Cardiovascular Pharmacology, Molecular Pharmacology, Neutrophiles and Nitric Oxide Synthase Address: Department ...

  6. Sethunathan, Dr Nambrattil

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Fellow Profile. Elected: 1986 Section: Plant Sciences. Sethunathan, Dr Nambrattil Ph.D. (Madras), FNA, FNAAS, FNASc. Date of birth: 2 June 1937. Specialization: Environmental Microbiology Address: Flat No. 103, Ushodaya Apartments, Sri Venkateswara Officers' Colony, Ramakrishnapuram, Secunderabad 500 056, A.P.

  7. Mukerji, Dr Mitali

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 2014 Section: Medicine. Mukerji, Dr Mitali Ph.D. (IISc). Date of birth: 13 November 1967. Specialization: Functional Genomics, Population Genomics, Ayurgenomics Address: Sr Principal Scientist, Genomics & Molecualr Medicine, Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology, Sukhdev Vihar, Mathura Road, New Delhi ...

  8. Entrepreneurship in Montana. A Handbook for Integrating Entrepreneurship into All Vocational Areas.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Harris, Ronald R.

    This handbook was developed to provide vocational education teachers in Montana with information about entreprenuership so that they can integrate the concepts into their vocational courses. The guide provides a definition of entrepreneurship and describes the syllabus for entrepreneurship (ownership, location, financing, personnel, promotion,…

  9. Bridging Gaps in Common Ground: Speakers Design Their Gestures for Their Listeners

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hilliard, Caitlin; Cook, Susan Wagner

    2016-01-01

    Communication is shaped both by what we are trying to say and by whom we are saying it to. We examined whether and how shared information influences the gestures speakers produce along with their speech. Unlike prior work examining effects of common ground on speech and gesture, we examined a situation in which some speakers have the same amount…

  10. Encoding, rehearsal, and recall in signers and speakers: shared network but differential engagement.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bavelier, D; Newman, A J; Mukherjee, M; Hauser, P; Kemeny, S; Braun, A; Boutla, M

    2008-10-01

    Short-term memory (STM), or the ability to hold verbal information in mind for a few seconds, is known to rely on the integrity of a frontoparietal network of areas. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to ask whether a similar network is engaged when verbal information is conveyed through a visuospatial language, American Sign Language, rather than speech. Deaf native signers and hearing native English speakers performed a verbal recall task, where they had to first encode a list of letters in memory, maintain it for a few seconds, and finally recall it in the order presented. The frontoparietal network described to mediate STM in speakers was also observed in signers, with its recruitment appearing independent of the modality of the language. This finding supports the view that signed and spoken STM rely on similar mechanisms. However, deaf signers and hearing speakers differentially engaged key structures of the frontoparietal network as the stages of STM unfold. In particular, deaf signers relied to a greater extent than hearing speakers on passive memory storage areas during encoding and maintenance, but on executive process areas during recall. This work opens new avenues for understanding similarities and differences in STM performance in signers and speakers.

  11. Incorporating Pass-Phrase Dependent Background Models for Text-Dependent Speaker verification

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Sarkar, Achintya Kumar; Tan, Zheng-Hua

    2018-01-01

    -dependent. We show that the proposed method significantly reduces the error rates of text-dependent speaker verification for the non-target types: target-wrong and impostor-wrong while it maintains comparable TD-SV performance when impostors speak a correct utterance with respect to the conventional system......In this paper, we propose pass-phrase dependent background models (PBMs) for text-dependent (TD) speaker verification (SV) to integrate the pass-phrase identification process into the conventional TD-SV system, where a PBM is derived from a text-independent background model through adaptation using...... the utterances of a particular pass-phrase. During training, pass-phrase specific target speaker models are derived from the particular PBM using the training data for the respective target model. While testing, the best PBM is first selected for the test utterance in the maximum likelihood (ML) sense...

  12. Dr. Hans Chang, Director, Physics Research Committee, Stichting voor Fundamenteel Onderzoek der Materie (FOM), Dr. Joris Van Enst, Head of Science Policy Division, Ministry of Education, Culture and S cience, Dr. Jan Bezemer, NL Delegate CERN, Netherlands

    CERN Multimedia

    Patrice Loiez

    1999-01-01

    Dr. Hans Chang, Director, Physics Research Committee, Stichting voor Fundamenteel Onderzoek der Materie (FOM), Dr. Joris Van Enst, Head of Science Policy Division, Ministry of Education, Culture and S cience, Dr. Jan Bezemer, NL Delegate CERN, Netherlands

  13. A century of climate and ecosystem change in Western Montana: What do temperature trends portend?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pederson, G.T.; Graumlich, L.J.; Fagre, D.B.; Kipfer, T.; Muhlfeld, C.C.

    2010-01-01

    The physical science linking human-induced increases in greenhouse gasses to the warming of the global climate system is well established, but the implications of this warming for ecosystem processes and services at regional scales is still poorly understood. Thus, the objectives of this work were to: (1) describe rates of change in temperature averages and extremes for western Montana, a region containing sensitive resources and ecosystems, (2) investigate associations between Montana temperature change to hemispheric and global temperature change, (3) provide climate analysis tools for land and resource managers responsible for researching and maintaining renewable resources, habitat, and threatened/endangered species and (4) integrate our findings into a more general assessment of climate impacts on ecosystem processes and services over the past century. Over 100 years of daily and monthly temperature data collected in western Montana, USA are analyzed for long-term changes in seasonal averages and daily extremes. In particular, variability and trends in temperature above or below ecologically and socially meaningful thresholds within this region (e.g., -17.8??C (0??F), 0??C (32??F), and 32.2??C (90??F)) are assessed. The daily temperature time series reveal extremely cold days (??? -17.8??C) terminate on average 20 days earlier and decline in number, whereas extremely hot days (???32??C) show a three-fold increase in number and a 24-day increase in seasonal window during which they occur. Results show that regionally important thresholds have been exceeded, the most recent of which include the timing and number of the 0??C freeze/thaw temperatures during spring and fall. Finally, we close with a discussion on the implications for Montana's ecosystems. Special attention is given to critical processes that respond non-linearly as temperatures exceed critical thresholds, and have positive feedbacks that amplify the changes. ?? Springer Science + Business Media B

  14. Mukhopadhyay, Dr Sangita

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 2013 Section: Medicine. Mukhopadhyay, Dr Sangita Ph.D. (Utkal), FNASc. Date of birth: 1 January 1966. Specialization: Immunology, Cell Signalling, Communicable Diseases Address: Group Leader, Molecular Cell Biology, Centre for DNA Fingerprinting & Diagnostics, Nampally, Hyderabad 500 001, A.P.. Contact ...

  15. Mohanty, Dr Debasisa

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 2012 Section: General Biology. Mohanty, Dr Debasisa Ph.D. (IISc), FNASc, FNA. Date of birth: 30 November 1966. Specialization: Bioinformatics, Computational & Structural Biology, Biophysics Address: National Institute of Immunology, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi 110 067, ...

  16. Banerjee, Dr Srikumar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Fellow Profile. Elected: 1990 Section: Engineering & Technology. Banerjee, Dr Srikumar Ph.D. (IIT, Kharagpur), FNA, FNAE, FNASc, FTWAS Council Service: 2007-12; Vice-President: 2010-12. Date of birth: 25 April 1946. Specialization: Materials Science, Physical Metallurgy, Phase Transformations, Nuclear Fuel Cycle, ...

  17. Authikesavalu, Dr Munisamy

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 1948 Section: Medicine. Authikesavalu, Dr Munisamy MBBS (Madras), MS (Minneapolis), FRCS. Date of birth: 16 August 1906. Date of death: 22 September 1973. Specialization: Experimental Surgery, Ophthalmology, Otolaryngology Last known address: 5-C, Lavelle Cross Road, ...

  18. Santhanam, Dr Vaidyanathaswamy

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1974 Section: Plant Sciences. Santhanam, Dr Vaidyanathaswamy Ph.D. (Madras). Date of birth: 31 July 1925. Specialization: Plant Breeding & Genetics, Research Management and Cotton Development Address: 'Shri Abhirami', 107, Venkataswamy Road West, R S Puram Post, Coimbatore 641 002, T.N.. Contact:

  19. Amarjit Singh, Dr

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 1974 Section: Engineering & Technology. Amarjit Singh, Dr Ph.D. (Harvard). Date of birth: 19 November 1924. Specialization: Millimeter Wave Tubes, Microwave Tubes and Microwave Electronics Address: 12, Auburn Court, Vernon Hills, IL 60061, USA Contact: Residence: ...

  20. Chandy, Dr Mammen

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 2008 Section: Medicine. Chandy, Dr Mammen MD (Madras), FRACP, FRCPA. Date of birth: 30 August 1949. Specialization: Hematology, Bone Marrow Transplantation and Molecular Genetics of Blood Diseases Address: Director, Tata Memorial Centre, 14, Major Arterial Road, ...

  1. Shivaji, Dr Sisinthy

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 2011 Section: Animal Sciences. Shivaji, Dr Sisinthy Ph.D. (Delhi), FNASc. Date of birth: 17 June 1950. Specialization: Anti-Microbial Resistance, Gut Microbiome, Eye Disease, Conservation Biology, Mammalian Sperm Function, Bacterial Biodiversity of Cold Habitats, Cold ...

  2. Speaker-Sex Discrimination for Voiced and Whispered Vowels at Short Durations

    OpenAIRE

    Smith, David R. R.

    2016-01-01

    Whispered vowels, produced with no vocal fold vibration, lack the periodic temporal fine structure which in voiced vowels underlies the perceptual attribute of pitch (a salient auditory cue to speaker sex). Voiced vowels possess no temporal fine structure at very short durations (below two glottal cycles). The prediction was that speaker-sex discrimination performance for whispered and voiced vowels would be similar for very short durations but, as stimulus duration increases, voiced vowel pe...

  3. Identifying the nonlinear mechanical behaviour of micro-speakers from their quasi-linear electrical response

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zilletti, Michele; Marker, Arthur; Elliott, Stephen John; Holland, Keith

    2017-05-01

    In this study model identification of the nonlinear dynamics of a micro-speaker is carried out by purely electrical measurements, avoiding any explicit vibration measurements. It is shown that a dynamic model of the micro-speaker, which takes into account the nonlinear damping characteristic of the device, can be identified by measuring the response between the voltage input and the current flowing into the coil. An analytical formulation of the quasi-linear model of the micro-speaker is first derived and an optimisation method is then used to identify a polynomial function which describes the mechanical damping behaviour of the micro-speaker. The analytical results of the quasi-linear model are compared with numerical results. This study potentially opens up the possibility of efficiently implementing nonlinear echo cancellers.

  4. Potensi dan Efektivitas Pemungutan Retribusi RSUD Dr. Agoesdjam Ketapang

    OpenAIRE

    B61110063, JAMALUDIN

    2014-01-01

    This study entitled Potential and Effectiveness of retribution collecting in RSUD Dr. Agoesdjam Ketapang which aims to identify and analyze the potential retribution of RSUD Dr . Agoesdjam and also to investigate and analyze the effectiveness of the retribution collecting in RSUD Dr. Agoesdjam . This study uses secondary data , from 2008 to 2012 that were obtained from the Regional Revenue Office of Ketapang and RSUD Dr. Agoesdjam Ketapang . The method of this study is descriptive. To analyz...

  5. Promoting Communities of Practice among Non-Native Speakers of English in Online Discussions

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kim, Hoe Kyeung

    2011-01-01

    An online discussion involving text-based computer-mediated communication has great potential for promoting equal participation among non-native speakers of English. Several studies claimed that online discussions could enhance the academic participation of non-native speakers of English. However, there is little research around participation…

  6. Learning foreign labels from a foreign speaker: the role of (limited) exposure to a second language.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Akhtar, Nameera; Menjivar, Jennifer; Hoicka, Elena; Sabbagh, Mark A

    2012-11-01

    Three- and four-year-olds (N = 144) were introduced to novel labels by an English speaker and a foreign speaker (of Nordish, a made-up language), and were asked to endorse one of the speaker's labels. Monolingual English-speaking children were compared to bilingual children and English-speaking children who were regularly exposed to a language other than English. All children tended to endorse the English speaker's labels when asked 'What do you call this?', but when asked 'What do you call this in Nordish?', children with exposure to a second language were more likely to endorse the foreign label than monolingual and bilingual children. The findings suggest that, at this age, exposure to, but not necessarily immersion in, more than one language may promote the ability to learn foreign words from a foreign speaker.

  7. Is the superior verbal memory span of Mandarin speakers due to faster rehearsal?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mattys, Sven L; Baddeley, Alan; Trenkic, Danijela

    2018-04-01

    It is well established that digit span in native Chinese speakers is atypically high. This is commonly attributed to a capacity for more rapid subvocal rehearsal for that group. We explored this hypothesis by testing a group of English-speaking native Mandarin speakers on digit span and word span in both Mandarin and English, together with a measure of speed of articulation for each. When compared to the performance of native English speakers, the Mandarin group proved to be superior on both digit and word spans while predictably having lower spans in English. This suggests that the Mandarin advantage is not limited to digits. Speed of rehearsal correlated with span performance across materials. However, this correlation was more pronounced for English speakers than for any of the Chinese measures. Further analysis suggested that speed of rehearsal did not provide an adequate account of differences between Mandarin and English spans or for the advantage of digits over words. Possible alternative explanations are discussed.

  8. 77 FR 31873 - Notice of Public Meeting; Central Montana Resource Advisory Council

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-05-30

    ... Main, Lewistown, Montana 59457, (406) 538-1900, [email protected] . Persons who use a... to contact the above individual during normal business hours. The FIRS is available 24 hours a day, 7... normal business hours. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: This 15-member council advises the Secretary of the...

  9. Potential effects of climate change on streamflow for seven watersheds in eastern and central Montana

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Katherine J. Chase

    2016-09-01

    New hydrological insights for the region: Projected changes in mean annual and mean monthly streamflow vary by the RegCM3 model selected, by watershed, and by future period. Mean annual streamflows for all future periods are projected to increase (11–21% for two of the four central Montana watersheds: Middle Musselshell River and Cottonwood Creek. Mean annual streamflows for all future periods are projected to decrease (changes of −24 to −75% for Redwater River watershed in eastern Montana. Mean annual streamflows are projected to increase slightly (2–15% for the 2030 period and decrease (changes of −16 to −44% for the 2080 period for the four remaining watersheds.

  10. Variation among heritage speakers: Sequential vs. simultaneous bilinguals

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Teresa Lee

    2013-08-01

    Full Text Available This study examines the differences in the grammatical knowledge of two types of heritage speakers of Korean. Early simultaneous bilinguals are exposed to both English and the heritage language from birth, whereas early sequential bilinguals are exposed to the heritage language first and then to English upon schooling. A listening comprehension task involving relative clauses was conducted with 51 beginning-level Korean heritage speakers. The results showed that the early sequential bilinguals exhibited much more accurate knowledge than the early simultaneous bilinguals, who lacked rudimentary knowledge of Korean relative clauses. Drawing on the findings of adult and child Korean L1 data on the acquisition of relative clauses, the performance of each group is discussed with respect to attrition and incomplete acquisition of the heritage language.

  11. Dr. Irene Sänger-Bredt, a life for astronautics

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zaganescu, Nicolae-Florin

    2004-12-01

    Irene Bredt (b.1911 at Bonn) obtained her Doctorate in Physics in 1937; in the same year she became a scientific researcher at the German Research Center for Aviation at Trauen, led by Prof. Dr. Eugen Sänger. Soon, the young but efficient Dr. Irene Bredt became the first assistant of Dr. Sänger, who married her (1951). During 1973-1978, Dr. Bredt was in correspondence with Prof. Dr. Nikolae-Florin Zaganescu and helped him to familiarize the Romanian readers with Prof. Sänger's life and achievements. As for Dr. Bredt's life, she specified three main periods of her activity: 1937-1942, when she was researcher in charge of thermodynamic problems of liquid-fuelled rocket engines at Trauen 1942-1945, when she was Senior Researcher in charge of Ramjet in flight performances at Ainring, and also coauthored the Top Secret Technical report entitled 'A Rocket Engine for a Long-Range Bomber', which was finished in 1941 but edited only in 1944 the post world war II period, when she was Scientific Advisor or Director at various civil and military research institutes, universities, etc. Dr. Irene Sänger-Bredt helped her husband to develop many scientific theories like Ramjet thermodynamic theory, and photon rocket theory and also in establishing IAF and IAA. In 1970, Dr. Irene Sänger-Bredt was honored with 'Hermann Oberth Gold Medal' for her impressive scientific activity.

  12. Professor Bakytzhan Abdiraiym Rector of the L. Gumilov Eurasian National University, Astana, Kazakhstan accompanied by Prof. Kairat Kuterbekov, Dr Bekzat Prmantayeva, Dr Kuralay Maksut with the Director-General, Dr Tadeusz Kurtyka, Adviser for Non-Member States, Mrs Julia Andreeva, Department of Information Technologies and Dr Nikolai Zimine, ATLAS Collaboration, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna

    CERN Document Server

    Maximilien Brice

    2011-01-01

    Professor Bakytzhan Abdiraiym Rector of the L. Gumilov Eurasian National University, Astana, Kazakhstan accompanied by Prof. Kairat Kuterbekov, Dr Bekzat Prmantayeva, Dr Kuralay Maksut with the Director-General, Dr Tadeusz Kurtyka, Adviser for Non-Member States, Mrs Julia Andreeva, Department of Information Technologies and Dr Nikolai Zimine, ATLAS Collaboration, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna

  13. Chaddah, Dr Praveen

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 1993 Section: Physics. Chaddah, Dr Praveen Ph.D. (Mumbai), FNA, FNASc. Date of birth: 20 December 1951. Specialization: Superconductivity, Low Temperature Physics and Phase Transitions Address: Flat 702, Block 24, Heritage City, MG Road (near Metro Station), Gurgaon ...

  14. Ranganathan, Dr Darshan

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1991 Section: Chemistry. Ranganathan, Dr Darshan Ph.D. (Delhi), FNA. Date of birth: 4 June 1941. Date of death: 4 June 2001. Specialization: Organic Chemistry, Bio-Organic Chemistry and Supramolecular Chemistry Last known address: Scientist, Indian Institue of Chemical, Technology, Uppal Road, Hyderabad ...

  15. The native-speaker fever in English language teaching (ELT: Pitting pedagogical competence against historical origin

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Anchimbe, Eric A.

    2006-01-01

    Full Text Available This paper discusses English language teaching (ELT around the world, and argues that as a profession, it should emphasise pedagogical competence rather than native-speaker requirement in the recruitment of teachers in English as a foreign language (EFL and English as a second language (ESL contexts. It establishes that being a native speaker does not make one automatically a competent speaker or, of that matter, a competent teacher of the language. It observes that on many grounds, including physical, sociocultural, technological and economic changes in the world as well as the status of English as official and national language in many post-colonial regions, the distinction between native and non-native speakers is no longer valid.

  16. Description of Work for Borehole Sampling at the 116-DR-1and 116-DR-2 Trenches

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Bergstrom, K. A.

    1999-01-01

    This description of work (DOW) details the sampling and analysis activities for characterizing the deep zone soils below the 116-DR-1and 116-DR-2 trenches, which are located in the 100-DR- 1 Operable Unit (OU), and will serve as a guide for the personnel performing the work. The ''deep zone'' refers to the portion of the vadose zone between the bottom of the waste site and the water table. The scope of work includes drilling a borehole (B8786), sampling vadose zone and upper saturated zone soils at ∼ 1-m intervals, collecting a water sample below the top of the water table, and analyzing the samples for all contaminants of concern (COCs). Specific procedures for defined tasks are covered under the Bechtel Hanford, Inc. (BHI)manual, BHI-EE-01, Environmental Investigations Procedures

  17. Goldie Brangman Remembers the Operation to Save Dr King.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Koch, Evan; Brangman, Goldie

    2015-12-01

    In September 1958 the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr was stabbed and nearly assassinated. Surgeons at Harlem Hospital in New York City removed a 17.8-cm (7-in)-long letter opener from Dr King's chest. Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist Goldie Brangman remembers this event because she participated in Dr King's anesthetic. This article correlates Brangman's memories with published accounts of the event. It also places the event within the context of the modern civil rights movement that Dr King led.

  18. Psychophysical Boundary for Categorization of Voiced-Voiceless Stop Consonants in Native Japanese Speakers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tamura, Shunsuke; Ito, Kazuhito; Hirose, Nobuyuki; Mori, Shuji

    2018-01-01

    Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the psychophysical boundary used for categorization of voiced-voiceless stop consonants in native Japanese speakers. Method: Twelve native Japanese speakers participated in the experiment. The stimuli were synthetic stop consonant-vowel stimuli varying in voice onset time (VOT) with…

  19. Physiological Indices of Bilingualism: Oral–Motor Coordination and Speech Rate in Bengali–English Speakers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chakraborty, Rahul; Goffman, Lisa; Smith, Anne

    2009-01-01

    Purpose To examine how age of immersion and proficiency in a 2nd language influence speech movement variability and speaking rate in both a 1st language and a 2nd language. Method A group of 21 Bengali–English bilingual speakers participated. Lip and jaw movements were recorded. For all 21 speakers, lip movement variability was assessed based on productions of Bengali (L1; 1st language) and English (L2; 2nd language) sentences. For analyses related to the influence of L2 proficiency on speech production processes, participants were sorted into low- (n = 7) and high-proficiency (n = 7) groups. Lip movement variability and speech rate were evaluated for both of these groups across L1 and L2 sentences. Results Surprisingly, adult bilingual speakers produced equally consistent speech movement patterns in their production of L1 and L2. When groups were sorted according to proficiency, highly proficient speakers were marginally more variable in their L1. In addition, there were some phoneme-specific effects, most markedly that segments not shared by both languages were treated differently in production. Consistent with previous studies, movement durations were longer for less proficient speakers in both L1 and L2. Interpretation In contrast to those of child learners, the speech motor systems of adult L2 speakers show a high degree of consistency. Such lack of variability presumably contributes to protracted difficulties with acquiring nativelike pronunciation in L2. The proficiency results suggest bidirectional interactions across L1 and L2, which is consistent with hypotheses regarding interference and the sharing of phonological space. A slower speech rate in less proficient speakers implies that there are increased task demands on speech production processes. PMID:18367680

  20. Does training make French speakers more able to identify lexical stress?

    OpenAIRE

    Schwab, Sandra; Llisterri, Joaquim

    2013-01-01

    This research takes the stress deafness hypothesis as a starting point (e.g. Dupoux et al., 2008), and, more specifically, the fact that French speakers present difficulties in perceiving lexical stress in a free-stress language. In this framework, we aim at determining whether a prosodic training could improve the ability of French speakers to identify the stressed syllable in Spanish words. Three groups of participants took part in this experiment. The Native group was composed of 16 speake...

  1. a sociophonetic study of young nigerian english speakers

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Oladipupo

    between male and female speakers in boundary consonant deletion, (F(1, .... speech perception (Foulkes 2006, Clopper & Pisoni, 2005, Thomas 2002). ... in Nigeria, and had had the privilege of travelling to Europe and the Americas for the.

  2. Quantifying social preferences toward woody biomass energy generation in Montana, USA

    Science.gov (United States)

    Robert Campbell; Tyron Venn; Nathaniel Anderson

    2015-01-01

    A significant amount of the forestland in Montana is in need of mechanical forest restoration treatments, which can improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk, but can be expensive to implement and produce little merchantable timber. One option for disposal of the small diameter material produced by these treatments is to utilize it to produce energy,...

  3. Dr. Steve Thompson, Chief Executive, The Royal Society of New Zealand

    CERN Multimedia

    Maximilien Brice

    2002-01-01

    L. to r.: Dr Austin Ball, Deputy Technical Coordinator, CMS experiment; Dr Roland Horisberger, Paul Scherrer Institute and CERN, CMS experiment; Dr Steve Thompson, Chief Executive, The Royal Society of New Zealand; Dr Michel Della Negra, Spokesman, CMS experiment and Dr Alick Macpherson, Paul Scherrer Institute and CERN, CMS experiment, in the CMS Silicon Tracker assembly hall.

  4. 78 FR 53158 - Notice of Public Meeting; Central Montana Resource Advisory Council

    Science.gov (United States)

    2013-08-28

    ..., Central Montana District Manager, Lewistown Field Office, 920 NE Main, Lewistown, MT 59457, (406) 538-1900... Information Relay Service (FIRS) at 1-800-677-8339 to contact the above individual during normal business... individual. You will receive a reply during normal business hours. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: This 15-member...

  5. Cost, performance, and esthetic impacts of an experimental forest road in Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rulon B. Gardner

    1978-01-01

    An experimental logging road designed to minimize environmental and esthetic impact was constructed in northwest Montana. The road was single-lane (14-foot finished surface, 3-foot ditch), constructed along the contour. Esthetically, the single-lane experimental road was judged far superior to existing roads on the forest.

  6. Classifications of Vocalic Segments from Articulatory Kinematics: Healthy Controls and Speakers with Dysarthria

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yunusova, Yana; Weismer, Gary G.; Lindstrom, Mary J.

    2011-01-01

    Purpose: In this study, the authors classified vocalic segments produced by control speakers (C) and speakers with dysarthria due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Parkinson's disease (PD); classification was based on movement measures. The researchers asked the following questions: (a) Can vowels be classified on the basis of selected…

  7. Bhandari, Dr Nita

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 2015 Section: Medicine. Bhandari, Dr Nita Ph.D. (JNU), FAMS. Date of birth: 9 November 1955. Specialization: Nutrition-Infection Interaction, Child Health, Nutritional Interventions, Clinical Evaluation of Vaccine Address: President & Director, Centre for Health R&D Society for Applied Studies, 45, Kalu Sarai, New ...

  8. Chandrasekaran, Dr Chidambara

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Fellow Profile. Elected: 1945 Section: Mathematical Sciences. Chandrasekaran, Dr Chidambara Ph.D. (London) 1962-64. Date of birth: 30 October 1911. Date of death: 4 January 2000. Specialization: Statistics, Public Health and Demography Last known address: 'Sri Kripa', 79/3, Benson Cross Road, Bengaluru 560 046.

  9. Mukhopadhyay, Dr Amitabha

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Fellow Profile. Elected: 2010 Section: General Biology. Mukhopadhyay, Dr Amitabha Ph.D. (Jadavpur), FNASc, FNA. Date of birth: 5 February 1959. Specialization: Cell Biology, Host-Pathogen Interactions, Drug Delivery Address: Staff Scientist VII, National Institute of Immunology, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi 110 067, ...

  10. Chandy, Dr Jacob

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1961 Section: Medicine. Chandy, Dr Jacob MBBS (Madras), FRCS (c) Council Service: 1962-70. Date of birth: 23 January 1910. Date of death: 23 June 2007. Specialization: Neurology, Neurosurgery and Medical Education Last known address: Paarra, Matteethra, Kottayam 686 004. YouTube; Twitter; Facebook ...

  11. Adhya, Dr Samit

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1999 Section: General Biology. Adhya, Dr Samit Ph.D. (New York), FNA. Date of birth: 29 September 1953. Specialization: Mitochondrial Biology, Molecular Genetics of Parasites, Intracellular RNA Trafficking and DNA Diagnostics Address: CSIR Emeritus Scientist, Indian Inst. of Chemical Biology, 4, Raja S.C. ...

  12. HLA-DR expression and disease activity in ulcerative colitis

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Poulsen, L O; Elling, P; Sørensen, Flemming Brandt

    1986-01-01

    and 3 months later. The rectal epithelial cells were HLA-DR-positive in all patients at the first two examinations. After 3 months five patients had changed to an HLA-DR-negative stage, whereas the other seven patients remained HLA-DR-positive. Closer analyses showed that expression/nonexpression of HLA...

  13. On the Use of Complementary Spectral Features for Speaker Recognition

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sridhar Krishnan

    2007-12-01

    Full Text Available The most popular features for speaker recognition are Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs and linear prediction cepstral coefficients (LPCCs. These features are used extensively because they characterize the vocal tract configuration which is known to be highly speaker-dependent. In this work, several features are introduced that can characterize the vocal system in order to complement the traditional features and produce better speaker recognition models. The spectral centroid (SC, spectral bandwidth (SBW, spectral band energy (SBE, spectral crest factor (SCF, spectral flatness measure (SFM, Shannon entropy (SE, and Renyi entropy (RE were utilized for this purpose. This work demonstrates that these features are robust in noisy conditions by simulating some common distortions that are found in the speakers' environment and a typical telephone channel. Babble noise, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN, and a bandpass channel with 1 dB of ripple were used to simulate these noisy conditions. The results show significant improvements in classification performance for all noise conditions when these features were used to complement the MFCC and ΔMFCC features. In particular, the SC and SCF improved performance in almost all noise conditions within the examined SNR range (10–40 dB. For example, in cases where there was only one source of distortion, classification improvements of up to 8% and 10% were achieved under babble noise and AWGN, respectively, using the SCF feature.

  14. 76 FR 31579 - Designation for the State of Georgia and State of Montana Areas

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-06-01

    ... agency Headquarters location and telephone start end Georgia Atlanta, GA (229) 386-3141......... 7/1/2011 6/30/2014. Additional Location: Tifton, GA.... Montana Helena, MT (406) 761-2141 7/1/2011 6/30/2014...

  15. HLA-DR-expressing cells and T-lymphocytes in sural nerve biopsies

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Schrøder, H D; Olsson, T; Solders, G

    1988-01-01

    was confirmed. HLA-DR expression was found in all biopsies and thus was not restricted to any particular type of neuropathy. The HLA-DR expression appeared to correlate with severity and activity of the neuropathy. HLA-DR-expressing macrophages wrapping myelinated fibers were prominent in primary demyelinating......Thirty-five sural nerve biopsies were stained immunohistochemically for HLA-DR antigen. HLA-DR was expressed on nonmyelinating Schwann cells, macrophages, vascular endothelium, and perineurium. By means of double immunofluorescence staining the identity of the HLA-DR presenting structures...

  16. US hydropower resource assessment for Montana

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Francfort, J.E.

    1993-12-01

    The Department of Energy is developing an estimate of the hydropower development potential in this country. The Hydropower Evaluation Software (HES) is a computer model that was developed by the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory for this purpose. The HES measures the potential hydropower resources available in the United States, using uniform criteria for measurement. The software was developed and tested using hydropower information and data provided by the Southwestern Power Administration. It is a dBASE menu-driven software application that allows the personal computer user to assign environmental attributes to potential hydropower sites, calculate development suitability factors for each site based on the environmental attributes present, and generate reports based on these suitability factors. This report details the resource assessment results for the state of Montana.

  17. Montana Proficiency Events Handbook. FHA HERO: Future Homemakers of America toward New Horizons.

    Science.gov (United States)

    McGregor, Linda, Ed.; Quickenden, Sandy, Ed.

    This handbook contains directions for FHA/HERO (Future Homemakers of America/Home Economics Related Occupations) participation activities in Montana. Participation activities are local, state, and national level competitions involving students in vocational home economics programs. The handbook provides a general overview of participation…

  18. 78 FR 67392 - Notice of Public Meeting, Eastern Montana Resource Advisory Council Meeting

    Science.gov (United States)

    2013-11-12

    ..., (406) 233-2831, [email protected] . Persons who use a telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD... variety of planning and management issues associated with public land management in Montana. At these... manager updates, Field Office Resource Management Planning updates, individual council member briefings...

  19. Speaker's voice as a memory cue.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Campeanu, Sandra; Craik, Fergus I M; Alain, Claude

    2015-02-01

    Speaker's voice occupies a central role as the cornerstone of auditory social interaction. Here, we review the evidence suggesting that speaker's voice constitutes an integral context cue in auditory memory. Investigation into the nature of voice representation as a memory cue is essential to understanding auditory memory and the neural correlates which underlie it. Evidence from behavioral and electrophysiological studies suggest that while specific voice reinstatement (i.e., same speaker) often appears to facilitate word memory even without attention to voice at study, the presence of a partial benefit of similar voices between study and test is less clear. In terms of explicit memory experiments utilizing unfamiliar voices, encoding methods appear to play a pivotal role. Voice congruency effects have been found when voice is specifically attended at study (i.e., when relatively shallow, perceptual encoding takes place). These behavioral findings coincide with neural indices of memory performance such as the parietal old/new recollection effect and the late right frontal effect. The former distinguishes between correctly identified old words and correctly identified new words, and reflects voice congruency only when voice is attended at study. Characterization of the latter likely depends upon voice memory, rather than word memory. There is also evidence to suggest that voice effects can be found in implicit memory paradigms. However, the presence of voice effects appears to depend greatly on the task employed. Using a word identification task, perceptual similarity between study and test conditions is, like for explicit memory tests, crucial. In addition, the type of noise employed appears to have a differential effect. While voice effects have been observed when white noise is used at both study and test, using multi-talker babble does not confer the same results. In terms of neuroimaging research modulations, characterization of an implicit memory effect

  20. Varadarajan, Dr Srinivasan

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1972 Section: Chemistry. Varadarajan, Dr Srinivasan Ph.D. (Delhi and Cantab), D.Sc. (h.c.), D.Litt. (h.c.), FNA, FNAE, FTWAS Council Service:1974-88; Vice-President: 1977-79; President: 1980-82. Date of birth: 31 March 1928. Specialization: Organic & Biological Chemistry, Molecular Biology, Engineering Design ...

  1. Sengupta, Dr Sagar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Sengupta, Dr Sagar Ph.D. (IISc), FNA, FNASc. Date of birth: 23 June 1968. Specialization: Cancer Biology, Cell Signalling, Mytochondrial Biology Address: National Institute of Immunology, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi 110 067, U.T.. Contact: Office: (011) 2670 3786. Residence: (0124) 422 7107. Mobile: 93131 05470

  2. Sengupta, Dr Sagar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Fellow Profile. Elected: 2017 Section: General Biology. Sengupta, Dr Sagar Ph.D. (IISc), FNA, FNASc. Date of birth: 23 June 1968. Specialization: Cancer Biology, Cell Signalling, Mytochondrial Biology Address: National Institute of Immunology, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi 110 067, U.T.. Contact: Office: (011) 2670 3786

  3. Assessment of undiscovered oil and gas resources in the North-Central Montana Province, 2017

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schenk, Christopher J.; Mercier, Tracey J.; Brownfield, Michael E.; Tennyson, Marilyn E.; Woodall, Cheryl A.; Le, Phuong A.; Klett, Timothy R.; Gaswirth, Stephanie B.; Finn, Thomas M.; Pitman, Janet K.; Marra, Kristen R.; Leathers-Miller, Heidi M.

    2018-02-12

    Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated mean undiscovered, technically recoverable resources of 55 million barrels of oil and 846 billion cubic feet of gas in the North-Central Montana Province.

  4. The effect on recognition memory of noise cancelling headphones in a noisy environment with native and nonnative speakers

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Brett R C Molesworth

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available Noise has the potential to impair cognitive performance. For nonnative speakers, the effect of noise on performance is more severe than their native counterparts. What remains unknown is the effectiveness of countermeasures such as noise attenuating devices in such circumstances. Therefore, the main aim of the present research was to examine the effectiveness of active noise attenuating countermeasures in the presence of simulated aircraft noise for both native and nonnative English speakers. Thirty-two participants, half native English speakers and half native German speakers completed four recognition (cued recall tasks presented in English under four different audio conditions, all in the presence of simulated aircraft noise. The results of the research indicated that in simulated aircraft noise at 65 dB(A, performance of nonnative English speakers was poorer than for native English speakers. The beneficial effects of noise cancelling headphones in improving the signal to noise ratio led to an improved performance for nonnative speakers. These results have particular importance for organizations operating in a safety-critical environment such as aviation.

  5. DR6 as a diagnostic and predictive biomarker in adult sarcoma.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Kun Yang

    Full Text Available The Death Receptor 6 (DR6 protein is elevated in the serum of ovarian cancer patients. We tested DR6 serum protein levels as a diagnostic/predictive biomarker in several epithelial tumors and sarcomas.DR6 gene expression profiles were screened in publically available arrays of solid tumors. A quantitative immunofluorescent western blot analysis was developed to test the serum of healthy controls and patients with sarcoma, uterine carcinosarcoma, bladder, liver, and pancreatic carcinomas. Change in DR6 serum levels was used to assay the ability of DR6 to predict the response to therapy of sarcoma patients.DR6 mRNA is highly expressed in all tumor types assayed. Western blot analysis of serum DR6 protein demonstrated high reproducibility (r = 0.97. Compared to healthy donor controls, DR6 serum levels were not elevated in patients with uterine carcinosarcoma, bladder, liver, or pancreatic cancers. Serum DR6 protein levels from adult sarcoma patients were significantly elevated (p<0.001. This was most evident for patients with synovial sarcoma. Change in serum DR6 levels during therapy correlated with clinical benefit from therapy (sensitivity 75%, and positive predictive value 87%.DR6 may be a clinically useful diagnostic and predictive serum biomarker for some adult sarcoma subtypes.Diagnosis of sarcoma can be difficult and can lead to improper management of these cancers. DR6 serum protein may be a tool to aid in the diagnosis of some sarcomatous tumors to improve treatment planning. For patients with advanced disease, rising DR6 levels predict non-response to therapy and may expedite therapeutic decision making and reduce reliance on radiologic imaging.

  6. Continuing Medical Education Speakers with High Evaluation Scores Use more Image-based Slides

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ferguson, Ian

    2017-01-01

    Full Text Available Although continuing medical education (CME presentations are common across health professions, it is unknown whether slide design is independently associated with audience evaluations of the speaker. Based on the conceptual framework of Mayer’s theory of multimedia learning, this study aimed to determine whether image use and text density in presentation slides are associated with overall speaker evaluations. This retrospective analysis of six sequential CME conferences (two annual emergency medicine conferences over a three-year period used a mixed linear regression model to assess whether postconference speaker evaluations were associated with image fraction (percentage of image-based slides per presentation and text density (number of words per slide. A total of 105 unique lectures were given by 49 faculty members, and 1,222 evaluations (70.1% response rate were available for analysis. On average, 47.4% (SD=25.36 of slides had at least one educationally-relevant image (image fraction. Image fraction significantly predicted overall higher evaluation scores [F(1, 100.676=6.158, p=0.015] in the mixed linear regression model. The mean (SD text density was 25.61 (8.14 words/slide but was not a significant predictor [F(1, 86.293=0.55, p=0.815]. Of note, the individual speaker [χ2 (1=2.952, p=0.003] and speaker seniority [F(3, 59.713=4.083, p=0.011] significantly predicted higher scores. This is the first published study to date assessing the linkage between slide design and CME speaker evaluations by an audience of practicing clinicians. The incorporation of images was associated with higher evaluation scores, in alignment with Mayer’s theory of multimedia learning. Contrary to this theory, however, text density showed no significant association, suggesting that these scores may be multifactorial. Professional development efforts should focus on teaching best practices in both slide design and presentation skills.

  7. Continuing Medical Education Speakers with High Evaluation Scores Use more Image-based Slides.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ferguson, Ian; Phillips, Andrew W; Lin, Michelle

    2017-01-01

    Although continuing medical education (CME) presentations are common across health professions, it is unknown whether slide design is independently associated with audience evaluations of the speaker. Based on the conceptual framework of Mayer's theory of multimedia learning, this study aimed to determine whether image use and text density in presentation slides are associated with overall speaker evaluations. This retrospective analysis of six sequential CME conferences (two annual emergency medicine conferences over a three-year period) used a mixed linear regression model to assess whether post-conference speaker evaluations were associated with image fraction (percentage of image-based slides per presentation) and text density (number of words per slide). A total of 105 unique lectures were given by 49 faculty members, and 1,222 evaluations (70.1% response rate) were available for analysis. On average, 47.4% (SD=25.36) of slides had at least one educationally-relevant image (image fraction). Image fraction significantly predicted overall higher evaluation scores [F(1, 100.676)=6.158, p=0.015] in the mixed linear regression model. The mean (SD) text density was 25.61 (8.14) words/slide but was not a significant predictor [F(1, 86.293)=0.55, p=0.815]. Of note, the individual speaker [χ 2 (1)=2.952, p=0.003] and speaker seniority [F(3, 59.713)=4.083, p=0.011] significantly predicted higher scores. This is the first published study to date assessing the linkage between slide design and CME speaker evaluations by an audience of practicing clinicians. The incorporation of images was associated with higher evaluation scores, in alignment with Mayer's theory of multimedia learning. Contrary to this theory, however, text density showed no significant association, suggesting that these scores may be multifactorial. Professional development efforts should focus on teaching best practices in both slide design and presentation skills.

  8. Gaia DR2 documentation Chapter 7: Variability

    Science.gov (United States)

    Eyer, L.; Guy, L.; Distefano, E.; Clementini, G.; Mowlavi, N.; Rimoldini, L.; Roelens, M.; Audard, M.; Holl, B.; Lanzafame, A.; Lebzelter, T.; Lecoeur-Taïbi, I.; Molnár, L.; Ripepi, V.; Sarro, L.; Jevardat de Fombelle, G.; Nienartowicz, K.; De Ridder, J.; Juhász, Á.; Molinaro, R.; Plachy, E.; Regibo, S.

    2018-04-01

    This chapter of the Gaia DR2 documentation describes the models and methods used on the 22 months of data to produce the Gaia variable star results for Gaia DR2. The variability processing and analysis was based mostly on the calibrated G and integrated BP and RP photometry. The variability analysis approach to the Gaia data has been described in Eyer et al. (2017), and the Gaia DR2 results are presented in Holl et al. (2018). Detailed methods on specific topics will be published in a number of separate articles. Variability behaviour in the colour magnitude diagram is presented in Gaia Collaboration et al. (2018c).

  9. Speaker-Sex Discrimination for Voiced and Whispered Vowels at Short Durations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Smith, David R R

    2016-01-01

    Whispered vowels, produced with no vocal fold vibration, lack the periodic temporal fine structure which in voiced vowels underlies the perceptual attribute of pitch (a salient auditory cue to speaker sex). Voiced vowels possess no temporal fine structure at very short durations (below two glottal cycles). The prediction was that speaker-sex discrimination performance for whispered and voiced vowels would be similar for very short durations but, as stimulus duration increases, voiced vowel performance would improve relative to whispered vowel performance as pitch information becomes available. This pattern of results was shown for women's but not for men's voices. A whispered vowel needs to have a duration three times longer than a voiced vowel before listeners can reliably tell whether it's spoken by a man or woman (∼30 ms vs. ∼10 ms). Listeners were half as sensitive to information about speaker-sex when it is carried by whispered compared with voiced vowels.

  10. Infant sensitivity to speaker and language in learning a second label.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bhagwat, Jui; Casasola, Marianella

    2014-02-01

    Two experiments examined when monolingual, English-learning 19-month-old infants learn a second object label. Two experimenters sat together. One labeled a novel object with one novel label, whereas the other labeled the same object with a different label in either the same or a different language. Infants were tested on their comprehension of each label immediately following its presentation. Infants mapped the first label at above chance levels, but they did so with the second label only when requested by the speaker who provided it (Experiment 1) or when the second experimenter labeled the object in a different language (Experiment 2). These results show that 19-month-olds learn second object labels but do not readily generalize them across speakers of the same language. The results highlight how speaker and language spoken guide infants' acceptance of second labels, supporting sociopragmatic views of word learning. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  11. B Anand | Speakers | Indian Academy of Sciences

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    However, the mechanism by which this protospacer fragment gets integrated in a directional fashion into the leader proximal end is elusive. The speakers group identified that the leader region abutting the first CRISPR repeat localizes Integration Host Factor (IHF) and Cas1-2 complex in Escherichia coli. IHF binding to the ...

  12. Jameel, Dr Shahid

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Jameel, Dr Shahid Ph.D. (Washington State Univ.), FNASc, FNA. Date of birth: 8 August 1957. Specialization: Molecular Biology and Molecular Virology Address: Chief Executive Officer, The Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance, 8-2-684/3/K/19, Kaushik Society, Road NO. 12, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad 500 034, A.P.. Contact:

  13. L2 speakers decompose morphologically complex verbs: fMRI evidence from priming of transparent derived verbs

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sophie eDe Grauwe

    2014-10-01

    Full Text Available In this fMRI long-lag priming study, we investigated the processing of Dutch semantically transparent, derived prefix verbs. In such words, the meaning of the word as a whole can be deduced from the meanings of its parts, e.g. wegleggen ‘put aside’. Many behavioral and some fMRI studies suggest that native (L1 speakers decompose transparent derived words. The brain region usually implicated in morphological decomposition is the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG. In non-native (L2 speakers, the processing of transparent derived words has hardly been investigated, especially in fMRI studies, and results are contradictory: Some studies find more reliance on holistic (i.e. non-decompositional processing by L2 speakers; some find no difference between L1 and L2 speakers. In this study, we wanted to find out whether Dutch transparent derived prefix verbs are decomposed or processed holistically by German L2 speakers of Dutch. Half of the derived verbs (e.g. omvallen ‘fall down’ were preceded by their stem (e.g. vallen ‘fall’ with a lag of 4 to 6 words (‘primed’; the other half (e.g. inslapen ‘fall asleep’ were not (‘unprimed’. L1 and L2 speakers of Dutch made lexical decisions on these visually presented verbs. Both ROI analyses and whole-brain analyses showed that there was a significant repetition suppression effect for primed compared to unprimed derived verbs in the LIFG. This was true both for the analyses over L2 speakers only and for the analyses over the two language groups together. The latter did not reveal any interaction with language group (L1 vs. L2 in the LIFG. Thus, L2 speakers show a clear priming effect in the LIFG, an area that has been associated with morphological decomposition. Our findings are consistent with the idea that L2 speakers engage in decomposition of transparent derived verbs rather than processing them holistically.

  14. Congenital Amusia in Speakers of a Tone Language: Association with Lexical Tone Agnosia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nan, Yun; Sun, Yanan; Peretz, Isabelle

    2010-01-01

    Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects the processing of musical pitch in speakers of non-tonal languages like English and French. We assessed whether this musical disorder exists among speakers of Mandarin Chinese who use pitch to alter the meaning of words. Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, we tested 117…

  15. Phoneme Error Pattern by Heritage Speakers of Spanish on an English Word Recognition Test.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shi, Lu-Feng

    2017-04-01

    Heritage speakers acquire their native language from home use in their early childhood. As the native language is typically a minority language in the society, these individuals receive their formal education in the majority language and eventually develop greater competency with the majority than their native language. To date, there have not been specific research attempts to understand word recognition by heritage speakers. It is not clear if and to what degree we may infer from evidence based on bilingual listeners in general. This preliminary study investigated how heritage speakers of Spanish perform on an English word recognition test and analyzed their phoneme errors. A prospective, cross-sectional, observational design was employed. Twelve normal-hearing adult Spanish heritage speakers (four men, eight women, 20-38 yr old) participated in the study. Their language background was obtained through the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire. Nine English monolingual listeners (three men, six women, 20-41 yr old) were also included for comparison purposes. Listeners were presented with 200 Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 words in quiet. They repeated each word orally and in writing. Their responses were scored by word, word-initial consonant, vowel, and word-final consonant. Performance was compared between groups with Student's t test or analysis of variance. Group-specific error patterns were primarily descriptive, but intergroup comparisons were made using 95% or 99% confidence intervals for proportional data. The two groups of listeners yielded comparable scores when their responses were examined by word, vowel, and final consonant. However, heritage speakers of Spanish misidentified significantly more word-initial consonants and had significantly more difficulty with initial /p, b, h/ than their monolingual peers. The two groups yielded similar patterns for vowel and word-final consonants, but heritage speakers made significantly

  16. Combining Behavioral and ERP Methodologies to Investigate the Differences Between McGurk Effects Demonstrated by Cantonese and Mandarin Speakers

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Juan Zhang

    2018-05-01

    Full Text Available The present study investigated the impact of Chinese dialects on McGurk effect using behavioral and event-related potential (ERP methodologies. Specifically, intra-language comparison of McGurk effect was conducted between Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. The behavioral results showed that Cantonese speakers exhibited a stronger McGurk effect in audiovisual speech perception compared to Mandarin speakers, although both groups performed equally in the auditory and visual conditions. ERP results revealed that Cantonese speakers were more sensitive to visual cues than Mandarin speakers, though this was not the case for the auditory cues. Taken together, the current findings suggest that the McGurk effect generated by Chinese speakers is mainly influenced by segmental phonology during audiovisual speech integration.

  17. Combining Behavioral and ERP Methodologies to Investigate the Differences Between McGurk Effects Demonstrated by Cantonese and Mandarin Speakers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, Juan; Meng, Yaxuan; McBride, Catherine; Fan, Xitao; Yuan, Zhen

    2018-01-01

    The present study investigated the impact of Chinese dialects on McGurk effect using behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) methodologies. Specifically, intra-language comparison of McGurk effect was conducted between Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. The behavioral results showed that Cantonese speakers exhibited a stronger McGurk effect in audiovisual speech perception compared to Mandarin speakers, although both groups performed equally in the auditory and visual conditions. ERP results revealed that Cantonese speakers were more sensitive to visual cues than Mandarin speakers, though this was not the case for the auditory cues. Taken together, the current findings suggest that the McGurk effect generated by Chinese speakers is mainly influenced by segmental phonology during audiovisual speech integration. PMID:29780312

  18. 76 FR 52968 - Notice of Public Meeting; Central Montana Resource Advisory Council

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-08-24

    ..., Montana 59457, (406) 538-1900, [email protected] . Persons who use a telecommunications device for the... individual during normal business hours. The FIRS is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to leave a message or question with the above individual. You will receive a reply during normal business hours...

  19. A Descriptive Study of Students with Disabilities at Montana State University Billings

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dell, Thomas Francis

    2013-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to describe and analyze how the characteristics of age, major and type of disabilities for students who received services through Disability Support Services at Montana State University-Billings have changed from 1999 to 2011. Furthermore, this analysis contrasted local trends for types of disabilities with national…

  20. Communication‐related affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions in speakers with spasmodic dysphonia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vanryckeghem, Martine

    2017-01-01

    Objectives To investigate the self‐perceived affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions associated with communication of speakers with spasmodic dysphonia as a function of employment status. Study Design Prospective cross‐sectional investigation Methods 148 Participants with spasmodic dysphonia (SD) completed an adapted version of the Behavior Assessment Battery (BAB‐Voice), a multidimensional assessment of self‐perceived reactions to communication. The BAB‐Voice consisted of four subtests: the Speech Situation Checklist for A) Emotional Reaction (SSC‐ER) and B) Speech Disruption (SSC‐SD), C) the Behavior Checklist (BCL), and D) the Communication Attitude Test for Adults (BigCAT). Participants were assigned to groups based on employment status (working versus retired). Results Descriptive comparison of the BAB‐Voice in speakers with SD to previously published non‐dysphonic speaker data revealed substantially higher scores associated with SD across all four subtests. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) revealed no significantly different BAB‐Voice subtest scores as a function of SD group status (working vs. retired). Conclusions BAB‐Voice scores revealed that speakers with SD experienced substantial impact of their voice disorder on communication attitude, coping behaviors, and affective reactions in speaking situations as reflected in their high BAB scores. These impacts do not appear to be influenced by work status, as speakers with SD who were employed or retired experienced similar levels of affective and behavioral reactions in various speaking situations and cognitive responses. These findings are consistent with previously published pilot data. The specificity of items assessed by means of the BAB‐Voice may inform the clinician of valid patient‐centered treatment goals which target the impairment extended beyond the physiological dimension. Level of Evidence 2b PMID:29299525

  1. Communication-related affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions in speakers with spasmodic dysphonia.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Watts, Christopher R; Vanryckeghem, Martine

    2017-12-01

    To investigate the self-perceived affective, behavioral, and cognitive reactions associated with communication of speakers with spasmodic dysphonia as a function of employment status. Prospective cross-sectional investigation. 148 Participants with spasmodic dysphonia (SD) completed an adapted version of the Behavior Assessment Battery (BAB-Voice), a multidimensional assessment of self-perceived reactions to communication. The BAB-Voice consisted of four subtests: the Speech Situation Checklist for A) Emotional Reaction (SSC-ER) and B) Speech Disruption (SSC-SD), C) the Behavior Checklist (BCL), and D) the Communication Attitude Test for Adults (BigCAT). Participants were assigned to groups based on employment status (working versus retired). Descriptive comparison of the BAB-Voice in speakers with SD to previously published non-dysphonic speaker data revealed substantially higher scores associated with SD across all four subtests. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) revealed no significantly different BAB-Voice subtest scores as a function of SD group status (working vs. retired). BAB-Voice scores revealed that speakers with SD experienced substantial impact of their voice disorder on communication attitude, coping behaviors, and affective reactions in speaking situations as reflected in their high BAB scores. These impacts do not appear to be influenced by work status, as speakers with SD who were employed or retired experienced similar levels of affective and behavioral reactions in various speaking situations and cognitive responses. These findings are consistent with previously published pilot data. The specificity of items assessed by means of the BAB-Voice may inform the clinician of valid patient-centered treatment goals which target the impairment extended beyond the physiological dimension. 2b.

  2. Source rock potential of middle cretaceous rocks in Southwestern Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dyman, T.S.; Palacas, J.G.; Tysdal, R.G.; Perry, W.J.; Pawlewicz, M.J.

    1996-01-01

    The middle Cretaceous in southwestern Montana is composed of a marine and nonmarine succession of predominantly clastic rocks that were deposited along the western margin of the Western Interior Seaway. In places, middle Cretaceous rocks contain appreciable total organic carbon (TOC), such as 5.59% for the Mowry Shale and 8.11% for the Frontier Formation in the Madison Range. Most samples, however, exhibit less than 1.0% TOC. The genetic or hydrocarbon potential (S1+S2) of all the samples analyzed, except one, yield less than 1 mg HC/g rock, strongly indicating poor potential for generating commercial amounts of hydrocarbons. Out of 51 samples analyzed, only one (a Thermopolis Shale sample from the Snowcrest Range) showed a moderate petroleum potential of 3.1 mg HC/g rock. Most of the middle Cretaceous samples are thermally immature to marginally mature, with vitrinite reflectance ranging from about 0.4 to 0.6% Ro. Maturity is high in the Pioneer Mountains, where vitrinite reflectance averages 3.4% Ro, and at Big Sky Montana, where vitrinite reflectance averages 2.5% Ro. At both localities, high Ro values are due to local heat sources, such as the Pioneer batholith in the Pioneer Mountains.

  3. Dr. Albert Carr--Science Educator 1930-2000

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lopez, Leslie

    2013-01-01

    The very first issue of "Educational Perspectives" was published in October of 1962. Dr. Albert Carr wrote one of the inaugural essays on the topic of current developments in science education, and he went on to write several other articles for the journal. This article shares why Dr. Albert Carr's colleagues remember him for his…

  4. Schizophrenia among Sesotho speakers in South Africa | Mosotho ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Results: Core symptoms of schizophrenia among Sesotho speakers do not differ significantly from other cultures. However, the content of psychological symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations is strongly affected by cultural variables. Somatic symptoms such as headaches, palpitations, dizziness and excessive ...

  5. Sentence comprehension in Swahili-English bilingual agrammatic speakers

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Abuom, Tom O.; Shah, Emmah; Bastiaanse, Roelien

    For this study, sentence comprehension was tested in Swahili-English bilingual agrammatic speakers. The sentences were controlled for four factors: (1) order of the arguments (base vs. derived); (2) embedding (declarative vs. relative sentences); (3) overt use of the relative pronoun "who"; (4)

  6. An evidence-based rehabilitation program for tracheoesophageal speakers

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Jongmans, P.; Rossum, M.; As-Brooks, C.; Hilgers, F.; Pols, L.; Hilgers, F.J.M.; Pols, L.C.W.; van Rossum, M.; van den Brekel, M.W.M.

    2008-01-01

    Objectives: to develop an evidence-based therapy program aimed at improving tracheoesophageal speech intelligibility. The therapy program is based on particular problems found for TE speakers in a previous study as performed by the authors. Patients/Materials and Methods: 9 male laryngectomized

  7. Een nieuwe ondersoort van Zosterops montana afkomstig van de Goenoeng Papandajan (West Java)

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Hoogerwerf, A.; Boer, de L.E.

    1947-01-01

    In zijn laatste revisie van het genus Zosterops (Journ. für Orn., vol. 87, 1939, p. 156-164) geeft Stresemann o.a. een schematische voorstelling van de horizontale en verticale verspreiding binnen deze Archipel van de vier voornaamste groepen van dit geslacht: montana, atricapilla, palpebrosa en

  8. A Tribute to Dr. Willy Lens

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Maarten Vansteenkiste

    2016-07-01

    Full Text Available Dr. Willy Lens, born on December 10th, 1943, passed away on August 29th, 2014. With his passing, the motivation community has lost a seminal member, a mentor, and a friend. Dr. Lens – a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and Founding Fellow of the American Educational Research Association – made fundamental contributions to the study of motivation both through his own work and through his caring and thoughtful mentorship of a large community of scholars. With this tribute, we want to honor Dr. Willy Lens’ significance to psychology and education as well as his positive influence, both personally and professionally, on the lives of dozens of scholars. With his contagious enthusiasm and caring mentorship, Willy was an example for our academic community and with this tribute we express our gratitude for the privilege to have collaborated with him.

  9. On the same wavelength: predictable language enhances speaker-listener brain-to-brain synchrony in posterior superior temporal gyrus.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dikker, Suzanne; Silbert, Lauren J; Hasson, Uri; Zevin, Jason D

    2014-04-30

    Recent research has shown that the degree to which speakers and listeners exhibit similar brain activity patterns during human linguistic interaction is correlated with communicative success. Here, we used an intersubject correlation approach in fMRI to test the hypothesis that a listener's ability to predict a speaker's utterance increases such neural coupling between speakers and listeners. Nine subjects listened to recordings of a speaker describing visual scenes that varied in the degree to which they permitted specific linguistic predictions. In line with our hypothesis, the temporal profile of listeners' brain activity was significantly more synchronous with the speaker's brain activity for highly predictive contexts in left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), an area previously associated with predictive auditory language processing. In this region, predictability differentially affected the temporal profiles of brain responses in the speaker and listeners respectively, in turn affecting correlated activity between the two: whereas pSTG activation increased with predictability in the speaker, listeners' pSTG activity instead decreased for more predictable sentences. Listeners additionally showed stronger BOLD responses for predictive images before sentence onset, suggesting that highly predictable contexts lead comprehenders to preactivate predicted words.

  10. Student perceptions of native and non-native speaker language instructors: A comparison of ESL and Spanish

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Laura Callahan

    2006-12-01

    Full Text Available The question of the native vs. non-native speaker status of second and foreign language instructors has been investigated chiefly from the perspective of the teacher. Anecdotal evidence suggests that students have strong opinions on the relative qualities of instruction by native and non-native speakers. Most research focuses on students of English as a foreign or second language. This paper reports on data gathered through a questionnaire administered to 55 university students: 31 students of Spanish as FL and 24 students of English as SL. Qualitative results show what strengths students believe each type of instructor has, and quantitative results confirm that any gap students may perceive between the abilities of native and non-native instructors is not so wide as one might expect based on popular notions of the issue. ESL students showed a stronger preference for native-speaker instructors overall, and were at variance with the SFL students' ratings of native-speaker instructors' performance on a number of aspects. There was a significant correlation in both groups between having a family member who is a native speaker of the target language and student preference for and self-identification with a native speaker as instructor. (English text

  11. Thermal Stresses Analysis and Optimized TTP Processes to Achieved CNT-Based Diaphragm for Thin Panel Speakers

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Feng-Min Lai

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available Industrial companies popularly used the powder coating, classing, and thermal transfer printing (TTP technique to avoid oxidation on the metallic surface and stiffened speaker diaphragm. This study developed a TTP technique to fabricate a carbon nanotubes (CNTs stiffened speaker diaphragm for thin panel speaker. The self-developed TTP stiffening technique did not require a high curing temperature that decreased the mechanical property of CNTs. In addition to increasing the stiffness of diaphragm substrate, this technique alleviated the middle and high frequency attenuation associated with the smoothing sound pressure curve of thin panel speaker. The advantage of TTP technique is less harmful to the ecology, but it causes thermal residual stresses and some unstable connections between printed plates. Thus, this study used the numerical analysis software (ANSYS to analyze the stress and thermal of work piece which have not delaminated problems in transfer interface. The Taguchi quality engineering method was applied to identify the optimal manufacturing parameters. Finally, the optimal manufacturing parameters were employed to fabricate a CNT-based diaphragm, which was then assembled onto a speaker. The result indicated that the CNT-based diaphragm improved the sound pressure curve smoothness of the speaker, which produced a minimum high frequency dip difference (ΔdB value.

  12. 76 FR 21780 - Notice of Public Meeting; Central Montana Resource Advisory Council

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-04-18

    ..., Lewistown, Montana 59457, (406) 538-1900. Persons who use a telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) may... during normal business hours. The FIRS is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to leave a message or question with the above individual. You will receive a reply during normal business hours. Diane M. Friez...

  13. Drømmebilleder

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Fausing, Bent

    2014-01-01

    Bogen beskriver i en række intense analyser forbindelsen mellem ydre og indre billeder: altså mellem de moderne mediers billedverden og drømmens og erindringens indre billeder. I fokus for undersøgelsen er desuden kønnet, altså hvordan billeder viser, omformer eller skjuler kønnet, 'det andet', s...

  14. Roles of medical image processing in medical physics

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Arimura, Hidetaka

    2011-01-01

    Image processing techniques including pattern recognition techniques play important roles in high precision diagnosis and radiation therapy. The author reviews a symposium on medical image information, which was held in the 100th Memorial Annual Meeting of the Japan Society of Medical Physics from September 23rd to 25th. In this symposium, we had three invited speakers, Dr. Akinobu Shimizu, Dr. Hideaki Haneishi, and Dr. Hirohito Mekata, who are active engineering researchers of segmentation, image registration, and pattern recognition, respectively. In this paper, the author reviews the roles of the medical imaging processing in medical physics field, and the talks of the three invited speakers. (author)

  15. The Space-Time Topography of English Speakers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Duman, Steve

    2016-01-01

    English speakers talk and think about Time in terms of physical space. The past is behind us, and the future is in front of us. In this way, we "map" space onto Time. This dissertation addresses the specificity of this physical space, or its topography. Inspired by languages like Yupno (Nunez, et al., 2012) and Bamileke-Dschang (Hyman,…

  16. Does dynamic information about the speaker's face contribute to semantic speech processing? ERP evidence.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hernández-Gutiérrez, David; Abdel Rahman, Rasha; Martín-Loeches, Manuel; Muñoz, Francisco; Schacht, Annekathrin; Sommer, Werner

    2018-07-01

    Face-to-face interactions characterize communication in social contexts. These situations are typically multimodal, requiring the integration of linguistic auditory input with facial information from the speaker. In particular, eye gaze and visual speech provide the listener with social and linguistic information, respectively. Despite the importance of this context for an ecological study of language, research on audiovisual integration has mainly focused on the phonological level, leaving aside effects on semantic comprehension. Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the influence of facial dynamic information on semantic processing of connected speech. Participants were presented with either a video or a still picture of the speaker, concomitant to auditory sentences. Along three experiments, we manipulated the presence or absence of the speaker's dynamic facial features (mouth and eyes) and compared the amplitudes of the semantic N400 elicited by unexpected words. Contrary to our predictions, the N400 was not modulated by dynamic facial information; therefore, semantic processing seems to be unaffected by the speaker's gaze and visual speech. Even though, during the processing of expected words, dynamic faces elicited a long-lasting late posterior positivity compared to the static condition. This effect was significantly reduced when the mouth of the speaker was covered. Our findings may indicate an increase of attentional processing to richer communicative contexts. The present findings also demonstrate that in natural communicative face-to-face encounters, perceiving the face of a speaker in motion provides supplementary information that is taken into account by the listener, especially when auditory comprehension is non-demanding. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  17. Infants' Selectively Pay Attention to the Information They Receive from a Native Speaker of Their Language.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Marno, Hanna; Guellai, Bahia; Vidal, Yamil; Franzoi, Julia; Nespor, Marina; Mehler, Jacques

    2016-01-01

    From the first moments of their life, infants show a preference for their native language, as well as toward speakers with whom they share the same language. This preference appears to have broad consequences in various domains later on, supporting group affiliations and collaborative actions in children. Here, we propose that infants' preference for native speakers of their language also serves a further purpose, specifically allowing them to efficiently acquire culture specific knowledge via social learning. By selectively attending to informants who are native speakers of their language and who probably also share the same cultural background with the infant, young learners can maximize the possibility to acquire cultural knowledge. To test whether infants would preferably attend the information they receive from a speaker of their native language, we familiarized 12-month-old infants with a native and a foreign speaker, and then presented them with movies where each of the speakers silently gazed toward unfamiliar objects. At test, infants' looking behavior to the two objects alone was measured. Results revealed that infants preferred to look longer at the object presented by the native speaker. Strikingly, the effect was replicated also with 5-month-old infants, indicating an early development of such preference. These findings provide evidence that young infants pay more attention to the information presented by a person with whom they share the same language. This selectivity can serve as a basis for efficient social learning by influencing how infants' allocate attention between potential sources of information in their environment.

  18. Analgesia e ação antiinflamatória da Arnica montana 12CH comparativamente ao cetoprofeno em cães Analgesic and anti-inflammatory effects of Arnica montana 12CH in comparison with ketoprofen in dogs

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Renata Navarro Cassu

    2011-10-01

    Full Text Available Objetivou-se avaliar os efeitos analgésico e antiinflamatório da Arnica montana 12CH comparativamente ao cetoprofeno em cadelas submetidas à ovariossalpingohisterectomia (OSH. Foram avaliadas 16 cadelas, distribuídas aleatoriamente em dois grupos de oito animais cada, tratados por via oral com 1mg kg-1 de cetoprofeno (TC e com cinco glóbulos de Arnica montana 12CH (TA. Decorridos 60 minutos, os animais foram tranquilizados com acepromazina (0,05mg kg-1, IV, seguindo-se indução e manutenção anestésica com propofol (5mg kg-1, IV e isofluorano, respectivamente. Foram mensurados: frequência cardíaca, frequência respiratória, pressão arterial sistólica, concentração final expirada de dióxido de carbono, concentração final expirada de isofluorano, variáveis hemogasométricas, concentração sérica de cortisol, grau de analgesia e de inflamação. Em casos de analgesia insuficiente, foi realizada suplementação com morfina (0,5mg kg-1, IM. A estatística foi realizada com ANOVA e teste de Tukey (PThis study aimed to evaluate the analgesic and anti-inflammatory effects of Arnica montana 12CH comparatively to ketoprofen in dogs undergoing ovariohysterectomy. Sixteen female dogs were randomly distributed in two groups of eight animals and received 1mg kg-1 of ketoprofen (TC and 5 globules of Arnica montana 12CH (TA by oral route. After 60 minutes, the dogs were sedated with acepromazine (0.05mg kg-1, IV, followed by anesthetic induction with propofol (5mg kg-1 IV and maintained with isoflurane. Heart rate, respiratory rate, systolic blood pressure, arterial blood gases, serum cortisol concentration and degree of analgesia and inflammation were measured. Additional morphine (0.5mg kg-1IM was given when the analgesia was insufficient. Statistical analyses were performed by ANOVA and Tukey tests (P<0.05. Cardiopulmonary stability was observed in both treatments during the surgery. The degree of analgesia and inflammation did not

  19. Towards PLDA-RBM based speaker recognition in mobile environment: Designing stacked/deep PLDA-RBM systems

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Nautsch, Andreas; Hao, Hong; Stafylakis, Themos

    2016-01-01

    recognition: two deep architectures are presented and examined, which aim at suppressing channel effects and recovering speaker-discriminative information on back-ends trained on a small dataset. Experiments are carried out on the MOBIO SRE'13 database, which is a challenging and publicly available dataset...... for mobile speaker recognition with limited amounts of training data. The experiments show that the proposed system outperforms the baseline i-vector/PLDA approach by relative gains of 31% on female and 9% on male speakers in terms of half total error rate....

  20. Profile Interview: Dr. Patrick Dongosolo Kamalo – Consultant ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Dr. Yohane Gadama (YG), an MMJ intern, interviews Dr. Patrick Dongosolo Kamalo (PDK) on his work as Malawi's only local practicing neurosurgeon, the launch of Blantyre Institute of Neurological Sciences (BINS) and the beginning of Neurosurgery training in Malawi ...

  1. Neural bases of congenital amusia in tonal language speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, Caicai; Peng, Gang; Shao, Jing; Wang, William S-Y

    2017-03-01

    Congenital amusia is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder of fine-grained pitch processing. In this fMRI study, we examined the neural bases of congenial amusia in speakers of a tonal language - Cantonese. Previous studies on non-tonal language speakers suggest that the neural deficits of congenital amusia lie in the music-selective neural circuitry in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). However, it is unclear whether this finding can generalize to congenital amusics in tonal languages. Tonal language experience has been reported to shape the neural processing of pitch, which raises the question of how tonal language experience affects the neural bases of congenital amusia. To investigate this question, we examined the neural circuitries sub-serving the processing of relative pitch interval in pitch-matched Cantonese level tone and musical stimuli in 11 Cantonese-speaking amusics and 11 musically intact controls. Cantonese-speaking amusics exhibited abnormal brain activities in a widely distributed neural network during the processing of lexical tone and musical stimuli. Whereas the controls exhibited significant activation in the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) in the lexical tone condition and in the cerebellum regardless of the lexical tone and music conditions, no activation was found in the amusics in those regions, which likely reflects a dysfunctional neural mechanism of relative pitch processing in the amusics. Furthermore, the amusics showed abnormally strong activation of the right middle frontal gyrus and precuneus when the pitch stimuli were repeated, which presumably reflect deficits of attending to repeated pitch stimuli or encoding them into working memory. No significant group difference was found in the right IFG in either the whole-brain analysis or region-of-interest analysis. These findings imply that the neural deficits in tonal language speakers might differ from those in non-tonal language speakers, and overlap partly with the

  2. Mishra, Dr A C

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 2009 Section: Medicine. Mishra, Dr A C . Ph.D. (Pune), FNA. Date of birth: 1 July 1950. Specialization: Human Viral Infection & Zoonotic Diseases, Public Health Address: Director, Interactive Research School of Health Affairs, Bharati Vidyapeeth University, ...

  3. Thiagarajan, Dr Pazhamaneri Subramaniam

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1995 Section: Mathematical Sciences. Thiagarajan, Dr Pazhamaneri Subramaniam Ph.D. (Rice), FNASc. Date of birth: 9 November 1948. Specialization: Distributed Probabilistic Systems, Hybrid Systems and Computational Systems Biology Address: Laboratory of System Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School, ...

  4. Effective recreation visitor communication strategies: Rock climbers in the Bitterroot Valley, Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    William T. Borrie; James A. Harding

    2002-01-01

    A four-stage model of decisionmaking was investigated in the context of low-impact practices among rock climbers in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. Previous research has suggested that knowing what to do to minimize environmental and social impacts may not be the only factor limiting compliance with recommended visitor behaviors. Results from a sample of climbers at...

  5. Measuring effectiveness of three postfire hillslope erosion barrier treatments, western Montana, USA

    Science.gov (United States)

    Peter R. Robichaud; Frederick B. Pierson; Robert E. Brown; Joseph W. Wagenbrenner

    2008-01-01

    After the Valley Complex Fire burned 86 000 ha in western Montana in 2000, two studies were conducted to determine the effectiveness of contour-felled log, straw wattle, and hand-dug contour trench erosion barriers in mitigating postfire runoff and erosion. Sixteen plots were located across a steep, severely burned slope, with a single barrier installed in 12 plots (...

  6. Time-Contrastive Learning Based DNN Bottleneck Features for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Sarkar, Achintya Kumar; Tan, Zheng-Hua

    2017-01-01

    In this paper, we present a time-contrastive learning (TCL) based bottleneck (BN) feature extraction method for speech signals with an application to text-dependent (TD) speaker verification (SV). It is well-known that speech signals exhibit quasi-stationary behavior in and only in a short interval......, and the TCL method aims to exploit this temporal structure. More specifically, it trains deep neural networks (DNNs) to discriminate temporal events obtained by uniformly segmenting speech signals, in contrast to existing DNN based BN feature extraction methods that train DNNs using labeled data...... to discriminate speakers or pass-phrases or phones or a combination of them. In the context of speaker verification, speech data of fixed pass-phrases are used for TCL-BN training, while the pass-phrases used for TCL-BN training are excluded from being used for SV, so that the learned features can be considered...

  7. Perceptual and acoustic analysis of lexical stress in Greek speakers with dysarthria.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Papakyritsis, Ioannis; Müller, Nicole

    2014-01-01

    The study reported in this paper investigated the abilities of Greek speakers with dysarthria to signal lexical stress at the single word level. Three speakers with dysarthria and two unimpaired control participants were recorded completing a repetition task of a list of words consisting of minimal pairs of Greek disyllabic words contrasted by lexical stress location only. Fourteen listeners were asked to determine the attempted stress location for each word pair. Acoustic analyses of duration and intensity ratios, both within and across words, were undertaken to identify possible acoustic correlates of the listeners' judgments concerning stress location. Acoustic and perceptual data indicate that while each participant with dysarthria in this study had some difficulty in signaling stress unambiguously, the pattern of difficulty was different for each speaker. Further, it was found that the relationship between the listeners' judgments of stress location and the acoustic data was not conclusive.

  8. Switches to English during French Service Encounters: Relationships with L2 French Speakers' Willingness to Communicate and Motivation

    Science.gov (United States)

    McNaughton, Stephanie; McDonough, Kim

    2015-01-01

    This exploratory study investigated second language (L2) French speakers' service encounters in the multilingual setting of Montreal, specifically whether switches to English during French service encounters were related to L2 speakers' willingness to communicate or motivation. Over a two-week period, 17 French L2 speakers in Montreal submitted…

  9. Musical Sophistication and the Effect of Complexity on Auditory Discrimination in Finnish Speakers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dawson, Caitlin; Aalto, Daniel; Šimko, Juraj; Vainio, Martti; Tervaniemi, Mari

    2017-01-01

    Musical experiences and native language are both known to affect auditory processing. The present work aims to disentangle the influences of native language phonology and musicality on behavioral and subcortical sound feature processing in a population of musically diverse Finnish speakers as well as to investigate the specificity of enhancement from musical training. Finnish speakers are highly sensitive to duration cues since in Finnish, vowel and consonant duration determine word meaning. Using a correlational approach with a set of behavioral sound feature discrimination tasks, brainstem recordings, and a musical sophistication questionnaire, we find no evidence for an association between musical sophistication and more precise duration processing in Finnish speakers either in the auditory brainstem response or in behavioral tasks, but they do show an enhanced pitch discrimination compared to Finnish speakers with less musical experience and show greater duration modulation in a complex task. These results are consistent with a ceiling effect set for certain sound features which corresponds to the phonology of the native language, leaving an opportunity for music experience-based enhancement of sound features not explicitly encoded in the language (such as pitch, which is not explicitly encoded in Finnish). Finally, the pattern of duration modulation in more musically sophisticated Finnish speakers suggests integrated feature processing for greater efficiency in a real world musical situation. These results have implications for research into the specificity of plasticity in the auditory system as well as to the effects of interaction of specific language features with musical experiences. PMID:28450829

  10. Musical Sophistication and the Effect of Complexity on Auditory Discrimination in Finnish Speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dawson, Caitlin; Aalto, Daniel; Šimko, Juraj; Vainio, Martti; Tervaniemi, Mari

    2017-01-01

    Musical experiences and native language are both known to affect auditory processing. The present work aims to disentangle the influences of native language phonology and musicality on behavioral and subcortical sound feature processing in a population of musically diverse Finnish speakers as well as to investigate the specificity of enhancement from musical training. Finnish speakers are highly sensitive to duration cues since in Finnish, vowel and consonant duration determine word meaning. Using a correlational approach with a set of behavioral sound feature discrimination tasks, brainstem recordings, and a musical sophistication questionnaire, we find no evidence for an association between musical sophistication and more precise duration processing in Finnish speakers either in the auditory brainstem response or in behavioral tasks, but they do show an enhanced pitch discrimination compared to Finnish speakers with less musical experience and show greater duration modulation in a complex task. These results are consistent with a ceiling effect set for certain sound features which corresponds to the phonology of the native language, leaving an opportunity for music experience-based enhancement of sound features not explicitly encoded in the language (such as pitch, which is not explicitly encoded in Finnish). Finally, the pattern of duration modulation in more musically sophisticated Finnish speakers suggests integrated feature processing for greater efficiency in a real world musical situation. These results have implications for research into the specificity of plasticity in the auditory system as well as to the effects of interaction of specific language features with musical experiences.

  11. Dubois Quadrangle, Idaho and Montana

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Wodzicki, A.; Krason, J.

    1981-06-01

    Within the Dubois Quadrangle (Idaho and Montana), environments favorable for uranium deposits, based on National Uranium Resource Evaluation criteria, occur in the McGowan Creek Formation and within some Tertiary sedimentary basins. The Mississippian McGowan Creek Formation consists of uraniferous, black, siliceous mudstone and chert with minor porous sedimentary channels. In the southern Beaverhead Mountains it has been fractured by a bedding-plane fault, and uranium has been further concentrated by circulating groundwater in the porous channels and brecciated zones, both of which contain about 200 ppM uranium. The northern parts of the Pahsimeroi River, Lemhi River, Medicine Lodge Creek, Horse Prairie, and Sage Creek Basins are considered favorable for sandstone-type uranium deposits. Evidence present includes suitable source rocks such as rhyolitic flow breccia, laharic deposits, or strongly welded tuffs; permeable sediments, including most sandstones and conglomerates, providing they do not contain devitrified glass; suitable reductants such as lignite, pyrite, or low-Eh geothermal water; and uranium occurrences

  12. Association between HLA-DR antigens and rheumatoid arthritis in Arabs.

    OpenAIRE

    Sattar, M A; al-Saffar, M; Guindi, R T; Sugathan, T N; Behbehani, K

    1990-01-01

    Eighty five Arab patients with classical and definite rheumatoid arthritis were typed to determine the prevalence of HLA A, B, C, and DR antigens. A significant increase in the prevalence of HLA-A10, B8, B21, and DR3 was found in comparison with a control population matched for age and sex. HLA-DR5 was significantly decreased in the patient group. The classical association of HLA-DR4 with rheumatoid arthritis could not be confirmed in the Arab patients resident in Kuwait, supporting reported ...

  13. Willing Learners yet Unwilling Speakers in ESL Classrooms

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Zuraidah Ali

    2007-12-01

    Full Text Available To some of us, speech production in ESL has become so natural and integral that we seem to take it for granted. We often do not even remember how we struggled through the initial process of mastering English. Unfortunately, to students who are still learning English, they seem to face myriad problems that make them appear unwilling or reluctant ESL speakers. This study will investigate this phenomenon which is very common in the ESL classroom. Setting its background on related research findings on this matter, a qualitative study was conducted among foreign students enrolled in the Intensive English Programme (IEP at Institute of Liberal Studies (IKAL, University Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN. The results will show and discuss an extent of truth behind this perplexing phenomenon: willing learners, yet unwilling speakers of ESL, in our effort to provide supportive learning cultures in second language acquisition (SLA to this group of students.

  14. English exposed common mistakes made by Chinese speakers

    CERN Document Server

    Hart, Steve

    2017-01-01

    Having analysed the most common English errors made in over 600 academic papers written by Chinese undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers, Steve Hart has written an essential, practical guide specifically for the native Chinese speaker on how to write good academic English. English Exposed: Common Mistakes Made by Chinese Speakers is divided into three main sections. The first section examines errors made with verbs, nouns, prepositions, and other grammatical classes of words. The second section focuses on problems of word choice. In addition to helping the reader find the right word, it provides instruction for selecting the right style too. The third section covers a variety of other areas essential for the academic writer, such as using punctuation, adding appropriate references, referring to tables and figures, and selecting among various English date and time phrases. Using English Exposed will allow a writer to produce material where content and ideas-not language mistakes-speak the loudest.

  15. Budhani, Dr Ramesh Chandra

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Budhani, Dr Ramesh Chandra Ph.D. (IIT, Delhi), FNASc, FNA. Date of birth: 3 February 1955. Specialization: Renewable Energy, Nanoscale Systems, Experimental Condensed Matter Physics, Superconductivity and Magnetism Address: Department of Physics, Lasers & Photonics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur 208 ...

  16. Salunke, Dr Dinakar Mashnu

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Fellow Profile. Elected: 2001 Section: General Biology. Salunke, Dr Dinakar Mashnu Ph.D. (IISc), FNASc, FNA, FTWAS. Date of birth: 1 July 1955. Specialization: Structural Biology, Macromolecular Crystallography and Immunology Address: Director, International Centre for Genetic Engineering, & Biotechnology, Aruna Asaf ...

  17. Watve, Dr Milind Gajanan

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Date of birth: 12 December 1957. Specialization: Wildlife Ecology & Animal Cognition, Evolutionary Biology, Computational Biology and Microbial Diversity Address: Professor, Biology, Indian Institute of Science Education & Research, Dr Homi Bhabha Road, Pashan, Pune 411 008, Maharashtra Contact: Office: (020) 2590 ...

  18. Shivanna, Dr Kundaranahalli Ramalingaiah

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1985 Section: Plant Sciences. Shivanna, Dr Kundaranahalli Ramalingaiah Ph.D. (Delhi), FNA, FNAAS, FNASc. Date of birth: 30 June 1940. Specialization: Pollen Biology, Reproductive Ecology and Conservation Biology Address: Odekar Farms, Nandihalli, via Thovinakere, Tumkur 572 138, Karnataka Contact:

  19. Gaia DR1 documentation

    Science.gov (United States)

    van Leeuwen, F.; de Bruijne, J. H. J.; Arenou, F.; Comoretto, G.; Eyer, L.; Farras Casas, M.; Hambly, N.; Hobbs, D.; Salgado, J.; Utrilla Molina, E.; Vogt, S.; van Leeuwen, M.; Abreu, A.; Altmann, M.; Andrei, A.; Babusiaux, C.; Bastian, U.; Biermann, M.; Blanco-Cuaresma, S.; Bombrun, A.; Borrachero, R.; Brown, A. G. A.; Busonero, D.; Busso, G.; Butkevich, A.; Cantat-Gaudin, T.; Carrasco, J. M.; Castañeda, J.; Charnas, J.; Cheek, N.; Clementini, G.; Crowley, C.; Cuypers, J.; Davidson, M.; De Angeli, F.; De Ridder, J.; Evans, D.; Fabricius, C.; Findeisen, K.; Fleitas, J. M.; Gracia, G.; Guerra, R.; Guy, L.; Helmi, A.; Hernandez, J.; Holl, B.; Hutton, A.; Klioner, S.; Lammers, U.; Lecoeur-Taïbi, I.; Lindegren, L.; Luri, X.; Marinoni, S.; Marrese, P.; Messineo, R.; Michalik, D.; Mignard, F.; Montegriffo, P.; Mora, A.; Mowlavi, N.; Nienartowicz, K.; Pancino, E.; Panem, C.; Portell, J.; Rimoldini, L.; Riva, A.; Robin, A.; Siddiqui, H.; Smart, R.; Sordo, R.; Soria, S.; Turon, C.; Vallenari, A.; Voss, H.

    2017-12-01

    We present the first Gaia data release, Gaia DR1, consisting of astrometry and photometry for over 1 billion sources brighter than magnitude 20.7 in the white-light photometric band G of Gaia. The Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) processed the raw measurements collected with the Gaia instruments during the first 14 months of the mission, and turned these into an astrometric and photometric catalogue. Gaia DR1 consists of three parts: an astrometric data set which contains the positions, parallaxes, and mean proper motions for about 2 million of the brightest stars in common with the Hipparcos and Tycho-2 catalogues (the primary astrometric data set) and the positions for an additional 1.1 billion sources (the secondary astrometric data set). The primary set forms the realisation of the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS). The second part of Gaia DR1 is the photometric data set, which contains the mean G-band magnitudes for all sources. The third part consists of the G-band light curves and the characteristics of 3000 Cepheid and RR Lyrae stars observed at high cadence around the south ecliptic pole. The positions and proper motions in the astrometric data set are given in a reference frame that is aligned with the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) to better than 0.1 mas at epoch J2015.0, and non-rotating with respect to the ICRF to within 0.03 mas yr^-1. For the primary astrometric data set, the typical standard error for the positions and parallaxes is about 0.3 mas, while for the proper motions the typical standard error is about 1 mas yr^-1. Whereas it has been suggested in Gaia Collaboration et al. (2016a) that a systematic component of ∼0.3 mas should be 'added' (in quadrature) to the parallax uncertainties, Brown (2017) clarifies that reported parallax standard errors already include local systematics as a result of the calibration of the TGAS parallax uncertainties by comparison to Hipparcos parallaxes. For the subset of

  20. Comparative Ability of Oropsylla montana and Xenopsylla cheopis Fleas to Transmit Yersinia pestis by Two Different Mechanisms.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    B Joseph Hinnebusch

    2017-01-01

    Full Text Available Transmission of Yersinia pestis by flea bite can occur by two mechanisms. After taking a blood meal from a bacteremic mammal, fleas have the potential to transmit the very next time they feed. This early-phase transmission resembles mechanical transmission in some respects, but the mechanism is unknown. Thereafter, transmission occurs after Yersinia pestis forms a biofilm in the proventricular valve in the flea foregut. The biofilm can impede and sometimes completely block the ingestion of blood, resulting in regurgitative transmission of bacteria into the bite site. In this study, we compared the relative efficiency of the two modes of transmission for Xenopsylla cheopis, a flea known to become completely blocked at a high rate, and Oropsylla montana, a flea that has been considered to rarely develop proventricular blockage.Fleas that took an infectious blood meal containing Y. pestis were maintained and monitored for four weeks for infection and proventricular blockage. The number of Y. pestis transmitted by groups of fleas by the two modes of transmission was also determined. O. montana readily developed complete proventricular blockage, and large numbers of Y. pestis were transmitted by that mechanism both by it and by X. cheopis, a flea known to block at a high rate. In contrast, few bacteria were transmitted in the early phase by either species.A model system incorporating standardized experimental conditions and viability controls was developed to more reliably compare the infection, proventricular blockage and transmission dynamics of different flea vectors, and was used to resolve a long-standing uncertainty concerning the vector competence of O. montana. Both X. cheopis and O. montana are fully capable of transmitting Y. pestis by the proventricular biofilm-dependent mechanism.

  1. Perspectives and Future Directions Concerning Fresh, Whole Foods in Montana School Nutrition Programs

    Science.gov (United States)

    Stephens, Lacy; Byker Shanks, Carmen J.; Roth, Aubree; Bark, Katie

    2015-01-01

    Purpose/Objectives: To meet new USDA school meal standards, school nutrition programs may need to transition from a "heat and serve" meal preparation approach to increased scratch cooking and use of fresh, whole foods. This study aims to assess the attitudes, motivations, and barriers for Montana school nutrition professionals and key…

  2. Neural decoding of attentional selection in multi-speaker environments without access to clean sources

    Science.gov (United States)

    O'Sullivan, James; Chen, Zhuo; Herrero, Jose; McKhann, Guy M.; Sheth, Sameer A.; Mehta, Ashesh D.; Mesgarani, Nima

    2017-10-01

    Objective. People who suffer from hearing impairments can find it difficult to follow a conversation in a multi-speaker environment. Current hearing aids can suppress background noise; however, there is little that can be done to help a user attend to a single conversation amongst many without knowing which speaker the user is attending to. Cognitively controlled hearing aids that use auditory attention decoding (AAD) methods are the next step in offering help. Translating the successes in AAD research to real-world applications poses a number of challenges, including the lack of access to the clean sound sources in the environment with which to compare with the neural signals. We propose a novel framework that combines single-channel speech separation algorithms with AAD. Approach. We present an end-to-end system that (1) receives a single audio channel containing a mixture of speakers that is heard by a listener along with the listener’s neural signals, (2) automatically separates the individual speakers in the mixture, (3) determines the attended speaker, and (4) amplifies the attended speaker’s voice to assist the listener. Main results. Using invasive electrophysiology recordings, we identified the regions of the auditory cortex that contribute to AAD. Given appropriate electrode locations, our system is able to decode the attention of subjects and amplify the attended speaker using only the mixed audio. Our quality assessment of the modified audio demonstrates a significant improvement in both subjective and objective speech quality measures. Significance. Our novel framework for AAD bridges the gap between the most recent advancements in speech processing technologies and speech prosthesis research and moves us closer to the development of cognitively controlled hearable devices for the hearing impaired.

  3. Insight into the Attitudes of Speakers of Urban Meccan Hijazi Arabic towards their Dialect

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sameeha D. Alahmadi

    2016-04-01

    Full Text Available The current study mainly aims to examine the attitudes of speakers of Urban Meccan Hijazi Arabic (UMHA towards their dialect, which is spoken in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It also investigates whether the participants’ age, sex and educational level have any impact on their perception of their dialect. To this end, I designed a 5-point-Likert-scale questionnaire, requiring participants to rate their attitudes towards their dialect. I asked 80 participants, whose first language is UMHA, to fill out the questionnaire. On the basis of the three independent variables, namely, age, sex and educational level, the participants were divided into three groups: old and young speakers, male and female speakers and educated and uneducated speakers. The results reveal that in general, all the groups (young and old, male and female, and educated and uneducated participants have a sense of responsibility towards their dialect, making their attitudes towards their dialect positive. However, differences exist between the three groups. For instance, old speakers tend to express their pride of their dialect more than young speakers. The same pattern is observed in male and female groups. The results show that females may feel embarrassed to provide answers that may imply that they are not proud of their own dialect, since the majority of women in the Arab world, in general, are under more pressure to conform to the overt norms of the society than males. Therefore, I argue that most Arab women may not have the same freedom to express their opinions and feelings about various issues. Based on the results, the study concludes with some recommendations for further research.  Keywords: sociolinguistics, language attitudes, dialectology, social variables, Urban Meccan Hijazi Arabic

  4. Accuracy of MFCC-Based Speaker Recognition in Series 60 Device

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Pasi Fränti

    2005-10-01

    Full Text Available A fixed point implementation of speaker recognition based on MFCC signal processing is considered. We analyze the numerical error of the MFCC and its effect on the recognition accuracy. Techniques to reduce the information loss in a converted fixed point implementation are introduced. We increase the signal processing accuracy by adjusting the ratio of presentation accuracy of the operators and the signal. The signal processing error is found out to be more important to the speaker recognition accuracy than the error in the classification algorithm. The results are verified by applying the alternative technique to speech data. We also discuss the specific programming requirements set up by the Symbian and Series 60.

  5. Lip-Synching Using Speaker-Specific Articulation, Shape and Appearance Models

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Gaspard Breton

    2009-01-01

    Full Text Available We describe here the control, shape and appearance models that are built using an original photogrammetric method to capture characteristics of speaker-specific facial articulation, anatomy, and texture. Two original contributions are put forward here: the trainable trajectory formation model that predicts articulatory trajectories of a talking face from phonetic input and the texture model that computes a texture for each 3D facial shape according to articulation. Using motion capture data from different speakers and module-specific evaluation procedures, we show here that this cloning system restores detailed idiosyncrasies and the global coherence of visible articulation. Results of a subjective evaluation of the global system with competing trajectory formation models are further presented and commented.

  6. Safety evaluation for packaging for 1720-DR sodium-filled tank

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Mercado, M.S.

    1996-01-01

    Preparations are under way to sell the sodium stored in the 1720-DR tank in the 1720-DR building. This will require that the tank, as well as the 1720-DR facility, be moved to the 300 Area, so that the sodium may be melted and transferred into a railroad tanker car. Because the sodium is a hazardous material and is being shipped in a nonspecification packaging, a safety evaluation for packaging (SEP) is required. This SEP approves the sodium-filled tank for a single shipment from the 105-DR area to the 300 Area

  7. Green Algae from Coal Bed Methane Ponds as a Source of Fertilizer for Economically Important Plants of Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ogunsakin, O. R.; Apple, M. E.; Zhou, X.; Peyton, B.

    2016-12-01

    The Tongue River Basin of northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana is the location of natural gas reserves and coal bed methane (CBM) acreage. Although the water that emanates from CBM extraction varies with site, it is generally of higher quality than the waters produced by conventional oil and gas wells, in part because it is low in volatile organic compounds. However, since CBM water contains dissolved solids, including sodium (Na), bicarbonate (HCO3) and chloride (Cl) ions, the water must be treated before it can be discharged into the river or wetlands, or used for stock ponds or irrigation. Several ponds have been constructed to serve as a holding facility for CBM water. Algae from the CBM ponds of the Tongue River Basin have the potential to be utilized as fertilizer on economically important plants of Montana. Two very important crop plants of Montana are wheat, Triticum aestivum, and potatoes, Solanum tuberosum. To explore this potential, isolates of unicellular green algae (Chlorella sp.) from the CBM ponds were cultured in aerated vessels with Bold's Basic Growth Medium and natural and/or supplemental light. Algal biomass was condensed in and collected from a valved funnel, after which cell density was determined via light microscopy and a hemacytometer. Algal/water slurries with known nutrient contents were added to seedlings of hard winter wheat, T.aestivum, grown in a greenhouse for three months before harves. When compared to wheat provided with just water, or with water and a commercially available fertilizer, the wheat fertilized with algae had a higher chlorophyll content, more tillers (side shoots), and a higher ratio of influorescences (groups of flowers) per stem. In a related experiment, Ranger Russet seed potatoes, S. tuberosum were given just water, water and Hoagland's nutrient solution, or water with algae in order to compare aboveground growth and potato production among the treatments. The results of this study suggest that

  8. Umesh V Waghmare | Speakers | Indian Academy of Sciences

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Umesh V Waghmare. Theoretical Sciences Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Jakkur P.O., Bangalore 560 064, ... These ideas apply quite well to dynamical structure of a crystal, as described by the dispersion of its phonons or vibrational waves. The speakers group has shown an interesting ...

  9. A general auditory bias for handling speaker variability in speech? Evidence in humans and songbirds

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Kriengwatana, B.; Escudero, P.; Kerkhoven, A.H.; ten Cate, C.

    2015-01-01

    Different speakers produce the same speech sound differently, yet listeners are still able to reliably identify the speech sound. How listeners can adjust their perception to compensate for speaker differences in speech, and whether these compensatory processes are unique only to humans, is still

  10. Firing up White Clay: Immersion School Students Encouraged to Return, Give Back

    Science.gov (United States)

    Umbhau, Kurt

    2009-01-01

    Fort Belknap College President Carole Falcon-Chandler does not fluently speak the "A'ani" (White Clay) language, but her granddaughter does. The girl, one of the 12 students in the White Clay Language Immersion School located on the college campus in Harlem, Montana, is part of the next generation of fluent A'ani speakers. The language…

  11. Chandrashekar, Dr Tavarekere Kalliah

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Fellow Profile. Elected: 2000 Section: Chemistry. Chandrashekar, Dr Tavarekere Kalliah Ph.D. (IISc), FNASc, FNA, FTWAS Council Service: 2013-15. Date of birth: 1 January 1956. Specialization: Bio-inorganic Chemistry, Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry and Catalysis Address: Senior Professor, School of Chemical Sciences, ...

  12. Majumdar, Dr Subeer Suhash

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Fellow Profile. Elected: 2014 Section: Animal Sciences. Majumdar, Dr Subeer Suhash Ph.D. (nagpur), FNA, FNASc. Date of birth: 21 May 1961. Specialization: Animal Biotechnology, Transgenic Animals, Endocrinology Address: Director, National Institute of Animal Biotechnology, Gopan Pally, Hyderabad 500 046, A.P.

  13. Gupta, Dr Chhitar Mal

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Gupta, Dr Chhitar Mal Ph.D. (Agra), FNA, FNASc, FAMS, FTWAS Council Service: 1998-2000. Date of birth: 1 September 1944. Specialization: Membrane Biology, Bio-organic Chemistry and Molecular Biophysics Address: Distinguished Professor and Infosys Chair, Institute of Bioinformatics & Applied Biotechnology, Room ...

  14. Babu, Dr Cherukuri Raghavendra

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Fellow Profile. Elected: 1990 Section: Plant Sciences. Babu, Dr Cherukuri Raghavendra D.Phil. (Calcutta). Date of birth: 30 June 1940. Specialization: Biosystematics, Ecology and Population Genetics Address: Professor Emeritus, CEMDE, School of Environmental Studies, University of Delhi, Delhi 110 007, U.T.. Contact:

  15. Anil, Dr Arga Chandrashekar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 2015 Section: Earth & Planetary Sciences. Anil, Dr Arga Chandrashekar Ph.D. (Karnatak). Date of birth: 23 January 1959. Specialization: Biological Oceanography, Marine Ecology, Marine Biology Address: Chief Scientist, National Institute of Oceanography, Dona Paula 403 004, ...

  16. Sharma, Dr Ram Swaroop

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 1989 Section: Earth & Planetary Sciences. Sharma, Dr Ram Swaroop Ph.D. (Basel), FNA. Date of birth: 10 July 1937. Specialization: Metamorphic Petrology, Mineralogy and Precambrian Geology Address: 70/36, Pratapnagar, Sector 7, Sanganer (RHB), Jaipur 302 033, Rajasthan

  17. Dr Satish R. Shetye

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1992 Section: Earth & Planetary Sciences. Shetye, Dr Satish Ramnath Ph.D. (Washington), FNA, FNASc. Council Service: 1998-2003. Date of birth: 25 October 1950. Specialization: Physical Oceanography Address: Vice Chancellor, Goa University, Taleigao Plateau 403 206, Goa Contact: Office: (0832) 651 9001

  18. Jena, Dr Prafulla Kumar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Jena, Dr Prafulla Kumar Ph.D. (Utkal). Date of birth: 27 December 1931. Specialization: Extractive Metallurgy, Mineral Processing, Environmental Engineering and Materials Processing Address: Chairman, Institute of Advance Technology and Environmental Studies, 80A-831A Lewis Road, Bhubaneswar 751 002, Orissa

  19. Kulkarni, Dr Mohan Gopalkrishna

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1996 Section: Engineering & Technology. Kulkarni, Dr Mohan Gopalkrishna Ph.D. (Mumbai), FNAE. Date of birth: 14 November 1950. Specialization: Polymer Science & Engineering, Intellectual Property Address: Emeritus Scientist, Unit for R&D of Information Products, Tapovan, NCL Campus, Pashan Road, Pune ...

  20. Apte, Dr Shree Kumar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 2008 Section: General Biology. Apte, Dr Shree Kumar Ph.D. (Gujarat), FNA, FNASc, FNAAS. Date of birth: 18 October 1952. Specialization: Molecular Biology & Biotechnology, Physiology and Stress Biology of Bacteria & Plants Address: Emeritus Professor, Homi Bhabha National Institute, Anushakti Nagar, ...

  1. Age differences in vocal emotion perception: on the role of speaker age and listener sex.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sen, Antarika; Isaacowitz, Derek; Schirmer, Annett

    2017-10-24

    Older adults have greater difficulty than younger adults perceiving vocal emotions. To better characterise this effect, we explored its relation to age differences in sensory, cognitive and emotional functioning. Additionally, we examined the role of speaker age and listener sex. Participants (N = 163) aged 19-34 years and 60-85 years categorised neutral sentences spoken by ten younger and ten older speakers with a happy, neutral, sad, or angry voice. Acoustic analyses indicated that expressions from younger and older speakers denoted the intended emotion with similar accuracy. As expected, younger participants outperformed older participants and this effect was statistically mediated by an age-related decline in both optimism and working-memory. Additionally, age differences in emotion perception were larger for younger as compared to older speakers and a better perception of younger as compared to older speakers was greater in younger as compared to older participants. Last, a female perception benefit was less pervasive in the older than the younger group. Together, these findings suggest that the role of age for emotion perception is multi-faceted. It is linked to emotional and cognitive change, to processing biases that benefit young and own-age expressions, and to the different aptitudes of women and men.

  2. What makes a charismatic speaker?

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Niebuhr, Oliver; Voße, Jana; Brem, Alexander

    2016-01-01

    The former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was one of the most charismatic speakers of the past decades. However, there is, as yet, no detailed quantitative profile of his way of speaking. We used state-of-the-art computer techniques to acoustically analyze his speech behavior and relate it to reference...... samples. Our paper provides the first-ever acoustic profile of Steve Jobs, based on about 4000 syllables and 12,000 individual speech sounds from his two most outstanding and well-known product presentations: the introductions of the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2. Our results show that Steve Jobs stands out...

  3. Teaching medicine with the help of "Dr. House".

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jerrentrup, Andreas; Mueller, Tobias; Glowalla, Ulrich; Herder, Meike; Henrichs, Nadine; Neubauer, Andreas; Schaefer, Juergen R

    2018-01-01

    TV series such as "House MD", "Grey´s Anatomy" or "Emergency Room" are well perceived by medical students. Seminars featuring medical TV series such as "House MD" might serve as door-opener to attract medical students to learn more about rare diseases. The TV series "House MD" is troublesome for the main character Dr. House is an excellent diagnostician but at the same time a rather misanthropic person. Therefore, lecturing medicine with the help of "House MD" requires constant evaluation. From 2008 to 2016 we are using the well-known TV series "House MD" continuously to attract medical students and teach them about rare diseases as well as diagnostic strategies. We collected from 213 students a detailed questionnaire assessing their learning experience. 76.6% of our students (n = 157) reported to watching medical dramas on a regular basis. The Dr. House seminar was compared to traditional seminars and our students reported an improved learning effect (69.9%), better concentration (89.7%), higher motivation to participate (88.7%), and more fun (86.7%) (all pHouse's behavior quite critically. Likert assessment on a 5-point scale identified strong disagreement with Dr. House´s interpersonal skills in dealing with his colleagues (median = 1) and patients (median = 1). At the same time, the students strongly agreed with his outstanding diagnostic (median = 5) and therapeutic capabilities (median = 4). Medical students visiting a Dr. House teaching seminar are highly motivated to learn more about rare diseases. They were positively influenced by TV series such as Dr. House to improve their diagnostic and clinical skills. At the same time, they are critical enough not to see Dr. House as a role model for their own personality. Well performed medical TV shows such as Dr. House can successfully be used in an educational setting to motivate medical students to come into seminars to learn more about rare diseases.

  4. Dr. Tulp's Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt: the third day hypothesis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Afek, Arnon; Friedman, Tal; Kugel, Chen; Barshack, Iris; Lurie, Doron J

    2009-07-01

    An autopsy was an important event in 17th century Holland. Autopsies were held in an 'anatomy theater' and performed according to a fixed protocol that often took up to 3 days to complete. Of the five group portraits painted by Rembrandt over the course of his career, two were anatomy lessons given by Dr. Tulp and Dr. Deyman. An examination of Rembrandt's painting Dr. Tulp's Anatomy Lesson (1632) and an X-ray image of the painting, as compared to other paintings of anatomy lessons from the same period, reveal interesting differences, such as positioning, and light and shadow. Not only was the autopsy not performed according to the usual protocol, but in this painting Rembrandt created a unique dramatic scene in his effort to tell a story. We suggest that Dr. Tulp and Rembrandt "modified" the painting of Dr. Tulp's anatomy lesson to emphasize Dr. Tulp's position as the greatest anatomist of his era--"Vesalius of Amsterdam," and as a way of demonstrating God's greatness by highlighting the hand as a symbol of the most glorious of God's creations.

  5. Processing ser and estar to locate objects and events: An ERP study with L2 speakers of Spanish.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dussias, Paola E; Contemori, Carla; Román, Patricia

    2014-01-01

    In Spanish locative constructions, a different form of the copula is selected in relation to the semantic properties of the grammatical subject: sentences that locate objects require estar while those that locate events require ser (both translated in English as 'to be'). In an ERP study, we examined whether second language (L2) speakers of Spanish are sensitive to the selectional restrictions that the different types of subjects impose on the choice of the two copulas. Twenty-four native speakers of Spanish and two groups of L2 Spanish speakers (24 beginners and 18 advanced speakers) were recruited to investigate the processing of 'object/event + estar/ser ' permutations. Participants provided grammaticality judgments on correct (object + estar ; event + ser ) and incorrect (object + ser ; event + estar ) sentences while their brain activity was recorded. In line with previous studies (Leone-Fernández, Molinaro, Carreiras, & Barber, 2012; Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999), the results of the grammaticality judgment for the native speakers showed that participants correctly accepted object + estar and event + ser constructions. In addition, while 'object + ser ' constructions were considered grossly ungrammatical, 'event + estar ' combinations were perceived as unacceptable to a lesser degree. For these same participants, ERP recording time-locked to the onset of the critical word ' en ' showed a larger P600 for the ser predicates when the subject was an object than when it was an event (*La silla es en la cocina vs. La fiesta es en la cocina). This P600 effect is consistent with syntactic repair of the defining predicate when it does not fit with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. For estar predicates (La silla está en la cocina vs. *La fiesta está en la cocina), the findings showed a central-frontal negativity between 500-700 ms. Grammaticality judgment data for the L2 speakers of Spanish showed that beginners were significantly less accurate than

  6. The Effect of Noise on Relationships Between Speech Intelligibility and Self-Reported Communication Measures in Tracheoesophageal Speakers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Eadie, Tanya L; Otero, Devon Sawin; Bolt, Susan; Kapsner-Smith, Mara; Sullivan, Jessica R

    2016-08-01

    The purpose of this study was to examine how sentence intelligibility relates to self-reported communication in tracheoesophageal speakers when speech intelligibility is measured in quiet and noise. Twenty-four tracheoesophageal speakers who were at least 1 year postlaryngectomy provided audio recordings of 5 sentences from the Sentence Intelligibility Test. Speakers also completed self-reported measures of communication-the Voice Handicap Index-10 and the Communicative Participation Item Bank short form. Speech recordings were presented to 2 groups of inexperienced listeners who heard sentences in quiet or noise. Listeners transcribed the sentences to yield speech intelligibility scores. Very weak relationships were found between intelligibility in quiet and measures of voice handicap and communicative participation. Slightly stronger, but still weak and nonsignificant, relationships were observed between measures of intelligibility in noise and both self-reported measures. However, 12 speakers who were more than 65% intelligible in noise showed strong and statistically significant relationships with both self-reported measures (R2 = .76-.79). Speech intelligibility in quiet is a weak predictor of self-reported communication measures in tracheoesophageal speakers. Speech intelligibility in noise may be a better metric of self-reported communicative function for speakers who demonstrate higher speech intelligibility in noise.

  7. Native Speakers' Perception of Non-Native English Speech

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jaber, Maysa; Hussein, Riyad F.

    2011-01-01

    This study is aimed at investigating the rating and intelligibility of different non-native varieties of English, namely French English, Japanese English and Jordanian English by native English speakers and their attitudes towards these foreign accents. To achieve the goals of this study, the researchers used a web-based questionnaire which…

  8. Brahmayya Sastry, Dr Podila

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1978 Section: Medicine. Brahmayya Sastry, Dr Podila Ph.D. (McGill). Date of birth: 24 May 1913. Date of death: 28 May 1993. Specialization: Physiology, Neurophysiology and Placental Physiology Last known address: Sitaramanilayam, Plot No. 9, Doctors Co-Operative Housing Colony, Waltair, Visakhapatnam ...

  9. Chitnis, Dr Chetan Eknath

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 2009 Section: Medicine. Chitnis, Dr Chetan Eknath Ph.D. (UC, Berkeley), FNA. Date of birth: 3 April 1961. Specialization: Molecular Parasitology, Vaccine Development for Malaria and Molecular & Cell Biology Address: Head, Malaria Parasite Biology & Vaccine, Institut Pasteur, 28, ...

  10. Sharma, Dr Surendra Kumar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 2010 Section: Medicine. Sharma, Dr Surendra Kumar Ph.D. (AIIMS), MD (PGIMER, Chandigarh), FNASc, FNA. Date of birth: 22 February 1951. Specialization: Environmental Medicine, Infectious Diseases, Internal Medicine, Pulmonary & Critical Care and Sleep Medicine Address: B-5/3, B Block, Sector 13, RK ...

  11. Valluri, Dr Sitaram Rao

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 1971 Section: Engineering & Technology. Valluri, Dr Sitaram Rao Ph.D. (Caltech). Date of birth: 25 June 1924. Specialization: Metal Fatigue Address: 'Prashanthi', 659, 100 Feet Road, Indiranagar, Bengaluru 560 038, Karnataka Contact: Residence: (080) 2525 8294. YouTube ...

  12. Shastry, Dr B Sriram

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Shastry, Dr B Sriram Ph.D. (Mumbai), FNA, FNASc, FTWAS. Date of birth: 26 November 1950. Specialization: Strongly-Correlated Fermi Systems, Quantum Integrable Systems Address: Distinguished Professor, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA Contact: Office: (+1-831) 459 5849

  13. Gangal, Dr Sharad Vishwanath

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Gangal, Dr Sharad Vishwanath Ph.D. (Mumbai), FNASc. Date of birth: 2 May 1937. Specialization: Allergy, Immunology and Biochemistry Address: Lakshmi Niwas, Opp. Santoshi Mata Temple (B Cabin), Sane Guruji Path, Naupada, Thane 400 602, Maharashtra Contact: Residence: (022) 2537 6961. Mobile: 93249 24307

  14. Paranjpe, Dr Pramod Anand

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1975 Section: Engineering & Technology. Paranjpe, Dr Pramod Anand D.Sc. Tech. (ETH Zurich). Date of birth: 1 April 1934. Specialization: Turbomachinery and Jet Propulsion Systems Address: 'Bahaar', 5, Hindustan Estate, Road No. 13, Kalyaninagar, Pune 411 006, Maharashtra Contact: Residence: (020) 2668 ...

  15. Thakur, Dr Vikram Chandra

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 1991 Section: Earth & Planetary Sciences. Thakur, Dr Vikram Chandra Ph.D. (London). Date of birth: 15 January 1940. Specialization: Structural Geology, Tectonics of Himalayan Geology and Active Tectonics Address: 9/12 (Lane 9), Ashirwad Eclave, Dehra Dun 248 001, ...

  16. Gangal, Dr Sudha Gajanan

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Gangal, Dr Sudha Gajanan Ph.D. (Mumbai), FNA Council Service: 1995-97. Date of birth: 25 August 1934. Specialization: Cancer & Basic Immunology, Cell Biology and Genetic Diseases Address: 4, Mahavishnu Apartments, Dahanukar Colony A, Kothrud, Pune 411 029, Maharashtra Contact: Residence: (020) 2538 4382, ...

  17. Mishra, Dr Rakesh K

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Mishra, Dr Rakesh K Ph.D. (Allahabad), FNASc, FNA. Date of birth: 14 April 1961. Specialization: Genomics, Chromatin, Epigenetics Address: Director, Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology, Uppal Road, Hyderabad 500 007, A.P.. Contact: Office: (040) 2719 2600. Residence: (040) 2720 6400. Mobile: 94419 02188

  18. Parnaik, Dr Veena Krishnaji

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 2008 Section: Animal Sciences. Parnaik, Dr Veena Krishnaji Ph.D. (Ohio State), FNA. Date of birth: 22 August 1953. Specialization: Cell Biology, Molecular Biology, Lamins and Nuclear Organisation Address: INSA Senior Scientist, Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology, Uppal Road, Hyderabad 500 007, A.P.

  19. Dr. Shi Hanzhang's Experience in Treating Andropathy

    Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

    2007-01-01

    @@ Dr. Shi Hanzhang (施汉章) of Dongzhimen Hospital affiliated to Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine is experienced in both teaching and clinical practice, especially in treating andropathy, such as sexual disorder, infertility, and hyperplasia of the prostate. The author has the honour to follow him for study and really learned a lot from him. A brief introduction to Dr. Shi's way of thinking in treatment is as follows.

  20. Volume celebrating the 60th birthday of Professor Dr. Franz Fie; Professor Dr. Franz Fiedler zum 60. Geburtstag

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Beheng, K.D. [ed.

    1998-01-01

    This report was compiled in honor of Professor Dr. Franz Fiedler on the occasion of his 60th birthday on 7 January 1998. Its contributions deal with mesoscale modelling, the propagation of air pollutants, measurements of precipitation using radar, and prediction models. (orig./KW) [Deutsch] Dieser Bericht wurde aus Anlass des 60. Geburtstags von Herrn Prof. Dr. Franz Fiedler am 7. Januar 1998 zusammengestellt. Die Beitraege behandeln mesoskalige Modellierung, Ausbreitung von Luftschadstoffen, Niederschlagsmessung mit Radar und Vorhersagemodelle. (orig.)

  1. 75 FR 10456 - Kootenai National Forest, Fortine Ranger District, Montana; Galton Environmental Impact Statement

    Science.gov (United States)

    2010-03-08

    ...) Planning Areas (Wigwam, Grave, and Murphy) and the Fortine Ranger District portions of two (2) Planning... lawsuit settlement agreement with the Montana Wilderness Association commits the Forest Service to develop... travel planning for the Ten Lakes WSA. This project will also reduce hazardous fuels within and outside...

  2. Using structured decision making to manage disease risk for Montana wildlife

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mitchell, Michael S.; Gude, Justin A.; Anderson, Neil J.; Ramsey, Jennifer M.; Thompson, Michael J.; Sullivan, Mark G.; Edwards, Victoria L.; Gower, Claire N.; Cochrane, Jean Fitts; Irwin, Elise R.; Walshe, Terry

    2013-01-01

    We used structured decision-making to develop a 2-part framework to assist managers in the proactive management of disease outbreaks in Montana, USA. The first part of the framework is a model to estimate the probability of disease outbreak given field observations available to managers. The second part of the framework is decision analysis that evaluates likely outcomes of management alternatives based on the estimated probability of disease outbreak, and applies managers' values for different objectives to indicate a preferred management strategy. We used pneumonia in bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) as a case study for our approach, applying it to 2 populations in Montana that differed in their likelihood of a pneumonia outbreak. The framework provided credible predictions of both probability of disease outbreaks, as well as biological and monetary consequences of management actions. The structured decision-making approach to this problem was valuable for defining the challenges of disease management in a decentralized agency where decisions are generally made at the local level in cooperation with stakeholders. Our approach provides local managers with the ability to tailor management planning for disease outbreaks to local conditions. Further work is needed to refine our disease risk models and decision analysis, including robust prediction of disease outbreaks and improved assessment of management alternatives.

  3. For Dr. Nancy Snyderman's Parents, Staying Close to Family Is Key

    Science.gov (United States)

    ... to move closer to their daughter and her family, as part of the next chapter in their lives. Photo courtesy of Dr. Nancy Snyderman As Chief Medical Editor for NBC News and host of the popular MSNBC show, Dr. Nancy , Dr. ...

  4. DR and CR: Recent advances in technology

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Schaefer-Prokop, C.M.; De Boo, D.W.; Uffmann, M.; Prokop, M.

    2009-01-01

    After some initial reluctance, nowadays transition from conventional analogue-to-digital radiographic technique is realized in the vast majority of institutions. The eventual triumph of digital over conventional technique is related to its undoubted advantages with respect to image quality and improved image handling in the context of a picture archiving and communication system. CR represents the older system, which matured over decades and experienced some important recent improvements with respect to dose efficiency and work-flow efficiency that strengthened its position. It represents a very versatile, economically attractive system that is equally suited for integrated systems as well as for cassette-based imaging at the bedside. DR systems offer superb image quality and realistic options for dose reduction based on their high dose efficiency. While for a long time only integrated systems were on the market suited for a large patient throughput, also mobile DR systems became recently available. While for the next years, it is likely that DR and CR systems will coexist, the long term perspective of CR will depend on further innovations with respect to dose efficiency and signal-to-noise characteristics while for DR economical aspects and broader availability of mobile systems will play a role.

  5. Facial Expression Generation from Speaker's Emotional States in Daily Conversation

    Science.gov (United States)

    Mori, Hiroki; Ohshima, Koh

    A framework for generating facial expressions from emotional states in daily conversation is described. It provides a mapping between emotional states and facial expressions, where the former is represented by vectors with psychologically-defined abstract dimensions, and the latter is coded by the Facial Action Coding System. In order to obtain the mapping, parallel data with rated emotional states and facial expressions were collected for utterances of a female speaker, and a neural network was trained with the data. The effectiveness of proposed method is verified by a subjective evaluation test. As the result, the Mean Opinion Score with respect to the suitability of generated facial expression was 3.86 for the speaker, which was close to that of hand-made facial expressions.

  6. Bal, Dr Dattatreya Vaman

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 1943 Section: Animal Sciences. Bal, Dr Dattatreya Vaman Ph.D. (Liverpool). Date of birth: 25 August 1905. Date of death: 1 April 1999. Specialization: Marine Zoology, Oceanography. Fisheries and Aquaculture Last known address: 104, Swaroop Complex, Karve Road, Pune 411 ...

  7. Bhawalkar, Dr Dilip Devidas

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Fellow Profile. Elected: 1986 Section: Physics. Bhawalkar, Dr Dilip Devidas Ph.D. (Southampton), FNA, FNASc. Date of birth: 16 October 1940. Specialization: Lasers and laser Instrumentation Address: 26, Paramanu Nagar, Indore 452 013, M.P.. Contact: Office: (0731) 232 2707. Residence: (0731) 232 0031. Mobile: 93032 ...

  8. Agrewala, Dr Javed Naim

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Agrewala, Dr Javed Naim Ph.D. (Agra), FNA, FNASc. Date of birth: 14 May 1961. Specialization: Immunology, Vaccine, Drug Discovery Address: Chief Scientist, Immunology Laboratory, Institute of Microbial Technology, Sector 39A, Chandigarh 160 036, U.T.. Contact: Office: (0172) 666 5261. Residence: (0172) 666 5514

  9. Barua, Dr Asok Kumar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Elected: 1987 Section: Physics. Barua, Dr Asok Kumar Ph.D. (Calcutta). Date of birth: 1 July 1936. Specialization: Solid State Materials, Thin Film Technology and Thin Film Solar Cells Address: Honorary Emeritus Professor, Indian Institute of Engineering Science & Technology, Shibpur, Howrah 711 103, W.B.. Contact:

  10. Gurjar, Dr Mukund Keshao

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Gurjar, Dr Mukund Keshao Ph.D. (Nagpur and London), FNASc. Date of birth: 28 August 1952. Specialization: Carbohydrate Chemistry and Synthetic Organic Chemistry Address: Director, R&D, Emcure Pharmaceuticals Limited, P2, ITBT Park Phase II, Hinjwadi, Pune 411 057, Maharashtra Contact: Office: (020) 3982 1350, ...

  11. Linking resource selection and mortality modeling for population estimation of mountain lions in Montana

    Science.gov (United States)

    Robinson, Hugh S.; Ruth, Toni K.; Gude, Justin A.; Choate, David; DeSimone, Rich; Hebblewhite, Mark; Matchett, Marc R.; Mitchell, Michael S.; Murphy, Kerry; Williams, Jim

    2015-01-01

    To be most effective, the scale of wildlife management practices should match the range of a particular species’ movements. For this reason, combined with our inability to rigorously or regularly census mountain lion populations, several authors have suggested that mountain lions be managed in a source-sink or metapopulation framework. We used a combination of resource selection functions, mortality estimation, and dispersal modeling to estimate cougar population levels in Montana statewide and potential population level effects of planned harvest levels. Between 1980 and 2012, 236 independent mountain lions were collared and monitored for research in Montana. From these data we used 18,695 GPS locations collected during winter from 85 animals to develop a resource selection function (RSF), and 11,726 VHF and GPS locations from 142 animals along with the locations of 6343 mountain lions harvested from 1988–2011 to validate the RSF model. Our RSF model validated well in all portions of the State, although it appeared to perform better in Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (MFWP) Regions 1, 2, 4 and 6, than in Regions 3, 5, and 7. Our mean RSF based population estimate for the total population (kittens, juveniles, and adults) of mountain lions in Montana in 2005 was 3926, with almost 25% of the entire population in MFWP Region 1. Estimates based on a high and low reference population estimates produce a possible range of 2784 to 5156 mountain lions statewide. Based on a range of possible survival rates we estimated the mountain lion population in Montana to be stable to slightly increasing between 2005 and 2010 with lambda ranging from 0.999 (SD = 0.05) to 1.02 (SD = 0.03). We believe these population growth rates to be a conservative estimate of true population growth. Our model suggests that proposed changes to female harvest quotas for 2013–2015 will result in an annual statewide population decline of 3% and shows that, due to reduced dispersal, changes to

  12. White Native English Speakers Needed: The Rhetorical Construction of Privilege in Online Teacher Recruitment Spaces

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ruecker, Todd; Ives, Lindsey

    2015-01-01

    Over the past few decades, scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of native speakerism in the field of TESOL. Several recent studies have exposed instances of native speakerism in TESOL recruitment discourses published through a variety of media, but none have focused specifically on professional websites advertising programs in…

  13. 77 FR 33390 - Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest; Montana; Supplemental EIS for the Beaverhead-Deerlodge...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-06-06

    ..., watershed, vegetation, wildlife, and recreation users. This analysis will be used to determine if snowmobile... Land and Resource Management Plan (Forest Plan) environmental analysis in response to an April 2, 2012.... District Court for the District of Montana (Case 9:10-cv-00104-DWM) alleging inadequate analysis of the...

  14. Extending Situated Language Comprehension (Accounts) with Speaker and Comprehender Characteristics: Toward Socially Situated Interpretation.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Münster, Katja; Knoeferle, Pia

    2017-01-01

    More and more findings suggest a tight temporal coupling between (non-linguistic) socially interpreted context and language processing. Still, real-time language processing accounts remain largely elusive with respect to the influence of biological (e.g., age) and experiential (e.g., world and moral knowledge) comprehender characteristics and the influence of the 'socially interpreted' context, as for instance provided by the speaker. This context could include actions, facial expressions, a speaker's voice or gaze, and gestures among others. We review findings from social psychology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics to highlight the relevance of (the interplay between) the socially interpreted context and comprehender characteristics for language processing. The review informs the extension of an extant real-time processing account (already featuring a coordinated interplay between language comprehension and the non-linguistic visual context) with a variable ('ProCom') that captures characteristics of the language user and with a first approximation of the comprehender's speaker representation. Extending the CIA to the sCIA (social Coordinated Interplay Account) is the first step toward a real-time language comprehension account which might eventually accommodate the socially situated communicative interplay between comprehenders and speakers.

  15. Panel discussion on rock mechanics issues in repository design

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Bieniawski, Z.T.; Kim, K.S.; Nataraja, M.

    1996-01-01

    The panel discussion was introduced by Mr. Z.T.(Richard) Bieniawski and then continued with five additional speakers. The topics covered in the discussion included rock mechanics pertaining to the design of underground facilities for the disposal of radioactive wastes and the safety of such facilities. The speakers included: Mr. Kun-Soo Kim who is a specialist in the area of rock mechanics testing during the Basalt Waste Isolation Project; Dr. Mysore Nataraja who is the senior project manager with the NRC; Dr. Michael Voegele who is the project manager for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) on the Yucca Mountain Project; Dr. Edward Cording who is a member of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board; and Dr. Hemendra Kalia who is employed by Los Alamos National Laboratory and coordinates various activities of testing programs at the Yucca Mountain Site

  16. Overall properties of the Gaia DR1 reference frame

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, N.; Zhu, Z.; Liu, J.-C.; Ding, C.-Y.

    2017-03-01

    Aims: The first Gaia data release (Gaia DR1) provides 2191 ICRF2 sources with their positions in the auxiliary quasar solution and five astrometric parameters - positions, parallaxes, and proper motions - for stars in common between the Tycho-2 catalogue and Gaia in the joint Tycho-Gaia astrometric solution (TGAS). We aim to analyze the overall properties of Gaia DR1 reference frame. Methods: We compare quasar positions of the auxiliary quasar solution with ICRF2 sources using different samples and evaluate the influence on the Gaia DR1 reference frame owing to the Galactic aberration effect over the J2000.0-J2015.0 period. Then we estimate the global rotation between TGAS with Tycho-2 proper motion systems to investigate the property of the Gaia DR1 reference frame. Finally, the Galactic kinematics analysis using the K-M giant proper motions is performed to understand the property of Gaia DR1 reference frame. Results: The positional comparison between the auxiliary quasar solution and ICRF2 shows negligible orientation and validates the declination bias of -0.1mas in Gaia quasar positions with respect to ICRF2. Galactic aberration effect is thought to cause an offset 0.01mas of the Z axis direction of Gaia DR1 reference frame. The global rotation between TGAS and Tycho-2 proper motion systems, obtained by different samples, shows a much smaller value than the claimed value 0.24mas yr-1. For the Galactic kinematics analysis of the TGAS K-M giants, we find possible non-zero Galactic rotation components beyond the classical Oort constants: the rigid part ωYG = -0.38±0.15mas yr-1 and the differential part ω^primeYG = -0.29±0.19mas yr-1 around the YG axis of Galactic coordinates, which indicates possible residual rotation in Gaia DR1 reference frame or problems in the current Galactic kinematical model. Conclusions: The Gaia DR1 reference frame is well aligned to ICRF2, and the possible influence of the Galactic aberration effect should be taken into consideration

  17. Nageswara Rao, Dr Gullapalli

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Nageswara Rao, Dr Gullapalli M.D. (Opthal.) (AIIMS), FAMS, FACS, FRCS, FNASc. Date of birth: 1 September 1945. Specialization: Cornea, Community Eye Health and Eye Care Policy & Planning Address: Distinguished Chair of Eye Health, LV Prasad Eye Institute, LV Prasad Marg, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad 500 034, A.P.

  18. Ghosh, Dr Pushpito Kumar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 2010 Section: Chemistry. Ghosh, Dr Pushpito Kumar Ph.D. (Princeton). Date of birth: 29 May 1954. Specialization: Processes Research, Water Purification, Renewable Energy, R&D Management Address: A-604, Punit Park, Plot No. 182/C, Sector 17, Merol, Navi Mumbai 400 706, ...

  19. Nandicoori, Dr Vinay Kumar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Home; Fellowship. Fellow Profile. Elected: 2018 Section: General Biology. Nandicoori, Dr Vinay Kumar Ph.D. (IISc), FNASc. Date of birth: 1 March 1969. Specialization: Molecular & Cellular Biology, Cell Signalling, Cell Biology Address: National Institute of Immunology, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi 110 067, U.T.; Contact ...

  20. Panda, Dr Subrat Kumar

    Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

    Panda, Dr Subrat Kumar M.B.B.S. (Utkal), M.D. (Path.) (AIIMS), FNA. Date of birth: 18 November 1954. Specialization: Liver Pathology, Viral Hepatitis and Molecular Biology/Virology Address: Professor, Department of Pathology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi 110 029, U.T.. Contact: