Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acoustic measure of fundamental frequency during three speech tasks in vocally healthy children

The present study examined the fundamental frequency (F0) during three speech tasks in a group of vocally healthy children. The study also compared the reliability of different speech tasks for eliciting F0. Fifty-six vocally healthy children (31 boys and 25 girls) between the ages of 7.0 and 10.11 years participated in this study. Each child completed three speech tasks used to elicit a voice sample for subsequent analysis of fundamental frequency (F0). The tasks included: (a) sustained vowel /a/ prolongation, (b) repeating a sentence, and (c) reading aloud a passage. Two types of reliability, between-trial and between-day reliability, were compared across speech tasks. Results revealed significant difference in F0 between the three speech tasks ( p = 0.01). Post hoc comparisons revealed that vowel task elicited significantly higher F0 values than the passage task. Passage reading task yielded the highest intra-class correlation coefficient values for both between-trial and between-day reliability. The results provide some empirical data for standardizing voice assessment protocol for school-age children.
A Shape Grammar: The Language of Traditional Turkish Houses

In this paper, a parametric shape grammar which can generate the plans of traditional Turkish houses is presented. The grammar is based on a corpus of traditional Turkish houses that have been built in Anatolia and Rumelia for the past five centuries. The shape rule schemata are used for characterizing formal compositional aspects of this historical style.
Privacy principles, risks and harms

The protection of privacy is predicated on the individual's right to privacy and stipulates a number of principles that are primarily focused on information privacy or data protection and, as such, are insufficient to apply to other types of privacy and to the protection of other entities beyond the individual. This article identifies additional privacy principles that would apply to other types of privacy and would enhance the consideration of risks or harms to the individual, to groups and to society as a whole if they are violated. They also relate to the way privacy impact assessment (PIA) may be conducted. There are important reasons for generating consideration of and debate about these principles. First, they help to recalibrate a focus in Europe on data protection to the relative neglect of other types of privacy. Second, it is of critical importance at a time when PIA (renamed ‘data protection impact assessment’, or DPIA) may become mandatory under the European Commission's proposed Data Protection Regulation. Such assessment is an important instrument for identifying and mitigating privacy risks, but should address all types of privacy. Third, one can construct an indicative table identifying harms or risks to these additional privacy principles, which can serve as an important tool or instrument for a broader PIA to address other types of privacy.
An architectural design of a wavelet coprocessor

A flexible but fast and area-efficient VLSI architecture of a coprocessor to perform the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) can be designed using the pyramidal algorithm, pipelined data path unit, direct memory access, and a single 16-bit integer multiplier and adder/subtracter. A design of a 64-point, 4-coefficient Daubechies DWT is described. <<ETX>>
Patron‐focused services in three US libraries: collaborative interlibrary loan, collection development and acquisitions

To improve service and increase user satisfaction, some libraries are exploring new models of collaboration among the Interlibrary Loan, Collection Development and Acquisitions departments. One public library and two university libraries present models in which funds were set aside to purchase materials requested by library users through interlibrary loan. The models differ in some details but in all cases interlibrary loan staff select the titles to be purchased and acquisitions staff rush order the requested titles. Titles are then either rush processed in technical services and circulated to the user, or are received un‐processed in interlibrary loan for immediate patron use and are cataloged later. All three models have been in operation for two years or more and have moved from the pilot project stage to permanent implementation. Data are presented on the effectiveness of these models, including turnaround time, average cost per title, user satisfaction, and subsequent circulation of titles.
LibQUAL+TM: preliminary results from 2002

The LibQUAL+TM instrument derives from the Gap Theory of Service Quality, and the SERVQUAL instrument. Grounded in the constructs of discrepancy theory, the SERVQUAL protocol itself, is anchored by a singular precept: through a series of 22 questions the SERVQUAL instrument undertakes to measure the delivery of service quality across the five dimensions: reliability, assurance, empathy, responsiveness, tangibles. It has been established as defining the service quality construct.
Evaluation of predetection diversity techniques for RAKE receivers

This paper extends the results presented by Eng, Kong and Milstein (see IEEE Trans. Commun., vol.44, p.1117-29, 1996) to include the presence of a direct-path component, and subsequently, to investigate the efficacy of an Mth order pre-selection maximal-ratio combiner (M-SCMRC) in different fading environments. The performance of a maximal-ratio combiner with finite tap decisions (M-MRC), and the optimum linear diversity combiner (L-MRC) which combines all the L resolvable multipaths, is also evaluated for comparison. The results reveal that M-SCMRC outperforms M-MRC, although the combination of a strong specular component and a heavily decayed multipath intensity profile may result in only a minimal degradation of the receiver performance for an M-MRC RAKE receiver.
On the neural learning and harmonic control of a planar complex

This paper presents results on the harmonic control, in contrast to the fixed-point control as in the cases of inverted pendulum balance and truck backer-upper. In general, the harmonic control for driving a plant trajectory to a periodic orbit or a limit cycle is more difficult than the fixed point control. We use four a priori trajectories as well as a neural-based system identifier to train the controller. During the performance test on a planar complex, the controller is shown capable of driving the test plant to follow the predefined periodic orbit (i.e., limit cycle stability), given an arbitrary initial state and external disturbance added incidentally. The resulting planar model can be applied to real-life examples, such as the stability control of shipping-building, and smoothness control of rocking chair design.
Para-Social Presence and Communication Capabilities of a Web Site: A Theoretical Perspective

The goal of this paper is to describe the theoretical underpinnings of the construct Para-social Presence and to develop an instrument to measure this construct. Para-social presence refers to the extent to which a medium facilitates a sense of understanding, connection, involvement and interaction among participating social entities. We make a case for treating a web site as a valid social actor and argue that the relationship between a web site and her visitors should be characterized in much the same way one would characterize an inter-personal relationship. We also argue that a web site could possess different levels of para-social presence depending on how it is configured and used. We then develop a research framework that illustrates the impact of new technologies (such as personalization systems) and associated web interface design decisions on perceived communication characteristics of a web site, para-social presence, and subsequent user evaluations of the web site.
Rotation of Visual Reference Systems and Its Influence on Control Quality

Electronic displays pose large human-engineering possibilities and, at the same time, new problems. One special aspect is the rotation of the display reference system. The human operator is unable to compensate for rotation. This is why tracking errors increase considerably at 90 and 270° rotation angles. Related experiments are described in detail. A new "action display" indicating the stick signal to the control system compensates completely for the rotation effect.
Enhancing Operator Control by Adaptive Alarm Presentation

The use of alarms in process control is a complex affair, because alarms can have many different functions over and above that of alerting the operator to a new event. Alarms are potentially a rich source of information that can be used in all phases of responding to a disturbance and should therefore be considered as an aspect of the general process information. From the point of view of cognitive systems engineering, alarms provide information that enables the operators to maintain control of the process and to be proactive as well as reactive. An important issue is the time and effort needed to evaluate events and new information (time to evaluate: TE) and the time and effort needed to select an appropriate response or line of action (time to select: TS). The former (TE) can be supported by more effective presentation of information, specifically a more comprehensive presentation of alarms. The latter (TS) can be supported by various kinds of computerized support, ranging from planning systems to adapt.
LEXICAL AVAILABILITY AND L2 VOCABULARY ACQUISITION

Vocabulary research has followed a different path in English and in Spanish applied linguistics. Spanish applied linguistics has paid more attention to available lexicons of speakers than to word frequency. The measure of lexical availability combines the frequency at which a word is produced as a member of a semantic category (e.g. dog in category Animals) and the position in the list of associations provided by a group of individuals. It focuses on the words retrieved by speakers in response prompts (word stimulus) related to daily situations. This paper intends to present some of the aspects of lexical-availability research that are interesting for L2 vocabulary acquisition. It attempts to show the potential of lexical-availability research as an alternate approach for vocabulary planning (the use of L1 lexical-availability measures to select the teaching vocabulary for L2) as well as the study of some psycholinguistic aspects of vocabulary acquisition, such as the organization of learners' mental lexicons, the similarities and the differences between response patterns, the kinds of semantic associations that learners activate in response to prompts (semantic categories), the consideration of the most available words obtained by lexical-availability research as semantic prototypes. Likewise, the study of learners' lexical availability can uncover sociolinguistic and cultural issues. Furthermore, this paper wishes to inspire researchers of languages other than Spanish to apply this methodology to different languages. All these aspects are hereby presented on the basis of the Slovene learners' available lexicons in Spanish as L2 (N=200) (Sifrar Kalan, 2009; 2012; 2014b) and English as L2 (N=20) (Sifrar Kalan, 2014a). Keywords: foreign languages, vocabulary acquisition, lexical availability, word associations
A virtual e-retailing environment in GOLEM

We present a prototype multi-agent system whose goal is to support a 3D application for e-retailing. The prototype demonstrates how the use of agent environments can be amongst the most promising and flexible approaches to engineer e-retailing applications. We illustrate this point by showing how the agent environment GOLEM uses semantic Web concepts to develop the e-retailing application. In this context we describe the features of GOLEM that allow a user to become an avatar and explore the environment by searching and dynamically discovering new products and services.
Capacity and error probability analysis for space-time block codes over fading channels

The capacity and error probability of space-time block codes (STBC) are considered for PAM/PSK/QAM modulation in fading channels. The approach is based on an equivalent scalar AWGN (additive white Gaussian noise) channel with a channel gain proportional to the Frobenius norm of the matrix channel for the STBC. Using this effective channel, capacity and probability of error expressions are derived for PSK/PAM/QAM modulation with STBC. Rayleigh, Ricean and Nakagami fading channels are considered.
Discovery of unexpected patterns in data mining applications

Organizations are taking advantage of data mining techniques to leverage the vast amounts of data captured as they process routine transactions. However several of the pattern discovery methods in data-mining systems have the drawbacks that they discover too many obvious or irrelevant patterns and that they do not leverage to a full extent valuable prior domain knowledge that managers have. In particular, most methods for pattern discovery use objective measures of interestingness, such as confidence and support for the evaluation of the discovered patterns. It has been argued that besides objective measures of interestingness, subjective measures are equally important. These subjective measures, such as unexpectedness and actionability, assume that the interestingness of a pattern depends on the user and does not solely depend on the structure of a pattern. This dissertation addresses these drawbacks by describing a new framework for the discovery of interesting patterns and by developing new methods to generate patterns by incorporating prior knowledge in the process of searching for patterns in data. Specifically, new techniques are described that generate unexpected patterns with respect to managerial intuition by building beliefs about the domain and using these beliefs to seed the search for unexpected patterns in data. Further, since unexpected patterns imply a contradiction to prior knowledge, this dissertation also describes procedures for knowledge refinement—the process of refining prior beliefs based on the discovered unexpected patterns. In a case study application we demonstrate the strengths of this approach in discovering unexpected patterns and in knowledge refinement and compare the approach to a popular pattern discovery method. The contributions of this research are procedures for making data mining more intelligent and useful for the decision maker. This approach should lead to the development of decision support systems that provide more relevant patterns in the data to the user, patterns that confirm or challenge the user's beliefs and domain knowledge. We believe that such a breakthrough is required if data-mining is to achieve its potential in business applications.
Effects of interpersonal trust, team leader support, rewards, and knowledge sharing mechanisms on knowledge sharing in project teams

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of interpersonal trust, team leader support, rewards, and knowledge sharing mechanisms on voluntary knowledge sharing in software development project teams in Sri Lanka.Design/methodology/approach – Survey methodology was used and 150 software developers who were directly involved in developing and maintaining a software product from project teams responded. Regression analysis was used for data analysis.Findings – Interpersonal trust and rewards have significant positive effects on knowledge sharing. Although it was anticipated that the team leader support would be a significant predictor of knowledge sharing, the results did not provide evidence for a positive and significant relationship. “Work‐group communications” and “Personal interactions” had significant positive effects on knowledge sharing.Originality/value – It is expected that the findings of this study will provide useful information to better understand the predictors of the ex.
An observer-based approach for chaotic synchronization with applications to secure communications

In this paper a systematic approach, based on the linear-state-observer design for constructing two chaotically synchronized systems, is developed. The proposed method is then applied to suggest a means to secure communications. The method combines chaotic masking and chaotic modulation, where the information signal is injected into the transmitter and simultaneously transmitted to the receiver. Furthermore, two well-known chaotic systems, Rossler and Lorenz, and a hyperchaotic Rossler system are considered as illustrative examples to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
An improved genetic algorithm approach for on-line optimisation problems

Real-time systems have to react to disruptive events in manufacturing environments within tight time constraints. This article aims to enhance standard genetic algorithms (GA) to reduce the execution time and improve the solution quality when the objective function is time-expensive to evaluate. More precisely, we propose the addition of a cache memory to avoid re-testing an already tested solution and a predator mechanism to relax evaluation. After discussing the applicability conditions of those mechanisms, we propose a demonstrative example, based on a real scenario in the aluminium industry, in which a GA and a real-time discrete event simulation model are integrated to support the rescheduling process in enterprise resource planning controlled environments.
Alternative instructional systems and the development of problem‐solving skills in physics

Two different instructional approaches were used in a ninth grade Venezuelan secondary school. One was the traditional approach which has been used for the last 10 years in Venezuela; the other was based on the learning theory of Ausubel (1968). The influence of these two different systems upon student‐problem solving abilities was analysed using one‐way anova. The research findings suggest that instruction based on Ausubel's theory was better able to develop problem‐solving abilities, as measured by the acquisition of cognitive skills related to problem solving.
Artificial Neural Network Design for Modeling of Mixed Bivariate Outcomes in Medical Research Data

Background & Objective: Mixed outcomes arise when, in a multivariate model, response variables measured on different scales such as binary and continuous. Artificial neural networks (ANN) can be used for modeling in situations where classic models have restricted application when some of their assumptions are not met. In this paper, we propose a method based on ANNs for modeling mixed binary and continuous outcomes. Methods: Univariate and bivariate models were evaluated based on two different sets of simulated data. The …
A high-performance custom standard-cell CMOS equalizer for telecommunications applications

A high-performance CMOS programmable amplitude equalizer has been implemented with a dynamic range greater than 100 dB and supply rejection greater than 60 dB at 1 kHz from both supplies. This was accomplished using a balanced architecture. A nonreturn-to-zero sample-and-hold circuit is proposed that is also parasitic-insensitive. The circuits are implemented using a standard-cell methodology.
Learning from text: Matching readers and texts by latent semantic analysis

This study examines the hypothesis that the ability of a reader to learn from text depends on the match between the background knowledge of the reader and the difficulty of the text information. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a statistical technique that represents the content of a document as a vector in high‐dimensional semantic space based on a large text corpus, is used to predict how much readers will learn from texts based on the estimated conceptual match between their topic knowledge and the text information. Participants completed tests to assess their knowledge of the human heart and circulatory system, then read one of four texts that ranged in difficulty from elementary to medical school level, then completed the tests again. Results show a nonmonotonic relation in which learning was greatest for texts that were neither too easy nor too difficult. LSA proved as effective at predicting learning from these texts as traditional knowledge assessment measures. For these texts, optimal assignment o.
A resource donation based approach to load balancing of peer-to-peer overlay networks

Distributed hash table (DHT) is the current emerging technology among the peer-to-peer computing research community, due to their scalability, self organization and the lookup efficiency. However, load balancing is an issue in these DHT based peer-to-peer overlay networks. Some nodes are mapped with more data keys, and some are mapped with less data keys regardless of their heterogeneous capabilities, resulting in overloaded and under-loaded nodes. In this paper we describe a resource donation based approach to the load balancing of current DHT based overlay networks. Our approach assigns node identifiers by considering heterogeneous capabilities of the nodes. Nodes which donate more resources are assigned with more node identifiers. This kind of resource donation based multiple node identifiers assigning approach to the load balancing is not well known among the DHT research community. We use the DHT protocol Cycloid to evaluate our approach to load balancing. The simulation results show that this approach is capable of balancing the load on a node due to the key distribution when node heterogeneous capabilities are taken into account, and this also improves the overall lookup efficiency
Multi-channel learning using anticipatory ILCs

In general, a linear system with a single iterative learning controller (ILC) has a limited learnable frequency bandwidth. This limitation affects learning transient and final tracking accuracy. In this paper, a multi-channel method is proposed to extend the learning frequency bandwidth beyong that achievable by a single ILC. Each channel requires a single learning controller designed to fit the system dyanmics within this designated frequency band. To prepare tracking errors for each channel, DFT/IDFT and zero-phase filters are used. Learning using anticipatory learning control under the multi-channel structure is analysed in detail. The design procedure and effectiveness of the multi-channel method are demonstrated via simulations and experiments. Comparison of the multi-channel learning control with the conventional single-channel learning control highlights the merits of the multi-channel design method.
How to start a V2 declarative clause: Transfer of syntax vs. information structure in L2 German

This paper discusses V2 word order and information structure in Swedish, German and non-native German. Concentrating on the clause-initial position of V2 declaratives, the ‘prefield’, we investigate the extent of L1 transfer in a closely related L2. The prefield anchors the clause in discourse, and although almost any type of element can occur in this position, naturalistic text corpora of native Swedish and native German show distinct language-specific patterns. Certain types of elements are more common than others in clause-initial position, and their frequencies in Swedish differ substantially from German (subjects, fronted objects, certain adverbs). Nonnative cross-sectional production data from Swedish learners of German at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels are compared with native control data, matched for age and genre (Bohnacker 2005, 2006, Rosen 2006). The learners’ V2 syntax is largely targetlike, but their beginnings of sentences are unidiomatic. They have problems with the language-specific linguistic means that have an impact on information structure: They overapply the Swedish principle of “rheme later” in their L2 German, indicating L1 transfer at the interface of syntax and discourse pragmatics, especially for structures that are frequent in the L1 (subject-initial and expletive-initial clauses, and constructions with sa (‘so’) and object det (‘it/that’)).