Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exposure-independent comprehension of Greek-accented speech: evidence from New Zealand listeners

Accents provide extensive variation in speech, which can cause difficulties for comprehension. However, after a period of exposure to a foreign accent, listeners are usually able to understand it better. This study examined whether New Zealanders could adapt to consider Greek-accented raised /ɪ/ in English as part of their native centralised /ɪ/ phonetic category. Participants listened to a story in either Greek-accented or New Zealand-accented speech, and then underwent a cross-modal priming and lexical decision task as well as a rating task to examine perception at different levels of speech processing. Participants correctly identified words in Greek-accented English whether they had previous exposure to the accent or not. This effect extended throughout the speech processing system, from automatic lexical activation to deliberate categorisation. We discuss reasons for these results, including perceptual flexibility for variant forms of vowels and a high level of familiarity New Zealanders have with the Australian accent.
The Systemic Dimension of Hedge Fund Illiquidity and Prime Brokerage

We analyse the potentially vulnerable and systemically relevant financial intermediation chain established by hedge funds and prime brokers. Our dataset covers the 306 largest global hedge funds and their prime brokers over the period July 2001 to December 2011. The study illustrates that hedge funds and prime brokers act as complementary trading partners in normal times. However, we observe that this form of financial intermediation may be severely impaired in times of market distress. This can be explained by the hoarding of liquid securities by prime brokers who are eager to avert runs by their clients.
Privacy-preserving Anti-Money Laundering using Secure Multi-Party Computation

Money laundering is a serious financial crime where crimi-nals aim to conceal the illegal source of their money via a series of trans-actions. Although banks have an obligation to monitor transactions, it is difficult to track these illicit money flows since they typically span over multiple banks, which cannot share this information due to privacy concerns. We present secure risk propagation , a novel efficient algorithm for money laundering detection across banks without violating privacy concerns. In this algorithm, each account is assigned a risk score , which is then propagated through the transaction network. In this article we present two results. Firstly, using data from a large Dutch bank, we show that it is possible to detect unusual activity using this model, with cash ratio as the risk score. With a recall of 20%, the precision improves from 15% to 40% by propagating the risk scores, reducing the number of false positives significantly. Secondly, we present a privacy-preserving solution for securely performing risk propagation over a joint, inter-bank transaction network. To achieve this, we use Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) techniques, which are particularly well-suited for the risk propagation algorithm due to its structural simplicity. We also show that the running time of this secure variant scales linearly in the amount of accounts and transactions. For 200 , 000 transactions, two iterations of the secure algorithm between three virtual parties, run within three hours on a consumer-grade server.
CLEAR SPEECH SOUNDS FAST: THE IMPACT OF SPEAKING MODE VARIATION ON PERCEIVED TEMPO

Research has identified multiple acoustic cues for perceived speech tempo variation. Together, these warrant the proposal that speech which conveys more complex spectral information is heard as taking more time than speech conveying less complex information; if timing is controlled, the former sounds faster than the latter. We therefore hypothesize that hyper-articulated speech sounds faster than normal speech when articulation rates are controlled. We report on two listening experiments which address this hypothesis using clear and normal sentence productions. Experiment 1 assesses listeners’ ability to separate tempo and speaking mode judgements; Experiment 2 uses the same stimuli to probe the direction of any effect of speaking mode variation on perceived tempo. The results confirm that compressed clear sentence productions sound faster than normal productions with the same duration, although the precise mechanism underlying this effect remains to be established.
RSMPNet: Relationship Guided Semantic Map Prediction

In semantic navigation, a top-down map with accurate and complete semantic information is vital to subsequent decision-making. However, due to occlusions and limitations of the robot’s field of view (FOV), there are often un-observed areas in the top-down maps. To address this problem, recent works have studied semantic map prediction to complete the top-down maps. In this work, we propose to improve map prediction by integrating relational information. We propose RSMPNet, a relationship-guided semantic map prediction network, which makes use of semantic and spatial relationships to predict unobserved areas from accumulated semantic maps. Specifically, we propose a Relationship Reasoning Layer that includes two modules, namely 1) the Semantic Relationship Graph Reasoning Module (SeGRM) to capture the semantic relationship and 2) the Spatial Relationship Graph Reasoning Module (SpGRM) to utilize the spatial relationship. We also de-sign a semantic relationship enhanced loss to enhance our model to learn semantic relationship information. Experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed network which achieves state-of-the-art performance in semantic map prediction. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/jws39/semantic-map-prediction
Monitoring surface water quality using social media in the context of citizen science

Surface water quality monitoring (SWQM) provides essential information for water environmental protection. However, SWQM is costly and limited in terms of equipment and sites. The global popularity of social media and intelligent mobile devices with GPS and photography functions allows citizens to monitor surface water quality. This study aims to propose a method for SWQM using social media platforms. Specifically, a WeChat-based application platform is built to collect water quality reports from volunteers, which have been proven valuable for water quality monitoring. The methods for data screening and volunteer recruitment are discussed based on the collected reports. The proposed methods provide a framework for collecting water quality data from citizens and offer a primary foundation for big data analysis in future research.
A new method for estimating megacity NO x emissions and lifetimes from satellite observations

We present a new method for estimating NO x emissions and effective lifetimes from large cities. As in previous studies, the estimate is based on the downwind plume evolution for different wind directions separately. The novelty of the presented approach lies in the simultaneous fit of downwind patterns for opposing wind directions, which makes the method far more robust (i.e. less prone to local minima with nonphysically high or low lifetimes) than a single exponential decay 5 fit. In addition, the new method does not require the assumption of a city being a “point source”, but derives also the spatial distribution of emissions. The method was successfully applied to 100 cities worldwide on seasonal scale. Fitted emissions generally agree reasonably with EDGAR v6 (R=0.76) and are on average 16% lower, while estimated uncertainties are still rather large ( ≈ 30-50%). Lifetimes were found to be rather short (2.44 ± 0,68 h) and show no distinct dependency on season or latitude, which might be 10 a consequence of discarding observations at high solar zenith angles (>65°).
AN ACOUSTIC STUDY OF THE FRICATIVE VOWEL IN TWO ENDANGERED RYUKYUAN LANGUAGES

This study investigates the acoustic properties of the fricative vowel of two varieties of Ryukyuan languages: Aragusuku Yaeyama (AR) and Karimata Miyako (KR) Ryukyuans. Ryukyuans are endangered languages spoken in the Southwest Islands of Japan. The phonetic properties of the fricative vowel have been an issue of debate. We aim to characterize the frication in the acoustic signals of this vowel. We compared the zero-crossing rates (ZCR) between the fricative vowel and the regular vowel /i/. The results indicated that the fricative vowel has frication noise superimposed on its formant structure in the 5-8 kHz region. This noise distinguished the fricative vowel from /i/ in AR but not in KR based on ZCR. Nevertheless, the fricative vowels in both languages have a similar quantity of frication noise. These results suggest that the fricative vowels in AR and KR have a similar acoustic profile to those reported in other languages.
Kainu-Integration of genomic and proteomic data to identify candidate genes in HT-29 cells after incubation with Bifidobacterium bifidum ATCC 29521

As the predominant group inhabiting the human gastrointestinal tract, bifidobacteria play a vital role in human nutrition, therapeutics, and health by shaping and maintaining the gut ecosystem, reducing blood cholesterol, and promoting the supply of nutrients. The interaction between bacterial cells and human intestinal epithelial cell lines has been studied for decades in an attempt to understand the mechanisms of action. These studies, however, have been limited by lack of genomic and proteomic database to aid in achieving comprehensive understanding of these mechanisms at molecular levels. Microarray data (GSE: 74119) coupled with isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantitation (iTRAQ) were performed to detect differentially expressed genes and proteins in HT-29 cells after incubation with Bifidobacterium bifidum . Real-time quantitative PCR, gene ontology, and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analyses were further conducted for mRNA validation, functional annotation, and pathway identification, respectively. According to the results of microarray, 1,717 differentially expressed genes, including 1,693 upregulated and 24 downregulated genes, were selected and classified by the gene ontology database. The iTRAQ analysis identified 43 differentially expressed proteins, where 29 proteins were upregulated and 14 proteins were downregulated. Eighty-two candidate genes showing consistent differences with microarray and iTRAQ were further validated in HT-29 and Caco-2 cells by real-time quantitative PCR. Nine of the top genes showing interesting results with high confidence were further investigated in vivo in mice intestine samples. Integration of genomic and proteomic data provides an approach to identify candidate genes that are more likely to function in ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis
CREAPY: A PYTHON-BASED TOOL FOR THE DETECTION OF CREAK IN CONVERSATIONAL SPEECH

The annotation of creaky voice is relevant for various linguistic topics, from phonological analyses to the investigation of turn-taking, but manual annotation is a time-consuming process. In this paper, we present creapy , a Python-based tool to detect creaky intervals in speech signals. creapy does not require prior phonetic segmentation and supports the export of Praat TextGrid files, allowing for manual revision of the automatically labelled intervals. creapy was developed and tested using Austrian German conversational speech. It was optimised for recall to facilitate a semi-automatic annotation process, and it achieved a better performance for men’s (recall: .79) than for women’s voices (recall: .60).
AN ARTICULATORY STUDY OF THE WORD-INITIAL /stɹ/ CLUSTER IN BRITISH ENGLISH

This paper explores the articulatory characteristics of the word-initial /stɹ/ cluster in British English. Of specific interest is the phenomenon called /s/- retraction. Using EPG and EMA data collected from the MOCHA-TIMIT database, variable realizations of the /stɹ/ cluster were analyzed for four speakers. The tongue-palate contact pattern of the /s/ in the /stɹ/ cluster (e.g. street ) was compared with that of the onset singleton /s/ and /ʃ/ (e.g. seat, sheet ). The temporal extent of anticipatory labial coarticulation was inspected. The results reveal that (i) for one speaker, the contact anteriority index of the /s/ in the /stɹ/ cluster is significantly different from that of the onset singleton /s/, (ii) /t/-affrication (e.g. street > s [tʃ] reet ) is found for all the speakers, (iii) the constriction peak of the lower lip gesture is systematically attained at the release of the /t/ in the cluster. These preliminary findings are discussed in terms of speaker-dependent articulatory strategies.
Digital Commons @ DU Digital Commons @ DU

There has been extensive discussion about gender gaps in representation and career advancement in the sciences. However, psychological science itself has yet to be the focus of discussion or systematic review, despite our field’s investment in questions of equity, status, well-being, gender bias, and gender disparities. In the present article, we consider 10 topics relevant for women’s career advancement in psychological science. We focus on issues that have been the subject of empirical study, discuss relevant evidence within and outside of psychological science, and draw on established psychological theory and social-science research to begin to chart a path forward. We hope that better understanding of these issues within the field will shed light on areas of existing gender gaps in the discipline and areas where positive change has happened, and spark conversation within our field about how to create lasting change to mitigate remaining gender differences in psychological science.
STOP DEVOICING AND PLACE OF ARTICULATION: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY USING LARGE-SCALE CORPORA

Voicing in stops is relatively hard to maintain from an articulatory and aerodynamic standpoint. Consonants with posterior constrictions (velars) are more prone to devoicing than consonants with more anterior constrictions (labials, coronals). Aerodynamic accounts have linked this pattern to the compliant tissue surface available for passive vocal tract expansion. This study investigates whether place of articulation plays a role in stop devoicing in five Romance languages using large corpora and automatic alignment with pronunciation variants. Results show that voicing maintenance patterns do not support an aerodynamic hypothesis: In Romance languages velars do not devoice at higher rates than labials and coronals. This suggests other elements than articulation naturalness are at play.
Human Capital as a Critical Capability and Asset for Supply Chains in Africa: An Econometric Analysis of the Automotive Sector

The African continent is one of the major suppliers of raw materials, which are necessary for the supply chain, yet the continent remains far behind in integrating into the global supply chain. Therefore, building supply chain resilience is one of the continent’s major objectives, including Agenda 2063, Sustainable Development Goals, and the regional supply chain under the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA). A solution for the redress of the supply chain in Africa and to exploit the full potential of its natural capital in the service of good integration of its supply chain remains the strengthening of its human capital. This paper uses econometric methods to analyse how human capital could be a critical capability of African supply chains. In this paper, we focus on the automotive supply chain, which remains one of the most important areas of global supply chains. The African continent is, at the same time, the continent with the lowest human capital and the least integrated in the global supply chains. In Africa, we find a dependence between the various measures of human capital and exports of all the components of automotive supply chains, characterised by strong correlations, except the automotive tier 3 supply chain products, which indicates that human capital is an important driver for Africa to upgrade in automotive supply chain. Econometric models to capture just-in-case and just-in-time supply chains confirm human capital as a key asset to the African automotive supply chain. The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the UNCTAD secretariat or its member States. The designations employed and the presentation of material do not imply the expression of any opinion on the part of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area, or of authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. This paper has not been formally edited.
Acoustic merger between /e/ and /æ/ in Singapore English: insights into stylistic variation and sub-varietal difference

This study investigates the extent of the /e/-/æ/ acoustic merger in Singapore English produced by young Chinese Singaporeans in their twenties. We examine the effects of speech style on the acoustic properties of these vowels and the amount of spectral overlap. Participants were recorded reading a wordlist and sentences written in Singapore Standard English (SSE) and Singapore Colloquial English (SCE). Results show some evidence of merger between /e/ and /æ/ on the group level, with the SSE and the SCE sentence styles showing almost complete overlap, but the wordlist showing the least overlap. However, these overlapping patterns are highly gradient when examined individually, with a merger present in the wordlist for some of the speakers. These findings raise questions about the status of Singapore English as a stable or emergent variety and emphasise the need for further fine-grained phonetic research on the vowel systems in New Englishes.
ANALYZING VARIABILITY IN CLOSURE VOICING AND CO-INTRINSIC F0 IN CENTRAL STANDARD SWEDISH

The voicing contrast of Central Standard Swedish has been argued to be typologically unusual, on the grounds that it contrasts phonetically prevoiced with voiceless aspirated plosives. However, reports vary regarding how often voiced plosives are actually realized with closure voicing. In this study, we measure how often phonologically voiced plosives /b d/ are devoiced, along with F0 trajectories and aspiration durations following release of closure. Results reveal considerable variation in voicing rates: some speakers consistently prevoice /b d/, while others consistently devoice them. Phonologically voiced plosives are frequently realised with short-lag VOT, regardless of whether or not they are also realized with closure voicing. Finally, F0 trajectories following nasals and phonologically voiced plosives are indistinguishable, regardless of whether plosives are prevoiced or devoiced, but differ significantly from those following phonologically voiceless plosives. F0 may thus be a more reliable phonetic indicator of laryngeal status in Swedish than the presence of closure voicing.
Study on the milk yield and lactation persistency of F4 crosses between Pleven blackhead sheep and the Assaf sheep during different lambing seasons

Petkova, Z. & Nikolov, V. (2022). Study on the milk yield and lactation persistency of F4 crosses between Pleven blackhead sheep and the Assaf sheep during different lambing. Bulg. J. Agric. Sci., 28 (Supplement 1) , 72–79 The milk yield and lactation persistency of 85 F4 crosses between Pleven blackhead sheep and the Assaf sheep breed were studied based on the performance of 932 controls. It was ascertained that under the conditions of intense production system-a year-round barn breeding and standardized, good quality feeding, the average 180-day-period daily milk yield upon first lactation was 1.584±0.028 kg, and for a 300-day period it was 1.500±0.027 kg. Up to 180 th lactation day, the percentage of ewes milked was 82,4, and up to day 300 – 55.3%. No reliable differences in the milk yield (P > 0.05) were ascertained upon lambing during 4 periods-March, July, August and September which serves to prove that the cross-breeds may be successfully used for a year-round milk production. The lactation persistency was reliably influenced (P < 0.001) by the month of lambing. The lactation peak was reached at the end of the first month post lambing (2.024 kg/d), the milk yield was retained until the end of the second month (97.6% of the maximum) and after that it gradually decreased reaching 63.2% on day 120 and 51.9% of the maximum on day 180. The most stable lactation is reported for the sheep which lambed in the spring-it started at the lowest level of 1.541 kg/d (on day 15 after lambing), reached the peak of 2.112 kg/d at the end of the second month and as of the latter period until the 120 th lactation day, it remained higher when compared with that of the other groups. The sheep which lambed in July exhibited the highest dynamics – their lactation started at the highest level (2.442 kg/d), reached its maximum (2.563 kg/d) but until the middle of the second month, the milk yield sharply decreased (1.734 kg/d) and after that it maintained the level of the other groups. The sheep which lambed in August and September had milk yield of respectively 1.723 kg/d and 1.910 kg/d during the first control, the peak was registered at the third control (45 th day) and was respectively 2.126 kg/d and 2.110 kg/d for the two months.
The New Comparative Economics

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank. org.
The Concept of Continuous Creation

The concept of continuous creation is now widely used in the context of reﬂections on the dialogue between science and religion. The ﬁrst part of this research work seeks to understand its meaning through a twofold elaboration: (1) the historical setting of the three philosophical trends in which this concept was developed: scholastic (conservation), Cartesian (conservation through repetition of the creative act at each instant), and dynamic (interpreting the emergence of radical and contingent novelty in nature as a sign of the continuity of creation); (2) a philosophical and theological critique of the concept of continuous creation regarding the question of the relationship between change and creation, in the light of its highly polymorphous contemporary use, and, in opposition, its absence within the Catholic Magisterium. This work opens the ﬁeld a further step toward reﬂection on a renewed concept of continuous creation.
Asymmetric Bounded Neural Control for an Uncertain Robot by State Feedback and Output Feedback

In this paper, an adaptive neural bounded control scheme is proposed for an <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-link rigid robotic manipulator with unknown dynamics. With the combination of the neural approximation and backstepping technique, an adaptive neural network control policy is developed to guarantee the tracking performance of the robot. Different from the existing results, the bounds of the designed controller are known <italic>a priori</italic>, and they are determined by controller gains, <italic>making them applicable within actuator limitations</italic>. Furthermore, the designed controller is also able to compensate the effect of unknown robotic dynamics. Via the Lyapunov stability theory, it can be proved that all the signals are uniformly ultimately bounded. Simulations are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.