Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acoustic and perceptual analysis of discontinuities in t wo TTS c oncatenation s ystems

Background Discontinuities It is fair to say that L&H’s (now Scansoft’s) RealSpeak and AT&T’s NextGen are two of the most natural sounding unit selection systems. The transitions between connected units sometimes contain discontinuities, thus creating one of the greatest problems concerning the output in these kinds of systems. The discontinuities are often perceived as ‘jumps’, i.e. a disturbance. The analyses in this paper investigate the acoustic properties of the ‘jumps’, if they are perceived as disturbing and in that case how disturbing. The results show that the selection criteria do not include enough information on single acoustic parameters, such as formants. Since listeners perceive discontinuities in formants, especially F2, as disturbing, one of the conclusions is that the next step in developing these systems must be to include more information on these parameters separately (especially formants 2 and 3) to improve the selection process. Of course other things like increasing database size and better structuring of data etc. can also improve the selection process as well as better grapheme to phoneme conversion, but those aspects are not dealt with here.
ASI-3 : Nueva escala para la evaluación de la sensibilidad a la ansiedad

The Anxiety Sensitivity Index—3 (ASI-3) is a new 18-item self-report multidimensional instrument de-signed to assess the three best replicated dimensions of anxiety sensitivity, i.e., Physical, Cognitive and Social Concerns (Taylor et al., 2007). In the present study we examined the factor structure, reli-ability, validity and normative data of the Spanish version of the ASI-R in a nonclinical sample of 582 undergraduates. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicate a hierarchical factor structure consisting of 3 lower-order factors and 1 higher-order factor; where the 3 primary factors were identical to the ones reported by Taylor et al. (2007). Data on reliability (internal consistency and test-retest) and validity (convergent and discriminant) show the ASI-3 to have sound psychometric properties. Normative ASI-3 data reveal that women scored higher than men on the ASI-3 Physical Concerns subscale and on the ASI-3 total score. Implications of these results on psychopathology and clinical psychology are discussed.
FPGA based multi-shell filter for hot pixel removal within colour filter array demosaicing

Modern cameras have an image sensor with millions of pixels, among which some of them are inevitably defective (known as hot pixels). Moreover, the number of hot pixels will increase with ageing. colour filter array (CFA) demosaicing will result in colour artifacts caused by these hot pixels. Such artifacts are virtually impossible to remove after demosaicing. In this paper, we propose two effective filter structures for removing low and high density hot pixels within CFA demosaicing for efficient implementation on FGPA for real-time processing. It has been shown that our proposed filter structures are able to remove hot pixels effectively with minimal colour artifacts while preserving image details.
PI-0620 Optimal Portfolio Choice with Annuitization

We study the optimal consumption and portfolio choice problem over an individual’s life-cycle taking into account annuity risk at retirement. Optimally, the investor allocates wealth at retirement to nominal, inflation-linked, and variable annuities and conditions this choice on the state of the economy. We also consider the case in which there are, either for behavioral or institutional reasons, limitations in the types of annuities that are available at retirement. Subsequently, we determine how the investor optimally anticipates annuitization before retirement. We find that i) using information on term structure variables and risk premia significantly improves the optimal annuity choice, ii) restricting the annuity menu to nominal or inflation-linked annuities is costly for both conservative and more aggressive investors, and iii) adjustments in the optimal investment strategy before retirement induced by the annuity demand due to inflation risk and time-varying risk premia are economically significant. This holds as well for sub-optimal annuity choices. The adjustment to hedge real interest rate risk is negligible. We estimate that the welfare costs of not taking these three factors into account at retirement are 9% for an individual with an average risk aversion (γ = 5). Not hedging annuity risk before retirement causes an additional welfare costs between 1% and 13%, depending on the annuitization strategy implemented at retirement.
Can Additional Resources Lead to Higher Levels of Productivity (Arrests) in Police Agencies?

While most police chiefs might be willing to make such a claim that there is a positive relationship between COPS grants and police arrests, empirical research on this topic is very limited. Following from an earlier study by Zhao, Scheider, and Thurman (2003), this research makes several contributions to the current literature. First, it includes additional years of data from police agencies receiving federal funding to examine the effects of additional resources on arrests. Second, making use of the two waves of census data (1990 and 2000) allowed time-varying analysis of the relationship between police arrests and demographics. Finally, a hierarchical statistical method for longitudinal analysis (HMLM) was used in the analysis of police arrest data from 5,871 cities during 1993 and 2000 when the involvement of federal government for promoting community policing or quality of life policing was unprecedented. Our primary findings suggest a positive relationship between COPS hiring grants and all four types of police arrests during the period of study though COPS funding usually accounted for only a small percentage of the total budget in a police department (GAO, 2005). More specifically, the hiring grant, the largest part of the COPS funding project, had consistently significant impact on police arrests after controlling for the socioeconomic variables and crimes. In addition, the hiring grant was significant predictor of all four categories of arrests, indicating that additional manpower did have a direct casual relationship with number of police arrests.
Lauding the Leisure Class: Symbolic Content and Conspicuous Consumption

Symbolic consumption is assessed as an evolution of previously identified conspicuous consumption, after this has undergone a “de-materialization” that is socially, as much as ecologically, driven. As Veblen observed, the shift of wealth towards new forms of physical and financial capital with industrialization compels traditional wealth-holders to redefine privilege in terms of cultural capital. Accompanying social changes enable them to do so. The limited reproducibility of items consumed for their symbolic value, and slow transmissibility of the means of symbolic consumption, force holders of new wealth to compete for status on terms set by the established leisure class. Conspicuity shifts from quantity to quality, from the appropriation of materially valued products to the appreciation of culturally valued products. This paper examines some key implications of a shift from “waste” to “taste” in conspicuous consumption for the social and natural environment, and for economic development. In particular, it explores the possibility of branded products representing the mass production of symbolic goods in high-income economies; and the brand premium's potentially beneficial consequences for global income distribution, when branded production relocates to lower-income economies in conditions of free trade.
Real-Time Software Engineering in Ada: Observations and Guidelines

Abstract : Two important aspects of developing a real-time system are controlling devices and managing concurrency. In this paper, we present several techniques for controlling devices with Ada and several Ada Tasking paradigms for managing concurrency. The material presented in this paper is taken from our experiences in developing a real-time embedded system in Ada, and we use numerous examples from this system to illustrate the various methods we present. We begin by relating our experiences with using Ada to control devices. Specifically, we identify issues related to accessing device registers and handling interrupts and present techniques for dealing with such issues. We then relate our experiments with using Ada to manage concurrency. Specifically, we present coding paradigms for implementing periodicity and constructing synchronization mechanisms. Analytical methods for determining the schedulability of a task set that employs paradigms are illustrated and emphasized. We then discuss the effect of aperiodic processing requirements on the schedulability of a task set. Keywords: Computer program development; Real time; Ada computer language; Software engineering; Scheduling theory; Managing concurrency; Controlling devices.
In vitro synthesis of infectious retroviral RNA

A plasmid was constructed in which a T7 RNA polymerase promoter was placed upstream of a recombinant amphotropic retrovirus genome containing a selectable neomycin resistance gene. To test the infectivity of the RNA produced by T7 RNA polymerase in vitro, the RNA was microinjected into the nuclei of psi 2 packaging cells. Infectious particles conferring G418 resistance were released.
Multisensor Data Fusion : From Algorithm and Architecture Design to Applications

In this chapter, we focus on a cognitive wireless sensor network (WSN), where a primary WSN (PWSN) is co-located with a cognitive (or secondary) WSN (CWSN). The shared frequency spectrum can be “freely” assigned by the PWSN. In particular, this spectrum is divided into disjoint “subchannels” and each subchannel is assigned (in a unique way) to a node of the PWSN. We assume that the nodes of the CWSN cooperate to sense the frequency spectrum and estimate the free subchannels which can be used to transmit their data. The key contribution of this work is two-fold. First, the sensing correlation among the secondary nodes is exploited to improve the reliability of the decision, taken by a secondary fusion center (FC), on the occupation status (by a node of the PWSN) of each subchannel. In this context, we provide a simple model for characterizing the local sensing performance per subchannel, in terms of probabilities of missed detection (MD) and false alarm (FA). Then, we analyze the use of joint source channel coding (JSCC) schemes in the CWSN, in order to further exploit the source correlation to make the final decision of the secondary FC on the status of the frequency subchannels more reliable.
Multi-view Dynamic Shape Refinement Using Local Temporal Integration

We consider 4D shape reconstructions in multi-view environments and investigate how to exploit temporal redundancy for precision refinement. In addition to being beneficial to many dynamic multi-view scenarios this also enables larger scenes where such increased precision can compensate for the reduced spatial resolution per image frame. With precision and scalability in mind, we propose a symmetric (non-causal) local time-window geometric integration scheme over temporal sequences, where shape reconstructions are refined framewise by warping local and reliable geometric regions of neighboring frames to them. This is in contrast to recent comparable approaches targeting a different context with more compact scenes and real-time applications. These usually use a single dense volumetric update space or geometric template, which they causally track and update globally frame by frame, with limitations in scalability for larger scenes and in topology and precision with a template based strategy. Our templateless and local approach is a first step towards temporal shape super-resolution. We show that it improves reconstruction accuracy by considering multiple frames. To this purpose, and in addition to real data examples, we introduce a multi-camera synthetic dataset that provides ground-truth data for mid-scale dynamic scenes.
Floating gate comparator with automatic offset manipulation functionality

We present a voltage comparator that uses nonvolatile floating gate charge storage for either offset nulling or automatic programming of a desired offset. We demonstrate the ability to reduce the variance of the initial offset and to accurately program a desired offset. We exploit the negative feedback functionality of pFET hot-electron injection to achieve fully automatic offset cancellation. The design has been fabricated in a commercially available 0.35 /spl mu/m process. Experimental results confirm the ability to reduce the variance of the initial offset by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude and to accurately define a desired offset with maximum observed deviation of 728 /spl mu/V and typical deviation of 109 /spl mu/V. We achieve adaptation with settling time of 50 ms, which is inversely proportional to the exponential of the injection voltage. We achieve controlled injection to accurately program the input offset to voltages uniformly distributed from -1 V to 1 V. The comparator exhibits a 5 ns propagation delay.
Is length of stay in hospital a stable proxy for injury severity?

Research question Is length of stay (LoS) in hospital a stable proxy for severity of injury when monitoring time trends in serious injury incidence? Objective To investigate whether LoS metrics (mean, median and proportion exceeding several LoS thresholds) have changed over time for injury diagnoses with known severity. Design Time series investigation. Subjects and setting New Zealand population admitted to hospital for injury and discharged during the period 1989 to 1998. Main outcome measures Interpolated median and geometric mean lengths of stay, as well as the proportion of cases that have an LoS greater than or equal to 3, 4, 7 and 14 days in hospital. Methods ICD-9-CM diagnoses that are approximately homogeneous in regard to severity of injury (ICD-HS diagnoses) were identified. Trends were investigated in the LoS statistics for: injury and non-injury diagnoses combined; all injury diagnoses; major body sites of injury; severity strata; and ICD-HS diagnoses. Results Almost without exception, there was a decline in the LoS statistics over time for all diagnoses, all injury diagnoses, each body site of injury investigated, severity strata, and the ICD-HS diagnoses. Conclusions Reductions in median and geometric mean LoS over time, as well as reductions in the proportion exceeding selected LoS thresholds, were due to factors other than reductions in the incidence of serious injury; for example, changes in service delivery over time. An LoS threshold should not be used as a proxy for severity of injury if the goal is to monitor time trends in injury incidence.
Improved Compressed Sensing-Based Algorithm for Sparse-View CT Image Reconstruction

In computed tomography (CT), there are many situations where reconstruction has to be performed with sparse-view data. In sparse-view CT imaging, strong streak artifacts may appear in conventionally reconstructed images due to limited sampling rate that compromises image quality. Compressed sensing (CS) algorithm has shown potential to accurately recover images from highly undersampled data. In the past few years, total-variation-(TV-) based compressed sensing algorithms have been proposed to suppress the streak artifact in CT image reconstruction. In this paper, we propose an efficient compressed sensing-based algorithm for CT image reconstruction from few-view data where we simultaneously minimize three parameters: the ℓ 1 norm, total variation, and a least squares measure. The main feature of our algorithm is the use of two sparsity transforms—discrete wavelet transform and discrete gradient transform. Experiments have been conducted using simulated phantoms and clinical data to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results using the proposed scheme show much smaller streaking artifacts and reconstruction errors than other conventional methods.
Abnormalities of adherent layers grown from bone marrow of patients with myelodysplasia

Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are characterized by a clonal disorder of haemopoiesis with defective growth in vitro. The long‐term culture system was used to examine aspects of stromal function in MDS patients. Primary long‐term cultures of MDS bone marrow showed poor myelopoiesis with progenitors being detected for a median 3·5 weeks (n = 12) compared with 18 weeks in cultures of normal marrow (n = 10; P < 0·0001). The haemopoietic function of adherent layers was assessed in secondary co‐cultures seeded with 5 × 106 cord blood mononuclear cells on irradiated normal (n = 27; aged 38–82 years) or MDS (n = 32; aged 41–86 years) adherent layers (> 60% confluent). The median myeloid progenitor number/cord blood co‐culture was 135 in 5‐week‐old cultures with normal adherent layers and 22 in those with MDS layers (P < 0·0001). Myeloid colonies were detectable for a median 11 weeks with normal adherent layers and 6 weeks with MDS adherent layers (P < 0·0001); erythroid colonies were detectable for 7 weeks (normal) compared with 5 weeks (MDS) (P < 0·01). The differences in granulocyte‐macrophage colony forming unit (CFU‐GM) generation were not related to patient age. Cells from adherent layers of at least half of the primary normal (n = 48) and MDS (n = 26) long‐term cultures expressed cytokines [interleukin (IL)‐3, IL‐1β, thrombopoietin (Tpo) and erythropoietin (Epo)] and receptors for retinoic acid (RARα) [IL‐2, IL‐3, macrophage colony stimulating factor (M‐CSF) (Fms) and Tpo (Mpl)]. Only IL‐1β expression was reduced in week‐5 MDS cultures compared with those from normal marrows (P < 0·05). There was also a highly significant decline in IL‐1β expression in normal (but not MDS) adherent layers between week 5 and week 10. Thus, the adherent layers in cultures grown from MDS patients were haemopoietically defective and showed abnormal IL‐1β expression.
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: How Dr. Seuss Reinforces Management Concepts and Promotes Community Citizenship

The authors recommend that management educators add the works of Dr. Seuss to their repertoire of teaching tools. After describing why instructors should use Dr. Seuss’s stories to foster understanding of concepts in management and organizational behavior, the authors describe a Seuss-based project at two levels that (a) helps students identify and apply course concepts and (b) cultivates their sense of civic responsibility. The authors also provide story recommendations, plots, and sample concepts, and end by encouraging others to design new pedagogical techniques using other culturally relevant media.
Subjective Well-Being in Urban, Ethnically Diverse Adolescents The Role of Stress and Coping

This study examines stressors, general stress levels, coping strategies, and subjective well-being in a sample of 144 ethnically diverse, urban adolescents (mean age of 13). The most frequently reported stressors include the death of a family member, feeling socially isolated, family financial problems, injury of a family member, and parents arguing. The most common coping strategies are seeking support, acceptance, active coping, using distraction, and venting. Positive and negative affect are related to many coping strategies, but only humor buffered the relationship between stress and negative affect. Venting exacerbates the negative relationship between stress and life satisfaction. Implications for helping ethnically diverse, urban adolescents cope with stressors and maintain well-being are discussed.
Optimal experimental design for event‐related fMRI

An important challenge in the design and analysis of event‐related or single‐trial functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments is to optimize statistical efficiency, i.e., the accuracy with which the event‐related hemodynamic response to different stimuli can be estimated for a given amount of imaging time. Several studies have suggested that using a fixed inter‐stimulus‐interval (ISI) of at least 15 sec results in optimal statistical efficiency or power and that using shorter ISIs results in a severe loss of power. In contrast, recent studies have demonstrated the feasibility of using ISIs as short as 500 ms while still maintaining considerable efficiency or power. Here, we attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction by a quantitative analysis of the relative efficiency afforded by different event‐related experimental designs. This analysis shows that statistical efficiency falls off dramatically as the ISI gets sufficiently short, if the ISI is kept fixed for all trials. However, if the ISI is properly jittered or randomized from trial to trial, the efficiency improves monotonically with decreasing mean ISI. Importantly, the efficiency afforded by such variable ISI designs can be more than 10 times greater than that which can be achieved by fixed ISI designs. These results further demonstrate the feasibility of using identical experimental designs with fMRI and electro‐/magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) without sacrificing statistical power or efficiency of either technique, thereby facilitating comparison and integration across imaging modalities. Hum. Brain Mapping 8:109–114, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Association of Perceived Stress with Stressful Life Events, Lifestyle and Sociodemographic Factors: A Large-Scale Community-Based Study Using Logistic Quantile Regression

Objective. The present paper aimed at investigating the association between perceived stress and major life events stressors in Iranian general population. Methods. In a cross-sectional large-scale community-based study, 4583 people aged 19 and older, living in Isfahan, Iran, were investigated. Logistic quantile regression was used for modeling perceived stress, measured by GHQ questionnaire, as the bounded outcome (dependent), variable, and as a function of most important stressful life events, as the predictor variables, controlling for major lifestyle and sociodemographic factors. This model provides empirical evidence of the predictors' effects heterogeneity depending on individual location on the distribution of perceived stress. Results. The results showed that among four stressful life events, family conflicts and social problems were more correlated with level of perceived stress. Higher levels of education were negatively associated with perceived stress and its coefficients monotonically decrease beyond the 30th percentile. Also, higher levels of physical activity were associated with perception of low levels of stress. The pattern of gender's coefficient over the majority of quantiles implied that females are more affected by stressors. Also high perceived stress was associated with low or middle levels of income. Conclusions. The results of current research suggested that in a developing society with high prevalence of stress, interventions targeted toward promoting financial and social equalities, social skills training, and healthy lifestyle may have the potential benefits for large parts of the population, most notably female and lower educated people.