Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measurement of Time-Variant Binaural Room Impulse Responses for Data-Based Synthesis of Dynamic Auditory Scenes

In binaural synthesis, the ear signals are generated by filtering the source signal with a pair of binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs) that characterize the acoustic transmissions from a sound source to the outer ears [1]. Simulated BRIRs are used in model-based binaural synthesis, whereas measured BRIRs are used in data-based binaural synthesis. In the latter approach, the BRIRs are usually measured in static experimental setups. For the auralization of dynamic scenes, such static BRIRs have to be interpolated or extrapolated which is not straightforward under non-freefield conditions. In this study, an alternative approach for the data-based synthesis of dynamic scenes is presented. The dynamic acoustic scene is excited by a test signal, and the response is captured by a dummy head, as shown in Fig. 1. By employing a recently proposed system identification method, the BRIRs are computed for every time instant. Thus, a massive number of BRIRs is obtained that describe the acoustic characteristics of the dynamic system.
Personal Traits and Trading in an Experimental Asset Market

We study the relationship between personal traits and trading outcomes in continuous double auction asset markets. There are mixed theoretical predictions about this relationship followed by similarly mixed empirical evidence. We examine the correlation of cognitive skills, willingness to speculate, risk attitude, willingness to compete, and overconfidence with trading activity in a very simple experimental market with one asset and no uncertainty about the fundamental value. We build on a market setting very close to the canonical one of Smith, Suchanek and Williams (1988) with a constant fundamental value. We conclude that willingness to speculate is the main driver of trading activity. Willingness to speculate and cognitive skills are the only significant predictors for achieved profits from trading. Our experimental results could provide a benchmark for trading activity outcomes in more complicated, real world asset market environments.
Digital Food Cards : YUL Forage

As a food-procurement tactic that hacks conventional farming-processing-supermarket complex, foraging for wild plants implicates its own set of eco-power structures. This ‘positioned’ workshop aims to hack foraging itself, linking ‘wild’ montréalaise plants with migration data and human agency, generating a timely perspective on eater-eaten interaction that transcends human-food to include more-than-human consumers.
Financial Markets Evolutionary Adaptive Dynamics

Modeling economic agents is quite often naively rooted in the maximization of a non-trivial and some-times subjective utility function. Finding statistical evidences of whose economic features explain what in the ﬁnancial world is most of the times, if not impossible, challenging. Nonetheless, in the recent years, developments in Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) have endorsed those who believe markets are nothing but a giant and complex evolutionary game bounded by both behavioral and economic rules. In this thesis, we ﬁrstly develop an adaptive model with 2 strategies as Market participants such as Momentum and Fundamental Traders. Through their investment decisions, we measure how population collective behavior evolve in time, through the dynamics of peer-inﬂuence and changes in the Market. We show that even in a oversimpliﬁed population dynamic, Momentum Strategy dominate as spreads out to the entire population, under several diﬀerent settings. Also, inequality and power-law distributions tend to constantly surge.
Schwa has an articulatory target in American English

Is American English schwa’s position determined solely by coarticulatory pressures? There is currently disagreement between articulation-based and acoustic-based studies (Browman & Goldstein, 1994; Flemming, 2009). In two acoustic corpus studies using the Switchboard and Buckeye corpora, we find that vowels head toward a central high vowel position when subject to increased coarticulatory pressures, rather than toward the position occupied by American English schwa. Even lexical schwa vowels shift to lower F1 values when their duration is relatively short. Our findings are consistent with schwa occupying a perceptually but not articulatorily neutral position. As such, they bear on vowel neutralization patterns, and suggest that unstressed syllables may convey specific information: that they are not stressed.
Idea Sharing: Process-Based Approach to Writing in Malaysian English Education

Malaysia strives to educate its people to be fluent in the English language, and as such the Ministry of Education Malaysia (MOE) has introduced the process-based approach to writing from the early 1980s in school curricula and syllabi. Unfortunately, even from the inclusion of process-based approach to writing in Malaysian national curricula and syllabi, Malaysian students‘ writing performance in the national primary and secondary school examinations remains low. Concerns arise over the process-based approach, due to its lack of proper implementation in the English as a second language (ESL) writing instruction. This article provides a review of the studies conducted on the implementation of processbased approach in teaching ESL writing in Malaysian English education. It seeks to investigate the problems that have been reported to occur during the implementation of process-based approach in the ESL writing instruction in Malaysia. In order to address the concerns regarding process-based approach to writing and to avoid possible issues in the future concerning the implementation of process-based approach in ESL writing in Malaysia, the researchers believe it is important to truly understand the nature and goals of the process-based approach to writing. 320 | PASAA Vol. 58 July December 2019 As such, the researchers call all educators in Malaysia to look for possible means to revive the process-based approach in the field of ESL writing.
IMP4GT: IMPersonation Attacks in 4G NeTworks

—Long Term Evolution (LTE/4G) establishes mutual authentication with a provably secure Authentication and Key Agreement (AKA) protocol on layer three of the network stack. Permanent integrity protection of the control plane safeguards the trafﬁc against manipulations. However, missing integrity protection of the user plane still allows an adversary to manipulate and redirect IP packets, as recently demonstrated. In this work, we introduce a novel cross-layer attack that exploits the existing vulnerability on layer two and extends it with an attack mechanism on layer three. More precisely, we take advantage of the default IP stack behavior of operating systems and show that this combination allows an active attacker to impersonate a user towards the network and vice versa; we name these attacks IMP 4G T (IMPersonation attacks in 4G neTworks). In contrast to a simple redirection attack as demonstrated in prior work, our attack dramatically extends the possible attack scenarios and thus emphasizes the need for user plane integrity protection in mobile communication standards. The results of our work imply that providers can no longer rely on mutual authentication for billing, access control, and legal prosecution. On the other side, users are exposed to any incoming IP connection as an adversary can bypass the provider’s ﬁrewall. To demonstrate the practical impact of our attack, we conduct two IMP 4G T attack variants in a commercial network, which— for the ﬁrst time—completely break the mutual authentication aim of LTE on the user plane in a real-world setting.
Information Elicitation Mechanisms for Statistical Estimation

We study learning statistical properties from strategic agents with private information. In this problem, agents must be incentivized to truthfully reveal their information even when it cannot be directly verified. Moreover, the information reported by the agents must be aggregated into a statistical estimate. We study two fundamental statistical properties: estimating the mean of an unknown Gaussian, and linear regression with Gaussian error. The information of each agent is one point in a Euclidean space.Our main results are two mechanisms for each of these problems which optimally aggregate the information of agents in the truth-telling equilibrium:• A minimal (non-revelation) mechanism for large populations — agents only need to report one value, but that value need not be their point. • A mechanism for small populations that is non-minimal — agents need to answer more than one question.These mechanisms are “informed truthful” mechanisms where reporting unaltered data (truth-telling) 1) forms a strict Bayesian Nash equilibrium and 2) has strictly higher welfare than any oblivious equilibrium where agents' strategies are independent of their private signals. We also show a minimal revelation mechanism (each agent only reports her signal) for a restricted setting and use an impossibility result to prove the necessity of this restriction.We build upon the peer prediction literature in the single-question setting; however, most previous work in this area focuses on discrete signals, whereas our setting is inherently continuous, and we further simplify the agents' reports.
THE INFLUENCE OF PERSONALITY AND COPING STYLES ON FORGIVENESS

Three types of forgiveness have been identified: forgiveness of self; forgiveness of others; and forgiveness of situations (such as illness or natural disaster). Forgiveness is related to personality factors; however, there is scant research to date examining the relation between coping styles and forgiveness. We recruited 160 undergraduate students to complete questionnaires. There were significant correlations among personality, coping styles, and forgiveness. When personality factor scores were used hierarchical multiple regression analyses, forgiveness of self was predicted by lower scores on Neuroticism and emotion focused coping, and higher scores on problem focused coping. Forgiveness of situations was predicted by lower scores on Neuroticism and emotion focused coping, and higher scores on Openness, Agreeableness, and problem focused coping. Finally, forgiveness of others was predicted by higher Agreeableness scores; coping styles did not contribute additional variance in this model. Regressions were also conducted using the facet (subscale) scores. Forgiveness of self was predicted by lower scores on hostility, depression, and self-consciousness. Forgiveness of situations was predicted by lower vulnerability. Higher altruism drove the relation between Agreeableness and forgiveness of others. Finally, lower emotion focused coping scores and higher problem focused coping scores contributed unique variance in each of the facet models.
Answering billion-scale label-constrained reachability queries within microsecond

In this paper, we study the problem of label-constrained reachability (LCR) query which is fundamental in many applications with directed edge-label graphs. Although the classical reachability query (i.e., reachability query without label constraint) has been extensively studied, LCR query is much more challenging because the number of possible label constraint set is exponential to the size of the labels. We observe that the existing techniques for LCR queries only construct partial index for better scalability, and their worst query time is not guaranteed and could be the same as an online breadth-first search (BFS). In this paper, we propose novel label-constrained 2-hop indexing techniques with novel pruning rules and order strategies. It is shown that our worst query time could be bounded by the in-out index entry size. With all these techniques, comprehensive experiments show that our proposed methods significantly outperform the state-of-the-art technique in terms of query response time (up to 5 orders of magnitude speedup), index size and index construction time. In particular, our proposed method can answer LCR queries within microsecond over billion-scale graphs in a single machine.
Adiponectin Levels and Its Role in Insulin Sensitivity among Obese Subjects

Insulin resistance is associated with increased risk of type-2-diabetes, which is also strongly accompanied with obesity. It is important to understand the link between obesity and lack of insulin sensitivity. Adiponectin is a member of the adipocytokines family of fat-cell secreted proteins, which exclusively expressed in adipose tissue. It may turn out to be a promising insulin sensitizing agent. Thirty obese subjects (BMI>30kg/m) and 10 normal, apparently healthy individuals (BMI<25kg/m) were participated in this study. The fasting plasma glucose and insulin levels in obese subjects were significantly higher than that in normal subjects, while plasma adiponectin was significantly decreased in obese subjects in comparison to the control group. Plasma adiponectin was negatively correlated with fasting insulin, plasma glucose, plasma triglycerides, body mass index, waist and hip circumferences, and positively correlated with HDL-cholesterol. From the recorded results, it was found that adiponectin level was decreased in obese subjects, at the same time insulin appeared to suppress adiponectin secretion. These findings suggested that adiponectin level could play a physiological role in insulin sensitivity.
Spatial Aliasing in Continuous Measurement of Spatial Room Impulse Responses

Recently, continuous measurement techniques have gained attention [3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. In a continuous measurement, either the loudspeaker or the microphone moves on a predefined path, while the system is excited by an excitation signal. The instantaneous impulse responses are computed from the captured signal using a time-varying system identification method. Compared to conventional static measurement methods, a large number of impulse responses can be measured in a short period of time. Continuous techniques have been used for the measurement of spatial room impulse responses [3, 7, 8], headrelated impulse responses [4, 9], and binaural room impulse responses [10, 6].
D3.2: Report on Confidence Measures

Quality estimation (QE) for machine translation is usually addressed as a regression problem where a learning model is used to predict a quality score from a (usually highly-redundant) set of features that represent the translation. This redundancy hinders model learning, and thus penalizes the performance of quality estimation systems. We propose different dimensionality reduction methods based on partial least squares regression to overcome this problem, and compare them against several reduction methods previously used in the QE literature. Moreover, we study how the use of such methods influence the performance of different learning models. Experiments carried out on the English-Spanish WMT12 QE task showed that it is possible to improve prediction accuracy while significantly reducing the size of the feature sets.
Xanthan-based biodegradable packaging for fish and meat products

Nowadays, the development of environmentally-friendly packaging materials is relevant worldwide. Biodegradable packaging materials are promising due to their safety and ability to extend shelf life of food products. This study aimed to investigate the properties of biodegradable film based on a bacterial exopolysaccharide (xanthan) with the view to extend the quality and shelf life of chilled meat products. We studied pork and carp samples packed in biodegradable film and stored at 0–2°C. Biodegradable packaging had positive effects on sensory, physicochemical, and microbiological parameters, as well as on ecological safety of the raw materials. During storage of packed chilled pork, its mass loss decreased from 2.16 to 0.21% (norm to 0.30%), and water activity reduced from 0.985 to 0.960, which had a positive effect on the microbiological resistance of pork during storage. The use of biodegradable film contributed to the preservation of quality and freshness of carp, which was confirmed by sensory and microbiological indicators. Total microbial contamination in carp packed in biodegradable film was significantly lower than that in unpacked samples, which extended its shelf life for one day compared to control. Biodegradable packaging also allowed mass loss and pH value to decrease during storage and inhibited oxidation processes in the samples under study. Free fatty acid content decreased by a factor of two, and peroxides, by 7%. Thus, biodegradable films can be effective film coatings to use in the food industry. This method of packaging not only preserves the functional and technological properties of food products, lowers their mass loss, and extends their shelf life, but also reduces costs and is environmentally friendly.
The IMU speech synthesis entry for Blizzard Challenge 2019

This paper decribes the IMU speech synthesis entry for Blizzard Challenge 2019, where the task was to build a voice from Mandarin audio data. Our system is a typical end-to-end speech synthesis system. The acoustic parameters is modeled by using “Tacotron” model, and the vocoder is using Grifﬁn-Lim algorithm. In the synthesis stage, the task is divided into the following parts: 1) segment long sentence into short sentences by comma; 2) predict interjection labels of each words in short sentences; 3) predict prosodic break labels of each words in short sentences; 4) generate corresponding synthesis speech for each short sentences which enriched by prosodic break labels and interjections; 5) concatenate short sentences into an entire long sentence. TheBlizzard Challenge listening test results show that the proposed system achieves unsatisfactory performance. The problems in the system are also discussed in this paper.
Anthocyanins in Thai rice varieties: distribution and pharmacological significance

Anthocyanins are phenolic, water-soluble, predominant flavonoids of plants, and are known for its wide distribution and its pharmacological importance. Almost all the plant sources like vegetables, fruits, cereals, grains are residing with anthocyanins. The type and quantity of the anthocyanins differ based on the species, varieties, cultivars, even the growth stage of the same plant, part of the plant, ethnic and environmental factors. Rice is one of the regular food sources for more than half of the people in the world. The rice cultivars and strains vary among the countries. Apart from the typical, polished, white rice, some of the colored rice varieties are in use. Anthocyanin present in the rice outer layer contributes the color of the rice. The nature, concentration, and distribution of anthocyanins are found to be varied among the rice cultivars. The current review focused on the anthocyanins content of Thai rice varieties and its reported pharmacological significance.
Cross-context News Corpus for Protest Events related Knowledge Base Construction

We describe a gold standard corpus of protest events that comprise of various local and international sources from various countries in English. The corpus contains document, sentence, and token level annotations. This corpus facilitates creating machine learning models that automatically classify news articles and extract protest event related information, constructing databases which enable comparative social and political science studies. For each news source, the annotation starts on random samples of news articles and continues with samples that are drawn using active learning. Each batch of samples was annotated by two social and political scientists, adjudicated by an annotation supervisor, and was improved by identifying annotation errors semi-automatically. We found that the corpus has the variety and quality to develop and benchmark text classification and event extraction systems in a cross-context setting, which contributes to generalizability and robustness of automated text processing systems. This corpus and the reported results will set the currently lacking common ground in automated protest event collection studies.
Recreational Angler Attitudes and Perceptions Regarding the Use of Descending Devices in Southeast Reef Fish Fisheries

Reducing discard mortality in recreational fisheries remains an important component of stock rebuilding for many reef fish species. Discard mortality for these species can be high due in part to barotrauma injury sustained during capture coupled with high catch rates, but recent advances in fish descending devices can mitigate some of these declines. Despite high survival rates with rapid recompression strategies, recreational angler opinions and perceived effectiveness of the devices are relatively unknown. This study surveyed the perceptions, opinions, and attitudes of 538 recreational anglers regarding the use of descending devices in the reef fish fisheries of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. South Atlantic, with particular emphasis on Red Snapper Lutjanus campechanus. In total, 1,074 descending devices were distributed to marine recreational anglers from North Carolina to Texas. After using the device for an average of 8 months and 15 fishing trips, recipients completed a questionnaire assessing their perceptions on the efficacy of the device. While 72% of respondents had little to no knowledge of descending devices prior to the study, 70% indicated that they preferred this release method over venting after the study. Survey respondents released over 7,000 Red Snapper and 4,000 other reef fish species with their descending devices, and 76% were likely to continue employing the device on their vessel. Eighty-nine percent of respondents believed descending Red Snapper would significantly reduce discard mortality in the recreational fishery. We discovered that recreational anglers perceive the devices to be highly useful in reducing discard mortality and are willing to employ them when releasing reef fish experiencing barotrauma. Other studies have demonstrated that these descending devices do reduce discard mortality of reef fishes, and this study indicates that recreational anglers are very willing to use them as a conservation tool. Recreational fishing is an important outdoor leisure activity to over 33 million people in the USA (Southwick Associates 2012). It generates substantial income to local, regional, and national economies while providing users an alternative means of domestic consumption (Arlinghaus et al. 2007). Recreational fishing is one of the most popular Subject editor: Debra J. Murie, University of Florida, Gainesville *Corresponding author: judd.curtis@tamucc.edu Received April 8, 2019; accepted November 3, 2019 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science 11:506–518, 2019 © 2019 The Authors. Marine and Coastal Fisheries published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of American Fisheries Society. ISSN: 1942-5120 online DOI: 10.1002/mcf2.10102