Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Voicing neutralization in Romanian fricatives across different speech styles

Romance languages such as Italian or Spanish preserve fricative voicing contrasts in word-ﬁnal position, while their neutralization has been reported for European Portuguese, but the behavior of Romanian fricatives remains understudied. Previous work with Romanian fricatives suggests a pattern of ﬁnal devoicing but, due to the speciﬁc properties of the corpus analyzed, it is unclear if this is limited to the presence of secondary palatalization and/or the result of morphological conditioning. In this study, we apply speech processing tools to investigate the acoustic characteristics of the voicing contrast in fricatives in contemporary spoken Romanian. We examine a corpus of prepared speech from newscasts and semi-spontaneous TV debates (86 speakers) and compare our results to previous ﬁndings from a corpus of controlled experimental speech (31 speakers). Our classiﬁcation tool employs cepstral coefﬁcients and hidden Markov model (HMM)-deﬁned temporal regions to identify the properties of these segments. Our ﬁndings conform to typological predictions regarding partial devoicing in coda position, especially at more posterior places, but we ﬁnd little support for voicing neutralization in Romanian fricatives more generally. Our study thus documents the properties of Romanian fricatives and contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of contrast maintenance in phonological systems.
On the extraction of spectral quantities with open boundary conditions

We discuss methods to extract decay constants, meson masses and gluonic observables in the presence of open boundary conditions. The ensembles have been generated by the CLS effort and have 2+1 flavors of O(a)-improved Wilson fermions with a small twisted-mass term as proposed by L\"uscher and Palombi. We analyse the effect of the associated reweighting factors on the computation of different observables.
Stereo Matching With Multiscale Hybrid Cost Volume

Stereo matching estimates the disparity between a pair of rectified left and right images. It plays an important role in robot navigation, autonomous driving, and other related tasks. Nowadays, convolutional neural networks based on deep learning have greatly improved the performance of stereo matching. However, there are still many challenges. One of them is that current stereo models mostly generate a single scale cost volume based on costly 3D convolutions method or quick 2D convolutions method, but neither of these two methods can achieve a fair trade-off between quality and time. In this paper, we propose to construct the multi-scale hybrid cost volume which aims at achieving fast speed while maintaining comparable accuracy. Concretely, we generate a correlation cost volume and a concatenation cost volume respectively, and then integrate together to form a hybrid cost volume which can significantly improve the accuracy and reduce the computational complexity. At the multi-scale level, we generate three hybrid cost volumes at different scales and then aggregate them by 2D convolutions which are faster than 3D convolutions. In addition, we adopt 2D CNN stacked hourglass with fused cost volume for cost aggregation. Specifically, the proposed method provides competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods, while being faster than most top-performing methods (e.g., <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$3.7\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> than PSMNet, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$8.1\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> than GCNet, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$16.3\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> than GANet). Extensive experiments of our model on the SceneFlow, KITTI 2012, and KITTI 2015 datasets demonstrate the competitiveness of our results.
PLGA-PVA-PEG Single Emulsion Method as a Candidate for Aminolevulinic Acid (5-ALA) Encapsulation: Laboratory Scaling Up and Stability Evaluation

One of the most widely used molecules used for photodynamic therapy (PDT) is 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA), a precursor in the synthesis of tetrapyrroles such as chlorophyll and heme. The 5-ALA skin permeation is considerably reduced due to its hydrophilic characteristics, decreasing its local bioavailability and therapeutic effect. For this reason, five different systems containing polymeric particles of poly [D, L–lactic–co–glycolic acid (PLGA)] were developed to encapsulate 5-ALA based on single and double emulsions methodology. All systems were standardized (according to the volume of reagents and mass of pharmaceutical ingredients) and compared in terms of laboratory scaling up, particle formation and stability over time. UV-VIS spectroscopy revealed that particle absorption/adsorption of 5-ALA was dependent on the method of synthesis. Different size distribution was observed by DLS and NTA techniques, revealing that 5-ALA increased the particle size. The contact angle evaluation showed that the system hydrophobicity was dependent on the surfactant and the 5-ALA contribution. The FTIR results indicated that the type of emulsion influenced the particle formation, as well as allowing PEG functionalization and interaction with 5-ALA. According to the 1H-NMR results, the 5-ALA reduced the T1 values of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and PLGA in the double emulsion systems due to the decrease in molecular packing in the hydrophobic region. The results indicated that the system formed by single emulsion containing the combination PVA–PEG presented greater stability with less influence from 5-ALA. This system is a promising candidate to successfully encapsulate 5-ALA and achieve good performance and specificity for in vitro skin cancer treatment.
Blind Language Separation: Disentangling Multilingual Cocktail Party Voices by Language

We introduce blind language separation (BLS) as novel research task, in which we seek to disentangle overlapping voices of multiple languages by language. BLS is expected to separate seen as well as unseen languages, which is different from the target language extraction task that works for one seen target language at a time. To develop a BLS model, we simulate a multilingual cocktail party database, of which each scene consists of two randomly selected languages, each represented by two randomly selected speakers. The database follows the recently proposed GlobalPhoneMCP database design concept that uses the audio data of the GlobalPhone 2000 Speaker Package . We show that a BLS model is able to learn the language characteristics so as to disentangle overlapping voices by language. We achieve a mean SI-SDR improvement of 12.63 dB over 231 test sets. The performance on the individual test sets varies depending on the language combination. Finally, we show that BLS can generalize well to unseen speakers and languages in the mixture.
Research on the Influence of Labor Contract on the Urban Integration of Migrant Workers: Empirical Analysis Based on China’s Micro Data

Using the micro data of the China Labor Dynamics Survey (CLDS), this paper uses factor analysis to construct urban integration indicators and uses the OLS model and intermediary effect model to study the urban integration of 1976 migrant workers in 29 cities in China. This paper empirically analyzes the impact of labor contracts on migrant workers’ urban integration and its mechanism. The study found that: (1) labor contract can significantly promote the urban integration of migrant workers. Further, this conclusion is still tenable after correcting endogenous bias with the 2SLS model and performing a series of robustness tests. (2) Signing labor contracts increases the participation rate of migrant workers in various insurances, enhances the social security level of migrant workers, alleviates the discrimination in the urban labor market, and thus enhances the urban integration of migrant workers. (3) The results of the heterogeneity tests show that the labor contract has a greater impact on the urban integration of the new generation, married and public sector of migrant workers compared with the old generation, unmarried and private sector of migrant workers. Therefore, this paper makes the following suggestions: the government should strengthen labor market supervision, encourage employers to sign long-term labor contracts with migrant workers, improve the social security system for migrant workers, and protect the legitimate rights and interests of migrant workers.
Sequential IT Investment: Can the Risk of IT Implementation Failure Be Your Friend?

Information technology (IT) investment often faces the risk of implementation failure. Such risk has important and intriguing impacts on firms’ investment and competitive strategies. We investigate these effects in a context in which two firms, a leader and a follower, invest in a cost-reducing IT sequentially, and IT implementation may fail. We show that the risk of IT implementation failure benefits the follower and can benefit or hurt the leader. It impacts the firms’ investment and profits through three distinct effects: mitigating competition, weakening the leader’s first mover advantage, and creating differentiation opportunities. The follower may have information about the leader’s IT investment before making its investment. The leader gains a first mover advantage when the follower makes its investment after knowing the leader’s IT investment level or implementation outcome. So pioneering IT adopters should announce their investment early to influence followers. In some cases, the follower can benefit from knowing the leader’s implementation outcome. The leader expects a higher profit than the follower, and early investment is beneficial unless implementation risk declines significantly with time. Finally, a sequential IT investment schedule in which the follower makes its investment after the leader’s investment level and outcome are known produces the highest social surplus.
Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale L.) as a Source of Biologically Active Compounds Supporting the Therapy of Co-Existing Diseases in Metabolic Syndrome

Nowadays, many people are struggling with obesity, type 2 diabetes, and atherosclerosis, which are called the scourge of the 21st century. These illnesses coexist in metabolic syndrome, which is not a separate disease entity because it includes several clinical conditions such as central (abdominal) obesity, elevated blood pressure, and disorders of carbohydrate and fat metabolism. Lifestyle is considered to have an impact on the development of metabolic syndrome. An unbalanced diet, the lack of sufficient physical activity, and genetic factors result in the development of type 2 diabetes and atherosclerosis, which significantly increase the risk of cardiovascular complications. The treatment of metabolic syndrome is aimed primarily at reducing the risk of the development of coexisting diseases, and the appropriate diet is the key factor in the treatment. Plant raw materials containing compounds that regulate lipid and carbohydrate metabolism in the human body are investigated. Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale F.H. Wigg.) is a plant, the consumption of which affects the regulation of lipid and sugar metabolism. The growth of this plant is widely spread in Eurasia, both Americas, Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. The use and potential of this plant that is easily accessible in the world in contributing to the treatment of type 2 diabetes and atherosclerosis have been proved by many studies.
Higher education quality assurance: the case of the United States

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview and critique of higher education quality assurance in the context of the United States (US), reviewing the US model in terms of its history, characteristics, problems and controversies, in an effort to extract lessons that are applicable to other countries, including Brazil. The study examines topics such as institutional rankings, student learning assessment, the role of government in the university accreditation process and the challenge of assuring the quality of for-profit institutions. The article concludes with a list of recommendations extracted from the US experience that could conceivably contribute to the improvement of quality assurance frameworks in other parts of the world.
Energy-gap modulation of BN ribbons by transverse electric fields: First-principles calculations

Systematic ab initio calculations show that the energy gap of BN nanoribbons (BNNRs) with zigzag or armchair edges can be significantly reduced by a transverse electric field and be completely closed at a critical field which decreases with increasing ribbon width. In addition, a distinct gap modulation in the ribbons with zigzag edges is presented when a reversed electric field is applied. In a weak field, the gap reduction of the BNNRs with zigzag edges originates from the field-induced energy level shifts of the spatially separated edge states, while the gap reduction of the BNNRs with armchair edges arises from the Stark effect. As the field gets stronger, the energy gaps of both types of the BNNRs gradually close due to the field-induced motion of nearly free electron states. Without the applied fields, the energy gap modulation by varying ribbon width is rather limited.
Speaking Rate Control of end-to-end TTS Models by Direct Manipulation of the Encoder's Output Embeddings

Since neural Text-To-Speech models have achieved such high standards in terms of naturalness, the main focus of the field has gradually shifted to gaining more control over the expressiveness of the synthetic voices. One of these leverages is the control of the speaking rate that has become harder for a human operator to control since the introduction of neural attention networks to model speech dynamics. While numerous models have reintroduced an explicit duration control (ex: Fast-Speech2), these models generally rely on additional tasks to complete during their training. In this paper, we show how an acoustic analysis of the internal embeddings delivered by the encoder of an unsupervised end-to-end TTS Tacotron2 model is enough to identify and control some acoustic parameters of interest. Specifically, we compare this speaking rate control with the duration control offered by a supervised FastSpeech2 model. Experimental results show that the control provided by embed-dings reproduces a behaviour closer to natural speech data.
Relative Acoustic Features for Distance Estimation in Smart-Homes

Any audio recording encapsulates the unique fingerprint of the associated acoustic environment, namely the background noise and reverberation. Considering the scenario of a room equipped with a fixed smart speaker device with one or more microphones and a wearable smart device (watch, glasses or smartphone), we employed the improved proportionate normalized least mean square adaptive filter to estimate the relative room impulse response mapping the audio recordings of the two devices. We performed inter-device distance estimation by exploiting a new set of features obtained extending the definition of some acoustic attributes of the room impulse response to its relative ver-sion. In combination with the sparseness measure of the estimated relative room impulse response, the relative features al-low precise inter-device distance estimation which can be exploited for tasks such as best microphone selection or acoustic scene analysis. Experimental results from simulated rooms of different dimensions and reverberation times demonstrate the effectiveness of this computationally lightweight approach for smart home acoustic ranging applications.
On the formation of a convergent cloud band over the Japan Sea in winter; numerical experiments

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the formation mechanism of a convergent cloud band which appears east of the Korea Peninsula over the western Japan Sea under northwesterly winter monsoon. Numerical experiments with different surface conditions reveal that the land-sea contrast of thermal property between the Peninsula and the Japan Sea plays the leading role in the formation of the convergent cloud band. Less transformation over the cold land causes a mesoscale high pressure in the lower troposphere with its center at the southeast end of the Peninsula and a convergence zone forms over sea at the eastern margin of it. The convergence zone makes cumulus convections active and organized into a band. In addition, blocking effect of the mountains north of Korea acts to intensify the convergence zone.
Monaural Speech Enhancement Based on Spectrogram Decomposition for Convolutional Neural Network-sensitive Feature Extraction

Many state-of-the-art speech enhancement (SE) systems have recently used convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract multi-scale feature maps. However, CNN relies more on local texture than global shape, which is more susceptible to degraded spectrogram and may fail to capture the detailed structure of speech. Although some two-stage systems feed the first-stage enhanced and original noisy spectrograms to the second stage simultaneously, this does not guarantee sufficient guidance for the second stage since the first-stage spectrogram can not provide precise spectral details. In order to allow CNNs to perceive clear speech component boundary information, we compose feature maps with spectrograms containing evident speech components according to the mask value from the first stage. The positions corresponding to the mask greater than certain thresholds are extracted as feature maps. These feature maps make the boundary information of speech components obvious by ignoring others, thus making CNNs sensitive to input features. Experiments on the VB dataset show that with a proper decomposition numbers, the proposed method can enhance SE performance, which can provide 0.15 PESQ improvement. Besides, the proposed method is more effective for spectral detail recovery.
Integral representations and embedding theorems for functions defined on the Heisenberg groups ℍⁿ

Integral representations of Sobolev type are obtained for functions defined on the Heisenberg group Hn. These representations are employed to prove embedding theorems, Poincaré inequalities, and coercive estimates for functions defined on regions in Hn. §0. Introduction 0.1. It is well known that integral representations of functions defined on regions in Euclidean spaces have considerable application to function spaces, partial differential equations, cubature formulas, and other areas. An intensive study of these fields was initiated by S. L. Sobolev in his fundamental papers in 1936–1938. The theory of spaces of functions with distributional derivatives is described in Sobolev’s book [1], and also in the monographs by J. Nečas [2], S. M. Nikol′skĭı [3], I. M. Stein [4], O. V. Besov, V. P. Il′in, and S. M. Nikol′skĭı [5], V. M. Gol′dshtĕın and Yu. G. Reshetnyak [6], V. G. Maz′ya [7], D. R. Adams and L. I. Hedberg [8], V. I. Burenkov [9], Yu. G. Reshetnyak [10], and in several books by other authors. For different ways of deriving integral representations, see also the papers [11]–[17]. The topicality of the theory of Sobolev spaces on Heisenberg groups is explained by numerous applications of it to the study of solutions of subelliptic differential equations, quasiconformal analysis, and many other related problems (see, e.g., [18]–[24]). The Heisenberg groups H represent the best known and, in many respects, a model case of the Carnot–Carathéodory spaces. The latter are smooth manifolds with distinguished tangent subbundle satisfying certain algebraic conditions. The vector fields of this subbundle are called horizontal. The curves for which the tangent vectors are contained in the distinguished subbundle are also called horizontal. The Carnot–Carathéodory distance between two points is equal to the infimum of the lengths of the horizontal curves connecting these points. The Carnot–Carathéodory metric is not equivalent to the Riemann metric. The geometry of the Carnot–Carathéodory spaces was studied by M. Gromov in [25, 26], A. Nagel, E. M. Stein, and S. Wainger in [27], P. Pansu in [26, 28], and by other authors. The Sobolev classes of functions on regions of Carnot–Carathéodory spaces are defined by derivatives along vector fields of the distinguished subbundle. The development of the theory of such function spaces was stimulated by the study of regularity properties of subelliptic differential equations. In particular, to generalize the iterative technique of Moser, we need to prove the Poincaré and Sobolev inequalities for functions defined on a ball in the Carnot–Carathéodory space. This line of investigation is related to the 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 46E35.
Meaning of work, organizational ties, and engagement: proposing an integrated theoretical model

Abstract This article aims to advance the possibilities of theorization about the meanings of work, organizational bonds (commitment, entrenchment, and consent), and engagement by connecting these constructs in an integrative model. Therefore, it is assumed that the meanings attributed to work are an antecedent variable to commitment, entrenchment, consent, and work engagement. This proposition is considered timely and contributes to the theoretical field as it allows identifying possible associations between the constructs, which helps to understand certain behaviors at work. After analyzing the relationships between the concepts, an integrated model proposal is presented, not yet empirically tested. Finally, a research agenda is suggested.
New region, new chances: does moving regionally for university shape later job mobility?

ABSTRACT The extensive literature on university graduates’ regional mobility highlights the importance of early mobility, but is primarily descriptive. We contribute to the identification of the effect of mobility upon high-school graduation on subsequent mobility across labour market regions. The data permit a novel identification strategy that uses the distance to university as an instrument. To ensure comparability, we select high-school graduates from only the suburban region of a large German agglomeration in a university graduate survey. We find that early mobility leads to a sizable increase in later labour mobility, which has implications for labour market efficiency and distributional policy concerns.
Tensor gauge fields of N=8 supergravity

We study the tensor gauge fields ("notophs") of ungauged N = 8,D = 4 supergravity in superspace. These are described by 2-form potentials B G in the ad- joint representation of G = E7(+7). The consistency of the natural candidates for the superspace constraints for their field strengths H G 3 fixes the form of the generalized