The Future of the Environment- Open-Minded Uncertainty

Take heart, all Foresters, if an environmentalist/forester such as I sounds pessimistic about the future that can only suggest that there is much yet to do

When vowels make us smile: The influence of articulatory feedback in judgments of warmth and competence

In six studies (N=725), we extended the articulatory feedback hypothesis to person perception, examining how words featuring /i:/ sounds that activate the zygomaticus major muscle and words featuring /u:/ sounds activating the orbicularis oris muscle affect preference, warmth, and competence judgments of mock-usernames. Users with usernames including /i:/, in contrast to /u:/ sounds, were always preferred and judged as warmer and more competent. The impact of this manipulation in shaping preference as well as judgments on the core dimensions of social perception confirms the stability of the vowel-emotion link and the role of articulatory feedback in social information processing.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Exploiting Nonlinear Recurrence and Fractal Scaling Properties for Voice Disorder Detection

Background: Voice disorders affect patients profoundly, and acoustic tools can potentially measure voice function objectively. Disordered sustained vowels exhibit wide-ranging phenomena, from nearly periodic to highly complex, aperiodic vibrations, and increased "breathiness". Modelling and surrogate data studies have shown significant nonlinear and non-Gaussian random properties in these sounds. Nonetheless, existing tools are limited to analysing voices displaying near periodicity, and do not account for this inherent biophysical nonlinearity and non-Gaussian randomness, often using linear signal processing methods insensitive to these properties. They do not directly measure the two main biophysical symptoms of disorder: complex nonlinear aperiodicity, and turbulent, aeroacoustic, non-Gaussian randomness. Often these tools cannot be applied to more severe disordered voices, limiting their clinical usefulness.

Methods: This paper introduces two new tools to speech analysis: recurrence and fractal scaling, which overcome the range limitations of existing tools by addressing directly these two symptoms of disorder, together reproducing a "hoarseness" diagram. A simple bootstrapped classifier then uses these two features to distinguish normal from disordered voices.

Results: On a large database of subjects with a wide variety of voice disorders, these new techniques can distinguish normal from disordered cases, using quadratic discriminant analysis, to overall correct classification performance of 91.8% plus or minus 2.0%. The true positive classification performance is 95.4% plus or minus 3.2%, and the true negative performance is 91.5% plus or minus 2.3% (95% confidence). This is shown to outperform all combinations of the most popular classical tools.

Conclusions: Given the very large number of arbitrary parameters and computational complexity of existing techniques, these new techniques are far simpler and yet achieve clinically useful classification performance using only a basic classification technique. They do so by exploiting the inherent nonlinearity and turbulent randomness in disordered voice signals. They are widely applicable to the whole range of disordered voice phenomena by design. These new measures could therefore be used for a variety of practical clinical purposes.
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Software Defined Media: Virtualization of Audio-Visual Services

Internet-native audio-visual services are witnessing rapid development. Among these services, object-based audio-visual services are gaining importance. In 2014, we established the Software Defined Media (SDM) consortium to target new research areas and markets involving object-based digital media and Internet-by-design audio-visual environments. In this paper, we introduce the SDM architecture that virtualizes networked audio-visual services along with the development of smart buildings and smart cities using Internet of Things (IoT) devices and smart building facilities. Moreover, we design the SDM architecture as a layered architecture to promote the development of innovative applications on the basis of rapid advancements in software-defined networking (SDN). Then, we implement a prototype system based on the architecture, present the system at an exhibition, and provide it as an SDM API to application developers at hackathons. Various types of applications are developed using the API at these events. An evaluation of SDM API access shows that the prototype SDM platform effectively provides 3D audio reproducibility and interactiveness for SDM applications.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC2017), Paris, France, 21-25 May 201

“It was not Death” : The Poetic Career of the Chronotope

As Bakhtin noted, chronotopes arise from the density and fusion of temporal and spatial indicators. In prose narrative, the density of temporal and spatial indicators arises as a natural consequence of setting scenes and explaining action, and those indicators are fused by the centripetal forces of plot, character and so on that encourage us to read the various elements of the text as aspects of a coherent story and world. In non-narrative poetry, however, there is no story to drive the setting of scene or generation of character; there may not even be scene or character. As a result, temporal and spatial indicators can be quite sparse, and there may be little centripetal force to encourage their fusion. In a textual environment bereft of character, plot, scene, in which even the centripetal forces of syntax are frayed by linebreaks and other poetic devices, how can chronotopes form and function? [...] In the centripetal environment afforded by most prose narratives, the stable chronotopes and the relationships among them define consciousness, world and values. In the centrifugal environment of non-narrative poetry, chronotopes flicker and flow in a series of hints, glimpses, dissolves, defining consciousness, world and values via evanescence rather than stability. However, as I hope to show below, the evanescence of chronotopes in non-narrative poetry can be as central to the vitality and meaning of those texts as the stability of chronotopes is to the vitality and meaning of prose narratives

Spartan Daily, January 31, 1935

Volume 23, Issue 74https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/2253/thumbnail.jp

Activities for A Wetland Field Study (title provided or enhanced by cataloger)

These activities were designed to enhance the sixth chapter of a module about wetlands. The activities can be used as part of the module or can stand alone as lab activities. In the first activity students set up a plant transect, identify as many different types of vegetation as possible in the wetland, and compare upland and wetland species by observing differences in their structure. The objective of the second activity is to observe soil profiles and record wetland soil characteristics. Next, students record direct and indirect observations of wetland wildlife. If there is a body of surface water at the site, students will investigate characteristics of water including velocity (for running water), temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, and evidence of point and nonpoint source pollution in the water. Students next make an artist's inventory of the wetland by describing, illustrating, and photographing its shapes, colors, and sounds. In the final steps students observe and document any impacts that people have made to the wetland interior and boundaries and refine the measurements of the wetland base map. As they proceed, students should work together to assimilate the qualitative and quantitative information they have gathered in the field so it can be shared with others. Educational levels: Middle school

In Search of the Regional Diversification of Latin: Some Methodological Considerations in Employing the Inscriptional Evidence.

The aim of the project entitled “Computerized Historical Linguistic Database of Latin Inscriptions of the Imperial Age” (http://lldb.elte.hu) is to develop and digitally publish a fundamental computerized historical linguistic database that incorporates and manages the Vulgar Latin material of the Latin inscriptions from the European provinces of the Roman Empire. In my paper, however, I do not present the Database (as this has already been done, in Adamik 2009), but instead I consider only the methodology of extracting regional variations from inscriptions, with reference to Adams 2007. In connection with this I will show that the methodology recommended by Adams 2007 does not really work whereas that established by Herman (meaning the last version, in Herman 2000a) is the most efficient, and yields a solid basis for building up the new Database