Education and Economic Mobility

Surveys the literature on how education affects intergenerational mobility. Discusses the impacts of parents' education, financial resources, GED and job training programs, K-12 quality improvements, and early childhood education and intervention

Effectiveness of computer-based auditory training in improving the perception of noise-vocoded speech

Five experiments were designed to evaluate the effectiveness of “high-variability” lexical training in improving the ability of normal-hearing subjects to perceive noise-vocoded speech that had been spectrally shifted to simulate tonotopic misalignment. Two approaches to training were implemented. One training approach required subjects to recognize isolated words, while the other training approach required subjects to recognize words in sentences. Both approaches to training improved the ability to identify words in sentences. Improvements following a single session (lasting 1–2 h) of auditory training ranged between 7 and 12 %pts and were significantly larger than improvements following a visual control task that was matched with the auditory training task in terms of the response demands. An additional three sessions of word- and sentence-based training led to further improvements, with the average overall improvement ranging from 13 to 18 %pts. When a tonotopic misalignment of 3 mm rather than 6 mm was simulated, training with several talkers led to greater generalization to new talkers than training with a single talker. The results confirm that computer-based lexical training can help overcome the effects of spectral distortions in speech, and they suggest that training materials are most effective when several talkers are included

International Standards for the Induction Motor Efficiency Evaluation: a Critical Analysis of the Stray-Load Losses Determination

Motor efficiency has to be measured or calculated in accordance with international standards. The most important standards are the IEEE 112-B, IEC 34-2, and JEC 3 . In this paper, a comparison of the measurement procedures defined by these international standards is reported, together with some comments on the prescribed methodologies. The comparison is based on experimental results obtained by tests on four general-purpose three-phase induction motors. The stray-load loss measurement represents a critical key for the correct evaluation of the motor efficiency. For this reason, a critical analysis of this type of losses has been performed. In particular, in order to understand which are the most critical quantities that influence their evaluation, the stray-load loss sensitivity to the measurement errors is analyzed. In the final part of the paper the temperature influence, on the conventional iron losses, is experimentally analyzed. The performed tests show that the temperature difference between the no-load test and the motor real operative conditions is not negligible