Intraspeaker Comparisons of Acoustic and Articulatory Variability in American English /r/ Productions

The purpose of this report is to test the hypothesis that speakers utilize an acoustic, rather than articulatory, planning space for speech production. It has been well-documented that many speakers of American English use different tongue configurations to produce /r/ in different phonetic contexts. The acoustic planning hypothesis suggests that although the /r/ configuration varies widely in different contexts, the primary acoustic cue for /r/, a dip in the F3 trajectory, will be less variable due to tradeoffs in articulatory variability, or trading relations, that help maintain a relatively constant F3 trajectory across phonetic contexts. Acoustic data and EMMA articulatory data from seven speakers producing /r/ in different phonetic contexts were analyzed. Visual inspection of the EMMA data at the point of F3 minimum revealed that each speaker appeared to use at least two of three trading relation strategies that would be expected to reduce F3 variability. Articulatory covariance measures confirmed that all seven speakers utilized a trading relation between tongue back height and tongue back horizontal position, six speakers utilized a trading relation between tongue tip height and tongue back height, and the speaker who did not use this latter strategy instead utilized a trading relation between tongue tip height and tongue back horizontal position. Estimates of F3 variability with and without the articulatory covariances indicated that F3 would be much higher for all speakers if the articulatory covariances were not utilized. These conclusions were further supported by a comparison of measured F3 variability to F3 variabilities estimated from the pellet data with and without articulatory covariances. In all subjects, the actual F3 variance was significantly lower than the F3 variance estimated without articulatory covariances, further supporting the conclusion that the articulatory trading relations were being used to reduce F3 variability. Together, these results strongly suggest that the neural control mechanisms underlying speech production make elegant use of trading relations between articulators to maintain a relatively invariant acoustic trace for /r/ across phonetic contexts

Intraspeaker Comparisons of Acoustic and Articulatory Variability in American English /r/ Productions

The purpose of this report is to test the hypothesis that speakers utilize an acoustic, rather than articulatory, planning space for speech production. It has been well-documented that many speakers of American English use different tongue configurations to produce /r/ in different phonetic contexts. The acoustic planning hypothesis suggests that although the /r/ configuration varies widely in different contexts, the primary acoustic cue for /r/, a dip in the F3 trajectory, will be less variable due to tradeoffs in articulatory variability, or trading relations, that help maintain a relatively constant F3 trajectory across phonetic contexts. Acoustic data and EMMA articulatory data from seven speakers producing /r/ in different phonetic contexts were analyzed. Visual inspection of the EMMA data at the point of F3 minimum revealed that each speaker appeared to use at least two of three trading relation strategies that would be expected to reduce F3 variability. Articulatory covariance measures confirmed that all seven speakers utilized a trading relation between tongue back height and tongue back horizontal position, six speakers utilized a trading relation between tongue tip height and tongue back height, and the speaker who did not use this latter strategy instead utilized a trading relation between tongue tip height and tongue back horizontal position. Estimates of F3 variability with and without the articulatory covariances indicated that F3 would be much higher for all speakers if the articulatory covariances were not utilized. These conclusions were further supported by a comparison of measured F3 variability to F3 variabilities estimated from the pellet data with and without articulatory covariances. In all subjects, the actual F3 variance was significantly lower than the F3 variance estimated without articulatory covariances, further supporting the conclusion that the articulatory trading relations were being used to reduce F3 variability. Together, these results strongly suggest that the neural control mechanisms underlying speech production make elegant use of trading relations between articulators to maintain a relatively invariant acoustic trace for /r/ across phonetic contexts

Admixture Correction in the Outgroup-f3 Statistic

Genetic inheritance can be studied within a purely genetic scope. However, this eliminates part of the picture. The field of genetics is often thought of as a natural science with little in common with fields of social science. However, in human genetics and the genetics of the organisms which humans impact, the role of cultural and societal forces cannot be ignored. For instance, lactase is an enzyme used to digest lactose in milk. As such, it is an enzyme whose activity reduces significantly after weaning. Nonetheless, as humans have begun to ingest more dairy products into adulthood, lactase persistence has evolved to enable humans to digest these dairy products. My research involves mathematically representing the genetic similarity of two populations accurately via the f3 statistic. The outgroup-f3 statistic is useful in understanding a population’s genetic history and how genetically related two populations are. It shows how close two populations are compared to a third population that is equally distant genetically from the first two. However, if two populations share a recent genetic interaction with another population, the outgroup-f3 statistic could show those two populations as being closer together than they truly are. This genetic interaction of two or more previously isolated populations interbreeding is referred to as admixture. Admixture skews, or even inhibits, an understanding of those populations’ genetic histories. To avoid this problem, I have attempted to devise a modified version of the outgroup-f3 statistic to ensure an accurate representation of genetic relatedness. For my project, artificial admixture was introduced in six unadmixed human populations. Depending on the relationship between increased contamination and the f3 statistic, we proposed and adjusted solutions for a corrected f3 accordingly. I tested my proposed corrections by applying it to populations that contain individuals with and without recent histories of genetic admixture. After correcting for the proportion of admixture in the population, I compared this corrected outgroup-f3 statistic to the outgroup-f3 value calculated for the original unadmixed population. The goal of this work is to have a corrected statistic that one can apply to two populations, independent of admixture proportions. Ultimately, this will help us to better understand the evolutionary histories of populations. Moreover, a corrected statistic will aid other researchers as they analyse demographic histories further in the past.MathematicsAnthropolog

Intrinsic 1/f device noise reduction and its effect on phase noise in CMOS ring oscillators

This paper gives experimental proof of an intriguing physical effect: periodic on-off switching of MOS transistors in a CMOS ring oscillator reduces their intrinsic 1/f noise and hence the oscillator's close-in phase noise. More specifically, it is shown that the 1/f3 phase noise is dependent on the gate-source voltage of the MOS transistors in the off state. Measurement results, corrected for waveform-dependent upconversion and effective bias, show an 8-dB-lower 1/f3 phase noise than expected. It will be shown that this can be attributed to the intrinsic 1/f noise reduction effect due to periodic on-off switchin

Nuclear effects and higher twists in F3 structure function

We analyze the CCFR collaboration iron target data on the xF3 structure function making particular emphasis on the extraction of the higher twist contributions from data. Corrections for nuclear effects are applied in order to extract data on the structure function of the isoscalar nucleon. Our analysis confirms the observation made earlier, that the higher twist terms depend strongly on the level to which QCD perturbation theory analysis is applied. We discuss the impact of nuclear effects on the higher twist term as well as on the QCD scale parameter Lambda_{\bar{MS}} extracted from the fit to data.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure

E-VOTING SYSTEMS: A TOOL FOR E-DEMOCRACY

Using electronic voting systems is divisive as some countries used such systems and others did not. Electronic voting (e-voting) is relatively a new concept based on its application that aims at reducing errors and improving the convenience and integrity of election process. This paper tried to explore the factors that influence the adoption of such systems in a university environment. The study utilized a sample of 302 bachelor degree students in a public Jordanian university and in relation to students’ council election process. Results indicated that students were keen on the concepts of trust and usefulness of e-voting when adopting such systems. The study supported the findings of TAM in the area of technology acceptance. Conclusions are at the end of this paper.E-government, e-democracy, e-voting, students’ elections.

Fratricide: defective decision making

Motivation – to explore the applicability of a Human Factors methodology for the investigation of fratricide. Research approach – The EAST methodology was used to analyse an incident of fratricide and its ability to explore the Famous Five of Fratricide (F3) model was investigated. Findings/Design – the analysis revealed that EAST was able to provide explicit discussion of the Famous Five of Fratricide (F3) models five causal factors of communication, cooperation, coordination, schemata and situation awareness. Research limitations/Implications – the research explored a single case study and as such is couched at the initial phases of investigation. Originality/Value – the analysis provides a contribution to the knowledge urrounding fratricide both with respect to the novel application of the EAST methodology to an incident of fratricide, and also the causal factors identified by EAST within the fratricide incident. Take away message – the EAST methodology provides an innovative way of exploring causality in incidents of fratricide<br/

The Texas Petawatt Laser And Current Experiments

The Texas Petawatt Laser is operational with experimental campaigns executed in both F/40 and F3 target chambers. Recent improvements have resulted in intensities of >2x10(21) W/cm(2) on target. Experimental highlights include, accelerated electron energies of >2 GeV, DD fusion ion temperatures >25 keV and isochorically heated solids to 10-50 eV.Physic