Stuttering generalization self-measure: preliminary development of a self-measuring tool

Objectives: The reader will become knowledgeable about 1) the relationship between stuttering severity and speech-anxiety level, and 2) the importance of assessing the generalization effect in different social speaking situations. Additionally, the reader will understand the processes of validating the Stuttering Generalization Self-Measure. Abstract Introduction: Generalization of treatment is considered a difficult task for clinicians and people who stutter (PWS), and can constitute a barrier to long-term treatment success. To our knowledge, there are no standardized tests that collect measurement of the behavioral and cognitive aspects alongside the client’s self-perception in real-life speaking situations. Purpose: This paper describes the development of a Stuttering Generalization Self-Measure (SGSM). The purpose of SGSM is to assess 1) stuttering severity and 2) speech-anxiety level during real-life situations as perceived by PWS. Additionally, this measurement aims to 3) investigate correlations between stuttering severity and speech-anxiety level within the same real-life situation. Method: The SGSM includes speaking situations that are developed to cover a variety of frequent speaking situations. These items were created according to five listener categories (family and close friends, acquaintances, strangers, persons of authority, and giving a short speech to small audience). Forty-three participants (22 PWS, and 21 control) aged 18 to 53 years were asked to complete the assessment in real-life situations. Results: Preliminary analyses indicated that test-retest reliability was high for both groups. Discriminant validity was also achieved as the SGSM scores significantly differed between the two groups for stuttering and speech-anxiety. Convergent validity was confirmed by significant correlations between the SGSM and other speech-related anxiety measures

ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION OF WASTE ELECTRIC AND ELECTRONICS DISPOSAL SYSTEM IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Electronic waste has become a challenge to most nations. The ewastechallenge can only be met by combining effective legislation withincentives to develop business and employment opportunities to maximizethe lifespan of these valuable finite natural resources. Capacity building andtechnology transfer from developed countries to developing countries, alongwith the implementation of international standards, will be a key to reducingwaste and pollution, in parallel with the creation of sustainable businessmodels. This paper attempts to review the management of WEEE in theMiddle East and propose a guiding framework for the national policies inregards to this growing problem

Delivery Time Minimization in Edge Caching: Synergistic Benefits of Subspace Alignment and Zero Forcing

An emerging trend of next generation communication systems is to provide network edges with additional capabilities such as additional storage resources in the form of caches to reduce file delivery latency. To investigate this aspect, we study the fundamental limits of a cache-aided wireless network consisting of one central base station, $M$ transceivers and $K$ receivers from a latency-centric perspective. We use the normalized delivery time (NDT) to capture the per-bit latency for the worst-case file request pattern at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), normalized with respect to a reference interference-free system with unlimited transceiver cache capabilities. For various special cases with $M=\{1,2\}$ and $K=\{1,2,3\}$ that satisfy $M+K\leq 4$, we establish the optimal tradeoff between cache storage and latency. This is facilitated through establishing a novel converse (for arbitrary $M$ and $K$) and an achievability scheme on the NDT. Our achievability scheme is a synergistic combination of multicasting, zero-forcing beamforming and interference alignment.Comment: submitted to ICC 2018; fixed some typo

Fabrication and Testing of Composite Materials From Rubber

Recently, there has been considerable interest in forming Filler as a means to improve several properties of Elastomers. For this purpose layered (CaCO3 and Stiric Acid "S.A" )  are now widely being used. These layered  are a class of inorganic materials that are naturally layered in structure  , 8 different rubber compound were prepared by using (SBR 1502) type of Styrene Butadiene rubber in level and each recipe reinforced with carbonate calcium  (CaCO3 ) at constant  ratio (60) pphr ( part per hundred ), Stearic Acid (S.A) at variable ratio (1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8) pphr  The physical properties such as Tensile ,Elongation , Young Modulus and Compression were Studied . The result show that the hardness, Fatigue, Compression, wear, increase with loading level of (S.A). But the Tensile and Elongation that increase with excited ratio of (S.A) and decrease in another Value at 100 %

Biologically-inspired hierarchical architectures for object recognition

PhD ThesisThe existing methods for machine vision translate the three-dimensional objects in the real world into two-dimensional images. These methods have achieved acceptable performances in recognising objects. However, the recognition performance drops dramatically when objects are transformed, for instance, the background, orientation, position in the image, and scale. The human’s visual cortex has evolved to form an efficient invariant representation of objects from within a scene. The superior performance of human can be explained by the feed-forward multi-layer hierarchical structure of human visual cortex, in addition to, the utilisation of different fields of vision depending on the recognition task. Therefore, the research community investigated building systems that mimic the hierarchical architecture of the human visual cortex as an ultimate objective. The aim of this thesis can be summarised as developing hierarchical models of the visual processing that tackle the remaining challenges of object recognition. To enhance the existing models of object recognition and to overcome the above-mentioned issues, three major contributions are made that can be summarised as the followings 1. building a hierarchical model within an abstract architecture that achieves good performances in challenging image object datasets; 2. investigating the contribution for each region of vision for object and scene images in order to increase the recognition performance and decrease the size of the processed data; 3. further enhance the performance of all existing models of object recognition by introducing hierarchical topologies that utilise the context in which the object is found to determine the identity of the object. Statement ofHigher Committee For Education Development in Iraq (HCED