Accurate quantitative EDS-TEM analysis of precipitates and matrix in equilibrium (α+β) Zr–1Nb alloys with Ta addition

The (α+β) phase microstructure in Zr-1.05Nb, Zr-0.85Nb-0.20Ta and Zr-0.85Nb-0.40Ta (wt.%) alloys annealed at 570 °C for 3840 h after β-quenching were observed at different scales by optical, SEM and TEM microscopies. A quantitative study of phase chemical compositions was carried out by EDS-TEM with experimental Cliff-Lorimer factors. The α matrix was measured on thin films and the β particle on carbon extractive replicas. The Ta addition showed a continuous increase of (Nb + Ta) solubility in α-Zr and (Zr + Ta) solubility in the β-Nb phase. The increase of Ta in the nominal composition of the Zr-1(Nb, Ta) alloy causes the decrease of the mass fraction of β-Nb phase.Fil: Ferreirós, Pedro Antonio. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica. Gerencia del Área de Energía Nuclear. Unidad de Actividad de Materiales (CAC); Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto Sabato; Argentina. Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. Facultad Regional Haedo; ArgentinaFil: Alonso, P. R.. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica. Gerencia del Área de Energía Nuclear. Unidad de Actividad de Materiales (CAC); Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto Sabato; ArgentinaFil: Quirós, D. P.. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica. Gerencia del Área de Energía Nuclear. Unidad de Actividad de Materiales (CAC); ArgentinaFil: Zelaya, E.. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica. Centro Atómico Bariloche; ArgentinaFil: Rubiolo, Gerardo Hector. Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Instituto Sabato; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica. Gerencia del Área de Energía Nuclear. Unidad de Actividad de Materiales (CAC); Argentin

Encoding and inhibition of arbitrary episodic context with abstract concepts

Published online: 18 August 2021Context is critical for conceptual processing, but the mechanism underpinning its encoding and reinstantiation during abstract concept processing is unclear. Context may be especially important for abstract concepts—we investigated whether episodic context is recruited differently when processing abstract compared with concrete concepts. Experiments 1 and 2 presented abstract and concrete words in arbitrary contexts at encoding (Experiment 1: red/green colored frames; Experiment 2: male/female voices). Recognition memory for these contexts was worse for abstract concepts. Again using frame color and voice as arbitrary contexts, respectively, Experiments 3 and 4 presented words from encoding in the same or different context at test to determine whether there was a greater recognition memory benefit for abstract versus concrete concepts when the context was unchanged between encoding and test. Instead, abstract concepts were less likely to be remembered when context was retained. This suggests that at least some types of episodic context—when arbitrary—are attended less, and may even be inhibited, when processing abstract concepts. In Experiment 5, we utilized a context—spatial location—which (as we show) tends to be relevant during real-world processing of abstract concepts.We presented words in different locations, preserving or changing location at test. Location retention conferred a recognitionmemory advantage for abstract concepts. Thus, episodic context may be encoded with abstract concepts when context is relevant to real-world processing. The systematic contexts necessary for understanding abstract concepts may lead to arbitrary context inhibition, but greater attention to contexts that tend to be more relevant during real-world processing

HReMAS: Hybrid Real-time Musical Alignment System

[EN] This paper presents a real-time audio-to-score alignment system for musical applications. The aim of these systems is to synchronize a live musical performance with its symbolic representation in a music sheet. We have used as a base our previous real-time alignment system by enhancing it with a traceback stage, a stage used in offline alignment to improve the accuracy of the aligned note. This stage introduces some delay, what forces to assume a trade-off between output delay and alignment accuracy that must be considered in the design of this type of hybrid techniques. We have also improved our former system to execute faster in order to minimize this delay. Other interesting improvements, like identification of silence frames, have also been incorporated to our proposed system.This work has been supported by the "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" of Spain and FEDER under Projects TEC2015-67387-C4-{1,2,3}-R.Cabañas-Molero, P.; Cortina-Parajón, R.; Combarro, EF.; Alonso-Jordá, P.; Bris-Peñalver, FJ. (2019). HReMAS: Hybrid Real-time Musical Alignment System. The Journal of Supercomputing. 75(3):1001-1013. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-018-2265-1S10011013753Alonso P, Cortina R, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Alonso-González M, Ranilla J (2017) Parallel online time warping for real-time audio-to-score alignment in multi-core systems. J Supercomput 73(1):126–138Alonso P, Vera-Candeas P, Cortina R, Ranilla J (2017) An efficient musical accompaniment parallel system for mobile devices. J Supercomput 73(1):343–353Arzt A (2016) Flexible and robust music tracking. Ph.D. thesis, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, ÖsterreichArzt A, Widmer G, Dixon S (2008) Automatic page turning for musicians via real-time machine listening. In: Proceedings of the 18th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), Amsterdam, pp 241–245Carabias-Orti J, Rodríguez-Serrano F, Vera-Candeas P, Ruiz-Reyes N, Cañadas-Quesada F (2015) An audio to score alignment framework using spectral factorization and dynamic time warping. In: Proceedings of ISMIR, pp 742–748Cont A (2006) Realtime audio to score alignment for polyphonic music instruments, using sparse non-negative constraints and hierarchical HMMs. In: 2006 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings, vol 5. pp V–VCont A, Schwarz D, Schnell N, Raphael C (2007) Evaluation of real-time audio-to-score alignment. In: International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), ViennaDannenberg RB, Raphael C (2006) Music score alignment and computer accompaniment. Commun ACM 49(8):38–43Devaney J, Ellis D (2009) Handling asynchrony in audio-score alignment. In: Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference Computer Music Association. pp 29–32Dixon S (2005) An on-line time warping algorithm for tracking musical performances. In: Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). pp 1727–1728Duan Z, Pardo B (2011) Soundprism: an online system for score-informed source separation of music audio. IEEE J Sel Top Signal Process 5(6):1205–1215Ewert S, Muller M, Grosche P (2009) High resolution audio synchronization using chroma onset features. In: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2009 (ICASSP 2009). pp 1869–1872Hu N, Dannenberg R, Tzanetakis G (2003) Polyphonic audio matching and alignment for music retrieval. In: 2003 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics. pp 185–188Kaprykowsky H, Rodet X (2006) Globally optimal short-time dynamic time warping, application to score to audio alignment. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, vol 5. pp. V–VLi B, Duan Z (2016) An approach to score following for piano performances with the sustained effect. IEEE/ACM Trans Audio Speech Lang Process 24(12):2425–2438Miron M, Carabias-Orti JJ, Bosch JJ, Gómez E, Janer J (2016) Score-informed source separation for multichannel orchestral recordings. J Electr Comput Eng 2016(8363507):1–19Muñoz-Montoro A, Cabañas-Molero P, Bris-Peñalver F, Combarro E, Cortina R, Alonso P (2017) Discovering the composition of audio files by audio-to-midi alignment. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational and Mathematical Methods in Science and Engineering. pp 1522–1529Orio N, Schwarz D (2001) Alignment of monophonic and polyphonic music to a score. In: Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), pp 155–158Pätynen J, Pulkki V, Lokki T (2008) Anechoic recording system for symphony orchestra. Acta Acust United Acust 94(6):856–865Raphael C (2010) Music plus one and machine learning. In: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), pp 21–28Rodriguez-Serrano FJ, Carabias-Orti JJ, Vera-Candeas P, Martinez-Munoz D (2016) Tempo driven audio-to-score alignment using spectral decomposition and online dynamic time warping. ACM Trans Intell Syst Technol 8(2):22:1–22:2

Online score-informed source separation in polyphonic mixtures using instrument spectral patterns

[EN] Soundprism is a real-time algorithm to separate polyphonic music audio into source signals, given the musical score of the audio in advance. This paper presents a framework for a Soundprism implementation. A study of the sound quality of the online score-informed source separation is shown, although a real-time implementation is not carried out. The system is compound of two stages: (1) a score follower that matches a MIDI score position to each time frame of the musical performance; and (2) a source separator based on a nonnegative matrix factorization approach guided by the score. Real audio mixtures composed of an instrumental quartets were employed to obtain preliminary results of the proposed system.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad. Grant Number: TEC2015-67387-C4-{1, 2, 3}-RMuñoz-Montoro, A.; Vera-Candeas, P.; Cortina, R.; Combarro, EF.; Alonso-Jordá, P. (2019). Online score-informed source separation in polyphonic mixtures using instrument spectral patterns. Computational and Mathematical Methods. 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1002/cmm4.1040S11

Arsenic distribution in a pasture area impacted by past mining activities

[EN]Former mine exploitations entail a serious threat to surrounding ecosystems as after closure of mining activities their unmanaged wastes can be a continuous source of toxic trace elements. Quite often these mine sites are found within agricultural farming areas, involving serious hazards as regards product (feed/food) quality. In this work a grazing land impacted by the abandoned mine exploitation of an arsenical deposit was studied so as to evaluate the fate of arsenic (As) and other trace elements and the potential risks involved. With this aim, profile soil samples (0–50 cm) and pasture plant species (Agrostis truncatula, Holcus annus and Leontodon longirostris) were collected at different distances (0–100 m) from the mine waste dump and analyzed for their trace element content and distribution. Likewise, plant trace element accumulation from impacted grazing soils and plant trace element translocation were assessed. The exposure of livestock grazing animals to As was also evaluated, establishing its acceptability regarding food safety and animal health. International soil guideline values for As in grazing land soils (50 mg kg−1) resulted greatly exceeded (up to about 20-fold) in the studied mining-affected soils. Moreover, As showed a high mobilization potential under circumstances such as phosphate application or establishment of reducing conditions. Arsenic exhibited relatively high translocation factor (TF) values (up to 0.32–0.89) in pasture plant species, reaching unsafe concentrations in their above-ground tissues (up to 32.9, 16.9 and 9.0 mg kg−1 in Agrostis truncatula, Leontodon longirostris and Holcus annus, respectively). Such concentrations represent an elevated risk of As transfer to the high trophic-chain levels as established by international legislation. The limited fraction of arsenite found in plant roots should play an important role in the relatively high As root-to-shoot translocation shown by these plant species. Both soil ingestion and pasture intake resulted important entrance pathways of As into livestock animals, showing quite close contribution levels. The cow acceptable daily intake (ADI) of As regarding food safety was surpassed in some locations of the study area when the species Agrostis truncatula was considered as the only pasture feed. Restrictions in the grazing use of lands with considerable As contents where this plant was the predominant pasture species should be established in order to preserve food quality. Therefore, the exposure of livestock animals to As via both soil ingestion and pasture consumption should be taken into account to establish the suitability of mining-impacted areas for gazing

Ultrasonic Sensors in Urban Traffic Driving-Aid Systems

Currently, vehicles are often equipped with active safety systems to reduce the risk of accidents, most of which occur in urban environments. The most prominent include Antilock Braking Systems (ABS), Traction Control and Stability Control. All these systems use different kinds of sensors to constantly monitor the conditions of the vehicle, and act in an emergency. In this paper the use of ultrasonic sensors in active safety systems for urban traffic is proposed, and the advantages and disadvantages when compared to other sensors are discussed. Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) for urban traffic based on ultrasounds is presented as an application example. The proposed system has been implemented in a fully-automated prototype vehicle and has been tested under real traffic conditions. The results confirm the good performance of ultrasonic sensors in these systems

The Changing Epidemiology of Malaria in Ifakara Town, Southern Tanzania.

Between 1995 and 2000 there were marked changes in the epidemiology of malaria in Ifakara, southern Tanzania. We documented these changes using parasitological and clinical data from a series of community- and hospital-based studies involving children up to the age of 5 years. There was a right shift and lowering in the age-specific parasite prevalence in the community-based cohort studies. The incidence of clinical malaria in placebo-receiving infants in additional study cohorts dropped from 0.8 in 1995 to 0.43 episodes per infant per year in 2000, an incidence rate ratio of 0.53 (95% confidence interval: 0.404, 0.70, P<0.0001). At the same time, there was an increase in the total number of malaria admissions and a marked right shift in the age pattern of these admissions (median age in 1995 1.55 years vs. 2.33 in 2000, P<0.0001). However, the burden of malaria deaths remained in infants. We discuss how these dramatic changes in the epidemiology of malaria may have arisen from the use of currently available malaria control tools. Caution is required in the interpretation of hospital-based data as it is likely to underestimate the impact of anaemia on mortality in the community, where most paediatric deaths occur. Even in low/moderate malaria transmission settings, where older children suffer most malaria episodes, targeting effective malaria control at infants may produce important reductions in infant mortality caused by malaria

Age interactions in the development of naturally acquired immunity to Plasmodium falciparum and its clinical presentation

Background Naturally acquired malaria immunity has many determinants and, in the absence of immunological markers of protection, studies assessing malaria incidence through clinical endpoints remain an approach to defining immunity acquisition. We investigated the role of age in disease incidence and the effects of chemoprophylaxis on clinical immunity development to Plasmodium falciparum during a randomised controlled trial. Methods and Findings A total of 415 Tanzanian infants were randomly assigned to receive weekly malaria prophylaxis with Deltaprim (3.125 mg of pyrimethamine plus 25 mg of dapsone) or placebo between the ages of 2 and 12 mo. Children were followed up until 4 y of age. Uncomplicated febrile malaria, severe malaria, and anaemia morbidity were assessed through hospital-based passive surveillance. Compared with the group of control participants, there was a marked reduction in the incidence of clinical malaria, severe malaria, and anaemia in the group of children who had received chemoprophylaxis during the first year of life. After discontinuing the intervention, there was a significant increase in the incidence of clinical malaria for 2 y. The cumulative rates of clinical malaria, by age 4 y, were slightly higher in the group of children who had previously received chemoprophylaxis: 3.22 episodes versus 3.02 episodes in the group of control participants; rate difference 0.20 (95% confidence interval [CI]: −0.21 to 0.59). By age 4 y, the cumulative rates of severe malaria, however, were slightly lower in chemosuppressed children (0.47 versus 0.59) (rate difference −0.12 [95% CI: −0.27 to 0.03]). The number of episodes of anaemia was also slightly lower in chemosuppressed children by age 4y: 0.93 episodes (95% CI: 0.79 to 0.97) versus 1.12 episodes in the group of control participants (95% CI: 0.97 to 1.28) (rate difference −0.19 [95% CI: −0.40 to 0.01]), respectively. Conclusions Reducing exposure to P. falciparum antigens through chemoprophylaxis early in life can delay immunity acquisition. Infants appear to acquire immunity faster than older children, but have a higher risk of developing severe forms of malaria and anaemia. These findings provide insight on the interplay between immunity and exposure-reduction interventions

An efficient musical accompaniment parallel system for mobile devices

[EN] This work presents a software system designed to track the reproduction of a musical piece with the aim to match the score position into its symbolic representation on a digital sheet. Into this system, known as automated musical accompaniment system, the process of score alignment can be carried out real-time. A real-time score alignment, also known as score following, poses an important challenge due to the large amount of computation needed to process each digital frame and the very small time slot to process it. Moreover, the challenge is even greater since we are interested on handheld devices, i.e. devices characterized by both low power consumption and mobility. The results presented here show that it is possible to exploit efficiently several cores of an ARM(A (R)) processor, or a GPU accelerator (presented in some SoCs from NVIDIA) reducing the processing time per frame under 10 ms in most of the cases.This work was supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness from Spain (FEDER) under projects TEC2015-67387-C4-1-R, TEC2015-67387-C4-2-R and TEC2015-67387-C4-3-R, the Andalusian Business, Science and Innovation Council under project P2010-TIC-6762 (FEDER), and the Generalitat Valenciana PROMETEOII/2014/003Alonso-Jordá, P.; Vera-Candeas, P.; Cortina, R.; Ranilla, J. (2017). An efficient musical accompaniment parallel system for mobile devices. The Journal of Supercomputing. 73(1):343-353. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1865-xS343353731Cont A, Schwarz D, Schnell N, Raphael C (2007) Evaluation of real- time audio-to-score alignment. In: Proc. of the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) 2007, ViennaArzt A (2008) Score following with dynamic time warping. An automatic page-turner. Master’s Thesis, Vienna University of Technology, ViennaRaphael C (2010) Music plus one and machine learning. In: Proc. of the 27 th International Conference on Machine Learning, Haifa, pp 21–28Carabias-Ortí JJ, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Ruiz-Reyes N, Cañadas-Quesada FJ (2015) An audio to score alignment framework using spectral factorization and dynamic time warping. In: Proc. of the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), Málaga, pp 742–748Cont A (2010) A coupled duration-focused architecture for real-time music-to-score alignment. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 32(6):974–987Montecchio N, Orio N (2009) A discrete filterbank approach to audio to score matching for score following. In: Proc. of the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), pp 495–500Puckette M (1995) Score following using the sung voice. In: Proc. of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), pp 175–178Duan Z, Pardo B (2011) Soundprism: an online system for score-informed source separation of music audio. IEEE J. Sel. Top. Signal Process. 5(6):1205–1215Cont A (2006) Realtime audio to score alignment for polyphonic music instruments using sparse non-negative constraints and hierarchical hmms. In: Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), ToulouseCuvillier P, Cont A (2014) Coherent time modeling of Semi-Markov models with application to realtime audio-to-score alignment. In Proc. of the 2014 IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, p 16Joder C, Essid S, Richard G (2013) Learning optimal features for polyphonic audio-to-score alignment. IEEE Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process. 21(10):2118–2128Dixon S (2005) Live tracking of musical performances using on-line time warping. In: Proc. International Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx), Madrid, pp 92–97Hu N, Dannenberg RB, Tzanetakis G (2009) Polyphonic audio matching and alignment for music retrieval. In: Proc. of the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA), pp 185–188Orio N, Schwarz D (2001) Alignment of monophonic and polyphonic music to a score. In: Proc. International Computer Music Conference (ICMC)Alonso P, Cortina R, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Alonso-Gonzalez M, Ranilla J (2016) Parallel online time warping for real-time audio-to-score alignment in multi-core systems. J. Supercomput. doi: 10.1007/s11227-016-1647-5 (published online)Carabias-Ortí JJ, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Cañadas-Quesada FJ, Ruiz-Reyes N (2013) Constrained non-negative sparse coding using learnt instrument templates for realtime music transcription, Eng. Appl. Artif. Intell. 26(7):1671–1680Carabias-Ortí JJ, Rodríguez-Serrano FJ, Vera-Candeas P, Martínez-Muñoz D (2016) Tempo driven audio-to-score alignment using spectral decomposition and online dynamic time warping. ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. (accepted)FFTW (2016) http://www.fftw.org . Accessed July 2016NVIDIA CUDA Fast Fourier Transform library (cuFFT) (2016) http://developer.nvidia.com/cufft . Accessed July 2016The OpenMP API specification for parallel programming (2016) http://openmp.org . Accessed July 201

The Canary Deep Poleward Undercurrent

Poleward undercurrents are well known features in Eastern Boundary systems. In the California Current Eastern Boundary upwelling system (CalCEBS) the California poleward undercurrent has been widely reported, and it has been demonstrated that it transports nutrients from the equator waters to the northern limit of the subtropical gyre. However, in the Canary Current Eastern Boundary upwelling system (CanCEBS), the Canary deep poleward undercurrent (CdPU) has not been properly characterized. In this study, we use trajectories of Argo floats and model simulations to properly characterize the CdPU, including its seasonal variability, and the driving mechanism. The Argo observations show that the CdPU flows from 20oN, near cape Blanc, to, approximately, 45oN, near cape Finisterre in the northwest Spanish’s coast. The CdPU flows deeper than the CalUC, and its mean depth varies with latitude, from the surface at 20oN to 900 m at 44oN. The CdPU shows a marked seasonal variability, with it maximum strength in fall, and the minimum in spring