On the Assessment of Stability and Patterning of Speech Movements

Speech requires the control of complex movements of orofacial structures to produce dynamic variations in the vocal tract transfer function. The nature of the underlying motor control processes has traditionally been investigated by employing measures of articulatory movements, including movement amplitude, velocity, and duration, at selected points in time. An alternative approach, first used in the study of limb motion, is to examine the entire movement trajectory over time. A new approach to speech movement trajectory analysis was introduced in earlier work from this laboratory. In this method, trajectories from multiple movement sequences are time- and amplitude-normalized, and the STI (spatiotemporal index) is computed to capture the degree of convergence of a set of trajectories onto a single, underlying movement template. This research note describes the rationale for this analysis and provides a detailed description of the signal processing involved. Alternative interpolation procedures for time-normalization of kinematic data are also considered

Automatic Classification and Speaker Identification of African Elephant (\u3cem\u3eLoxodonta africana\u3c/em\u3e) Vocalizations

A hidden Markov model (HMM) system is presented for automatically classifying African elephant vocalizations. The development of the system is motivated by successful models from human speech analysis and recognition. Classification features include frequency-shifted Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and log energy, spectrally motivated features which are commonly used in human speech processing. Experiments, including vocalization type classification and speaker identification, are performed on vocalizations collected from captive elephants in a naturalistic environment. The system classified vocalizations with accuracies of 94.3% and 82.5% for type classification and speaker identification classification experiments, respectively. Classification accuracy, statistical significance tests on the model parameters, and qualitative analysis support the effectiveness and robustness of this approach for vocalization analysis in nonhuman species

Stress and Emotion Classification Using Jitter and Shimmer Features

In this paper, we evaluate the use of appended jitter and shimmer speech features for the classification of human speaking styles and of animal vocalization arousal levels. Jitter and shimmer features are extracted from the fundamental frequency contour and added to baseline spectral features, specifically Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) for human speech and Greenwood function cepstral coefficients (GFCCs) for animal vocalizations. Hidden Markov models (HMMs) with Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) state distributions are used for classification. The appended jitter and shimmer features result in an increase in classification accuracy for several illustrative datasets, including the SUSAS dataset for human speaking styles as well as vocalizations labeled by arousal level for African elephant and Rhesus monkey species

Causes of Perinatal Death at a Tertiary Care Hospital in Northern Tanzania 2000-2010: A Registry Based Study.

Perinatal mortality reflects maternal health as well as antenatal, intrapartum and newborn care, and is an important health indicator. This study aimed at classifying causes of perinatal death in order to identify categories of potentially preventable deaths. We studied a total of 1958 stillbirths and early neonatal deaths above 500 g between July 2000 and October 2010 registered in the Medical Birth Registry and neonatal registry at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC) in Northern Tanzania. The deaths were classified according to the Neonatal and Intrauterine deaths Classification according to Etiology (NICE). Overall perinatal mortality was 57.7/1000 (1958 out of 33 929), of which 1219 (35.9/1000) were stillbirths and 739 (21.8/1000) were early neonatal deaths. Major causes of perinatal mortality were unexplained asphyxia (n=425, 12.5/1000), obstetric complications (n=303, 8.9/1000), maternal disease (n=287, 8.5/1000), unexplained antepartum stillbirths after 37 weeks of gestation (n= 219, 6.5/1000), and unexplained antepartum stillbirths before 37 weeks of gestation (n=184, 5.4/1000). Obstructed/prolonged labour was the leading condition (251/303, 82.8%) among the obstetric complications. Preeclampsia/eclampsia was the leading cause (253/287, 88.2%) among the maternal conditions. When we excluded women who were referred for delivery at KCMC due to medical reasons (19.1% of all births and 36.0% of all deaths), perinatal mortality was reduced to 45.6/1000. This reduction was mainly due to fewer deaths from obstetric complications (from 8.9 to 2.1/1000) and maternal conditions (from 8.5 to 5.5/1000). The distribution of causes of death in this population suggests a great potential for prevention. Early identification of mothers at risk of pregnancy complications through antenatal care screening, teaching pregnant women to recognize signs of pregnancy complications, timely access to obstetric care, monitoring of labour for fetal distress, and proper newborn resuscitation may reduce some of the categories of deaths

Time trends in perinatal outcomes among HIV-positive pregnant women in Northern Tanzania: A registry-based study

Introduction Maternal HIV infection is associated with increased risk of having a preterm delivery, low birth weight baby, small for gestational age baby and stillbirth. Maternal use of combination antiretroviral treatment is also associated with preterm delivery and low birth weight, although the effects vary by the type of drugs and timing of initiation. Objective To examine time trends in adverse perinatal outcomes among HIV-positive compared with HIV-negative women. Design Registry-based cohort study. Setting Northern Tanzania, 2000–2018. Study sample Mother-baby pairs of singleton deliveries (n = 41 156). Methods Perinatal outcomes of HIV-positive women were compared with HIV-negative women during time periods representing shifts in prevention of mother-to-child transmission guidelines. Monotherapy was used as first-line therapy before 2007 while combination antiretroviral treatment was routinely used from 2007. Log binomial and quantile regression were used to analyze the data. Main outcome measures Preterm delivery, low birth weight, perinatal death, stillbirth, low Apgar score, transfer to neonatal care unit and small for gestational age. Results Overall, maternal HIV infection was associated with a higher risk of low birth weight and small for gestational age. Moreover, this pattern became more pronounced over time for low birth weight, the last time period being an exception. For other outcomes we found none or only a small overall association with maternal HIV infection, although a trend towards higher risk over time in HIV-positive compared with HIV-negative women was observed for preterm delivery and perinatal death. Quantile regression showed an increase in birth weight in babies born to HIV-negative women over time and a corresponding decline in birth weight in babies born to HIV-positive women. Conclusion Unfavourable trends in some of the selected perinatal outcomes were seen for HIV-positive compared with HIV-negative women. Potential side-effects of combination antiretroviral treatment in pregnancy should be further explored.publishedVersio

Parent-reported multi-national study of the impact of congenital and childhood onset myotonic dystrophy

Aim: The frequency and impact of symptoms experienced by patients with congenital, childhood, and juvenile-onset myotonic dystrophy (CDM/ChDM/JDM) is not documented. This report identifies symptomatic areas with the greatest disease burden in an international population of patients with early-onset myotonic dystrophy type-1 (DM1). Method: We distributed surveys to parents of patients with CDM/ChDM/JDM. Patients with CDM/ChDM/JDM were members of the US National Registry of DM1 Patients and Family Members, the Canadian Neuromuscular Disease Registry, or the Swedish Health System. Surveys inquired about 325 symptoms and 20 themes associated with CDM/ChDM/JDM. Parents identified the importance of each symptom and theme to their affected child. The prevalence of each symptom and theme were compared across subgroups of patients. The statistical analysis was performed using Fisher\u27s exact and Kruskal–Wallis tests. Results: One hundred and fifty parents returned surveys. The most frequently reported symptomatic themes in children were issues involving communication (81.7%) and problems with hands or fingers (79.6%). Problems with communication and fatigue were the issues that were reported to have the greatest impact on childrens’ lives, while 24.1% of children reported cardiac disorders and 15.8% had problems with anesthesia. Interpretation: A range of symptoms contribute to the burden of disease faced by children with DM1. Many of these symptoms are under-recognized

Atropselective syntheses of (-) and (+) rugulotrosin A utilizing point-to-axial chirality transfer

Chiral, dimeric natural products containing complex structures and interesting biological properties have inspired chemists and biologists for decades. A seven-step total synthesis of the axially chiral, dimeric tetrahydroxanthone natural product rugulotrosin A is described. The synthesis employs a one-pot Suzuki coupling/dimerization to generate the requisite 2,2'-biaryl linkage. Highly selective point-to-axial chirality transfer was achieved using palladium catalysis with achiral phosphine ligands. Single X-ray crystal diffraction data were obtained to confirm both the atropisomeric configuration and absolute stereochemistry of rugulotrosin A. Computational studies are described to rationalize the atropselectivity observed in the key dimerization step. Comparison of the crude fungal extract with synthetic rugulotrosin A and its atropisomer verified that nature generates a single atropisomer of the natural product.P50 GM067041 - NIGMS NIH HHS; R01 GM099920 - NIGMS NIH HHS; GM-067041 - NIGMS NIH HHS; GM-099920 - NIGMS NIH HH

The Case for a Muon Collider Higgs Factory

We propose the construction of a compact Muon Collider Higgs Factory. Such a machine can produce up to \sim 14,000 at 8\times 10^{31} cm^-2 sec^-1 clean Higgs events per year, enabling the most precise possible measurement of the mass, width and Higgs-Yukawa coupling constants.Comment: Supporting letter for the document: "Muon Collider Higgs Factory for Smowmass 2013", A White Paper submitted to the 2013 U.S. Community Summer Study of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, Y. Alexahin, et. al, FERMILAB-CONF-13-245-T (July, 2013