21,139 research outputs found
Safety and the flying doctor
Interest, curiosity, or dismay—which feeling predominates when we learn from BBC Newsnight that our NHS employs doctors who commute from Poland to cover the out of hours duties that local GPs are unable to work because they are too tired at night? Is it interest in an innovative solution for modern pan-European healthcare provision, curiosity in discovering huge variations in the standard of living across the medical profession in an open Europe, or dismay that the government’s emphasis, that healthcare practice should be based on the best scientific evidence, is little more than lip service?
Working continuously for a long time, particularly at night, increases the risk of making errors and causing injury, which is why many professions limit the number of hours of continuous duty. These risks also apply to the medical profession: tired doctors make mistakes that harm patients (N Engl J Med 2004;351:1838-48) and themselve
Syllable classification using static matrices and prosodic features
In this paper we explore the usefulness of prosodic features for
syllable classification. In order to do this, we represent the
syllable as a static analysis unit such that its acoustic-temporal
dynamics could be merged into a set of features that the SVM
classifier will consider as a whole. In the first part of our
experiment we used MFCC as features for classification,
obtaining a maximum accuracy of 86.66%. The second part of
our study tests whether the prosodic information is
complementary to the cepstral information for syllable
classification. The results obtained show that combining the
two types of information does improve the classification, but
further analysis is necessary for a more successful
combination of the two types of features
Non-adiabatic Kohn-anomaly in a doped graphene monolayer
We compute, from first-principles, the frequency of the E2g, Gamma phonon
(Raman G-band) of graphene, as a function of the charge doping. Calculations
are done using i) the adiabatic Born-Oppenheimer approximation and ii)
time-dependent perturbation theory to explore dynamic effects beyond this
approximation. The two approaches provide very different results. While, the
adiabatic phonon frequency weakly depends on the doping, the dynamic one
rapidly varies because of a Kohn anomaly. The adiabatic approximation is
considered valid in most materials. Here, we show that doped graphene is a
spectacular example where this approximation miserably fails.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Accepted by Phys. Rev. Let
NASTRAN application for the prediction of aircraft interior noise
The application of a structural-acoustic analogy within the NASTRAN finite element program for the prediction of aircraft interior noise is presented. Some refinements of the method, which reduce the amount of computation required for large, complex structures, are discussed. Also, further improvements are proposed and preliminary comparisons with structural and acoustic modal data obtained for a large, composite cylinder are presented
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