Speech as a pilot input medium

The speech recognition system under development is a trainable pattern classifier based on a maximum-likelihood technique. An adjustable uncertainty threshold allows the rejection of borderline cases for which the probability of misclassification is high. The syntax of the command language spoken may be used as an aid to recognition, and the system adapts to changes in pronunciation if feedback from the user is available. Words must be separated by .25 second gaps. The system runs in real time on a mini-computer (PDP 11/10) and was tested on 120,000 speech samples from 10- and 100-word vocabularies. The results of these tests were 99.9% correct recognition for a vocabulary consisting of the ten digits, and 99.6% recognition for a 100-word vocabulary of flight commands, with a 5% rejection rate in each case. With no rejection, the recognition accuracies for the same vocabularies were 99.5% and 98.6% respectively

The disconnect between downtown revitalization plans and project implementation

This creative project examines the disconnect between downtown revitalization plans and project implementation. The project examines implementation strategies of redevelopment plans, the overall success of planning documents and the leadership that drives implementation of projects in three case study communities. Downtowns are important components to any community; therefore the creative project outlines the importance of revitalization in the twenty-first century. Several planning literature pieces examine the trends communities have followed that have led to the abandonment of their downtown core and further the strategies communities have used to redevelop downtowns. To determine if a disconnect exists between the success of a community’s downtown redevelopment plan and the implementation of revitalization projects, three communities with downtown redevelopment plans have been examined. An evaluation of on each community’s downtown redevelopment plan and project implementation was completed. The success of downtown plans in driving revitalization efforts were determined by using the criteria created by Lewis D. Hopkins (2003) addressed in the chapter titled “How Plans Work” in Time Saver Standards for Urban Design. The criteria outlined by Hopkins determined if the overall planning document was successful in creating outcomes and ultimately if the revitalization strategies helped initiate downtown revitalization. Through the evaluation of each community’s revitalization efforts, three important lessons were determined; the success of downtowns is really an indefinable measure since there are so many unquantifiable elements; it is up to the community, and ultimately community leaders to carry out the action steps in the plan; and it is the role of the planner to educate the community of the importance of implementation of planning documents.Thesis (M.U.R.P.)Department of Urban Plannin

A qualitative and quantitative methodology in interpreting the results of field toxicity survey.

Though ample evidence supports the detrimental effects of residual chlorine to many aquatic biota, the on-site response of macroinvertebrates has hitherto been little documented. Accordingly, year-long in-stream collections were undertaken to assess and characterize the response of the macroinvertebrate community inhabiting Lampson Brook, Belchertown, Massachusetts. Artificial substrates (limestone chips) were used in the data gathering and a new methodology, Wrona\u27s, was applied to the data analysis. One control station and four downstream stations extending for 3000 meters along the stream were established. All the macroinvertebrates captured at these stations were counted and identified to their lowest taxonomic group. These data were employed to evaluate several diversity indices as well as qualitative and quantitative community comparison indices. The implications of the respective mathematical formulae applied to biological collections were examined and revisions of certain of the formulae are proposed. The combination of density estimates, species richness, EPT value (a value derived from total identified species of Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera and Tricoptera), and a number of selected indices was chosen to describe the impact of chlorinated/non-chlorinated sewage. A list of macroinvertebrate species has been designated as chlorine sensitive/tolerant with the respective total residual chlorine (TRC) concentration. The results indicate that community comparison indices are more sensitive than diversity indices in measuring pollution effects. Community comparison indices, however, showed considerable variations in assessing the severity of the impact. The macroinvertebrate community structures of all the downstream stations were altered due to changes in environmental conditions with regard to all aspects of community parameters. The suspected causes of such disruption in aquatic macroinvertebrate community may be attributed to either the immediate impact of TRC in the water column at station 2 or the chronic effects of stable chlorinated by-products associated with the sediments at stations 3, 4, and 5. The level of impact with regard to each station is a matter of subjective definition as to which are the most important parameters in describing community structure. Different aspects of change in relation to water quality need to be further tested before imposing any judgement on the extent of impact at each station

Prosodic and Segmental Correlates of Spontaneous Dutch Speech in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease:A Pilot Study

This study investigates the acoustic correlates of prosody and vowel articulation in Dutch individuals with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). We compared prosodic and segmental acoustic measures in spontaneous monologues in PD patients to those in elderly healthy controls matched for age and gender. For the prosodic measurements of pitch variability, span and speech rate, we analysed fundamental frequency and intensity. For articulation measurements, the first two formants were calculated from Dutch corner vowels extracted from the speech signal. Results show a monopitch trend, reduced speech rate, centralization of the formant frequencies and reduced first formant variability in individuals with PD compared to control group

What is Salience?

A commonly used concept in linguistics is salience. Oftentimes it is used without definition, and the meaning of the concept is repeatedly assumed to be self-explanatory. The definitions that are provided may vary greatly from one operationalization of salience to the next. In order to find out whether it is possible to postulate an overarching working definition of linguistic salience that subsumes usage across linguistic subdomains, we review these different operationalizations of linguistic salience. This article focuses on salience in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, second-language acquisition (SLA), and semantics. In this article, we give an overview of how these fields operationalize salience. Finally, we discuss correlations and contradictions between the different operationalizations

Evolving Plasticity for Autonomous Learning under Changing Environmental Conditions

A fundamental aspect of learning in biological neural networks is the plasticity property which allows them to modify their configurations during their lifetime. Hebbian learning is a biologically plausible mechanism for modeling the plasticity property in artificial neural networks (ANNs), based on the local interactions of neurons. However, the emergence of a coherent global learning behavior from local Hebbian plasticity rules is not very well understood. The goal of this work is to discover interpretable local Hebbian learning rules that can provide autonomous global learning. To achieve this, we use a discrete representation to encode the learning rules in a finite search space. These rules are then used to perform synaptic changes, based on the local interactions of the neurons. We employ genetic algorithms to optimize these rules to allow learning on two separate tasks (a foraging and a prey-predator scenario) in online lifetime learning settings. The resulting evolved rules converged into a set of well-defined interpretable types, that are thoroughly discussed. Notably, the performance of these rules, while adapting the ANNs during the learning tasks, is comparable to that of offline learning methods such as hill climbing.Comment: Evolutionary Computation Journa