A software tool for simulating practical chemistry

A software package has been written to allow a user to build and manipulate a simple chemistry experiment. Using a toolbox of equipment the apparatus can be interactively designed and the necessary chemicals added from a database. Selection of the appropriate physical and reaction conditions allows the experiment to be run both in real and virtual time, snapshots of the experiment being stored for subsequent modification and replay. The structure of the reaction data file allows any reaction to be designed with yields and both forward and backward reaction rates. Thus, the user has the opportunity to experiment with the best apparatus layout, reactant composition and physical conditions in order to achieve an optimal result. Some extensions of the current software are discussed

Ultrasonic study of the gelation of gelatin: phase diagram, hysteresis and kinetics

We map the ultrasonic (8 MHz) speed and attenuation of edible-grade gelatin in water, exploring the key dependencies on temperature, concentration and time. The ultrasonic signatures of the sol-gel transition, confirmed by rheological measurements, and incomplete gel formation at low concentrations, enable a phase diagram of the system to be constructed. Sensitivity is also demonstrated to the kinetics of gel formation and melting, and associated hysteresis effects upon cyclic temperature sweeps. Furthermore, simple acoustic models of the sol and gel state enable estimation of the speed of sound and compressibility of gelatin. Our results demonstrate the potential of ultrasonic measurements to characterise the structure and visco-elasticity of gelatin hydrogels.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

Probing the Information Encoded in X-vectors

Deep neural network based speaker embeddings, such as x-vectors, have been shown to perform well in text-independent speaker recognition/verification tasks. In this paper, we use simple classifiers to investigate the contents encoded by x-vector embeddings. We probe these embeddings for information related to the speaker, channel, transcription (sentence, words, phones), and meta information about the utterance (duration and augmentation type), and compare these with the information encoded by i-vectors across a varying number of dimensions. We also study the effect of data augmentation during extractor training on the information captured by x-vectors. Experiments on the RedDots data set show that x-vectors capture spoken content and channel-related information, while performing well on speaker verification tasks.Comment: Accepted at IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) 201

The power of linked data: Evaluating diverse multi-program projects designed to reduce welfare dependence

This presentation showcases the innovative use of linked government administrative data in Australia to evaluate a range of diverse social interventions aimed at supporting vulnerable groups to achieve economic independence. The interventions were developed and funded as part of the Australian Priority Investment Approach to Welfare, an approach supported by actuarial analyses of administrative data designed to deliver targeted support for groups at-risk of long-term welfare dependence. In 2018, the Australian Government, commissioned an impact evaluation to assess the effectiveness of the approach in achieving its intended outcomes. The evaluation is based on analyses of linked administrative data to assess the extent to which the new interventions enabled pathways out of welfare dependence. Our presentation will outline the strengths and weaknesses of using government administrative data to evaluate the outcomes. Strengths include easy comparison across diverse programs designed to achieve the same goals; reduced respondent reporting burdens; robust quasi-experimental techniques such as a matching design based on exact matching on a few key characteristics and/or propensity score matching on a broad range of pre-program characteristics; and evidence-based investment practice decisions. Weaknesses include the adoption of an observational rather than experimental design and the lack of information on some social characteristics such as orientations to work, attitudes and social values. The presentation not only assesses the compilation of administrative data used for the first time to evaluate multi-program projects, it will also describe how these data feed into visual interactive dashboards used to monitor the outcomes of the interventions

(Invited) towards a vertical and damage free post-etch InGaAs fin profile: dry etch processing, sidewall damage assessment and mitigation options

Based on current projections, III-Vs are expected to replace Si as the n-channel solution in FinFETs at the 7nm technology node. The realisation of III-V FinFETs entails top-down fabrication via dry etch techniques. Vertical fins in conjunction with high quality sidewall MOS interfaces are required for high-performance logic devices. This, however, is difficult to achieve with dry etching. Highly anisotropic etching required of vertical fins is concomitant with increased damage to the sidewalls, resulting in the quality of the sidewall MOS interface being compromised. In this work, we address this challenge in two stages by first undertaking a systematic investigation of dry etch processing for fin formation, with the aim of obtaining high resolution fins with vertical sidewalls and clean etch surfaces. In the second stage, dry etch process optimisation and post-etch sidewall passivation schemes are explored to mitigate the damage arising from anisotropic etching required for the realisation of vertical fins

The Influence of Sequence Variability and Dimerization on Mannose Binding in Monocot Mannose Binding Lectins

Abstract Motivation. A model of the lectin from Aloe arborescens was built by homology modeling. Docking studies with mannose were performed on this model and the known crystal structures of monocot mannose binding lectins from snowdrop and garlic. On the basis of these results association of monomers to form dimers is found to be necessary for successful binding of mannose by site III of these lectins, by providing the fourth strand of the -sheet that is a supporting edge for the site. From an analysis of the carbohydrate binding sites (I, II and III) of the above lectins and the docking studies, the mannose binding site I of aloe lectin is predicted to retain the ability to bind mannose with all of the key residues involved in binding unchanged. Site II and III lose residues specific for hydrogen bonding and are predicted to be unable to bind mannose. Aloe lectin monomers are shown to be able to associate as dimers but docking is still unsuccessful in site III. Method. Protein homology modeling and AutoDock docking studies were used in this study. Results. A homology model of aloe lectin was created by both manual and automatic methods and its ability to bind the natural substrate mannose was assessed by docking studies using the genetic algorithm approach in the AutoDock program. The results of the docking studies were correlated with those on lectins for which X-ray crystal data is known and rationalized in terms of specific mutations in the aloe lectin binding sites. Conclusions. Aloe lectin is predicted to be able to bind mannose in its site I binding site, unable to bind in site II because of key residue mutations and also unable to bind in site III

Geochemical compositional controls on DNA strand breaks induced in in vitro cell-free assays by crushed rock powders from the Panasqueira mine area, Portugal

From Springer Nature via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2019-12-15, accepted 2020-06-24, registration 2020-06-24, pub-electronic 2020-07-09, online 2020-07-09, pub-print 2021-07Publication status: PublishedFunder: Saudi Arabia Cultural Bureau in London; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100012363Abstract: DNA strand breaks are a common form of DNA damage that can contribute to chromosomal instability or gene mutations. Such strand breaks may be caused by exposure to heavy metals. The aim of this study was to assess the level of DNA strand breaks caused by µm-scale solid particles of known chemical composition with elevated heavy metals/metalloids, notably arsenic, using an in vitro cell-free DNA plasmid scission assay. These samples were incubated with and without H2O2 to see whether damage occurs directly or indirectly through the Fenton reaction. Levels of DNA damage in the absence of H2O2 were < 10%, but in the presence of H2O2, all samples showed higher levels of damage ranging from 10 to 100% suggesting that damage was being incurred through the Fenton reaction. Using bivariate correlation analysis and multiple linear regression, manganese oxide (MnO), sulphur (S), copper (Cu), and zinc (Zn) concentrations in the particulates were found to be the most significant predictors of DNA damage. The mechanism of this DNA damage formation has yet to be thoroughly investigated but is hypothesised to be due to reactive oxygen species formation. Further work is required to assess the extent of contribution of reactive oxygen species to this DNA damage, but this study highlights the potential role of chemistry and/or mineralogy to the extent and/or nature of DNA damage caused by particulates

Quantifying the value of pronunciation lexicons for keyword search in low resource languages

ABSTRACT This paper quantifies the value of pronunciation lexicons in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) systems that support keyword search (KWS) in low resource languages. Stateof-the-art LVCSR and KWS systems are developed for conversational telephone speech in Tagalog, and the baseline lexicon is augmented via three different grapheme-to-phoneme models that yield increasing coverage of a large Tagalog word-list. It is demonstrated that while the increased lexical coverage -or reduced out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rate -leads to only modest (ca 1%-4%) improvements in word error rate, the concomitant improvements in actual term weighted value are as much as 60%. It is also shown that incorporating the augmented lexicons into the LVCSR system before indexing speech is superior to using them post facto, e.g., for approximate phonetic matching of OOV keywords in pre-indexed lattices. These results underscore the disproportionate importance of automatic lexicon augmentation for KWS in morphologically rich languages, and advocate for using them early in the LVCSR stage. Index Terms-Speech Recognition, Keyword Search, Information Retrieval, Morphology, Speech Synthesis LOW-RESOURCE KEYWORD SEARCH Thanks in part to the falling costs of storage and transmission, large volumes of speech such as oral history archives [1, 2] and on-line lectures We are interested in improving KWS performance in a low resource setting, i.e. where some resources are available to develop The authors, listed here in alphabetical order, were supported by DARPA BOLT contract Nō HR0011-12-C-0015, and IARPA BABEL contract Nō W911NF-12-C-0015. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. Disclaimer: The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of DARPA, IARPA, DoD/ARL or the U.S. Government. an LVCSR system -such as 10 hours of transcribed speech corresponding to about 100K words of transcribed text, and a pronunciation lexicon that covers the words in the training data -but accuracy is sufficiently low that considerable improvement in KWS performance is necessary before the system is usable for searching a speech collection. A fair amount of past research has been devoted to improving the acoustic models from un-transcribed speech The importance of pronunciation lexicons for LVCSR is not entirely underestimated. Several papers have addressed the problem of automatically generating pronunciations for out of vocabulary (OOV) words Two notable exceptions to this conventional wisdom are (i) accuracy on infrequent, content-bearing words, which are more likely to be OOV, and (ii) accuracy in morphologically rich languages, e.g. Czech and Turkish. These exceptions come together in a detrimental fashion when developing KWS systems for a morphologically rich, low resource language such as Tagalog. This is the setting in which we will quantify the impact of increasing lexical coverage on the performance of a KWS system. We assume a transcribed corpus of 10 hours of Tagalog conversational telephone speech We first develop state-of-the-art LVCSR and KWS systems based on the given resources. We process and index a 10 hour search collection using the KWS system, and measure KWS performance using a set of 355 Tagalog queries. We then explore three different methods for augmenting the 5.7K word lexicon to include additional words seen in the larger LM training corpus. The augmented lexicons are used to improve the KWS system in two different ways: reprocessing the speech with the larger lexicon, or using it during keyword search. The efficacy of the augmented lexicons is measured in terms of 8560 978-1-4799-0356-6/13/$31.0

The impact of forming gas annealing on the electrical characteristics of sulfur passivated Al2O3/In0.53Ga0.47As (110) metal-oxide-semiconductor capacitors

This study reports the impact of forming gas annealing (FGA) on the electrical characteristics of sulfur passivated, atomic layer deposited Al2O3 gate dielectrics deposited on (110) oriented n- and p-doped In0.53Ga0.47 As layers metal-oxide-semiconductor capacitors (MOSCAPs). In combination, these approaches enable significant Fermi level movement through the bandgap of both n- and p-doped In0.53Ga0.47 As (110) MOSCAPs. A midgap interface trap density (Dit) value in the range 0.87−1.8×1012 cm−2eV−10.87−1.8×1012 cm−2eV−1 is observed from the samples studied. Close to the conduction band edge, a Dit value of 3.1×1011 cm−2eV−13.1×1011 cm−2eV−1 is obtained. These data indicate the combination of sulfur pre-treatment and FGA is advantageous in passivating trap states in the upper half of the bandgap of (110) oriented In0.53Ga0.47 As. This is further demonstrated by a reduction in border trap density in the n-type In0.53Ga0.47 As (110) MOSCAPs from 1.8×1012 cm−21.8×1012 cm−2 to 5.3×1011 cm−25.3×1011 cm−2 as a result of the FGA process. This is in contrast to the observed increase in border trap density after FGA from 7.3×1011 cm−27.3×1011 cm−2 to 1.4×1012 cm−21.4×1012 cm−2 in p-type In0.53Ga0.47 As (110) MOSCAPs, which suggest FGA is not as effective in passsivating states close to the valence band edge