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