Intelligibility of one\u27s own speech relative to the speech of others

This paper reviews a speech intelligibility experiment using the same subjects as both talkers and listeners

Surprising Subscriptions: How Electronic Journal Publishing Has Affected the Partnership Among Subscription Agents, Publishers and Librarians

This compilation is a mixture of papers submitted by speakers and text derived from notes taken by the moderator and Mary Hawks of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Library and has been reviewed by the participants

Platyceroidini, a new tribe of North American stag beetles(Coleoptera: Lucanidae: Lucaninae)

The tribe Platyceroidini is created to accommodate two genera of North American stag beetles, Platyceroides Benesh and Platyceropsis Benesh (Lucanidae: Lucaninae). These genera are removed from the tribe Platycerini Mulsant

Motion Planning for a Continuum Robotic Mobile Lamp: Navigating the Configuration Space to Assist with Aging in Place

For a robot to operate autonomously, it must have a method of planning its motion through its environment without the explicit guiding control of a human operator. In this thesis, a new approach was implemented to plan a collision-path for a mobile robot featuring a novel continuum arm. We consider motion planning in the configuration spaces of robots containing continuum elements. The configuration space structure of extensible continuum sections was first analyzed, with practical constraints unique to continuum elements identified. The results were applied to generate the configuration space of a hybrid continuum lamp/mobile base robot developed as a part of a wider project aimed at robots in the home to assist aging-in-place. A conventional motion planning (Rapidly-exploring Random Tree search, RRT/A*) approach was subsequently applied for the robot in the aging-in-place application scenario. The RRT generated complete paths through various environments and was successfully able to connect the start configuration to the goal configuration using the robot’s specific configuration space. Once the RRT completed, an A* search algorithm was run on the graph and the optimal path was found. This path, consisting of series of actions necessary for the robot to move from configuration to configuration, was then communicated to two generations of robot hardware using a local wireless network. The robots then executed the actions and moved through the environment

Introgression Makes Waves in Inferred Histories of Effective Population Size

Human populations have a complex history of introgression and of changing population size. Human genetic variation has been affected by both these processes, so that inference of past population size depends upon the pattern of gene flow and introgression among past populations. One remarkable aspect of human population history as inferred from genetics is a consistent “wave” of larger effective population size, found in both African and non-African populations, that appears to reflect events prior to the last 100,000 years. Here I carry out a series of simulations to investigate how introgression and gene flow from genetically divergent ancestral populations affect the inference of ancestral effective population size. Both introgression and gene flow from an extinct, genetically divergent population consistently produce a wave in the history of inferred effective population size. The time and amplitude of the wave reflect the time of origin of the genetically divergent ancestral populations and the strength of introgression or gene flow. These results demonstrate that even small fractions of introgression or gene flow from ancient populations may have visible effects on the inference of effective population size