We, the Judges, and the Environment

This is the text of a speech given at the International Symposium on Environmental Courts and Tribunals, hosted by Pace Law School and the International Judicial Institute for Environmental Adjudication (IJIEA), on April 1, 2011, in White Plains, New York. Any annotations to the text of this speech have been added by the author in connection with its publication in this Special Edition

Teaching the nature of science: Practices and associated factors

This exploratory study investigated the extent and manner that former ISU-STEP students implemented the nature of science (NOS), and potential factors associated with their varying levels of NOS implementation. Thirteen teachers from the ISU-STEP participated in this study. All of the participants completed the nature of science in science education course at ISU, and were in at least in their second year of professional practice. A naturalistic inquiry approach was employed in this study and data sources included teaching observations, classroom artifacts, questionnaires, and interviews. Evidence from this study indicates factors associated with teachers\u27 NOS implementation levels include their implementation of reform-based practices, self reflection abilities, considerations of how people learn, understanding of NOS teaching, perceived utility value for NOS teaching, level of responsibility to implement reform-based and NOS teaching practices, and coping strategies in response to teaching constraints. Furthermore, teachers who implemented the NOS at moderate or high levels interacted with one another forming a kind of informal support network which resulted in a higher level of responsibility to accurately and effectively teach the NOS. Recommendations for pre and inservice science teacher professional development include: (1) ensuring sufficient opportunities to understand and reflect upon the NOS and effective NOS teaching through focused coursework and practical experiences; (2) facilitating the internalization of the importance and utility value of NOS instruction; (3) explicitly addressing how to effectively cope with teaching constrains; and (4) facilitating the development of support networks and co-generated responsibility to teach the NOS

Revisiting speech segmentation and lexicon learning with better features

We revisit a self-supervised method that segments unlabelled speech into word-like segments. We start from the two-stage duration-penalised dynamic programming method that performs zero-resource segmentation without learning an explicit lexicon. In the first acoustic unit discovery stage, we replace contrastive predictive coding features with HuBERT. After word segmentation in the second stage, we get an acoustic word embedding for each segment by averaging HuBERT features. These embeddings are clustered using K-means to get a lexicon. The result is good full-coverage segmentation with a lexicon that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ZeroSpeech benchmarks.Comment: 2 page

Intratympanic steroids as a salvage therapy for severe to profound idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss

Background: Idiopathic sudden sensorineural hearing loss (ISSNHL) is defined as a decline in hearing affecting three or more frequencies by 30 dB Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the results of intratympanic steroids as a salvage treatment for severe ISSNHL. Materials and methods: A regimen of three IT steroid injections was offered to patients who failed a 7-days intravenous steroid treatment. Eighty-four patients underwent IT salvage treatment (IT group). Their outcomes were compared with those of 255 patients with severe ISSNHL who received the same intravenous steroid regimen without salvage IT steroid therapy (Control group). Results: 56% of the patients in the IT group had a hearing improvement of >15 dB after one month. The average hearing improvements were 26.5 ± 28 dB and 27.9 ± 24 dB in the IT group and the Control group, respectively (p ¼ .67). However, patients with a type E audiogram pattern (total deafness), displayed a substantial hearing gain. Conclusion: Intratympanic steroids failed to show a global auditory benefit as a salvage treatment in patients with severe ISSNHL. Significance: Our data suggest that a salvage treatment with intratympanic dexamethasone may be offered to patients with total deafness for whom the first systemic treatment has failed

Voice Conversion With Just Nearest Neighbors

Any-to-any voice conversion aims to transform source speech into a target voice with just a few examples of the target speaker as a reference. Recent methods produce convincing conversions, but at the cost of increased complexity -- making results difficult to reproduce and build on. Instead, we keep it simple. We propose k-nearest neighbors voice conversion (kNN-VC): a straightforward yet effective method for any-to-any conversion. First, we extract self-supervised representations of the source and reference speech. To convert to the target speaker, we replace each frame of the source representation with its nearest neighbor in the reference. Finally, a pretrained vocoder synthesizes audio from the converted representation. Objective and subjective evaluations show that kNN-VC improves speaker similarity with similar intelligibility scores to existing methods. Code, samples, trained models: https://bshall.github.io/knn-vcComment: 5 page, 1 table, 2 figures. Accepted at Interspeech 202

Visually grounded few-shot word acquisition with fewer shots

We propose a visually grounded speech model that acquires new words and their visual depictions from just a few word-image example pairs. Given a set of test images and a spoken query, we ask the model which image depicts the query word. Previous work has simplified this problem by either using an artificial setting with digit word-image pairs or by using a large number of examples per class. We propose an approach that can work on natural word-image pairs but with less examples, i.e. fewer shots. Our approach involves using the given word-image example pairs to mine new unsupervised word-image training pairs from large collections of unlabelled speech and images. Additionally, we use a word-to-image attention mechanism to determine word-image similarity. With this new model, we achieve better performance with fewer shots than any existing approach.Comment: Accepted at Interspeech 202

Correlation of Cooling Data from an Air-Cooled Cylinder and Several Multicylinder Engines

The theory of engine-cylinder cooling developed in a previous report was further substantiated by data obtained on a cylinder from a Wright r-1820-g engine. Equations are presented for the average head and barrel temperatures of this cylinder as functions of the engine and the cooling conditions. These equations are utilized to calculate the variation in cylinder temperature with altitude for level flight and climb. A method is presented for correlating average head and barrel temperatures and temperatures at individual points on the head and the barrel obtained on the test stand and in flight. The method is applied to the correlation and the comparison of data obtained on a number of service engines. Data are presented showing the variation of cylinder temperature with time when the power and the cooling pressure drop are suddenly changed

Disturbances in the Arizona Monsoon

Numerical modeling simulations of tropical squall lines were begun to determine the role of large scale terrain features over Arizona and Mexico in their initiation and propagation. Installation was completed for a short-base, high resolution lightning location and detection network in and around Tucson. Data from a Doppler wind profiler is being analyzed to determine the role of large scale heating over the inter-mountain plateau region in governing local diurnal wind variations and possible relationships to the monsoon flow. The portable solar photometer for determining high temporal resolution values of the local precipitable water vapor was completed and calibrated. The assembly is nearly completed for a multi-channel microwave passive radiometer to determine local temperature and water vapor profiles