A Compact and Discriminative Feature Based on Auditory Summary Statistics for Acoustic Scene Classification

One of the biggest challenges of acoustic scene classification (ASC) is to find proper features to better represent and characterize environmental sounds. Environmental sounds generally involve more sound sources while exhibiting less structure in temporal spectral representations. However, the background of an acoustic scene exhibits temporal homogeneity in acoustic properties, suggesting it could be characterized by distribution statistics rather than temporal details. In this work, we investigated using auditory summary statistics as the feature for ASC tasks. The inspiration comes from a recent neuroscience study, which shows the human auditory system tends to perceive sound textures through time-averaged statistics. Based on these statistics, we further proposed to use linear discriminant analysis to eliminate redundancies among these statistics while keeping the discriminative information, providing an extreme com-pact representation for acoustic scenes. Experimental results show the outstanding performance of the proposed feature over the conventional handcrafted features.Comment: Accepted as a conference paper of Interspeech 201

Effects of Intermittent Lighting on Breeder Chicks Provided with In-Transit Nutrients

In-transit supply of nutrients and water supplement is essential to maintaining good chick quality and well-being during long, international shipments. Although chicks require light to promote ingestion of nutrients, supply of continuous in-transit lighting is impractical. This study compared four intermittent lighting regimens of 1L:5D, 5L:10D,10L:10D, and 5L:15D applied to a three-day simulated transport period with regard to chick performance and energetics during the treatment period and a four-day subsequent growth period. The four lighting regimens produced similar seven-day chick performance, although chicks under 10L:10D had a somewhat higher body mass loss and metabolic rate than birds in other regimens during the three-day treatment period (P \u3c 0.05). The results suggest the existence of flexibility in providing in-transit lighting for shipping chicks. Significant differences in the heat and moisture production rate of the chicks were observed between light and dark periods, with the response values being 21 to 27% lower in the dark period than in the light period. The results further suggest that chicks in transit would benefit the most from sufficient lighting to ingest necessary nutrients but then remaining in darkness to conserve body energy

Acoustic Scene Classification by Implicitly Identifying Distinct Sound Events

In this paper, we propose a new strategy for acoustic scene classification (ASC) , namely recognizing acoustic scenes through identifying distinct sound events. This differs from existing strategies, which focus on characterizing global acoustical distributions of audio or the temporal evolution of short-term audio features, without analysis down to the level of sound events. To identify distinct sound events for each scene, we formulate ASC in a multi-instance learning (MIL) framework, where each audio recording is mapped into a bag-of-instances representation. Here, instances can be seen as high-level representations for sound events inside a scene. We also propose a MIL neural networks model, which implicitly identifies distinct instances (i.e., sound events). Furthermore, we propose two specially designed modules that model the multi-temporal scale and multi-modal natures of the sound events respectively. The experiments were conducted on the official development set of the DCASE2018 Task1 Subtask B, and our best-performing model improves over the official baseline by 9.4% (68.3% vs 58.9%) in terms of classification accuracy. This study indicates that recognizing acoustic scenes by identifying distinct sound events is effective and paves the way for future studies that combine this strategy with previous ones.Comment: code URL typo, code is available at https://github.com/hackerekcah/distinct-events-asc.gi

The progenitors of type Ia supernovae in the semidetached binaries with red giant donors

Context. The companions of the exploding carbon-oxygen white dwarfs (CO WDs) for producing type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) are still not conclusively confirmed. A red-giant (RG) star has been suggested to be the mass donor of the exploding WD, named as the symbiotic channel. However, previous studies on the this channel gave a relatively low rate of SNe Ia. Aims. We aim to systematically investigate the parameter space, Galactic rates and delay time distributions of SNe Ia from the symbiotic channel by employing a revised mass-transfer prescription. Methods. We adopted an integrated mass-transfer prescription to calculate the mass-transfer process from a RG star onto the WD. In this prescription, the mass-transfer rate varies with the local material states. Results. We evolved a large number of WD+RG systems, and found that the parameter space of WD+RG systems for producing SNe Ia is significantly enlarged. This channel could produce SNe Ia with intermediate and old ages, contributing to at most 5% of all SNe Ia in the Galaxy. Our model increases the SN Ia rate from this channel by a factor of 5. We suggest that the symbiotic systems RS Oph and T CrB are strong candidates for the progenitors of SNe Ia.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

A01: A Pilot Study of Student Cadres Mental Health at a Sport University During COVID-19

Purpose: Over 90% of college students have experienced negative mental health symptoms due to the pandemic, according to a survey from BestColleges.com. More than half (54%) of college students believe COVID-19 circumstances have impacted their mental health. Although the pandemic\u27s influence on mental health expanded, not all students have felt its effects to the same degree. Physical activity has been reported to have many physical and mental health benefits. Students at sport universities tend to participate in more sport and physical activity. During the pandemic, student cadres are expected to take more responsibilities such as coordinating COVID-19 tests and interacting with more students. The purpose of this study was to examine the mental health of student cadres at a sport university in southwest China. Methods: Literature research, field observation and a survey questionnaire were used in this study. Forty college student cadres were surveyed from a sport university in Sichuan province. The Self-rating Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90) scale was used to estimate the mental status of students. A total of 33 surveys were returned with 29 valid samples were analyzed. Among the samples there were 13 males and 16 females with an average age of 19.62. The results were compared with general college students’ mental health reported in the literature. Results: According to a recent systematic review by meta-analysis, the anxiety prevalence was 33% in Asia, 51% in Europe, and 56% in the USA. University students have a high prevalence of anxiety, indicating an increased mental health burden during this pandemic. Only 6.9% of student cadres in this study showed anxiety symptoms. According to the SLC-90 score, compared with the documented normal mental health rate (62.2%) in the literature, the survey found 79.31% of sport university student cadres are in a normal mental health status. Conclusion: COVID-19 pandemic has impacted college students’ mental health. However, the student cadres of the sport university had a higher rate of normal mental health than the average rate reported in the literature, even though they had more responsibility and risks of being exposed to positive cases. It indicates sport and physical activity may reduce the mental health impact caused by the pandemic

Target-organ specificity of autoimmunity is modified by thymic stroma and bone marrow-derived cells

Physical contact between thymocytes and the thymic stroma is essential for the establishment of self-tolerance, and Aire in thymic epithelial cells plays an important role in this action. As expected, the autoimmune phenotypes of Aire-deficient mice are thymic stroma-dependent. Interestingly, the spectrum of the organs involved differs depending on the genetic background of non-autoimmune-prone mouse strains. Furthermore, deficiency of Aire in an autoimmune-prone strain of NOD also modifies target-cell specificity in the pancreas. In order to clarify the factors that regulate target-organ specificity in Aire-dependent autoimmunity, I have generated both thymic and bone-marrow chimeras, making it possible to evaluate the contribution of thymic stroma and bone-marrow-derived cells to this pathogenic process. The findings suggested that the genetic background of bone-marrow-derived cells contributes to the strain-dependent target-organ specificity of non-autoimmune-prone strains. Furthermore, in a study using NOD mice with a fixed genetic background, thymic stromal cells but not bone-marrow- derived cells were found to be relevant to the Aire-dependent alteration of target-cell specificity in the pancreas. These results clearly underscore the significance of immunological and/or genetic complexity that underlies Aire-deficiency monogenic disease together with critical dialogue between thymic stroma and bone-marrow-derived cells in the organized thymic microenvironment

Numerical Simulation of the Effect of Structural Stress Field on Stability of Surrounding Rock in Coal Seam Roadway

AbstractTo research the effect of structural stress field on the stability of rock surrounding underground roadways, Phase2 software was used in the numerical simulation analysis of the stability of underground roadway in different location in the structural stress field. It is concluded that the stability of underground roadways in axis of syncline are poorer than in wings of syncline. Therefore, it is proposed that, in underground roadways configuration, we should base the appearance regularity of field stress, and prevent roadways arranged in the axis of syncline

Energy Losses and Voltage Stability Study in Distribution Network with Distributed Generation

With the distributed generation technology widely applied, some system problems such as overvoltages and undervoltages are gradually remarkable, which are caused by distributed generations like wind energy system (WES) and photovoltaic system (PVS) because of their probabilistic output power which relied on natural conditions. Since the impacts of WES and PVS are important in the distribution system voltage quality, we study these in this paper using new models with the probability density function of node voltage and the cumulative distribution function of total losses. We apply these models to solve the IEEE33 distribution system to be chosen in IEEE standard database. We compare our method with the Monte Carlo simulation method in three different cases, respectively. In the three cases, these results not only can provide the important reference information for the next stage optimization design, system reliability, and safety analysis but also can reduce amount of calculation