Letter to John Butler and Eliza (Smith) Butler from Joseph Butler and Jane Butler

Joseph and Jane Butler send condolences for Berryman Murphy\u27s death, and describe sickness in Iowa

PERCEPTION OF ACCENTS AND DIALECTS IN ADULTS AND INFANTS

This thesis has been undertaken with the purpose of investigating how adult speech processing systems are affected by. and how they cope with, the presence of different regional and foreign accents in speech, and to investigate the developmental origins of adult accent perception capabilities. Experiments 1 to 4 were designed to investigate the long term effects of exposure to different accents, and whether short term adaptation to an accent was possible, using a lexical decision task. The results demonstrated an effect of accent familiarity but no short term adaptation was evident. Experiments 5 to 7 investigated the short term effects of accents by looking at the length of activation of accent-related information in working memory by using a cross-modal matching task. The results found that selective accent related effects were reduced after a 1500 millisecond delay. Experiments 8 to 11 investigated infants' discrimination abilities for regional and foreign accents using a preferential looking habituation method, and found infants at 5 and 7 months could discriminate their own accent from another, unfamiliar regional accent, but could not discriminate two unfamiliar regional accents at 5 months or a foreign accent from their own at 7 months. Experiments 12 and 13 investigated how accents affected infants' word segmentation abilities with continuous speech at 10 months, and found that segmentation was impaired in the presence of regional and foreign accents. Using these results, the Accent Training Model (ATP) is proposed, which attempts to explain how accent related indexical information is processed in the speech processing system. The findings of the infant studies further our understanding of the effect of indexicat variation in early speech perception

Letter to Brother and Sister from Joseph Butler

Joseph Butler describes the health of his family and his intention to move from Dutch Creek somewhere farther south. The letter mentions hearing from the family in Oregon, mostly about the war with the Indians

Letter to Brother and Sister from Joseph Butler

A letter from Joseph Butler discussing national political news of the next President and the Black Republicans. He mentions a visit from James Butler and a new baby in the family

Practical Hidden Voice Attacks against Speech and Speaker Recognition Systems

Voice Processing Systems (VPSes), now widely deployed, have been made significantly more accurate through the application of recent advances in machine learning. However, adversarial machine learning has similarly advanced and has been used to demonstrate that VPSes are vulnerable to the injection of hidden commands - audio obscured by noise that is correctly recognized by a VPS but not by human beings. Such attacks, though, are often highly dependent on white-box knowledge of a specific machine learning model and limited to specific microphones and speakers, making their use across different acoustic hardware platforms (and thus their practicality) limited. In this paper, we break these dependencies and make hidden command attacks more practical through model-agnostic (blackbox) attacks, which exploit knowledge of the signal processing algorithms commonly used by VPSes to generate the data fed into machine learning systems. Specifically, we exploit the fact that multiple source audio samples have similar feature vectors when transformed by acoustic feature extraction algorithms (e.g., FFTs). We develop four classes of perturbations that create unintelligible audio and test them against 12 machine learning models, including 7 proprietary models (e.g., Google Speech API, Bing Speech API, IBM Speech API, Azure Speaker API, etc), and demonstrate successful attacks against all targets. Moreover, we successfully use our maliciously generated audio samples in multiple hardware configurations, demonstrating effectiveness across both models and real systems. In so doing, we demonstrate that domain-specific knowledge of audio signal processing represents a practical means of generating successful hidden voice command attacks

Diamondback Terrapin Population Distribution and Nesting Areas in Coastal Georgia

The terrapin population range is small and the research is scarce. Surveil of the entire Georgia coast is the overarching goal of the research and the past four years have already resulted in 60% percent of the state completed and 1500 records accomplished. Coverage of the coastline will be continued in 2019 in the southernmost county, Cambden, and in 2020 completing the research in the northernmost county, Chathman. Diamondback terrapins are the only turtle to prefer brackish water habitats and are the first to be affected by sea level rising. Crab pots are a main factor in terrapin mortality. When they are collected, it is too late for the terrapin because they have already drowned (Butler and Heinrich 2007). Shoreline hardening makes it impossible for terrapins to journey onto land because they cannot cross the large rocks or cement walls. The work will be carried out utilizing a 16 foot Carolina skiff to navigate into rivers and creeks searching for evidence of terrapin presence. Capturing a live terrapin is not necessary. Evidence is found in the form of surfacing heads, intact and depredated nests, terrapin remains, live terrapins, and crawls (trails). One of the primary goals of the main conservation body of turtles; The Diamondback Terrapin Working Group (www.dtwg.org), is to identify the remaining locations of nesting and terrapin population so accurate management and categorization of terrapin information is carried out. We will create ARCGIS maps that illustrate geolocations reflecting our findings, and aid future researchers