Survivors\u27 Attainment of Life-Skills

Domestic Violence (DV), Human Trafficking (HT), and Sexual Assault (SA), otherwise known as power based personal violence, survivors’ lack life-skills to deal with the demands and challenges of everyday life. Community Solutions’ Solutions to Violence department, a non-profit agency serving survivors of SA, HT, and DV is actively assisting their clients with accessing community resources and advocating beside them through their journey to self-sufficiency. The contributing factors for the lack of life-skills are dependence on others, trauma, and lack of professional development opportunities. The consequences that arise from this issue for survivors are ongoing dependence on perpetrators, depression/anxiety, and poverty. This project was designed to create and implement an open self-sufficiency support group that ran for six weeks. The group touched on the topics of stress busters, SMART goals, healthy communication and relationships, and much more. After the sixth week, data from evaluations administered at the end of every session was collected. The findings indicated that the support group did, in fact, change the survivors\u27 lives and after the six weeks they had many tools to help them become self-sufficient. One of the participants commented after a session that she is very grateful and happy she attended the group. She stated that she now feels like she can conquer her trauma and be the self-sufficient woman she used to be. The Self-Sufficiency Group is recommended to continue in an ongoing loop and by properly evaluating the data, the workshops can be modified for the future if needed

An explicit relationship between time-domain noise correlation and spatial autocorrelation (SPAC) results

The success of recent ambient noise tomographic studies is now understood to arise due to cross-correlation properties documented in the acoustics community since the 1950s. However, despite the fact that Aki's 1957 spatial autocorrelation (SPAC) work yields identical analytical results to certain noise correlation results, the precise relationship between SPAC and time-domain cross-correlation remains not entirely transparent. Here, we present an explicit comparison of the two approaches and clarify that SPAC theory is indeed equivalent to the cross-correlation theory used for recent noise tomography studies. This equivalence allows theoretical work from each field to be applied to the other, and we illustrate a few examples of this

Beta-Lactamase Repressor BlaI Modulates Staphylococcus aureus Cathelicidin Antimicrobial Peptide Resistance and Virulence.

BlaI is a repressor of BlaZ, the beta-lactamase responsible for penicillin resistance in Staphylococcus aureus. Through screening a transposon library in S. aureus Newman for susceptibility to cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide, we discovered BlaI as a novel cathelicidin resistance factor. Additionally, through integrational mutagenesis in S. aureus Newman and MRSA Sanger 252 strains, we confirmed the role of BlaI in resistance to human and murine cathelidicin and showed that it contributes to virulence in human whole blood and murine infection models. We further demonstrated that BlaI could be a target for innate immune-based antimicrobial therapies; by removing BlaI through subinhibitory concentrations of 6-aminopenicillanic acid, we were able to sensitize S. aureus to LL-37 killing

Learning When to Speak: Latency and Quality Trade-offs for Simultaneous Speech-to-Speech Translation with Offline Models

Recent work in speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) has focused primarily on offline settings, where the full input utterance is available before any output is given. This, however, is not reasonable in many real-world scenarios. In latency-sensitive applications, rather than waiting for the full utterance, translations should be spoken as soon as the information in the input is present. In this work, we introduce a system for simultaneous S2ST targeting real-world use cases. Our system supports translation from 57 languages to English with tunable parameters for dynamically adjusting the latency of the output -- including four policies for determining when to speak an output sequence. We show that these policies achieve offline-level accuracy with minimal increases in latency over a Greedy (wait-$k$) baseline. We open-source our evaluation code and interactive test script to aid future SimulS2ST research and application development.Comment: To appear at INTERSPEECH 202

Implementation of a Community Emergency Security Alert System

Emergency alert and response is carried out in different ways around the world. Governments, corporate bodies and individuals take emergencies very seriously and continue to develop ingenious ways of responding to emergencies very swiftly. Most Urban areas have well-developed emergency response systems but this is not true of rural and sub-urban settlements. Security risk keeps increasing by the day due to rapid population growth. This is particularly true at the grassroots or community level. This paper proposes a very effective and economical way of alerting a community to all kinds of security emergencies. It incorporates the use of a mobile application that was codenamed “CEMAS” (Community Emergency Alarm System). The mobile application with a “Panic button” on it provides all inhabitants of the community with the means of triggering two SMS-activated central alarms. The first alarm is located at the community center and the second at the community police station. The central alarm system is activated by pressing the “Panic Button” whenever there is a security threat. The designed and implemented system worked satisfactorily well