A High Quality Text-To-Speech System Composed of Multiple Neural Networks

While neural networks have been employed to handle several different text-to-speech tasks, ours is the first system to use neural networks throughout, for both linguistic and acoustic processing. We divide the text-to-speech task into three subtasks, a linguistic module mapping from text to a linguistic representation, an acoustic module mapping from the linguistic representation to speech, and a video module mapping from the linguistic representation to animated images. The linguistic module employs a letter-to-sound neural network and a postlexical neural network. The acoustic module employs a duration neural network and a phonetic neural network. The visual neural network is employed in parallel to the acoustic module to drive a talking head. The use of neural networks that can be retrained on the characteristics of different voices and languages affords our system a degree of adaptability and naturalness heretofore unavailable.Comment: Source link (9812006.tar.gz) contains: 1 PostScript file (4 pages) and 3 WAV audio files. If your system does not support Windows WAV files, try a tool like "sox" to translate the audio into a format of your choic

The Wrong Kind of Lean: Over-Commitment and Under-Represented Skills on Technology Teams

This paper reports on results from five companies in the aerospace and automotive industries to show that over-commitment of technical professionals and under-representation of key skills on technology development and transition teams seriously impairs team performance. The research finds that 40 percent of the projects studied were inadequately staffed, resulting in weaker team communications and alignment. Most importantly, the weak staffing on these teams is found to be associated with a doubling of project failure rate to reach full production. Those weakly staffed teams that did successfully insert technology into production systems were also much more likely than other teams to have development delays and late engineering changes. The conclusion suggests that the expense of project failure, delay and late engineering changes in these companies must greatly out-weigh the savings gained from reduced staffing costs, and that this problem is likely going to be found in other technology-intensive firms intent on seeing project budgets as a cost to be minimized rather than an investment to be maximized

The Effect of Dietary Supplementation with Spent Cider Yeast on the Swine Distal Gut Microbiome

peer-reviewedBackground: There is an increasing need for alternatives to antibiotics for promoting animal health, given the increasing problems associated with antibiotic resistance. In this regard, we evaluated spent cider yeast as a potential probiotic for modifying the gut microbiota in weanling pigs using pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA gene libraries. Methodology and Principal Findings: Piglets aged 24–26 days were assigned to one of two study groups; control (n = 12) and treatment (n = 12). The control animals were fed with a basal diet and the treatment animals were fed with basal diet in combination with cider yeast supplement (500 ml cider yeast containing ,7.6 log CFU/ml) for 21 days. Faecal samples were collected for 16s rRNA gene compositional analysis. 16S rRNA compositional sequencing analysis of the faecal samples collected from day 0 and day 21 revealed marked differences in microbial diversity at both the phylum and genus levels between the control and treatment groups. This analysis confirmed that levels of Salmonella and Escherichia were significantly decreased in the treatment group, compared with the control (P,0.001). This data suggest a positive influence of dietary supplementation with live cider yeast on the microbial diversity of the pig distal gut. Conclusions/Significance: The effect of dietary cider yeast on porcine gut microbial communities was characterized for the first time using 16S rRNA gene compositional sequencing. Dietary cider yeast can potentially alter the gut microbiota, however such changes depend on their endogenous microbiota that causes a divergence in relative response to that given diet.This work was funded by Enterprise Ireland, under the Commercialisation Fund (Contract No: CFTD/05/117), the Irish Government under the National Development Plan, 2000–2006, the European Research and Development Fund and Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).European Research and Development Fun

The Effect of Variability in the Powder/Liquid Ratio on the Strength of Zinc Phosphate Cement

Aim. To investigate (a) variability in powder/liquid proportioning and (b) effect of variability on diametral tensile strength (DTS), in a zinc phosphate cement. Statistical analyses (α = 0.05) were by Student's t-test in the case of powder/liquid ratio and one-way ANOVA and Tukey HSD for pair-wise comparisons of mean DTS. The Null hypotheses were that (a) the powder-liquid mixing ratios would not differ from the manufacturer's recommended ratio (b) DTS of the set cement samples using the extreme powder/liquid ratios would not differ from those made using the recommended ratio. Methodology. 34 dental students dispensed the components according to the manufacturer's instructions. The maximum and minimum powder/liquid ratios, together with the manufacturer's recommended ratio, were used to prepare samples for DTS testing. Results. Powder/liquid ratios ranged from 2.386 to 1.018. The mean ratio (1.644) was not significantly different from the recommended value of 1.718 (P = 0.189). DTS values for the maximum and minimum ratios were both significantly different from each other (P < 0.001) and from the mean value obtained from the recommended ratio (P < 0.001). Conclusions. Variability exists in powder/liquid ratio for hand dispensed zinc phosphate cement. This variability can affect the DTS of the set material

Significance of Fundamental Metrology of 3D-Printed Parts for Engineering Design: Dimensional Accuracy

This paper discusses some basic metrology considerations when 3D printing. The importance of ensuring correct measurements is highlighted especially for practical applications.  The last part of the paper presents sample dimensional measurements of 3D-printed parts with varying sizes, infill density and layer thickness.  Different cube sizes of 10 mm3, 15 mm3, and 20 mm3 has been produced using a commercially-available 3D printer. Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) has been used for the experiments. Important observations and insights are presented

Sistema web para gestión de inventario y facturación en el negocio Pulpería Rizo

Implementar un sistema web para gestión de inventario y facturación para la pulpería Rizo ubicada en la ciudad de Estelí. Es una investigación de tipo aplicada y descriptiva. Se hizo uso de la entrevista como técnica de recolección de información. Para el desarrollo del sistema se utilizó la metodología SCRUM, siguiendo cada una de las fases. Como resultados se identificaron los requerimientos funcionales y no funcionales para posteriormente elaborar el sistema automatizado, el cual fue validado para evidenciar el funcionamiento del mismo. De ésta manera se dio cumplimiento a los objetivos propuestos. Lo más gratificante es que puede ser utilizado de manera inmediata en el negocio ya que se incorporaron todos los requerimientos solicitados por la propietaria del mismo