Text-based and Signal-based Prediction of Break Indices and Pause Durations

The relation between symbolic and signal features of prosodic boundaries is experimentally studied using prediction methods. Text-based break index prediction turns out to be fairly good, but signal-based prediction and pause duration prediction perform worse. A possible reason is that random signal feature variations, as usually produced by humans, are hard to predict

The Memory of Persistence

This composition for Wind Ensemble (like Concert Band but usually only one player on a part) was Scott Master\u27s Thesis for completing a Master of Music degree in Composition at Butler University. Written in 2010, the piece is a combination of styles, philosophies, and techniques, all in balance with each other. Avant-garde and traditional techniques are used; tonality and atonality vie with each other, resulting in a combination of the two; specific musical directions are balanced by a degree of choice available to each participant. “The Memory of Persistence” is about a journey. No specific personal story is presented, nor is the piece programmatic, but the progress and development of the piece could mirror many life situations and be accessible to anyone from that point of view. There is a progression from simple to complex, from innocence to maturity, that is demonstrated in the instrumentation as well as the melodic and harmonic elements. The title of the composition is an allusion to Salvador Dali’s painting called “The Persistence of Memory.” Even the font of the score’s title page is based on Dali’s own handwriting. Dali was a major player in the Surrealism movement of the twentieth century, combining classical elements of art with unusual, surprising, or even outrageous twists. “The Memory of Persistence” does the same thing in a musical setting. Yet, even without knowledge of Dali, the listener can understand the title because the piece demonstrates persistence through difficulty while retaining the memory of the past and incorporating it into current life

Text Preprocessing for Speech Synthesis

In this paper we describe our text preprocessing modules for English text-to-speech synthesis. These modules comprise rule-based text normalization subsuming sentence segmentation and normalization of non-standard words, statistical part-of-speech tagging, and statistical syllabification, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and word stress assignment relying in parts on rule-based morphological analysis

On the Necessity for High-availability Data Center Backends in a Distributed Wireless System

When business processes depend on the processing capabilities within a data center, the typical system architecture use a high-availability setup to maintain a high level of service. Faced with a specific machine-to-machine system consisting of many endpoints that collect and forward data to the data center we argue that the dependability of the overall system does not necessitate a high level of service for the data center components. Taking an existing discrete event simulation model of a distributed technical system we investigate and discuss the effects of prolonged outages of the data center on the major business processes of the system

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RUNNING KINEMATICS AND PERFORMANCE IN ELITE TRIATHLETES

The purpose of this study was to examine the running kinematics of Elite, U23 and Junior triathletes and their relationships to performance during an Olympic or sprint distance race. A total of 238 male and female triathletes were analysed to determine ground contact time, flight time, stride rate, stride length, foot-strike type and velocity for each lap and an overall representative mean created for each variable across the race. Women displayed notably greater differences in kinematics between Junior and Elite fields than was observed in the men. Large correlations were observed for running performance with contact time (r = 0.500-0.580, p < 0.001) and stride length (r = 0.552-0.664, p < 0.001). Analysis of foot strike type revealed a significant interaction with contact time, with heel strike longer than mid-foot strike, but no relationship with running velocity

Experiences surrounding sports participation for 16-18-year old female students : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Psychology at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Sport participation has been found to decrease with age particularly in the later teenage years. According to a survey conducted by Sport New Zealand (2019), participation in sports in New Zealand was reported to decrease between the ages 15 and 17, and young females were found to participate in sports 1.5 hours less per week than males of the same age group. The aim of this research was to explore the barriers and motivations for participation in sport of 16-18-year-old females in New Zealand. By identifying what young women enjoy and what holds them back in their sports participation, changes should be made to the sports environment in order to increase and retain the participation of young women in sports. Semi-structured interviews took place over email with 16, 16-18-year-old female high school students who participate in sport for school and clubs. Participants were recruited from a secondary school in Auckland, North Shore. The interviews were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six step thematic analysis guide. The identified themes were divided into barriers to participation and motivators for participation. The overarching barrier themes were: 1. too much pressure in sport 2. time restraints due to sports participation 3. poor health due to overtraining 4. financial strain and 5. gender inequality in support and recognition. The overarching motivating themes were: 1. sport is fun, 2. enjoy the improvement of skills and competence and competing, 3. friendships and socialising 4. sports related health benefits 5. support, and 6. professional sport. The findings found differing and welcome more positive perspectives in regard to health, body image, and weight and sports role than previous research. Students did face major difficulties in balancing their academic commitments with their sports and socialising. Another key factor found by this study was the important role parents play in their child's sport plus also identified coaching techniques as being highly influential on participants enjoyment of their sport. A lack of peer support for female sports was also identified as a barrier for females as male sports are taken more seriously and regarded more highly. An area that I recommend more research should be done on is the culture surrounding individual sports. This study is one of few who have conducted qualitative research into the views of young women in sports. The implications of this research and possible future directions are discussed as well as my recommendations

Linguistically motivated parameter estimation methods for a superpositional intonation model

This paper proposes two novel approaches for parameter estimation of a superpositional intonation model. These approaches present linguistic and paralinguistic assumptions for initializing a pre-existing standard method. In addition, all restrictions on the configuration of commands were eliminated. The proposed linguistic hypotheses can be based on either pitch accents or lexical stress, which give rise to two different estimation methods. These two hypotheses were validated by comparison of the estimation performance relative to two standard methods, one manual and one automatic. The results of the experiments for German, English and Spanish corpora show that the proposed methods outperform the standard ones.Fil: Torres, Humberto Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo; ArgentinaFil: Gurlekian, Jorge Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo; ArgentinaFil: Mixdorff, Hansjörg. Beuth University Berlin; AlemaniaFil: Pfitzinger, Hartmut. Pfitzinger Voice Design; Alemani

Network-wide Measurement of TCP RTT in 2G Networks

We analyze existing server-side log data of a large scale automatic toll system to measure the TCP round-trip-time (RTT) as experienced by the communication between the central system and the on-board units (OBUs) deployed for tolling heavy-goods vehicles. The RTT is estimated from passive monitoring by parsing server-side log files and aggregating fleet-wide statistics over time. Using this data we compare the characteristics of the four different types of OBU and the three GPRS (2G) networks used. We find the RTT data to be consistent with existing, smaller samples and extend the observed RTT range by an order of magnitude. The OBU types exhibit a markedly different behavior, most notably for long RTTs, and we find one of the 2G networks to -˜hum’ at 50 Hz and harmonics

Evaluating baccalaureate curriculum end-of-life care content based upon End of Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) guidelines

Evidence shows that the demand for palliative and end-of-life care is increasing in healthcare, yet nurses lack the proper education to provide this care with confidence and competence. Before educational practices are modified, a method is needed to assess current palliative and end-of-life care education. This dissertation study described a process for assessing a baccalaureate curriculum for its palliative and end-of-life care content integration, using an adapted theoretical framework, the Palliative Care Curriculum Evaluation Model. The End of Life Nursing Education Consortium (ELNEC) Core Curriculum was decomposed to identify all its key elements. Faculty members teaching in a baccalaureate nursing program were surveyed to identify strategies used and courses within which the ELNEC Core Curriculum content was taught. Survey responses from students enrolled in required nursing-specific courses within the curriculum at two time points within the semester were analyzed to assess changes in their knowledge of palliative and end-of-life care, attitudes toward death and toward care of the dying, and perceived competence in providing palliative and end-of-life care. Findings revealed that clinical conference discussion/debriefing and lecture were the most frequently used strategies. The Pain Management and Symptom Management categories were most covered, and Final Hours and Introduction to Palliative Nursing were least covered. There was an overall 95.3% match between the ELNEC Core Curriculum and the baccalaureate curriculum studied when all faculty member survey responses were analyzed, but this incorporated courses with much variability in content covered. There was a 78.45% match when only courses for which the content was covered consistently were analyzed. Baseline student outcomes demonstrated significantly higher results on knowledge and attitudes toward care of the dying measures (p<.02) for students further along in the curriculum as opposed to students toward the beginning of the program. The improvement in perceived competence across the semester for students was not significant, but did have a near-moderate effect size. The findings suggest that the methods used in the study were successful in assessing palliative and end-of-life care education. Implications of the findings for nursing practice, education, policy, and research are discussed.Nursin

Modeling the GPRS Network Latency with a Double Pareto-lognormal or a Generalized Beta Distribution

Taking a newly collected large data set on the TCP connection termination latency in GPRS networks we try to identify the underlying statistical distribution. The data extends the observed latencies to large time scales necessitating a heavy-tail distribution. Many distributions work well for the main body of the data. However, the heavy tail of the distribution benefits from mixing different statistical distributions. We compare several distributions and find that the double Pareto-lognormal distribution and the generalized Beta distribution of the second kind fit the data equally well