The Voice and Cystic Fibrosis: A Descriptive Case Study

Cystic fibrosis is a common autosomal recessive disease with severe effects on the respiratory, digestive, and endocrine systems. Symptoms include chronic cough and wheezing, frequent upper respiratory tract infections, and reflux disease. While most treatments for cystic fibrosis aim to mitigate the respiratory and gastrointestinal dysfunction, the potential adverse effects on an individual’s voice has not been researched in a systematic manner. We hypothesized that individuals with cystic fibrosis may show physical signs of vocal fold damage, as well as common dysphonic symptoms. Given the impact voice disorders have an overall quality of life, identification and management of cystic fibrosis-related dysphonia could be of great importance for assessment and treatment of this chronic illness. Four individuals participated, a male and female with cystic fibrosis, and male and female without cystic fibrosis. Each participant underwent videostroboscopy for vocal fold observation. Additionally, aerodynamic vocal parameters were measured using the Visi-PitchTM. Substantial structural changes were observed in the participants with cystic fibrosis. Significant differences in aerodynamic measures were also found, particularly in the area of vocal perturbation (jitter and shimmer). Participants with cystic fibrosis had markedly higher measures of jitter and shimmer. The observed differences may be a direct result of the phonotrauma experienced during day-to-day treatments and respiratory symptoms of the individual with cystic fibrosis

College students\u27 perceptions of dialects

The purpose of this investigation was to determine college students\u27 perceptions of their own dialects and 4 specific dialects common to the English language. To determine this, the investigator developed a 3-part survey (Appendices H, I, J). On Part I, respondents completed identifying information. On Part II, they rated 9 general Likert Scale items related to dialect. On Part III, they completed the same semantic differential scale for speakers who represented 4 different dialects: Appalachian-American, Eastern-American, General-American, and African-American. There were 2 speakers for each dialect, i.e., 1 male and 1 female.;On Part I, respondents who completed a 3-part survey included 143 undergraduate students at West Virginia University; 53.1% were between the ages of 19 and 20 years old. The majority (74.8%) was female and Caucasian (96.5%). In addition, the majority (46.2%) felt they spoke with a dialect while 31.8% identified themselves as speaking with a General-American dialect.;On Part II, respondents indicated personal satisfaction with the way they speak. They also were comfortable speaking in formal and informal settings despite their dialects and did not feel others stereotyped them negatively because of their dialects.;On Part III of this investigation respondents assigned the highest mean to the General-American male (3.90); followed by the African-American female (3.86); the General-American female (3.72); the Appalachian-American female (3.55); the Eastern-American female (3.46); the Appalachian-American male (3.35); the Eastern-American male (2.91); and the African-American male (2.88). Overall means for each of the dialects reveal that respondents rated General-American dialect speakers most positively with a mean of 3.81, followed by Appalachian-American dialect speakers (3.45), African-American dialect speakers (3.37), and Eastern-American dialect speakers (3.19).;Appalachian-American speakers are perceived as approachable, mature, friendly, humble, stable, and even-tempered, with the female being more positively stereotyped than the male. Eastern-American speakers are perceived as mature, attractive, stable, and even-tempered, with the female being more positively stereotyped than the male. General-American speakers are perceived as intelligent, approachable, mature, motivated, powerful, attractive, friendly, stable, and even-tempered, with the male being more positively stereotyped than the female. African-American speakers are perceived as approachable, friendly, and even-tempered, with the female being more positively stereotyped than the male.;The findings suggest individuals do indeed stereotype others, whether positively or negatively, based on the way in which others speak. For the most part, the stereotypes identified in this study supported the findings identified in a review of the literature. The results of this investigation also supported Robinson\u27s (1996) research findings in which speakers of Non-General-American English were thought to be less educated than speakers of General-American English. This study also was in agreement with Mulac (1976) who found that different stereotypes are associated with different dialects.;Overall, female speakers are perceived as approachable, mature, motivated, powerful, attractive, friendly, stable, and even-tempered, with the General-American dialect being most positively stereotyped. Male speakers are perceived as even-tempered, with the General-American dialect being most positively stereotyped

Development of a cross-flow fan powered quad-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle

The research presented is dedicated to the advancement of construction techniques in order to implement new designs of a vehicle suited for cross-flow fan propulsion. This is accomplished by designing a quad-rotor cross-flow fan that incorporates lessons learned from previous generation models as well introducing novel new construction concepts tailored to cross-flow fan propulsion vehicles. The current vehicle design was built using both custom and standard sections. Commercially available drivetrain and control components are used. The new design focused on three key areas of improvement: airframe simplification, gross takeoff weight reduction and structural rigidity improvement. At all phases the construction and emphasis on using readily available technologies or minor modifications to these was maintained. Novel techniques in construction are presented that allow these technologies to be leveraged. Finally, a new vehicle was built and tested and shown to be able to take-off vertically and be fully controllable in pitch, yaw, and roll.http://archive.org/details/developmentofcro1094545946Outstanding ThesisOutstanding ThesisLieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

'Woman's mission': the temperance and women's suffrage movements in Scotland, c.1870-1914

This thesis discusses the connections that bound together the late-nineteenth-century women’s temperance and suffrage movements in Scotland. The importance of women’s temperance reform in the women’s movement has been discussed in other Anglophone contexts, however there has been little scholarly analysis of these links in British historiography. This study aims to fill some of this gap. Moreover, by focusing on the Scottish case, this investigation adds a more ‘Britannic’ perspective to discussions of Victorian and Edwardian feminism, and thereby reveals regional variation and diversity. My exploration of the women’s suffrage movement focuses on constitutional societies, and offers a fresh perspective to balance the concentration on militancy in the only major monograph on Scottish suffragism – Leah Leneman’s A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland. This analysis takes a flexible approach to constitutionalism and argues that the women’s single-sex temperance society, the Scottish Christian Union (SCU) was an element of constitutional suffragism. Likewise, the Scottish Women’s Liberal Federation – peripheral to the historiography of British suffragism – is given a prominent place as a constitutionalist organisation. This study uses women’s roles in social reform and suffragism to examine the public lives of middle-class women. The ideology of ‘separate spheres’ is a leitmotif of much of women’s history, and discussions of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres are often linked to social class. My discussion of a ‘feminine public sphere’ is designed to reveal the ways in which women negotiated Victorian gender roles in order to participate in the civic life that was intrinsic to an urban middle-class identity. Thus, this thesis seeks to place suffragism and temperature in the context of middle-class women’s public world

Synthesizing Minimum Total Expansion Topologies for Reconfigurable Interconnection Networks

The Performance of a parallel algorithm depends in part on how the interconnection topology of the target parallel system matches the communication patterns of the algorithm. We describe how to generate a topology for a network that can be configured into and r-regular topology. The topology generated has small total expansion with respect to a given task graph. The expansion of an edge in a task graph is the length of the shortest path that the edge maps to in the processor graph. The algorithm used to generate the topologies is analyzed and its average case behavior is determined. In addition, this synthesis method is compared to the conventional approach of mapping a task graph onto a fixed processor topology

Comparative Analysis of Hill Climbing Mapping Algorithms

The performance of a parallel algorithm depends in part on how well the communication structure of the algorithm is matched to the communication structure of the target parallel system. The mapping problem is the problem of generating such a match algorithmically. Solving the mapping problem optimally for any non-trivial case is NP-complete. Therefore, a heuristic approach must be used to solve the problem. Although several heuristic algorithms to this problem have been developed, their performance has been evaluated on relatively few combinations of communication and processor structures. This paper extensively evaluates the performance of hill climbing mapping algorithms through simulation on communication structures representative of existing parallel algorithms and architectures. The motivations for our study are as follows: to establish the differences in performance between variations of the hill climbing heuristic; to determine the factors which affect the performance of hill climbing with respect to optimum; and to compare hill climbing to known optimum and non-optimum mappings to determine the effectiveness of hill climbing as a mapping heuristic

How the other half lives: under the arch with Lady Henry Somerset

The reforming work of Isabella Caroline Somerset (Lady Henry Somerset 1851-1921) is largely overlooked today. Dedicated to women’s causes at home and abroad and to temperance in particular, having first-hand knowledge of the privileged and the underprivileged, this determined, multi-talented and opinionated woman uncharacteristically wrote a fictional novel, Under the Arch (1906). In the novel, London aristocrats are portrayed rubbing shoulders with slum dwellers, but there is little real connection. The problems that the social policies introduced by the Liberals from 1906-1914 would address are nevertheless highlighted. It can be no coincidence that Somerset was well acquainted with many of these politicians. The themes of relieving the poor, Christian doctrine, marriage, women’s suffrage and imperialism are addressed, although Somerset’s focus is simply on “doing good” and loving one’s neighbour.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A guide to the clearwing borers (Sesiidae) of the North Central United States

1 online resource (PDF, 33 pages)This archival publication may not reflect current scientific knowledge or recommendations. Current information available from the University of Minnesota Extension: https://www.extension.umn.edu