335 research outputs found
Optimal management of the Jucar River and Turia River basins under uncertain drought conditions
This paper presents a methodology to assess the best behavior achievable for a water resources system, and we apply it to the joint system of the Jucar River and Turia River basins in Spain. The resources of the two rivers are used jointly to meet the different water uses within the region, especially urban demands and environmental requirements. The climate change effects in this area are predicted to be particularly severe in this area with great variability in drought patterns. The results are particularly suitable for evaluating the best performance of the system under uncertain conditions
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Twenty-one years of heave monitoring in London Clay at Horseferry Road Basement
An 11 m-deep basement structure in London SW1 was left vacant from 1968 to 1989. The basement heaved significantly during this period due to the lack of a superstructure, providing a unique opportunity to study the development of long-term heave in London Clay. May (1975) presented the monitoring results from 1968-73 and excerpts of site data collected after 1973 have also been circulating informally in the industry since the 1990s. However, the full set of monitoring data remains hitherto unpublished.
This paper was initially drafted in the early 1990s when three of the authors (Nicholson, Chapman, and Solera) were working together with Arup. The paper somehow never got published as people and circumstances changed. More recently, the first author (Chan) started postgraduate research on heave and pressure beneath slabs in excavations in over-consolidated clays, using the heave monitoring data from the draft paper to complement centrifuge test results. For this reason, it was decided that the draft paper should be revised and published for the benefit of the wider industry.
This paper provides a comprehensive case history of the site, publishing further heave data to June 1989, giving a total of 21 years of heave monitoring. Further site investigation data and calculations are included for comparison. The data show that the presence of a basement did not significantly reduce the shear strength of the clay beneath it. The coefficient of consolidation of the clay was 38 – 52 m²/year and long-term heave was still ongoing 21 years after the end of excavation.EPSRC grant reference number EP/L016095/
A semi-supervised learning approach for acoustic-prosodic personality perception in under-resourced domains
Automatic personality analysis has gained attention in the last years as a fundamental dimension in human-To-human and human-To-machine interaction. However, it still suffers from limited number and size of speech corpora for specific domains, such as the assessment of children's personality. This paper investigates a semi-supervised training approach to tackle this scenario. We devise an experimental setup with age and language mismatch and two training sets: A small labeled training set from the Interspeech 2012 Personality Sub-challenge, containing French adult speech labeled with personality OCEAN traits, and a large unlabeled training set of Portuguese children's speech. As test set, a corpus of Portuguese children's speech labeled with OCEAN traits is used. Based on this setting, we investigate a weak supervision approach that iteratively refines an initial model trained with the labeled data-set using the unlabeled data-set. We also investigate knowledge-based features, which leverage expert knowledge in acoustic-prosodic cues and thus need no extra data. Results show that, despite the large mismatch imposed by language and age differences, it is possible to attain improvements with these techniques, pointing both to the benefits of using a weak supervision and expert-based acoustic-prosodic features across age and language
Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials in the Treatment of Human Brucellosis
BACKGROUND: Brucellosis is a persistent health problem in many developing countries throughout the world, and the search for simple and effective treatment continues to be of great importance. METHODS AND FINDINGS: A search was conducted in MEDLINE and in the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL). Clinical trials published from 1985 to present that assess different antimicrobial regimens in cases of documented acute uncomplicated human brucellosis were included. The primary outcomes were relapse, therapeutic failure, combined variable of relapse and therapeutic failure, and adverse effect rates. A meta-analysis with a fixed effect model was performed and odds ratio with 95% confidence intervals were calculated. A random effect model was used when significant heterogeneity between studies was verified. Comparison of combined doxycycline and rifampicin with a combination of doxycycline and streptomycin favors the latter regimen (OR = 3.17; CI95% = 2.05-4.91). There were no significant differences between combined doxycycline-streptomycin and combined doxycycline-gentamicin (OR = 1.89; CI95% = 0.81-4.39). Treatment with rifampicin and quinolones was similar to combined doxycycline-rifampicin (OR = 1.23; CI95% = 0.63-2.40). Only one study assessed triple therapy with aminoglycoside-doxycycline-rifampicin and only included patients with uncomplicated brucellosis. Thus this approach cannot be considered the therapy of choice until further studies have been performed. Combined doxycycline/co-trimoxazole or doxycycline monotherapy could represent a cost-effective alternative in certain patient groups, and further studies are needed in the future. CONCLUSIONS: Although the preferred treatment in uncomplicated human brucellosis is doxycycline-aminoglycoside combination, other treatments based on oral regimens or monotherapy should not be rejected until they are better studied. Triple therapy should not be considered the current treatment of choice
Hipotiroidismo subclÃnico y factores de riesgo cardiovascular
Objetivo: Conocer la prevalencia del hipotiroidismo
subclÃnico en la población general de un centro de salud
urbano y describir las caracterÃsticas clÃnicas y factores
de riesgo cardiovascular de los pacientes con hipotiroidismo
subclÃnico.
Métodos: Se realizó un estudio observacional descriptivo,
transversal, retrospectivo, revisando las historias clÃnicas
de los pacientes incluidos en la muestra desde junio de 2005
hasta julio de 2007. Se analizaron las siguientes variables;
Datos generales: edad y sexo. Antecedentes familiares:
patologÃa tiroidea y otras enfermedades. Antecedentes personales:
cardiovasculares, pulmonares, enfermedades
autoinmunes, alteraciones gineco-obstétricas, diabetes,
hipertensión (HT), dislipemia, obesidad, alteraciones psiquiátricas
y hematológicas. Datos de laboratorio: niveles
de TSH, niveles de T4 libre,presencia de anticuerpos antiperoxidasa,
niveles de colesterol total y sus fracciones.
Resultados: La prevalencia de la muestra de 100
pacientes recogida durante 8 meses fue de 3,8% de la
población general mayor de 14 años, de la cual 79 eran
mujeres y 21 eran hombres. El 13% eran diabéticos tipo
2, 23% tenÃan HT y un 40% tenÃan dislipemia. Sobrepeso
y obesidad estaban presentes en un 26%. El nivel medio
de TSH fue 6.92 ± 2,29 U/ml y el nivel medio de T4 libre
fue 1,16 ± 0,16 ng/ml.
Conclusiones: La prevalencia del hipotiroidismo subclÃnico
fue 3,8%. sobre todo en mujeres con una edad
media de 46 años. La incidencia de factores de riesgo cardiovascular
en los sujetos estudiados es mayor en DM
(13%), similar a la población general en cuanto a la dislipemia
(40%) y obesidad (20%) y menor en HTA (23%).
En nuestro estudio no se observa una pauta común en
el manejo del hipotiroidismo subclÃnico, siendo necesaria
la implementación y promoción de guÃas de actuación en
Atención PrimariaObjective: To determine the prevalence of subclinical
hypothyroidism in the general population of an urban
health center and describe the clinical characteristics and
cardiovascular risk factors in patients with subclinical
hypothyroidism.
Methods: An observational study, retrospective, reviewing
the medical histories of patients sampled from June
2005 until July 2007. We analyzed the following variables;
facts: age and sex. Family history thyroid disease
and other diseases. Personal history: cardiovascular pulmonary
autoimmune, alterations gynecology obstetric
diabetes, hypertension (HT) dislipemia, obesity, psychiatric
alterations and haematological. Laboratory data:
novel TSH, free T4, antiperoxidase antibodies, total cholesterol
and its fractions.
Results: The prevalence of the sample of 100 patients
collected over 8 months was 3.8% in the general population
over 14 years, of which 79 were women and 21 were
men. 13% were type 2 diabetics, 23% had HT and 40%
had dyslipidemia. Overweight and obesity were present
in 26%. The average level of TSH was 6.92 ± 2.29 U/ml
and the average level of free T4 was 1.16 ± 0.16 ng/ml.
Conclusions: Prevalence subclinical hypothyroidism
was 3.8%. especially in women with a mean age of 46. The
incidence of cardiovascular risk factors in the subjects
studied is higher in DM (13%), similar to general population
in terms of dyslipidemia (40%) and obesity (23%)
and lowest in hypertension (23%). In our study we observed
a common pattern in the management of subclinical
hypothyroidism, requiring the implementation and promotion
of practice guidelines in primary car
Robust ASR using Support Vector Machines
The improved theoretical properties of Support Vector Machines with respect to other machine learning alternatives due to their max-margin training paradigm have led us to suggest them as a good technique for robust speech recognition. However, important shortcomings have had to be circumvented, the most important being the normalisation of the time duration of different realisations of the acoustic speech units.
In this paper, we have compared two approaches in noisy environments: first, a hybrid HMM–SVM solution where a fixed number of frames is selected by means of an HMM segmentation and second, a normalisation kernel called Dynamic Time Alignment Kernel (DTAK) first introduced in Shimodaira et al. [Shimodaira, H., Noma, K., Nakai, M., Sagayama, S., 2001. Support vector machine with dynamic time-alignment kernel for speech recognition. In: Proc. Eurospeech, Aalborg, Denmark, pp. 1841–1844] and based on DTW (Dynamic Time Warping). Special attention has been paid to the adaptation of both alternatives to noisy environments, comparing two types of parameterisations and performing suitable feature normalisation operations. The results show that the DTA Kernel provides important advantages over the baseline HMM system in medium to bad noise conditions, also outperforming the results of the hybrid system.Publicad
The interdisciplinary nature of SOIL
The holistic study of soils requires an interdisciplinary approach involving biologists, chemists, geologists, and physicists, amongst others, something that has been true from the earliest days of the field. In more recent years this list has grown to include anthropologists, economists, engineers, medical professionals, military professionals, sociologists, and even artists. This approach has been strengthened and reinforced as current research continues to use experts trained in both soil science and related fields and by the wide array of issues impacting the world that require an in-depth understanding of soils. Of fundamental importance amongst these issues are biodiversity, biofuels/energy security, climate change, ecosystem services, food security, human health, land degradation, and water security, each representing a critical challenge for research. In order to establish a benchmark for the type of research that we seek to publish in each issue of SOIL, we have outlined the interdisciplinary nature of soil science research we are looking for. This includes a focus on the myriad ways soil science can be used to expand investigation into a more holistic and therefore richer approach to soil research. In addition, a selection of invited review papers are published in this first issue of SOIL that address the study of soils and the ways in which soil investigations are essential to other related fields. We hope that both this editorial and the papers in the first issue will serve as examples of the kinds of topics we would like to see published in SOIL and will stimulate excitement among our readers and authors to participate in this new venture
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