Development of Small-scale Speech Synthesizer based on Vector Qantization

A new scheme of speech synthesis by rule was presented which could be implemented in ROM less than 4M bytes. The features of our scheme are consist in the use of the vector quantization of LSP parameters for VCV instance. We proposed two synthesis unit selection methods, 1) selection method by using phonemic environmental resemblance score (PER method), and 2) selection method by searching minimal connective distortion path (MLD method), for small scale speech synthesis system. PER method requires phonemic environmental information for each VCV instance in a VCV unit dictionary. This paper investigated experimentally to what extent we can reduce the phonemic environmental information with keeping high quality of synthesized speech. We verified that two phonemes frontward and one phoneme rearward range to a current VCV instance is enough to synthesize similar quality of speech as five phonemes frontward and five phonemes rearward. This result gives an experimental basis on minimizing a size of VCV unit dictionary

HEAT RECOVERY FROM MELTED BLAST FURNACE SLAG USING FLUIDIZED BED

A novel fluidized bed system is proposed to recover heat from melted blast furnace slag. The melted slag is fed into a fluidized bed of crushed solid slag particles. The heat of slag solidification is transported to immersed heat transfer surface through fluidizing particles. The solid slag clumps, which consist of solidified slag and bed material, are removed from the bottom. A part of the slag clumps are crushed and recycled into the bed as bed material. In the present article, conceptual design of arrangement of heat transfer surface was carried out. Fundamental study of heat recovery from melted wax (simulated melted slag) was conducted using a fluidized bed cold model. Heat balance of the fluidized bed cold model was established

CO2 Looping Cycle for CO2 Separation

A dual fluidized bed process using CaO-based solid sorbent is considered to be a promising technology to separate CO2 from flue gas with low energy penalty. As reactor for CaO-looping cycle, both bubbling fluidized bed and “fast” fluidized bed are available, thus four possible combinations, (bubbling or fast absorber)x(bubbling or fast regenerator), are conceivable for this process. In this work, the authors discuss favorable combination of reactor type from viewpoints of heat removal from carbonation reactor and on energy penalty associated with dilution of pure oxygen by CO2 in the regenerator. As conclusion, suitable combination was found to be bubbling bed absorber and fast regenerator. Design of bench-scale experimental apparatus of the present system was also carried out. Bubbling bed absorber was designed to achieve 86 % CO2 removal efficiency from flue gas. Preliminary operating results of solid circulation at room temperature are also presented

Changes in salivary physiological stress markers induced by muscle stretching in patients with irritable bowel syndrome

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Psychophysiological processing has been reported to play a crucial role in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) but there has been no report on modulation of the stress marker chromogranin A (CgA) resulting from muscle stretching. We hypothesized that abdominal muscle stretching as a passive operation would have a beneficial effect on a biochemical index of the activity of the sympathetic/adrenomedullary system (salivary CgA) and anxiety.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Fifteen control and eighteen untreated IBS subjects underwent experimental abdominal muscle stretching for 4 min. Subjects relaxed in a supine position with their knees fully flexed while their pelvic and trunk rotation was passively and slowly moved from 0 degrees of abdominal rotation to about 90 degrees or the point where the subject reported feeling discomfort.</p> <p>Changes in the Gastrointestinal Symptoms Rating Scale (GSRS), State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS), ordinate scale and salivary CgA levels were compared between controls and IBS subjects before and after stretching. A three-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) with period (before vs. after) as the within-subject factor and group (IBS vs. Control), and sex (men vs. female) as the between-subject factors was carried out on salivary CgA.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>CgA showed significant interactions between period and groups (F[1, 31] = 4.89, p = 0.03), and between groups and sex (F[1, 31] = 4.73, p = 0.03). Interactions between period and sex of CgA secretion were not shown (F[1, 3] = 2.60, p = 0.12). At the baseline, salivary CgA in IBS subjects (36.7 ± 5.9 pmol/mg) was significantly higher than in controls (19.9 ± 5.5 pmol/mg, p < 0.05). After the stretching, salivary CgA significantly decreased in the IBS group (25.5 ± 4.5 pmol/mg), and this value did not differ from that in controls (18.6 ± 3.9 pmol/mg).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our results suggest the possibility of improving IBS pathophysiology by passive abdominal muscle stretching as indicated by CgA, a biochemical index of the activity of the sympathetic/adrenomedullary system.</p

Status Report of Neutral Kaon photo-production study using Neutral Kaon Spectrometer 2 (NKS2) at LNS-Tohoku(I. Nuclear Physics)

The approach described in this paper uses an array of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices to implement a fault tolerant hardware system that can be compared to the running of fault tolerant software on a traditional processor. Fault tolerance is achieved is achieved by using FPGA with on the fly partial programmability feature. Major considerations while mapping to the FPGA includes the size of the area to be mapped and communication issues related to their communication. Area size selection is compared to the page size selection in Operating System Design. Communication issues between modules are compared to the software engineering paradigms dealing with module coupling, fan-in, fan-out and cohesiveness. Finally, the overhead associated with the downloading of the reconfiguration files is discussed