An investigation of feature models for music genre classification using the support vector classifier

In music genre classification the decision time is typically of the order of several seconds, however, most automatic music genre classification systems focus on short time features derived from 10?50ms. This work investigates two models, the multivariate Gaussian model and the multivariate autoregressive model for modelling short time features. Furthermore, it was investigated how these models can be integrated over a segment of short time features into a kernel such that a support vector machine can be applied. Two kernels with this property were considered, the convolution kernel and product probability kernel. In order to examine the different methods an 11 genre music setup was utilized. In this setup the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients were used as short time features. The accuracy of the best performing model on this data set was 44% compared to a human performance of 52% on the same data set

Androgen receptor phosphorylation status at serine 578 predicts poor outcome in prostate cancer patients

Purpose: Prostate cancer growth is dependent upon androgen receptor (AR) activation, regulated via phosphorylation. Protein kinase C (PKC) is one kinase that can mediate AR phosphorylation. This study aimed to establish if AR phosphorylation by PKC is of prognostic significance. Methods: Immunohistochemistry for AR, AR phosphorylated at Ser-81 (pARS81), AR phosphorylated at Ser-578 (pARS578), PKC and phosphorylated PKC (pPKC) was performed on 90 hormone-naïve prostate cancer specimens. Protein expression was quantified using the weighted histoscore method and examined with regard to clinico-pathological factors and outcome measures; time to biochemical relapse, survival from biochemical relapse and disease-specific survival. Results: Nuclear PKC expression strongly correlated with nuclear pARS578 (c.c. 0.469, p=0.001) and cytoplasmic pARS578 (c.c. 0.426 p=0.002). High cytoplasmic and nuclear pARS578 were associated with disease-specific survival (p<0.001 and p=0.036 respectively). High nuclear PKC was associated with lower disease-specific survival when combined with high pARS578 in the cytoplasm (p=0.001) and nucleus (p=0.038). Combined high total pARS81 and total pARS578 was associated with decreased disease-specific survival (p=0.005) Conclusions: pARS578 expression is associated with poor outcome and is a potential independent prognostic marker in hormone-naïve prostate cancer. Furthermore, PKC driven AR phosphorylation may promote prostate cancer progression and provide a novel therapeutic target

Public perceptions of indecent image offenders

Indecent images of children (IIOC) offences are on the rise year by year, in part due to the easy accessibility to this content with the augmentation of the internet. This has led to increased attention from the public and those involved with law enforcement. However, research into the public perceptions of these offences is very limited. While they do not directly dictate law enforcement, the views of the public have become dominant in penal policymaking and therefore, understanding their current perceptions and beliefs is paramount. One of the only items of research into this area was conducted by Lam et al (2010), who examined the perceptions of North American students on IIOC offences. The current study is a partial replication of this study, and examined these perceptions, using nine vignettes with varying victim and offender age, with a more generalisable U.K. sample. A total of 253 participants rated their perceptions of offence severity, appropriate justice response, the probability of reoffence, the probability of past and future physical sexual contact with a child, the probability that the offender is a paedophile, and the perceived gender of the offender. Victim age influenced perceived crime severity, appropriate justice responses and probability of reoffence. There was no influence by either victim age or offender age on perceived probability of past or future sexual contact with a child, but an interaction between the two independent variables was found on perceived probability the offender was a paedophile. The study notes variation between public perceptions and actual data

A Comparison of the Tensile and Bending Properties of Dental Gold Wires

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68282/2/10.1177_00220345510300022001.pd

The factors determining uptake of energy crop cultivation and woodland creation in England: Insights from farmers and landowners

Perennial energy crops (PECs) and trees have key roles to play in delivering the negative emissions needed for the UK to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. Significant changes to land use are needed and the decision to make changes will lie with individual landowners. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews, this research explores the attitudes of farmers and landowners in England to replacing traditional arable and livestock farming with growing annual or perennial energy crops or planting trees. It was concluded that considerable government policy intervention will be needed to overcome the many economic and social barriers in place including lack of markets and attractive contracts for growers, high establishment costs, loss of annual income, high prices available for cereal crops and the cultural division between farming and forestry. Although energy crops and woodland creation are generally researched and regulated separately, this research suggests that annual energy crops, PECs and woodland creation form a spectrum of land use options for a landowner, with the propensity to adopt these crops being determined predominantly by crop attributes including the risk of planting and the term of commitment

Magnetically Stabilized Luminescent Excitations in Hexagonal Boron Nitride

Magnetically stabilized luminescence is observed in hexagonal boron nitride. The luminescence is induced by absorption of cold neutrons and is in the visible region. In the absence of a magnetic field, the photon emission level is observed to decay over several hundred seconds. A fraction of this luminescence can be suppressed if the temperature is T <~ 0.6 K and the magnetic field is B >~ 1.0 T. Subsequent to irradiation and suppression, luminescence can be induced by an increase in T or lowering of B. Possible explanations include stabilization of triplet states or the localization and stabilization of excitons.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, to appear in the Journal of Luminescenc

Screened Coulomb interactions in metallic alloys: I. Universal screening in the atomic sphere approximation

We have used the locally self-consistent Green's function (LSGF) method in supercell calculations to establish the distribution of the net charges assigned to the atomic spheres of the alloy components in metallic alloys with different compositions and degrees of order. This allows us to determine the Madelung potential energy of a random alloy in the single-site mean field approximation which makes the conventional single-site density-functional- theory coherent potential approximation (SS-DFT-CPA) method practically identical to the supercell LSGF method with a single-site local interaction zone that yields an exact solution of the DFT problem. We demonstrate that the basic mechanism which governs the charge distribution is the screening of the net charges of the alloy components that makes the direct Coulomb interactions short-ranged. In the atomic sphere approximation, this screening appears to be almost independent of the alloy composition, lattice spacing, and crystal structure. A formalism which allows a consistent treatment of the screened Coulomb interactions within the single-site mean-filed approximation is outlined. We also derive the contribution of the screened Coulomb interactions to the S2 formalism and the generalized perturbation method.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figure

Slavnov-Taylor identities in Coulomb gauge Yang-Mills theory

The Slavnov-Taylor identities of Coulomb gauge Yang-Mills theory are derived from the (standard, second order) functional formalism. It is shown how these identities form closed sets from which one can in principle fully determine the Green's functions involving the temporal component of the gauge field without approximation, given appropriate input.Comment: 20 pages, no figure