Unsupervised Speaker Change Detection for Broadcast News Segmentation

This paper presents a speaker change detection system for news broadcast segmentation based on a vector quantization (VQ) approach. The system does not make any assumption about the number of speakers or speaker identity. The system uses mel frequency cepstral coefficients and change detection is done using the VQ distortion measure and is evaluated against two other statistics, namely the symmetric Kullback-Leibler (KL2) distance and the so-called ‘divergence shape distance’. First level alarms are further tested using the VQ distortion. We find that the false alarm rate can be reduced without significant losses in the detection of correct changes. We furthermore evaluate the generalizability of the approach by testing the complete system on an independent set of broadcasts, including a channel not present in the training set. 1

How replacing fossil fuels with electrofuels could influence the demand for renewable energy and land area

During recent years, electrofuels (fuels from electricity, water, and carbon) have gained increased interest as substitute for fossil fuels in all energy and chemical sectors. The feasibility of electrofuels has been assessed from a range of aspects but no study has assessed the land area needed if scaling up the production based on renewables. The amount of land on Earth is limited and the competition for land, in a long-term perspective, imposes a risk of, e.g., increased food prices and biodiversity losses. The aim of this paper is to assess how much land area it would require if all fossil fuels were substituted by electrofuels (‘All electrofuel’-scenario) and compare this with the area needed if all fossil fuels were substituted by bioenergy (‘All biomass’-scenario) or by electricity (‘All electric’-scenario). Each scenario represents extreme cases towards fully renewable energy systems to outline the theoretical area needed. Main conclusions are (1) the electricity demand, if substituting all fossil fuels with electrofuels, is huge (1540 EJ) but technically obtainable, demanding 1.1% of the Earth\u27s surface, for solar panels, in the most optimistic case, and (2) the sustainable technical potential for biomass cannot alone substitute all fossil fuels, unless radical energy demand reductions

The crossed projection to the striatum in two species of monkey and in humans: behavioral and evolutionary significance

The corpus callosum establishes the anatomical continuity between the 2 hemispheres and coordinates their activity. Using histological tracing, single axon reconstructions, and diffusion tractography, we describe a callosal projection to n caudatus and putamen in monkeys and humans. In both species, the origin of this projection is more restricted than that of the ipsilateral projection. In monkeys, it consists of thin axons (0.4–0.6 µm), appropriate for spatial and temporal dispersion of subliminal inputs. For prefrontal cortex, contralateral minus ipsilateral delays to striatum calculated from axon diameters and conduction distance are <2 ms in the monkey and, by extrapolation, <4 ms in humans. This delay corresponds to the performance in Poffenberger's paradigm, a classical attempt to estimate central conduction delays, with a neuropsychological task. In both species, callosal cortico-striatal projections originate from prefrontal, premotor, and motor areas. In humans, we discovered a new projection originating from superior parietal lobule, supramarginal, and superior temporal gyrus, regions engaged in language processing. This projection crosses in the isthmus the lesion of which was reported to dissociate syntax and prosody. The projection might originate from an overproduction of callosal projections in development, differentially pruned depending on species

Functional and structural plasticity co-express in a left premotor region during early bimanual skill learning

Contains fulltext : 223034.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

AZGP1 Protein Expression in Hormone-Naïve Advanced Prostate Cancer Treated with Primary Androgen Deprivation Therapy

Biomarkers for predicting the risk of castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) in men treated with primary androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) are lacking. We investigated whether Zinc-alpha 2 glycoprotein (AZGP1) expression in the diagnostic biopsies of men with hormone-na&iuml;ve prostate cancer (PCa) undergoing primary ADT was predictive of the development of CRPC and PCa-specific mortality. The study included 191 patients who commenced ADT from 2000 to 2011. The AZGP1 expression was evaluated using immunohistochemistry and scored as high or low expression. The risks of CRPC and PCa-specific mortality were analyzed using stratified cumulative incidences and a cause-specific COX regression analysis for competing risk assessment. The median follow-up time was 9.8 (IQR: 6.1&ndash;12.7) years. In total, 94 and 97 patients presented with low and high AZGP1 expression, respectively. A low AZGP1 expression was found to be associated with a shorter time to CRPC when compared to patients with a high AZGP1 expression (HR: 1.5; 95% CI: 1.0&ndash;2.1; p = 0.03). However, the multivariable analysis demonstrated no added benefit by adding the AZGP1 expression to prediction models for CRPC. No differences for PCa-specific mortality between the AZGP1 groups were observed. In conclusion, a low AZGP1 expression was associated with a shorter time to CRPC for PCa patients treated with first-line ADT but did not add any predictive information besides well-established clinicopathological variables