Mitochondrial DNA Variation Among Populations of Rhynchophorus ferrugineus (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) From Pakistan.

The Red Palm Weevil (RPW) Rhynchophorus ferrugineus (Olivier) is a voracious pest of palm species. In recent decades its range has expanded greatly, particularly impacting the date palm industry in the Middle East. This has led to conjecture regarding the origins of invasive RPW populations. For example, in parts of the Middle East, RPW is commonly referred to as the "Pakistani weevil" in the belief that it originated there. We sought evidence to support or refute this belief. First reports of RPW in Pakistan were from the Punjab region in 1918, but it is unknown whether it is native or invasive there. We estimated genetic variation across five populations of RPW from two provinces of Pakistan, using sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene. Four haplotypes were detected; two (H1 and H5) were abundant, accounting for 88% of specimens across the sampled populations, and were previously known from the Middle East. The remaining haplotypes (H51 and H52) were newly detected (in global terms) and there was no geographic overlap in their distribution within Pakistan. Levels of haplotype diversity were much lower than those previously recorded in accepted parts of the native range of RPW, suggesting that the weevil may be invasive in Pakistan. The affinity of Pakistani haplotypes to those reported from India (and the geographical proximity of the two countries), make the latter a likely "native" source. With regards the validity of the name "Pakistani weevil", we found little genetic evidence to justify it

Orientasi Madrasah Dan Pengembangan Sumber Daya Manusia

For educational purposes can be achieved, then education should be managed by a professional educational institutions with good management and by staff who have high work motivation. To be able to answer the challenges of the future of the madrasa institution must have a human resources ready to face a future full of risks. Human Resource Management in Islamic educational institutions (Madrasah) toward the quality, is a must in order to improve the quality of education in madrasas. To be able to build a system of Islamic education (madrasah) of quality, the main key is to have skilled human resources (quality). To be able to have a reliable human resources, the madrasas must implement measures or strategies in managing and developing human resources degan good

Information Relevance and Availability: Toward Effective Management of Projects in Public Sector

Information plays a critical role in the different stages of managing a project. This study examines the views of one hundred and two (102) Portuguese Public sector officials on the relevance, availability and sharability of information as practiced in their organizations. Cluster analysis, gap analysis and confirmatory factor analysis procedures are utilized to analyze the collected data. The results of this study tend to underscore the growing need to have well- designed information systems, which are capable of enhancing the availability and promoting the sharability of relevant information

Variance of spectral entropy (VSE): an SNR estimator for speech enhancement in hearing aids

In everyday situations an individual can encounter a variety of acoustic environments. For an individual with a hearing aid following speech in different types of background noise can often present a challenge. For this reason, estimating the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is a key factor to consider in hearing-aid design. The ability to adjust a noise reduction algorithm according to the SNR could provide the flexibility required to improve speech intelligibility in varying levels of background noise. However, most of the current high-accuracy SNR estimation methods are relatively complex and may inhibit the performance of hearing aids. This study investigates the advantages of incorporating a spectral entropy method to estimate SNR for speech enhancement in hearing aids; in particular a variance of spectral entropy (VSE) measure. The VSE approach avoids some of the complex computational steps of traditional statistical-model based SNR estimation methods by only measuring the spectral entropy among frequency channels of interest within the hearing aid. For this study, the SNR was estimated using the spectral entropy method in different types of noise. The variance of the spectral entropy in a hearing-aid model with 10 peripheral frequency channels was used to measure the SNR. By measuring the variance of the spectral entropy at input SNR levels between -10 dB to 20 dB, the relationship function between the SNR and the VSE was estimated. The VSE for the speech-in-noise was measured at temporal intervals of 1.5s. The VSE method demonstrates a more reliable performance in different types of background noise, in particular for low-number of speakers babble noise when compared to the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) or Waveform Amplitude Distribution Analysis (WADA) methods. The VSE method may also reduce additional computational steps (reducing system delays) making it more appropriate for implementation in hearing aids where system delays should be minimized as much as possible

Auditory filter-bank compression improves estimation of signal-to-noise ratio for speech in noise

Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation is necessary for many speech processing applications often challenged by nonstationary noise. The authors have previously demonstrated that the variance of spectral entropy (VSE) is a reliable estimate of SNR in nonstationary noise. Based on pre-estimated VSE-SNR relationship functions, the SNR of unseen acoustic environments can be estimated from the measured VSE. This study predicts that introducing a compressive function based on cochlear processing will increase the stability of the pre-estimated VSE-SNR relationship functions. This study demonstrates that calculating the VSE based on a nonlinear filter-bank, simulating cochlear compression, reduces the VSE-based SNR estimation errors. VSE-SNR relationship functions were estimated using speech tokens presented in babble noise comprised of different numbers of speakers. Results showed that the coefficient of determination (R2) of the estimated VSE-SNR relationship functions have absolute percentage improvements of over 26% when using a filter-bank with a compressive function, compared to when using a linear filter-bank without compression. In 2-talker babble noise, the estimation accuracy is more than 3 dB better than other published methods