Influence of experimental conditions on sound pleasantness evaluations

ICA 2016, 22nd International Congress on Acoustics, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINE, 05-/09/2016 - 09/09/2016Being able to characterize and estimate the urban sound perception is a key point to improve the city dwellers environmental quality. In the past decade, various studies have focused on collecting perceived global sound pleasantness at specific locations. Some of them were carried out on field in order to evaluate the soundscape perception of the participants directly in their context. Other studies were realized in laboratory to better control the stimuli and to increase the number of participants who were subjected to the same sound environment. Most of the laboratory experiments are done in large or semi-anechoic chamber with calibrated and highly realistic audio reproduction in order to respect the ecological validity of the experiment. On one hand, even with a high immersive level, the laboratory context is not as rich as the field context and the two types of experiment could lead to different results. On the other hand, few studies exist showing the influence of decreasing ecological validity for the same experience. This work presents a short statistical analysis of perceptive evaluations of ten urban locations under 4 different test conditions. First, evaluations are carried out directly in-situ in the city of Paris. Then audio-visual recordings of these locations are evaluated in three different experimental conditions: (i) in a well-controlled acoustic laboratory in Paris region with French people, (ii) in an acoustic laboratory in Buenos Aires with Argentinean participants and lowest immersive conditions, (iii) in a habitational room with Argentinean participants and subjective calibration. The study reveals that both the 'country' factor and the experimental conditions in laboratory do not show any significant impact on the perceived sound pleasantness and perceived loudness assessments

A constrained sports scheduling problem

AbstractA real case of sports scheduling problem is presented. A calendar for two leagues has to be constructed; besides the usual restrictions on the alternation of home- and away-games, one has to consider the fact that some pairs of teams in the two leagues share the same facilities and cannot play home-games simultaneously. Furthermore depending on the results in the first games, one of the leagues is divided for the last games into two subleagues. An optimal solution is constructed by using properties of oriented factorizations of complete graphs

Production of a full length Tat protein in E. coli and its purification

AbstractA full length tat gene was constructed by a combination of a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for the first exon and chemical synthesis for the second exon. This gene was expressed in E. Coli under the control of the strongly regulated araB promoter, either directly or fused to a secretion signal encoding sequence. We the defined a rapid, three-step procedure for the purification of the Tat protei

ASSOCIATION OF LACTOFERRIN WITH SPECIFIC GRANULES IN RABBIT HETEROPHIL LEUKOCYTES

Lactoferrin has been identified in rabbit heterophil leukocytes on the basis of its immunological reactivity, electrophoretic mobility, acid-resistant iron-binding properties, and spectral characteristics. Leukocyte lactoferrin was found to be exclusively localized in the specific (secondary) granules, which have been resolved from other subcellular components by zonal differential centrifugation and by isopycnic equilibration

ASSESSMENT OF THE OSMO-CONVECTIVE DEHYDRATION ON THE QUALITY ATTRIBUTES AND CENTESIMAL COMPOSITION OF YACON (Smallanthus sonchifolius)

This work has studied the application of the osmo-convective dehydration on yacon roots, regarding its composition and quality attributes. Slices of yacon were submitted to osmotic treatment with sucralose solution followed by convective dry. The experiments followed a complete 23 factorial design to assessthe effect of three variables of the process (temperature, stirring rate of the osmotic solution and drying temperature) over four quality attributes (moisture content, color, luminosity and soluble solid content). The application of the osmotic treatment before convective drying provided quality gains to the dried product, such as low browning and shrinkage rates, and reduction of the structural damages towards angular distortions and fissures, in comparison to the samples dried directly on the tray dryer. The effect of osmotic treatment over the centesimal composition of yacon have resulted on absorption of sucralose and water loss without a significance compromise of its nutritional attributes. The obtained product presented different contents of moisture, but similar levels of darkening and color alteration at diverse experimental conditions