The use of acoustic cues in phonetic perception: Effects of spectral degradation, limited bandwidth and background noise

Hearing impairment, cochlear implantation, background noise and other auditory degradations result in the loss or distortion of sound information thought to be critical to speech perception. In many cases, listeners can still identify speech sounds despite degradations, but understanding of how this is accomplished is incomplete. Experiments presented here tested the hypothesis that listeners would utilize acoustic-phonetic cues differently if one or more cues were degraded by hearing impairment or simulated hearing impairment. Results supported this hypothesis for various listening conditions that are directly relevant for clinical populations. Analysis included mixed-effects logistic modeling of contributions of individual acoustic cues for various contrasts. Listeners with cochlear implants (CIs) or normal-hearing (NH) listeners in CI simulations showed increased use of acoustic cues in the temporal domain and decreased use of cues in the spectral domain for the tense/lax vowel contrast and the word-final fricative voicing contrast. For the word-initial stop voicing contrast, NH listeners made less use of voice-onset time and greater use of voice pitch in conditions that simulated high-frequency hearing impairment and/or masking noise; influence of these cues was further modulated by consonant place of articulation. A pair of experiments measured phonetic context effects for the "s/sh" contrast, replicating previously observed effects for NH listeners and generalizing them to CI listeners as well, despite known deficiencies in spectral resolution for CI listeners. For NH listeners in CI simulations, these context effects were absent or negligible. Audio-visual delivery of this experiment revealed enhanced influence of visual lip-rounding cues for CI listeners and NH listeners in CI simulations. Additionally, CI listeners demonstrated that visual cues to gender influence phonetic perception in a manner consistent with gender-related voice acoustics. All of these results suggest that listeners are able to accommodate challenging listening situations by capitalizing on the natural (multimodal) covariance in speech signals. Additionally, these results imply that there are potential differences in speech perception by NH listeners and listeners with hearing impairment that would be overlooked by traditional word recognition or consonant confusion matrix analysis

High frequency atomic tunneling yields ultralow and glass-like thermal conductivity in chalcogenide single crystals

Crystalline solids exhibiting glass-like thermal conductivity have attracted substantial attention both for fundamental interest and applications such as thermoelectrics. In most crystals, the competition of phonon scattering by anharmonic interactions and crystalline imperfections leads to a non-monotonic trend of thermal conductivity with temperature. Defect-free crystals that exhibit the glassy trend of low thermal conductivity with a monotonic increase with temperature are desirable because they are intrinsically thermally insulating while retaining useful properties of perfect crystals. However, this behavior is rare, and its microscopic origin remains unclear. Here, we report the observation of ultralow and glass-like thermal conductivity in a hexagonal perovskite chalcogenide single crystal, BaTiS₃, despite its highly symmetric and simple primitive cell. Elastic and inelastic scattering measurements reveal the quantum mechanical origin of this unusual trend. A two-level atomic tunneling system exists in a shallow double-well potential of the Ti atom and is of sufficiently high frequency to scatter heat-carrying phonons up to room temperature. While atomic tunneling has been invoked to explain the low-temperature thermal conductivity of solids for decades, our study establishes the presence of sub-THz frequency tunneling systems even in high-quality, electrically insulating single crystals, leading to anomalous transport properties well above cryogenic temperatures

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis

Search for supersymmetry in events with one lepton and multiple jets in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

Peer reviewe

Calibration of the CMS hadron calorimeters using proton-proton collision data at root s=13 TeV

Methods are presented for calibrating the hadron calorimeter system of theCMSetector at the LHC. The hadron calorimeters of the CMS experiment are sampling calorimeters of brass and scintillator, and are in the form of one central detector and two endcaps. These calorimeters cover pseudorapidities vertical bar eta vertical bar ee data. The energy scale of the outer calorimeters has been determined with test beam data and is confirmed through data with high transverse momentum jets. In this paper, we present the details of the calibration methods and accuracy.Peer reviewe

Search for anomalous couplings in boosted WW/WZ -> l nu q(q)over-bar production in proton-proton collisions at root s=8TeV

Peer reviewe

Inclusive search for supersymmetry using razor variables in pp collisions at root s=13 TeV

Peer reviewe

\u3ci\u3eDrosophila\u3c/i\u3e Muller F Elements Maintain a Distinct Set of Genomic Properties Over 40 Million Years of Evolution

The Muller F element (4.2 Mb, ~80 protein-coding genes) is an unusual autosome of Drosophila melanogaster; it is mostly heterochromatic with a low recombination rate. To investigate how these properties impact the evolution of repeats and genes, we manually improved the sequence and annotated the genes on the D. erecta, D. mojavensis, and D. grimshawi F elements and euchromatic domains from the Muller D element. We find that F elements have greater transposon density (25–50%) than euchromatic reference regions (3–11%). Among the F elements, D. grimshawi has the lowest transposon density (particularly DINE-1: 2% vs. 11–27%). F element genes have larger coding spans, more coding exons, larger introns, and lower codon bias. Comparison of the Effective Number of Codons with the Codon Adaptation Index shows that, in contrast to the other species, codon bias in D. grimshawi F element genes can be attributed primarily to selection instead of mutational biases, suggesting that density and types of transposons affect the degree of local heterochromatin formation. F element genes have lower estimated DNA melting temperatures than D element genes, potentially facilitating transcription through heterochromatin. Most F element genes (~90%) have remained on that element, but the F element has smaller syntenic blocks than genome averages (3.4–3.6 vs. 8.4–8.8 genes per block), indicating greater rates of inversion despite lower rates of recombination. Overall, the F element has maintained characteristics that are distinct from other autosomes in the Drosophila lineage, illuminating the constraints imposed by a heterochromatic milieu