Self-imitating Feedback Generation Using GAN for Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training

Self-imitating feedback is an effective and learner-friendly method for non-native learners in Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training. Acoustic characteristics in native utterances are extracted and transplanted onto learner's own speech input, and given back to the learner as a corrective feedback. Previous works focused on speech conversion using prosodic transplantation techniques based on PSOLA algorithm. Motivated by the visual differences found in spectrograms of native and non-native speeches, we investigated applying GAN to generate self-imitating feedback by utilizing generator's ability through adversarial training. Because this mapping is highly under-constrained, we also adopt cycle consistency loss to encourage the output to preserve the global structure, which is shared by native and non-native utterances. Trained on 97,200 spectrogram images of short utterances produced by native and non-native speakers of Korean, the generator is able to successfully transform the non-native spectrogram input to a spectrogram with properties of self-imitating feedback. Furthermore, the transformed spectrogram shows segmental corrections that cannot be obtained by prosodic transplantation. Perceptual test comparing the self-imitating and correcting abilities of our method with the baseline PSOLA method shows that the generative approach with cycle consistency loss is promising

Natural Disaster and Child Labor: Evidence from Indonesian Earthquake

Natural disasters can bring considerable damages to households in terms of casualties of household members, destruction of houses, and loss of physical assets. We examine the impact of an earthquake in Indonesia on children’s school and work activities and how the effect differs by access to credit. We find that the earthquake decreases education and increases child labor, but the effect is stronger for households with access to credit. Our finding indicates the complementary effect between credit and child labor and suggests the need for policies to increase educational investment when providing credits to households recovering from a shock

Teachers’ Monitoring and Schools’ Performance: Evidence from Public Schools in Pakistan

This paper evaluates the impact of an innovative monitoring system on teacher attendance and school performance in Pakistan. In 2014, the government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province introduced the Independent Monitoring Project aiming at increasing teacher attendance in primary and secondary public schools by distributing to the government-hired monitors smart phones with a special data collection software installed. Our analysis is based on a difference-in-differences approach using the country wide Annual Status of Education Report from 2012 to 2016. Our findings suggest that monitoring of government schools has increased teacher attendance by 7.5 percentage points in the first year of intervention. But the positive effect wears off to 2.7 percentage points in the second year. Child attendance and test scores also increased in the first year, but in the second year they disappeared. Especially, in the first year, the monitoring system improved students’ math, reading, and English test scores by 0.13, 0.14, and 0.15 standard deviation, respectively, if they are grades 1-5. This result suggests that teacher attendance has an important role in delivering better student outcomes, but that monitoring should be coupled with appropriate incentive mechanism in order to have a lasting impact

Development and Effects of Simulation Practice Program about Family centered Delivery Care

PURPOSE: This study was conducted to investigate the relationship of knowledge, attitudes and needs of sex education in high school students. METHODS: There were 258 participants who were high school students in S high school in G city. Data were collected from October 1 to October 31, 2011, and analyzed using SPSS/WIN 19.0. RESULTS: The mean score for sexual knowledge was 69.78, sexual attitudes was 63.66, and needs of sex education was 75.37. Sexual knowledge had positive correlation with needs of sex education (r=.17, p=.007). CONCLUSION: The findings of this study indicated a need to develop programs for high school students to increase appropriate sexual knowledge, and to encourage appropriate sexual attitudes, and to reflect needs of sex education

Consensus of Corporate E-Learning System Stakeholders Regarding the Satisfaction of End-Users

The purpose of this study is to call attention to the consensus of stakeholders of corporate e-Learning system regarding success. We identified the critical success factors (contents, technical features, management, and organizational support) as major components of corporate eLearning systems and questioned whether stakeholders’ consensus on the importance of these components facilitates the implementation of these components to achieve good quality or well. We also questioned whether the influence of these components on user satisfaction could be moderated by contextual factors. Based on empirical testing of 18 eLearning user companies, we verified that the consensus of stakeholders regarding the importance of content, technological features, and organizational support has a positive influence on the perceived quality of these factors in their e-Learning systems, which in turn is positively related to user satisfaction. The learning subjects and learning style did significantly moderate the influences of these perceived qualities on user satisfaction

Interindustry Differentials in Health Coverage and Dynamic Employment Substitution

Using data on the U.S., we study the effects of employer-provided health insurance on dynamic employment substitution between 1990 and 2007 by exploiting the interindustry variation in health care coverage. We find that industries with a high health benefit structure in 1990 have experienced slower employment growth of part-time workers relative to full-time workers, in particular part-time routine workers, while the relative wage of part-time to full-time workers and capital per worker have increased more in such industries. We suggest that this can be explained as firms’ and workers’ optimal responses to the benefit structure

Two-Dimensional Dirac Fermions Protected by Space-Time Inversion Symmetry in Black Phosphorus

We report the realization of novel symmetry-protected Dirac fermions in a surface-doped two-dimensional (2D) semiconductor, black phosphorus. The widely tunable band gap of black phosphorus by the surface Stark effect is employed to achieve a surprisingly large band inversion up to ~0.6 eV. High-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectra directly reveal the pair creation of Dirac points and their moving along the axis of the glide-mirror symmetry. Unlike graphene, the Dirac point of black phosphorus is stable, as protected by spacetime inversion symmetry, even in the presence of spin-orbit coupling. Our results establish black phosphorus in the inverted regime as a simple model system of 2D symmetry-protected (topological) Dirac semimetals, offering an unprecedented opportunity for the discovery of 2D Weyl semimetals