Food Superstores, Food Deserts and Traffic Generation in the UK: A Semi-Parametric Regression Approach

This study contributes another route towards explaining and tackling ‘food desert’ effects. It features the estimation of a (semi-parametric) trip attraction model for food superstores in the UK using a composite dataset. The data comprises information from the UK Census of Population, the NOMIS (National Online Manpower Information System) archive and traffic and site-specific data from the TRICS (Trip Rate Information Computer System) databases. The results indicate that traffic to a given food superstore, ceteris paribus, increases with household car ownership, store parking provision, site size (floor space), and distance to the nearest competitor. Furthermore, increases in public transport provision are shown to be associated with increasing car trips. This latter effect is discussed in the light of planning policy for development control purposes and a role linked to the reinforcement of ‘food deserts’. The results also reveal activity-specific household economies of scope and scale. It is suggested how these may also further perpetuate unsustainable development and ‘food desert’ characteristics.Traffic Generation, Food Superstores, Food Deserts, Activity Based Travel, Sustainable Development, Modelling

The InproTK 2012 release

Baumann T, Schlangen D. The InproTK 2012 release. In: Eskenazi M, Black A, Traum D, eds. SDCTD '12 NAACL-HLT Workshop on Future Directions and Needs in the Spoken Dialog Community: Tools and Data. Stroudsburg, PA: ACL; 2012: 29-32

Towards Zero-shot Learning for Automatic Phonemic Transcription

Automatic phonemic transcription tools are useful for low-resource language documentation. However, due to the lack of training sets, only a tiny fraction of languages have phonemic transcription tools. Fortunately, multilingual acoustic modeling provides a solution given limited audio training data. A more challenging problem is to build phonemic transcribers for languages with zero training data. The difficulty of this task is that phoneme inventories often differ between the training languages and the target language, making it infeasible to recognize unseen phonemes. In this work, we address this problem by adopting the idea of zero-shot learning. Our model is able to recognize unseen phonemes in the target language without any training data. In our model, we decompose phonemes into corresponding articulatory attributes such as vowel and consonant. Instead of predicting phonemes directly, we first predict distributions over articulatory attributes, and then compute phoneme distributions with a customized acoustic model. We evaluate our model by training it using 13 languages and testing it using 7 unseen languages. We find that it achieves 7.7% better phoneme error rate on average over a standard multilingual model.Comment: AAAI 202

Physical and digital architecture for collection and analysis of imparted accelerations on Zip Line attractions

The accelerations experienced by riders of Zip Line attractions is an underexplored area of public safety assurance. These amusement devices require complex processes to collect and analyze acceleration data. Highly versatile and effective rider-worn and ride-carried devices are necessary to collect acceleration and velocity data without affecting the integrity of the ride. This paper introduces the use of a sensor device for collecting Zip Line acceleration data in the form of a Trailing Trolley. This architecture extends the work of Sicat et. al.’s which proposed the use of a Sensor Vest and Headwear to collect linear and rotational accelerations of a Zip Line rider. We investigate the logistics of combining the two sensor platforms and formulate a procedure to post-process and analyze the data. Techniques to extract, filter, and process the accelerations recorded is discussed and the potential for the synthesis of positioning linear and rotational data is described. Additional testing of data collection and analysis is necessary to prove the viability of these techniques and apparatuses as potential parts of a standardized test method for measuring rider experienced g-forces on Zip Lines

Disulfonated azo-dyes : metal coordination and ion-pair separation in twelve MII compounds of ponceau xylidine and crystal scarlet

The structures of seven divalent metal cation compounds of Ponceau Xylidine (PX) aka Acid Red 26, CI 16150, and of five divalent metal cation compounds of Crystal Scarlet (CS) aka Acid Red 44, CI 16250, are presented. In all cases the structures obtained were solvates with DMF and/or water present. The disulfonated naphthalene based azo anions adopt hydrozone tautomeric forms. The structures of the Mg salt and of four transition metal forms (M = Co, Ni, Cu and Zn) of PX are found to form an isostructural series. All have solvent-separated ion-pair (SSIP) type structures and formula [M(OH2)6][PX]·DMF. The Ca salt of PX also has a SSIP structure, but has a higher hydration state, [Ca(OH2)7] [PX]·2.5H2O. In contrast, the Sr salt of PX [Sr(PX)(DMF)2(OH2)0.5]n forms a one-dimensional coordination polymer. Both the Ca and Sr salts of CS have SSIP structures, namely [Ca(OH2)7][CS]·H2O and [Sr(OH2)8][CS]·H2O whilst the heavier Ba analogue [Ba(CS)(DMF)(OH2)3]n forms a one-dimensional coordination polymer. Unlike PX, two CS structures containing transition metals are found to be coordination complexes, [Cu((CS)(DMF)4]·H2O and [Zn(CS) (DMF)3(OH2)]n.n/2 Et2O. This suggests that CS is a better ligand than PX for transition metals. The Cu complex forms discrete molecules with Cu in a square pyramidal environment, whilst the Zn species is a one-dimensional coordination polymer based on octahedral Zn centres

Universal Phone Recognition with a Multilingual Allophone System

Multilingual models can improve language processing, particularly for low resource situations, by sharing parameters across languages. Multilingual acoustic models, however, generally ignore the difference between phonemes (sounds that can support lexical contrasts in a particular language) and their corresponding phones (the sounds that are actually spoken, which are language independent). This can lead to performance degradation when combining a variety of training languages, as identically annotated phonemes can actually correspond to several different underlying phonetic realizations. In this work, we propose a joint model of both language-independent phone and language-dependent phoneme distributions. In multilingual ASR experiments over 11 languages, we find that this model improves testing performance by 2% phoneme error rate absolute in low-resource conditions. Additionally, because we are explicitly modeling language-independent phones, we can build a (nearly-)universal phone recognizer that, when combined with the PHOIBLE large, manually curated database of phone inventories, can be customized into 2,000 language dependent recognizers. Experiments on two low-resourced indigenous languages, Inuktitut and Tusom, show that our recognizer achieves phone accuracy improvements of more than 17%, moving a step closer to speech recognition for all languages in the world.Comment: ICASSP 202

Enrichment of pathogenic alleles in the brittle cornea gene, ZNF469, in keratoconus

Keratoconus, a common inherited ocular disorder resulting in progressive corneal thinning, is the leading indication for corneal transplantation in the developed world. Genome-wide association studies have identified common SNPs 100 kb upstream of ZNF469 strongly associated with corneal thickness. Homozygous mutations in ZNF469 and PR domain-containing protein 5 (PRDM5) genes result in brittle cornea syndrome (BCS) Types 1 and 2, respectively. BCS is an autosomal recessive generalized connective tissue disorder associated with extreme corneal thinning and a high risk of corneal rupture. Some individuals with heterozygous PRDM5 mutations demonstrate a carrier ocular phenotype, which includes a mildly reduced corneal thickness, keratoconus and blue sclera. We hypothesized that heterozygous variants in PRDM5 and ZNF469 predispose to the development of isolated keratoconus. We found a significant enrichment of potentially pathologic heterozygous alleles in ZNF469 associated with the development of keratoconus (P = 0.00102) resulting in a relative risk of 12.0. This enrichment of rare potentially pathogenic alleles in ZNF469 in 12.5% of keratoconus patients represents a significant mutational load and highlights ZNF469 as the most significant genetic factor responsible for keratoconus identified to date