Sanpete County Agriculture Profile

This publication includes a report that gives agricultural facts and statistics pertaining to Sanpete County

The Seventh Day Adventist Pastor in a multicultural congregation: Coventry Central's expectations of their Pastor

This thesis aims to ascertain the expectations that three different cultural groups in the Coventry Central Seventh-Day Adventist Church (S.D.A.) in Radford have of their Pastor. The S.D.A. church in Britain in general and Coventry in particular have experienced changes in their social composition over recent years, as migrants from various countries have made the church more racially and culturally diverse. This investigation aims to explore whether these diverse cultural groups have varying expectations of the way their Pastor functions in his role and relationship with them, using questionnaires directed at the three largest groups in Coventry Central: Zimbabwean, Filipino and 'White' English. From the replies I attempt to discern what attitudes, practices and expectations shape these different group's feelings and perspectives on worship, preaching and the cultural norms of the church. Before conducting the research I thought that these groups would have the same attitudes towards and expectations of the Pastor. However, the research has revealed that although these different cultural groups share a powerful common identity and uniformity in doctrinal beliefs; the product of the global S.D.A. Church's training and teaching programmes. Deeper analysis and reflection, however, reveal that there is a complex interplay between doctrinal beliefs, practices and the social context in which they are worked out. In the end I came to the conclusion that whilst the S.D.A. Church has common teaching and educational material for ministers and congregations across the world, it is the interpretation of those beliefs and norms that means that ministers have to be sensitive to the variety of cultures in a specific context. In the end all Christian ministry is contextualized and that affects the way a Pastor has to operate

Can the palatability of healthy, satiety-promoting foods increase with repeated exposure during weight loss?

Repeated exposure to sugary, fatty, and salty foods often enhances their appeal. However, it is unknown if exposure influences learned palatability of foods typically promoted as part of a healthy diet. We tested whether the palatability of pulse containing foods provided during a weight loss intervention which were particularly high in fiber and low in energy density would increase with repeated exposure. At weeks 0, 3, and 6, participants (n = 42; body mass index (BMI) 31.2 ± 4.3 kg/m²) were given a test battery of 28 foods, approximately half which had been provided as part of the intervention, while the remaining half were not foods provided as part of the intervention. In addition, about half of each of the foods (provided as part or not provided as part of the intervention) contained pulses. Participants rated the taste, appearance, odor, and texture pleasantness of each food, and an overall flavor pleasantness score was calculated as the mean of these four scores. Linear mixed model analyses showed an exposure type by week interaction effect for taste, texture and overall flavor pleasantness indicating statistically significant increases in ratings of provided foods in taste and texture from weeks 0 to 3 and 0 to 6, and overall flavor from weeks 0 to 6. Repeated exposure to these foods, whether they contained pulses or not, resulted in a ~4% increase in pleasantness ratings. The long-term clinical relevance of this small increase requires further study.T32 AT000815 - NCCIH NIH HH

SIFT: Sonification integrable flexible toolkit

Presented at the 11th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2005)This paper describes work-in-progress on a platformindependent toolkit for sonification of scientific data. The data being displayed and the sonification control information can be provided in real-time and distributed over a wide area via Ethernet. The toolkit allows the designer to process, scale, and map data to a wide variety of sonification parameters and methods. Sonification processing and control commands are stored in standard XML syntax files and can be applied or modified in real-time. The toolkit described here is easily added to existing visualization applications and can be quickly expanded to use new data formats and sonification modalities. Early results of interactive auditory and visual analysis of an example domain are described, and extensive user tests are being planned

Prosody-Based Automatic Segmentation of Speech into Sentences and Topics

A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction, topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (information gleaned from the timing and melody of speech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with word-based approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadcast News and Switchboard. Results show that the prosodic model alone performs on par with, or better than, word-based statistical language models -- for both true and automatically recognized words in news speech. The prosodic model achieves comparable performance with significantly less training data, and requires no hand-labeling of prosodic events. Across tasks and corpora, we obtain a significant improvement over word-only models using a probabilistic combination of prosodic and lexical information. Inspection reveals that the prosodic models capture language-independent boundary indicators described in the literature. Finally, cue usage is task and corpus dependent. For example, pause and pitch features are highly informative for segmenting news speech, whereas pause, duration and word-based cues dominate for natural conversation.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures. To appear in Speech Communication 32(1-2), Special Issue on Accessing Information in Spoken Audio, September 200

Functional Properties and Toxin Pharmacology of a Dorsal Root Ganglion Sodium Channel Viewed through its Voltage Sensors

The voltage-activated sodium (Nav) channel Nav1.9 is expressed in dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons where it is believed to play an important role in nociception. Progress in revealing the functional properties and pharmacological sensitivities of this non-canonical Nav channel has been slow because attempts to express this channel in a heterologous expression system have been unsuccessful. Here, we use a protein engineering approach to dissect the contributions of the four Nav1.9 voltage sensors to channel function and pharmacology. We define individual S3b–S4 paddle motifs within each voltage sensor, and show that they can sense changes in membrane voltage and drive voltage sensor activation when transplanted into voltage-activated potassium channels. We also find that the paddle motifs in Nav1.9 are targeted by animal toxins, and that these toxins alter Nav1.9-mediated currents in DRG neurons. Our results demonstrate that slowly activating and inactivating Nav1.9 channels have functional and pharmacological properties in common with canonical Nav channels, but also show distinctive pharmacological sensitivities that can potentially be exploited for developing novel treatments for pain