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Patients' Views of Distributed Decision-making and Decisional Turmoil inside Otolaryngologic Surgical treatment During the COVID-19 Pandemic.
The back-end of the system is a sound event classifier that is based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and convolutional long short-term memory networks Mel-spectrograms are used as the input features to the CNNs. Simulations and experiments conducted in a live room have demonstrated the strength and weakness of the direct and two-stage methods. Signal quality enhancement using the array-based front-end proves beneficial for improved classification accuracy over a single microphone.The current study examined sentence recognition across speaking styles (conversational, neutral, and clear) in quiet and multi-talker babble (MTB) for cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing listeners under CI simulations. Listeners demonstrated poorer recognition accuracy in MTB than in quiet, but were relatively more accurate with clear speech overall. Within CI users, higher-performing participants were also more accurate in MTB when listening to clear speech. Lower performing users' accuracy was not impacted by speaking style. Clear speech may facilitate recognition in MTB for high-performing users, who may be better able to take advantage of clear speech cues.The Southern United States have long been known for language diversity, yet linguistic research in this region has often focused on broad descriptions of characteristics of Southern American English as compared to other regional dialects of American English. Linguistic subregions in the South, however, are distinctly different from each other, and additional social variation also occurs within those subregions. Thus, the different English varieties spoken in the South cannot be collapsed under a single umbrella. selleck compound Analyzing varieties of English in the Southern United States calls for a narrower approach, which will more accurately represent diverse Southern communities, their languages of practice, and the sound changes in process. Sociophonetic research on variation within English varieties in the Southern United States highlights theoretical and practical areas in speech acoustics that would otherwise remain under-documented and under-investigated, such as socially meaningful variation in vowel trajectories, nasalance of vowels, and temporal characteristics. The goal of this special issue is to bring together research that investigates the production and perception of Southern varieties of American English by documenting the segmental and prosodic patterns unique to these subregional varieties and by determining how these features are perceived by both Southerners and non-Southerners.Compressive spherical beamforming (CSB) with spherical microphone arrays enjoys high spatial resolution and strong sidelobes suppression at medium to high frequencies. In this paper, the adaptive reweighting homotopy (ARH) algorithm is adapted to CSB, and the proposed method is abbreviated as ARH-CSB, which bypasses a priori signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation. ARH-CSB iteratively solves the CSB model by determining the support set and adaptively searching for weights while estimating the source strength. Simulations and experiments demonstrate that ARH-CSB can effectively identify acoustic sources. Furthermore, compared to CSB solved by ℓ1-norm minimization algorithm and iterative reweighted ℓ1-norm minimization algorithm, ARH-CSB does not depend on a priori SNR and has better adaptability to low SNR, stronger robustness, higher weak sources quantification accuracy, and faster computation speed.In this paper, the problem of source localization using one-step direct position determination (DPD) approaches with large-aperture horizontal line arrays is considered. In practice, it may be difficult to keep the array configuration and overlarge inter-element spacing may cause the split beam problem when decentralized DPD approaches are applied. A cluster-based coherent MUSIC DPD approach is proposed to handle the unfavourable array configuration. The large-aperture array is divided into several small-aperture arrays, which form a coherent cluster to keep the largest covariance lag unchanged. Experimental results with the SWellEx96 data demonstrate the performance gain achieved by cluster-based coherent processing.In the original paper [Yasui and Izu, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 141(6), 4398-4407 (2017)], the temperature gradient in Rott equations was assumed as zero by mistake as an author error, although temperature gradient was adequately taken into account in the numerical simulations of thermal conduction between a fluid parcel and the wall of a stack. In the present erratum, the results of the corrected numerical simulations are shown. The results show that the pV work done by a fluid parcel is larger in a wet stack compared to that in a dry stack not only in a traveling-wave thermoacoustic engine but also in a standing-wave thermoacoustic engine. The pV work is determined not only by the volume oscillation amplitude of a fluid parcel but also by the change in the mean volume of a fluid parcel.Perceptual anchors are representations of stimulus features stored in long-term memory rather than short-term memory. The present study investigated whether listeners use perceptual anchors to improve pure-tone frequency discrimination. Ten amateur musicians performed a two-interval, two-alternative forced-choice frequency-discrimination experiment. In one half of the experiment, the frequency of the first tone was fixed across trials, and in the other half, the frequency of the first tone was roved widely across trials. The durations of the interstimulus intervals (ISIs) and the frequency differences between the tones on each trial were also manipulated. The data were analyzed with a Bayesian model that assumed that performance was limited by sensory noise (related to the initial encoding of the stimuli), memory noise (which increased proportionally to the ISI), fluctuations in attention, and response bias. It was hypothesized that memory-noise variance increased more rapidly during roved-frequency discrimination than fixed-frequency discrimination because listeners used perceptual anchors in the latter condition. The results supported this hypothesis. The results also suggested that listeners experienced more lapses in attention during roved-frequency discrimination.The small-slope approximation (SSA) for rough-interface scattering is most commonly applied to the upper boundary of either impenetrable media or uniform half-space media, but has been recently developed for layered media in the acoustic and electromagnetic cases. The present work gives an overview of three forms of the SSA for layered media. The first has been previously presented in the acoustics literature. The second is from the electromagnetics literature and in the present work is converted to the fluid-sediment problem. A missing proof is supplied of a key consistency condition demanded of the small-slope ansatz. As is usual, these small-slope results are expressed in k-space. A third SSA for layered seafloors follows from conversion of the usual half-space formulation from k-space to coordinate space. This form turns out to be useful for reverberation simulations. The three different approaches are compared with respect to scattering strength and the coherent reflection coefficient, but an assessment of their relative merits will require comparison with exact calculations.Many bat species, e.g., in the rhinolophid and hipposiderid families, have dynamic biosonar systems with highly mobile pinnae. Pinna motion patterns have been shown to fall into two distinct categories rigid rotations and non-rigid motions (i.e., deformations). In the present work, two questions regarding the rigid rotations have been investigated (i) what is the nature of the variability (e.g., discrete subgroups or continuous variation) within the rigid motions, (ii) what is its acoustic impact? To investigate the first question, rigid pinna motions in Pratt's leaf-nosed bats (Hipposideros pratti) have been tracked with stereo vision and a dense set of landmark points on the pinna surface. Axis-angle representations of the recorded rigid motions have shown a continuous variation in the rotation axes that covered a range of almost 180° in azimuth and elevation. To investigate the second question, the observed range of rigid pinna motions has been reproduced with a biomimetic pinna. Normalized mutual information between acoustic inputs associated with every pair of the rigid pinna motions showed that even small changes in the rotation axis resulted in more than 50% new sensory information encoding capacity (i.e., normalized mutual information less than 50%). This demonstrates a potential sensory benefit to the observed variability in the rigid pinna rotations.This paper investigates multidimensional characteristics of tonal noise from heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems, besides loudness and tonality, to improve prediction of annoyance. Two studies were conducted multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis to determine what other perceptual signal characteristics are important and perceptual weight analysis (PWA) to understand the impact of multiple tones in a signal. In the MDS study, paired comparison tasks were conducted to gather similarity and annoyance data. Results show that the latent perceptual dimensions are related to the signal's tonality, loudness, sharpness, and roughness. Including metrics for these perceptions, except roughness, improves the performance of earlier annoyance prediction models. Including both sharpness and tonal audibility does not further improve prediction performance, though. In the PWA study, noise stimuli with five-tone complexes between 125 Hz and 2 kHz were generated for subjective testing to obtain a perceptual weighting function. The levels of each tone were randomly adjusted for every trial, and both harmonic and inharmonic tone complexes were utilized. The PWA result was applied as a spectral weighting function to calculate a proposed weighted-sum tonal audibility metric. Utilizing the proposed metric instead of the traditional tonal audibility metric improves annoyance prediction to a similar degree as including sharpness.Cochlear implantation is increasingly being used as a hearing-loss treatment for patients with residual hearing in the low acoustic frequencies. These patients obtain combined electric-acoustic stimulation (EAS). Substantial residual hearing and relatively long electrode arrays can lead to interactions between the electric and acoustic stimulation. This work investigated EAS interaction through psychophysical and electrophysiological measures. Moreover, cone-beam computed-tomography data was used to characterize the interaction along spatial cochlear locations. Psychophysical EAS interaction was estimated based on the threshold of audibility of an acoustic probe stimulus in the presence of a simultaneously presented electric masker stimulus. Intracochlear electrocochleography was used to estimate electrophysiological EAS interaction via the telemetry capability of the cochlear implant. EAS interaction was observed using psychophysical and electrophysiological measurements. While psychoacoustic EAS interaction was most pronounced close to the electrical stimulation site, electrophysiological EAS interaction was observed over a wider range of spatial cochlear locations. Psychophysical EAS interaction was significantly larger than electrophysiological EAS interaction for acoustic probes close to the electrode position.
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