Search results for: standard score.

Authors: P. Grasgruber, J. Cacek, S. Hřebíčková

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The purpose of this study was to test the reliability of various standards that assess the quality of proteins via the “amino-acid score” and serve as a nutritional guideline for both children and adults. The height of young men in 42 European countries, Australia, New Zealand and USA was compared with the average consumption of food (after FAOSTAT, 2009) and a subsequent statistical analysis identified types of food with the most pronounced effect on physical growth. The results show that milk products and pork meat are by far the most significant nutritional factors in this regard. Cereals, vegetables and especially wheat played a strongly negative role. The results generally agreed best with the amino-acid score of proteins according to the standard of FAO 1985. In our opinion, the new standard of FAO 2007 underestimates the importance of tryptophan, which should provoke a debate about new modifications of the FAO guidelines.

Keywords: Protein quality, amino-acid score, physical growth, male height.

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Authors: Hiroaki Hirose, Hiroshi Ikeda, Isao Takeda

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The Japanese version of the SF-36 has been employed to assess individuals’ health-related QOL (HRQOL). This study aimed to clarify the HRQOL of motorists with a spinal cord injury, in order to compare these individuals' SF-36 scores and national standard values. A total of 100 motorists with a spinal cord injury participated in this study. Participants’ HRQOL was evaluated using the Japanese version of the SF-36 (second edition). The score for each subscale was standardized based on data on the Japanese population. The average scores for NPF, NRP, NBP, NGH, NVT, NSF, NRE, and NMH were 10.9, 41.8, 45.9, 47.1, 46.1, 46.7, 46.0, and 47.4 points, respectively. Subjects showed significantly lower scores for NPF and NRP compared with national standard values, which were both ≤ 45.0 points, but relatively normal scores for the other items: NBP, NGH, NVT, NSF, NRE and NMH (> 45.0 points). The average scores for PCS, MCS and RCS were 21.9, 56.0, and 50.0 points, respectively. Subjects showed a significantly lower PCS score (≤ 20.0 points); however, the MCS score was higher (> 55.0 points) along with a relatively normal RCS score in these individuals (= 50.0 points).

Keywords: Health-related QOL (HRQOL), SF-36, motorist, spinal cord injury, Japan.

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Authors: Nipon Sasithornsaowapa

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The objective of this research was to study the career success and the satisfaction of female executives working for schools in Bangkok, Thailand. This paper drew upon the survey data collected from 68 female executives. The survey conducted in on Bangkok schools. The statistics utilized in this paper included percentage, mean, standard deviation as well as t-test. The findings revealed that the majority of samples had more than 30 years of experience, held a master degree, and had an average income of less than 40,000 baht. The majority of respondents worked not more than 50 hours per week. In addition, the mean score revealed career development was ranked as their number one career satisfaction and having a job related to education was ranked as their number one job satisfaction. Also, the mean score of all categories of satisfaction was 4.61 with standard deviation of 1.677 which indicated that female executive level of satisfaction was high. In terms of the subjectivity career success, the hypothesis testing’s result disclosed that female executives with different married status had a difference in their job satisfaction which was significant at the 0.05 confidence level.

Keywords: Female executives, Career Success, Satisfaction.

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Authors: M.H. Ahmad Fadzil, Hurriyatul Fitriyah, Esa Prakasa, Hermawan Nugroho, S.H. Hussein, Azura Mohd. Affandi

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Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory skin condition which affects 2-3% of population around the world. Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI) is a gold standard to assess psoriasis severity as well as the treatment efficacy. Although a gold standard, PASI is rarely used because it is tedious and complex. In practice, PASI score is determined subjectively by dermatologists, therefore inter and intra variations of assessment are possible to happen even among expert dermatologists. This research develops an algorithm to assess psoriasis lesion for PASI scoring objectively. Focus of this research is thickness assessment as one of PASI four parameters beside area, erythema and scaliness. Psoriasis lesion thickness is measured by averaging the total elevation from lesion base to lesion surface. Thickness values of 122 3D images taken from 39 patients are grouped into 4 PASI thickness score using K-means clustering. Validation on lesion base construction is performed using twelve body curvature models and show good result with coefficient of determinant (R2) is equal to 1.

Keywords: 3D digital imaging, base construction, PASI, psoriasis lesion thickness.

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Authors: H. El Khattabi, A. Tamtaoui, D. Aboutajdine

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In this paper, we present the video quality measure estimation via a neural network. This latter predicts MOS (mean opinion score) by providing height parameters extracted from original and coded videos. The eight parameters that are used are: the average of DFT differences, the standard deviation of DFT differences, the average of DCT differences, the standard deviation of DCT differences, the variance of energy of color, the luminance Y, the chrominance U and the chrominance V. We chose Euclidean Distance to make comparison between the calculated and estimated output.

Keywords: video, neural network MLP, subjective quality, DCT, DFT, Retropropagation

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Authors: Mohammad Samarah, Benjamin Stark, Jennifer Kindle, Langley Payton

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Innovation is a key driver for companies, society, and economic growth. However, assessing and measuring innovation for individuals as well as organizations remains difficult. Our i5-Score presented in this study will help to overcome this difficulty and facilitate measuring the innovation potential. The score is based on a framework we call the 5Gs of innovation which defines specific innovation attributes. Those are 1) the drive for long-term goals 2) the audacity to generate new ideas, 3) the openness to share ideas with others, 4) the ability to grow, and 5) the ability to maintain high levels of optimism. To validate the i5-Score, we conducted a study at Florida Polytechnic University. The results show that the i5-Score is a good measure reflecting the innovative mindset of an individual or a group. Thus, the score can be utilized for evaluating, refining and enhancing innovation capabilities.

Keywords: Change management, innovation attributes, organizational development, STEM and venture creation.

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Authors: U. Bawa

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Macro invertebrates have been used to monitor organic pollution in rivers and streams. Several biotic indices based on macro invertebrates have been developed over the years including the Biological Monitoring Working Party (BMWP). A new biotic index, the Gammarus:Asellus ratio has been recently proposed as an index of organic pollution. This study tested the validity of the Gammarus:Asellus ratio as an index of organic pollution, by examining the relationship between the Gammarus:Asellus ratio and physical chemical parameters, and other biotic indices such as BMWP and, Average Score Per Taxon (ASPT) from lakes and streams at Markeaton Park, Allestree Park and Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire. Macro invertebrates were sampled using the standard five minute kick sampling techniques physical and chemical environmental variables were obtained based on standard sampling techniques. Eighteen sites were sampled, six sites from Markeaton Park (three sites across the stream and three sites across the lake). Six sites each were also sampled from Allestree Park and Kedleston Hall lakes. The Gammarus:Asellus ratio showed an opposite significant positive correlations with parameters indicative of organic pollution such as the level of nitrates, phosphates, and calcium and also revealed a negatively significant correlations with other biotic indices (BMWP/ASPT). The BMWP score correlated positively significantly with some water quality parameters such as dissolved oxygen and flow rate, but revealed no correlations with other chemical environmental variables. The BMWP score was significantly higher in the stream than the lake in Markeaton Park, also The ASPT scores appear to be significantly higher in the upper Lakes than the middle and lower lakes. This study has further strengthened the use of BMWP/ASPT score as an index of organic pollution. But additional application is required to validate the use of Gammarus:Asellus as a rapid bio monitoring tool.

Keywords: Asellus, Biotic index, Gammarus, Organic pollution, Macro invertebrate.

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Authors: Hao-Hsi Tseng, Hsin-Yun Lee

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Adopting Most Advantageous Tender (MAT) for the government procurement projects has become popular in Taiwan. As time pass by, the problems of MAT has appeared gradually. People condemn two points that are the result might be manipulated by a single committee member’s partiality and how to make a fair decision when the winner has two or more. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem proposed that the best scoring method should meet the four reasonable criteria. According to these four criteria this paper constructed an “Illegitimate Scores Checking Scheme” for a scoring method and used the scheme to find out the illegitimate of the current evaluation method of MAT. This paper also proposed a new scoring method that is called the “Standardizing Overall Evaluated Score Method”. This method makes each committee member’s influence tend to be identical. Thus, the committee members can scoring freely according to their partiality without losing the fairness. Finally, it was examined by a large-scale simulation, and the experiment revealed that the it improved the problem of dictatorship and perfectly avoided the situation of cyclical majorities, simultaneously. This result verified that the Standardizing Overall Evaluated Score Method is better than any current evaluation method of MAT.

Keywords: Arrow’s impossibility theorem, most advantageous tender, illegitimate scores checking scheme, standard score.

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Authors: Reza Ziaie Moayad, Azam Kouhpeyma

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In-situ testing is preferred to evaluate the liquefaction potential in cohesionless soils due to high disturbance during sampling. Although new in-situ methods with high accuracy have been developed, standard penetration test, the simplest and the oldest in-situ test, is still used due to the profusion of the recorded data. This paper reviews the Iranian standard of evaluating liquefaction potential in soils (codes 525) and compares the liquefaction assessment methods based on standard penetration test (SPT) results on cohesionless soil in this standard with the international standards. To this, methods for assessing liquefaction potential are compared with what is presented in standard 525. It is found that although the procedure used in Iranian standard of evaluating the potential of liquefaction has not been updated according to the new findings, it is a conservative procedure.

Keywords: cohesionless soil, liquefaction, SPT, Iranian liquefaction standard

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Authors: Faiza Belbachir, Thibault Schienhinski

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The massive development of online social networks allows users to post and share their opinions on various topics. With this huge volume of opinion, it is interesting to extract and interpret these information for different domains, e.g., product and service benchmarking, politic, system of recommendation. This is why opinion detection is one of the most important research tasks. It consists on differentiating between opinion data and factual data. The difficulty of this task is to determine an approach which returns opinionated document. Generally, there are two approaches used for opinion detection i.e. Lexical based approaches and Machine Learning based approaches. In Lexical based approaches, a dictionary of sentimental words is used, words are associated with weights. The opinion score of document is derived by the occurrence of words from this dictionary. In Machine learning approaches, usually a classifier is trained using a set of annotated document containing sentiment, and features such as n-grams of words, part-of-speech tags, and logical forms. Majority of these works are based on documents text to determine opinion score but dont take into account if these texts are really correct. Thus, it is interesting to exploit other information to improve opinion detection. In our work, we will develop a new way to consider the opinion score. We introduce the notion of trust score. We determine opinionated documents but also if these opinions are really trustable information in relation with topics. For that we use lexical SentiWordNet to calculate opinion and trust scores, we compute different features about users like (numbers of their comments, numbers of their useful comments, Average useful review). After that, we combine opinion score and trust score to obtain a final score. We applied our method to detect trust opinions in TRIPADVISOR collection. Our experimental results report that the combination between opinion score and trust score improves opinion detection.

Keywords: Tripadvisor, Opinion detection, SentiWordNet, trust score.

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Authors: Prateep Wajeetongratana

Abstract:

The purpose of this research was to study the influence of learning efficiency on local accountants’ job performance effectiveness. This paper drew upon the survey data collected from 335 local accountants survey conducted at Nakhon Ratchasima province, Thailand. The statistics utilized in this paper included percentage, mean, standard deviation, and regression analysis. The findings revealed that the majority of samples were between 31-40 years old, married, held an undergraduate degree, and had an average income between 10,000-15,000 baht. The majority of respondents had less than five years of accounting experience and worked for local administrations. The overall learning efficiency score was in the highest level while the local accountants’ job performance effectiveness score was also in the high level. The hypothesis testing’s result disclosed that learning efficiency factors which were knowledge, Skill, and Attitude had an influence on local accountants’ job the performance effectiveness.

Keywords: Accountants, Leaning Efficiency, Performance Effectiveness.

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Authors: Yuan-Hsiang Chang, Zhong-Xian Peng, Li-Der Jeng

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Music has always been an integral part of human’s daily lives. But, for the most people, reading musical score and turning it into melody is not easy. This study aims to develop an Automatic music score recognition system using digital image processing, which can be used to read and analyze musical score images automatically. The technical approaches included: (1) staff region segmentation; (2) image preprocessing; (3) note recognition; and (4) accidental and rest recognition. Digital image processing techniques (e.g., horizontal /vertical projections, connected component labeling, morphological processing, template matching, etc.) were applied according to musical notes, accidents, and rests in staff notations. Preliminary results showed that our system could achieve detection and recognition rates of 96.3% and 91.7%, respectively. In conclusion, we presented an effective automated musical score recognition system that could be integrated in a system with a media player to play music/songs given input images of musical score. Ultimately, this system could also be incorporated in applications for mobile devices as a learning tool, such that a music player could learn to play music/songs.

Keywords: Connected component labeling, image processing, morphological processing, optical musical recognition.

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Authors: Hamed Alizadeh Dashagholi, Hossein Yousefi-Banaem, Mina Naeimi

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Current study established for EEG signal analysis in patients with language disorder. Language disorder can be defined as meaningful delay in the use or understanding of spoken or written language. The disorder can include the content or meaning of language, its form, or its use. Here we applied Z-score, power spectrum, and coherence methods to discriminate the language disorder data from healthy ones. Power spectrum of each channel in alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and theta frequency bands was measured. In addition, intra hemispheric Z-score obtained by scoring algorithm. Obtained results showed high Z-score and power spectrum in posterior regions. Therefore, we can conclude that peoples with language disorder have high brain activity in frontal region of brain in comparison with healthy peoples. Results showed that high coherence correlates with irregularities in the ERP and is often found during complex task, whereas low coherence is often found in pathological conditions. The results of the Z-score analysis of the brain dynamics showed higher Z-score peak frequency in delta, theta and beta sub bands of Language Disorder patients. In this analysis there were activity signs in both hemispheres and the left-dominant hemisphere was more active than the right.

Keywords: EEG, electroencephalography, coherence methods, language disorder, power spectrum, z-score.

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Authors: Heshalini Rajagopal, Li Sze Chow, Raveendran Paramesran

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Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of the most important medical imaging modality. Subjective assessment of the image quality is regarded as the gold standard to evaluate MR images. In this study, a database of 210 MR images which contains ten reference images and 200 distorted images is presented. The reference images were distorted with four types of distortions: Rician Noise, Gaussian White Noise, Gaussian Blur and DCT compression. The 210 images were assessed by ten subjects. The subjective scores were presented in Difference Mean Opinion Score (DMOS). The DMOS values were compared with four FR-IQA metrics. We have used Pearson Linear Coefficient (PLCC) and Spearman Rank Order Correlation Coefficient (SROCC) to validate the DMOS values. The high correlation values of PLCC and SROCC shows that the DMOS values are close to the objective FR-IQA metrics.

Keywords: Medical Resonance (MR) images, Difference Mean Opinion Score (DMOS), Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA).

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Authors: Pedro M. Abreu, Bruno R. Mendes

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The management of pharmacotherapy and the process of dispensing medicines is becoming critical in clinical pharmacy due to the increase of incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases, the complexity and customization of therapeutic regimens, the introduction of innovative and more expensive medicines, the unbalanced relation between expenditure and revenue as well as due to the lack of rationalization associated with medication use. For these reasons, co-payments emerged in Europe in the 70s and have been applied over the past few years in healthcare. Co-payments lead to a rationing and rationalization of user’s access under healthcare services and products, and simultaneously, to a qualification and improvement of the services and products for the end-user. This analysis, under hospital practices particularly and co-payment strategies in general, was carried out on all the European regions and identified four reference countries, that apply repeatedly this tool and with different approaches. The structure, content and adaptation of European co-payments were analyzed through 7 qualitative attributes and 19 performance indicators, and the results expressed in a scorecard, allowing to conclude that the German models (total score of 68,2% and 63,6% in both elected co-payments) can collect more compliance and effectiveness, the English models (total score of 50%) can be more accessible, and the French models (total score of 50%) can be more adequate to the socio-economic and legal framework. Other European models did not show the same quality and/or performance, so were not taken as a standard in the future design of co-payments strategies. In this sense, we can see in the co-payments a strategy not only to moderate the consumption of healthcare products and services, but especially to improve them, as well as a strategy to increment the value that the end-user assigns to these services and products, such as medicines.

Keywords: Clinical pharmacy, co-payments, healthcare, medicines.

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Authors: Raghav Lakhotia, Chandra Kanth Nagesh, Krishna Madgula

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A lot has been said and discussed regarding the rationale and significance of the Bechdel Score. It became a digital sensation in 2013, when Swedish cinemas began to showcase the Bechdel test score of a film alongside its rating. The test has drawn criticism from experts and the film fraternity regarding its use to rate the female presence in a movie. The pundits believe that the score is too simplified and the underlying criteria of a film to pass the test must include 1) at least two women, 2) who have at least one dialogue, 3) about something other than a man, is egregious. In this research, we have considered a few more parameters which highlight how we represent females in film, like the number of female dialogues in a movie, dialogue genre, and part of speech tags in the dialogue. The parameters were missing in the existing criteria to calculate the Bechdel score. The research aims to analyze 342 movies scripts to test a hypothesis if these extra parameters, above with the current Bechdel criteria, are significant in calculating the female representation score. The result of the Principal Component Analysis method concludes that the female dialogue content is a key component and should be considered while measuring the representation of women in a work of fiction.

Keywords: Bechdel test, dialogue genre, parts of speech tags, principal component analysis.

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Authors: Katleho Daniel Makatjane, Diteboho Lawrence Xaba, Ntebogang Dinah Moroke

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The current study investigates the behaviour of time-varying parameters that are based on the score function of the predictive model density at time t. The mechanism to update the parameters over time is the scaled score of the likelihood function. The results revealed that there is high persistence of time-varying, as the location parameter is higher and the skewness parameter implied the departure of scale parameter from the normality with the unconditional parameter as 1.5. The results also revealed that there is a perseverance of the leptokurtic behaviour in stock returns which implies the returns are heavily tailed. Prior to model estimation, the White Neural Network test exposed that the stock price can be modelled by a GAS model. Finally, we proposed further researches specifically to model the existence of time-varying parameters with a more detailed model that encounters the heavy tail distribution of the series and computes the risk measure associated with the returns.

Keywords: Generalized autoregressive score model, stock returns, time-varying.

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Authors: M. Anidha, K. Premalatha

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Feature Selection is significant in order to perform constructive classification in the area of cancer diagnosis. However, a large number of features compared to the number of samples makes the task of classification computationally very hard and prone to errors in microarray gene expression datasets. In this paper, we present an innovative method for selecting highly informative gene subsets of gene expression data that effectively classifies the cancer data into tumorous and non-tumorous. The hybrid gene selection technique comprises of combined Mutual Information and Fisher score to select informative genes. The gene selection is validated by classification using Support Vector Machine (SVM) which is a supervised learning algorithm capable of solving complex classification problems. The results obtained from improved Mutual Information and F-Score with SVM as a classifier has produced efficient results.

Keywords: Gene selection, mutual information, Fisher score, classification, SVM.

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Authors: Ammar Ali Saleh Jaber, Amer Hayat Khan, Syed Azhar Syed Sulaiman

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Tuberculosis (TB) is considered as a major disease that affects daily activities and impairs health-related quality of life (HRQoL). The impact of TB on HRQoL can affect treatment outcome and may lead to treatment defaulting. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the HRQoL of TB treatment lost to follow-up during and after treatment in Yemen. For this aim, this prospective study enrolled a total of 399 TB lost to follow-up patients between January 2011 and December 2015. By applying HRQoL criteria, only 136 fill the survey during treatment. Moreover, 96 were traced and fill out the HRQoL survey. All eight HRQol domains were categorized into the physical component score (PCS) and mental component score (MCS), which were calculated using QM scoring software. Results show that all lost to follow-up TB patients reported a score less than 47 for all eight domains, except general health (67.3) during their treatment period. Low scores of 27.9 and 29.8 were reported for emotional role limitation (RE) and mental health (MH), respectively. Moreover, the mental component score (MCS) was found to be only 28.9. The trace lost follow-up shows a significant improvement in all eight domains and a mental component score of 43.1. The low scores of 27.9 and 29.8 for role emotion and mental health, respectively, in addition to the MCS score of 28.9, show that severe emotional condition and reflect the higher depression during treatment period that can result to lost to follow-up. The low MH, RE, and MCS can be used as a clue for predicting future TB treatment lost to follow-up.

Keywords: Yemen, tuberculosis, health-related quality of life, khat.

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Authors: Ozan Mut, Mehmet Göktürk

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Matching algorithms have significant importance in speaker recognition. Feature vectors of the unknown utterance are compared to feature vectors of the modeled speakers as a last step in speaker recognition. A similarity score is found for every model in the speaker database. Depending on the type of speaker recognition, these scores are used to determine the author of unknown speech samples. For speaker verification, similarity score is tested against a predefined threshold and either acceptance or rejection result is obtained. In the case of speaker identification, the result depends on whether the identification is open set or closed set. In closed set identification, the model that yields the best similarity score is accepted. In open set identification, the best score is tested against a threshold, so there is one more possible output satisfying the condition that the speaker is not one of the registered speakers in existing database. This paper focuses on closed set speaker identification using a modified version of a well known matching algorithm. The results of new matching algorithm indicated better performance on YOHO international speaker recognition database.

Keywords: Automatic Speaker Recognition, Voice Recognition, Pattern Recognition, Digital Audio Signal Processing.

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Authors: K. M. Ravikumar, Balakrishna Reddy, R. Rajagopal, H. C. Nagaraj

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Automatic detection of syllable repetition is one of the important parameter in assessing the stuttered speech objectively. The existing method which uses artificial neural network (ANN) requires high levels of agreement as prerequisite before attempting to train and test ANNs to separate fluent and nonfluent. We propose automatic detection method for syllable repetition in read speech for objective assessment of stuttered disfluencies which uses a novel approach and has four stages comprising of segmentation, feature extraction, score matching and decision logic. Feature extraction is implemented using well know Mel frequency Cepstra coefficient (MFCC). Score matching is done using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) between the syllables. The Decision logic is implemented by Perceptron based on the score given by score matching. Although many methods are available for segmentation, in this paper it is done manually. Here the assessment by human judges on the read speech of 10 adults who stutter are described using corresponding method and the result was 83%.

Keywords: Assessment, DTW, MFCC, Objective, Perceptron, Stuttering.

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Authors: Chanoknart Mayusoh

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In most of apparel creation, the designer usually uses standard pattern as a fundamental of pattern making. In the design of each kind of apparel, standard pattern is starting point of production. The importance of standard pattern is that it is able to have the apparel fits to general people. Therefore, standard pattern is standardized to be the same. Regardless which type of apparel, its standard pattern will have similar production. Anyhow, the author sees that the apparel design, regardless for which type of apparel, has to stick on the standard pattern as a fundamental of apparel design and this seems to be a limitation of apparel design without any designing alternative being developed. In the research on the creation of contemporary apparel Inspired by the sofa’s pattern structure in Vimanmek Mansion. The author has applied the pattern of the sofa and armchair to be the principle in the apparel design, instead of standard pattern, to create new form of structures and shapes making the contemporary apparel becomes more interesting and different than previous, can be used in daily life, as well as being a new alternative for apparel design. Those who are interesting in such idea can apply and develop it to be more variety further.

Keywords: Contemporary Apparel, Sofa’s Pattern, Armchair’s Pattern, Vimanmek Mansion.

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Authors: Abdelrasoul, Khalid Ahmed Elrabie

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The study was conducted on Sahiwal cattle bulls maintained at the Artificial Breeding Complex, NDRI, Karnal, Hayana, India, to determine the effect of exercise on the sexual behavior and semen quality. Fourteen Sahiwal bulls were classified into two groups of seven each. Group-1, bulls were exercised by walking in a bull exerciser once a week one hour before semen collection, whereas bulls in group-2 were exercised daily. Sexual behavior and semen quality traits studied were: Reaction time (RT), Dismounting time (DMT), Total time taken in mounts (TTTM), Flehmen response (FR), Erection Score (ES), Protrusion Score (PS), Intensity of thrust (ITS), Temperament Score (TS), Libido Score (LS), Semen volume, Physical appearance, Mass activity, Initial progressive motility, Non-eosinophilic spermatozoa count (NESC) and post thaw motility percent. Data were analyzed by least squares technique. Group-2 showed significantly (p < 0.01) higher value in RT (sec), DMT (sec), TTTM (sec), ES, PS, ITS, LS, semen volume, semen color density and mass activity.

Keywords: Exercise, Sahiwal bulls, semen quality, sexual behavior.

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Authors: C. Ardil

Abstract:

In this study, a model, together with a software tool that implements it, has been developed to determine the performance ratings of employees in an organization operating in the information technology sector using the indicators obtained from employees' online study data. Weighted Sum (WS) Method and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method based on multidimensional decision making approach were used in the study. WS and TOPSIS methods provide multidimensional decision making (MDDM) methods that allow all dimensions to be evaluated together considering specific weights, allowing employees to objectively evaluate the problem of online performance tracking. The application of WS and TOPSIS mathematical methods, which can combine alternatives with a large number of dimensions and reach simultaneous solution, has been implemented through an online performance tracking software. In the application of WS and TOPSIS methods, objective dimension weights were calculated by using entropy information (EI) and standard deviation (SD) methods from the data obtained by employees' online performance tracking method, decision matrix was formed by using performance scores for each employee, and a single performance score was calculated for each employee. Based on the calculated performance score, employees were given a performance evaluation decision. The results of Pareto set evidence and comparative mathematical analysis validate that employees' performance preference rankings in WS and TOPSIS methods are closely related. This suggests the compatibility, applicability, and validity of the proposed method to the MDDM problems in which a large number of alternative and dimension types are taken into account. With this study, an objective, realistic, feasible and understandable mathematical method, together with a software tool that implements it has been demonstrated. This is considered to be preferable because of the subjectivity, limitations and high cost of the methods traditionally used in the measurement and performance appraisal in the information technology sector.

Keywords: Weighted sum, entropy ınformation, standard deviation, online performance tracking, performance evaluation, performance management, multidimensional decision making.

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Authors: Xun Ge, Jingju Qian

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To investigate some relations between higher mathe¬matics scores in Chinese graduate student entrance examination and calculus (resp. linear algebra, probability statistics) scores in subject's completion examination of Chinese university, we select 20 students as a sample, take higher mathematics score as a decision attribute and take calculus score, linear algebra score, probability statistics score as condition attributes. In this paper, we are based on rough-set theory (Rough-set theory is a logic-mathematical method proposed by Z. Pawlak. In recent years, this theory has been widely implemented in the many fields of natural science and societal science.) to investigate importance of condition attributes with respective to decision attribute and strength of condition attributes supporting decision attribute. Results of this investigation will be helpful for university students to raise higher mathematics scores in Chinese graduate student entrance examination.

Keywords: Rough set, higher mathematics scores, decision attribute, condition attribute.

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Authors: Ting Wang, Huiqin Yang, Buxin Han

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Background: This investigated the mental health of the elderly survivors six months, ten months and two years after the “5.12 Wenchuan" earthquake. Methods: Two hundred and thirty-two physically healthy older survivors from earthquake-affected Mianyang County were interviewed. The measures included the Revised Impact of Event Scale (IES-R, Chinese version, for PTSD) and a Chinese Mental Health Inventory for the Elderly (MHIE). A repeated measures ANOVA test was used for statistical analysis. Results: The follow-up group had a statistically significant lower IES-R score and lower MHIE score than the initial group ten months after the earthquake. Two years later, the score of IES-R in follow-up group were still lower than that of non-follow-up group, but no differences were significant on the score of MHIE between groups. Furthermore, a negative relationship was found between scores of IES-R and MHIE. Conclusion: The earthquake has had a persistent negative impact on older survivors- mental health within the two-year period and that although the PTSD level declined significantly with time, it did not disappear completely.

Keywords: Elderly survivors, follow-up, mental health, post-Wenchuan earthquake.

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Authors: Münevver Başman, Ezel Tavşancıl

Abstract:

Making the right decisions about students depends on teachers’ use of the assessment and evaluation techniques effectively. In order to do that, teachers should have positive attitudes and adequate self-efficacy perception towards assessment and evaluation. The purpose of this study is to investigate relationship between self-efficacy perception and the attitudes of prospective teachers towards assessment and evaluation and what kind of differences these issues have in terms of a variety of demographic variables. The study group consisted of 277 prospective teachers who have been studying in different departments of Marmara University, Faculty of Education. In this study, ‘Personal Information Form’, ‘A Perceptual Scale for Measurement and Evaluation of Prospective Teachers Self-Efficacy in Education’ and ‘Attitudes toward Educational Measurement Inventory’ are applied. As a result, positive correlation was found between self-efficacy perceptions and the attitudes of prospective teachers towards assessment and evaluation. Considering different departments, there is a significant difference between the mean score of attitudes of prospective teachers and between the mean score of self-efficacy perceptions of them. However, considering variables of attending statistics class and the class types at the graduated high school, there is no significant difference between the mean score of attitudes of prospective teachers and between the mean score of self-efficacy perceptions of them.

Keywords: Attitude, perception, prospective teacher, self-efficacy.

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Authors: Aleksandra Nocoń (Szunke)

Abstract:

The study is a review of the literature concerning the consequences of non-standard monetary policy, which are used by central banks during unconventional periods, threatening banking sector instability. In particular, the attention was paid to the effects of non-standard monetary policy tools for financial markets. However, the empirical evidence about their effects and real consequences for financial markets is still not final. The main aim of the study is to survey consequences of standard and non-standard monetary policy instruments, implemented during the global financial crisis in the United States, United Kingdom and euro area, with particular attention to the results for the stabilization of global financial markets. The study consists mainly of the empirical review, indicating the impact of the implementation of these tools for financial markets. The following research methods were used in the study: literature studies, including domestic and foreign literature, cause and effect analysis and statistical analysis.

Keywords: Asset purchase facility, consequences of monetary policy instruments, non-standard monetary policy, Quantitative Easing.

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Authors: Khalid Ahmed Elrabie Abdelrasoul

Abstract:

The present study was carried out on Sahiwal cattle bulls maintained at the Artificial Breeding Complex, NDRI, Karnal, Hayana, India, to assess the effect of cooling using mist cooling and fanning on Sahiwal bulls in the dry hot summer season. Fourteen Sahiwal bulls were divided into two groups of seven each. Sexual behavior and semen quality traits considered were: Reaction time (RT), Dismounting time (DMT), Total time taken in mounts (TTTM), Flehmen response (FR), Erection Score (ES), Protrusion Score (PS), Intensity of thrust (ITS), Temperament Score (TS), Libido Score (LS), Semen volume, Physical appearance, Mass activity, Initial progressive motility, Non-eosinophilic spermatozoa count (NESC) and post thaw motility percent. Data were analyzed by least squares technique. Group-1 was the control, whereas group-2 (treatment group) bulls were exposed to mist cooling and fanning (thrice a day 15 min each) in the dry hot summer season. Group-2 showed significantly (p < 0.01) higher value in DMT (sec), ES, PS, ITS, LS, semen volume (ml), semen color density, mass activity, initial motility, progressive motility and live sperm.

Keywords: Mist cooling, Sahiwal bulls, semen quality, sexual behavior.

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Authors: Othman O. Khalifa, Zakiah Hanim Ahmad, Teddy Surya Gunawan

Abstract:

This paper presents a rule-based text- to- speech (TTS) Synthesis System for Standard Malay, namely SMaTTS. The proposed system using sinusoidal method and some pre- recorded wave files in generating speech for the system. The use of phone database significantly decreases the amount of computer memory space used, thus making the system very light and embeddable. The overall system was comprised of two phases the Natural Language Processing (NLP) that consisted of the high-level processing of text analysis, phonetic analysis, text normalization and morphophonemic module. The module was designed specially for SM to overcome few problems in defining the rules for SM orthography system before it can be passed to the DSP module. The second phase is the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) which operated on the low-level process of the speech waveform generation. A developed an intelligible and adequately natural sounding formant-based speech synthesis system with a light and user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) is introduced. A Standard Malay Language (SM) phoneme set and an inclusive set of phone database have been constructed carefully for this phone-based speech synthesizer. By applying the generative phonology, a comprehensive letter-to-sound (LTS) rules and a pronunciation lexicon have been invented for SMaTTS. As for the evaluation tests, a set of Diagnostic Rhyme Test (DRT) word list was compiled and several experiments have been performed to evaluate the quality of the synthesized speech by analyzing the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) obtained. The overall performance of the system as well as the room for improvements was thoroughly discussed.

Keywords: Natural Language Processing, Text-To-Speech (TTS), Diphone, source filter, low-/ high- level synthesis.

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