Focus, prosodic context, and phonological feature specification: patterns of variation in fricative production

Because they consist, in large part, of random turbulent noise, fricatives present a challenge to attempts to specify the phonetic correlates of phonological features. Previous research has focused on temporal properties, acoustic power, and a variety of spectral properties of fricatives in a number of contexts [Jongman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 108, 1252-1263 (2000); Jesus and Shadle, J. Phonet. 30, 437-467 (2002); Crystal and House, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 83, 1553-1573 (1988a)]. However, no systematic investigation of the effects of focus and prosodic context on fricative production has been carried out. Manipulation of explicit focus can serve to selectively exaggerate linguistically relevant properties of speech in much the same manner as stress [de Jong, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 97, 491-504 (1995); de Jong, J. Phonet. 32, 493-516 (2004); de Jong and Zawaydeh, J. Phonet. 30, 53-75 (2002)]. This experimental technique was exploited to investigate acoustic power along with temporal and spectral characteristics of American English fricatives in two prosodic contexts, to probe whether native speakers selectively attend to subsegmental features, and to consider variability in fricative production across speakers. While focus in general increased noise power and duration, speakers did not selectively enhance spectral features of the target fricatives.     

Scale-Free Interpersonal Influences on Opinions in Complex Systems

An important side effect of the evolution of the human brain is an increased capacity to form opinions in a very large domain of issues, which become points of aggressive interpersonal disputes. Remarkably, such disputes are often no less vigorous on small differences of opinion than large differences. Opinion differences that may be measured on the real number line may not directly correspond to the subjective importance of an issue and extent of resistance to opinion change. This is a hard problem for the field of opinion dynamics, a field that has become increasingly prominent as it has attracted more contributions to it from investigators in the natural and engineering sciences. The paper contributes a scale-free approach to assessing the extents to which individuals, with unknown heterogeneous resistances to influence, have been influenced by the opinions of others.     

Harborth constants for certain classes of metacyclic groups

The Harborth constant of a finite group $G$ is the smallest integer $k\ge exp\left(G\right)$ such that any subset of $G$ of size $k$ contains $exp\left(G\right)$ distinct elements whose product is 1. Generalizing previous work on the Harborth constants of dihedral groups, we compute the Harborth constants for the metacyclic groups of the form $H_{n,m}=〈x,y\mid x^n=1,y^2=x^m,yx=x^{?1}y〉$. We also solve the “inverse” problem of characterizing all smaller subsets that do not contain $exp\left(H_{n,m}\right)$ distinct elements whose product is 1.     

Response and bifurcation analysis of a MDOF rotor system with a strong nonlinearity

A new HB (Harmonic Balance)/AFT (Alternating Frequency Time) method is further developed to obtain synchronous and subsynchronous whirling response of nonlinear MDOF rotor systems. Using the HBM, the nonlinear differential equations of a rotor system can be transformed to algebraic equations with unknown harmonic coefficients. A technique is applied to reduce the algebraic equations to only those of the nonlinear coordinates. Stability analysis of the periodic solutions is performed via perturbation of the solutions. To further reduce the computational time for the stability analysis, the reduced system parameters (mass, damping, and stiffness) are calculated in terms of the already known harmonic coefficients. For illustration, a simple MDOF rotor system with a piecewise-linear bearing clearance is used to demonstrate the accuracy of the calculated steady-state solutions and their bifurcation boundaries. Employing ideas from modern dynamics theory, the example MDOF nonlinear rotor system is shown to exhibit subsynchronous, quasi-periodic and chaotic whirling motions.     

Gradient-based Regularization Parameter Selection for Problems With Nonsmooth Penalty Functions

In high-dimensional and/or nonparametric regression problems , regularization (or penalization) is used to control model complexity and induce desired structure. Each penalty has a weight parameter that indicates how strongly the structure corresponding to that penalty should be enforced. Typically, the parameters are chosen to minimize the error on a separate validation set using a simple grid search or a gradient-free optimization method. It is more efficient to tune parameters if the gradient can be determined, but this is often difficult for problems with nonsmooth penalty functions. Here, we show that for many penalized regression problems, the validation loss is actually smooth almost-everywhere with respect to the penalty parameters. We can, therefore, apply a modified gradient descent algorithm to tune parameters. Through simulation studies on example regression problems, we find that increasing the number of penalty parameters and tuning them using our method can decrease the generalization error.     

Short-range orientational order and thermodynamic properties of polymer solutions

The concept of short-range orientational order was applied to the calculation of thermodynamic characteristics of polymer solutions in terms of the lattice model. It was shown that allowance for short-range order makes it possible to explain negative values of the entropy of mixing and the existence of a lower critical solution temperature in both polymer solutions and solutions of low-molecular-mass compounds. It was found that systems with lower critical solution temperature can exist even when the degree of orientational order in solutions slightly increases as compared with the corresponding values of this parameter in their components.     

Surfactin production from potato process effluent by Bacillus subtilis in a chemostat

The biosurfactant surfactin has potential to aid in the recovery of energy resources (oil recovery) or subsurface organic contaminants (environmental remediation). However, high medium and purification costs limit its use in these high-volume applications. In previous work, we showed that surfactin could be produced from an inexpensive low-solids potato process effluent with minimal amendments or pretreatments. Previous research has also shown that surfactin can be both produced in Bacillus subtilis cultures and recovered by foam fractionation in an airlift reactor. Results using both purified potato starch and unamended low-solids potato process effluent as substrates for surfactin production indicate that the process is oxygen limited and that recalcitrant indigenous bacteria in the potato process effluent hamper continuous surfactin production. The research reported here features the use of a chemostat operated in batch mode for producing surfactin with concomitant use of antifoam to prevent surfactant loss. The antifoam did not interfere with surfactin recovery by acid precipitation or its efficacy. Initial trials took about 48 h to produce 0.9 g/L of surfactin from potato process effluent. Increasing the oxygen mass transfer by increasing the stirring speed and adding a baffle decreased production time to 12–24 h and produced about 0.6 g/L of surfactin from two different potato-processing facilities.