The automatic estimation of speaker characteristics, such as height, age, and gender, has various applications in forensics, surveillance, customer service, and many human-robot interaction applications. These applications are often required to produce a response promptly. This work proposes a novel approach to speaker profiling by combining filter bank initializations, such as continuous wavelets and gammatone filter banks, with one-dimensional (1D) convolutional neural networks (CNN) and residual blocks. The proposed end-to-end model goes from the raw waveform to an estimated height, age, and gender of the speaker by learning speaker representation directly from the audio signal without relying on handcrafted and pre-computed acou

The present study aims at scrutinizing the impoliteness types, causes, and purposes utilized by Iraqi English language learners when refusing marriage proposals. Thus, it attempts to answer the questions: (1) what are the impoliteness formulas used by the Iraqi learners of English in refusing marriage proposals?, and (2) What are their impoliteness triggers/causes and the purposes? The study is significant in bridging the gap that few linguistic types of research concentrate on studying intentionality and emotions allied with impoliteness. Data were collected from 35 Iraqi learners of English responding to 6 situations of marriage. The data were analyzed using Culpeper’s (2011) formulas of impoliteness and Bousfield’s (2007) impolite

Ground-based active optical sensors (GBAOS) have been successfully used in agriculture to predict crop yield potential (YP) early in the season and to improvise N rates for optimal crop yield. However, the models were found weak or inconsistent due to environmental variation especially rainfall. The objectives of the study were to evaluate if GBAOS could predict YP across multiple locations, soil types, cultivation systems, and rainfall differences. This study was carried from 2011 to 2013 on corn (Zea mays L.) in North Dakota, and in 2017 in potatoes in Maine. Six N rates were used on 50 sites in North Dakota and 12 N rates on two sites, one dryland and one irrigated, in Maine. Two active GBAOS used for this study were GreenSeeker and Holl

Trajectory tracking and vibration suppression are essential objectives in a flexible joint manipulator control. The flexible joint manipulator is an under-actuated system, in which the number of control actions is less than the degree of freedom to be controlled. It is very challenging to control the underactuated nonlinear system with two degree of freedom. This paper presents a hierarchical sliding mode control (HSMC) for a rotary flexible joint manipulator (RFJM). Firstly, the rotary flexible joint manipulator is modeled by two subsystems. Secondly, the sliding surfaces for both subsystems are constructed. Finally, the control action is designed based on the Lyapunov function. Computer simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of

Photovoltaic devices (PVs) were fabricated by spray-coating an ink of copper indium diselenide CuInSeR 2 R(CIS) nanocrystals as the light-absorbing layer. Without high-temperature post-deposition annealing, PVs were made on glass substrates with power conversion efficiencies of up to 1.5% and 0.9%, for Au and Mo coated respectively, under AM 1.5 illumination. UV–Vis spectrophotometer in the wavelength range 350–1500 nm. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) analysis it is evident that CuInSeR 2 R have the chalcopyrite structure as the major phase and no secondary phase with a preferred orientation along (112) direction and The atomic ratio of Cu : In : Se in the nanocrystals is nearly 1 : 1 : 2.

لا يزال المهتمون بلعبة كرة السلة يبحثون عن إيجاد الوسائل الأكثر أهمية وصولاً إلى ما تطمح إليه الدول لتحقيق افضل المستويات في نواحي اللعبة كافة من خلال التغلب على المعوقات التي تحول دون تقدمها إلى الأمام بالدراسة والبحث. ومن هذا المنطلق انصب البحث في ضرورة معالجة القصور الناتج عن عدم وجود المستويات المعيارية ذات العلاقة باختبارات قدرات اللاعبين وعلى وفق مراكز اللعب ولا سيما المهارية الهجومية، ومما شكل ذلك ضع

The main objective of this study is to characterize the main factors which may affect the behavior of segmental prestressed concrete beams comprised of multi segments. The 3-D finite element program ABAQUS was utilized. The experimental work was conducted on twelve simply supported segmental prestressed concrete beams divided into three groups depending on the precast segments number. They all had an identical total length of 3150mm, but each had different segment numbers (9, 7, and 5 segments), in other words, different segment lengths. To simulate the genuine fire disasters, nine beams were exposed to high-temperature flame for one hour, the selected temperatures were 300°C (572°F), 500°C (932°F) and 700°C (1292°F) as recomm