It is a Fascist Empire. Some points of discussion on the nature of the Italy’s colonialism during the Fascist period

This article concerns the two most ambitious city plans that were developed by Italian planners late in the fascist period. The first is the plan for Addis Ababa, in Ethiopia, and the second is the one for EUR, or the Esposizione Universale di Roma (Rome Universal Expo). To some degree, my objective is to compare them, but not in the formal sense. My interest is not so much in tracing a history of plans as in discerning a story about intentions, the intentions of planners and what the two plans had in common in terms of the burden of the expectations with which they were invested. Addis Ababa was chosen to be the capital of the Italian Empire, which was proclaimed in May 1936, following the conquest of Ethiopia. This Empire, in East Africa, lumped together the older colonies of Eritrea and Somalia with Ethiopia into the entity of l'Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East Africa), and also included Libya, which had been Italian since 1912.1 EUR, on the other hand, was to be an international exhibition, a world fair, just outside Rome, and was to be inaugurated in 1942, on the twentieth anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome. The two plans were initially conceived at roughly the same time, and both were seen as opportunities to show fascist Italy in a prestigious light and present its modernity to other moder nations. Although EUR was built (and still stands) on Italian soil, the claim I will make is that both were colonial cities, and that, in fact, EUR was the final and most complete of Italy's colonial cities, since, in the end, it was the one that most thoroughly fulfilled the agendas of Italian colonial city planning. The image in Figure 1 was included editorially in the architectural publication Domus, in 1936. Italian troops had invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and the League of Nations had imposed sanctions against Italy as a result. A wave of Italian propaganda followed that was meant to justify Italy's actions on the basis that

A system is described for analyzing recorded natural speech in real time using a microcomputer. Recordings up to 15 min in length can be analyzed in terms of fundamental frequency, amplitude, length of utterances, and pauses. Although primarily developed for clinical research, the system has applicability to other research areas involving speech.

Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists

Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia by Nigusie Kassaye W. Michael examines the political history of the last Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I. Nigusie provides a comprehensive account of the Ethiopian domestic and foreign politics during Haile Selassie's reign, a time when Ethiopia reached the peak of its power. Drawing on Russian and Ethiopian archival sources, this book analyzes Haile Selassie I as not only the final Emperor of Ethiopia but also the founder of modern Ethiopian diplomacy and centralized Ethiopia with access to the sea. The monarch carried out numerous, important reforms that encouraged the country’s development and growth of its international authority. In 1974, when the monarch left his palace, Ethiopia was a member of the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity, the World Health Organization, the International Red Cross, etc. and maintained diplomatic relations with eighty-one states, sixty-one of which had embassies and missions in Addis Ababa.

Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia by Nigusie Kassaye W. Michael examines the political history of the last Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I. Nigusie provides a comprehensive account of the Ethiopian domestic and foreign politics during Haile Selassie's reign, a time when Ethiopia reached the peak of its power. Drawing on Russian and Ethiopian archival sources, this book analyzes Haile Selassie I as not only the final Emperor of Ethiopia but also the founder of modern Ethiopian diplomacy and centralized Ethiopia with access to the sea. The monarch carried out numerous, important reforms that encouraged the country’s development and growth of its international authority. In 1974, when the monarch left his palace, Ethiopia was a member of the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity, the World Health Organization, the International Red Cross, etc. and maintained diplomatic relations with eighty-one states, sixty-one of which had embassies and missions in Addis Ababa.

A real time speech to text conversion system converts the spoken words into text form exactly in the similar way that the user pronounces. We created a real time speech recognition system that was tested in real time noiseous environment. We used the design of a bidirectional nonstationary Kalman filter to enhance the ability of this Real time speech recognition system. Bidirectional Kalman filter has been proved to be the best noise estimator in nonstationary noiseous environment. Real time speech to text conversion system introduces conversion of the uttered words instantly after the utterance. The purpose of this project was to introduce a new speech recognition system that is computationally simple and more robust to noise than the HMM based speech recognition system. We have used our own created database for its flexibility and TIDIGIT database for its accuracy comparison with the HMM based speech recognition system. MFCC features of speech sample were calculated and words were distinguished according to the feature matching of each sampled word. System was tested in different noise conditions and we obtained overall word accuracy of 90%.

The Italian Invasion, the Ethiopian Empire, and Oromo Nationalism:The Significance of the Western Oromo Confederation of 1936 Ezekiel Gebissa Background In 1916, a palace coup d'état led by the Shewan nobility brought to power Ras Taffari Mekonnen as the regent and heir apparent to the throne of the Ethiopian empire.1 Soon Taffari began to take measures to make himself the de facto ruler of the empire. In the 1920s, he focused on removing Menelik's stalwarts from office and cutting them off from their power base. After his accession to the throne in 1930 as Emperor Haile Sellassie, he embarked on a program of political centralization to end the limited autonomy of the regions that had maintained semi-independent status since their incorporation into Ethiopia. As he worked to concentrate power in his own hands, Haile Sellassie reversed the political arrangements of Emperor Menelik. The latter had ruled through a combination of coercion and consent, appointing military rulers where he encountered resistance and granting internal autonomy to hereditary rulers who agreed to accept his suzerainty peacefully and pay annual tributes.2 Haile Sellassie found his predecessor's administrative system incongruent with his vision of an empire ruled from the center by an all-powerful sovereign. He abolished the semi-independent status of such regions as Tigray, Gojjam, and Jimma, and appointed only Shewans to rule the subordinate regions.3 [End Page 75] When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, the deposed hereditary rulers felt that their time had come to settle scores. They defected to the Italian side in the hope of regaining their positions. Indeed, the Italians appointed them as governors of their former domains. In 1941, when Haile Sellassie returned to power, they were once again excluded from power. In response, they made common cause with the oppressed people in their regions and rebelled against an apparently "irreversible centralization under the hegemony of the Shewan Amhara nobility."4 In Oromo areas, grievances against the initial conquest and loss of autonomy ran deep. Ever since they had been conquered by Menelik, Oromos had expressed their rejection of Abyssinian rule through acts of defiance, ranging from embracing Islam to outright rebellion. When Italy invaded Abyssinia, Oromos seized the moment to reclaim their lost freedom and sovereign existence. In 1935, the Raya and Azeboo Oromos attacked the Abyssinian armies going to and returning from the Battle of Maichew. Even the fleeing emperor felt threatened enough to avoid passing through their land. In 1936, the Oromo of Jimma attacked and expelled Amhara officials and thereby demonstrated their rejection of colonial rule. In western Abyssinia, the hereditary rulers of the Oromo declared the establishment of an independent polity called the Western Oromo Confederation (WOC) and offered themselves as a mandate territory of the League of Nations.5 These acts of resistance have not been adequately documented in Ethiopian historiography. The neglect is not due to a lack of adequate sources. Contemporary observers have left a thorough record of events in the Oromo areas during the Italian invasion. British consular reports from Goré, for instance, maintain that several Oromo regions took advantage of the Italian invasion to reclaim their lands. According to one such report, the various factions (provinces) were always on the point of open war . . . with the Taffari party which was only a family government operating in Addis Ababa as events clearly proved on the Italian invasion every single province either going into open rebellion like GOJAM-TIGRE and OGADEN or passive rebellion by refusing to take part in the war like the western Galla provinces and the [End Page 76] southern provinces held in subjection with a light Amhara garrison of feudal soldiery holding the occupied provinces in serfdom. These Amhara garrisons were withdrawn to Northern front and the whole country has been seized by whatever tribe the province contains.6 As the above statement shows, most of the Oromo resistance movements have always sought freedom from Amhara domination, restoration of their land, and recognition of their cultural identity and political autonomy. These objectives ran contrary to the political desires of the Ethiopianist elite to maintain Ethiopia as a unified country. Documenting Oromo-led movements as worthy historical phenonema...

In the 1960s, Addis Ababa experienced a construction boom, spurred by its new international stature as the seat of both the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the Organization of African Unity. Working closely with Emperor Haile Selassie, expatriate architects played a major role in shaping the Ethiopian capital as a symbol of an African modernity in continuity with tradition. Haile Selassie's Imperial Modernity: Expatriate Architects and the Shaping of Addis Ababa examines how a distinct Ethiopian modernity was negotiated through various borrowings from the past, including Italian colonial planning, both at the scale of the individual building and at the scale of the city. Focusing on public buildings designed by Italian Eritrean Arturo Mezzedimi, French Henri Chomette, and the partnership of Israeli Zalman Enav and Ethiopian Michael Tedros, Ayala Levin critically explores how international architects confronted the challenges of mediating Haile Selassie's vision of an imperial modernity.

A hard-wired real-time linear predictive coding (LPC) synthesizer has been built. The synthesizer computes the speech signal from data which it receives pitch synchronously from a computer: the data includes a pitch period, sum of squares amplitude, and 12 LPC coefficients. In computing the speech signal for one pitch period, the overhang energy from previous pitch periods contributes to the energy of the signal; this factor must be taken into account in order to eliminate roughness in the resultant speech. The device computes a scaling factor for the excitation function which allows for this overhang energy. This requires substantial additional computation; therefore, fast arithmetic processors were designed so that speech can be synthesized in real time. All computation is performed in floating-point arithmetic to eliminate round-off errors. The resulting device can synthesize speech in real time, and the speech quality is the same as that of the software version.11

The construct of oral ability is multifaceted, but due to technological and practical constraints, the majority of computer‐delivered speaking assessments are designed to measure only certain aspects of this ability. Most notably, interactional competence, which we define as the ability to actively structure dialogic speech in real time, is often not assessed. Innovations in technology, namely, computer‐mediated video, make it possible for test takers in different locations to see and speak with others in real time and may make it achievable for computer‐based tests to assess more aspects of oral communication, including interactional competence. This report gives the findings from a study that explored to what extent computer‐mediated video, namely, Skype, could function in conjunction with a platform designed to present four innovative speaking tasks that could conceivably assess a broad construct of oral ability. The overarching goals of this project were twofold. First, we aimed to determine (a) the degree to which current computer video‐mediated technology can be used effectively to deliver assessments remotely and (b) the extent to which participants felt that four specific tasks could assess speaking ability by means of this technology. The speaking tasks included giving short responses to an interlocutor's questions, summarizing a proposal, defending a position in a group discussion, and giving a prepared presentation and responding to questions from other participants. Two data collections were conducted: one with all 72 participants located in the United States and one with all 74 participants located in China. The findings provide preliminary evidence that the stability of computer video‐mediated technology varies considerably, with technical disruptions being relatively few in the U.S. trial but very frequent in the China context. Moreover, the findings suggest that participants viewed the tasks as generally representing interactive speaking activities that they encounter in the oral language use domain, affording them the opportunity to demonstrate their oral abilities, and that these tasks can be effectively completed in a computer video‐mediated environment when technology cooperates.

We propose an end-to-end speech synthesizer, Fast DCTTS, that synthesizes speech in real time on a single CPU thread. The proposed model is composed of a carefully-tuned lightweight network designed by applying multiple network reduction and fidelity improvement techniques. In addition, we propose a novel group highway activation that can compromise between computational efficiency and the regularization effect of the gating mechanism. As well, we introduce a new metric called elastic mel-cepstral distortion (EMCD) to measure the fidelity of the output mel-spectrogram. In experiments, we analyze the effect of the acceleration techniques on speed and speech quality. Compared with the baseline model, the proposed model exhibits improved MOS from 2.62 to 2.74 with only 1.76% computation and 2.75% parameters. The speed on a single CPU thread was improved by 7.45 times, which is fast enough to produce mel-spectrogram in real time without GPU.

The use of two parallel architectures, a single-instruction-stream, multiple-data-stream (SIMD) machine and a VLSI processor array, to implement an isolated word recognition system is examined. SIMD and VLSI processor array algorithms are written for each of the components of the recognition system. The component parallel algorithms are simulated along with two complete recognition systems, one composed of SIMD algorithms and other composed of VLSI processor array algorithms. The simulations show that a SIMD machine with 100 processing elements, each based on an 8-MHz MC68000, can perform isolated word recognition over a large vocabulary in real time. The VLSI processor array simulations show that an array using 51 cells, each containing a 12-MHz Intel 8051, can recognize speech in real time over a small vocabulary. The simulation revealed certain architectural features that can enhance the overall performance of the speech system.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Real time prosody modification involves changing the prosody parameters such as pitch, duration and intensity of speech in real time without affecting the intelligibility and naturalness. In this paper prosody modification is performed using instants of significant excitation (ISE) of the vocal tract system during production of speech. In the conventional prosody modification system the ISE are computed using group delay function, and it is computationally intensive task. In this paper, we propose computationally efficient methods to determine the ISE suitable for prosody modification in interactive (real time) applications. The overall computational time for the prosody modification by using the proposed method is compared with the conventional prosody modification method which uses the group delay function for computing the ISE.

The requirements of real-time signal processing dictate that the audio signal must be completely processed before the subsequent audio segment may be received. This is done in order to achieve those requirements. This highlights how important it is to create methods of signal processing that are not just quick but also accurate. I describe many ways for processing audio signals in real time within the scope of this thesis. The publications that are being presented cover a wide range of issues, including noise dosimetry, speech analysis, and network echo cancellation, to name a few. In this article, the process of constructing a system that uses audio signal processing to improve speech in real time is broken down and examined. Speech enhancement makes speech more audible and comprehensible in noisy surroundings, which is beneficial to individuals who have hearing loss as well as speech recognition and communication systems. Signal-to-noise ratio, power spectral efficiency ratio, and spectrum transfer entropy index are the metrics that are utilized to evaluate speech quality enhancement system development strategies, abbreviated as STOI. Because studies have shown that being exposed to loud noises over extended periods of time can have severe impacts on health, it is essential to have precise methods for detecting the levels of noise. The findings of a study that measured exposure to noise while also taking into account the impact of the speaker's own voice are presented in this article.

Criminal Law of East and Central Africa. By J. J. R. Collingwood: London, Sweet and Maxwell, Lagos, African Universities Press, 1967. xlix, 313 pp. £3·50. - Ethiopian Criminal Procedure: A Sourcebook. By Z. Fisher Stanley: Addis Ababa, Faculty of Law, Haile Sellassie I University, in association with Oxford University Press, 1969. xl, 519 pp. - The Penal Code of the Somali Democratic Republic, with Cases, Commentary and Examples. By R. Ganzglass Martin: New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1971. xxi, 644 pp. $19·50. - Volume 16 Issue 1