Accurate Indexes Research Articles

Inequalities in infant mortality in Italy

BackgroundAll the children of the world should be born equal, but this is not so: even in Italy, there are striking differences already at birth. Neonatal and infant mortality are accurate indexes to assess the demographic wellbeing and quality of life of a population. The aim of the present study is to analyze the infant (IMR) and neonatal (NMR) mortality rates of Italian and foreign children and to evaluate if there is a disparity among geographical macro-areas.MethodsData from 2006 to 2015 were collected by the Italian Statistics Bureau (ISTAT) and extracted from two different national databases, which considered i) underlying cause of death and ii) birth registry. Mortality rates were calculated using conventional definitions. The main analyses were made comparing Italian versus foreigners as a single category as well as by country origin and contrasting Northern residents versus Southern ones. Comparisons between groups were done using relative risks.ResultsData show disparity in neonatal and infant mortality among immigrant and Italian residents. In 2015, neonatal (3.0 vs. 1.8/1000) and infant (4.5 vs 2.6/1000) mortality rates were higher among foreign children compared to Italian children. Among babies born to immigrant women, there is a higher infant mortality among children born to women coming from Central and South Africa (8.2 /1000).Inequalities are reported even among Italian regions: in Southern Italy, infant mortality is 1.4 fold higher than in Northern Italy.ConclusionInequalities in neonatal and infant mortality are evident between Italians and immigrants and among geographical macro-areas There is therefore urgent need for a political and social plan focusing on infancy.

A combination of routine laboratory findings and vital signs can predict survival of advanced cancer patients without physician evaluation: a fractional polynomial model

IntroductionThere have been no reports about predicting survival of patients with advanced cancer constructed entirely with objective variables. We aimed to develop a prognostic model based on laboratory findings and vital signs using a fractional polynomial (FP) model. MethodsA multicentre prospective cohort study was conducted at 58 specialist palliative care services in Japan from September 2012 to April 2014. Eligible patients were older than 20 years and had advanced cancer. We developed models for predicting 7-day, 14-day, 30-day, 56-day and 90-day survival by using the FP modelling method. ResultsData from 1039 patients were analysed to develop each prognostic model (Objective Prognostic Index for advanced cancer [OPI-AC]). All models included the heart rate, urea and albumin, while some models included the respiratory rate, creatinine, C-reactive protein, lymphocyte count, neutrophil count, total bilirubin, lactate dehydrogenase and platelet/lymphocyte ratio. The area under the curve was 0.77, 0.81, 0.90, 0.90 and 0.92 for the 7-day, 14-day, 30-day, 56-day and 90-day model, respectively. The accuracy of the OPI-AC predicting 30-day, 56-day and 90-day survival was significantly higher than that of the Palliative Prognostic Score or the Prognosis in Palliative Care Study model, which are based on a combination of symptoms and physician estimation. ConclusionWe developed highly accurate prognostic indexes for predicting the survival of patients with advanced cancer from objective variables alone, which may be useful for end-of-life management. The FP modelling method could be promising for developing other prognostic models in future research.

Interval Reliability Assessment of Power System under Epistemic Uncertainty Based on Belief UGF Method

At present, reliability assessment plays an important role in power systems. When the component failure probabilities are interval valued, common methods fail to achieve reasonable interval reliability assessment result of power systems. In this paper a novel approach based on the belief universal generating function (BUGF) is proposed to calculate the reliability indexes of power systems. Instead of giving a single-valued assessment result, a belief function and a plausibility function are exploited to calculate the lower and upper bounds of the loss of load probability (LOLP), the loss of load expectation (LOLE), the expected unsupplied load (EUL) and the expected unsupplied energy (EUE) in UGF, respectively. The proposed approach can track the correlation of the original data well and keep it to the end of the calculation. By using BUGF compared to other common methods to calculate the interval LOLP, LOLE, EUL, and EUE of IEEE-RTS 79, the results show the BUGF method can track the correlation of the original data well, and can get narrower and more accurate interval reliability indexes of the power generation system, which illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Genetic parameters for wool traits, live weight, and ultrasound carcass traits in Merino sheep.

Genetic correlations between 29 wool production and quality traits and live weight and ultrasound fat depth (FAT) and eye muscle depth (EMD) traits were estimated from the Information Nucleus (IN). The IN comprised 8 genetically linked flocks managed across a range of Australian sheep production environments. The data were from a maximum of 9,135 progeny born over 5 yr from 184 Merino sires and 4,614 Merino dams. The wool traits included records for yearling and adult fleece weight, fiber diameter (FD), staple length (SL), fiber diameter CV (FDCV), scoured color, and visual scores for breech and body wrinkle. We found high heritability for the major yearling wool production traits and some wool quality traits, whereas other wool quality traits, wool color, and visual traits were moderately heritable. The estimates of heritability for live weight generally increased with age as maternal effects declined. Estimates of heritability for the ultrasound traits were also higher when measured at yearling age rather than at postweaning age. The genetic correlations for fleece weight with live weights were positive (favorable) and moderate (approximately 0.5 ± 0.1), whereas those with FD were approximately 0.3 (unfavorable). The other wool traits had lower genetic correlations with the live weights. The genetic correlations for FAT and EMD with FD and SL were positive and low, with FDCV low to moderate negative, but variable with wool weight and negligible for the other wool traits. The genetic correlations for FAT and EMD with postweaning weight were positive and high (0.61 ± 0.18 to 0.75 ± 0.14) but were generally moderate with weights at other ages. Selection for increased live weight will result in a moderate correlated increase in wool weight as well as favorable reductions in breech cover and wrinkle, along with some unfavorable increases in FD and wool yellowness but little impact on other wool traits. The ultrasound meat traits, FAT and EMD, were highly positively genetically correlated (0.8), and selection to increase them would result in a small unfavorable correlated increase in FD, moderately favorable reductions in breech cover and wrinkle, but equivocal or negligible changes in other wool traits. The estimated parameters provide the basis for calculation of more accurate Australian Sheep Breeding Values and selection indexes that combine wool and meat objectives in Merino breeding programs.

Measuring drought based on a CGE model with multi-regional irrigation water

There have been many droughts in China that have caused severe losses. Previous studies evaluating droughts were from meteorological and hydrological perspectives. We measure the Chinese drought of 2000 based on a static computable general equilibrium model of China's macroeconomy, which describes the relationships between drought, agricultural production, and rural households' welfare from an economic perspective. In the model, the irrigation water inputs of the 16 regions of China are estimated and combined with the same regions' cropland inputs. Thus, the drought is simulated as an external impact by reducing the productivity of different crops in different regions. The reductions in 10 crop outputs and the rural households' welfare, total consumption and food consumption from 16 regions are more severe than those from a perfect market reaction. The findings herein are also distinct in that the five rural households that suffer most as a result of drought are from southern areas. The results provide an available reference for the Chinese government's decision on what measures to take to prevent drought and its impacts. The model can be further improved by incorporating meteorological and hydrological models to identify droughts using more accurate indexes.

Erratum: Employee well‐being in organizations: Theoretical model, scale development, and cross‐cultural validation

Erratum: Employee well‐being in organizations: Theoretical model, scale development, and cross‐cultural validation

Czochraski growth, defect analysis and refractive index of Ba2TiGe2O8 crystal with excellent optical nonlinearities

Ba2TiGe2O8 (BTG) shows excellent second-order nonlinearity and electro-optical effects. However, it is difficult to grow a perfect BTG single crystal, and the accurate refractive indexes of this crystal are unavailable at present. In this paper, a sizeable single BTG crystal with high quality was grown by Czochraski (CZ) method. SEM and EDS analyses of crystal defect indicate that the volatilization of GeO2 and the obvious supercooling feature of BTG melt were the main inducements of inclusion defects. The accurate refractive indexes were measured by the self-collimating method. The birefringence and SHG results show that the angle phase matching of SHG at 1064nm hardly be achieved in this crystal. Nevertheless, the effective frequency-doubled laser output may be achieved by using the technique of periodic polarization reversal for quasi phase matching. In view of the high optical transmittance and the huge nonlinear optical coefficients, BTG crystal may be a good candidate material for nonlinear optical devices and electro-optical devices.

A Variational Method to Solve Waveguide Problems by Employing Dynamic Programming Technique

A new variational method for the modal analysis of 2-D waveguide structures is proposed in this paper. Maxwell's equations describing the modal properties of scalar and semivectorial guided waves in the 2-D waveguides are expressed as variational/minimization problems, which are then discretized in terms of a finite-difference scheme on a finite rectangular computational window. By applying a dynamic programming technique to solve such variational problems, a 1-D equation representing the relation between the modal fields on any pair of adjacent columns in the computational window can be derived. By using such 1-D equation in a stepwise fashion from one boundary column toward the other boundary column, a system of linear equations with the unknown column modal fields can be derived and then solved to give both the accurate modal indexes and the discrete modal fields. In the examples of one weakly guiding rib-type dielectric waveguide and another strongly guiding silicon-on-insulator waveguide, computational results show that a small size of the coefficient matrix for such a system of linear equations is adequate to cause a relative error of 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-5</sup> -10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-6</sup> in the evaluation of the modal indexes reachable in an efficient manner. The results of the convergence tests show that the proposed method is at least an order of magnitude faster than the conventional finite-difference beam propagation method because of the transformation of a 2-D problem into a 1-D problem. Moreover, the proposed method is applied to investigate the modal properties of the conductor-gap-silicon plasmonic waveguide. The feature of the hybrid guided-mode profile is also observable from the modal field calculated by the proposed method.

Sleep Measures Expressing ‘Functional Uncertainty' in Elderlies' Sleep

Background: The notion of ‘functional uncertainty' during sleep was first proposed to indicate an inability of the central nervous system to maintain stable states by coordinating physiological processes. While the presence of functional uncertainty phenomena has been shown in infants and hypothesized in the elderly, its actual occurrence in the aged population has never been systematically investigated. Objective: The aim of the study is to identify, in the sleep of aged individuals, indexes of sleep instability and fragmentation as markers of functional uncertainty, by comparing a sample of healthy elderly subjects to one of young adults. Methods: We compared polysomnograhic recordings of 20 healthy elderly subjects (age range 65-85 years) with those of 20 young individuals (age range 22-32 years), with special regard to the variables expressing functional uncertainty in sleep, such as continuity (e.g. arousals, awakenings), stability (e.g. state transitions, periods of marked ‘functional uncertainty') and cyclic organization parameters. Results: Significant differences emerged for all variables of interest: the elderly group showed higher indexes of fragmentation and instability than the young, as well as less and shorter cycles, and a lower percentage of time spent in cycles. Conclusion: Our results support the hypothesis of a progressive sleep quality disruption with aging, expressed by pronounced sleep instability, fragmentation and disorganization. We propose that functional uncertainty measures could usefully be included in standard sleep assessments on both aged and sleep-disordered populations as accurate sleep quality indexes.

Anti-cytokine treatment for Takayasu arteritis: State of the art.

Takayasu arteritis (TA) is a rare and idiopathic large-vessel arteritis typically affecting young women which has important morbidity and mortality. There are no animal models of TA and pathogenesis is still mysterious. Clinical assessment lacks accurate activity indexes and is based on the integration of clinical, laboratory and radiological data. TA rarity has hampered randomized clinical trials and the achievement of high-quality evidence to guide clinical activity. Prevention of vascular progression, with progressive vessel wall remodelling and hyperplasia, is the main therapeutic goal. Medical therapy remains the mainstay of management and comprises traditional immunosuppressive agents and anti-inflammatory drugs, such as steroids and blockers of pivotal cytokines, TNF-α and IL-6. These strategies however only partially limit vascular progression, indicating that local molecular events are involved. Here we discuss recent data suggesting that selected cellular components of TA lesions should be evaluated as novel therapeutic targets.

IceMorph: An Automated Morphological Analyzer and English-Language Lookup Tool for Old Icelandic

INTRODUCTION The advent of inexpensive computing and the creation of large machine-actionable corpora consisting of well-structured digital texts have made it possible to analyze and mark for morphosyntactic features significant amounts of text (> 1,000,000 tokens) with a high degree of accuracy (> 80 percent) rapidly and automatically. Although the problem of automatically tagging text with part-of-speech (POS) information has been largely solved for languages with little morphonological complexity, (2) more complex languages, such as Old Icelandic (OIc) and other ancient languages, continue to pose problems for automated systems. Despite these difficulties, rich morphosyntactic markup that includes lemmatization holds great promise for both linguistic and textual scholarship. Accurate markup would enable the development of sophisticated online study environments that allow researchers to perform complex searches, make comparisons across multiple texts, and generate calculations concerning word-use and syntactical patterns. Our work, focusing on Old Icelandic, confirms that even for morphonologically complex Indo-European languages, the information gain offered by automatic morphosyntactic analysis of texts, measured as the percentage of correctly tagged tokens, sentences, and complete texts over the extant corpus, offers a marked improvement over previously available hand-marked texts (Rognvaldsson and Helgadottir 2008, 2011). (3) Even the most detailed and accurate indexes produced in the past centuries--such as Oniforradet i de dista islandska handskrifterna (Larsson 1891), which provides an accurate and exhaustive word-form index for a number of the oldest Old Icelandic manuscripts (ranging from late twelfth- to mid-thirteenth-century manuscripts)--offer only minimal coverage when compared to the very large number of extant Old Icelandic texts. For a researcher interested in the study of the entire Old Icelandic corpus (or a large sub-corpus of Old Icelandic literature), these early handbooks, no matter how accurately compiled, are of limited use. Unfortunately, it is not economically feasible to extend the earlier practice of manual encoding to a greater number of manuscripts; the manual compilation of handbooks is costly and requires tremendous amounts of time, expertise, and energy. The old paper-and-pen approach does not, to borrow a term front computer science, scale well. A dream of many researchers in Old Icelandic is to be able to work with a large number of texts (and manuscript witnesses to texts)--or even a comprehensive corpus--that include the high level of morphosyntactic detail of the early handbooks mentioned above. Similarly, historical linguists (especially syntacticians) are eager to work with a much larger parsed corpus of Old Icelandic texts than is currently available. Recent work, such as that of the Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus group (IcePaHC) (Wallenberg et al. 2011) is a major step toward making such resources available, as it provides a considerable number of texts tagged in a semi-supervised fashion, and moves us closer to a comprehensive parsed Old Icelandic corpus. Yet, it is unlikely that IcePaHC alone will provide adequate coverage for Old Icelandic textual research, in part because it is focused on the historical development of Icelandic up through the present, and in part because it provides limited lemmatization of the texts. As such, IcePaHC diverges from our project, which has as its sole focus the morphosyntactic analysis and lemmatization of Old Icelandic texts. We believe that the computational methods developed by our group can augment those of IcePaHC and others, and have the potential to not only extend the necessarily limited scope of the earlier historical handbooks, but also increase considerably the number of richly marked texts available to researchers. (4) Automatic morphosyntactic analysis of Old Icelandic oilers an efficient method for accurately tagging millions of tokens in the growing corpus of machine-actionable texts. …

Heart Rate or Heart Rate Variability? Evidence from Breath Suspension

Studies have assessed changesin autonomic variables in terms of heart rate variability (HRV) during meditation, but their results have been conflicting. Recently, Telles and colleagues’ excellent study 1 compared changes in HRV measures during the first four meditative states—cancalata (random thinking), ekagrata (nonmeditative focusing), dharana (meditative focusing), and dhyana (effortless meditation)— described in traditional yoga texts. Their results revealed that the discrepancy in changes in HRV measures might be due to the different stages. At the end of the Discussion section, the authors mention the ultimate state in yoga, samadhi, which manifests with breath suspension. They did not explore this advancedmeditativestateintheirstudy.Therefore,wewould like to share our results about changes in HRV measures during breath suspension. We collected and compared HRV measures in time and frequency domains, along with heart rate and blood pressure, during random thinking, breath meditation, and the advanced meditative stage with breath suspension in 10 meditative sessions conducted by an experienced meditator. The results (Table 1) show that none of HRV measures of time and frequency domains differed significantly during meditation. In contrast, heart rate and systolic blood pressure reliably decreased as meditation advanced. Because the meditation technique used in this study is close to meditative focusing, the results are concordant with the dharana state described in Telles and colleagues’ study. By using a device to monitor the chest circumstance of the meditator, the current study confirmed that the timing of breath suspension coincided with the subjective experience of breath suspension, complete quiescence, and absence of self-boundary. HRV measures, on the other hand, did not concord with the subjective experience of pure quiescence. Because other authors have argued that HRV is not an index of autonomic control of the circulation, 2 whether HRV can be an ideal index of sympathetic or parasympathetic activities remains questionable. According to the current results, the variations of HRV measures, manifested as the ratio of standard deviation to mean, are much greater than those of heart rate and blood pressure. This has also been shown in previous studies. 1,3,4 According to this view, HRV measures cannot be accurate indexes. The current results suggest that heart rate itself is a better HRV measure for meditation and agree with findings from Mukherjee et al. 5 These authors examined the sensitivity to mental effort and reliability of various HRV measures. Their

Accuracy of radiographic vertebral heart score and sphericity index in the detection of pericardial effusion in dogs

To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of radiographically derived measurements of vertebral heart score (VHS) and sphericity index (SI) in the detection of pericardial effusion (PE) in dogs. Retrospective case-control study. Animals-51 dogs with PE associated with various cardiac disorders, 50 dogs with left- or right-sided cardiac disorders without PE, 50 dogs with bilateral cardiac disorders without PE, and 50 healthy dogs. Measurements of VHS on lateral (lateral VHS) and ventrodorsal (ventrodorsal VHS) radiographs, SI on lateral (lateral SI) and ventrodorsal (ventrodorsal SI) radiographs, and global SI (mean of lateral SI and ventrodorsal SI) were obtained. Receiver operating characteristic curves were calculated to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of the radiographic indexes at differentiating dogs with PE from those with other cardiac disorders without PE. Measurements of lateral and ventrodorsal VHS were significantly higher in dogs with PE, compared with values for all dogs without PE. Measurements of lateral, ventrodorsal, and global SI were significantly lower in dogs with PE, compared with values for all dogs without PE. Cutoff values of > 11.9, > 12.3, and ≤ 1.17 for lateral VHS, ventrodorsal VHS, and global SI, respectively, were the most accurate radiographic indexes for identifying dogs with PE. Cardiac silhouettes of dogs with PE were larger and more rounded, compared with those of dogs with other cardiac disorders without PE. Objective radiographic indexes of cardiac size and roundness were only moderately accurate at distinguishing dogs with PE from dogs with other cardiac disorders without PE.

Improved Subspace-Based Method Applied to Structural Damage Detection

Precise and automatic identification of structural properties is a vital step toward detection and localization of damage in structures. However, even simple structures may present a complex dynamical behavior, and a large number of poles for a given frequency interval. This complexity leads often to numerical problems, like spurious modes in the identified model. In this article it is proposed a novel frequency-windowed subspace identification method, suitable to perform reduced-order identification, using band-limited excitation. The proposed methodology is employed to identify natural frequencies and damage detection of an experimental bench. Experimental results show its effectiveness to improve model identification. It is also shown that the frequency-windowing subspace identification is able to enhance damage detection, by generating more accurate damage indexes.

Discrimination of environmental variables that influence the catch per unit effort: the case of the Antarctic krill fishery

The use of the catch per unit effort (CPUE) as an index of abundance usually requires a standardization process consisting of isolating all those exogenous factors from temporal variations in abundance from the CPUE time-series. These exogenous factors include those generated by modifications in fishery vessel efficiency, variations in fishing strategies, and environmental fluctuations. The selection of the latter has been considered to be one of the most difficult, arbitrary, and poorly documented stages since the environmental effects vary on different temporal scales in autocorrelated and non-random manners, influencing the CPUE through a cause-effect process. Transfer function models (TFM) were constructed to describe statistically the cause-effect relationship between two time-series and herein we propose that TFM are a valid tool for: i) discriminating environmental effects that influence the CPUE and ii) describing how these effects should be included in a generalized lineal model (GLM). We analyzed the Antarctic krill CPUE from August 1989 to July 1999, and as possible causal effects, the Antarctic Oscillation Index (AOI) and atmospheric pressure at sea level (APSL). TFM shows that the APSL, with an annual lag (APSL12), influences the CPUE of Antarctic krill, whereas the AOI did not have a significant effect. The use of APSL12 in the GLM increased the explanation of the deviance by 31% as compared with the APSL with no lag. We concluded that TFM constitute a promising tool for including environmental effects in the standardization of the CPUE that would result in less biased and more accurate indexes of abundance.

Percent Body Fat and Chronic Disease Risk Factors in U.S. Children and Youth

The dramatic increase in pediatric obesity has renewed interest in accurate methods and screening indexes for identifying at-risk children and youth. Whether age-specific standards are needed is a factor that remains uncertain. This study was designed to describe the age-specific fatness-risk factor relationship in boys and girls across a wide age range. Data were from 12,279 white, black, and Mexican-American children and adolescents from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Surveys (NHANES) III (1998-1994) and IV (1999-2004). Children were grouped based on percent fat, estimated from subscapular and triceps skinfolds, and the age-specific relationships between percent fat and chronic disease risk factors (e.g., blood pressure, lipids and lipoprotein levels, glucose, insulin, and circulating C-reactive protein levels) were described in boys and girls, aged 6-18 years. Percent fat was significantly related to risk factor levels. At higher levels of percent fat, the prevalence of adverse cardiovascular disease risk factors was higher, particularly above 20% fat in boys and above 30% fat in girls. In boys and girls, the interaction term age by percent fat was a significant predictor of risk factors, whereas the percent fat by race interaction term was nonsignificant. The results demonstrate a strong relationship between chronic disease risk factors and percent fat in children and youth that varies by age in boys and girls.

Local MRI analysis approach in the diagnosis of early and prodromal Alzheimer's disease

Medial temporal lobe (MTL) atrophy is one of the key biomarkers to detect early neurodegenerative changes in the course of Alzheimer's disease (AD). There is active research aimed at identifying automated methodologies able to extract accurate classification indexes from T1-weighted magnetic resonance images (MRI). Such indexes should be fit for identifying AD patients as early as possible. A reference group composed of 144AD patients and 189 age-matched controls was used to train and test the procedure. It was then applied on a study group composed of 302 MCI subjects, 136 having progressed to clinically probable AD (MCI-converters) and 166 having remained stable or recovered to normal condition after a 24month follow-up (MCI-non converters). All subjects came from the ADNI database. We sampled the brain with 7 relatively small volumes, mainly centered on the MTL, and 2 control regions. These volumes were filtered to give intensity and textural MRI-based features. Each filtered region was analyzed with a Random Forest (RF) classifier to extract relevant features, which were subsequently processed with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Once a prediction model was trained and tested on the reference group, it was used to compute a classification index (CI) on the MCI cohort and to assess its accuracy in predicting AD conversion in MCI patients. The performance of the classification based on the features extracted by the whole 9 volumes is compared with that derived from each single volume. All experiments were performed using a bootstrap sampling estimation, and classifier performance was cross-validated with a 20-fold paradigm. We identified a restricted set of image features correlated with the conversion to AD. It is shown that most information originate from a small subset of the total available features, and that it is enough to give a reliable assessment. We found multiple, highly localized image-based features which alone are responsible for the overall clinical diagnosis and prognosis. The classification index is able to discriminate Controls from AD with an Area Under Curve (AUC)=0.97 (sensitivity ≃89% at specificity ≃94%) and Controls from MCI-converters with an AUC=0.92 (sensitivity ≃89% at specificity ≃80%). MCI-converters are separated from MCI-non converters with AUC=0.74(sensitivity ≃72% at specificity ≃65%). The present automated MRI-based technique revealed a strong relationship between highly localized baseline-MRI features and the baseline clinical assessment. In addition, the classification index was also used to predict the probability of AD conversion within a time frame of two years. The definition of a single index combining local analysis of several regions can be useful to detect AD neurodegeneration in a typical MCI population.

Discriminación de variables ambientales que influencian la captura por unidad de esfuerzo: el caso de la pesquería de krill antártico

The use of the catch per unit effort (CPUE) as an index of abundance usually requires a standardization process consisting of isolating all those exogenous factors from temporal variations in abundance from the CPUE time-series. These exogenous factors include those generated by modifications in fishery vessel efficiency, variations in fishing strategies, and environmental fluctuations. The selection of the latter has been considered to be one of the most difficult, arbitrary, and poorly documented stages since the environmental effects vary on different temporal scales in autocorrelated and non-random manners, influencing the CPUE through a cause-effect process. Transfer function models (TFM) were constructed to describe statistically the cause-effect relationship between two time-series and herein we propose that TFM are a valid tool for: i) discriminating environmental effects that influence the CPUE and ii) describing how these effects should be included in a generalized lineal model (GLM). We analyzed the Antarctic krill CPUE from August 1989 to July 1999, and as possible causal effects, the Antarctic Oscillation Index (AOI) and atmospheric pressure at sea level (APSL). TFM shows that the APSL, with an annual lag (APSL12), influences the CPUE of Antarctic krill, whereas the AOI did not have a significant effect. The use of APSL12 in the GLM increased the explanation of the deviance by 31% as compared with the APSL with no lag. We concluded that TFM constitute a promising tool for including environmental effects in the standardization of the CPUE that would result in less biased and more accurate indexes of abundance.

Fast Caption Alignment for Automatic Indexing of Audio

For large archives of audio media, just as with text archives, indexing is important for allowing quick and accurate searches. Similar to text archives, audio archives can use text for indexing. Generating this text requires using transcripts of the spoken portions of the audio. From them, an alignment can be made that allows users to search for specific content and immediately view the content at the position where the search terms were spoken. Although previous research has addressed this issue, the solutions align the transcripts only in real-time or greater. In this paper, the authors propose AutoCap. It is capable of producing accurate audio indexes in faster than real-time for archived audio and in real-time for live audio. In most cases it takes less than one quarter the original duration for archived audio. This paper discusses the architecture and evaluation of the AutoCap project as well as two of its applications.

A State-Space Modeling Approach for Active Structural Acoustic Control

The demands for improvement in sound quality and reduction of noise generated by vehicles are constantly increasing, as well as the penalties for space and weight of the control solutions. A promising approach to cope with this challenge is the use of active structural-acoustic control. Usually, the low frequency noise is transmitted into the vehicle's cabin through structural paths, which raises the necessity of dealing with vibro-acoustic models. This kind of models should allow the inclusion of sensors and actuators models, if accurate performance indexes are to be accessed. The challenge thus resides in deriving reasonable sized models that integrate structural, acoustic, electrical components and the controller algorithm. The advantages of adequate active control simulation strategies relies on the cost and time reduction in the development phase. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present a methodology for simulating vibro-acoustic systems including this coupled model in a closed loop control simulation framework that also takes into account the interaction between the system and the control sensors/actuators. It is shown that neglecting the sensor/actuator dynamics can lead to inaccurate performance predictions.