The Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals has released three new speech corpora for both industrial and academic use: a) Hempels Sofa contains recordings of up to 60 seconds of non-scripted telephone speech, b) ZipTel is a corpus with telephone speech covering postal addresses and telephone numbers from a real world application, and c) RVG-J, an extension of the original Regional Variants of Germ...

1 Departamento de Bioquímica, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Caixa Postal 5069, 88040-970 Florianópolis, SC, Brazil Health Sciences Area, Universidade Comunitária da Região de Chapecó, Avenida Senador Attílio Fontana 591E, 89809-000 Chapecó, SC, Brazil 3 Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New ...

Between 1935 and 1985, Irish law criminalized the sale and importation of condoms. Activists established illegal markets to challenge the law and alleviate its social consequences. They distributed condoms through postal services, shops, stalls, clinics, and machines. Though they largely operated in the open, their activities attracted little direct punishment from the state, and they were able...

James Schneeloch,1 Curtis J. Broadbent,1,2 Stephen P. Walborn,3 Eric G. Cavalcanti,4,5 and John C. Howell1 1Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA 2Rochester Theory Center, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA 3Instituto de Fı́sica, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Caixa Postal 68528, Rio de Janeiro, RJ 21941-972, Br...

We consider birth-and-death processes of objects (animals) defined in Zd having unit death rates and random birth rates. For animals with uniformly bounded diameter we establish conditions on the rate distribution under which the following holds for almost all realizations of the birth rates: (i) the process is ergodic with at worst power-law time mixing; (ii) the unique invariant measure has e...

Logistics serves for the planning, control, and monitoring of material flows in the supply, the production, and the distribution of commodities as well as in the disposal of waste. It is an essential element of any product’s life cycle. Always being focused on is the increase of efficiency with regard to economy, quality, and service. However, efficiency in total is nowadays examined under the ...

Article history: Received 16 December 2007 Revised 2 August 2008 Available online 14 August 2008 The spatial mismatch hypothesis posits that employment decentralization isolated urban blacks from work opportunities. This paper focuses on one large employer that has remained in the central city over the twentieth century—the U.S. Postal Service. We find that blacks substitute towards postal work...

This paper studies a theoretical model aimed at assessing the optimal access charges and retail prices in the postal sector. It takes explicitly into account three main characteristics of the postal sector: the ability of entrants to bypass the incumbent’s delivery network; the imposition on the incumbent, but not on entrants of universal service obligations; and the provision of access to both...

Details about the movement of trucks on postal express lines are investigated to improve the performances of mail distribution. A mixed driving pattern of trucks is introduced to minimize the transportation cost of a postal express line network with a service level requirement. We formulate this problem as a mixed p meeting depots location with shipment scheduling problem and build a MINLP mode...