We explain our strategy towards a Semantic Desktop and our research and prototype. In this paper we complement these with the paradigm of paper — scribbling, annotating, revising—, an information interface for knowledge work, which has been well-tried and elaborated over the centuries. Everybody is highly trained for it. The combination can instantly improve the conditions of knowledge work. By...

In the current analysis we examined the acoustic and phonetic characteristics of filled pauses in spontaneous French speech and their relationship to the prosody of the surrounding context. Two main results emerged : 1) There was no effect of the duration of filled pauses or their sentence location on their F0 patterns or on the differences between the highest and lowest values. 2) There was no...

Although channels of microfluidic devices are normally pipes, some groups have recently studied surface-directed channels. These channels were created between two stacked glass slides that were physically flat but chemically patterned. The working fluids used for such channels were mostly water solutions, though organic solvents are important in some applications such as organic synthesis. In t...

The paper reports preliminary results on Mandarin filled pauses (FPs), based on a large speech corpus of Mandarin telephone conversation. We find that Mandarin intensively uses both demonstratives (zhege ‘this’, nage ‘that’) and uh/ mm as FPs. Demonstratives are more frequent FPs and are more likely to be surrounded by other types of disfluency phenomena than uh/mm, as well as occurring more of...

Water microdroplets containing graphene oxide and a second solute are shown to spontaneously segregate into sack-cargo nanostructures upon drying. Analytical modeling and molecular dynamics suggest the sacks form when slow-diffusing graphene oxide preferentially accumulates and adsorbs at the receding air-water interface, followed by capillary collapse. Cargo-filled graphene nanosacks can be na...

Filled pauses occur frequently in spontaneous human speech, yet modern text-to-speech synthesis systems rarely model these disfluencies overtly, and consequently they do not output convincing synthetic filled pauses. This paper presents a text-to-speech system that is specifically designed to model these particular disfluencies more efffectively. A preparatory investigation shows that a synthet...

Coarse-grained simulations in the united-atom-model approximation are used to investigate confinement-induced morphological changes in Nafion-like ionomers. The system we study models a cylindrical pore in a hydrophobic matrix of supporting material with pore diameters that vary from 0.7 to 3.96 nm. Simulation results indicate a strong dependence of the equilibrium ionomer structures both on th...

Infrared reflectance spectroscopy measurements were made on four members of the MFe4P12 family of filled skutterudites, with M5La, Th, Ce, and U. In progressing from M5La to U the system undergoes a metalinsulator transition. It is shown that, although the filling atom induces such dramatic changes in the transport properties of the system, it has only a small effect on lattice dynamics. We dis...

We present our recent progress in filled pause (FP) modeling for a highly spontaneous medical transcription task. Our studies confirm that FP modeling is an important topic for spontaneous speech applications, which must be explicitly addressed in acoustic, lexical, and language modeling. We provide a framework for datadriven lexical modeling of FP acoustic variability with respect to phonemic ...

The inclusion of low phytate grains in poultry diets can reduce the phosphorus (P) content of poultry feces, but their influence on fecal P composition is not well established. To assess this, 100 male broiler chicks (21 days old) were fed dietary treatments based on either a wild-type barley or one of three low phytate mutant barleys with 59, 62 and 99% reductions in phytate P, compared with t...