The increased interest for linguistic analysis of spontaneous (i.e. non-prepared) speech from various points of view (semantic, syntactic, morphologic, phonologic and intonative) lead to the development of ever more sophisticated dedicated tools. Although the software Praat emerged as the de facto standard for the analysis of spoken data, its use for intonation studies is often felt as not opti...

Stress-induced hyperglycemia has been considered an adaptive mechanism to stress up to the first intensive insulin therapy trial, which showed a 34% reduction in relative risk of in-hospital mortality when normalizing blood glucose levels. Further trials had conflicting results and, at present, stress-induced hyperglycemia management remains non-consensual. These findings could be explained by ...

Women have a life-expectancy advantage over men, but a marked disadvantage with regards to morbidity. This is known as the female-male health-survival paradox in disciplines such as medicine, medical sociology, and epidemiology. Individual differences in physical and mental health are further notably explained by the degree of stress individuals endure, with women being more affected by stresso...

Using data for 1238 banks located in 94 developing and emerging countries, we explore whether the impact of bank regulation and supervision on banking risk (measured by the banks’ Z-scores) depends on bank structure. Our findings suggest that stricter regulation and supervision increases the banks’ Z-scores. Notably capital requirements and supervisory control diminish banking risk. However, th...

This paper examines the spatial pattern of the pharmaceutical industry in Ireland and in particular the drivers accounting for spatial concentration in the industry. 1 Spatial concentration indexes indicate a particularly high level of spatial concentration in one of the industry's sub-sectors, namely, drug substance production. This high level of concentration has been attributed to the operat...

Knowledge management (KM) is a dominant theme in the behaviour of contemporary organisations. While KM has been extensively studied in developed economies, it is much less well understood in developing economies, notably those that are characterised by different social and cultural traditions to the mainstream of Western societies. This is notably the case in China. In this paper, we develop an...

Sense of agency refers to the experience of initiating and controlling actions in order to influence events in the outside world. A disturbed sense of agency is found in certain psychiatric and neurological disorders, most notably schizophrenia. Sense of agency is associated with a subjective compression of time: actions and their outcomes are perceived as bound together in time. This is known ...

This paper proposes to use the techniques of Concatenative Sound Synthesis in the context of real-time Music Interaction. We describe a system that generates an audio track by concatenating audio segments extracted from pre-existing musical files. The track can be controlled in real-time by specifying high-level properties (or constraints) holding on metadata about the audio segments. A constra...

Wireless networks are often very lightly used. Some wireless networks, most notably sensor networks, are also energyconstrained – that is, the period of time during which the network is operational depends on battery lifetime. We have designed and simulated a novel design for a mobile ad hoc network with a low offered load (of approximately 1% average loading) that uses dramatically less (often...

Vacuum grippers are often notably diffused for grasping and moving very large and heavy objects. The absence of theoretical models able to foresee the behavior of the suction cup notably limits the applications and development of vacuum grippers. In this work, a study of grasping with a vacuum gripper has been carried out. A mathematical model is proposed for determining the forces of contact b...