Recent research has demonstrated the usefulness of subglottal resonances (SGRs) in speaker normalization. However, existing algorithms for estimating SGRs from speech signals have limited applicability—they are effective with isolated vowels only. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for estimating the first three SGRs (Sg1; Sg2 and Sg3) from continuous adults’ speech. While Sg1 and Sg2 are es...

Agriculture information is the source of energy from which farmer will gain power in decision making. Finding the right approach to providing information to empower farmers is vital due to the high failure rate in current agricultural information systems. As most farmers now have mobile phones we developed a mobile based information system. We used participatory action research methodology to e...

We propose a simple framework for estimating derivatives without fitting the regression function in nonparametric regression. Unlike most existing methods that use the symmetric difference quotients, our method is constructed as a linear combination of observations. It is hence very flexible and applicable to both interior and boundary points, including most existing methods as special cases of...

This comment discusses Kaidesoja (2013) and raises the issue whether his analysis justifies stronger conclusions than he presents in the book. My comments focus on four issues. First, I argue that his naturalistic reconstruction of critical realist transcendental arguments shows that transcendental arguments should be treated as a rare curiosity rather than a general argumentative strategy. Sec...

Reliability demonstration techniques are used to formally verify that the reliability of a product meets a specified target with a certain degree of confidence. When the reliability target to be demonstrated is very high (close to one), traditional reliability demonstration plans require extremely large sample sizes or have low power. One solution to this problem is to inflate the failure proba...

This document contains the online appendices for “Growth in the Shadow of Expropriation.” Section I contains the proofs of all propositions. Section II extends the benchmark model to incorporate exogenous productivity growth. Section III considers the case in which the capitalists are also political insiders and therefore enter the incumbent’s utility function. Section IV considers the near suf...

In the recent times, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become one of the most dynamic topics of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), both in the academia and the market. This popularity is indeed a result of the promising features offered by CRM. All the studies to date have highlighted elements associated with CRM success by studying its adoption and implementation in the...

Widespread deployment of multicast depends critically on the existance of congestion control protocols that are provably fair to unicast traffic. In this work, we present an optimization-based congestion control mechanism for one-to-many communication with provable fairness properties. The optimization-based approach attempts to find an allocation of rates that maximizes the aggregate utility o...

We present a duality-based method for decentralized communication resource management in the context of networked tracking and surveillance systems. This method shares communication resources according to the joint utility provided by information of particular types. By formulating the problem as an optimization of the joint utility of information flow rates, the dual of the problem can be unde...