This paper proposes a novel voice activity detector (VAD) based on singular value decomposition (SVD). The spectro-temporal characteristics of background noise region can be easily analyzed by SVD. The proposed method naturally drops hangover algorithm from VAD. Moreover, it adaptively changes the decision threshold by employing the most dominant singular value of the observation matrix in the ...

In this study the integration of an absorption heat pump (AHP) with the concentration section of an industrial pulp and paper process is investigated using pinch technology. The optimum design of the proposed water-lithium bromide AHP is then achieved by minimizing the total annual cost. A comprehensive optimization is carried out by relaxation of all stream pressure drops as well as heat excha...

To cite: Parkinson MH, Patel R, Davagnanam I, et al. Pract Neurol 2014;14: 409–414. A 26-year-old woman presented after developing slurred speech and drooling overnight. She had a 6-month history of tiredness and poor concentration, and episodes of loss of consciousness accompanied by paraesthesia of her hands, feet and mouth. Occasionally, one arm would ‘hang in a strange way’. Her mother repo...

Aqueous drops on silicone oil infused lubricating surfaces are cloaked with a thin layer of oil to minimize their surface energy. These oil cloaked aqueous drops exhibit pseudo-stable coalescence or spontaneous coalescence depending upon the lubricating oil thickness which controls the interaction point of the drops. For thick oil films, drops interact with each other through the surrounding oi...

Many data sets derived from the web are large, high-dimensional, sparse and have a Zipfian distribution of both classes and features. On such data sets, current scalable clustering methods such as streaming clustering suffer from fragmentation, where large classes are incorrectly divided into many smaller clusters, and computational efficiency drops significantly. We present a new clustering al...