The phonetic realization of nasal vowels produced by Pwo speakers of different ages can vary. The present study investigated mid and low nasal vowels of Pwo speakers from Mae Hong Son province, Thailand. Due to the higher tendency of language contact with Thai, the younger group’s nasal vowels were expected to lose more nasality than the older group. The emergence of final nasal consonants was ...

We present a time domain approach to explore a sound transformation paradigm for musical performance. Given a set of sounds containing a priori desired qualities and a population of agents interacting locally, the method generates both musical form and matter resulting from sonic trajectories. This proposal involves the use of bio-inspired algorithms, which possess intrinsic features of adaptiv...

BACKGROUND The emergence of neuraminidase inhibitor resistance has raised concerns about the prudent use of antiviral drugs in response to the next influenza pandemic. While resistant strains may initially emerge with compromised viral fitness, mutations that largely compensate for this impaired fitness can arise. Understanding the extent to which these mutations affect the spread of disease in...

I would like to hear comments from more experienced experimental researchers about standard practices for recruiting and compensating participants in consumer and marketing experiments. What are the pros and cons of using student participants? (I know there was a debate about this in the literature a few years ago, but what is the current prevailing opinion?) Is there a difference between using...

HOSPITAL-BASED DIARRHOEAL DISEASE SURVEILLANCE IN BANGLADESH: URBAN-RURAL DIFFERENTIALS IN MAJOR FINDINGS Abu SG Faruque, Sumon K Das, Mohammed A Malek, Mohammed A Salam, A Cravioto. Background ICDDR,B maintains a Diarrhoeal Disease Surveillance System (DDSS) at its Dhaka (urban) and Matlab (rural) hospitals to monitor emergence of new enteric pathogens, re-emergence of conventional pathogens, ...

Cities are so common today that we cannot imagine a world without them. In fact, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and that number is expected to increase to two-thirds in the next century. For most of our history, however, there were no cities. Understandably, scholars want to know why, how, and when urban life began. Was the emergence of the city just a matter of nucle...

This case study addresses environmental equity, in terms of African American, Latino, White, and poor communities’ proximity to both industrial facilities and parkland in Hall County, Georgia, USA. The project’s two primary goals are to (a) expand environmental justice analyses to account for both environmental burdens (industrial sites) and benefits (parkland acreage), and (b) extend this broa...

Language is the most important evolutionary invention of the last few million years. How human language evolved from animal communication is a challenging question for evolutionary biology. In this paper we use mathematical models to analyze the major transitions in language evolution. We begin by discussing the evolution of coordinated associations between signals and objects in a population. ...

Colorado and Pennsylvania, like parallel universes, provide strikingly different examples of how external forces affect the evolution of oil and gas conservation jurisprudence originating from a common starting point. This jurisprudence includes both “Classical” oil and gas conservation—measures to prevent waste of the oil and gas resource, and “Values” oil and gas conservation—measures that ad...