In his pioneering work on product and process improvement, Taguchi (1986) emphasizes two types of factors that effect product quality: “control factors” are those variables that can be (easily) manipulated by the manufacturer and “noise factors” are those variables that represent either different environmental conditions that affect the performance of a product in the field or (uncontrollable) ...

In this paper, the control of sound propagation in an air-handling duct is investigated. Employing identified discrete t ime models of the duct, robust linear controllers are designed using the combined pole placement/sensitivity function shaping method. T h e particularities of harmonic noise sources are taken into account, avoiding the classical stochastic adaptive and the reference noise bas...

This paper presents a method for making nonaudible murmur (NAM) enhancement based on statistical voice conversion (VC) robust against external noise. NAM, which is an extremely soft whispered voice, is a promising medium for silent speech communication thanks to its faint volume. Although such a soft voice can still be detected with a special body-conductive microphone, its quality significantl...

STUDY OBJECTIVE To assess relations between socioeconomic status and local air quality, and combined effects on respiratory health, in the context of environmental and health inequality. DESIGN Data on people taking part in the Health Survey for England were attributed with a small area index of air pollution using annual mean concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, benzene, and ...

bananas of long cavendish variety constituted the experimental samples in this research work. following the slicing of bananas, the samples were treated with three pretreatments of: 1% sodium bisulphate (t1), a combination of blanching and 1% sodium bisulphate treatment (t2), combined blanching and treatment with 1% ascorbic plus citric acid (1:1) mixture (t3) as well as an untreated sample, co...