Fishes of the Mekong River: conservation and need for aquaculture

Conservation and the potential and need for aquaculture of three major fish (Catlocarpio siamensis, Probarbus spp. and Pangasius gigas) of the Mekong River are discussed. Different steps being undertaken by the Cambodian government in doing such activities are highlighted.

Effects of observation time on interpretation of climatic time series - a need for consistency

Much of what we know about the climate of the United States is derived from data gathered under the auspices of the cooperative climate network. Particular aspects of the way observations are taken can have significant influences on the values of climate statistics derived from the data. These influences are briefly reviewed. The purpose of this paper is to examine their effects on climatic time series. Two other items discussed are: (1) a comparison of true (24-hour) means with means derived from maximums and minimums only, and (2) preliminary work on the times of day at which maximums and minimums are set.

Continuous F0 in the source-excitation generation for HMM-based TTS: Do we need voiced/unvoiced classification?

Most HMM-based TTS systems use a hard voiced/unvoiced classification to produce a discontinuous F0 signal which is used for the generation of the source-excitation. When a mixed source excitation is used, this decision can be based on two different sources of information: the state-specific MSD-prior of the F0 models, and/or the frame-specific features generated by the aperiodicity model. This paper examines the meaning of these variables in the synthesis process, their interaction, and how they affect the perceived quality of the generated speech The results of several perceptual experiments show that when using mixed excitation, subjects consistently prefer samples with very few or no false unvoiced errors, whereas a reduction in the rate of false voiced errors does not produce any perceptual improvement. This suggests that rather than using any form of hard voiced/unvoiced classification, e.g., the MSD-prior, it is better for synthesis to use a continuous F0 signal and rely on the frame-level soft voiced/unvoiced decision of the aperiodicity model. © 2011 IEEE.