Where the consumer is not a myth : letters from England describing economic and industrial conditions by Zach McGhee, Washington correspondent : speech of Hon. Wyatt Aiken in the House of Representatives, Tuesday, March 22, 1910

This document contains a speech of David Wyatt Aiken, representative of South Carolina, to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, March 22, 1910. Much of the speech is a letter from Zach McGhee, Washington correspondent of The State newspaper on industrial conditions in England and Europe.

Protection to farmers : speech of Hon. D. Wyatt Aiken, of South Carolina, in the House of Representatives, Tuesday, March 6, 1882, upon the Agricultural Appropriation Bill

This speech is about the Agricultural Appropriation Bill, which is a bill making appropriations for the Agricultural Department of the Government for the fiscal year ending in June 30,1883. Mr. Aiken is approved by the chairman to speak and he goes on to explain that he agrees with the majority of the bill with the exception of two or three clauses. He gives the reasoning behind his objections in the rest of the speech.

Speech delivered by Hon. Hermann Ridder at the one hundred and forty-second anniversary dinner, German Friendly Society, Charleston, S. C., January 15th, 1908

The speech was delivered to the German Friendly Society by the Hon. Hermann Ridder and opens with a brief history of the society and its importance. He then goes on to acknowledge notable German settlers and their importance. He calls for history to be rewritten and textbooks to be revised to give credit to the Germans who contributed to America’s foundation and history.

Speech of Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina, on the relation of states; delivered in the Senate of the United States, May 21, 1860

The speech is a response by Hon. James H. Hammond as to whether or not the territorial governments established by Congress have the power to define and declare what shall be and what shall not be property within the territorial boundaries. The speech goes on to discuss colonists who went to newly purchased territory and claimed land as their own. He argues whether or not these people have sovereignty of the land over the government.

Speech of Hon. John Lowndes McLaurin, of South Carolina, in the Senate of the United States, Monday, December 9, 1901

This speech is to address the statement that Mr. McLaurin has been excluded from the caucuses of his party and thus that he will be without assignment on any committee. He goes on to explain his exclusion and defend his views that led to his exclusion.

Speech of Mr. Calhoun, of South Carolina, on the slavery question. Delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 4, 1850

The speech addresses the question, how can the union be preserved? He goes on to explain the threats to the union and give suggestions for how the threats can be handled.

Stable standard essential for prosperity. Speech in the Senate of the United States, February 4, 1878

This speech was given when the United States Senate was considering a bill to authorize the free coinage of the standard silver dollar and to restore its legal tender character. Mr. Bayard argues against the bill in this speech. He is interrupted during his speech multiple times and questioned about his points.

Campaign speech of W.D. Mayfield [for re-election as State Superintendent of Education]

This speech was given by Mr. Mayfield while running for re-election to the office of State Superintendent of Education. He gives evidence and reasons that he should be re-elected. He also talks about his future plans for if he does get re-elected.

Free coinage of silver : speech of Hon. William Elliott, of South Carolina, in the House of Representatives, Thursday, February 13, 1896 [Pamphlet]

This speech is given to the United States House of Representatives. Hon. William Elliot gives a persuasive argument for why he will be voting against the senate amendment for free coinage of silver. He defines free coinage of silver and he describes fifty-cent dollar. He discusses the fall in the price of products and provides causation.

Effective-fourth-order resonator based MASH bandpass sigma-delta modulators

Two novel effective-fourth-order (eighth-order) resonator based MASH (MultistAge noise SHaping) bandpass Σ-Δ modulators are introduced at the behavioural level and subsequently examined by simulations utilising the ALTA SPW environment. The considered bandpass configurations have in their loop filter a cascade of standard second-order resonator structures in order to achieve appropriate noise shaping. The quantisation noise in each stage is suppressed by feeding the error of each section into the input of the following stage. It is demonstrated in this paper that the quadruple effective-first-order cascade configuration has significantly better performance as well as conforming more closely with theory in comparison with the effective-second-order effective-second-order cascade. The superior performance of the former can be attributed to the cumulative effect of the multi-bit outputs as well as the presence of more notch filters.

Phonological and articulation treatment approaches in Portuguese children with speech and language impairments: a randomized controlled intervention study

Background: In Portugal, the routine clinical practice of speech and language therapists (SLTs) in treating children with all types of speech sound disorder (SSD) continues to be articulation therapy (AT). There is limited use of phonological therapy (PT) or phonological awareness training in Portugal. Additionally, at an international level there is a focus on collecting information on and differentiating between the effectiveness of PT and AT for children with different types of phonologically based SSD, as well as on the role of phonological awareness in remediating SSD. It is important to collect more evidence for the most effective and efficient type of intervention approach for different SSDs and for these data to be collected from diverse linguistic and cultural perspectives. Aims: To evaluate the effectiveness of a PT and AT approach for treatment of 14 Portuguese children, aged 4.0–6.7 years, with a phonologically based SSD. Methods & Procedures: The children were randomly assigned to one of the two treatment approaches (seven children in each group). All children were treated by the same SLT, blind to the aims of the study, over three blocks of a total of 25 weekly sessions of intervention. Outcome measures of phonological ability (percentage of consonants correct (PCC), percentage occurrence of different phonological processes and phonetic inventory) were taken before and after intervention. A qualitative assessment of intervention effectiveness from the perspective of the parents of participants was included. Outcomes & Results: Both treatments were effective in improving the participants’ speech, with the children receiving PT showing a more significant improvement in PCC score than those receiving the AT. Children in the PT group also showed greater generalization to untreated words than those receiving AT. Parents reported both intervention approaches to be as effective in improving their children’s speech. Conclusions & Implications: The PT (combination of expressive phonological tasks, phonological awareness, listening and discrimination activities) proved to be an effective integrated method of improving phonological SSD in children. These findings provide some evidence for Portuguese SLTs to employ PT with children with phonologically based SSD

Adaptive modeling and high quality spectral estimation for speech enhancement

In this work an adaptive modeling and spectral estimation scheme based on a dual Discrete Kalman Filtering (DKF) is proposed for speech enhancement. Both speech and noise signals are modeled by an autoregressive structure which provides an underlying time frame dependency and improves time-frequency resolution. The model parameters are arranged to obtain a combined state-space model and are also used to calculate instantaneous power spectral density estimates. The speech enhancement is performed by a dual discrete Kalman filter that simultaneously gives estimates for the models and the signals. This approach is particularly useful as a pre-processing module for parametric based speech recognition systems that rely on spectral time dependent models. The system performance has been evaluated by a set of human listeners and by spectral distances. In both cases the use of this pre-processing module has led to improved results.

Automatic syllabification for danish text-to-speech systems

In this paper, a rule-based automatic syllabifier for Danish is described using the Maximal Onset Principle. Prior success rates of rule-based methods applied to Portuguese and Catalan syllabification modules were on the basis of this work. The system was implemented and tested using a very small set of rules. The results gave rise to 96.9% and 98.7% of word accuracy rate, contrary to our initial expectations, being Danish a language with a complex syllabic structure and thus difficult to be rule-driven. Comparison with data-driven syllabification system using artificial neural networks showed a higher accuracy rate of the former system.

Adaptive filtering for high quality HMM based speech synthesis

In this work an adaptive filtering scheme based on a dual Discrete Kalman Filtering (DKF) is proposed for Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based speech synthesis quality enhancement. The objective is to improve signal smoothness across HMMs and their related states and to reduce artifacts due to acoustic model's limitations. Both speech and artifacts are modelled by an autoregressive structure which provides an underlying time frame dependency and improves time-frequency resolution. Themodel parameters are arranged to obtain a combined state-space model and are also used to calculate instantaneous power spectral density estimates. The quality enhancement is performed by a dual discrete Kalman filter that simultaneously gives estimates for the models and the signals. The system's performance has been evaluated using mean opinion score tests and the proposed technique has led to improved results.

Integration of speech-processing technologies into Activobank's client interaction process

This dissertation analyzes the possibilities of utilizing speech-processing technologies to transform the user experience of ActivoBank’s customers while using remote banking solutions. The technologies are examined through different criteria to determine if they support the bank’s goals and strategy and whether they should be incorporated in the bank’s offering. These criteria include the alignment with ActivoBank’s values, the suitability of the technology providers, the benefits these technologies entail, potential risks, appeal to the customers and impact on customer satisfaction. The analysis suggests that ActivoBank might not be in a position to adopt these technologies at this point in time.