1,141 research outputs found
Author, landscape and communication in Estonian haiku
No full textPresent article tries to give insight into the ways in which Estonian haiku models its author and communicates with the reader. The author thinks that while Japanese haiku is a predominantly autocommunicative piece of literature, where even a fixed point of view is not recommended, Estonian literary conventions are oriented towards openly communicational texts, which convey a fixed axiology and rely on abundant use of pronouns and rhetorical questions, addresses and apostrophes. While there is a considerable amount of Estonian haiku that depend on Estonian literary conventions, most of the Estonian haiku texts, however, are oriented to the Japanese model. These texts have been labelled “the catalogues of landscape”, as they are constituted by naming different landscape objects without developing a line of narration. Thereby every landscape element in poetry is granted its own voice, and through this multitude of voices inside the text, the reader is forced to enter an autocommunicative process of remodelling him/herself
Barthes’s positive theory of the author
No full textWhile it is well known that Roland Barthes consecrated his last lecture series at the Collège de France to the theme of the preparation of a novel, it is less known that his first writings on literature focused on the same question, but from a less individual point of view. The interrogation that motivates Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953) and many of the essays in Essais critiques (1964) is the question of how to write, of what procedures one can follow in preparing a literary work of art. At the two ends of Barthes’s career one finds the same themes of writing as action and of the writer’s possibilities and motivations in writing. The article explores the hypothesis that there is ground for a positive theory of the author in Barthes’s work. It seeks to discover similarities between writings from the early and the late period that concern three themes: (1) writing as action, (2) the deferral of its achievement, and (3) writing as representation. The article ends with a discussion on the relationships between Barthes’s positive theory of the author and related important issues that have been discussed recently in literary criticism
Spoofing voice verification systems with statistical speech synthesis using limited adaptation data
No full textState-of-the-art speaker verification systems are vulnerable to spoofing attacks using speech synthesis. To solve the issue, high-performance synthetic speech detectors (SSDs) for attack methods have been proposed recently. Here, as opposed to developing new detectors, we investigate new attack strategies. Investigating new techniques that are specifically tailored for spoofing attacks that can spoof the voice verification system and are difficult to detect is expected to increase the security of voice verification systems by enabling the development of better detectors. First, we investigated the vulnerability of an i-vector based verification system to attacks using statistical speech synthesis (SSS), with a particular focus on the case where the attacker has only a very limited amount of data from the target speaker. Even with a single adaptation utterance, the false alarm rate was found to be 23%. Still, SSS-generated speech is easy to detect (Wu et al., 2015a, 2015b), which dramatically reduces its effectiveness. For more effective attacks with limited data, we propose a hybrid statistical/concatenative synthesis approach and show that hybrid synthesis significantly increases the false alarm rate in the verification system compared to the baseline SSS method. Moreover, proposed hybrid synthesis makes detecting synthetic speech more difficult compared to SSS even when very limited amount of original speech recordings are available to the attacker. To further increase the effectiveness of the attacks, we propose a linear regression method that transforms synthetic features into more natural features. Even though the regression approach is more effective at spoofing the detectors, it is not as effective as the hybrid synthesis approach in spoofing the verification system. An interpolation approach is proposed to combine the linear regression and hybrid synthesis methods, which is shown to provide the best spoofing performance in most cases
Long term pressure gradients along the Belgian and Dutch coast
No full textThe aim of the investigation is to quantify the long shore and cross shore Sea Surface Slope (SSS) along the Dutch and Belgian coast. We have to pay particular attention to the influence of the river Rhine, the windeffect, the seasonal influence and finally the effect of Dover Strait on the Mean Sea Level. Furthermore, these investigations provide an improved view of the Sea Surface Slope and can be important for the calibration of models. The Mean Sea Level and Sea Surface Slope can be derived from waterlevel recordings. CONCLUSIONS 1. A clear relation between the longshore SSS and the windvector is found. The longshore SSS reaches its maximum positive value during north-easterly winds and its maximum negative value during a westerly wind. In case of a strong northeasterly wind, a state of equilibrium between the SSS and the wind stress is almost established. 2. In the absence of any wind, only a small positive (increasing sea level towards the north) longshore SSS remains (2.10^-8 - 8.10^-8 m/m) if the water level recordings of all coastal stations are taken into account. The influence of the river Rhine on this longshore SSS can be neglected. 3. The longshore SSS is always negative along the Belgian coast except for strong north-easterly winds. This SSS is generated by a structural difference in MSL between the southern North Sea and the English Channel. This negative SSS amounts up to 1.10^-6 m/m. 4. The cross shore SSS between Meetpost Noordwijk and the coast reaches at high windspeeds its maximum during an on-shore directed wind. At a lower windspeed, on the other hand, the cross shore SSS reaches its maximum during a south-southwesterly wind. In general, the cross shore SSS becomes increasingly more positive with an increasing Rhine discharge.MaST*G8
Subsurface Iron Removal and Hand-pump Adsorptive Arsenic Removal: The influence of iron catalyzed oxidation on arsenic adsorption and surface regeneration in household filters (abstract)
No full textWater ManagementCivil Engineering and Geoscience
The conceptual validity of empirical scale construction: the case of the sensation seeking scale
No full textAn assessment of the present state of sensation seeking (SS) research suggests that the concepts of physical risk taking and sensation seeking have become synonymous with version five of Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS). Given this, it would appear that the validity of SS research rests on the extent to which the SSS actually measures risk taking and sensation seeking tendencies. The present paper suggests that a series of logical and conceptual errors in the development of the SSS have resulted in a scale that does not measure sensation seeking. This raises concerns about both the value and meaning of investigations in which it is employed. It is concluded that risk taking and SS research has learned more about the SSS than sensation seeking itself.Peer reviewedFinal article publishe
Modal shift from road haulage to short sea shipping: a systematic literature review and research directions
No full textModal shift from road haulage to short sea shipping (SSS) has been advocated by authorities and researchers for more than two decades. This paper provides a review of literature on modal shift and pinpoints paths for future research on topics in six categories: (1) factors influencing SSS competitiveness, (2) the policy-oriented perspective, (3) environmental legislation, (4) SSS performance, (5) port characteristics, and (6) the multi-agent perspective. In particular, we propose first, in evaluating the performance of SSS versus road haulage in different trade corridors, three performance-related dimensions–the economic dimension (e.g. external costs), the environmental dimension, and the dimension of service quality–should be considered. Second, researchers should use rich, real-world, numerical data and operational research techniques to identify the relative importance of individual drivers and barriers for a modal shift from road haulage to SSS. Third proposed direction is related to assessing which groups of actors certain policies should target. In doing so, researchers should extend their policy-related focus beyond the European Union, which has long encompassed the major geopolitical scope of research on the modal shift. Fourth, to moderate the adverse impact of environmental legislation on SSS, strategic solutions need to be identified. Fifth, we also suggest that the influence of contingencies, particularly port strikes and cyberattacks, on SSS operations and approaches for managing them should be investigated. Sixth, the economic and financial advantages of coordination and alliance for each transport chain agent need to be evaluated.Transport and Plannin
Australian political science and the study of discourse
No full textCopyright © 2002 The Author The document attached has been archived with permission from the copyright holder.This paper argues that the study of political discourse, in its various forms and taking various approaches, has become an increasingly useful aspect of Australian political science. That development, in turn, is related to a ‘discursive shift’, associated with the influence of neo-liberalism, that has taken place in Australian government discourse and that has challenged previous understandings of Australian political thought. As well, the increasing study of political discourse has been influenced by the impact of interdisciplinary approaches such as post-structuralist, postmodernist, feminist, queer, critical theory and postcolonial analyses. Such analyses can generate very useful insights. However, this paper also argues that discursive approaches should be seen as merely supplementing more traditional approaches to the study of politics.Carol Johnsonhttp://arts.anu.edu.au/sss/apsa/papers.ht
Enhancing Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts with secret sharing
No full textBlockchain networks have acquired ongoing notoriety among associations that need to utilise the security perspectives that blockchain gives. Hyperledger Fabric (HF) is one of the most widely utilised distributed network technologies, most ordinarily applied in situations that require private information to be maintained safely and secretly. Usecase models are finance, commerce and healthcare record-keeping.HF has been shown to have vulnerabilities that might allow hostile attackers to gain access to the data contained in the ledger or the state database, according to many studies. Using Shamir’s Secret Sharing (SSS), this paper provides a way to increase the security measurements of information stored on the ledger or in the state database. As a result of this research, design details for implementing these privacy-protection measures are given.In conclusion, although this design improves the security of HF, it also affects the runtime and code complexity.CSE3000 Research ProjectComputer Science and Engineerin
Processing of solid state sintered alpha-SiC ceramics with carbon-black addition
No full textÇelik, Ali (Bilecik, Author)The efficient removal of surface silica layer from SiC particles by the addition of carbon is required for solid state sintering (SSS) of SiC ceramics. While wax-based organics are generally utilized as carbon source in many commercial SSS-SiC ceramics, carbon black powders with high specific surface area (SSA) are potential alternatives as carbon source, which can be dispersed in ceramic slurries directly without needing any additional pyrolysis reactions. In this study, carbon black powders were utilized as carbon source for sintering of SiC. The effect of particle size of carbon black powders on densification and microstructural development during pressureless and spark plasma sintering (SPS) were investigated. It was observed that while the density of the SiC samples increased with increasing SSA of carbon black powders, complete densification was not achieved for all samples in case of pressureless sintering due to the flaws originated by carbon black segregation on granule surfaces. SPS was found an effective sintering method for the elimination of such flaws and SiC ceramics were sintered to 100% of theoretical density independent from the particle size of the carbon black powders in this sintering technique.Turkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK) - 1509 - 912004
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