Like several other classes of hormones, the class of plant hormones called auxins exert myriad effects on cell development. While auxins are most noted for inducing cell elongation, they are also involved in cell division, cell differentiation, cell and organ polarity, and wound responsiveness. Consistent with this pleiotropy, is the recent identification of several putative auxin receptors that in theory could represent the primary elements of more than one auxin signal pathway leading to distinct responses or leading in parallel to (...) a single response. Our current working hypothesis is that some auxin‐mediated responses may be mediated by multiple receptors. We describe some of what is known about each of the new putative receptors and elaborate on the hypothesis using the example of cell elongation. Specifically for auxin‐induced elongation, we propose that two rapid events, specific gene transcription and cell wall acidification, are separately mediated by at least two receptors, acting in the nucleus and at the plasma membrane, respectively. (shrink)

The performance of most of the state-of-the-art speaker recognition systems deteriorates under degraded conditions, owing to mismatch between the training and testing sessions. This study focuses on the front end of the speaker verification system to reduce the mismatch between training and testing. An adaptive voice activity detection algorithm using zero-frequency filter assisted peaking resonator was integrated into the front end of the SV system. The performance of this proposed SV system was studied under degraded conditions with 50 selected speakers (...) from the NIST 2003 database. The degraded condition was simulated by adding different types of noises to the original speech utterances. The different types of noises were chosen from the NOISEX-92 database to simulate degraded conditions at signal-to-noise ratio levels from 0 to 20 dB. In this study, widely used 39-dimension Mel frequency cepstral coefficient features were used, and Gaussian mixture model–universal background model was used for speaker modeling. The proposed system’s performance was studied against the energy-based VAD used as the front end of the SV system. The proposed SV system showed some encouraging results when EMD-based VAD was used at its front end. (shrink)

Speaker recognition under mismatched conditions is a challenging task. Speech signal is nonlinear and nonstationary, and therefore, difficult to analyze under realistic conditions. Also, in real conditions, the nature of the noise present in speech data is not known a priori. In such cases, the performance of speaker identification or speaker verification degrades considerably under realistic conditions. Any SR system uses a voice activity detector as the front-end subsystem of the whole system. The performance of most VADs deteriorates at the (...) front end of the SR task or system under degraded conditions or in realistic conditions where noise plays a major role. Recently, speech data analysis and processing using Norden E. Huang’s empirical mode decomposition combined with Hilbert transform, commonly referred to as Hilbert–Huang transform, has become an emerging trend. EMD is an a posteriori, adaptive, data analysis tool used in time domain that is widely accepted by the research community. Recently, speech data analysis and speech data processing for speech recognition and SR tasks using EMD have been increasing. EMD-based VAD has become an important adaptive subsystem of the SR system that mostly mitigates the effect of mismatch between the training and the testing phase. Recently, we have developed a VAD algorithm using a zero-frequency filter-assisted peaking resonator and EMD. In this article, the efficacy of an EMD-based VAD algorithm is studied at the front end of a text-independent language-independent SI task for the speaker’s data collected in three languages at five different places, such as home, street, laboratory, college campus, and restaurant, under realistic conditions using EDIROL-R09 HR, a 24-bit wav/mp3 recorder. The performance of this proposed SI task is compared against the traditional energy-based VAD in terms of percentage identification rate. In both cases, widely accepted Mel frequency cepstral coefficients are computed by employing frame processing from the extracted voiced speech regions using the respective VAD techniques from the realistic speech utterances, and are used as a feature vector for speaker modeling using popular Gaussian mixture models. The experimental results showed that the proposed SI task with the VAD algorithm using ZFFPR and EMD at its front end performs better than the SI task with short-term energy-based VAD when used at its front end, and is somewhat encouraging. (shrink)

In this article, a new adaptive data-driven strategy for voice activity detection using empirical mode decomposition is proposed. Speech data are decomposed using an a posteriori, adaptive, data-driven EMD in the time domain to yield a set of physically meaningful intrinsic mode functions. Each IMF preserves the nonlinear and nonstationary property of the speech utterance. Among a set of IMFs, the IMF that contains source information dominantly called characteristic IMF can be identified and extracted by designing a zero-frequency filter-assisted peaking (...) resonator. The detected CIMF is used to compute energy using short-term processing. Choosing proper threshold, voiced regions in speech utterances are detected using frame energy. The proposed framework has been studied on both clean speech utterance and noisy speech utterance. The proposed method is used for voice activity detection in the presence of white noise and shows encouraging result in the presence of white noise up to 0 dB. (shrink)

DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

In this thirteenth book of scilogs – one may find topics on Neutrosophy, Plithogeny, Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy – email messages to research colleagues, or replies, notes, comments, remarks about authors, articles, or books, spontaneous ideas, and so on. It presents new types of soft sets and new types of topologies. -/- Exchanging ideas with Mohammad Abobala, Ishfaq Ahmad, Ibrahim M. Almanjahie, Fatimah Alshahrani, Nizar Altounji, Muhammad Aslam, Said Broumi, Victor Christianto, R. Diksh, Feng Liu, Frank Julian Gelli, Erick Gonzalez Caballero, (...) Riad Hamido, Yaser Al-Hasan, Ahmed Hatip, Yasin Karmouta, Nivetha Martin, Preda Mihăilescu, V. Lakshmana Gomathi Nayagam, Ze Carlos Tiago de Oliveira, Alexey Platonov, Andrei Pogany, Shakti Prasad, Ranulfo Paiva Barbosa (Sobrinho), Dmitri Rabounski, Ackbar Rezaei, Constantin Sandu, A. Saraswathi, Usman Shahzad, Gocho V. Sharlanov, Stefan Spaarmann, Michael Voskoglou, Vinay Kumar Yadav, Tomasz Witczak, William H. Woodall, Mircea Zărnescu, Mohamed Bisher Zeina (in order of reference in the book). (shrink)

This eighth volume of Collected Papers includes 75 papers comprising 973 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2010-2022 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 102 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 24 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abduallah Gamal, Firoz Ahmad, Ahmad Yusuf Adhami, Ahmed B. Al-Nafee, Ali Hassan, Mumtaz Ali, Akbar Rezaei, Assia Bakali, Ayoub Bahnasse, Azeddine Elhassouny, Durga Banerjee, Romualdas Bausys, Mircea Boșcoianu, Traian Alexandru Buda, Bui Cong Cuong, Emilia Calefariu, Ahmet Çevik, Chang Su Kim, Victor (...) Christianto, Dae Wan Kim, Daud Ahmad, Arindam Dey, Partha Pratim Dey, Mamouni Dhar, H. A. Elagamy, Ahmed K. Essa, Sudipta Gayen, Bibhas C. Giri, Daniela Gîfu, Noel Batista Hernández, Hojjatollah Farahani, Huda E. Khalid, Irfan Deli, Saeid Jafari, Tèmítópé Gbóláhàn Jaíyéolá, Sripati Jha, Sudan Jha, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, M. Karthika, Kawther F. Alhasan, Giruta Kazakeviciute-Januskeviciene, Qaisar Khan, Kishore Kumar P K, Prem Kumar Singh, Ranjan Kumar, Maikel Leyva-Vázquez, Mahmoud Ismail, Tahir Mahmood, Hafsa Masood Malik, Mohammad Abobala, Mai Mohamed, Gunasekaran Manogaran, Seema Mehra, Kalyan Mondal, Mohamed Talea, Mullai Murugappan, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Aslam Malik, Muhammad Khalid Mahmood, Nivetha Martin, Durga Nagarajan, Nguyen Van Dinh, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Lewis Nkenyereya, Jagan M. Obbineni, M. Parimala, S. K. Patro, Peide Liu, Pham Hong Phong, Surapati Pramanik, Gyanendra Prasad Joshi, Quek Shio Gai, R. Radha, A.A. Salama, S. Satham Hussain, Mehmet Șahin, Said Broumi, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Selvaraj Ganesan, Shahbaz Ali, Shouzhen Zeng, Manjeet Singh, A. Stanis Arul Mary, Dragiša Stanujkić, Yusuf Șubaș, Rui-Pu Tan, Mirela Teodorescu, Selçuk Topal, Zenonas Turskis, Vakkas Uluçay, Norberto Valcárcel Izquierdo, V. Venkateswara Rao, Volkan Duran, Ying Li, Young Bae Jun, Wadei F. Al-Omeri, Jian-qiang Wang, Lihshing Leigh Wang, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas. (shrink)

Is God's foreknowledge compatible with human freedom? One of the most attractive attempts to reconcile the two is the Ockhamistic view, which subscribes not only to human freedom and divine omniscience, but retains our most fundamental intuitions concerning God and time: that the past is immutable, that God exists and acts in time, and that there is no backward causation. In order to achieve all that, Ockhamists distinguish ‘hard facts’ about the past which cannot possibly be altered from ‘soft facts’ (...) about the past which are alterable, and argue that God's prior beliefs about human actions are soft facts about the past. (shrink)

This is the first of two companion articles drawn from a larger project, provisionally entitled Undisciplining Moral Epistemology. The overall goal is to understand how moral claims may be rationally justified in a world characterized by cultural diversity and social inequality. To show why a new approach to moral justification is needed, it is argued that several currently influential philosophical accounts of moral justification lend themselves to rationalizing the moral claims of those with more social power. The present article explains (...) how discourse ethics is flawed just in this way. The article begins by identifying several conditions of adequacy for assessing reasoning practices designed to achieve moral justification and shows that, when used in contexts of cultural diversity and social inequality, discourse ethics fails these conditions. It goes on to argue that the failure of discourse ethics is rooted in its reliance on a broader conception of moral epistemology that is invidiously idealized. It concludes by pointing to the need to rethink both the mission and the method of moral epistemology. (shrink)

The Greeks and Romans have been charged with destroying the ecosystems within which they lived. In this book, however, M. D. Usher argues rather that we can find in their lives and thought the origin of modern ideas about systems and sustainability, important topics for humans today and in the future. With chapters running the gamut of Greek and Roman experience – from the Presocratics and Plato to Roman agronomy and the Benedictine Rule – Plato's Pigs brings together unlikely bedfellows, (...) both ancient and modern, to reveal surprising connections. Lively prose and liberal use of anecdotal detail, including an afterword about the author's own experiments with sustainable living on his sheep farm in Vermont, add a strong authorial voice. In short, this is a unique, first-of-its-kind book that is sure to be of interest to anyone working in Classics, environmental studies, philosophy, ecology, or the history of ideas. (shrink)

According to the standard analysis of degree questions, the logical form of a degree question contains a variable that ranges over individual degrees and is bound by the degree question operator how. In contrast with this, we claim that the variable bound by the degree question operator how does not range over individual degrees but over intervals of degrees, by analogy with Schwarzschild and Wilkinson's proposal regarding the semantics of comparative clauses. Not only does the interval-based semantics predict the existence (...) of certain readings that are not predicted under the standard view, it is also able, together with other natural assumptions, to account for the sensitivity of degree questions to negative islands, as well as for the fact, uncovered by Fox and Hackl, that negative islands can be obviated by some properly placed modals. Like Fox and Hackl, we characterize negative island effects as arising from the fact that the relevant question, due to its meaning alone, can never have a maximally informative answer. Contrary to Fox and Hackl, however, we do not need to assume that scales are universally dense, nor that the notion of maximal informativity responsible for negative islands is blind to contextual parameters. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Outline of Indian Non-RealismS. R. SahaAdvaita Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Outline of Indian Non-Realism. By Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. Pp. xii + 274. Hardcover $75.00.Chakrabarthi Ram-Prasad deserves praise for Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Outline of Indian Non-Realism, a book on the core area of Advaita Vedānta philosophy, written in an analytical and comparative style, choosing contemporary Western philosophy as (...) his canvas. George Thibaut's translations of Vedānta commentaries were supplemented by the writings of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and others, who followed the style of history of philosophy in their works. But the brand of Western philosophy that served as the background for them was perhaps limited to Hegelian and Neo-Hegelian philosophy. Many later philosophers, notably Krish-nachandra Bhattacharya, Rashbihary Das, G. R. Malkani, T.R.V. Murti, and T.M.P. Mahadevan, followed an interpretive style in their writings on Vedānta, mostly confining themselves to systems of Indian philosophy. After India achieved independence, a new era began for analytical research in Indian philosophy, led by Daniel Ingalls, J. N. Mohanty, Bimal Krishna Matilal, and Arindam Chakrabarti, although their work is mostly confined to Nyāya, Buddhism, and Vedānta. Following their model many others in India and abroad have been doing important work mainly in the areas of Nyāya and Buddhism but rarely in Vedānta. The credit goes to Chakra-barthi Ram-Prasad to have been able to produce a full-length book on Advaita Vedānta written in a thoroughly analytical style that transcends geographical barriers in philosophy.The book contains an Introduction and four sections. In the Introduction we get an idea of the project Ram-Prasad has undertaken. By "Advaita" he means the philosophy that Ś an.kara argues for in his commentaries on various Upaniṣads and on Bādarāyaṇa's Vedāntasūtras. It is not Ram-Prasad's aim to give an exposition of this philosophy in the style of historicist-philological exegesis, but rather to give an innovative reconstruction of Advaita on the basis of the views of three philosophers of the school interpreted in the light of the views of prominent philosophers of the West, although the book is firmly anchored in the Indian tradition. A distinction is made in Advaita between soteriology and philosophy. The Upaniṣads declare that brahman is the ultimate reality. Brahman is, however, identical with ātman, and ātman is again identical with ji¯va. That there is a self cannot be denied, for one who denies is the self itself. This self is undeniable because it is reflexive in nature. Self, understood in this sense, is identical with brahman. ji¯va, which is conceived as suffering consciousness, is only a particular exemplification of this brahman-ātman. Every ji¯va is thus individuated ātman. The goal of liberation for an individual is nothing other than the attainment of the de-individuated state. Not only ji¯va but also the [End Page 264] world, according to Advaita, is ultimately brahman, although the world is independent of ji¯va and its cognitional states. The de-individuation of ji¯va and the reducibility of the world to brahman do not get ready acceptance in human consciousness. On the matter of such a realization, s´ravaṇa or teachings from the texts stand in need of aid from manana or philosophical reflection. Ram-Prasad has argued for a philosophy of Advaita that is not incompatible with its soteriological goal, although his interest in developing this philosophy is autonomous in character.Ram-Prasad calls the brand of philosophy that he develops in this book "non-realism." It holds that the object of experience is not what it appears to be. The object appears in experience as an "other" to cognition. According to realism, the object is really so and is elementary to reality. But according to anti-realism the object is not elementary and is reducible to cognition and hence is only a construct. Advaita metaphysics is neither realistic nor anti-realistic. Ram-Prasad argues for this philosophical position on the basis of his interpretation of some leading philosophers of... (shrink)

Plato's Timaeus contains a powerful and influential myth, of the construction of the universe by a divine craftsman. A god imposes reason on necessity, to bring order from a primeval 'receptacle' of disordered matter. There results the 'child' that is the cosmos - a copy of an eternally-existing perfect model. Here eight new essays from a distinguished international cast, explore aspects of this challenging work: the principles of the mythical narrative, how the world soul and human body are formed, implications (...) for illness - mental and physical, the importance of music and harmonious proportion. Later developments are also treated: Aristotle's theory of generation, the commentary of Proclus and elements of modern evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Considerable methodological difficulties abound in neuroimaging, and several philosophers of science have recently called into question the potential of neuroimaging studies to contribute to our knowledge of human cognition. These skeptical accounts suggest that functional hypotheses are underdetermined by neuroimaging data. I apply Mayo’s error-statistical account to clarify the evidential import of neuroimaging data and the kinds of inferences it can reliably support. Thus, we can answer the question “What can we reliably learn from neuroimaging?” and make sense of how (...) this knowledge can contribute to novel construals of cognition. (shrink)

Peckham claims that my "behavior" in dealing with the quotations in Natural Supernaturalism is the same, in methodology and validity, as the interpretative behavior of Booth's waiter. But the great bulk of the utterances in my quotations—and no less, of the utterances constituting Peckham's own essay—do not consist of orders, requests, or commands. Instead, they consist of assertions, descriptions, judgments, exclamations, approbations, condemnations, and many other kinds of speech-acts, the meanings of which are not related to my interpretative behavior, even (...) in the indirect way in which the meaning of Booth's order is related to the future behavior of his waiter. M. H. Abrams, author of Natural Supernaturalism and The Mirror and the Lamp and Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, responds in this essay to Morse Peckham's "The Infinitude of Pluralism" . Morse Peckham, in his Critical Response, was commenting on issues raised by the forum on "The Limits of Pluralism" , to which M. H. Abrams contributed. Previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne Booth" and "The Deconstructive Angel". (shrink)

In retrospect, I think I was right to compose Natural Supernaturalism by relying on taste, tact, and intuition rather than on a controlling method. A book of this kind, which deals with the history of human intellection, feeling, and imagination, employs special vocabularies, procedures, and modes of demonstration which, over many centuries of development, have shown their profitability when applied to matters of this sort. I agree with Booth that these procedures, when valid, are in a broad sense rational, and (...) subject to analysis and some degree of definition. But the rules underlying such a discourse are complex, elusive, unsystematic, and subject to innovative modification; they manifest themselves in the intuitive expertise of the historian; and the specification of these rules should not precede, but follow practice. . . . After the fact, nevertheless, a book like Natural Supernaturalism is subject to close critical inquiry about its methods and rationale. I am grateful to Booth for opening up such an inquiry, and for doing so in a way that is not only disarming, but seems to me to be the most promising of useful results. That is, instead of adopting a prosecutorial stance, demanding: "Justify the rationality and probative force of what you have done; it looks dammed suspicious to me," he has adopted the friendly tactic of saying: "Your book, in my experience of it, has yielded discoveries that I want to call knowledge, by methods, however deviant from standard rubrics of valid reasoning, that it seems irrational to call non-rational. Let's set out to clarify what these methods are, and to see what grounds we can find for the claim that they provide warranted knowledge." M.H. Abrams' contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Deconstructive Angel" and "Behaviorism and Deconstruction: A Comment on Morse Peckham's 'The Infinitude of Pluralism'". (shrink)