观音峰

心中有佛Buddha at heart此方大化石,金黄与深灰相互交杂,色彩明艳,对比强烈;石体上小下大,近似锥形。若论形态,它似含苞待放的花朵,又似直入云霄的山峰,还似高高堆起的金银珠宝。然而,藏者看到的,是一尊威严的、释放耀着眼光芒的观音圣像。"心中有佛,所见皆佛。相由心生,所见皆所想。"由此可见,藏者心中定有一尊圣洁的佛,因而面对此石时,便心生了"观音普度众生"的美好夙愿。

Analysis of Smooth Cepstral Peak Prominence in Hypokinetic Dysarthria Associated With Parkinson’s Disease

Smoothed cepstral peak prominence(CPPs)is a measurement of the distance from the prominent cepstral peak to the linear regression line directly beneath it.Variations of CPPs data acquisition and analysis lead to the complexity of the clinical cut-off values,and there are no agreeable values for a specific voice disorder,such as hypokinetic dysarthria associated with Parkinson’s disease(PD).This study examined the CPPs in people with hypokinetic dysarthria associated with PD compared with healthy participants.Results demonstrated significant differences in speech tasks of sustained vowel and connected speech,with CPPs of connected speech more sensitive to dysphonia and gender difference in PD participants.Males in PD participants presented higher CPPs for sustained vowels and lower CPPs for connected speech than females.It is implied that a consistent clinical application protocol is necessary,and multiple acoustic measures are needed to ensure the accuracy of clinical decisions.

Resistance of cavitation erosion of multimodal WC-12Co coatings sprayed by HVOF

Conventional,submicron and multimodal WC-12Co cermet coatings were deposited by high velocity oxy-fuel（HVOF）.The microhardness and microstructure of the coatings were compared,and the resistance of the coatings to cavitation erosion was studied by ultrasonic vibration cavitation equipment.Cavitation pits and craters were observed by SEM and cavitation mechanisms were explored.The results show that the microstructures of submicron and multimodal WC-12Co coatings prepared by HVOF are dense with little porosity,and their microhardness values are obviously higher than that of the conventional WC-12Co coating.The average microhardness of multimodal WC-12Co coating reaches nearly HV1500,which is much higher than that of the conventional one.As well,it is found that the multimodal WC-12Co coating exhibits the best cavitation erosion resistance among the three coatings,the erosion rate is approximately 40% that of the conventional coating,and the cavitation erosion resistance of multimodal WC-12Co coating is enhanced by above 150% in comparison with the conventional coating.

A new formant feature and its application in Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality assessment

In order to improve the Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality assessment, a nox/el formant feature was proposed and applied to formant classification for Chinese Mandarin vowel pronunciation quality evaluation. Formant candidates of each frame were plotted on the time-frequency plane to form a bitmap, and its Gabor feature was extracted to represent the formant trajectory. The feature was then classified by using GMM model and the classification posterior probability was mapped to pronunciation quality grade. The experiments of comparing the Gabor transformation based formant trajectory feature with several other kinds of traditionally used features show that with this method, a human-machine scoring correlation coefficient （CC） of 0.842 can be achieved, which is better than the result of 0.832 by traditional speech recognition techniques. At the same time, considering that the long-term information of formant classification and the short-term information of speech recognition technique are complementary to each other, it is investigated to combine their results with linear or nonlinear methods to further improve the evaluation performance. As a result, experiments on PSK show that the best CC of 0.913, which is very close to the correlation of inter-human rating of 0.94, is gotten by using neural network.

Spectral analysis of bowel sounds in intestinal obstruction using an electronic stethoscope

AIM: To determine the value of bowel sounds analysis using an electronic stethoscope to support a clinical diagnosis of intestinal obstruction. METHODS: Subjects were patients who presented with a diagnosis of possible intestinal obstruction based on symptoms, signs, and radiological findings. A 3MTH Littmann Model 4100 electronic stethoscope was used in this study. With the patients lying supine, six 8-second recordings of bowel sounds were taken from each patient from the lower abdomen. The recordings were analysed for sound duration, soundto-sound interval, dominant frequency, and peak frequency. Clinical and radiological data were reviewed and the patients were classified as having either acute, subacute, or no bowel obstruction. Comparison of bowel sound characteristics was made between these subgroups of patients. In the presence of an obstruction, the site of obstruction was identified and bowel calibre was also measured to correlate with bowel sounds. RESULTS: A total of 71 patients were studied during the period July 2009 to January 2011. Forty patientshad acute bowel obstruction (27 small bowel obstruction and 13 large bowel obstruction), 11 had subacute bowel obstruction (eight in the small bowel and three in large bowel) and 20 had no bowel obstruction (diagnoses of other conditions were made). Twenty-five patients received surgical intervention (35.2%) during the same admission for acute abdominal conditions. A total of 426 recordings were made and 420 recordings were used for analysis. There was no significant difference in sound-to-sound interval, dominant frequency, and peak frequency among patients with acute bowel obstruction, subacute bowel obstruction, and no bowel obstruction. In acute large bowel obstruction, the sound duration was significantly longer (median 0.81 s vs 0.55 s, P = 0.021) and the dominant frequency was significantly higher (median 440 Hz vs 288 Hz, P = 0.003) when compared to acute small bowel obstruction. No significant difference was seen between acute large bowel obstruction and large bowel pseudoobstruction. For patients with small bowel obstruction, the sound-to-sound interval was significantly longer in those who subsequently underwent surgery compared with those treated non-operatively (median 1.29 s vs 0.63 s, P < 0.001). There was no correlation between bowel calibre and bowel sound characteristics in both acute small bowel obstruction and acute large bowel obstruction. CONCLUSION: Auscultation of bowel sounds is nonspecific for diagnosing bowel obstruction. Differences in sound characteristics between large bowel and small bowel obstruction may help determine the likely site of obstruction.

Emotion recognition of Uyghur speech using uncertain linear discriminant analysis

To achieve efficient a d compact low-dimensional features for speech emotion recognition,a novel featurereduction method using uncertain linear discriminant analysis is proposed.Using the same principles as for conventional linear discriminant analysis(LDA),uncertainties of the noisy or distorted input data ae employed in order to estimate maximaiy discriminant directions.The effectiveness of the proposed uncertain LDA(ULDA)is demonstrated in the Uyghur speech emotion recognition task.The emotional features of Uyghur speech,especially,the fundamental fequency and formant,a e analyzed in the collected emotional data.Then,ULDA is employed in dimensionality reduction of emotional features and better performance is achieved compared with other dimensionality reduction techniques.The speech emotion recognition of Uyghur is implemented by feeding the low-dimensional data to support vector machine(SVM)based on the proposed ULDA.The experimental results show that when employing a appropriate uncertainty estimation algorithm,uncertain LDA outperforms the conveetional LDA counterpart on Uyghur speech emotion recognition.