The performance of the Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC) may be affected by (1) the number of filters, (2) the shape of filters, (3) the way in which filters are spaced, and (4) the way in which the power spectrum is warped. In this paper, several comparison experiments are done to find a best implementation. The traditional MFCC calculation excludes the 0th coefficient for the reason that it is regarded as somewhat unreliable. According to the analysis and experiments, the authors find that it can be regarded as the generalized frequency band energy (FBE) and is hence useful, which results in the FBE-MFCC. The authors also propose a better analysis, namely the auto-regressive analysis, on the frame energy,which outperforms its 1st and/or 2nd order differential derivatives. Experiments with the “863”Speech Database show that, compared with the traditional MFCC with its corresponding autoregressive analysis coefficients, the FBE-MFCC and the frame energy with their corresponding auto-regressive analysis coefficients form the best combination, reducing the Chinese syllable error rate (CSER) by about 10%, while the FBE-MFCC with the corresponding auto-regressive analysis coefficients reduces CSER by 2.5%. Comparison experiments are also done with a quite casual Chinese speech database, named Chinese Annotated Spontaneous Speech (CASS)corpus. The FBE-MFCC can reduce the error rate by about 2.9% on an average.

Comparison of Different Implementations of MFCC

Wastewater contains many organic and inorganic pollutants and discharging them into received waters leads to serious environmental problems. The wastewater that is produced from various industries contains a noticeable amount of dyes; heavy metals and metalloids this has remained one of the major environmental problems facing public health. Unfortunately, the conventional wastewater remediation process is unable to remove dyes and heavy metals completely. One of the widely used water treatment technologies is biosorption, biosorbents are considered to be an emerging green, cost-effective, and efficient alternative. Therefore, the search for locally or regionally available biomasses for heavy metals/metalloids and dyes removal gained rapid attention. Methylene blue, Crystal violet, Reactive black 5, and Congo red; Cd, Cr, Cu, Pb, Hg, Ni, and Zn; and As were selected as examples for dyes, heavy metals, and metalloids, respectively, In this regard, a comprehensive understanding of the biosorption capability of different biosorbents is necessary to know how they can remove inorganic and organic contaminants in wastewater. Biosorption is an ion exchange, complexation, and coordination process. Besides, the recent advances in various biomaterials-based biosorbents and different approaches of pollutants removal from wastewater with several examples to provide a backdrop for future research have been reviewed. This can be beneficial for developing more effective technologies to eliminate contaminants, thus bridging the gap between laboratory results and industrial use. crustacean shells, algae, chitosan are the most effective biosorbents. These biosorbents can serve as good alternatives to synthetic materials for pollutants removal from wastewater.

A critical review of biosorption of dyes, heavy metals and metalloids from wastewater as an efficient and green process

Background

In the UK, women aged 50–73 years are invited for screening by mammography every 3 years. In 2009–10, more than 2.24 million women in this age group in England were invited to take part in the programme, of whom 73% attended a screening clinic. Of these, 64,104 women were recalled for assessment. Of those recalled, 81% did not have breast cancer; these women are described as having a false-positive mammogram.

 Objective

The aim of this systematic review was to identify the psychological impact on women of false-positive screening mammograms and any evidence for the effectiveness of interventions designed to reduce this impact. We were also looking for evidence of effects in subgroups of women.

 Data sources

MEDLINE, MEDLINE In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations, EMBASE, Health Management Information Consortium, Cochrane Central Register for Controlled Trials, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD) Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, CRD Health Technology Assessment (HTA), Cochrane Methodology, Web of Science, Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Science, Conference Proceeding Citation Index-Social Science and Humanities, PsycINFO, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Sociological Abstracts, the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents and others. Initial searches were carried out between 8 October 2010 and 25 January 2011. Update searches were carried out on 26 October 2011 and 23 March 2012.

 Review methods

Based on the inclusion criteria, titles and abstracts were screened independently by two reviewers. Retrieved papers were reviewed and selected using the same independent process. Data were extracted by one reviewer and checked by another. Each included study was assessed for risk of bias.

 Results

Eleven studies were found from 4423 titles and abstracts. Studies that used disease-specific measures found a negative psychological impact lasting up to 3 years. Distress increased with the level of invasiveness of the assessment procedure. Studies using instruments designed to detect clinical levels of morbidity did not find this effect. Women with false-positive mammograms were less likely to return for the next round of screening [relative risk (RR) 0.97; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.96 to 0.98] than those with normal mammograms, were more likely to have interval cancer [odds ratio (OR) 3.19 (95% CI 2.34 to 4.35)] and were more likely to have cancer detected at the next screening round [OR 2.15 (95% CI 1.55 to 2.98)].

 Limitations

This study was limited to UK research and by the robustness of the included studies, which frequently failed to report quality indicators, for example failure to consider the risk of bias or confounding, or failure to report participants' demographic characteristics.

 Conclusions

We conclude that the experience of having a false-positive screening mammogram can cause breast cancer-specific psychological distress that may endure for up to 3 years, and reduce the likelihood that women will return for their next round of mammography screening. These results should be treated cautiously owing to inherent weakness of observational designs and weaknesses in reporting. Future research should include a qualitative interview study and observational studies that compare generic and disease-specific measures, collect demographic data and include women from different social and ethnic groups.

Systematic review of the psychological consequences of false-positive screening mammograms

This study of Matamba shell reviled them as material with outstanding surface morphology, elemental and kinetic mechanism characteristics. Mutamba biochar revealed irregular honeycomb morphological transformation from the field emission scanning electron microscope after pyrolysis at 600 °C for 2 h. Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy revealed high content of carbon (72.68wt%), nitrogen (14.14wt%) and oxygen (10.35wt%) on the biochar surface. The available oxygen composition provides enough polarization ability for high iodine adsorption (43.65 mmol/g) from the experimental data which were significantly induced by weak van der Waals forces and π-π and π-stacking interaction on the biochar surface and its micropores. The carbon content above 50% in ash rich biochar with an increase in pyrolysis can be ascribed to elements incorporated into aromatic or heterocyclic ring system established through preferential loss of oxygen at 600 °C pyrolysis. The adsorption kinetics were conducted to evaluate the equilibrium adsorption of the novel material and Elovich and Intra particle diffusion better described well the kinetic adsorption through Iodine adsorption than pseudo first order and pseudo second order models. Elovich was the best model to fit the adsorption kinetics with 45.41 mmol/(g•min) adsorption rate. The second order Akaike Information Criterion (38.26), adjusted correlation coefficient R2 (0.9898) and sum of squares error (1.442) were used to fit the data. Consequently, the biochar in this study can serve as a promising green material for efficiently removing organic and inorganic contaminants from the environmental water ecosystem. The environmental significance of biochar will be of fundamental meaning to rural areas in developing countries in aquatic contaminants immobilization for water reuse. These results indicate that the Matamba fruit shells has the possibility to be used as an eco-friendly and low-cost effective adsorbent for anionic dye removal from the water environment. They also demonstrate the immense potential of the fruit shell waste to produce high performance biochar as an alternative green carbonaceous material that can be applied to adsorb organic and inorganic unwanted constituencies from wastewater as well as improvement of waste management in developing countries at a low cost. Its application as a pathway mitigation for diminishing greenhouse gasses and reducing the global warming potential could not be underestimated. 

Biochar derived from non-customized matamba fruit shell as an adsorbent for wastewater treatment

Development of fruit waste derived bio-adsorbents for wastewater treatment: A review

Microalgal biosorption of heavy metals: A comprehensive bibliometric review

Reduction of particulate matter and volatile organic compounds in biorefineries: A state-of-the-art review.

The current method of raising tilapia in the Philippines is through fish ponds exposed to the weather Methods for measuring pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and ammonia are limited to manually using a chemical test kit The current system relies on manually regulating the water quality so the fish are at risk of harmful situations resulting from unsafe levels of temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, or ammonia This study aims to solve that problem by creating a system that automatically measures and regulates the pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and ammonia This study takes advantage of electronic sensors for pH, temperature, and dissolved oxygen, while computing the ammonia factor, to allow the user to measure the levels of the said parameters at any given time, process, send the data to a LabVIEW database, and use the data to automatically take corrective action against harmful levels of pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and ammonia while notifying the user through SMS The proponents of this study built the prototype and tested it on two different trials of 50 fingerlings each in a 1 cubic-meter glass aquarium

Automated aquaculture system that regulates Ph, temperature and ammonia

Analyzing cardiovascular activity of patients using ECG clinical paper printouts requires prior knowledge and practice. This research used spatial-oriented image processing methods for analyzing ECG readings by retrieving only the essential features, and not all ECG data, to assist physicians in diagnosis. Different values such as Atrial (rate/min) and Ventricular (rate/min), QRS interval (sec), QT interval (sec), QTc (sec), and PR interval (sec) were successfully extracted with indication as to whether the values are within the accepted normal values, given the patient’s gender and age. Performance of the system was tested based on accuracy, RMSE and normalized RMSE. The methodology achieved average accuracy as high as 95.424 % while the PR interval feature extraction achieved a relatively low average accuracy of 87.196%.

Aaron Don M. Africa

Papers

Microalgal biosorption of heavy metals: A comprehensive bibliometric review

Reduction of particulate matter and volatile organic compounds in biorefineries: A state-of-the-art review.

Automated aquaculture system that regulates Ph, temperature and ammonia

ECG Print-out Features Extraction Using Spatial-Oriented Image Processing Techniques

Ripe fruit detection and classification using machine learning