Showing papers on "Naturalness published in 1990"

Weak scale effective supersymmetry

Abstract: The idea of supersymmetry at the weak scale should be tested without regard to the Planck-scale origin of any specific model. A class of low-energy effective supersymmetric theories is derived from four assumptions: minimal field content, {ital R}-parity conservation, absence of quadratic divergences, and naturalness of near-flavor conservation. Current experiments are testing and constraining this wide class of supersymmetric models, and not just a specific {ital N}=1 supergravity model.

Predictive hierarchical model of quark and lepton masses.

Abstract: Details of a recently proposed model of quark and lepton masses are presented, including a thorough discussion of technical issues relating to the naturalness, self-consistency, and realism of the model. Also discussed are the essential underlying ideas, which are compared to other ideas in the literature, and possible variants of the model.

"YOU ATTITUDE" AND "NATURALNESS": Theory and Practice

Abstract: Two theoretical concepts that business comunication teachers usually deal with to a large extent in their classes are the &dquo;You Attitude&dquo; concept and the &dquo;Naturalness&dquo; concept. The &dquo;You Attitude&dquo; (or &dquo;You Viewpoint,&dquo; &dquo;Reader Benefit&dquo;) concept stresses the importance in business communication of developing messages around the interests, needs, problems, etc. of the receiver, rather than those of the sender. The &dquo;Naturalness&dquo; (or &dquo;Natural Speaking,&dquo; &dquo;Conversational Language,&dquo; &dquo;Informal English&dquo;) concept emphasizes the need for common, ordinary, everyday &dquo;natural&dquo; wording in business communication. Ober and Wunsch (1983) identify Communicating in Business by Sigband and Bateman ( 1985), Business Communications by Himstreet and Baty (1987), and Effective Business Communications by Murphy and Hildebrandt (1988) as being the three most widely used textbooks in business communication classes. All three of these texts

The Cultural Politics of (Sexual) Knowledge: On the Margins with Goodman'

Abstract: It is a commonplace of contemporary thought that the significant differences between theorists concerned with alterity (whether of race, class, gender...) evolve around the issues of essentialization and naturalization and, furthermore, that once the supposed naturalness of any particular sexual (or indeed other cultural) practice is abandoned, the chances for political change are decisively improved. Yet, as the discourses proliferating in today's reformist academy amply demonstrate, the political optimism based on the interrogation and dissolution of those conceptual entities called "essence" and "nature" as the ultimate "explanations" for normative hierarchies has been premature. Those traditional "opacities" (let us call them this to mark them as the concepts beyond which argument presumably need not go) have been readily replaced today by others which produce equally mystifying effects. In 1989, even while seeking to evade the concept of a feminine "essence" under the influence of deconstruction and Lacanian analysis, many prominent feminists, American and European, continue to represent woman as a site of opacity, as an unknown and indeed perhaps unknowable difference, inviting the implication that other alterities may be similarly understood.2 Such a strategy has the distinct disadvantage not only of leaving "opaque" to the dominant system what the dominant system has already designated as opaque, but also of accepting "opacity" as such as a part of the strategist's own "self-understanding." Considering these limitations, such conceptual maneuvers stand forth more and more markedly as complicitous with the status quo. When, furthermore, to serve the ideological needs of the dominant academy, this intellectual occlusionism is stretched to its outer limits, it results in such remarkable statements as that by Eve Sedgwick, who writing recently in Raritan concludes that "the array of analytic tools available today to anyone thinking about issues of homo/hetero/sexual definition is remarkably little enriched from that available to, say, Proust." 3 The present inquiry aims to illuminate the ways in which the texts of a relatively "forgotten" cultural critic of the recent past, Paul Goodman, constitute a still relevant intervention in today's knowl

Perceptual evaluation of the naturalness of synthetic speech

Abstract: This paper reports an investigation that assessed the naturalness of speech produced by several text‐to‐speech (TTS) systems. Using a 9‐point subjective rating scale of naturalness, a group of listeners assigned ratings to speech produced by DECtalk 2.0, three versions of STL's system, and a software system. Each system produced 12 short paragraphs, two of which were repeated in order to assess reliability. These 60 paragraphs were used as the speech stimuli. The paragraphs were recorded in random order onto digital audio tape. Listeners made judgments based on how natural they perceived the speech to be, and assigned a rating accordingly. The reliability with which listeners assigned naturalness ratings was assessed by comparing their judgments on the paragraphs that were repeated. The listeners performed the task with satisfactory levels of intralistener agreement. The results showed that the average naturalness ratings obtained for these TTS systems fell within the predicted range, but outside the range expected for natural human speech. These findings suggest that this procedure may be a reliable tool for perceptually evaluating the naturalness of synthetic speech. The limitations and implications will be discussed.

Computing over the Reals (or an Arbitrary Ring)

Abstract: Classically, the theories of computation and computational complexity deal with discrete problems, for example over the integers, about graphs, etc.. On the other hand, most computational problems that arise in numerical analysis and scientific computation, in optimization theory and more recently in robotics and computational geometry have as natural domains the reals, or complex numbers. A variety of ad hoc methods and models have been employed to analyze complexity issues in this realm, but unlike the classical case, a natural and invariant theory has not yet emerged. One would like to develop theoretical foundations for a theory of computational complexity for numerical analysis and scientific computation that might embody some of the naturalness and strengths of the classical theory.