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The present study compares the perceptual categorization of four CV syllables /ta, da, ka, ga/ in two different speech registers-modal speech and whistled speech-of Tashlhiyt Berber used in the Moroccan High Atlas. Whistled speech in a non-tonal language such as Tashlhiyt is a special speech register used for long distance dialogues that consists of the natural production of vocalic and consonantal qualities in a simple modulated whistled signal. The technique of whistling imposes various restrictions on speech articulation, which result in a simplification of the phonetics of spoken speech into a 'whistled formant'. Here, we describe this simplification for Tashlhiyt syllables /ta, da, ka, ga/ and use them as stimuli in a behavioral experiment. We analyze and compare the perceptual categorization obtained from native Tashlhiyt listeners (trained since childhood in whistled speech) for both speech registers on these 4 syllable types. Results show that whistled stimuli were fairly well identified (~42%) above chance (25%), though less well than spoken ones (~84%). The detailed analysis of confusions between CVs enabled us to understand better how whistled consonants are perceived, highlighting the phonological contrasts that are best perceived and retained from spoken to whistled speech in this language.

Cashew nut shell (CNS) was utilized for carbonization in developed prototype kiln. Prototype kiln was evaluated with direct and indirect methods and characteristics of CNS and CNS char were determined by proximate and ultimate analysis. The maximum CNS temperatures obtained inside the kiln during direct and indirect method were recorded as 452.2 0 C and 458.8 0 C respectively. Maximum oil percentage, charcoal percentage and ash percentage in direct method were observed as 21.1 per cent, 21.04 per cent and 3.34 per cent respectively whereas 23.8 per cent, 18.3 per cent and 1.27 per cent in indirect method respectively. Hydrogen content in CNS was found about 6 to 7 per cent and nitrogen content in CNS was found about 0.70 to 0.75 per cent. Oxygen content in CNS was observed about 29 to 31 percent. Carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen content of the CNS char were observed in the range of 73 to 76 per cent, 4 to 5 per cent and 1 to 2 per cent respectively. It was found that nitrogen content has increased in CNS char after the carbonization of CNS. Oxygen content in the CNS char gets reduced to 13 to 14 percent, which was comparatively very less than CNS. It was observed that indirect method is more suitable for carbonization than direct method for obtaining higher calorific value char and maximum fixed carbon percentage as found in cashew nut shell char as 60 per cent.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of the prediction by energy computation of RNA stable secondary structures. We present, under the Hypothesis of Loops Dependent Energy (HLDE), our dynamic programming algorithm to compute the free energies of the stable secondary structures and our traceback algorithm to predict these structures. We compute the free energies of the stable secondary structures by using a new approach, called m-Multiloop Approach (m-MA), m > 1. This computation is achieved within a time proportional to n 4 and using a memory space proportional to n 2. The prediction of the stable secondary structures is achieved within a time proportional to n 3 * log 3 (n). Compared to other approaches, the m-MA enables us to improve the estimation of the minimum energetic contributions of the multiloops. And hence, it enables us to improve the estimation of the free energies of the stable secondary structures.

Leachate is a highly complex and polluted wastewater that is produced by the interaction of percolating water through the body of a landfill. Treatment of landfill leachate is essential as it could threaten the surrounding ecosystem. The aim of this research was to determine the efficiency of polyaluminum chloride (PACl)

Recent surveys carried out to investigate the quality of groundwater in India indicated that some areas in the Dry Zone have the fluoride problem in endemics proportions. In these studies, it is clearly revealed that more than 60 percent of drinking water wells had fluoride levels exceeding 1.5 mg/L in the fluoride rich areas. Therefore, a technique for the defluoridation of fluoride-rich waters is necessary. This study describes the development of low cost effective adsorbent for the removal of dissolved fluoride in water using Phyllanthus emblica. The batch adsorption study was applied to analyze the defluoridating efficiency by varying contact time, adsorbent dose, adsorbate concentration, adsorbent particle size and presence of co-anions at neutral pH. Prepared adsorbent shows enhanced removal of fluoride by 82.1% at equilibrium contact time of 75 minutes. This study is a step in developing a general platform suitable for producing potable water that also specifically addresses the problem of fluoride removal.

This paper explores Speculative Precomputation, a technique that uses idle thread contexts in a multithreaded architecture to improve performance of single-threaded applications. It attacks program stalls from data cache misses by pre-computing future memory accesses in available thread contexts, and prefetching these data. This technique is evaluated by simulating the performance of a research processor based on the Itanium T M ISA supporting Simultaneous Multithreading. Two primary forms of Speculative Precomputation are evaluated. If only the non-speculative thread spawns speculative threads, performance gains of up to 30% are achieved when assuming ideal hardware. However, this speedup drops considerably with more realistic hardware assumptions. Permitting speculative threads to directly spawn additional speculative threads reduces the overhead associated with spawning threads and enables significantly more aggressive speculation, overcoming this limitation. Even with realistic costs for spawning threads, speedups as high as 169% are achieved, with an average speedup of 76%.

Zooplankton are the grazers on the phytoplankton and a food base for the carnivorous as well as omnivorous fishes, have been reported in percentage composition of different groups. The diversity of various types of zooplankton was studied of fresh water reservoir Nyari–II Rajkot district, Gujarat. The planktonic forms were collected from the surface of the reservoir water with plankton net of 20µ mesh size nylon cloth. The plankton samples were preserved for laboratory analysis. The collected samples were identified ...

Estimating the vocal tract length (VTL), given the acoustic signal of a vowel sound, is an important problem, which is useful in speaker normalization for vowel recognition, in the inversion problem and in acoustic-phonetic studies. The common approach of using the formant data to estimate VTL works for a neutral vowel approximating a uniform tube. However, for natural vowels, formant data shift considerably away from the resonant frequencies of a uniform tube. The proposed method is motivated from these observations: (a) the frequency of a spectral valley, Fv, depends inversely on VTL; (b) there is much smaller shift in Fv, across vowels, from the corresponding valley frequency of a uniform tube; (c) Fv can be estimated from the spectral envelope itself. VTL has been estimated for the Peterson and Barney (33 male and 28 female speakers) and the TIMIT (326 male and 136 female speakers) databases. When the estimated Fv is used for normalization, the spread in the formant data due to gender differences is considerably reduced. The normalization procedure is vowel and speaker intrinsic. Additionally, we report applications such as front/back classification, gender recognition and phonetic feature mapping.

A new idea for digital signature scheme is suggested. The suggested scheme employs a composite modulus that is a product of two distinct prime numbers. There is a similarity with the most widely used digital signature schemes such as RSA regarding the algebraic background. The new scheme uses operations in prime integer order, a characteristic that is similar to Digital Signature Standard ( DSS ) scheme. Thus the proposed signature scheme is deterministic. The new scheme is competitive and more efficient in time complexity compared with DSS and RSA schemes regarding measurement over both key generation and key verification.

In this paper, the rhythmic patterns observed in natural and synthesized speech are compared for three literary forms (rhymes, poems, and fairy tales). The aim of the comparison is to evaluate how rhythm could be improved in synthesized speech, which could allow adapting it to specific styles or genres. The study is based on the analysis of a corpus of six rhymes, four poems and two extracts from fairy tales. All texts were recorded by three speakers and were generated with two distinct synthesized voices. The comparison of the rhythmic patterns observed is done by analyzing duration in relation to prosodic structure in the various data sets. This approach allows showing that rhythmic differences between synthesized and natural speech are mostly due to the marking of prosodic structure.

This paper examines simultaneous multithreading, a technique permitting several independent threads to issue instructions to a superscalar's multiple functional units in a single cycle. We present several models of simultaneous multithreading and compare them with alternative organizations: a wide superscalar, a fine-grain multithreaded processor, and single-chip, multiple-issue multiprocessing architectures. Our results show that both (single-threaded) superscalar and fine-grain multithreaded architectures are limited in their ability to utilize the resources of a wide-issue processor. Simultaneous multithreading has the potential to achieve 4 times the throughput of a superscalar, and double that of fine-grain multithreading. We evaluate several cache configurations made possible by this type of organization and evaluate tradeoffs between them. We also show that simultaneous multithreading is an attractive alternative to single-chip multiprocessors; simultaneous multithreaded processors with a variety of organizations outperform corresponding conventional multiprocessors with similar execution resources.

Musical Speech is a new methodology for transcribing speech prosody using musical notation. The methodology presented in this paper is an updated version of our work [12]. Our work is situated in a historical context with a brief survey of the literature of speech melodies, in which we highlight the pioneering works of John Steele, Leoš Janáček, Engelbert Humperdinck, and Arnold Schoenberg, followed by a linguistic view of musical notation in the analysis of speech. Finally, we present the current state-of-the-art of our innovative methodology that uses a quarter-tone scale for transcribing speech, and shows some initial results of the application of this methodology to prosodic transcription.

We investigated the speech and musical performances of six classical pianists, of native Mandarin Chinese and English language backgrounds, comparing the prosodic properties in their speech with temporal expressivity in their piano performances. We expected intra-language consistency. Results, while mixed, suggest both intra-language and intraspeaker consistency, which implies that individual, expressive (performative) ability affects both speech and music.

In this paper we study the impact of sharing memory resources on five Google datacenter applications: a web search engine, bigtable, content analyzer, image stitching, and protocol buffer. While prior work has found neither positive nor negative effects from cache sharing across the PARSEC benchmark suite, we find that across these datacenter applications, there is both a sizable benefit and a potential degradation from improperly sharing resources. In this paper, we first present a study of the importance of thread-tocore mappings for applications in the datacenter as threads can be mapped to share or to not share caches and bus bandwidth. Second, we investigate the impact of co-locating threads from multiple applications with diverse memory behavior and discover that the best mapping for a given application changes depending on its co-runner. Third, we investigate the application characteristics that impact performance in the various thread-to-core mapping scenarios. Finally, we present both a heuristics-based and an adaptive approach to arrive at good thread-to-core decisions in the datacenter. We observe performance swings of up to 25% for web search and 40% for other key applications, simply based on how application threads are mapped to cores. By employing our adaptive thread-to-core mapper, the performance of the datacenter applications presented in this work improved by up to 22% over status quo thread-to-core mapping and performs within 3% of optimal.

Prosody, it is assumed, does not always disambiguate syntax. We investigate one classic case at point from the psycholinguistics literature: garden path sentences involving the mainverb vs. reduced relative clause contrast (the horse raced past the barn (and) fell). Despite their centrality in shaping theories of sentence processing, no experimental work to date has investigated the prosody of these sentences. We show that, contrary to previous assumptions [1, 2], this contrast is prosodically disambiguated, but that this disambiguation can only be observed when the relevant clauses are embedded within a matrix clause which provides a baseline pace. Prosodic disambiguation obtains through pace modulation, with faster pace associated with the embedded/reduced relative reading and regular pace (no change) with main verb analysis. The essential contribution of the matrix sentence is to provide a baseline pace without which it is impossible to establish whether a change took place. Importantly, duration is solely determined by prosody and independent from complexity: faster pace is associated with the more complex structure.

This paper describes progress in a development of the humanhuman dialogue corpus. The corpus contains transcribed user's phone calls to a train timetable information center. The phone calls consist of inquiries regarding their train traveler's plans. The corpus is based on dialogues's transcription of user's inquiries that were previously collected for a train timetable information center. We enriched this transcription by dialogue act tags. The dialogue act tags comprehend abstract semantic annotation. The corpus comprises a recorded speech of both operators and users, orthographic transcription, normalized transcription, normalized transcription with named entities, and dialogue act tags with abstract semantic annotation. A combination of a dialogue act tagset and a abstract semantic annotation is proposed. A technique of dialogue act tagging and abstract semantic annotation is described and used.

Simultaneous multithreading is a technique that permits multiple independent threads to issue multiple instructions each cycle. In previous work we demonstrated the performance potential of simultaneous multithreading, based on a somewhat idealized model. In this paper we show that the throughput gains from simultaneous multithreading can be achieved without extensive changes to a conventional wide-issue superscalar, either in hardware structures or sizes. We present an architecture for simultaneous multithreading that achieves three goals: (1) it minimizes the architectural impact on the conventional superscalar design, (2) it has minimal performance impact on a single thread executing alone, and (3) it achieves significant throughput gains when running multiple threads. Our simultaneous multithreading architecture achieves a throughput of 5.4 instructions per cycle, a 2.5-fold improvement over an unmodified superscalar with similar hardware resources. This speedup is enhanced by an advantage of multithreading previously unexploited in other architectures: the ability to favor for fetch and issue those threads most efficiently using the processor each cycle, thereby providing the "best" instructions to the processor.

The consistent programmer hypothesis postulates that a feature or set of features exist that can be used to recognize the author of a given program. It further postulates that different test strategies work better for some programmers (or programming styles) than for others. For example, all-edges adequate tests may detect faults for programs written by Programmer A better than for those written by Programmer B. This has numerous useful applications: to help detect plagiarism/copyright violation of source code, to help improve the practical application of software testing, to identify the author of a subset of a large project's code that requires maintenance, and to help pursue specific rogue programmers of malicious code and source code viruses. Previously, a small study was performed and supported this hypothesis. We present a predictive study that applies principal component analysis and factor analysis to further evaluate the hypothesis as well as to classify programs by author. This analysis resulted in five components explaining 96% of variance for one dataset, four components explaining 92% variance for a second dataset, and three components explaining 80% variance for a third dataset. One of the components was very similar for all three datasets (understandability), two components were shared by the second and third datasets, and one component was shared by the first and second dataset. We were able to achieve 100% accuracy of classification for one dataset, 93% accuracy for the second dataset, and 61% accuracy for the third dataset. Closer examination of the third dataset indicated that many of the programmers were very inexperienced. Consequently, two subsets of the programs were examined (the first written by programmers possessing a high level of experience and the second adding in less experienced programmers) and classification accuracy of 100% and 89%, respectively, was achieved. This lends support for the consistent programmer hypothesis.

Biodiesel is a monoalkyl esters of long chain fatty acids derived from renewable feedstock like vegetable oils and animal fats. It is produced by transesterification in which oil or fat is reacted with a monohydric alcohol in the presence of a catalyst. In this research, transesterification process was used to convert olive oil and cashew nut oil into biodiesel (methyl ester). The selected material used in the preparation of this biodiesel was methanol, alkaline catalyst (KOH), constant temperature of 70 o C at 1.5hrs, to optimize the experimental conditions for maximum biodiesel yield. The thermodynamic properties of the biodiesel produced such as heat content of the pure biodiesel (B100) and the blends were investigated.

This study presents a psycholinguistically motivated evaluation method for phoneme classifiers by using non-categorical perceptual data elicited in a Japanese sibilant matching 2AFC task. Probability values of a perceptual [s]-[S] boundary, obtained from 42 speakers over a 7-step synthetic [s]-[S] continuum, were compared to probability estimates of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) of Japanese [s] and [S]. The GMMs, trained on the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese, differed in feature vectors (MFCC, PLP, acoustic features), covariance matrix types (full, tied, diagonal, spherical), and numbers of mixtures (1-20). Using tenfold cross validation, it was found that GMMs trained on MFCC features had the best sibilant classification accuracies (87.4-90.4%), but their correlations with human perceptual data were non-conclusive (0.35-0.98). Acoustic feature-based GMMs with tied covariance matrices had near human-like synthetic stimuli perception (0.957-0.996), but their classification performance was poor (71.3-80.4%). Models trained on perceptual linear prediction (PLP) features were on par with the acoustic feature-based models in terms correlation to the perceptual experiment (0.884-0.995), while losing slightly on classification performance (86.1-88.9%) compared to MFCC models. Across the board correlation tests and mixture-effect models confirmed that GMMs with better sibilant classifying performance produced more human-like probability estimations on the synthetic sibilant continuum.

Emergency contraception is very important in the fight to reduce the incidence of unwanted pregnancy and the attendant unsafe abortion within the developing countries. This multicentered, cross sectional and questionnaire based study assessed the knowledge and practice of emergency contraception among 600 undergraduate students selected from four tertiary institutions in Anambra State Southeast Nigeria. 38.1% were aware of emergency contraception while only 8.5% of them had ever practiced it. Friends were the major source of information about emergency contraception (34.7%) followed by the media (20.6%). None of the respondents cited family planning clinic as their source of information on contraceptives. Postinor was the commonest emergency contraceptive mentioned by the students who know about emergency contraceptives (45.0%) followed by oral contraceptive pills (33.3%). It is recommended that the Government and collaborating agencies should intensify efforts in improving access to emergency contraceptives among the undergraduates.

We propose "secret-protected (SP)" architecture to enable secure and convenient protection of critical secrets for a given user in an on-line environment. Keys are examples of critical secrets, and key protection and management is a fundamental problem-often assumed but not solved-underlying the use of cryptographic protection of sensitive files, messages, data and programs. SP-processors contain a minimalist set of architectural features that can be built into a general-purpose microprocessor to provide protection of critical secrets and their computations, without expensive or inconvenient auxiliary hardware. SP-architecture also requires a trusted software module, a few modifications to the operating system, a secure I/O path to the user, and a secure installation process. Unique aspects of our architecture include: decoupling of user secrets from the devices, enabling users to securely access their keys from different networked computing devices; the use of symmetric master keys rather than more costly public-private key pairs; and the avoidance of any permanent or factory-installed device secrets. 1

Code Transformations for Embedded Multimedia Applications: Impact on Power and Performance Nikos D. Zervas University of Patras Dep. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Rio 26500, Greece Tel.:(+) 30 61 997324 E-mail: zervas@ ee. upatras. gr Kostas Masselos University of ...

Five different quinolones group of antibiotics viz ciprofloxacin, norfloxacin, sparfloxacin, ofloxacin, levofloxacin were tested against four different common bacterial pathogens, Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Eschericia coli, Klebsiella pneumonia isolated from clinical samples of patients from Kolhapur city of Maharashtra,India. Results indicated that all the four pathogens except E. coli and Pseudomonas found to be highly sensitive to ciprofloxacin, norfloxacin, sparfloxacin, ofloxacin, and levofloxacin. However, Escherichia coli found to be resistant to ofloxacin and moderately sensitive to Levofloxacin and Pseudomonas aeruginosa was found to be resistant to Sparfloxacin and moderately sensitive to norfloxacin and ofloxacin.

An efficient mechanism to track and enforce memory dependences is crucial to an out-of-order microprocessor. The conventional approach of using cross-checked load queue and store queue, while very effective in earlier processor incarnations, suffers from scalability problems in modern high-frequency designs that rely on buffering many in-flight instructions to exploit instruction-level parallelism. In this paper, we make a case for a very different approach to dynamic memory disambiguation. We move away from the conventional exact disambiguation strategy and adopt an opportunistic method: we allow loads and stores to access an L0 cache as they are issued out of program order, hoping that with such a laissez-faire approach, most loads actually obtain the right value. To guarantee correctness, they execute a second time in program order to access the nonspeculative L1 cache. A discrepancy between the two executions triggers a replay. Such a design completely eliminates the necessity of real-time violation detection and thus avoids the conventional approach's complexity and the associated scalability issue. We show that even a simplistic design can provide similar performance level achieved with a conventional queue-based approach with optimisticallysized queues. When simple, optional optimizations are applied, the performance level is close to that achieved with ideally-sized queues.

Prosody is often attributed a fundamental role in the process of language acquisition, allowing infants to use prosodic cues to begin to acquire the syntactic structures of their language. The Prosodic Bootstrapping process may combine a number of phonological phenomena (e.g., stress, rhythmic units, intonation), and recently, it has been proposed that a Rhythmic Activation Principle integrating the Iambic-Trochaic Law also contributes to bootstrapping, with the acoustic characteristics of phrasal prominence cuing a language's basic word order [1, 2]. That is, association of the different properties of iambic and trochaic stress with phrasal prominence patterns would allow a child to identify whether a language is syntactically VO or OV (see [1, 2] for French and Turkish). We further test this hypothesis by investigating the acoustic manifestations of stress in Turkish and French, specifically by comparing them in non-focus and focus conditions.

We present research towards developing a pronunciation dictionary that features sensitivity to learners' native phonology, specifically designed for Korean learners of English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL). We envision a future system that can record and process learners' imitation of the dictionary pronunciation and instantly provide segmental and prosodic feedback on accent. Towards this goal, we have designed and collected a speech corpus to address the phonological and prosodic issues of Korean EFL learners. We leverage the SUMMIT speech recognizer's ability to model phonological rules to automatically identify non-native phonological phenomena. These phonological rules were carefully constructed to account for the influence of learners' native language (Korean) on the target language (English). Feedback messages are provided to the learner to point out the non-native phonological variations detected by the speech recognizer in order to help them improve segmental pronunciation. Instructions are also given to the user on the prosodic aspects of the pronunciation, which are based on detected duration and ¼ cues. We evaluated the effectiveness of the feedback mechanism by rating 222 English utterances from six native Korean subjects, before and after receiving native-language dependent feedback messages. Human raters judged 61% of the utterances as improved after feedback.

We investigated prosodic variability attributable to age in Standard Bulgarian. In readings of The North Wind and the Sun, recorded by two groups of six female speakers aged between 19-23 and 79-88 years, we found significant differences in pitch span, minimum F0, syllable, intonation phrase and pause duration. The older speakers made more pauses, which were also of longer duration. They also realized longer syllables and intonation phrases than young speakers. Both groups used the same inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones, but there were significant differences in the frequency counts of some of the tones: young speakers used pre-nuclear rises with a post-tonic high target, while older speakers preferred rises with a high target within the stressed syllable; the nuclear pitch accent used most frequently by the young speakers was L*, whereas the one preferred by the elderly speakers was L+H*; younger speakers used more phrase accents (especially H-), while older speakers preferred boundary tones (H-% and L-%) and "level" (H-L% and HL-) pitch curves. Our findings suggest that the study of tonal repertoires and frequencies of use could offer interesting insights into age-related differences between speakers.

Listeners of different languages have been reported to vary significantly in prominence perception tasks. We know very little, however, about which exact cues different listeners use in these tasks. In this study, we examined the role of duration in the perception of prominence in both typologically different and related languages. The stimuli consisted of the disyllabic logatome <baba> for which the durations of the first and second syllable were systematically manipulated. 80 listeners (8 varieties*10 listeners/variety) judged the relative prominence of the two syllables. We found that differences in the sensitivity to duration cues between varieties of the same language can be equal in magnitude to those found for typologically unrelated languages. Results are discussed in light of prosodic typology and speech perception.

The authors have proposed a method of generating synthetic speech with emotion by creating three copora of emotional speech for use with CHATR [1][2], the concatenative speech synthesis system developed at ATR [3][4]. The corpora express joy, anger and sadness. For the previous trial, speech corpora were made with female voice. Having added speech corpora of male voice, the authors developed a prototype of a speech synthesis system with emotion, “CHATAKO,” which works on a notebook PC in Japanese language environment. The ultimate goal of this system is to assist people with communication problems. In this paper, first, design principles are stated, followed by system configuration and the evaluation on the synthetic speech with emotion generated by our method.

This paper focuses on the perception and production of the English alveolar stops (/t/ and /d/) in syllable coda by Brazilian learners of English. In the production test, the participants read a list of English sentences containing alveolar stops in word-final position. The preceding and following phonological contexts were controlled, so that the effect of context on the production of the alveolar stops could be analyzed. The perception test consisted of an oddity discrimination task where the target obstruents were either unreleased, aspirated, palatalized or produced with a paragogic vowel. The results of the production investigation show that the learners tended to unrelease the obstruents, but several tokens were aspirated, palatalized or produced with a paragogic vowel. As regards the relationship between perception and production of word-final /t/ and /d/, a positive correlation was found between the discrimination and production rates.

To capture local and global constraints in a language, statistical Ò-grams are used in combination with multi-span language models for improved language modelling. Use of latent semantic analysis (LSA) to capture the global semantic constraints and bigram models to capture local constraints, is shown to reduce the perplexity of the model. In this paper we propose a method in which the multi-span LSA language model can be developed based on the speech signal. Reference pattern vectors are derived from the speech signal for each word in the vocabulary. Based on the normalised distance between the reference word pattern vector and the pattern vector of a word in the training data, the LSA model is developed. We show that this model in combination with a standard bigram model performs better than the conventional bigram + LSA model. The results are demonstrated for a limited vocabulary on a database for the Indian language, Tamil.

In human-mediated translation scenarios a human interpreter translates between a source and a target language using either a spoken or a written representation of the source language. In this paper we improve the recognition performance on the speech of the human translator spoken in the target language by taking advantage of the source language representations. We use machine translation techniques to translate between the source and target language resources and then bias the target language speech recognizer towards the gained knowledge, hence the name Machine Translation Enhanced Automatic Speech Recognition. We investigate several different techniques among which are restricting the search vocabulary, selecting hypotheses from n-best lists, applying cache and interpolation schemes to language modeling, and combining the most successful techniques into our final, iterative system. Overall we outperform the baseline system by a relative word error rate reduction of 37.6%.

El modelo facilita la implementation y certificación en un sistema de gestión NTC 6001 en micro y peque ñas empresas (mypes), equivalente a la NTC ISO 9001, diseñada para todo tamaño de empresa; las mypes al no poder evidenciar dicha implementation, ha venido afectándolas cuando en el proceso de se lección de proveedores exigen estar certificadas, las mypes tienen escases en recursos para el proceso de implementaria y lograr la certificación; el ICON-TEC, diseñó la norma de gestión NTC 6001 para las mypes, con la que logran formalidad del negocio, normatividad legal, mejoramiento de los procesos administrativos, operativos y de apoyo; su imple mentation es alcanzable, contribuye en la calidad, seguridad, satisfacción, baja incertldumbre, trans formándolas en empresas sostenibles, competitivas con ¡guales condiciones. Palabras clave: certificación, formalidad, micros y pequeñas, sistema de gestión, estabilidad.

Biodiesel is a monoalkyl esters of long chain fatty acids derived from renewable feedstock like vegetable oils and animal fats. It is produced by transesterification in which oil or fat is reacted with a monohydric alcohol in the presence of a catalyst. In this research, transesterification process was used to convert olive oil and cashew nut oil into biodiesel (methyl ester). The selected material used in the preparation of this biodiesel was methanol, alkaline catalyst (KOH), constant temperature of 70 o C at 1.5hrs, to optimize the experimental conditions for maximum biodiesel yield. The thermodynamic properties of the biodiesel produced such as heat content of the pure biodiesel (B100) and the blends were investigated.

The use of model checking for validation requires that models of the underlying system be created. Creating such models is both difficult and error prone and as a result, verification is rarely used despite its advantages. In this paper, we present a method for automatically extracting models from low level software implementations. Our method is based on the use of an extensible compiler system, xg++, to perform the extraction. The extracted model is combined with a model of the hardware, a description of correctness, and an initial state. The whole model is then checked with the Mur model checker. As a case study, we apply our method to the cache coherence protocols of the Stanford FLASH multiprocessor. Our system has a number of advantages. First, it reduces the cost of creating models, which allows model checking to be used more frequently. Second, it increases the effectiveness of model checking since the automatically extracted models are more accurate and faithful to the unde...