Mental and emotional health

Nowadays probably every person came across the term Psychotherapy. It seems, however, not to be so clear what psychotherapy actually means. Besides that, it seems to be not so clear, what a Psychotherapist does and how s/he can assist someone, who finds himself temporarily in distress. When we speak about psychotherapy, we refer to a form of therapeutic interaction or intervention which usually addresses emotional issues.peer-reviewe

Pauses and the temporal structure of speech

Natural-sounding speech synthesis requires close control over the temporal structure of the speech flow. This includes a full predictive scheme for the durational structure and in particuliar the prolongation of final syllables of lexemes as well as for the pausal structure in the utterance. In this chapter, a description of the temporal structure and the summary of the numerous factors that modify it are presented. In the second part, predictive schemes for the temporal structure of speech ("performance structures") are introduced, and their potential for characterising the overall prosodic structure of speech is demonstrated

Fast and Slow Speech Rate: a Characterisation for French

This paper is concerned with the evaluation of speech rate in French. Usually, this dynamic parameter is described as a unidimensional quantitative dimension. It is shown that the slowing down of speech has also major qualitative effects that must be taken into account. The theory on slowing down speech is thus revised

Civil liability of credit rating agencies - regulatory all-or-nothing approaches between immunity and over-deterrence

The European Commission recently put forward a proposal for a regulation to amend and strengthen the 2009 version of the EU's rules on the regulation of credit rating agencies ("CRA3"). Among other things, Art. 35a of the draft proposal introduces strict liability for rating agencies. This liability proposal is at odds with the aim to strengthen competition in the rating sector and could have a chilling effect on capital markets. The paper analyses existing rules on civil liability of rating agencies under different legal systems. Subsequently, the provision under Art. 35a of the Draft Proposal is examinded more closely. Suggestions on possible improvemts of the proposal are made

Temporal structures for Fast and Slow Speech Rate

The rhythmic component in speech synthesis often remains rather rudimentary, despite recent major efforts in the modeling of prosodic models. The European COST Action 258 has identified this problem as one of the next challenges for speech synthesis. This paper is a contribution to a new, promising approach that was tested on a French temporal model

Von Neumann Stability Analysis of Finite Difference Schemes for Maxwell--Debye and Maxwell--Lorentz Equations

This technical report yields detailed calculations of the paper [1] (B. Bid\'egaray-Fesquet, "Stability of FD-TD schemes for Maxwell-Debye and Maxwell-Lorentz equations", Technical report, LMC-IMAG, 2005) which have been however automated since (see http://ljk.imag.fr/membres/Brigitte.Bidegaray/NAUtil/). It deals with the stability analysis of various finite difference schemes for Maxwell--Debye and Maxwell--Lorentz equations. This work gives a systematic and rigorous continuation to Petropoulos previous work [5] (P.G. Petropoulos.,"Stability and phase error analysis of FD-TD in dispersive dielectrics", IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, 42(1):62--69, 1994).Comment: English translation of version

A Framework for Quality-Driven Delivery in Distributed Multimedia Systems

In this paper, we propose a framework for Quality-Driven Delivery (QDD) in distributed multimedia environments. Quality-driven delivery refers to the capacity of a system to deliver documents, or more generally objects, while considering the users expectations in terms of non-functional requirements. For this QDD framework, we propose a model-driven approach where we focus on QoS information modeling and transformation. QoS information models and meta-models are used during different QoS activities for mapping requirements to system constraints, for exchanging QoS information, for checking compatibility between QoS information and more generally for making QoS decisions. We also investigate which model transformation operators have to be implemented in order to support some QoS activities such as QoS mapping

Differentiation between organic and conventionally produced milk in pasture based farming systems : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Animal Science at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

Consumer perception of organic cow’s milk is associated with the assumption that organic milk differs from conventionally produced milk. The value associated with this difference, justifies the premium retail price. It includes the perception that organic dairy farming is kinder on the environment, animals and people; that organic milk products are produced without the use of antibiotics, added hormones, synthetic chemicals and genetic modification and may have potential benefits for human health. Controlled studies investigating the chemical differences between organic and conventionally produced milk have so far fallen short of a conclusion as to whether or not these exist. Reasons for this are many folds, caused principally by the complexity of the research problem. A main complication is that farming practices and their impacts differ depending on country, region, year and season between and within organic and conventional systems. Factors influencing milk composition (e.g. diet, breed, and stage of lactation) have been studied individually, while interactions between multiple factors have been largely ignored. Studies fail to consider that factors other than the farming system (organic versus conventional) could have caused or contributed to, the reported differences in milk composition. These omissions make it impossible to determine whether there is a system related difference between organic and conventional milk, or not. The present study investigated the chemical differences between organic and conventionally produced milk in a pasture based farming system. Milk samples have been collected on two farm sets each comprised of one organic and one conventional farm. All farms applied year-round pasture grazing. Milk samples were collected from individual animals on Farm Set 1 and throughout the milking season on both farm sets. Milk samples have been analysed for fatty acid, free oligosaccharides, major casein and whey proteins, and milk fat volatiles, as well for a limited set of milk metabolites using a non-targeted NMR method. Considering the known influence factors on milk composition and the differences observed between the farms on the farm sets in our study, we postulated that fatty acids were influenced by breed and fertilizer application. Oligosaccharides differed between farming systems, with causes presently unknown. The farm set was the dominant influence factor on protein composition, while none of the compounds identified using NMR show any trend. Thus, the major conclusions from this study were that the factors influencing milk composition are not exclusive to either farming system, and pasture feeding conventional cows will most probably remove differences previously reported in other organic and conventionally produced milk studies