VOCE Corpus: Ecologically Collected Speech Annotated with Physiological and Psychological Stress Assessments.

Public speaking is a widely requested professional skill, and at the same time an activity that causes one of the most common adult phobias (Miller and Stone, 2009). It is also known that the study of stress under laboratory conditions, as it is most commonly done, may provide only limited ecological validity (Wilhelm and Grossman, 2010). Previously, we introduced an inter-disciplinary methodology to enable collecting a large amount of recordings under consistent conditions (Aguiar et al., 2013). This paper introduces the VOCE corpus of speech annotated with stress indicators under naturalistic public speaking (PS) settings. The novelty of this corpus is that the recordings are carried out in objectively stressful PS situations, as recommended in (Zanstra and Johnston, 2011). The current database contains a total of 38 recordings, 13 of which contain full psychological and physiologic annotation. We show that the collected recordings validate the assumptions of the methodology, namely that participants experience stress during the PS events. We describe the various metrics that can be used for physiologic and psychological annotation, and we characterise the sample collected so far, providing evidence that demographics do not affect the relevant psychological or physiologic annotation. The collection activities are on-going, and we expect to increase the number of complete recordings in the corpus to 30 by June 2014

Can the mitochondrial malondialdehyde content be an useful tool to distinguish ecological quality of Petromyzon marinus habitat?

The sea lamprey is an anadromous species that migrates twice during its life cycle between freshwater and seawater. Microphagous larvae generally spend 4–5 years burrowed in the substrate of rivers and streams before undergoing metamorphosis that ends with the beginning of the juvenile trophic migration. Once metamorphosis is complete, sea lamprey juvenile downstream migrants are fully tolerant to 35 PSU seawater. Pollution resulting from industrial effluents may disturb the seawater acclimatization causing oxidative damages, and ultimately may lead to a decrease of sea lamprey population. The aim of this study was to compare salt acclimation of sea lamprey juveniles captured in river basins with different levels of aquatic pollution, using mitochondrial glutathione and malondialdehyde of gills and liver as markers of physiological stress and cell damages. The results showed that juveniles from Lima basin exhibited the highest levels of mitochondrial malondialdehyde in gills, even though significant changes in the stress markers of mitochondrial gills of all animals subject to salt acclimation were not detected. In addition, an increase in the oxidative damages of hepatic mitochondria of macrophthalmia from Vouga basin suggests the occurrence of metabolic failures with the potential to disturb the capacity to adaptation to the marine environment

Dynamical tunneling in molecules: Quantum routes to energy flow

Dynamical tunneling, introduced in the molecular context, is more than two decades old and refers to phenomena that are classically forbidden but allowed by quantum mechanics. On the other hand the phenomenon of intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution (IVR) has occupied a central place in the field of chemical physics for a much longer period of time. Although the two phenomena seem to be unrelated several studies indicate that dynamical tunneling, in terms of its mechanism and timescales, can have important implications for IVR. Examples include the observation of local mode doublets, clustering of rotational energy levels, and extremely narrow vibrational features in high resolution molecular spectra. Both the phenomena are strongly influenced by the nature of the underlying classical phase space. This work reviews the current state of understanding of dynamical tunneling from the phase space perspective and the consequences for intramolecular vibrational energy flow in polyatomic molecules.Comment: 37 pages and 23 figures (low resolution); Int. Rev. Phys. Chem. (Review to appear in Oct. 2007

Stochastic Gravity: Theory and Applications

Whereas semiclassical gravity is based on the semiclassical Einstein equation with sources given by the expectation value of the stress-energy tensor of quantum fields, stochastic semiclassical gravity is based on the Einstein-Langevin equation, which has in addition sources due to the noise kernel.In the first part, we describe the fundamentals of this new theory via two approaches: the axiomatic and the functional. In the second part, we describe three applications of stochastic gravity theory. First, we consider metric perturbations in a Minkowski spacetime: we compute the two-point correlation functions for the linearized Einstein tensor and for the metric perturbations. Second, we discuss structure formation from the stochastic gravity viewpoint. Third, we discuss the backreaction of Hawking radiation in the gravitational background of a quasi-static black hole.Comment: 75 pages, no figures, submitted to Living Reviews in Relativit

Emergence of structural and dynamical properties of ecological mutualistic networks

Mutualistic networks are formed when the interactions between two classes of species are mutually beneficial. They are important examples of cooperation shaped by evolution. Mutualism between animals and plants plays a key role in the organization of ecological communities. Such networks in ecology have generically evolved a nested architecture independent of species composition and latitude - specialists interact with proper subsets of the nodes with whom generalists interact. Despite sustained efforts to explain observed network structure on the basis of community-level stability or persistence, such correlative studies have reached minimal consensus. Here we demonstrate that nested interaction networks could emerge as a consequence of an optimization principle aimed at maximizing the species abundance in mutualistic communities. Using analytical and numerical approaches, we show that because of the mutualistic interactions, an increase in abundance of a given species results in a corresponding increase in the total number of individuals in the community, as also the nestedness of the interaction matrix. Indeed, the species abundances and the nestedness of the interaction matrix are correlated by an amount that depends on the strength of the mutualistic interactions. Nestedness and the observed spontaneous emergence of generalist and specialist species occur for several dynamical implementations of the variational principle under stationary conditions. Optimized networks, while remaining stable, tend to be less resilient than their counterparts with randomly assigned interactions. In particular, we analytically show that the abundance of the rarest species is directly linked to the resilience of the community. Our work provides a unifying framework for studying the emergent structural and dynamical properties of ecological mutualistic networks.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Chromatic Illumination Discrimination Ability Reveals that Human Colour Constancy Is Optimised for Blue Daylight Illuminations

The phenomenon of colour constancy in human visual perception keeps surface colours constant, despite changes in their reflected light due to changing illumination. Although colour constancy has evolved under a constrained subset of illuminations, it is unknown whether its underlying mechanisms, thought to involve multiple components from retina to cortex, are optimised for particular environmental variations. Here we demonstrate a new method for investigating colour constancy using illumination matching in real scenes which, unlike previous methods using surface matching and simulated scenes, allows testing of multiple, real illuminations. We use real scenes consisting of solid familiar or unfamiliar objects against uniform or variegated backgrounds and compare discrimination performance for typical illuminations from the daylight chromaticity locus (approximately blue-yellow) and atypical spectra from an orthogonal locus (approximately red-green, at correlated colour temperature 6700 K), all produced in real time by a 10-channel LED illuminator. We find that discrimination of illumination changes is poorer along the daylight locus than the atypical locus, and is poorest particularly for bluer illumination changes, demonstrating conversely that surface colour constancy is best for blue daylight illuminations. Illumination discrimination is also enhanced, and therefore colour constancy diminished, for uniform backgrounds, irrespective of the object type. These results are not explained by statistical properties of the scene signal changes at the retinal level. We conclude that high-level mechanisms of colour constancy are biased for the blue daylight illuminations and variegated backgrounds to which the human visual system has typically been exposed

Study of the reaction e^{+}e^{-} -->J/psi\pi^{+}\pi^{-} via initial-state radiation at BaBar

We study the process $e^+e^-\to J/\psi\pi^{+}\pi^{-}$ with initial-state-radiation events produced at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy collider. The data were recorded with the BaBar detector at center-of-mass energies 10.58 and 10.54 GeV, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 454 $\mathrm{fb^{-1}}$. We investigate the $J/\psi \pi^{+}\pi^{-}$ mass distribution in the region from 3.5 to 5.5 $\mathrm{GeV/c^{2}}$. Below 3.7 $\mathrm{GeV/c^{2}}$ the $\psi(2S)$ signal dominates, and above 4 $\mathrm{GeV/c^{2}}$ there is a significant peak due to the Y(4260). A fit to the data in the range 3.74 -- 5.50 $\mathrm{GeV/c^{2}}$ yields a mass value $4244 \pm 5$ (stat) $\pm 4$ (syst)$\mathrm{MeV/c^{2}}$ and a width value $114 ^{+16}_{-15}$ (stat)$\pm 7$(syst)$\mathrm{MeV}$ for this state. We do not confirm the report from the Belle collaboration of a broad structure at 4.01 $\mathrm{GeV/c^{2}}$. In addition, we investigate the $\pi^{+}\pi^{-}$ system which results from Y(4260) decay

Performance of the CMS Cathode Strip Chambers with Cosmic Rays

The Cathode Strip Chambers (CSCs) constitute the primary muon tracking device in the CMS endcaps. Their performance has been evaluated using data taken during a cosmic ray run in fall 2008. Measured noise levels are low, with the number of noisy channels well below 1%. Coordinate resolution was measured for all types of chambers, and fall in the range 47 microns to 243 microns. The efficiencies for local charged track triggers, for hit and for segments reconstruction were measured, and are above 99%. The timing resolution per layer is approximately 5 ns

Stochastic Gravity: Theory and Applications

Whereas semiclassical gravity is based on the semiclassical Einstein equation with sources given by the expectation value of the stress-energy tensor of quantum fields, stochastic semiclassical gravity is based on the Einstein-Langevin equation, which has in addition sources due to the noise kernel. In the first part, we describe the fundamentals of this new theory via two approaches: the axiomatic and the functional. In the second part, we describe three applications of stochastic gravity theory. First, we consider metric perturbations in a Minkowski spacetime, compute the two-point correlation functions of these perturbations and prove that Minkowski spacetime is a stable solution of semiclassical gravity. Second, we discuss structure formation from the stochastic gravity viewpoint. Third, we discuss the backreaction of Hawking radiation in the gravitational background of a black hole and describe the metric fluctuations near the event horizon of an evaporating black holeComment: 100 pages, no figures; an update of the 2003 review in Living Reviews in Relativity gr-qc/0307032 ; it includes new sections on the Validity of Semiclassical Gravity, the Stability of Minkowski Spacetime, and the Metric Fluctuations of an Evaporating Black Hol