A presente tese consta da criação de traços de sentido e de um grupo de peças composto para este trabalho. Os traços de sentido são utilizados na definição do sentido de materiais composicionais. Há três categorias principais nas quais os traços estão inseridos: traços sonoros, expressivos e estilísticos. Por meio de um conjunto de traços é possível definir questões de sonoridade, conteúdo expressivo e pressupostos estilísticos que estão associados a cada material composicional de cada peça. Este grupo de elementos sonoros, expressivos e estilísticos é o sentido que procuro definir neste trabalho. / This work presents the creation of sense features and a group of musical pieces composed to this work. The sense features have the purpose of defining the sense of compositional materials. There is three categories of sense features: sonorous features, expressive features and stylistic features. It’s possible to define matters of sound, expressive content and stylistic agenda associated to each compositional material in one piece. This group of sonic, expressive and stylistic elements are the sense that I intend to define in this work.

Com o intuito de caracterizar e reconhecer os processos formadores das feições de interação vulcano-sedimentares, optou-se pelo detalhamento de cinco áreas da borda atual da Bacia do Paraná, no estado do Rio Grande do Sul. Nessas regiões selecionadas afloram arenitos eólicos e os derrames vulcânicos, respectivamente pertencentes às Formações Botucatu e Serra Geral, Sequência Juro-Cretácea da Bacia do Paraná. Na interface entre essas duas unidades há a ocorrência de feições vulcano-sedimentares devido a interação ocasionada pelo intenso magmatismo de caráter básico e ácido, este último em menor volume, que recobriu um extenso campo de dunas eólicas em atividade. Uma variedade de estruturas vulcano-sedimentares se originaram pela interação de sedimentos consolidados ou inconsolidados, saturados ou não em água, com derrames de composição basáltica ou dacítica. As feições vulcano-sedimentares encontradas abrangem: estrias de fluxo sobre intertraps arenosos, brechas vulcânicas, brechas vulcano-sedimentares, autobrechas, diques de arenito e geodos, estas foram detalhadas por meio de técnicas de petrografia e DRX. Os processos responsáveis pela formação dessas feições são influenciados por fatores de natureza ígnea e sedimentar. Localizam-se na base e topo dos derrames e ocorrem de diferentes maneiras devido a diferenças na temperatura da lava e do tipo de sedimento em questão. Classificam-se de duas maneiras: interação do sedimento ainda úmido com a lava de temperatura elevada e parcialmente cristalizada; e a segunda refere-se a interação com o derrame já consolidado por meio de erosão e intemperismo. / In order to characterize and recognize the formation processes of the vulcano-sedimentary interaction features, five areas of the current border of the Paraná Basin in the state of Rio Grande do Sul werechosen. It was noted eolic sandstones and volcanic flows, respectively belonging to the Botucatu and Serra Geral Formations, they appear on Jurassic-Cretaceous Sequence of the Paraná Basin. At the interface between these two units there is occurrence of vulcano-sedimentary features due to the interaction caused by the intense magmatism of a basic and acidic character, the latter one has smaller volume, which covered an extensive field of dunes. A variety of vulcano-sedimentary structures originated by the interaction of consolidated or unconsolidated sediments, saturated or not in water, with flows of basaltic or dacitic composition. The vulcano-sedimentary features found include: flow streaks over sand intertraps, volcanic breccias, vulcano-sedimentary breccias, autobreccias, sandstone dikes and geodes, these were defined by petrography and XRD analysis. Processes responsible for the formation of these features are influenced by igneous and sedimentary action. They are located on the base and top of the flows occuring in different ways due to differences on lava temperature and type of sediment. They are classified in two ways: interaction of the wet sediment with the high temperature lava, partially crystallized; The second one refers to the interaction with the consolidated flow due to the erosion and weathering.

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is a neurogenetic syndrome characterized by cognitive impairments and high rates of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). FXS is often used as a model for exploring mechanisms and pathways of symptom expression in ASD due to the high prevalence of ASD in this population and the known single-gene cause for ASD in FXS. Early vocalization features – including volubility, canonical complexity, vocalization duration and vocalization pitch – have shown promise in detecting ASD in idiopathic ASD populations but have yet to be extensively studied in a population with a known cause for ASD, such as FXS. The present study characterizes early vocalization features in FXS, demonstrating how these features are associated with language ability and ASD outcomes, as well as highlighting how these features in FXS may diverge from patterns observed in typically developing (TD) populations. We coded vocalization features during a standardized child-examiner interaction in 39 nine-month-old infants (22 FXS, 17 TD) who were then followed up at 24 months to determine developmental and clinical outcomes. Although many findings did not reach statistical significance in this small sample, our results provide preliminary evidence that infants with FXS may demonstrate patterns of associations with 24-month language outcomes that diverge from those observed in typical development, and that certain vocalization features may be associated with later ASD outcomes in the FXS group. These findings warrant more research exploring these features as potential early markers of ASD in FXS. Characterizing the associations of early vocalization features with ASD outcomes in FXS can inform mechanisms of ASD development that can then be tested broadly with other etiologically-distinct populations at risk for ASD. Thus, further characterization of these early vocalization features in typical and atypical development may lead to improved early identification methods, treatment approaches, and overall well-being of individuals in the ASD population.

O crescimento do volume de dados ocasionado pelo desenvolvimento tecnológico atual, tem sido fortemente evocado como premissa para a utilização de técnicas que auxiliem a exploração, análise e entendimento desses dados. Um conjunto dessas técnicas está compreendido na área de Visualização de Dados, que proporciona maneiras visuais de identificar padrões e tendências, além de extrair características obscuras dos dados. Tais abordagens podem ser aplicadas a qualquer problema que culmine na análise de dados. Um desses problemas é a utilização do som como ferramenta para descrever as características de uma paisagem, área denominada análise de Paisagens Acústicas. Nesta pesquisa de mestrado é apresentada uma abordagem visual para análise de Paisagens Acústicas. Essa abordagem consiste em duas etapas, sendo que na primeira são aplicadas técnicas visuais (Projeção Multidimensional t-SNE) e numéricas (Coeficiente de Silhueta) para avaliar quais conjuntos de características melhor descrevem uma Paisagem Acústica específica. A segunda etapa utiliza técnicas de visualização para analisar diferenças globais e características específicas de paisagens terrestres e aquáticas. Para isso foram utilizados o Mapa de Calor, as Coordenadas Paralelas e a xHiPP, uma extensão da projeção HiPP. A xHiPP busca melhorar a HiPP para alcançar melhor capacidade de análise e flexibilidade de aplicação. Com a aplicação das etapas apresentadas foi possível encontrar evidências de que o Mel-frequency Cepstrum Coefficients formam um conjunto de atributos eficaz para representação e segregação de Paisagens Acústicas. Também foi possível verificar que as técnicas de visualização empregadas na análise são capazes de destacar atributos semelhantes dos áudios, facilitando a análise, permitindo que o usuário dê enfoque às características relevantes do ambiente, no lugar de analisar áudios individuais para extrair informações. / The growth of data volume caused by current technological development has been strongly evoked as a premise for use of techniques that help exploration, analysis, and understanding of data. A subset of these techniques is yielded by the field of Data Visualization, which provides visual manners to identify patterns and trends, as well as the extraction of hidden data features. Such approaches can be applied to problems that aim at data analysis with a strong exploratory component. One such problem is the use of sound as a tool to describe environmental landscapes, named ecological Soundscapes. A visual approach to analysis Soundscapes is presented in this master research. The approach contains two steps, and the first step applies visual (tSNE Multidimensional Projection) and numeric (Silhouette Coefficient) techniques to evaluate attributes groups that better describe a specific Soundscape. The second step employs visual techniques to analysis global differences and specific features of the terrestrial and underwater environment. To achieve these goals, the research used Heatmap, Parallel Coordinates, and xHiPP, an extension of HiPP projection. The xHiPP enhanced HiPP to improve its analytical capabilities and flexibility. The presented steps were able to show evidence of the Mel-frequency Cepstrum Coefficients is an effective attribute collection to represent and segregate Soundscapes. As well, visual techniques employed in the analysis are capable to highlight similar audio features, making exploration easy, allowing users to focus relevant environmental attributes, instead of analyzing individual audios to extraction some information.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; in partial fulfillment for the degree of Master of Medicine (Anatomical Pathology) 2015. / Cytological criteria distinguishing phyllodes tumour of the breast from fibroadenoma. Fibroepithelial lesions of the breast include fibroadenomas and phyllodes tumours. Fibroadenomas are benign tumours, whereas phyllodes tumours range from benign, indolent neoplasms to malignant tumours capable of distant metastasis and occasionally resulting in death. The aim of this study was to determine whether there are statistically significant differences between fibroadenomas and phyllodes tumours with regard to selected cytological features. A ten year retrospective review was performed of patients who had an excision of a fibroadenoma or phyllodes tumour, and on whom a pre-operative fine needle aspirate was performed. The following cytological criteria were assessed: number of stromal and epithelial fragments, stromal to epithelial ratio, stromal cellularity, Stromal borders, stromal atypia and proportion of background wavy spindled cells. The patient age, tumour laterality and tumour size were recorded. Fifty fibroadenomas and 17 phyllodes tumours were included. When compared with phyllodes tumours, fibroadenomas had a larger number of epithelial fragments, a smaller number of stromal fragments and a lower stromal to epithelial ratio. The stroma tended to be less cellular and less atypical compared with phyllodes tumours and the background cellular population contained less spindled cells. Fibroadenomas and phyllodes tumours differ with regard to various cytological features, possibly aiding in their distinction on fine needle aspiration biopsy. / AC2016

The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines identify memorized words and phrases as a hallmark of novice-level speech. For this reason, research by Cox (2017) found rehearsed content to be a major hindrance to interviewees being rated at higher sublevels on the Oral Proficiency Interview-computer (OPIc). To further investigate, an analysis of these memorized segments to determine patterns of lexico-grammatical and discursive features was conducted. In this study, researchers utilized a Praat analysis to compare prosodic features (specifically, mean length of utterance, number of silent pauses, and articulation rate) of speech segments marked as memorized and those which were not. A qualitative analysis was also conducted by identifying via a grounded theory approach any notable patterns both within single interviews as well as between speakers. Articulation rates differed significantly between the spontaneous and rehearsed segments; however, the strongest evidence of memorization lay in the transcriptions and the patterns that emerged within and across interviews.

Previous research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has shown that some of the systematic errors of second language (L2) learners can be attributed to the influence of the native language (L1). In fact, many hypotheses in generative SLA have focused on the role of L1 transfer ranging the spectrum from No Transfer to Full Transfer. The goal of this dissertation was to investigate L1 transfer by focusing on L1-L2 differences in terms of linguistic features; specifically, how differences in the featural and morpholexical organization of L1 and L2 pronominal paradigms affect SLA. In this work I operationalize L1 transfer in terms of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH; Lardiere, 2009). The hypothesis pioneers conceptualization of L1 transfer as an initial attempt by L2 learners to establish a direct mapping between L1 and L2 forms. The FRH is particularly suitable to the study of L2 development because it predicts that when a one-to-one initial mapping is unsuccessful, L2 learners will gradually reorganize the L1 grammatical system until they attain (possibly complete) convergence. Empirical testing of the hypothesis is critical since determining when and why transfer occurs opens numerous possibilities to predict transfer errors and to develop pedagogical approaches to tackle negative transfer. In the current study I focus on the L2 acquisition of four 3rd person singular French object pronouns in the interlanguage of native speakers of English. Difficulties in the acquisition of Romance object pronouns have been amply documented in L2 research. However, most of the previous studies of the topic have focused on L2 acquisition of clitic pronouns and their syntactic properties. The present study takes a novel approach investigating the acquisition of strong as well as clitic pronouns. In my dissertation I test different kinds of knowledge including learners' comprehension of different kinds of pronouns. Going beyond production data, my experimental tasks include a grammaticality judgment task with correction, a picture selection task, and a self-paced reading task. The experimental tasks were administered to a group of native speakers (n=43) and L2 learners of French (n=87). The overall picture that emerges from the current study allows unveiling the initial mapping and subsequent reassembly of the semantic and morphosyntactic features implicated in the acquisition process of the four forms under investigation.

With the increase in interracial marriage researchers have begun to thoroughly assess how self-esteem and racial identity are affected. Recent studies have revealed that the construct of biracial identity is complex in forming a sense of self and racial identity. This inability to identify with a specific race is not only an issue to our entire population but especially to the biracial community. The social work profession has an array fields and services that become flexible to diverse populations; yet, the biracial population has not be explored in depth which may result in not fully understanding the dynamics of the culture that play into the individual. This study utilized a qualitative analysis consisting of interviews with nine participants who shared their experiences of self-esteem as being a biracial individual. The purpose of this study is to explore the perception of self-esteem among biracial individuals. Biracial in this current study refers to an individual being biologically mixed with two different races, yet one biological parent is African American. Biracial females, not to exclude biracial males, are dealing with a complex issue because they are placed in a predicament of trying to parallel their identity from Western culture. The findings of the study will increase the awareness and cultural humility within a new growing population, impact future social work policy, practice, and research.

Object tracking is an active research topic in computer vision and has appli- cation in several areas, such as event detection and robotics. Vehicle tracking is used in Intelligent Transport System (ITS) and surveillance systems. Its re- liability is critical to the overall performance of these systems. Feature-based methods that are used to represent distinctive content in visual frames are one approach to vehicle tracking. Existing feature-based tracking systems can only track vehicles under ideal conditions. They have difficulties when used under a variety of conditions, for example, during both the day and night. They are highly dependent on stable local features that can be tracked for a long time period. These local features are easily lost because of their local property and image noise caused by factors such as, headlight reflections and sun glare. This thesis presents a new approach, addressing the reliability issues mentioned above, tracking whole feature groups composed of feature points extracted with the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm. A feature group in- cludes several features that share a similar property over a time period and can be tracked to the next frame by tracking individual feature points inside it. It is lost only when all of the features in it are lost in the next frame. We cre- ate these feature groups by clustering individual feature points using distance, velocity and acceleration information between two consecutive frames. These feature groups are then hierarchically clustered by their inter-group distance, velocity and acceleration information. Experimental results show that the pro- posed vehicle tracking system can track vehicles with the average accuracy of over 95%, even when the vehicles have complex motions in noisy scenes. It gen- erally works well even in difficult environments, such as for rainy days, windy days, and at night. We are surprised to find that our tracking system locates and tracks motor bikes and pedestrians. This could open up wider opportunities and further investigation and experiments are required to confirm the tracking performance for these objects. Further work is also required to track more com- plex motions, such as rotation and articulated objects with different motions on different parts.

Speech recognition systems have improved in robustness in recent years with respect to both speaker and acoustical variability. Nevertheless, it is still a challenge to deploy speech recognition systems in real-world applications that are exposed to diverse and significant level of noise. Robustness and recognition accuracy are the essential criteria in determining the extent of a speech recognition system deployed in real-world applications. This work involves development of techniques and extensions to extract robust features from speech and achieve substantial performance in speech recognition. Robustness and recognition accuracy are the top concern in this research. In this work, the robustness issue is approached using the front-end processing, in particular robust feature extraction. The author proposes an unified framework for robust feature and presents a comprehensive evaluation on robustness in speech features. The framework addresses three distinct approaches: robust feature extraction, temporal information inclusion and normalization strategies. The author discusses the issue of robust feature selection primarily in the spectral and cepstral context. Several enhancement and extensions are explored for the purpose of robustness. This includes a computationally efficient approach proposed for moment normalization. In addition, a simple back-end approach is incorporated to improve recognition performance in reverberant environments. Speech features in this work are evaluated in three distinct environments that occur in real-world scenarios. The thesis also discusses the effect of noise on speech features and their parameters. The author has established that statistical properties play an important role in mismatches. The significance of the research is strengthened by the evaluation of robust approaches in more than one scenario and the comparison with the performance of the state-of-the-art features. The contributions and limitations of each robust feature in all three different environments are highlighted. The novelty of the work lies in the diverse hostile environments which speech features are evaluated for robustness. The author has obtained recognition accuracy of more than 98.5% for channel distortion. Recognition accuracy greater than 90.0% has also been maintained for reverberation time 0.4s and additive babble noise at SNR 10dB. The thesis delivers a comprehensive research on robust speech features for speech recognition in hostile environments supported by significant experimental results. Several observations, recommendations and relevant issues associated with robust speech features are presented.