The standard vocal repertoire for soprano requires use of the uppermost segment of the female voice, which is typically produced using whistle register phonation. Voice teachers recognize that sopranos use whistle register phonation during performance to produce pitches in the highest segment of their range; however, the use of whistle register phonation as a training tool for female singers of all voice types is less common and the benefits of using whistle registration exercises to condition the female voice are not widely known. While several pedagogical manuals recommend vocal exercises that use whistle register phonation in the range of the second passaggio and in the highest segment of the female voice, no research has been conducted to investigate the benefits of singing in whistle register. The purpose of this study was to measure the efficacy of vocal exercises that incorporate whistle register phonation as treatment for poor intonation and pressed and/or breathy vocal quality in female singers with vocal challenges in the second passaggio of their voice. The influence of whistle register phonation on extending vocal range was also investigated. A treatment-no treatment (ABAB) research design was used. Five female vocalists attended 16 weekly sessions. During the treatment phases, participants received weekly instruction in vocal exercises using whistle register phonation and practiced these activities daily. Audio samples of two vocal exercises and a repertoire excerpt were collected weekly. Measurements taken during the treatment phases were compared to measurements taken during the no-treatment phases. Results of comparative Voice Range Profiles and a weekly Range Extension Measurement Task showed a positive relationship between practice of whistle register exercises and an increase in the upper pitch range in all subjects. Subjects gained an average of 2.4 semitones during Treatment Phase 1, when the whistle register tasks were introduced. Subjects lost an average of 1.2 semitones during the No Treatment phase, when the practice of whistle register tasks was withdrawn. Subjects gained an average of 2.2 semitones during Treatment Phase 2, when the whistle register tasks were reintroduced. The average overall gain in the upper pitch range was +4.3 semitones for mezzo-sopranos and +2 semitones for sopranos. In addition, data collected to measure the pitch range over which whistle register phonation was possible showed an average range of 14 semitones (D5 - E6); supporting the notion that whistle register phonation is possible in the range of the second passaggio and could be developed in this range by female singers of all voice types. Eight voice teachers rated each audio sample for intonation and vocal quality during register transition through the second passaggio. Mixed-model ANOVA (analysis of variance) was conducted to compare the effect of whistle register phonation exercises on quality of intonation, vocal quality, the presence and severity of breathiness, and the presence and severity of strain at each phase of the study. Significance was determined at the p<.05 level. There was a significant effect of whistle register phonation exercises on severity of Breathiness [F(3,209) = 6.66, p = 0.0003]. Mean severity ratings for Breathiness for all subjects were significantly lower during No Treatment than in Treatment Phase 1 and Treatment Phase 2, suggesting that breathiness was less severe when the subjects were not practicing whistle register exercises. Severity of strain generally decreased continually throughout all phases. Mean severity ratings for Strain were consistently lower for Treatment Phase 1, No Treatment, and Treatment Phase 2 compared to Baseline. The differences between Treatment Phase 1, No Treatment, and Treatment Phase 2 were statistically significant [F(3,209) = 3.52, p = 0.0161]. Mean Intonation ratings generally increased through Treatment Phase 1 and were significantly higher for the No Treatment phase and Treatment Phase 2 compared to Baseline [F(3,209) = 2.99, p = 0.0322]. The effect of whistle register phonation exercises on vocal quality was not significant at the p<.05 level. A Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) was used to calculate the intra-judge reliability for perceptual evaluation of all vocal tasks. Statistical analysis comparing the judges' ratings for identical audio samples shows that in this study the judges were consistent in their rating of Breathiness (PCC = 0.76) and had difficulty rating Strain (0.57), Vocal Quality (0.60), and Intonation (0.65). A PCC was used to calculate the correlations between each pair of judges' rating for all vocal tasks, and Cronbach's Alpha was used as an overall measure of the inter-rater reliability. Statistical analysis comparing the judges' ratings for all audio samples shows that in this study the judges were consistent in their rating of Breathiness (α = 0.80), mediocre in rating Strain (0.62) and Vocal Quality (0.69), and not consistent in their rating of Intonation (0.53). The results of the current study suggest that whistle register exercises can be used to facilitate range extension for all female voice types. That performance of whistle register phonation exercises correlated to increased breathiness implies that the exercises tested in this study may not be an effective treatment for singers with breathy voices. Further research investigating the influence of whistle register exercises on intonation, overall vocal quality, and severity of strain is needed. Results of the intra- and inter-rater reliability tests demonstrate a need for research that explores more reliable ways to quantify perceptual evaluation of vocal quality in singers.

An individual’s bad news reporting behavior has been studied from a number of perspectives and has resulted in a variety of research streams including the MUM effect (or reluctance to transmit bad news), whistle-blowing, and organizational silence. While many scholars in different areas have studied reporting behavior, it has not been widely discussed in the information systems literature. This dissertation research addresses an individual’s bad news reporting behavior (and its antecedents) in the troubled IT project context. Many social phenomena are multi-causal (Hollander 1971). The silence phenomenon involved in an individual’s bad news reporting behavior is multi-causal too. While prior research has identified many antecedents to the bad news reporting behavior, it has not provided any systematic approach for categorizing them. In this dissertation, the antecedents are categorized into three different levels: personal factors (i.e., individual-level factors), situational factors (i.e., project-level factors), and organizational factors. This research empirically investigates how the antecedents at different levels affect (i.e., encourage or discourage) an individual’s decision to report or not report bad news in the IT project context. The dissertation follows a multi-paper model, and includes three independent, empirical studies, each with its own research model focusing on personal, situational, and organizational factors.

For many undersea research application scenarios, instruments need to be deployed for more than one month which is the basic time interval for many phenomena. With limited power supply and memory, management strategies are crucial for the success of data collection. For acoustic recording of undersea activities, in general,either preprogrammed duty cycle is configured to log partial time series,or spectrogram of signal is derived and stored,to utilize the available memory storage efficiently.To overcome this limitation, we come up with an algorithm to classify different and store only the sound data of interest. Features like characteristic frequencies, large amplitude of selected frequencies or intensity threshold are used to identify or classify different patterns. On main limitation for this type of approaches is that the algorithm is generally range-dependent, as a result, also sound-level-dependent. This type of algorithms will be less robust to the change of the environment.One the other hand, one interesting observation is that when human beings look at the spectrogram, they will immediately tell the difference between two patterns. Even though no knowledge about the nature of the source, human beings still can discern the tiny dissimilarity and group them accordingly. This suggests that the recognition and classification can be done in spectrogram as a recognition problem. In this work, we propose to modify Principal Component Analysis by generating feature points from moment invariant and sound Level variance, to classify sounds of interest in the ocean. Among all different sound sources in the ocean, we focus on three categories of our interest, i.e., rain, ship and whale and dolphin. The sound data were recorded with the Passive Acoustic Listener developed by Nystuen, Applied Physics Lab, University of Washington. Among all the data, we manually identify twenty frames for each cases, and use them as the base training set. Feed several unknown clips for classification experiments, we suggest that both point-based feature extraction are effective ways to describe whistle vocalizations and believe that this algorithm would be useful for extracting features from noisy recordings of the callings of a wide variety of species.

The bottlenose dolphin exhibits a fission-fusion social structure characterized by temporary associations lasting from minutes to hours. Although social structure has been described for some dolphin communities, the selective pressures affecting fission-fusion patterns and their consequences on dolphin communication are not well understood. The goals of the present study were three-fold: 1) to quantify the rate with which fission-fusion occurred and identify the selective pressures influencing an individual's decision to leave and join a temporary group; 2) to examine the communication signals produced during temporary separations; and 3) to estimate the distances over which dolphins could remain in acoustic contact while separated. It was found that a dolphin's decision to join or leave a group was related to social considerations such as the class of individual encountered (e.g., mothers with calves, adult single females, adult males, and juveniles) as dolphins move in different environments. The decision was also influenced by ecological characteristics such as the habitat where a dolphin was found. The two aspects in turn determined the rate of fission-fusion. Mothers with calves regularly using deep waters had high rates of fission-fusion. Those females encountered other females in the same reproductive condition frequently and associated with them. In contrast, mothers with calves using shallow waters had lower fission-fusion rates. Those females encountered juvenile dolphins often but they did not associate with them frequently. Temporarily separated dolphins did not always produce the sounds typically used for long-distance communication, and sometimes they did not use any detectable acoustic signal to find each other. On average, this absence of communication occurred at distances less than 50 m. When both whistles and echolocation produced, they were apparently involved in maintaining contact between mothers and their calves and other associates. Estimates of active spaces defined by whistle transmission indicated that communication range varied between habitats. Shallow seagrass areas had the smallest active space while channels had the greatest active space. Findings indicated that the distances over which dolphins remain in acoustic contact and can be considered members of groups are much greater than has been described from observations of dolphin spacing and activity alone.

The prediction of sound generated from fluid flow has always been a difficult subject due to the nonlinearities in the governing equations. However, flow noise can now be simulated with the help of modern computation techniques and super computers. The research presented in this thesis uses the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the acoustic finite element method (FEM) in order to simulate the whistle noise caused by vortex shedding. The acoustic results were compared to both analytical solutions and experimental results to better understand the effects of turbulence models, fluid compressibility, and wall boundary meshes on the acoustic frequency response. In the case of the whistle, sound power and pressure levels are scaled since 2-D models are used to model 3-D phenomenon. The methodology for scaling the results is detailed.

I den här studien intervjuas 13 diakoner i Svenska kyrkan om profetisk diakoni och vadde behöver för att utföra den. Syftet med studien är att undersöka diakoners syn påprofetisk diakoni och dess dilemman, kostnader och utmaningar. Slutsatsen är att diakonerna är mycket positivt inställda till profetisk diakoni, men de harsällan tid att ägna sig åt den – kyrkans struktur och ledarskap komplicerar arbetet. Dessutom upplever diakonerna att deras vigningslöften om att arbeta profetiskt kan varamycket tunga att bära och svåra att leva efter, vilket kan utlösa moralisk stress. Diakonerna vill att diakonrollen uppgraderas och ges större frihet, samt att kyrkansledare gå före och visar vägen. / <p>En artikelversion av uppsatsen publicerades i Svensk Kyrkotidning 9/2014, sid 271-273.</p>

Although IS studies have begun to recognize the role of emotion in decision making, the research in this area is still in its infancy. The exploration of IS decision making phenomena through the lens of regret can offer rich implications to both research and practice. The presence of regret, for instance, can explain how and why IS decision makers choose a certain option. Motivated by the gap in the literature, the three papers in this dissertation investigate the role of regret in decision making in IS contexts. Specifically, the three projects investigate the following: IT real options decision in the context of RFID investment in libraries, whistle-blowing decision in the context of violations of heath information privacy, and process documentation decision in the context of investment in process improvement initiatives in an IT project. The contributions and implications of the three studies are presented further.

M.Com. (Business Management) / South Africa as a country is struggling with the impact and consequences of fraud and corruption. This problem is driven by mostly white-collar crime and organisational wrongdoing. One of the largest banks in the country is losing in excess of R200m per annum as a result of internal fraud and corruption. This study aims to investigate the factors that influence whistleblowing as a measure to remediate this problem. For the sake of this study, whistle-blowing is defined as the reporting of illegal, immoral or illegitimate practices to people or institutions that can correct these wrongdoings. If the employees and the organisation better understand the drivers that promote effective whistleblowing, it could in turn help to expose these wrongdoings and thereby limit the negative impact on the organisational stakeholders and society in general. The research method used was quantitative, aimed at discovering patterns and/or causal relationships that could shed light on the factors that impact whistle-blowing. This study applied statistical methods to critically test the research results. The statistical analysis highlighted some of the key variables that influence the determinants of whistle-blowing. These findings revealed trust, knowledge, character and situation as the key variables that correlate to whistle-blowing determinants. It rejected motives, prevention, gender, level of education and employment duration as whistle-blowing determinants. The study concludes by providing recommendations to both the organisation and the prospective whistle-blower in this regard.

The purpose of the study was concerned with specific elements of the portion of the female voice commonly referred to as whistle or flute register. Three elements of vocal production were chosen for which past research has demonstrated relationships to source function. These elements included spectral characteristics, airflow rates, and perceptual identification. The research compared what the singer-subjects perceived as being whistle register phonations with that which they perceived as being head register phonations. A comparative technique was utilized where pitch, intensity and phonemic category were held relatively constant, register, therefore, being the only variable. Spectral characteristics and airflow rates of the two subject-determined registers were compared. In addition, an attempt was made to determine if the whistle register could be perceptually differentiated on the basis of voice quality,

The use of whistle-blowing as means to curb unethical behaviour of police officers in the Nelson Mandela Bay is investigated in this study. In order to investigate this, various instruments were used, these are interviews and questionnaires. However the objectives of the study were: - To examine the implementation of whistle-blowing in the SAPS. - To develop strategies and measures that can be used to encourage whistle-blowing in the SAPS. Broadly speaking, these objectives have been achieved by providing empirical evidence which shows that: - Unethical behaviour by police officers is the most ethical challenge facing police officers in the Nelson Mandela Bay Area. This is based on the findings which eminate from the interviews. - Whistle-blowing is used by police officers as an early warning system that alerts the superiors about misconduct before it is too late as it defects and deters wrongdoing. However, the study suggests various strategies and measures to assist the implementation of whistle-blowing. These strategies include: - Development of hotlines. - Assurance of confidentiality and anonymity of disclosures. - Response plan development. - Training development. - Regarding whistle-blowing as an ongoing communication. This study also indicates that misconduct by police officers in the Nelson Mandela Bay area is not high. While whistle-blowing is considered as a key tool in promoting individual responsibility and accountability among police officers. In conclusion, recommendations are provided which could assist the SAPS and individual police officers to improve ethical conduct, and for improved measures and mechanisms to deal with unethical behaviour of police officers and recommendations for improved implementation of whistle-blowing process.