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The Gems of Jazz is a prospective TV series that features local New Orleans Jazz musicians. The purpose of the show, created and hosted by Virgile Beddok, is to look into the lives of the people who make the New Orleans Jazz scene all that it is, and has been. This paper delves into each stage of the creative and production processes that enabled the completion of this pilot episode which features master drummer Herlin Riley as a guest.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Environmental changes have created new requirements and conditions for industrial activity in Brazil, highlighting the need for exploration of the aspects related to sustainable development and expansion into new markets. This study aimed to understand how the adoption of sustainable management strategies influence the export performance of Brazilian internationalized industrial sector of Gems and Jewelry. The sustainable strategies were evaluated from the adaptation of the strategic model of the Batelle American Institute, presented by Placet, Anderson and Fowler (2005), which addresses the interaction of economic, social and environmental aspects, considering innovation as perspective, reflected in the company and in society. The export performance was analyzed through the adaptation of the model of Papadopoulos and Martin (2010) that develops and evaluates a formative measure of export performance, identifying and quantifying the relative contribution of its consequences concerning the economic and strategic dimensions. The research is characterized as qualitative and exploratory, and was carried out through semi-structured interviews in the industrial internationalized sector of gems and jewelry as well as quantitative and descriptive, given that subjects responded to a survey. Data was analyzed by univariate and bivariate correlation test and Spearman's Rho. Such tests allow to understand which sustainable management practices of the model are being added in the industrial sector, and which dimensions of sustainable development affect the export performance of companies in the gems and jewelry sector, establishing the correlations of greater significance. The results may contribute to a better understanding of such sector, pointing out which each year has contributed to the positive balance of trade. The actions in the international market of surveyed companies are in the early stages of internationalization. The changes offered by the internationalization of the industrial companies of the sector are felt and influence the strategic management and growth of companies. / As mudanças ambientais criaram novas exigências e condicionantes para a atividade industrial brasileira, ressaltando a necessidade da exploração dos aspectos relacionados ao desenvolvimento sustentável e a ampliação para novos mercados. Este trabalho teve como objetivo entender como a adoção de estratégias de gestão sustentáveis influencia no desempenho exportador de empresas industriais brasileiras internacionalizadas do setor de Gemas e Joias. As estratégias sustentáveis foram avaliadas a partir da adaptação do modelo estratégico do Instituto Americano Battelle, apresentado por Placet, Anderson e Fowler (2005), que aborda a interação dos aspectos econômicos, social e ambiental tendo como perspectiva a inovação, com reflexos na empresa e na sociedade. O desempenho exportador foi analisado a partir da adaptação do modelo de Papadopoulos e Martín (2010) que desenvolve e testa uma medida formativa do desempenho exportador e identifica e quantifica a contribuição relativa das suas consequências nas dimensões econômica e estratégica. A pesquisa caracteriza-se por ser uma investigação de natureza qualitativa e exploratória realizada com entrevistas semi estruturadas em empresas industriais internacionalizadas do Setor Mineral de Gemas e Joias e; quantitativa e descritiva, através da aplicação de uma survey. Os dados foram avaliados por meio da análise univariada e bivariada e teste de correlação de Ró de Spearman. Foi possível perceber quais práticas de gestão sustentável apresentadas no modelo estão sendo inseridas nas empresas industriais do setor, e quais as dimensões do desenvolvimento sustentável influenciam o desempenho exportador das empresas do setor de gemas e joias, estabelecendo as correlações de maior significância. Através dos resultados pode-se ter um melhor entendimento desse setor , que a cada ano vêm contribuindo para o saldo positivo da balança comercial. A atuação no mercado externo da maioria das empresas pesquisadas se encontra nos dois primeiros estágios de internacionalização. As mudanças proporcionadas pela internacionalização das empresas industriais do setor, se fazem sentir e influenciam na gestão estratégica e no crescimento das empresas do setor.

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Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T18:57:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 30 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Esta dissertação tem como temática principal as políticas públicas e iniciativas privadas de apoio a aglomerações produtivas, a qual é desenvolvida através de evidências empíricas do arranjo gaúcho de gemas e jóias. Para tanto, valendo-se do conceito neo-schumpeteriano de arranjos produtivos locais (APL), foram resgatados alguns aspectos relacionados à promoção de aglomerados produtivos, além da experiência brasileira na formulação de políticas com este foco. Ademais, caracterizou-se o arranjo de gemas e jóias do RS, destacando-se sua estrutura produtiva e institucional, bem como a dinâmica interativa desenvolvida entre os atores. Também foram mapeadas as ações, programas e projetos realizados junto ao APL, tanto no âmbito das políticas públicas, quanto das iniciativas privadas. Por fim, o trabalho sistematiza a avaliação de tais políticas e iniciativas – com base, principalmente, na visão dos beneficiários, ou seja, as firmas. / This work has as main theme public policies and private initiatives to support productive arrangement, which is developed through empirical evidence of south brazilian arrangement of gems and jewelry. In such a way, using evolutionary concept of local productive arrangements (LPAs), some aspects related to promotion of productive arrangement had been rescued, besides brazilian experience in politics formulation with this focus. Moreover, the RS arrangements of gems and jewelry was characterized being distinguished its productive and institutional structure, as well as interactive dynamic developed between the actors. Also actions, programs and projects realized next to LPA were mapped, in public politics as private initiatives. Finally, the work systematizes the evaluation of such politics and initiatives – based, especially in view of beneficiaries, i.e. firms.

The current investigation supports the objectives of Project GEMS (Roberts, 2008), a grant funded program whose objectives include the development and validation of a protocol to identify students from underrepresented and diverse populations as gifted in the content areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Identification of students from low-income and diverse populations as gifted has been a struggle with current assessment techniques (Baldwin, 2005). Project GEMS aims to address this problem through development of interest measures specific to the STEM areas for use within an identification protocol. The current project developed a measure to assess interest in mathematics. The construct of interest was targeted as it is correlated with many positive factors in education that lead to increased academic performance (Schunk, Pintrich, & Meece, 2008). Existing math interest inventories are designed for older populations, lack good psychometric properties and are atheoretical. To improve upon existing interest measures, Hidi and Renninger’s (2006) four-phase model of interest served as the theoretical basis to inform and guide the process of development and validation of a math interest inventory. A twenty-seven item self-report math interest measure was designed to assess the four phases of Hidi and Renninger’s interest model (emotion, value, knowledge, and engagement; 2006). Pilot and field testing of the measure were conducted in elementary schools selected on the basis of a high proportion of low-income students in a south central Kentucky school district. The sample consists of 1,429,429 students in grades two through six. The measure was hypothesized to evidence good internal consistency, a four-factor structure, and a significant and positive correlations between the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the composite and subscales of the math interest inventory. The first hypothesis found support with an internal consistency reliability coefficient of .916 for the overall score. Results of confirmatory factor analysis supported a four-factor structure resembling Hidi and Renninger’s (2006) four phase model of interest and including the four components emotion, value, knowledge, and engagement. The correlations between the math scores from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the math interest inventory total score and scales partially supported the last hypothesis. The correlations were small and positive for the Values and Knowledge scales but small and negative for the Emotion and Engagement scales. The correlations for the total score of the math interest inventory were significant; however, their values had little practical significance. While the math interest measure evidences good reliability and support for the structure of the scales through confirmatory factor analysis, the current study did not provide evidence for a significant relationship with math achievement as measured by a standardized group administered math achievement test. These results are discussed in relation to limitations of the current study and recommendations for further investigation.

This thesis investigates the use of an auxiliary sensor, the GEMS device, for improving the quality of noisy speech and designing noise preprocessors to MELP speech coders. Use of auxiliary sensors for noise-robust ASR applications is also investigated to develop speech enhancement algorithms that use acoustic-phonetic properties of the speech signal. A Bayesian risk minimization framework is developed that can incorporate the acoustic-phonetic properties of speech sounds and knowledge of human auditory perception into the speech enhancement framework. Two noise suppression systems are presented using the ideas developed in the mathematical framework. In the first system, an aharmonic comb filter is proposed for voiced speech where low-energy frequencies are severely suppressed while high-energy frequencies are suppressed mildly. The proposed system outperformed an MMSE estimator in subjective listening tests and DRT intelligibility test for MELP-coded noisy speech. The effect of aharmonic comb filtering on the linear predictive coding (LPC) parameters is analyzed using a missing data approach. Suppressing the low-energy frequencies without any modification of the high-energy frequencies is shown to improve the LPC spectrum using the Itakura-Saito distance measure. The second system combines the aharmonic comb filter with the acoustic-phonetic properties of speech to improve the intelligibility of the MELP-coded noisy speech. Noisy speech signal is segmented into broad level sound classes using a multi-sensor automatic segmentation/classification tool, and each sound class is enhanced differently based on its acoustic-phonetic properties. The proposed system is shown to outperform both the MELPe noise preprocessor and the aharmonic comb filter in intelligibility tests when used in concatenation with the MELP coder. Since the second noise suppression system uses an automatic segmentation/classification algorithm, exploiting the GEMS signal in an automatic segmentation/classification task is also addressed using an ASR approach. Current ASR engines can segment and classify speech utterances in a single pass; however, they are sensitive to ambient noise. Features that are extracted from the GEMS signal can be fused with the noisy MFCC features to improve the noise-robustness of the ASR system. In the first phase, a voicing feature is extracted from the clean speech signal and fused with the MFCC features. The actual GEMS signal could not be used in this phase because of insufficient sensor data to train the ASR system. Tests are done using the Aurora2 noisy digits database. The speech-based voicing feature is found to be effective at around 10 dB but, below 10 dB, the effectiveness rapidly drops with decreasing SNR because of the severe distortions in the speech-based features at these SNRs. Hence, a novel system is proposed that treats the MFCC features in a speech frame as missing data if the global SNR is below 10 dB and the speech frame is unvoiced. If the global SNR is above 10 dB of the speech frame is voiced, both MFCC features and voicing feature are used. The proposed system is shown to outperform some of the popular noise-robust techniques at all SNRs. In the second phase, a new isolated monosyllable database is prepared that contains both speech and GEMS data. ASR experiments conducted for clean speech showed that the GEMS-based feature, when fused with the MFCC features, decreases the performance. The reason for this unexpected result is found to be partly related to some of the GEMS data that is severely noisy. The non-acoustic sensor noise exists in all GEMS data but the severe noise happens rarely. A missing data technique is proposed to alleviate the effects of severely noisy sensor data. The GEMS-based feature is treated as missing data when it is detected to be severely noisy. The combined features are shown to outperform the MFCC features for clean speech when the missing data technique is applied.

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Submitted by Marcos Wanderley (marcos.wanderley@ufcg.edu.br) on 2018-07-19T21:46:31Z No. of bitstreams: 1 FABRÍCIO FERNANDES VIEIRA - DISSERTAÇÃO(PPGEPM) 2017.pdf: 2744244 bytes, checksum: c3940283d95c033e09e2e8fc64643fa8 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-19T21:46:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 FABRÍCIO FERNANDES VIEIRA - DISSERTAÇÃO(PPGEPM) 2017.pdf: 2744244 bytes, checksum: c3940283d95c033e09e2e8fc64643fa8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-07-20 / As apatitas da região de Sumé, cidade localizada no Cariri paraibano, estão inseridas nos skarnitos da Província Borborema, mais precisamente no Complexo Sumé do terreno geotectônico Alto Moxotó, correlacionado à orogênese Brasiliana. As apatitas da região já foram alvo de pesquisas para exploração do minério fosfato e atualmente é estudada para fins gemológicos. Após tratamento térmico, a apatita apresenta cor azul neon, que tem grande aceitação no mercado e, consequentemente, valor agregado. O objetivo deste trabalho é caracterizar a apatita verde bruta e a apatita azul tratada, através de análises laboratoriais físicas e/ou químicas. As análises físicas apresentaram índice de refração e densidade compatível com a literatura que são 1,635 a 1,641 e 3,16 e 3,23g/cm3 respectivamente. Para o tratamento térmico da apatita verde natural, a faixa de temperatura de 700ºC é a que resulta na cor azul artificial mais intensa. Os resultados das análises químicas de fluorescência e microfluorescência mostraram que se trata de uma fluorapatita, apresentando concentrações de Neodímio e Praseodímio e alta anomalia de Tório. As análises de UV-Visível constataram as bandas dos terras raras Neodímio e Praseodímio. Os espectros de Infravermelho evidenciaram nas amostras tratadas a perda de agua e os carbonatos de substituição. A mudança de cor após tratamento térmico das apatitas verdes naturais para as apatitas azuis artificiais é creditada à substituição do íon (PO4)3, pelo íon Mn5+. As apatitas azuis tratadas apresentam coloração violeta quando estão submetidas à radiação UV, enquanto as apatitas verdes naturais não alteram sua cor. / Apatite crystals of the Sumé region, occur in the Cariri region, inserted in skarns of the Sumé Complex, of the Alto Moxotó Terrane, Borborema Province, which is correlated to the Brasiliano orogeny. Such minerals, has already been focus of exploitation research, being currently studied for gemological purposes. After the heat treatment, the apatite show blue neon color, which has great acceptance in the market and, consequently, economic value. The objective of this work is to characterize the crude green apatite and the treated blue apatite, through physical and / or chemical laboratory analyzes. The physical analyses presented refractive index and density compatible with the literature data that are 1,635 to 1,641 and 3,16, besides 3,23 g/cm³, respectively. For the heat treatment of natural green apatite, the temperature range of 700ºC resulted in the most intense artificial blue color. The results of the chemical analyses of fluorescence and microfluorescence showed that it corresponds to a fluorapatite, presenting considerable concentrations of Neodymium and Praseodymium and high thorium anomaly. UV-Visible analyses showed the rare earth bands neodymium and praseodymium. Infrared spectra revealed in loss of water and carbonate replacement in the treated samples. Color changing after heat treatment of the natural green apatites to the artificial blue ones is credited to the substitution of the ion (PO4)3 by the ion Mn5+. Treated blue apatites showed violet coloration when subjected to UV radiation, while natural green apatites do not alter their color.

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