A critical assumption of all current visual speech recognition systems is that there are visual speech units called visemes which can be mapped to units of acoustic speech, the phonemes. Despite there being a number of published maps it is infrequent to see the effectiveness of these tested, particularly on visual-only lip-reading (many works use audio-visual speech). Here we examine 120 mappin...

Personnel systems and policies can have a substantial influence on the quality of local government. This paper shows that Japanese local governments provide stable and well-paid careers. Indeed, pay scales are slightly higher than those of central government staff. As a result, Japanese local governments have attracted good staff into their ranks and built up strong human resource capacity over...

We report the discovery of a novel group of highly conserved DNA sequences located within the intergenic regions of the chromosomes of Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium and other bacteria. These intergenic repeat units (IRUs) are 124-127 nucleotides long and have the potential to form stable stem-loop structures. The location of these sequences within the intergenic regions is variable w...

Density functional calculations on carbonic acid H2CO3 are extended to clusters of up to five such units. The most stable forms are the linear, hydrogen-bonded analogs of the dimer with anti–anti orientation. We calculate structures and vibration frequencies, as well as the energy required to bend and stretch the linear isomers. Linear chains of up to ;20 units should be favored over ring struc...

We developed a kinetic procedure for determination of amylase activity in serum by use of nephelometric measurements. Light scattering from the substrate, a stable suspension of starch, is decreased as amylase hydrolyzes the starch to soluble fragments. Values obtained for serum amylase correlate closely with those determined by a method in which a starch-dye complex is used. Precision of the n...

Small networks of chaotic units which are coupled by their time-delayed variables are investigated. In spite of the time delay, the units can synchronize isochronally, i.e., without time shift. Moreover, networks cannot only synchronize completely, but can also split into different synchronized sublattices. These synchronization patterns are stable attractors of the network dynamics. Different ...

The growth requirements of 135 clinical isolates of Neisseria gonorrhoeae and six American Type Culture Collection reference strains were examined by using a simple chemically defined medium known as Wong-Shockley-Johnston medium, WSJM. The simple liquid medium supported growth of gonococci from an inoculum of 2 X 10(6) colony-forming units ml-1 and yielded 10(10) colony-forming units ml-1 in 1...