The collision on February 10, 2009 between the Iridium 33 satellite and the defunct Cosmos 2251 satellite at an altitude of 470 miles (770 km) significantly increases the amount of space debris in the region of space that is already the most crowded and has the greatest risk of collisions between orbiting objects. The debris cloud created by this collision is like a shotgun blast that threatens...

Acoustic masking from anthropogenic noise is increasingly being considered as a threat to marine mammals, particularly low-frequency specialists such as baleen whales. Low-frequency ocean noise has increased in recent decades, often in habitats with seasonally resident populations of marine mammals, raising concerns that noise chronically influences life histories of individuals and populations...

This paper reports on the articulatory and acoustic correlates of the mid-central vowel (schwa) in an attempt to find out the perimeter of this vowel in both the articulatory and acoustic vowel space of female American English speakers. F1xF2 plots were used to determine the acoustic vowel space. The articulatory vowel space was determined by plotting the maximum vertical displacement of the ja...

We study the effect of different feature space normalization techniques in adverse acoustic conditions. Recognition tests are reported for cepstral mean and variance normalization, histogram normalization, feature space rotation, and vocal tract length normalization on a German isolated word recognition task with large acoustic mismatch. The training data was recorded in clean office environmen...