Recently, we demonstrated chromosome instability (CIN) in human cleavage stage embryogenesis following in vitro fertilization (IVF). CIN not necessarily undermines normal human development (i.e. when remaining normal diploid blastomeres develop the embryo proper), however it can spark a spectrum of conditions, including loss of conception, genetic disease and genetic variation development. To s...

We report the application of a psychophysical model of pitch perception to the analysis of speech intonation. The model was designed to reproduce the empirical findings on the perception of musical phenomena (the dissonance/consonance of intervals and the tension/sonority of chords), but does not depend on specific musical scales or tuning systems. Application to intonation allows us to calcula...

In a sense I write under false pretences because the BBC possesses no special archives devoted to folk music. For the purposes of broadcasting, the BBC began to make recordings a t the end of 1931 and over the las t thirty years has built up a general Sound Archives of some 30,000 accession numbers: recordings mainly selected from its own broadcast programmes, ranging from variety to grand oper...

The research objective has been to confirm the efficiency of phonetic voice and pronunciation exercises. The results of listeners' assessment have then been compared to the objective parameters f0, shimmer and jitter, as well as to the spectra energy on the basis of LTASS. The dissimilarity index (SDDD) has been calculated to compare the spectra before and after the exercises. Voices that have ...

In this work, we perform the acoustic analysis of features harmonicity, sonority, duration and intensity each /g/ sound extracted from a sample spontaneous speech corpus collected recordings local television programs in Andalusia, Madrid Basque Country. This consists 1292 utterances, which velar appears on 151 occasions different contexts. These sounds are described categorized thanks to Praat ...

Constraints based on the sonority scale and other markedness hierarchies have been formalized in two different ways: as scale-partition constraint families, with a universally fixed ranking, and as stringency constraint families, where the constraints stand in subset relations and their ranking is not universal. We identify a new empirical domain where these two approaches make different predic...

Background: To study the ethical aspects of comprehensive preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) through microarrays and whole genome sequencing Materials and Methods: In order to pinpoint ethical issues regarding comprehensive embryo screening we have first investigated the technical and moral issues by organizing a campus meeting with experts and by a literature study. Subsequently we have i...