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New Research Advances Voice Security Technology
ScienceDaily (Mar. 11, 2010) — Most people are familiar with security technology that scans a person's handprint or eye for identification purposes. Now, thanks in part to research from North Carolina State University, we are closer to practical technology that can test someone's voice to confirm their identity.
"The big picture is speaker authentication by computer," says Dr. Robert Rodman, professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a new paper on the subject. "The acoustic parameters of the voice are affected by the shape of the vocal tract, and different people have different vocal tracts," Rodman explains. "This new research will help improve the speed of speech authentication, without sacrificing accuracy."
Rodman explains that speech authentication could have a host of applications in this age of heightened security and mobile electronics. "Potential users of this technology include government, financial, health-care and telecommunications industries," Rodman says, "for applications ranging from preventing ID theft and fraud to data protection."
Current computer models that are used to compare acoustic profiles, effectively evaluating whether a speaker is who he says he is, may take several seconds or more to process the information, which is still too long for the technology to gain widespread acceptance. "In order for this technology to gain traction among users," Rodman says, "the response time needs to improve without increasing the error rate."
To address this problem, Rodman and his fellow researchers modified existing computer models to streamline the authentication process so that it operates more efficiently. "This is part of the evolution of speech authentication software," Rodman says, "and it moves us closer to making this technology a practical, secure tool."
The research was co-authored by NC State's Rodman; Rahim Saeidi, Tomi Kinnunen and Pasi Franti of the University of Joensuu in Finland; and Hamid Reza Sadegh Mohammadi of the Iranian Academic Center for Education, Culture & Research.
The research, "Joint Frame and Gaussian Selection for Text Independent Speaker Verification", will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Dallas, March 14-19. The research was funded, in part, by the Centre for International Mobility.
NC State's Department of Computer Science is part of the university's College of Engineering.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100308102202.htm
According to the text, all the following statements are true of Dr. Robert Rodman, EXCEPT
Cell Phones: Are they dangerous?
Do you have a cell phone? Do you use it a lot? If the answer to these questions is yes, you should read the following information very carefully.
If you keep on using a cell phone, it will probably cause premature ageing, which might be rather difficult to get over. At least this is what most scientists claim. Low-level radiation from the phone may heat up body cells, damaging skin and making it look slightly lined and tired. Scientists say that if you expose cells to the radiation from a cell phone, the natural process that repairs your skin will probably be affected. Furthermore, radiation produces mutations in the cells and these mutations could be related to other health problems.
Cell phone users have also found out that if they use their phone for a long time they feel other symptoms such as fatigue and memory loss. The fatigue may be caused because, when using phones, people suffer an involuntary speeding up of their heart beat. Apart from that, nearly two out of three people interviewed complained of regular headaches from using their phones, although this may be due to bad posture rather than radiation emissions.
The most surprising fact discovered by researchers is that people exposed to the radiation of a cell phone for 45 minutes go to the bathroom twice as much as usual. This proves that radiation has a biological effect on humans.
So if I were you, I would definitely think twice before using a cell phone if I looked in the mirror and saw wrinkles on my face, felt fatigue, had trouble remembering things, or if I started using my bathroom more often than I used to.
The underlined words in the text are all examples of:
Source: Newsweek Magazine (Adapted) May 25th 2009
Tony Blair, Britain ́s longest-serving Labour Prime Minister, left office in 2007 as a relatively young man of 54. At his office in London, Blair spoke to NEWSWEEK ́s Stryker McGuire. Excerpts:
Question 2: How do you think President Barack Obama is doing as a leader and healer on the world scene?
He ́s created a situation where there is a possibility of a completely different form of engagement with the world of Islam and with the outside world. The single most important thing for him is that his decision to reach out is answered by the rest of the world by a decision to reach back. As I keep saying to people, he doesn ́t want cheerleaders; he wants partners. You know, he doesn ́t want people to tell him how great he is; he ́s perfectly well aware of the transient nature of all that fluff, as it were, around the new president and the first hundred days. He ́s trying to change the world in partnership, and he needs partners to do it.
In his answer to question 2, Mr Blair says that President Barack Obama is “perfectly well aware of the transient nature of all that fluff.” In other words, the US President
As Information Systems (IS) development becomes more a function of purchasing packages or assembling components, with less emphasis on programming, student enrollment in IS courses at universities continues to decline.
Sometimes it looks like the IT revolution has moved on and left many IS researchers [ADVERB].
For example, according to Nokia, the next generation of computers will be in your pocket. About 1.3 billion mobile phones are sold each year, compared to only 300 million personal computers. An increasing number of these phones come with full-blown operating systems that let users access, organize, and use much more information than older handhelds. The mobile software market may soon exceed the current software market for computers, and a wide variety of information systems will rise on top of all the new software. However, only a relatively small percentage of IS research focuses on the mobile revolution.
Actually, many IS programs in business colleges seem impervious to the wake-up call that information schools provide. Rather, they continue to offer curricula that reflect the past rather than look toward the future. Little wonder that students, whose degrees are based on a very limited number of traditional courses in one area of study, often fail to meet their employers’ expectations. With little integration across disciplines to prepare students for the complex problems they will face, organizations find it necessary to further educate those whom they hire or go abroad to seek appropriate employees with a wider range of skills and knowledge.
(Adapted from http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/1009/rW_CO_ISInnovation.pdf)
De acordo com o texto
There are lots of things you can do to save energy at home, from simple things like washing at 30 °C, saving water and recycling, to insulating your loft and cavity walls. By saving energy you’ll be reducing your home’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and helping to fight climate change.
Why should you save energy? Over 40 per cent of the UK’s man-made CO₂ emissions actually come from energy we use every day – at home and when we travel. To generate that energy, we burn fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) that produce ‘greenhouse’ gases – in particular CO₂ – which are changing our climate and damaging the environment.
The greenhouse effect CO₂ and various other gases wrap the Earth in an invisible ‘blanket’, helping to prevent heat from escaping. Without this greenhouse effect, the average temperature on Earth would be around -18 ºC, compared with the current average of around +15 ºC. This blanket of gases has remained at a constant concentration for many thousands of years. Since the Industrial Revolution began around 200 years ago, people have been burning more fossil fuels. This has increased the heating effect of the ‘blanket’, trapping more of the sun’s energy inside our atmosphere. In turn the Earth’s temperature has increased more rapidly in a shorter period of time than it has for thousands of years.
The impact of climate change People sometimes think that climate change will be a positive thing for the UK, giving us warmer summers and fewer cold winters. But hotter summers and less rain in the south and east will mean water shortages, forest fires and damage to crops and wildlife. In the north and west there could be much heavier rain and more flooding. As the polar ice caps continue to melt, rising sea levels will threaten many coastal communities. Overall, the cost to society, the environment, our health and the economy is likely to far outweigh any benefits.
Make a difference The average UK household creates around six tonnes of CO₂ every year – that’s 6,000 kg – to heat and power their home. Making your home more energy efficient could save you up to £340 a year and reduce your home’s CO₂ emissions by up to 1,500–2,000 kg. You could save even more by switching to renewable energy sources, by walking, cycling or using public transport whenever possible, and by driving more efficiently.
(Texto introdutório ao manual “A guide to energy saving in the home”, disponível em: http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Resources/Publications.)
Among some actions to save energy at home, in the text we find:
Cell Phones: Are they dangerous?
Do you have a cell phone? Do you use it a lot? If the answer to these questions is yes, you should read the following information very carefully.
If you keep on using a cell phone, it will probably cause premature ageing, which might be rather difficult to get over. At least this is what most scientists claim. Low-level radiation from the phone may heat up body cells, damaging skin and making it look slightly lined and tired. Scientists say that if you expose cells to the radiation from a cell phone, the natural process that repairs your skin will probably be affected. Furthermore, radiation produces mutations in the cells and these mutations could be related to other health problems.
Cell phone users have also found out that if they use their phone for a long time they feel other symptoms such as fatigue and memory loss. The fatigue may be caused because, when using phones, people suffer an involuntary speeding up of their heart beat. Apart from that, nearly two out of three people interviewed complained of regular headaches from using their phones, although this may be due to bad posture rather than radiation emissions.
The most surprising fact discovered by researchers is that people exposed to the radiation of a cell phone for 45 minutes go to the bathroom twice as much as usual. This proves that radiation has a biological effect on humans.
So if I were you, I would definitely think twice before using a cell phone if I looked in the mirror and saw wrinkles on my face, felt fatigue, had trouble remembering things, or if I started using my bathroom more often than I used to.
Match the phrasal verbs to their definitions:
Verbs
I. keep on
II. join in
III. find out
IV. take after
V. get over
Definitions
( ) discover
( ) recover
( ) continue, go on
( ) take part in
( ) look like
Choose the alternative which contains the correct sequence, from top to bottom:
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the c ountry's left-leaning president, is carving out a role for Brazil as spokesman for poor countries, most notably by founding the G20 group which lobbies for rich countries to open up farm trade. His government is playing a more active role across South America. And it is seeking a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. "Brazil has begun to flex its muscles as a regiona superpower," says Miguel Díaz of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think-tank.
If so, it is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, Brazil's fondest wish is to mitigate the United States' dominance of global affairs and thereby to enhance Brazil's influence. The foreign minister, Celso Amorim, calls for "a more balanced world" and justifies the Haiti mission in part as a step towards it "You can't be a supporter of multilateralism and when it comes to act say it's [too] dangerous," says Mr Amorim.
On the other hand, Brazil's new activism often, though B, coincides with the interests of the United States. Both countries want democracy and stability in places in the Americas where these seem fragile. In some of those places, Lula's Brazi has more friends and influence than George Bush's more abrasive United States. The two sometimes back rivals in these countries, but that is one source of Brazil's usefulness.
Lula did not start Brazil's international activism. In recent years, Brazilian troops have joined UN missions in Eas Timor and Angola. In 1996, Brazil acted with Argentina and the United States to forestall a coup in Paraguay – recognition that the defence of democracy in the region should take precedence over a tradition of non-intervention in the affairs o neighbours.
The search for a stable South America has long been an axiom of Brazil's foreign policy, but demographics have given it greater urgency. Brazilians, once described as clinging to the coast like crabs, have scurried westwards and northwards. The building of Brasília, which replaced Rio de Janeiro as the capital in 1960, helped to spark development of the interior, a process accelerated by an agricultural boom insuch western states as Mato Grosso. The Amazon, Brazil is learning, is both a resource and weak spot, vulnerable to guerrillas, drug traffickers and land-grabbers.
For most of its history as an independent country, Brazil saw Argentina as its chief rival and strategic threat. That changed with the formation of Mercosur, an incipient customs union also involving Paraguay and Uruguay. This has allowed Brazil to shift much of its army from its southern border to the north-western jungles near Colombia and Peru.
Brazil's sense of neighbourhood may be widening. Yet argues Mr Valladão, Brazil has not de cided what sort of neighbour to be. At times, it portrays itself as a team player. In theory, it negotiates on trade as a member of Mercosur. But Brazil also sees itself as a "whale", with the heft and appetite to act on its own. Mr Amorim's answer is that, in a world likely to be dominated by blocks, Brazil's best option is to co-operate as much as possible with its neighbours and other developing countries. Whales, he notes, "are gregarious animals.
One can infer from the text that
New Research Advances Voice Security Technology
ScienceDaily (Mar. 11, 2010) — Most people are familiar with security technology that scans a person's handprint or eye for identification purposes. Now, thanks in part to research from North Carolina State University, we are closer to practical technology that can test someone's voice to confirm their identity. "The big picture is speaker authentication by computer," says Dr. Robert Rodman, professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a new paper on the subject. "The acoustic parameters of the voice are affected by the shape of the vocal tract, and different people have different vocal tracts," Rodman explains. "This new research will help improve the speed of speech authentication, without sacrificing accuracy."
Rodman explains that speech authentication could have a host of applications in this age of heightened security and mobile electronics. "Potential users of this technology include government, financial, health-care and telecommunications industries," Rodman says, "for applications ranging from preventing ID theft and fraud to data protection."
Current computer models that are used to compare acoustic profiles, effectively evaluating whether a speaker is who he says he is, may take several seconds or more to process the information, which is still too long for the technology to gain widespread acceptance. "In order for this technology to gain traction among users," Rodman says, "the response time needs to improve without increasing the error rate."
To address this problem, Rodman and his fellow researchers modified existing computer models to streamline the authentication process so that it operates more efficiently. "This is part of the evolution of speech authentication software," Rodman says, "and it moves us closer to making this technology a practical, secure tool."
The research was co-authored by NC State's Rodman; Rahim Saeidi, Tomi Kinnunen and Pasi Franti of the University of Joensuu in Finland; and Hamid Reza Sadegh Mohammadi of the Iranian Academic Center for Education, Culture & Research.
The research, "Joint Frame and Gaussian Selection for Text Independent Speaker Verification", will be presented at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Dallas, March 14-19. The research was funded, in part, by the Centre for International Mobility.
NC State's Department of Computer Science is part of the university's College of Engineering.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100308102202.htm
“Current computer models […] may take several seconds or more to process the information, which is still too long for the technology to gain widespread acceptance.”
In this sentence, the relative pronoun which refers to the
Windows
By Scott Gilbertson November 19, 2008
Microsoft plans to offer Windows users a new antivirus
package designed to protect the OS from viruses, spyware,
rootkits and trojans. The new software is tentatively code-
named Morro, and will be available for free to Windows XP,
Vista and 7 users sometime in the second half of 2009.
The new software will reportedly use very minimal resources,
which means it should work well with older PCs. If fact,
Microsoft says Morro has been specially designed for older
PCs and low-spec machines popular in developing nations. In
addition to its minimal processor demands, Morro has been
developed to use very little bandwidth,making it ideal for those
without broadband connections.
Morro will replace Microsoft's current, paid service, Windows
Live One Care, which has been available on a subscription
basis for $50 per year.
While a free, antivirus solution that ships with Windows would
be a boon for the average user, it could also mean trouble for
third-party software solutions. Given that a bundled solution
could raise antitrust concerns and would no doubt see
competitors like McAfee and Grisoft reaching for the lawyers
Microsoft will be offering Morro as a separate download.
Assuming Morro can deliver decent security it should be a
welcome free addition to Windows, but we don't suggest
throwing away your third-party software just yet. Antivirus
software suites will likely continue to hold an edge over Morro
by offering additional handy tools like password managers,
identity theft protection and browser-based phishing
protection.
Still, if you've been running Windows with no antivirus software
at all,Morrowill no doubt be better than nothing, and it's hard to
argue with free.
Windows
By Scott Gilbertson November 19, 2008
Microsoft plans to offer Windows users a new antivirus
package designed to protect the OS from viruses, spyware,
rootkits and trojans. The new software is tentatively code-
named Morro, and will be available for free to Windows XP,
Vista and 7 users sometime in the second half of 2009.
The new software will reportedly use very minimal resources,
which means it should work well with older PCs. If fact,
Microsoft says Morro has been specially designed for older
PCs and low-spec machines popular in developing nations. In
addition to its minimal processor demands, Morro has been
developed to use very little bandwidth,making it ideal for those
without broadband connections.
Morro will replace Microsoft's current, paid service, Windows
Live One Care, which has been available on a subscription
basis for $50 per year.
While a free, antivirus solution that ships with Windows would
be a boon for the average user, it could also mean trouble for
third-party software solutions. Given that a bundled solution
could raise antitrust concerns and would no doubt see
competitors like McAfee and Grisoft reaching for the lawyers
Microsoft will be offering Morro as a separate download.
Assuming Morro can deliver decent security it should be a
welcome free addition to Windows, but we don't suggest
throwing away your third-party software just yet. Antivirus
software suites will likely continue to hold an edge over Morro
by offering additional handy tools like password managers,
identity theft protection and browser-based phishing
protection.
Still, if you've been running Windows with no antivirus software
at all,Morrowill no doubt be better than nothing, and it's hard to
argue with free.
The lights went ____ twice when I was ____ the computer this morning, so I had to stop working ____ the project. Well, that's why I'ml ate.
Windows
By Scott Gilbertson November 19, 2008
Microsoft plans to offer Windows users a new antivirus
package designed to protect the OS from viruses, spyware,
rootkits and trojans. The new software is tentatively code-
named Morro, and will be available for free to Windows XP,
Vista and 7 users sometime in the second half of 2009.
The new software will reportedly use very minimal resources,
which means it should work well with older PCs. If fact,
Microsoft says Morro has been specially designed for older
PCs and low-spec machines popular in developing nations. In
addition to its minimal processor demands, Morro has been
developed to use very little bandwidth,making it ideal for those
without broadband connections.
Morro will replace Microsoft's current, paid service, Windows
Live One Care, which has been available on a subscription
basis for $50 per year.
While a free, antivirus solution that ships with Windows would
be a boon for the average user, it could also mean trouble for
third-party software solutions. Given that a bundled solution
could raise antitrust concerns and would no doubt see
competitors like McAfee and Grisoft reaching for the lawyers
Microsoft will be offering Morro as a separate download.
Assuming Morro can deliver decent security it should be a
welcome free addition to Windows, but we don't suggest
throwing away your third-party software just yet. Antivirus
software suites will likely continue to hold an edge over Morro
by offering additional handy tools like password managers,
identity theft protection and browser-based phishing
protection.
Still, if you've been running Windows with no antivirus software
at all,Morrowill no doubt be better than nothing, and it's hard to
argue with free.
Windows
By Scott Gilbertson November 19, 2008
Microsoft plans to offer Windows users a new antivirus
package designed to protect the OS from viruses, spyware,
rootkits and trojans. The new software is tentatively code-
named Morro, and will be available for free to Windows XP,
Vista and 7 users sometime in the second half of 2009.
The new software will reportedly use very minimal resources,
which means it should work well with older PCs. If fact,
Microsoft says Morro has been specially designed for older
PCs and low-spec machines popular in developing nations. In
addition to its minimal processor demands, Morro has been
developed to use very little bandwidth,making it ideal for those
without broadband connections.
Morro will replace Microsoft's current, paid service, Windows
Live One Care, which has been available on a subscription
basis for $50 per year.
While a free, antivirus solution that ships with Windows would
be a boon for the average user, it could also mean trouble for
third-party software solutions. Given that a bundled solution
could raise antitrust concerns and would no doubt see
competitors like McAfee and Grisoft reaching for the lawyers
Microsoft will be offering Morro as a separate download.
Assuming Morro can deliver decent security it should be a
welcome free addition to Windows, but we don't suggest
throwing away your third-party software just yet. Antivirus
software suites will likely continue to hold an edge over Morro
by offering additional handy tools like password managers,
identity theft protection and browser-based phishing
protection.
Still, if you've been running Windows with no antivirus software
at all,Morrowill no doubt be better than nothing, and it's hard to
argue with free.