Reliable evaluation of stress-strain characteristics can be done only in the laboratory where boundary conditions with respect to stress and strain can be controlled. The most popular laboratory equipment is a triaxial apparatus. Unfortunately, standard version of triaxial apparatus can reliable measure strain not smaller than 0.1 %. Such accuracy does not allow to determine stiffness referred to strain range most often mobilized in situ i.e. 10-3 ÷ 10-1%, in which stiffness distribution is highly nonlinear. In order to overcome this problem fundamental modifications of standard triaxial apparatus should be done. The first one concerns construction of the cell. The second refers to method of measurement of vertical and horizontal deformation of a specimen. The paper compares three versions of triaxial equipment i.e. standard cell, the modified one and the cell with system of internal measurement of deformation. The comparison was made with respect to capability of stiffness measurement in strain range relevant for typical geotechnical applications. Examples of some test results are given, which are to illustrate an universal potential of the laboratory triaxial apparatus with proximity transducers capable to trace stress-strain response of soil in a reliable way.

In total, 8511 amphipods of 12 species caught in Admiralty Bay were examined for the presence of acanthocephalans using them as intermediate hosts. Only 27 specimens of eight species were infected (total prevalence 0.32%). Acanthellae and cystacanths of four species using fishes as either definitive or paratenic hosts were found. Normally, single parasites occurred; in one case two acanthocephalans were present in one specimen of Bovallia gigantea. This host species was the most strongly infected, with the prevalence 3.41%. Six other amphipod species were infected with the prevalence 0.08-0.66%. One of two Jassa ingens examined was also infected. Over 50% of acanthocephalans belonged to one echinorhynchid species maturing in fishes, Aspersentis megarhynchus, which occurred in five host species of four amphipod families, B. gigantea, Gondogeneia antarctica, J. ingens, Hippomedon kergueleni and Orchomenella rotundi-frons. Two polymorphid species maturing in seals, Corynosoma hamanni and C. pseudohamanni, were found in a single host species each, Prostebbingia brevicornis and Cheirimedon femoratus, respectively. Three parasite species mentioned occurred exclusively in sublittoral host species, at the depth 0-30 m. The third polymorphid species, C. bullosum, was the only species occurring in the amphipod, Waldeckia obesa, living in the deeper water (infected specimen was caught at the depth 60 m), but was found also in B. gigantea. Differences between infections of Amphipoda and fishes with echinorhynchids and polymorphids are discussed.

Research work on the design of robust multimodal speech recognition systems making use of acoustic and visual cues, extracted using the relatively noise robust alternate speech sensors is gaining interest in recent times among the speech processing research fraternity. The primary objective of this work is to study the exclusive influence of Lombard effect on the automatic recognition of the confusable syllabic consonant-vowel units of Hindi language, as a step towards building robust multimodal ASR systems in adverse environments in the context of Indian languages which are syllabic in nature. The dataset for this work comprises the confusable 145 consonant-vowel (CV) syllabic units of Hindi language recorded simultaneously using three modalities that capture the acoustic and visual speech cues, namely normal acoustic microphone (NM), throat microphone (TM) and a camera that captures the associated lip movements. The Lombard effect is induced by feeding crowd noise into the speaker’s headphone while recording. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models are built to categorise the CV units based on their place of articulation (POA), manner of articulation (MOA), and vowels (under clean and Lombard conditions). For validation purpose, corresponding Hidden Markov Models (HMM) are also built and tested. Unimodal Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems built using each of the three speech cues from Lombard speech show a loss in recognition of MOA and vowels while POA gets a boost in all the systems due to Lombard effect. Combining the three complimentary speech cues to build bimodal and trimodal ASR systems shows that the recognition loss due to Lombard effect for MOA and vowels reduces compared to the unimodal systems, while the POA recognition is still better due to Lombard effect. A bimodal system is proposed using only alternate acoustic and visual cues which gives a better discrimination of the place and manner of articulation than even standard ASR system. Among the multimodal ASR systems studied, the proposed trimodal system based on Lombard speech gives the best recognition accuracy of 98%, 95%, and 76% for the vowels, MOA and POA, respectively, with an average improvement of 36% over the unimodal ASR systems and 9% improvement over the bimodal ASR systems.