Rahvapillipärandi säilitamine Eestis ja välismaal

By the middle of the 20th century, old folk musical instruments had disappeared from Estonian culture. Musicians played modern internationally widespread instruments, especially the accordion and the guitar. The article discusses the return of old folk musical instruments, especially the Estonian kannel (plucked Baltic psaltery), bagpipe, and bowed lyre. The revival of these traditions has been more marked in Estonia, due to the contribution from music schools and museums; yet similar processes can also be detected among diaspora Estonians. Initiators and key persons enthused by the lost culture of their ancestors have played an important role on both sides. Interest in these old instruments is a manifestation of people’s resistance to the homogeneity of the modern society. Urbanization, international contacts, and modern technology led to the fading popularity of folk music in the past century, yet the same factors have recently proven important in reviving traditions

Magnetic Excitations in quasi two-dimensional Spin-Peierls Systems

A study is presented of a two-dimensional frustrated and dimerized quantum spin-system which models the effect of inter-chain coupling in a spin-Peierls compound. Employing a bond-boson method to account for quantum disorder in the ground state the elementary excitations are evaluated in terms of gapful triplet modes. Results for the ground state energy and the spin gap are discussed. The triplet dispersion is found to be in excellent agreement with inelastic neutron scattering data in the dimerized phase of the spin-Peierls compound CuGeO_3. Moreover, consistent with these neutron scattering experiments, the low-temperature dynamic structure factor exhibits a high-energy continuum split off from the elementary triplet mode.Comment: 8 pages, Revtex, 8 eps-figure

Refinement of Light-Responsive Transcript Lists Using Rice Oligonucleotide Arrays: Evaluation of Gene-Redundancy

Studies of gene function are often hampered by gene-redundancy, especially in organisms with large genomes such as rice (Oryza sativa). We present an approach for using transcriptomics data to focus functional studies and address redundancy. To this end, we have constructed and validated an inexpensive and publicly available rice oligonucleotide near-whole genome array, called the rice NSF45K array. We generated expression profiles for light- vs. dark-grown rice leaf tissue and validated the biological significance of the data by analyzing sources of variation and confirming expression trends with reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. We examined trends in the data by evaluating enrichment of gene ontology terms at multiple false discovery rate thresholds. To compare data generated with the NSF45K array with published results, we developed publicly available, web-based tools (www.ricearray.org). The Oligo and EST Anatomy Viewer enables visualization of EST-based expression profiling data for all genes on the array. The Rice Multi-platform Microarray Search Tool facilitates comparison of gene expression profiles across multiple rice microarray platforms. Finally, we incorporated gene expression and biochemical pathway data to reduce the number of candidate gene products putatively participating in the eight steps of the photorespiration pathway from 52 to 10, based on expression levels of putatively functionally redundant genes. We confirmed the efficacy of this method to cope with redundancy by correctly predicting participation in photorespiration of a gene with five paralogs. Applying these methods will accelerate rice functional genomics

An improved analysis of GW150914 using a fully spin-precessing waveform model

This paper presents updated estimates of source parameters for GW150914, a binary black-hole coalescence event detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) on September 14, 2015 [1]. Reference presented parameter estimation [2] of the source using a 13-dimensional, phenomenological precessing-spin model (precessing IMRPhenom) and a 11-dimensional nonprecessing effective-one-body (EOB) model calibrated to numerical-relativity simulations, which forces spin alignment (nonprecessing EOBNR). Here we present new results that include a 15-dimensional precessing-spin waveform model (precessing EOBNR) developed within the EOB formalism. We find good agreement with the parameters estimated previously [2], and we quote updated component masses of $35^{+5}_{-3}\mathrm{M}_\odot$ and $30^{+3}_{-4}\mathrm{M}_\odot$ (where errors correspond to 90% symmetric credible intervals). We also present slightly tighter constraints on the dimensionless spin magnitudes of the two black holes, with a primary spin estimate $0.65$ and a secondary spin estimate $0.75$ at 90% probability. Reference [2] estimated the systematic parameter-extraction errors due to waveform-model uncertainty by combining the posterior probability densities of precessing IMRPhenom and nonprecessing EOBNR. Here we find that the two precessing-spin models are in closer agreement, suggesting that these systematic errors are smaller than previously quoted