Systematic review of the efficacy and safety of using mesh in surgery for uterine or vaginal vault prolapse

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comPeer reviewedPostprin

Deliberate paradigm shift in research in rare neurodevelopmental disorders

Diagnosis and management of children with rare neurodevelopmental disorders (RNDDs) are complex. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to rethink the research activities critical to improve our understanding and treatment of RNDDs, such as creating large international registries and developing natural history studies. In this communication, we reflect on our latest effort in conducting research remotely while providing support, education and feedback to families affected by a specific RNDD. Specifically, we advocate for a deliberate paradigm shift towards virtual family meetings as ecological platforms to enroll and assess individuals with rare disorders. Herein, we demonstrate that such a shift is crucial to substantially increasing geographical and age range coverage, which are essential for capturing the phenotypic variations in RNDDs. Finally, we call on the community to invest in building integrated technological platforms necessary for effective remote research activities, through standardization, collaboration and training

Encoding Musical Performances

The musical performance of a score is a domain rarely addressed in a reasonable level of detail by current digital music editions. A main reason for this may be a lack of suitable data formats that are capable of encoding more than ambiguous performance symbols or rather technical measurement series. The Music Performance Markup format is a recent development that fills this gap. This workshop gives a practical introduction to the format. The core software tool to create performance encodings is MPM Toolbox. Participants familiarise themselves with it during the course of the workshop, have the opportunity to experiment and create their own performance encodings, and give feedback that will motivate future development

Optical Music Recognition Workflow for Neume Notation and its Encoding & The Art of Teaching Computers

Closing keynote of the Music Encoding Conference 2022

A Notation-Free Approach to Encoding Commatic Drifts in Just Intonation

Musics in just intonation pose a wide number of challenges to encoding but perhaps none more imposing than their potential to freely drift through rational pitch space by minute intervals. Though such commatic drifts—whether Pythagorean, syntonic, septimal, or otherwise—are all too often framed as ‘problems’ inherent to rational tuning systems, the study of musics in which they are used as a compositional resource motivates a methodology that can sensibly account for them. This paper accordingly presents a pragmatic approach to encoding commatic drifts in just intonation deliberately divorced from any particular notation system and instead based on tracking changes both to and relative to (not necessarily sounded) ‘1/1’ reference fundamentals. Notably, this approach helps facilitate understandings of commatic drifts that can be obscured by compromises inherent to notation systems

The mei-friend Web Application: Editing MEI in the Browser

mei-friend is a ‘last mile’ editor for MEI-encodings intended to alleviate the common task of cleaning up encodings generated via optical music recognition, or via conversion from other formats. The open-source tool, building on the earlier mei-tools-atom codebase, was first presented to the MEI community at MEC ‘21, and has received more than 500 downloads, demonstrating the demand for interactive MEI editing. Among the feedback we received at this presentation were requests to port the tool, which was implemented as a plugin package for the Atom text editor, to work in a generic Web browser environment; while Atom’s architecture is already built on a Chromium (browser) back-end, it is somewhat slow to use, and the installation process and requirement for a separate application may be off-putting to less technically-minded users. Here, we are pleased to present mei-friend in its new guise as a full-featured, cross-browser compatible Web application, with optimized performance and an extended set of features

Proposal to Adopt MEI for Encoding Traditional Japanese Music Scores

Encoding of western music notation is being standardized as a result of the dedicated work of the MEI and MusicXML communities. However, there is no machine-readable format for encoding traditional Japanese musical notation. This short paper discusses the use of MEI to encode traditional Japanese musical notation

Joseph Haydn Werke Metadata: MEI Way

The work of the Joseph Haydn Institute has been well-known in eighteenth-century studies and beyond since publishing the first four volumes of the Joseph Haydn Werke in 1958. As with any Gesamtausgabe undertaking, sources occupy a central role, and with them come massive amounts of data. Naturally, compilation and organization of the metadata occurred over the life of this project, with digitization only a comparatively recent focus. Multiple factors led to the development of an idiomatic schema. Inasmuch as this system served immediate needs and created a foundation for content findability, it created limitations in accessibility, interoperability, and reusability—all desirable or essential qualities for the online Joseph Haydn Portal. It creates a distinct set of challenges for creating a digital Werkverzeichnis within the portal, the most pressing of which is transforming data into a standardized format enabled for the necessary qualities. This poster provides an overview of this process using file samples, concordances for terms and structure, and presents the challenges involved in a project of this size, and the realities of planning the project life cycle

Kinetic consequences of the endogenous ligand to molybdenum in the DMSO reductase family: a case study with periplasmic nitrate reductase

The molybdopterin enzyme family catalyzes a variety of substrates and plays a critical role in the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, arsenic, and selenium. The dimethyl sulfoxide reductase (DMSOR) subfamily is the most diverse family of molybdopterin enzymes and the members of this family catalyze a myriad of reactions that are important in microbial life processes. Enzymes in the DMSOR family can transform multiple substrates; however, quantitative information about the substrate preference is sparse, and, more importantly, the reasons for the substrate selectivity are not clear. Molybdenum coordination has long been proposed to impact the catalytic activity of the enzyme. Specifically, the molybdenum-coordinating residue may tune substrate preference. As such, molybdopterin enzyme periplasmic nitrate reductase (Nap) is utilized as a vehicle to understand the substrate preference and delineate the kinetic underpinning of the differences imposed by exchanging the molybdenum ligands. To this end, NapA from Campylobacter jejuni has been heterologously overexpressed, and a series of variants, where the molybdenum coordinating cysteine has been replaced with another amino acid, has been produced. The kinetic properties of these variants are discussed and compared with those of the native enzyme, providing quantitative information to understand the function of the molybdenum-coordinating residue

Mysterium: A Corpus of Alexander Scriabin's Music for Solo Piano

A new digital encoding of 207 works by Alexander Scriabin is reported. The corpus includes all of Scriabin’s works for solo piano with an opus number. Each work is in the **kern format, having first been encoded into Finale, exported to a MusicXML file, and then converted using the musicxml2hum command. The corpus’s content and method of encoding are detailed, as well as some complications of the encoding process