A Large-Scale Evaluation of Acoustic and Subjective Music Similarity Measures

Subjective similarity between musical pieces and artists is an elusive concept, but one that music be pursued in support of applications to provide automatic organization of large music collections. In this paper, we examine both acoustic and subjective approaches for calculating similarity between artists, comapring their performance on a common database of 400 popular artists. Specifically, we evaluate acoustic techniques based on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and an intermediate `anchor space' of genre classification, and subjective techniques which use data from The All Music Guide, from a survey, from playlists and personal collections, and from web-text mining. We find the following: (1) Acoustic-base measures can acheive agreement with ground truth data that is at least comparable to the internal agreement between different subjective sources. However, we observe significant differences between suerficially similar distribution modeling and comparison techniques. (2) Subjective measures from diverse sources show reasonable agreement, with the measure derived from co-occurrence in personal music collections being the most reliable overall. (3) Our methodology for large-scale cross-site music similarity evaluations is practical and convenient, yielding directly comparable numbers for different approaches. In particular, we hope that for out information-retrieval-based approach to scoring similarity measures, our paradigm of sharing common feature representations, and even our particular dataset of features for 400 artists, will be useful to other researchers

Exploring potential differential relationships between social anxiety and emotional eating amongst normative vs. academically gifted students

The social environment, which plays a critical role, is an important factor for self-development during adolescence. On the other hand, gifted adolescents may be relatively at risk in social relationships. Therefore, the first objective of the current research is to examine the relationship between social anxiety and emotional eating in normative adolescents. The second objective is to examine whether this relationship would be different for academically gifted adolescents. For both groups, three constructs of social anxiety were examined: fear of negative evaluation, social avoidance and distress for new or unfamiliar situations, and social avoidance and distress for general situations. In total, 429 Dutch high school students completed measures of emotional eating and social anxiety (normative = 246, gifted = 83). The results from a confirmatory factor analysis showed that for normative adolescents only fear of negative evaluation was positively related to emotional eating (p <.001). For academically gifted adolescents, there were no significant relationships between any of the three constructs of social anxiety and emotional eating. Results and implications for future research directions are discussed. Future research projects would benefit from the exploration and addition of coping mechanisms to such studies. This could allow researchers to investigate the potential mediational effects of coping strategies between anxiety and emotional eating in these two groups

Association study of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) variants and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

IntroductionIdiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a chronic interstitial pneumonia marked by progressive lung fibrosis and a poor prognosis. Recent studies have highlighted the potential role of infection in the pathogenesis of IPF and a prior association of theHLA-DQB1gene with idiopathic fibrotic interstitial pneumonia (including IPF) has been reported. Due to the important role that the Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) region plays in the immune response, here we evaluated if HLA genetic variation was associated specifically with IPF risk.MethodsWe performed a meta-analysis of associations of the HLA region with IPF risk in individuals of European ancestry from seven independent case-control studies of IPF (comprising a total of 5159 cases and 27 459 controls, including the prior study of fibrotic interstitial pneumonia). Single nucleotide polymorphisms, classical HLA alleles and amino acids were analysed and signals meeting a region-wide association thresholdp&lt;4.5×10−4and a posterior probability of replication &gt;90% were considered significant. We sought to replicate the previously reportedHLA-DQB1association in the subset of studies independent of the original report.ResultsThe meta-analysis of all seven studies identified four significant independent single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with IPF risk. However, none met the posterior probability for replication criterion. TheHLA-DQB1association was not replicated in the independent IPF studies.ConclusionVariation in the HLA region was not consistently associated with risk in studies of IPF. However, this does not preclude the possibility that other genomic regions linked to the immune response may be involved in the aetiology of IPF