Opposition to a Neoclassical Scenario: Hip hop in Contemporary Jazz

This project takes up the subject of contemporary jazz musicians who use influences from hip hop music to create new jazz compositions. This musical practice is part of a larger movement in jazz to integrate modern popular culture in a jazz setting; in part as a reaction to a conservative jazz movement that emerged in the 1980s and 90s. During the 1980s and 90s a group of young jazz musicians and critics, often referred to as neoclassicists, established themselves as part of a new iteration of jazz music based upon a conservative understanding of what constitutes the “jazz tradition.” The rigid adherence of neoclassicists to conventional jazz styles served an overall ideology of “respectability politics.” Hip hop-inflected jazz is one specific manifestation of a modern movement to include more recent popular music in the genre. The importance of this movement resides in its distinctive cultural and political dimensions. In both its aesthetic and conceptual elements, hip hop-based jazz presents itself as a product of contemporary African American intellectual thought. As a genre, hip hop-based jazz has received criticisms for its perceived accessibility and commercialism, and for whether it serves the perceived cultural prestige that neoclassicists associate with the music. Despite this criticism, many jazz musicians are establishing hip hop-based jazz as a new genre that has helped to democratize and politicize the genre based upon shared cultures, a reintroduction of dance sensibilities, and through emulation of music created through new technologies of production

SWITCHGRASS YIELD AND QUALITY WITH MULTIPLE FERTILIZER APPLICATIONS AND HARVEST DATES

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.) is an important native warm-season grass for biomass and forage production in the U.S. This research determined the effect of fertilizer type (conventional, manure, and biosolids) and rate on switchgrass biomass yield and forage quality. Fertilizers were added at 0, 33, 67, 100, and 134 kg N ha-1 on established stands of ‘Kanlow’ switchgrass in three northeastern Kentucky counties. Soils across sites ranged from recently cleared forestland (low pH, P, and K) to productive cropland (high pH, P and K). Stands were sampled for forage nutritive value in June, simulating a hay harvest. Nutritive value and biomass yield were sampled in November and March. Results showed a harvest date effect for mean crude protein (CP) of 8.31% in June and 1.16% November and March. There was also a harvest effect for biomass with a mean yield of all harvests of 16.6 MT ha-1 but a N response at only one site. In conclusion, this study suggested that switchgrass may produce adequate nutritive value for dry beef cows in June and fertilizer type and rate may have a limited effect on biomass yields

Comparison of Blood and Brain Mercury Levels in Infant Monkeys Exposed to Methylmercury or Vaccines Containing Thimerosal

Thimerosal is a preservative that has been used in manufacturing vaccines since the 1930s. Reports have indicated that infants can receive ethylmercury (in the form of thimerosal) at or above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines for methylmercury exposure, depending on the exact vaccinations, schedule, and size of the infant. In this study we compared the systemic disposition and brain distribution of total and inorganic mercury in infant monkeys after thimerosal exposure with those exposed to MeHg. Monkeys were exposed to MeHg (via oral gavage) or vaccines containing thimerosal (via intramuscular injection) at birth and 1, 2, and 3 weeks of age. Total blood Hg levels were determined 2, 4, and 7 days after each exposure. Total and inorganic brain Hg levels were assessed 2, 4, 7, or 28 days after the last exposure. The initial and terminal half-life of Hg in blood after thimerosal exposure was 2.1 and 8.6 days, respectively, which are significantly shorter than the elimination half-life of Hg after MeHg exposure at 21.5 days. Brain concentrations of total Hg were significantly lower by approximately 3-fold for the thimerosal-exposed monkeys when compared with the MeHg infants, whereas the average brain-to-blood concentration ratio was slightly higher for the thimerosal-exposed monkeys (3.5 ± 0.5 vs. 2.5 ± 0.3). A higher percentage of the total Hg in the brain was in the form of inorganic Hg for the thimerosal-exposed monkeys (34% vs. 7%). The results indicate that MeHg is not a suitable reference for risk assessment from exposure to thimerosal-derived Hg. Knowledge of the toxicokinetics and developmental toxicity of thimerosal is needed to afford a meaningful assessment of the developmental effects of thimerosal-containing vaccines

Fan-Slicer: A Pycuda Package for Fast Reslicing of Ultrasound Shaped Planes

Fan-Slicer (https://github.com/UCL/fan-slicer) is a Python package that enables the fast sampling (slicing) of 2D ultrasound-shaped images from a 3D volume. To increase sampling speed, CUDA kernel functions are used in conjunction with the Pycuda package. The main features include functions to generate images from both 3D surface models and 3D volumes. Additionally, the package also allows for the sampling of images from curvilinear (fan shaped planes) and linear (rectangle shaped planes) ultrasound transducers. Potential uses of Fan-slicer include the generation of large datasets of 2D images from 3D volumes and the simulation of intra-operative data among others

The Surface Morphology of Normal and Atherosclerotic Coronary Arteries in Male Macaca Fascicularis and the Effect of Coronary Angiography

Selective coronary angiography is one of the procedures used frequently in the diagnosis and management of coronary artery disease. Macaca fascicularis monkeys were used to study the effects of coronary angiography on coronary artery surface morphology. Fourteen M. fascicularis were fed either an atherogenic diet (0.34 mg of cholesterol/kcal and 40 to 43% of the calories as fat) for six to nine months or a control diet. For six of these animals the Judkin method of selective left coronary angiography was done 24 h prior to necropsy. The ascending aorta, right coronary artery, left circumflex (LCX), left anterior descending (LAD) and left main (LM) coronary arteries were examined using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The animals fed an atherogenic diet had 27% of the ascending aorta and 7% of the coronary arteries covered with raised lesions. The surface of these coronary arteries differed from those of animals fed a control diet in that the surface appeared smoother and often had numerous adherent leukocytes. The animals undergoing coronary angiography had 25% of the ascending aorta and 10% of the LM surface injured by the catheter. These areas were denuded of endothelium and covered with adherent platelets. There were no morphologic changes observed by SEM following angiography within the LCX or LAD arteries. Thus even in a setting of hypercholesterolemia exposure to contrast media during the coronary angiography procedure did not lead to surface alterations

Large scale simulation of labeled intraoperative scenes in unity

PURPOSE: The use of synthetic or simulated data has the potential to greatly improve the availability and volume of training data for image guided surgery and other medical applications, where access to real-life training data is limited. METHODS: By using the Unity game engine, complex intraoperative scenes can be simulated. The Unity Perception package allows for randomisation of paremeters within the scene, and automatic labelling, to make simulating large data sets a trivial operation. In this work, the approach has been prototyped for liver segmentation from laparoscopic video images. 50,000 simulated images were used to train a U-Net, without the need for any manual labelling. The use of simulated data was compared against a model trained with 950 manually labelled laparoscopic images. RESULTS: When evaluated on data from 10 separate patients, synthetic data outperformed real data in 4 out of 10 cases. Average DICE scores across the 10 cases were 0.59 (synthetic data), 0.64 (real data) and 0.75 (both synthetic and real data). CONCLUSION: Synthetic data generated using this method is able to make valid inferences on real data, with average performance slightly below models trained on real data. The use of the simulated data for pre-training boosts model performance, when compared with training on real data only

Training and transfer of mnemonic skills in children\u27s paired-associate and serial recall.

Dept. of Psychology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1973 .C64. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-13, Section: A. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1973