Two Evenings of Performance - Hearing the Unheard: Music by Mazzoli, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Coleridge-Taylor, and Lili Boulanger; Joys of Spring: Music by Paris-Carter, Bach, and Dvorak

The program of my first senior concert formed almost accidentally, yet a common and important thread quickly emerged. Few, if any, of the names or the pieces on the program have entered into the canon of classical music. With compositions by Missy Mazzoli, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and Lili Boulanger, I was able to introduce an audience to people who are not the status quo dead cishet (cisgender, heterosexual) white male composer. The performance of the music of such artists was inspired by an urgency that I felt since arriving at Bard, and that became an international necessity during the 2020 covid lockdown. This has been reflected in many aspects of my academic and musical life at Bard, from taking a course on gender and sexuality in Italian opera, to helping to form a concert of Baroque music by women composers. While the impulses behind this concert may seem progressive, from the moment I had any ideas about a potential music senior project, I really wanted one of my performances to be a standard, conservative violin recital, wearing fancy clothes and performing with an accompanist. I achieved that, and was quite proud of how it went. Especially after performances, I tend to be displeased with how I sounded and fixate on the negative aspects of my playing. Luckily, this performance was one of very few that I felt really happy with, perhaps due to a large, supportive audience, or because of the interesting and unique repertoire on the program. For my second senior concert, I wanted to find a way to combine all aspects of my undergraduate music studies; specifically, violin performance, conducting, Baroque performance, and the necessity to showcase works by such composers. Working with James Bagwell, I learned Dvorak’s Wind Serenade, Op. 44, and working with Erica Kiesewetter, Renée Louprette, and Marka Gustavsson, I prepared J.S. Bach’s E Major Violin Concerto, BWV 1042. Both of these pieces, however, utilized completely separate musical forces—one solely strings, and one solely winds, plus a cello and a bass—so I wanted to find a piece that somehow combined all the moving parts. We were privileged to premiere Reef (Bird’s Eye) by Sasha Paris-Carter, who currently studies composition at Oberlin Conservatory. They graciously arranged and rewrote the piece for the forces that I had, and added a solo violin part that I could lead the orchestra from. Through three intense months of outreach, I was able to recruit seventeen really wonderful musicians to perform with me. Every corner of the College was represented, from Conservatory students, to fellow music seniors, to community members, to graduate students. This concert would not have been successful without their generous time and musicianship, and I am very grateful to all of them. Logistically, this was a huge concert to accomplish, especially in terms of recruitment, and scheduling rehearsals and spaces. I was also out for a few days with covid the week before the concert. However, I think it was very successful, and I look forward to organizing and forming more orchestras to work with in the future

Rational Dual Certificates for Weighted Sums-of-Squares Polynomials with Boundable Bit Size

In (Davis and Papp, 2022), the authors introduced the concept of dual certificates of sum-of-squares polynomials, which are vectors from the dual cone of the cone of weighted sums of squares (WSOS) polynomials that can be interpreted as WSOS nonnegativity certificates. This initial theoretical work showed that for every polynomial in the interior of a WSOS cone, there exists a rational dual certificate proving that the polynomial is WSOS. In this article, we analyze the complexity of rational dual certificates of WSOS polynomials by bounding the bit sizes of integer dual certificates as a function of parameters such as the degree and the number of variables of the polynomials, or their distance from the boundary of the cone. After providing a general bound, we explore a number of special cases, such as univariate polynomials nonnegative over the real line or a bounded interval, represented in different commonly used bases. We also provide an algorithm which runs in rational arithmetic and computes a rational certificate with boundable bit size for a WSOS lower bound of the input polynomial.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

A dohányzási szokásokat befolyásoló környezeti tényezők egy- és kétpetéjű ikrek körében

Introduction: Smoking habits are influenced by environmental (family, friends) and psychologic factors. Aim: To investigate environmental factors which influence the smoking habits of monozygotic and dizygotic twins. Method: 45 monozygotic and 23 dizygotic twin pairs (age 35+/-16 years) completed a questionnaire. Results: Maternal non-smoking decreases the risk of smoking of the twin children by 53%, while this effect accounts for 49% by the father. Dizygotic twins are more influenced by parents (70%) than monozygotics (31-36%). If the twin or non-twin sibling does not smoke, the risk that the twin individual starts smoking, is decreased by 86% both in monozygotic and dizygotic twins. If an individual smoking is present in the fraternity and he or she does not attempt to quit, the risk of smoking increases 8.3-fold. The role of fraternity is more important in males and youth. Conclusions: The parents' and the siblings' exemplary behaviour helps to avoid smoking initiation of young twins. Orv. Hetil., 2013, 154, 978-984

Inhibition of DNA methyltransferase leads to increased genomic 5-hydroxymethylcytosine levels in hematopoietic cells.

5-Hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) is produced from 5-methylcytosine (5mC) by Ten-eleven translocation (TET) dioxygenases. The epigenetic modification 5hmC has crucial roles in both cellular development and differentiation. The 5hmC level is particularly high in the brain. While 5mC is generally associated with gene silencing/reduced expression, 5hmC is a more permissive epigenetic mark. To understand its physiological function, an easy and accurate quantification method is required. Here, we have developed a novel LC-MS/MS-based approach to quantify both genomic 5mC and 5hmC contents. The method is based on the liberation of nucleobases by formic acid. Applying this method, we characterized the levels of DNA methylation and hydroxymethylation in mouse brain and liver, primary hepatocytes, and various cell lines. Using this approach, we confirm that the treatment of different cell lines with the DNA methyltransferase inhibitor 5-aza-2\u27-deoxycytidine leads to a decrease in 5mC content. This decrease was accompanied by an increase in 5hmC levels in cell lines of hematopoietic origin. Finally, we showed that ascorbate elevates the levels of 5hmC and augments the effect of 5-aza-2\u27-deoxycytidine without significantly influencing 5mC levels

Reconstruction of human thorax from CT images

3D printing, as a rapid prototyping method is become more common nowadays world widely, including medicine too. The purpose of this article is to reveal the potential of using 3D printing in medicine, especially with a specific example of making a human thorax model from the very beginning of imaging diagnose to the physical model. There will be shown in details how the model of bones, lungs and heart had been created. The circumstances of the 3D printing will be discussed too

Evolution of giant molecular clouds across cosmic time

Giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are well studied in the local Universe, however, exactly how their properties vary during galaxy evolution is poorly understood due to challenging resolution requirements, both observational and computational. We present the first time-dependent analysis of GMCs in a Milky Way-like galaxy and an Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC)-like dwarf galaxy of the FIRE-2 (Feedback In Realistic Environments) simulation suite, which have sufficient resolution to predict the bulk properties of GMCs in cosmological galaxy formation self-consistently. We show explicitly that the majority of star formation outside the galactic centre occurs within self-gravitating gas structures that have properties consistent with observed bound GMCs. We find that the typical cloud bulk properties such as mass and surface density do not vary more than a factor of 2 in any systematic way after the first Gyr of cosmic evolution within a given galaxy from its progenitor. While the median properties are constant, the tails of the distributions can briefly undergo drastic changes, which can produce very massive and dense self-gravitating gas clouds. Once the galaxy forms, we identify only two systematic trends in bulk properties over cosmic time: a steady increase in metallicity produced by previous stellar populations and a weak decrease in bulk cloud temperatures. With the exception of metallicity, we find no significant differences in cloud properties between the Milky Way-like and dwarf galaxies. These results have important implications for cosmological star and star cluster formation and put especially strong constraints on theories relating the stellar initial mass function to cloud properties

Live Fast, Die Young: GMC lifetimes in the FIRE cosmological simulations of Milky Way-mass galaxies

We present the first measurement of the lifetimes of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in cosmological simulations at z = 0, using the Latte suite of FIRE-2 simulations of Milky Way (MW) mass galaxies. We track GMCs with total gas mass ≳10⁵ M⊙ at high spatial (∼1 pc), mass (7100 M⊙), and temporal (1 Myr) resolution. Our simulated GMCs are consistent with the distribution of masses for massive GMCs in the MW and nearby galaxies. We find GMC lifetimes of 5–7 Myr, or 1–2 freefall times, on average, with less than 2 per cent of clouds living longer than 20 Myr. We find decreasing GMC lifetimes with increasing virial parameter, and weakly increasing GMC lifetimes with galactocentric radius, implying that environment affects the evolutionary cycle of GMCs. However, our GMC lifetimes show no systematic dependence on GMC mass or amount of star formation. These results are broadly consistent with inferences from the literature and provide an initial investigation into ultimately understanding the physical processes that govern GMC lifetimes in a cosmological setting