Lifelong Influences of Being a Chorister: a Phenomenological Study

This thesis examines English choristers’ education based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with thirty people who attended a broad selection of English Choir Schools as choristers between 1940 and 2010, divided into three groups: 1) those in secondary or tertiary education; 2) those in work; 3) retired people. The value of traditional education is much debated, but by giving a detailed description, this phenomenological study has focused on providing a better basis for understanding the subject, and offers empirical evidence about how musical expertise is achieved. Choir schools claim to offer a solid training in choral singing, especially sight-reading and vocal proficiency, and in academic subjects, and that the regime they employ seems also to help the general development of the individual, especially where commitment and team spirit are concerned, as the majority of interviewees agreed. However, this way of life does not suit every child even if they enjoy singing, and this study has developed a further interpretation of its complexities. Almost every choir school with a sound reputation is also a boarding school, which can in some cases damage family ties and preclude a normal childhood, a sacrifice mentioned by many participants. Interviewees also generally found life hard during the transition to their next school and some even had no desire to return to a church environment because of the religious aspect, though they would return for the singing. I hope this study will contribute to educational research and practice in several ways, giving future researchers some useful guidelines. Perhaps the research outcomes can also inspire parents and more especially those who are directly involved with choristers’ education to consider the needs of the child alongside those of the school thus making the process more beneficial and at the same time helping to continue the tradition

The Evolution of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s Political Identity

The divide and rule policy adopted by the British India government, which had drive the British India society from religious complexity and social conflicted into even worse. With sectarian conflict in the British India and the invasion from the United Kingdom, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s initial reaction was to appeal solidarity and struggle for the independence of whole British Indian people. However, with the evolution of a series of events, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan had abandoned the original intention gradually, and had played a vital role in promoted the British India Islamic Nationalism among the British India Muslims eventually

Exploring the religious and spiritual trajectory of cathedral choristers in England

The present paper reports findings from interviews with thirty ex-choristers from cathedrals and collegiate chapels in England, aged from eighteen to eighty. These interviews explored choristers’ religious commitments before entering choir school and factors for staying with, leaving, or later returning to religious practice. The findings suggest that the attitudes to religion among ex-choristers mirror those of the wider population and confirms the trend that ex-choristers may be seeking spirituality but not religion. The study concludes that, although choristers are not invited into the spiritual community on a level that allows them to engage cognitively with organised religion, they remain open to its emotional connotations as expressed in music. They might, nonetheless, subsequently find faith if they get help to explore the meaning of liturgy and music within it. However, there have been accounts where this faith is forced upon them in a way that pushes them away

Human Pose Estimation using Global and Local Normalization

In this paper, we address the problem of estimating the positions of human joints, i.e., articulated pose estimation. Recent state-of-the-art solutions model two key issues, joint detection and spatial configuration refinement, together using convolutional neural networks. Our work mainly focuses on spatial configuration refinement by reducing variations of human poses statistically, which is motivated by the observation that the scattered distribution of the relative locations of joints e.g., the left wrist is distributed nearly uniformly in a circular area around the left shoulder) makes the learning of convolutional spatial models hard. We present a two-stage normalization scheme, human body normalization and limb normalization, to make the distribution of the relative joint locations compact, resulting in easier learning of convolutional spatial models and more accurate pose estimation. In addition, our empirical results show that incorporating multi-scale supervision and multi-scale fusion into the joint detection network is beneficial. Experiment results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the benchmarks.Comment: ICCV201

Spatio-temporal mapping of variation potentials in leaves of Helianthus annuus L. seedlings in situ using multi-electrode array.

Damaging thermal stimuli trigger long-lasting variation potentials (VPs) in higher plants. Owing to limitations in conventional plant electrophysiological recording techniques, recorded signals are composed of signals originating from all of the cells that are connected to an electrode. This limitation does not enable detailed spatio-temporal distributions of transmission and electrical activities in plants to be visualised. Multi-electrode array (MEA) enables the recording and imaging of dynamic spatio-temporal electrical activities in higher plants. Here, we used an 8 × 8 MEA with a polar distance of 450 μm to measure electrical activities from numerous cells simultaneously. The mapping of the data that were recorded from the MEA revealed the transfer mode of the thermally induced VPs in the leaves of Helianthus annuus L. seedlings in situ. These results suggest that MEA can enable recordings with high spatio-temporal resolution that facilitate the determination of the bioelectrical response mode of higher plants under stress

Quantum super-cavity with atomic mirrors

We study single-photon transport in an array of coupled microcavities where two two-level atomic systems are embedded in two separate cavities of the array. We find that a single-photon can be totally reflected by a single two-level system. However, two separate two-level systems can also create, between them, single-photon quasi-bound states. Therefore, a single two-level system in the cavity array can act as a mirror while a different type of cavity can be formed by using two two-level systems, acting as tunable "mirrors", inside two separate cavities in the array. In analogy with superlattices in solid state, we call this new "cavity inside a coupled-cavity array" a super-cavity. This supercavity is the quantum analog of Fabry-Perot interferometers. Moreover, we show that the physical properties of this quantum super-cavity can be adjusted by changing the frequencies of these two-level systems.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figure