The effect of background music on second-grade children's rhythmic and tonal pattern recognition

Thesis (D.M.A.)--Boston UniversityThe purpose of this study was to examine the effects of background music on second-grade students' rhythmic and tonal pattern recognition. As no locatable research has examined the effects of passive listening on the tonal and rhythmic pattern recognition skills of second-grade students, this investigation sought to answer the following research questions: 1) What is the extent ofthe relationship between exposure to repetitive background music and music pattern recognition scores among second-grade children; and 2) What is the extent ofthe relationship between musical preference and music pattern recognition scores among second-grade children? This study was conducted over a period of fourteen weeks. Sixty second-grade students comprised the sample used in this investigation. The participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the treatment group, which heard a continuous collection of classical background music every day for a total of sixty minutes per day, five days per week, and the control group, which received no treatment. The standardized test employed in this study was Edwin Gordon's Primary Measures ofMusic Audiation (PMMA), intended for children from kindergarten to grade 3. Additionally, a survey addressing the issue of preference was distributed at the end of the fourteen weeks to the students in the treatment group. All participants were administered the PMMA at the end ofthe fourteen-week testing period. The data gathered in this investigation were analyzed via a two-way Repeated Measures ANOVA. Analysis ofthe PMMA scores revealed statistically significant differences between the control group and the treatment group in the subset of participants with low-to-average music aptitude on the rhythm test. Statistically significant differences were also found between the composite percentile, rhythm raw and rhythm percentile scores of those participants in the treatment group who liked the music versus those who disliked the music. The significant results of this study include: a) those participants who possessed low-to-average music aptitude benefited from the background music program in the area ofrhythmic discriminatory skills; and b) those participants who liked the music performed better on the rhythm test of the PMMA than did those participants who disliked the music

Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning With Homomorphic Encryption: An Introduction

Privacy-preserving deep learning with homomorphic encryption (HE) is a novel and promising research area aimed at designing deep learning solutions that operate while guaranteeing the privacy of user data. Designing privacy-preserving deep learning solutions requires one to completely rethink and redesign deep learning models and algorithms to match the severe technological and algorithmic constraints of HE. This paper provides an introduction to this complex research area as well as a methodology for designing privacy-preserving convolutional neural networks (CNNs). This methodology was applied to the design of a privacy-preserving version of the well-known LeNet-1 CNN, which was successfully operated on two benchmark datasets for image classification. Furthermore, this paper details and comments on the research challenges and software resources available for privacy-preserving deep learning with HE

Religious marriage of same-sex couples : A report on places of worship in England and Wales registered for the solemnization of same-sex marriage

The change in law in 2013 to allow same-sex couples to marry in England and Wales was a major milestone on the road to legal equality for gay men and lesbians in the United Kingdom. Same-sex couples in England and Wales now have the same opportunities as different-sex couples to marry by way of a civil ceremony in, for example, a register office or approved premises such as hotels. However, same-sex couples who wish to marry by way of a religious ceremony in England and Wales are at a significant disadvantage to different-sex couples. Only a small number of religious organizations, and the tiniest number of places of worship, permit same-sex marriage. As a consequence, same-sex couples have very little opportunity to marry in a place of worship or by way of a religious ceremony. Religious faith and homosexuality are not antithetical. Many same-sex couples who want to get married wish to do so according to the rites of their faith. This fact is recognized by those religious organizations that have taken the significant step of offering same-sex couples the opportunity to have a religious marriage ceremony. This report presents findings from the first piece of empirical research on religious marriage of same-sex couples in England and Wales. Drawing on a unique dataset, it provides an insight into why places of worship take the decision to permit same-sex marriage, their experiences of offering same-sex couples a religious marriage ceremony, and the consequences of doing so

Escritoras de la Transición. Propuesta de una antología comentada de cuentos femeninos para el público italiano

ope

Ortodossi nel Mediterraneo cattolico: comunità di rito greco nell'Italia del Settecento

Italy was in the eighteenth century a region of contact between Orthodoxy and Roman Christianity. Three main factors contributed to make this region a place of particular importance for the interaction between these two cultures: the settlement of a number of old and new Greek-rite communities, the rising presence and influence of Orthodox Russia across all the Mediterranean and the extensive power of the Catholic Church exerted above all through the Congregation of Propaganda Fide and its network of missionaries. This 'Catholic Mediterranean' constitutes the terrain of investigation for my thesis. In the first part I reconstitute the formation process of a 'western Orthodoxy' along the boundary between the Respublica christiana and the «Orthodox Commonwealth». I draw attention, in particular, to the different legal statuses of the Greek-rite Christians with respect to the ecclesiastical and civil institutions. The Orthodox migrants/settlers organized themselves in multiple institutional forms of community: in brotherhoods, in merchant 'nations' protected by a consul or in relatively autonomous administrative units. Likewise, their political statuses were various: they could be subjects of the Catholic sovereign or foreigners from Venetian or Ottoman domains. For the civil authority being a Venetian or an Ottoman subject could be more important than belonging to a confessional minority. In general, all these legal factors, as well as the interstate relationships and the complex interaction between the ecclesiastical and civil spheres, influenced the confessional status of migrants/settlers. On the informal plan, the confessional and community borders were continuously crossed and contested, so that the official taxonomies, both political and religious, failed to give order to an extremely fluid reality. In the second part, the 'western space' of Orthodoxy is reconstituted through the analysis of the individual trajectories and the inter-community ties. The lives of the orthodox migrants/settlers appear liminal, continuously shifting between different cultures, confessions and roles. The composite and fragmented reality, in which they moved, was internally connected by a network of manifold relationships (not only commercial) and by an intense mobility. The Kingdom of Naples is the main area of observation: it was, in fact, at the centre (although not the economic centre) of the Mediterranean and the orthodox migrant and social networks as well. It was a place of landing or a crossing point not only for hundreds of Orthodox merchants, soldiers and clergymen, but also for a variety of other subjects from Republics of Ragusa, Genoa and Venice, Dalmatia and Ionian islands, Habsburg lands and Ottoman empire. So, despite strong ties among the members of 'nation' existed, they intersected a more various reality. The study of Greek merchants resident in the coastal and inland towns of the Adriatic province of the Kingdom, Terra di Bari, brings out the partiality of the model addressed by the scholars of the 'Greek commercial diaspora'. Here the Greek merchant was not only nor mainly, like this model presumes, an intermediary between the eastern Mediterranean markets and the West, embedded in a Greek 'diasporic' space. In Terra di Bari the merchants of the «Greek nation» were also involved in the local economic circuits, especially in the rural economy and in the transport and trade of grain. The merchant trust was not founded solely on the ethno-confessional bonds; the cross-cultural and inter-confessional relationships, moreover, extended beyond the sphere of trade. Above all the church, which was for a long time denied by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, was not the centre of community ties. In the third and final part, the analysis focuses on the community’s praxis. I explore under different respects the way in which community ties were created or challenged and the forms and meanings of belonging. Comparing western and eastern Mediterranean contexts, I investigate the connection among legal forms (the church, the brotherhood, the normative statutes, etc.), the informal practices (customs, temporary associations, etc.) and the ideological representations of community by the élite. The community as a coherent and 'perennial' unit does not exist in reality, but only like an image, shaped by its leaders in order to preserve the collective rights and the legal existence of the community. In reality, instead, the community is not an insular and compact entity, but is affected by environmental, economic and social factors. Exploring the factors determining the belonging, I find that the differences – political, religious and linguistic – are not in practice expression of distinct and separate identities. In some circumstances, nevertheless, they can assume an identitarian value at the ideological and discursive levels. So, in general, I note that the 'identities' exist only as processes, mostly transient and instrumental. In conclusion, with this work I attempted to give a more nuanced and unitary picture of the so-called Greek diaspora and the Orthodoxy in the West. The continuous crossing of borders shows the historicity of civilizations (Catholic and Orthodox) and their inner and confused movement, especially at the boundar

JUDICIAL INTERPRETATION, HUMAN RIGHTS, SEXUAL ORIENTATION: A SOCIO-LEGAL STUDY OF THE JURISPRUDENCE OF THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS

The contemporaneity has been famously defined as \u201cthe age of rights\u201d (Bobbio 1995), and the logic of rights has become \u201cthe principal language that we use in public settings to discuss weighty questions of both right and wrong\u201d (Glendon 1991, 63). If human rights give voice to minorities and marginalized groups in society, and they can do so with powerful legal and symbolical resources, the tendency to frame almost every social conflict in terms of a clash of rights also favours absolute formulations and the activation of judiciary.Under such premises, this dissertation provides a qualitative socio-legal analysis of the jurisprudence on sexual orientation of the European Court of Human Rights. More in detail, I focus on the arguments produced by the judges, and I analyze the legal controversies, the normative framing, the social perspectives, and the moral standpoints that orient the interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights. The aim is twofold; on one hand, I investigate how the aforementioned arguments influence the evaluation, the acceptance, or the refusal of claims grounded on sexual orientation. On the other, the purpose is to critically engage in the asserted neutral character of judicial reasoning, in order to reveal the clash of perspectives underpinned to the interpretation of human rights