48,352 research outputs found
BowScribe: Supporting the violinist's performance model
Musicians often learn about their vision of a
piece through practicing it and listening to recordings. However,
this does not always free the player to develop his or her own
interpretation of the piece, especially when technique is lacking. We
have developed software, the BowScribe markup language, that supports
a violinist in creating a ``performance model'' of a piece currently
beyond his or her playing skills, by allowing the player fine control
over tempo, volume, and articulation, including playing of chords, at
a level of expressiveness and flexibility that is significantly beyond
the MIDI playback modes of popular music notation software. BowScribe
has been used by the first author (who was trained as a prfessional
violinist) to create a model of the entire Bach Chaconne (edited by
Glamian), a long and demanding piece of music for solo violin that has
many phrases that span groups of chords as well as melodic passages.
The markup language specified chords to be rolled in two classic ways,
as well as a wide variety of other strokes, including greater volume
for individual notes in long slurs and small but essential variations
in tempo
Fish -- More Than Just Another Commodity
This brief highlights the contribution of wild capture fisheries to nutritional security in fish dependent developing countries. It is intended to stimulate debate around two broad themes: (1) when should the focus of fisheries policies be on local food security and human well-being as opposed to revenue generation, and (2) how does the current research agenda, with its emphasis on environmental and economic issues, assist or impair decision making processes
The principle of equivalence and projective structure in space-times
This paper discusses the extent to which one can determine the space-time
metric from a knowledge of a certain subset of the (unparametrised) geodesics
of its Levi-Civita connection, that is, from the experimental evidence of the
equivalence principle. It is shown that, if the space-time concerned is known
to be vacuum, then the Levi-Civita connection is uniquely determined and its
associated metric is uniquely determined up to a choice of units of
measurement, by the specification of these geodesics. It is further
demonstrated that if two space-times share the same unparametrised geodesics
and only one is assumed vacuum then their Levi-Civita connections are again
equal (and so the other metric is also a vacuum metric) and the first result
above is recovered.Comment: 23 pages, submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit
Oscillations of solar and atmospheric neutrinos
Motivated by recent results from SuperKamiokande, we study both solar and
atmospheric neutrino fluxes in the context of oscillations of the three known
neutrinos. We aim at a global view which identifies the various possibilities,
rather than attempting the most accurate determination of the parameters of
each scenario. For solar neutrinos we emphasise the importance of performing a
general analysis, independent of any particular solar model and we consider the
possibility that any one of the techniques --- chlorine, gallium or water
Cerenkov --- has a large unknown systematic error, so that its results should
be discarded. The atmospheric neutrino anomaly is studied by paying special
attention to the ratios of upward and downward going nu_e and nu_mu fluxes.
Both anomalies can be described in a minimal scheme where the respective
oscillation frequencies are widely separated or in non-minimal schemes with two
comparable oscillation frequencies. We discuss explicit forms of neutrino mass
matrices in which both atmospheric and solar neutrino fluxes are explained. In
the minimal scheme we identify only two `zeroth order' textures that can result
from unbroken symmetries. Finally we discuss experimental strategies for the
determination of the various oscillation parameters.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures. Final version: one reference added; fit of
atmospheric neutrinos improve
Coulomb plus power-law potentials in quantum mechanics
We study the discrete spectrum of the Hamiltonian H = -Delta + V(r) for the
Coulomb plus power-law potential V(r)=-1/r+ beta sgn(q)r^q, where beta > 0, q >
-2 and q \ne 0. We show by envelope theory that the discrete eigenvalues
E_{n\ell} of H may be approximated by the semiclassical expression
E_{n\ell}(q) \approx min_{r>0}\{1/r^2-1/(mu r)+ sgn(q) beta(nu r)^q}.
Values of mu and nu are prescribed which yield upper and lower bounds.
Accurate upper bounds are also obtained by use of a trial function of the form,
psi(r)= r^{\ell+1}e^{-(xr)^{q}}. We give detailed results for
V(r) = -1/r + beta r^q, q = 0.5, 1, 2 for n=1, \ell=0,1,2, along with
comparison eigenvalues found by direct numerical methods.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure
Transverse laser cooling of a thermal atomic beam of dysprosium
A thermal atomic beam of dysprosium (Dy) atoms is cooled using the
transition at 421 nm. The cooling is
done via a standing light wave orthogonal to the atomic beam. Efficient
transverse cooling to the Doppler limit is demonstrated for all observable
isotopes of dysprosium. Branching ratios to metastable states are demonstrated
to be . A scheme for enhancement of the
nonzero-nuclear-spin-isotope cooling, as well as a method for direct
identification of possible trap states, is proposed.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures v2: 7 pages, 7 figure
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