Situating Sound: The Space and Time of the Dancehall Session

This research situates the multiple body of the Jamaica Dancehall "Crowd" (audience) in the intensities of the Sound System Session. This is a heterogeneous "acoustic space," and discontinuous ritual time, in which sexual expression and orientation, and racial attitudes, diverge from Jamaican norms. This essay proceeds to account for the propagation of this temporality and spatiality in terms of the electromechanical processes of the Sound System "Set" (equipment), that is control, power and transduction. It looks firstly at the Sound Engineers' sensorimotor engineering technique of compensation for monitoring and manipulating the auditory performance of the Set. Secondly it discusses the sociocultural procedures of the cutting and mixing of the music the Selector plays in the Session. The essay identifies these practices and procedures as the basic elements for many cultural, cybernetic, linguistic, or communication systems. In conclusion, it is suggested that for the Engineers' and Selectors' instrumental techniques to be affective and effective they have to be brought into a proportional relationship with the Crowd's experience. The Crew does this through their embodied experience and expert evaluative judgment - which is considered as an example of analogical, rather than logical, rationality

Sonic Dominance and the Reggae Sound System Session

Sound connects people; it draws us together. It was Count Basie who drew me to one the editors of this volume. He was playing Lester Leaps In. And it was the sound of the music that pulled me in through a half-open door. Portuguese trans. https://revistaecopos.eco.ufrj.br/eco_po

Small steps and giant leaps: Minimal Newton solvers for Deep Learning

We propose a fast second-order method that can be used as a drop-in replacement for current deep learning solvers. Compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), it only requires two additional forward-mode automatic differentiation operations per iteration, which has a computational cost comparable to two standard forward passes and is easy to implement. Our method addresses long-standing issues with current second-order solvers, which invert an approximate Hessian matrix every iteration exactly or by conjugate-gradient methods, a procedure that is both costly and sensitive to noise. Instead, we propose to keep a single estimate of the gradient projected by the inverse Hessian matrix, and update it once per iteration. This estimate has the same size and is similar to the momentum variable that is commonly used in SGD. No estimate of the Hessian is maintained. We first validate our method, called CurveBall, on small problems with known closed-form solutions (noisy Rosenbrock function and degenerate 2-layer linear networks), where current deep learning solvers seem to struggle. We then train several large models on CIFAR and ImageNet, including ResNet and VGG-f networks, where we demonstrate faster convergence with no hyperparameter tuning. Code is available

Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing

The reggae sound system has exerted a major influence on music, popular culture - and with Sonic Bodies - the idea that sound itself could provide a conceptual framework and research tool. Every night Dancehall sessions stage a visceral, immersive and immensely pleasurable experience of sonic dominance for the participating crowd - out on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica. Sonic Bodies concentrates on the skilled performance of the three crewmembers responsible for this auditory signature of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing, building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful “set” of equipment; the selectors choosing the music tracks played; and MCs (DJs) on the mic hyping up the crowd. Sonic Bodies proposes that these dancehall "vibes" are taken literally as the periodic movement of vibrations. These provide the basis for an analysis of how a sound system operates - not only at auditory, but also at corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. Sonic Bodies establishes the basis for a vibrational cultural studies, as distinct from a cultural study of vibrations. It formulates a fascinating auditory critique of visual dominance and the dualities inherent in ideas of image, text or discourse. This innovative book questions the assumptions that reason resides only in the mind, communication is an exchange of information and meaning is only ever representation

Liposomal and Deoxycholate Amphotericin B Formulations: Effectiveness against Biofilm Infections of Candida spp.

Background: candidiasis is the primary fungal infection encountered in patients undergoing prolonged hospitalization, and the fourth leading cause of nosocomial bloodstream infections. One of the most important Candida spp. virulence factors is the ability to form biofilms, which are extremely refractory to antimicrobial therapy and very difficult to treat with the traditional antifungal therapies. It is known that the prophylaxis or treatment of a systemic candidiasis are recurrently taken without considering the possibility of a Candida spp. biofilm-related infections. Therefore, it is important to assess the effectiveness of the available drugs and which formulations have the best performance in these specific infections. Methods: 24-h-biofilms of four Candida spp. and their response to two amphotericin B (AmB) pharmaceutical formulations (liposomal and deoxycholate) were evaluated. Results: generally, Candida glabrata was the less susceptible yeast species to both AmBs. MBECs revealed that it is therapeutically more appealing to use AmB-L than AmB-Deox for all Candida spp. biofilms, since none of the determined concentrations of AmB-L reached 10% of the maximum daily dose, but both formulations showed a very good capacity in the biomass reduction. Conclusions: the liposomal formulation presents better performance in the eradication of the biofilm cells for all the species in comparison with the deoxycholate formulation.This study was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit and COMPETE 2020 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006684) and BioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000004) funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the scope of Norte2020—Programa Operacional Regional do Norte and Célia F. Rodrigues’ [SFRH/BD/93078/2013] Ph.D. grant. The authors thank the Project “BioHealth—Biotechnology and Bioengineering approaches to improve health quality”, Ref. NORTE-07-0124-FEDER-000027, co-funded by the Programa Operacional Regional do Norte (ON.2—O Novo Norte), QREN, FEDER.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Portrait of matrix gene expression in Candida glabrata biofilms with stress induced by different drugs

(1) Background: Candida glabrata is one of the most significant Candida species associated with severe cases of candidiasis. Biofilm formation is an important feature, closely associated with antifungal resistance, involving alterations of gene expression or mutations, which can result in the failure of antifungal treatments. Hence, the main goal of this work was to evaluate the role of a set of genes, associated with matrix production, in the resistance of C. glabrata biofilms to antifungal drugs. (2) Methods: the determination of the expression of BGL2, XOG1, FKS1, FKS2, GAS2, KNH1, UGP1, and MNN2 genes in 48-h biofilms cells of three C. glabrata strains was performed through quantitative real-time PCR (RT-qPCR), after contact with Fluconazole (Flu), Amphotericin B (AmB), Caspofungin (Csf), or Micafungin (Mcf). (3) Results: Mcf induced a general overexpression of the selected genes. It was verified that the genes related to the production of -1,3-glucans (BGL2, XOG1, GAS2) had the highest expressions. (4) Conclusion: though -1,6-glucans and mannans are an essential part of the cell and biofilm matrix, C. glabrata biofilm cells seem to contribute more to the replacement of -1,3-glucans. Thus, these biopolymers seem to have a greater impact on the biofilm matrix composition and, consequently, a role in the biofilm resistance to antifungal drugs.This study was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the scope of the strategic funding of UID/BIO/04469/2013 unit and COMPETE 2020 (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006684) and BioTecNorte operation (NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000004) funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the scope of Norte2020—Programa Operacional Regional do Norte and Célia F. Rodrigues’ [SFRH/BD/93078/2013] Ph.D. grant. We also would like to acknowledge MSD® and Astellas® for the kind donation of Caspofungin and Micafungin, respectivelyinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Tourism and Algarve underwater archaeological heritage valorisation: a case study

This paper aims to investigate the interrelation between sea, tourism and culture associated with underwater archaeological heritage. Its main objective is to determine the existence of creative actions and projects that valorise tourism related with underwater archaeological heritage in the Algarve. The assumption is that underwater heritage is a valuable resource to tourism economy of seaside territories. Regarding the Algarve, WTTC (2003) refers that “the Travel & Tourism industry directly contributes 45% of GDP and 37% of jobs”. However, as is also refereed in this document “forecasts for the next ten years (2013) are very modest”. This means that, unless Algarve Tourism (Turismo do Algarve) and the private sector succeed in changing direction and surpassing the baseline forecasts, the share of visitor exports in the scheme of total exports will fall. As MEID/TP (2011) and Governo de Portugal (2013) point out for the Algarve region, the Sun and Sea, as well as Golf, are considered to be the main strategic products. The core Sun and Sea product should have a multi-segmented offer and be able to widen the summer season. In this context, it is important to develop new tourism products related with sea, nautical and cultural tourism. The present paper is based on a documental research of tourism public policies and also on a set of interviews of entities connected with underwater archaeological heritage with the intention of determining their role in the valorisation of this type of heritage in the Algarve

The role of bacteria in pine wilt disease: insights from microbiome analysis.

Pine Wilt Disease (PWD) has a significant impact on Eurasia pine forests. The microbiome of the nematode (the primary cause of the disease), its insect vector, and the host tree may be relevant for the disease mechanism. The aim of this study was to characterize these microbiomes, from three PWD-affected areas in Portugal, using Denaturing Gradient Gel Electrophoresis, 16S rRNA gene pyrosequencing, and a functional inference-based approach (PICRUSt). The bacterial community structure of the nematode was significantly different from the infected trees but closely related to the insect vector, supporting the hypothesis that the nematode microbiome might be in part inherited from the insect. Sampling location influenced mostly the tree microbiome (P < 0.05). Genes related both with plant growth promotion and phytopathogenicity were predicted for the tree microbiome. Xenobiotic degradation functions were predicted in the nematode and insect microbiomes. Phytotoxin biosynthesis was also predicted for the nematode microbiome, supporting the theory of a direct contribution of the microbiome to tree-wilting. This is the first study that simultaneously characterized the nematode, tree and insect-vector microbiomes from the same affected areas, and overall the results support the hypothesis that the PWD microbiome plays an important role in the disease's development