Musical Rhetoric, Narrative, Drama, and Their Negation in Morton Feldman\u27s Piano and String Quartet

Though Morton Feldman famously expressed his aversion to conventional compositional rhetoric early in his career, an examination of his music from the late 1970s onward reveals a more complex and ambiguous relationship with musical rhetoric than has often been acknowledged. In his own writings Feldman hinted at the notion of illusory function and directionality in his music, as well as to the phenomenon of negation. It is my contention that the extended-length works written in the last years of the composer\u27s life, which frequently feature tantalizing suggestions of conventional musical narrative, provide rich opportunity for readings of these statements. My examination focuses upon Piano and String Quartet, one of the composer\u27s very last works, which, I argue, exemplifies compositional approaches characteristic of much of Feldman\u27s music from this period in its evocation and simultaneous negation of a sense of traditional narrative linearity

Effects of Facility Design on the Stress Response of Market Weight Pigs during Loading and Unloading

The objective of this study was to determine the effects of finisher pig facility design on pig stress responses at the time of loading for the market weight pig. The new (NEW) design had 192 pigs / pen with internal swing gates that were used to manually pre-sort market weight pigs on the day before loading. Traditional (TRAD) design had 32 pigs / pen; it was not feasible to pre-sort market weight pigs prior to loading. During loading, treatments were alternatively assigned to trailer decks. Pigs were loaded onto straight deck trailers, provided with ~0.41 m 2 / pig and were transported ~1 h to a commercial plant. During loading and unloading, the number of pigs displaying open mouth breathing (OMB), skin discoloration (SD) and muscle tremors (MT) were recorded. At the plant, dead and nonambulatory pigs were recorded during unloading, and nonambulatory pigs were classified as fatigued (stress-related) or injured. Total losses were defined as the sum of dead + non-ambulatory pigs at the plant. Data were analyzed by Proc Glimmix of SAS. NEW pigs had lower (P ≤ 0.05) percentages of OMB, SD and MT during loading and unloading compared to TRAD pigs. NEW pigs had fewer (P \u3c 0.05) dead pigs (0.01 vs. 0.23 ± 0.05 %), total nonambulatory pigs (0.29 vs. 0.66 ± 0.12 %) and total losses (0.30 vs. 0.89 ± 0.14 %) at the plant compared to TRAD pigs. In summary, utilizing large pens and pre-sorting prior to loading, reduced physical signs of stress during loading and unloading, and reduced total losses at the plant by 66 % compared to pigs from traditional pens

Scandium separation from tungsten crucibles : preliminary investigation into the separation of scandium metal from tungsten metal crucibles using an acid soak process.

The first step in an attempt to isolate Sco from a Wo crucible was explored by soaking the samples in a series of organic (HOAc) and inorganic (HCl, H2SO4, H3PO4, HNO3) acids. All samples, except the HOAc, yielded a powder. The weight loss suggests that HNO3 is the most efficient solvent; however, the powders were tentatively identified by PXRD and found to contain both W and Sc by-products. The higher weight loss may also indicate dissolution of the Wo crucible, which was further evidenced upon visual inspection of the crucible. The H3PO4 acid soak yielded the cleanest removal of Sc from the crucible. More work to understand the separation of the Sco from the Wo crucible is necessary but the acid routes appear to hold promise under not as of yet established criteria

Distribution of Metals in the Termite Tumulitermes tumuli (Froggatt): Two Types of Malpighian Tubule Concretion Host Zn and Ca Mutually Exclusively

The aim of this study was to determine specific distribution of metals in the termite Tumulitermes tumuli (Froggatt) and identify specific organs within the termite that host elevated metals and therefore play an important role in the regulation and transfer of these back into the environment. Like other insects, termites bio-accumulate essential metals to reinforce cuticular structures and utilize storage detoxification for other metals including Ca, P, Mg and K. Previously, Mn and Zn have been found concentrated in mandible tips and are associated with increased hardness whereas Ca, P, Mg and K are accumulated in Malpighian tubules. Using high resolution Particle Induced X-Ray Emission (PIXE) mapping of whole termites and Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX) spot analysis, localised accumulations of metals in the termite T. tumuli were identified. Tumulitermes tumuli was found to have proportionally high Mn concentrations in mandible tips. Malpighian tubules had significant enrichment of Zn (1.6%), Mg (4.9%), P (6.8%), Ca (2.7%) and K (2.4%). Synchrotron scanning X-ray Fluorescence Microprobe (XFM) mapping demonstrated two different concretion types defined by the mutually exclusive presence of Ca and Zn. In-situ SEM EDX realisation of these concretions is problematic due to the excitation volume caused by operating conditions required to detect minor amounts of Zn in the presence of significant amounts of Na. For this reason, previous researchers have not demonstrated this surprising finding

The Role of Pressure in Inverse Design for Assembly

Isotropic pairwise interactions that promote the self assembly of complex particle morphologies have been discovered by inverse design strategies derived from the molecular coarse-graining literature. While such approaches provide an avenue to reproduce structural correlations, thermodynamic quantities such as the pressure have typically not been considered in self-assembly applications. In this work, we demonstrate that relative entropy optimization can be used to discover potentials that self-assemble into targeted cluster morphologies with a prescribed pressure when the iterative simulations are performed in the isothermal-isobaric ensemble. By tuning the pressure in the optimization, we generate a family of simple pair potentials that all self-assemble the same structure. Selecting an appropriate simulation ensemble to control the thermodynamic properties of interest is a general design strategy that could also be used to discover interaction potentials that self-assemble structures having, for example, a specified chemical potential.Comment: 29 pages, 8 figure

The Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 Early Release Science data: Panchromatic Faint Object Counts for 0.2-2 microns wavelength

We describe the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) Early Release Science (ERS) observations in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) South field. The new WFC3 ERS data provide calibrated, drizzled mosaics in the UV filters F225W, F275W, and F336W, as well as in the near-IR filters F098M (Ys), F125W (J), and F160W (H) with 1-2 HST orbits per filter. Together with the existing HST Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) GOODS-South mosaics in the BViz filters, these panchromatic 10-band ERS data cover 40-50 square arcmin at 0.2-1.7 {\mu}m in wavelength at 0.07-0.15" FWHM resolution and 0.090" Multidrizzled pixels to depths of AB\simeq 26.0-27.0 mag (5-{\sigma}) for point sources, and AB\simeq 25.5-26.5 mag for compact galaxies. In this paper, we describe: a) the scientific rationale, and the data taking plus reduction procedures of the panchromatic 10-band ERS mosaics; b) the procedure of generating object catalogs across the 10 different ERS filters, and the specific star-galaxy separation techniques used; and c) the reliability and completeness of the object catalogs from the WFC3 ERS mosaics. The excellent 0.07-0.15" FWHM resolution of HST/WFC3 and ACS makes star- galaxy separation straightforward over a factor of 10 in wavelength to AB\simeq 25-26 mag from the UV to the near-IR, respectively.Comment: 51 pages, 71 figures Accepted to ApJS 2011.01.2

Transcript-indexed ATAC-seq for precision immune profiling.

T cells create vast amounts of diversity in the genes that encode their T cell receptors (TCRs), which enables individual clones to recognize specific peptide-major histocompatibility complex (MHC) ligands. Here we combined sequencing of the TCR-encoding genes with assay for transposase-accessible chromatin with sequencing (ATAC-seq) analysis at the single-cell level to provide information on the TCR specificity and epigenomic state of individual T cells. By using this approach, termed transcript-indexed ATAC-seq (T-ATAC-seq), we identified epigenomic signatures in immortalized leukemic T cells, primary human T cells from healthy volunteers and primary leukemic T cells from patient samples. In peripheral blood CD4+ T cells from healthy individuals, we identified cis and trans regulators of naive and memory T cell states and found substantial heterogeneity in surface-marker-defined T cell populations. In patients with a leukemic form of cutaneous T cell lymphoma, T-ATAC-seq enabled identification of leukemic and nonleukemic regulatory pathways in T cells from the same individual by allowing separation of the signals that arose from the malignant clone from the background T cell noise. Thus, T-ATAC-seq is a new tool that enables analysis of epigenomic landscapes in clonal T cells and should be valuable for studies of T cell malignancy, immunity and immunotherapy