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

Smithsonian package for algebra and symbolic mathematics

Symbolic programming system for computer processing of algebraic expression

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

Flavor changing interactions mediated by scalars at the weak scale

The quark and lepton mass matrices possess approximate flavor symmetries. Several results follow if the interactions of new scalars possess these approximate symmetries. Present experimental bounds allow these exotic scalars to have a weak scale mass. The Glashow-Weinberg criterion is rendered unnecessary. Finally, rare leptonic B meson decays provide powerful probes of these scalars, especially if they are leptoquarks.Comment: 13 pages, report LBL-3234

Semiclassical energy formulas for power-law and log potentials in quantum mechanics

We study a single particle which obeys non-relativistic quantum mechanics in R^N and has Hamiltonian H = -Delta + V(r), where V(r) = sgn(q)r^q. If N \geq 2, then q > -2, and if N = 1, then q > -1. The discrete eigenvalues E_{n\ell} may be represented exactly by the semiclassical expression E_{n\ell}(q) = min_{r>0}\{P_{n\ell}(q)^2/r^2+ V(r)}. The case q = 0 corresponds to V(r) = ln(r). By writing one power as a smooth transformation of another, and using envelope theory, it has earlier been proved that the P_{n\ell}(q) functions are monotone increasing. Recent refinements to the comparison theorem of QM in which comparison potentials can cross over, allow us to prove for n = 1 that Q(q)=Z(q)P(q) is monotone increasing, even though the factor Z(q)=(1+q/N)^{1/q} is monotone decreasing. Thus P(q) cannot increase too slowly. This result yields some sharper estimates for power-potential eigenvlaues at the bottom of each angular-momentum subspace.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

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

Vaccination

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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