The Nose-hoover thermostated Lorentz gas

We apply the Nose-Hoover thermostat and three variations of it, which control different combinations of velocity moments, to the periodic Lorentz gas. Switching on an external electric field leads to nonequilibrium steady states for the four models with a constant average kinetic energy of the moving particle. We study the probability density, the conductivity and the attractor in nonequilibrium and compare the results to the Gaussian thermostated Lorentz gas and to the Lorentz gas as thermostated by deterministic scattering.Comment: 7 pages (revtex) with 10 figures (postscript), most of the figures are bitmapped with low-resolution. The originals are many MB, they can be obtained upon reques

Functional Scaffolding for Musical Composition: A New Approach in Computer-Assisted Music Composition

While it is important for systems intended to enhance musical creativity to define and explore musical ideas conceived by individual users, many limit musical freedom by focusing on maintaining musical structure, thereby impeding the user\u27s freedom to explore his or her individual style. This dissertation presents a comprehensive body of work that introduces a new musical representation that allows users to explore a space of musical rules that are created from their own melodies. This representation, called functional scaffolding for musical composition (FSMC), exploits a simple yet powerful property of multipart compositions: The pattern of notes and rhythms in different instrumental parts of the same song are functionally related. That is, in principle, one part can be expressed as a function of another. Music in FSMC is represented accordingly as a functional relationship between an existing human composition, or scaffold, and an additional generated voice. This relationship is encoded by a type of artificial neural network called a compositional pattern producing network (CPPN). A human user without any musical expertise can then explore how these additional generated voices should relate to the scaffold through an interactive evolutionary process akin to animal breeding. The utility of this insight is validated by two implementations of FSMC called NEAT Drummer and MaestroGenesis, that respectively help users tailor drum patterns and complete multipart arrangements from as little as a single original monophonic track. The five major contributions of this work address the overarching hypothesis in this dissertation that functional relationships alone, rather than specialized music theory, are sufficient for generating plausible additional voices. First, to validate FSMC and determine whether plausible generated voices result from the human-composed scaffold or intrinsic properties of the CPPN, drum patterns are created with NEAT Drummer to accompany several different polyphonic pieces. Extending the FSMC approach to generate pitched voices, the second contribution reinforces the importance of functional transformations through quality assessments that indicate that some partially FSMC-generated pieces are indistinguishable from those that are fully human. While the third contribution focuses on constructing and exploring a space of plausible voices with MaestroGenesis, the fourth presents results from a two-year study where students discuss their creative experience with the program. Finally, the fifth contribution is a plugin for MaestroGenesis called MaestroGenesis Voice (MG-V) that provides users a more natural way to incorporate MaestroGenesis in their creative endeavors by allowing scaffold creation through the human voice. Together, the chapters in this dissertation constitute a comprehensive approach to assisted music generation, enabling creativity without the need for musical expertise

Not So Hip?: The Expanded Burdens on and Consequences to Law Firms as Business Associates Under HITECH Modifications to HIPAA

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”) governs the management of protected health information (“PHI”) by covered entities (e.g., health care providers) and their business associates. However, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (“HITECH”), contained within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, drastically alters the scope of HIPAA regulations with regard to business associates, including law firms that routinely handle the PHI governed by HIPAA. Under the HITECH Act, the definition of “business associate” is expanded, and these entities are treated as “covered” for purposes of the HIPAA security regulations; this increased regulatory burden has important implications for the management of PHI at law firms and the practice of health care law as a whole. This article details the development of the HIPAA privacy and security regulations applicable to covered entities and business associates in the wake of the HITECH Act, with a focus on the updated regulatory scheme and its impact on law firms, especially those that deal with substantial amounts of PHI in the ordinary course of business. Beyond the development and content of the current HIPAA regulations that impact law firms, this piece addresses the practice implications of these regulations and proposes recommendations for cost-effective and careful handling of PHI from the perspective of business associates and regulators alike

Remarks on NonHamiltonian Statistical Mechanics: Lyapunov Exponents and Phase-Space Dimensionality Loss

The dissipation associated with nonequilibrium flow processes is reflected by the formation of strange attractor distributions in phase space. The information dimension of these attractors is less than that of the equilibrium phase space, corresponding to the extreme rarity of nonequilibrium states. Here we take advantage of a simple model for heat conduction to demonstrate that the nonequilibrium dimensionality loss can definitely exceed the number of phase-space dimensions required to thermostat an otherwise Hamiltonian system.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, minor typos correcte

Building a Scholarly Communication Boot Camp for East Carolina University Liaisons

The presentation that corresponds with this paper is titled "Scholarly Communication Boot Camp: Getting Liaisons Up to Speed."A growing demand for scholarly communication expertise led two librarians at East Carolina University to create a series of informative and interactive sessions for liaisons. These boot camp sessions covered topics such as open access, citation management, research impact, data management, authors’ rights, copyright, digital humanities and OERs. The goal of the boot camp was to familiarize liaisons with these concepts enough so that they might be able to talk with faculty about them. To achieve this goal, the developers of the sessions used active learning exercises and a flipped classroom model

Effects of single and mixed infections with wild type and genetically modified Helicoverpa armigera nucleopolyhedrovirus on movement behaviour of cotton bollworm larvae

Naturally occurring insect viruses can modify the behaviour of infected insects and thereby modulate virus transmission. Modifications of the virus genome could alter these behavioural effects. We studied the distance moved and the position of virus-killed cadavers of fourth instars of Helicoverpa armigera (Hübner) (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae) infected with a wild-type genotype of H. armigera nucleopolyhedrovirus (HaSNPV) or with one of two recombinant genotypes of this virus on cotton plants. The behavioural effects of virus infection were examined both in larvae infected with a single virus genotype, and in larvae challenged with mixtures of the wild-type and one of the recombinant viruses. An egt-negative virus variant caused more rapid death and lower virus yield in fourth instars, but egt-deletion did not produce consistent behavioural effects over three experiments, two under controlled glasshouse conditions and one in field cages. A recombinant virus containing the AaIT-(Androctonus australis Hector) insect-selective toxin gene, which expresses a neurotoxin derived from a scorpion, caused faster death and cadavers were found lower down the plant than insects infected with unmodified virus. Larvae that died from mixed infections of the AaIT-expressing recombinant and the wild-type virus died at positions significantly lower, compared to infection with the pure wild-type viral strain. The results indicate that transmission of egt-negative variants of HaSNPV are likely to be affected by lower virus yield, but not by behavioural effects of egt gene deletion. By contrast, the AaIT recombinant will produce lower virus yields as well as modified behaviour, which together can contribute to reduced virus transmission under field conditions. In addition, larvae infected with both the wild-type virus and the toxin recombinant behaved as larvae infected with the toxin recombinant only, which might be a positive factor for the risk assessment of such toxin recombinants in the environment

Not So Hip - The Expanded Burdens on and Consequences to Law Firms as Business Associates under Hitech Modifications to HIPAA

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 ( HIPAA ) governs the management of protected health information by covered entities (e.g., health care providers) and their business associates. However, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act ( HITECH ), contained within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ( ARRA ), drastically alters the scope of HIPAA regulations with regard to business associates, including law firms that routinely handle the protected health information ( PHI ) governed by HIPAA. Under the HITECH Act, the definition of business associate is expanded, and these entities are treated as covered for purposes of the HIPAA security regulations; this increased regulatory burden has important implications for the management of PHI at law firms and the practice of health care law as a whole. This article details the development of the HIPAA privacy and security regulations applicable to covered entities and business associates in the wake of the HITECH Act, with a focus on the updated regulatory scheme and its impact on law firms, especially those that deal with substantial amounts of PHI in the ordinary course of business. Beyond the development and content of the current HIPAA regulations that impact law firms, this piece addresses the practice implications of these regulations and proposes recommendations for costeffective and careful handling of PHI from the perspective of business associates and regulators alike