Voice in devising/devising through voice: A conversation with Mikhail Karikis, Elaine Mitchener and Jessica Walker

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.How is voice used in devising practices? What is the interplay between structure, freedom and improvisation in such compositional practices? In what ways is voice conceived and practised as material? In providing answers to such questions, this multi-vocal interview/roundtable transcript is composed around the responses of three contemporary vocal artists based in the United Kingdom, Mikhail Karikis, Elaine Mitchener and Jessica Walker. Their work ranges from audio-visual installations and solo shows to immersive performance and site-responsive work, and their deployment of vocality ranges from jazz and Victorian music hall repertoires to extended vocal techniques and experimentations across the speech–song continuum. In conversation with practitioner-scholar Konstantinos Thomaidis, their responses offer valuable insights into current vocal experimentation but are also an invitation to expand discussions around devising in the field of interdisciplinary voice studies

Pedestrians moving in dark: Balancing measures and playing games on lattices

We present two conceptually new modeling approaches aimed at describing the motion of pedestrians in obscured corridors: * a Becker-D\"{o}ring-type dynamics * a probabilistic cellular automaton model. In both models the group formation is affected by a threshold. The pedestrians are supposed to have very limited knowledge about their current position and their neighborhood; they can form groups up to a certain size and they can leave them. Their main goal is to find the exit of the corridor. Although being of mathematically different character, the discussion of both models shows that it seems to be a disadvantage for the individual to adhere to larger groups. We illustrate this effect numerically by solving both model systems. Finally we list some of our main open questions and conjectures

Political Regimes and Sovereign Credit Risk in Europe, 1750-1913

This article uses a new panel data set to perform a statistical analysis of political regimes and sovereign credit risk in Europe from 1750 to 1913. Old Regime polities typically suffered from fiscal fragmentation and absolutist rule. By the start of World War I, however, many such countries had centralized institutions and limited government. Panel regressions indicate that centralized and?or limited regimes were associated with significant improvements in credit risk relative to fragmented and absolutist ones. Structural break tests also reveal close relationships between major turning points in yield series and political transformations

Scour prediction in non-uniform soils: undrained shear strength and erodibility

Scour development in non-uniform soils is still an area of great uncertainty and remains a challenge for designing structurally efficient and effective foundations in the marine environment. Scour risk in cohesive soils is made more uncertain by effects such as weathering and time-scale to scour. For large volume installation of foundations such as those related to offshore wind farm developments there is a limit to the amount of detailed geotechnical information that can be collected as part of the project. Therefore, reliance in data such as undrained shear strength, derived from cone penetration tests, supplemented with borehole data collected at a limited number of sites across the wind farm and laboratory analysis of soil samples becomes the principal source of geotechnical information. Hence, the question arises as to whether the undrained shear strength be used as a proxy for the erodibility of a soil as proposed in the approach of Annandale (1995). This paper will present evidence from both field and laboratory measurements of undrained shear strength and scour potential to test the hypothesis of undrained shear strength as a proxy for scour

Texture analysis of MR images of patients with Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Our objective was to study the effect of trauma on texture features in cerebral tissue in mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI). Our hypothesis was that a mild trauma may cause microstructural changes, which are not necessarily perceptible by visual inspection but could be detected with texture analysis (TA).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We imaged 42 MTBI patients by using 1.5 T MRI within three weeks of onset of trauma. TA was performed on the area of mesencephalon, cerebral white matter at the levels of mesencephalon, corona radiata and centrum semiovale and in different segments of corpus callosum (CC) which have been found to be sensitive to damage. The same procedure was carried out on a control group of ten healthy volunteers. Patients' TA data was compared with the TA results of the control group comparing the amount of statistically significantly differing TA parameters between the left and right sides of the cerebral tissue and comparing the most discriminative parameters.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>There were statistically significant differences especially in several co-occurrence and run-length matrix based parameters between left and right side in the area of mesencephalon, in cerebral white matter at the level of corona radiata and in the segments of CC in patients. Considerably less difference was observed in the healthy controls.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>TA revealed significant changes in texture parameters of cerebral tissue between hemispheres and CC segments in TBI patients. TA may serve as a novel additional tool for detecting the conventionally invisible changes in cerebral tissue in MTBI and help the clinicians to make an early diagnosis.</p

Empirical Research on Sovereign Debt and Default

The long history of sovereign debt and the associated enforcement problem have attracted researchers in many fields. In this paper, we survey empirical work by economists, historians, and political scientists. As we review the empirical literature, we emphasize parallel developments in the theory of sovereign debt. One major theme emerges. Although recent research has sought to balance theoretical and empirical considerations, there remains a gap between theories of sovereign debt and the data used to test them. We recommend a number of steps that researchers can take to improve the correspondence between theory and data

Developmental malformation of the corpus callosum: a review of typical callosal development and examples of developmental disorders with callosal involvement

This review provides an overview of the involvement of the corpus callosum (CC) in a variety of developmental disorders that are currently defined exclusively by genetics, developmental insult, and/or behavior. I begin with a general review of CC development, connectivity, and function, followed by discussion of the research methods typically utilized to study the callosum. The bulk of the review concentrates on specific developmental disorders, beginning with agenesis of the corpus callosum (AgCC)—the only condition diagnosed exclusively by callosal anatomy. This is followed by a review of several genetic disorders that commonly result in social impairments and/or psychopathology similar to AgCC (neurofibromatosis-1, Turner syndrome, 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, Williams yndrome, and fragile X) and two forms of prenatal injury (premature birth, fetal alcohol syndrome) known to impact callosal development. Finally, I examine callosal involvement in several common developmental disorders defined exclusively by behavioral patterns (developmental language delay, dyslexia, attention-deficit hyperactive disorder, autism spectrum disorders, and Tourette syndrome)