Making in the moment: The dynamic cognition of musicians-in-action

Watching highly-skilled experts in the midst of improvised performance can be a source of mystification and wonder. Understanding this mystery in more detail, especially for music, is a major motivation for my dissertation. Moreover, while there are multiple avenues through which one could explore improvisation, I will primarily utilize the tools of embodied cognitive science to help better understand it in general and bebop jazz improvisation in particular. I furthermore consider possible ways to define improvisation as an essential precondition of my project.In what follows, I will not defend one type of embodied approach over all alternatives. Instead, I will consider improvisation in light of three different strands of research: shared intentions, ecological psychology (especially in regards to a theory of affordances), and predictive processing. The focus on these strands, taken both as individual research programs and a single unit of analysis, closely mirrors the essential core commitment of embodiment by providing a dynamic account that spans brain, body, and world. It likewise does so in ways that reject any neat partition of inputs, cognition, and output.For shared intentions, the main issue I will explore concerns how to best account for the dynamic moment-to-moment engagement of musicians with each other, especially in light of improvisation as an intentional activity, and covering the differences from novices to experts in bebop performance. For a theory of affordances, the focus will be on the interplay between a skilled agent and a structured environment as an essential part of musical perception and action. Finally, for predictive processing, a picture of the brain as a predictive, anticipatory engine takes center stage to explain how musicians can respond to the extremely fast time constraints that are part of musical performance. I will also consider how novelty can be accounted for on predictive processing accounts. Through considerations of these different areas, the impacts of embodied approaches will be further clarified and help us to better model, understand, and appreciate the cognition of musicians-in-action

Introduction

Introduction to volume 6 of Macalester College\u27s journal Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities

The Impact of Antarctic Treaty Challenges on the US Military

While the Antarctic Treaty of 1961 largely prevented conflicts on the continent, growing challenges to the treaty system could affect the United States and the global community. Through historical documents and press reports, this article examines ice deterioration, unreported and unregulated fishing, resource extraction preparation, hostilities between treaty members, and the roles of China and Russia in the region. It provides recommendations for policymakers and military strategists on how the United States can maintain global security and treaty interests—and the potential request for intervention—within the guidelines of the National Security Strategy

Forgiveness Motives Among Evangelical Christians: Implications for Christian Marriage and Family Therapists

Therapists and researchers interested in forgiveness can learn from those who have experienced interpersonal wounds and have chosen to forgive. We interviewed 20 evangelical Christian forgivers, asking about motives for forgiveness. Transcripts were analyzed using qualitative methods. Five categories of motivation are presented: comfort, duty, relational, humility/empathy, and Christian beliefs. Respondents described multiple motives for forgiveness, often combining a desire for comfort or a sense of duty with their Christian beliefs. Four implications for Christian marriage and family therapists are discussed: Expect diversity, avoid moralistic views of motives, remember religious resources in the forgiveness process, and expect benefits, but not immediately

Monitoring Natural Events Globally in Near Real-Time Using NASA's Open Web Services and Tools

Since 1960, NASA has been making global measurements of the Earth from a multitude of space-based missions, many of which can be useful for monitoring natural events. In recent years, these measurements have been made available in near real-time, making it possible to use them to also aid in managing the response to natural events. We present the challenges and ongoing solutions to using NASA satellite data for monitoring and managing these events

Interaction of forced Orr-Sommerfeld and Squire modes in a low-order representation of turbulent channel flow

A resolvent-based reduced-order representation is used to capture time-averaged second-order statistics in turbulent channel flow. The recently proposed decomposition of the resolvent operator into two distinct families related to the Orr-Sommerfeld and Squire operators [Rosenberg and McKeon, Efficient representation of exact coherent states of the Navier-Stokes equations using resolvent analysis, Fluid Dyn. Res. 51, 011401 (2019)] results in dramatic improvement in the ability to match all components of the energy spectra and the uv cospectrum. The success of the new representation relies on the ability of the Squire modes to compete with the vorticity generated by Orr-Sommerfeld modes, which is demonstrated by decomposing the statistics into contributions from each family. It is then shown that this competition can be used to infer a phase relationship between the two sets of modes. Additionally, the relative Reynolds number scalings for the two families of resolvent weights are derived for the universal classes of resolvent modes presented by Moarref et al. [Moarref, Sharma, Tropp, and McKeon, Model-based scaling of the streamwise energy density in high-Reynolds-number turbulent channels, J. Fluid Mech. 734, 275 (2013)]. These developments can be viewed as a starting point for further modeling efforts to quantify nonlinear interactions in wall-bounded turbulence