Crowd-Sourcing the Sounds of Places with a Web-Based Evolutionary Algorithm

The sounds we associate with particular places are tightly interwoven with our memories and sense of belonging. We describe a platform designed to assist in gathering the sounds a group of people associate with a place. A web-based evolutionary algorithm, with human-in-the-loop fitness evaluations, ranks and recombines sounds to find collections that the group rates as familiar. An experiment covering four geographical locations shows that the process does indeed find sounds deemed familiar by participants

Polyanionic Ligand Platforms for Methyl- and Dimethylaluminum Arrays

Trimethylaluminum finds widespread applications in chemical and materials synthesis, most prominently in its partially hydrolyzed form of methylalumoxane (MAO), which is used as a cocatalyst in the polymerization of olefins. This work investigates the sequential reactions of trimethylaluminum with hexaprotic phosphazenes (RNH)6P3N3 (=XH6) equipped with substituents R of varied steric bulk including tert-butyl (1H6), cyclohexyl (2H6), isopropyl (3H6), isobutyl (4H6), ethyl (5H6), propyl (6H6), methyl (7H6), and benzyl (8H6). Similar to MAO, the resulting complexes of polyanionic phosphazenates [XHn]n−6 accommodate multinuclear arrays of [AlMe2]+ and [AlMe]2+. Reactions were monitored by 31P NMR spectroscopy, and structures were determined by single-crystal X-ray diffraction. They included 1H4(AlMe2)2, 1H3(AlMe2)3, 2H3(AlMe2)3, 3(AlMe2)4AlMe, 4H­(AlMe2)5, 4(AlMe2)6, {5H­(AlMe2)4}2AlMe, 5(AlMe2)6, 6(AlMe2)6, {7(AlMe2)4AlMe}2, and 8(AlMe2)6. The study shows that subtle variations of the steric properties of the R groups influence the reaction pathways, levels of aggregation, and fluxional behavior. While [AlMe2]+ is the primary product of the metalation, [AlMe]2+ is utilized to alleviate overcrowding or to aid aggregation. At the later stages of metalation, [AlMe2]+ groups start to scramble around congested sites. The ligands proved to be very robust and extremely flexible, offering a unique platform to study complex multinuclear metal arrangements

Brexit: Be Careful What You Wish For?

In this paper, I focus on the British future from Brexit. The institutional form this will take is not yet fixed. However, one can consider likely outcomes based on dominant economic frameworks. From this perspective, it seems unlikely that Brexit will address the actual grievances that resulted in Brexit. These transcend European Union membership

Crowd Sourcing The Sounds Of Places With A Web Based Genetic Algorithm Techreport

The sounds that we associate with particular places are tightly interwoven with our memories and sense of belonging. It is assumed that such an association is a complex process, and much of its mechanism is hidden from analytical examination. The association of sound to place has been much explored and examined by artistic approaches. For example, soundscape composition, which makes great use of recorded and barely-processed sounds from places in the compositional practice, highlights the power of the association. However, it does not offer us a scientific insight into its process, particularly, the role of familiarity of sounds people hear and their association to specific places. We describe a platform designed to assist in gathering the sounds that a group of people associate with a place. A web-based evolutionary algorithm, with human-in-the-loop fitness evaluations, ranks and recombines sounds to find collections that the group rates as familiar. An experiment involving independent groups of people associated with four geographical locations shows that the process does indeed find sounds deemed familiar by participants

Piketty's Calibration Economics: Inequality and the Dissolution of Solutions?

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. Abstract: By popularising interest in inequality, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has made a significant contribution. It has helped to change the basic terms of debate regarding wealth and income. However, Capital exhibits several weaknesses. The overall statement of Piketty's 3 laws tends to confuse the reader by conflating capital with all forms of wealth, and capital with the current market valuation of wealth assets. The whole creates a form of empiricism by metrics or calibration. The aggregation also lends itself to data as history rather than as historically grounded explanation of evidence. Concomitantly, it lacks a theorisation of capitalism, of power, of the state, of social movements, and of social transformations. This affects the way in which possible solutions to inequality are conceived. However, it does provoke further grounds for ethical counterargument productive of more progressive solutions to the problems it highlights

Marketing and Outreach in Law Libraries: A White Paper

In recent years, libraries have turned to marketing and outreach to better educate library users about services and resources while gaining an understanding of their needs. Marketing and outreach are relatively new concepts in academic law libraries, and librarians tasked with these functions have found resources and examples of this type of work to be lacking. Though focused on academic law libraries, the article identifies the challenges facing all law libraries, explains why libraries need marketing and outreach plans, and provides examples of marketing and outreach successes

Change and a Changing World? Theorizing Morphogenic Society

In the following review essay I provide some background in order to place Margaret Archer's edited Volume 3 text, Generative Mechanisms, in context of the series (Social Morphogenesis) from which it derives. In doing so I provide some sense of the significance of the series. Thereafter, I provide an overview of the key substantive claims of the essays, with some comment on how they may be linked together in terms of the theme of the series

A Note on the Contingent Necessity of a Morphogenic Society and Human Flourishing

The Centre for Social Ontology working group project has been exploring the concept of a Morphogenic Society since 2013. The project is now drawing to a close. One of the arising issues from the project has been whether such a society can be and is liable to be one of human flourishing. In this short paper, I explore one possible aspect of the concept of a Morphogenic Society.1 A Morphogenic Society may involve issues of ‘contingent necessity’. Contingent necessity may provide one way to think about human flourishing, and this in turn may highlight the potential significance of the concept of a Morphogenic Society as a resource in positional argument for human flourishing

Process evaluation for complex interventions in health services research: Analysing context, text trajectories and disruptions

Background: Process evaluations assess the implementation and sustainability of complex healthcare interventions within clinical trials, with well-established theoretical models available for evaluating intervention delivery within specific contexts. However, there is a need to translate conceptualisations of context into analytical tools which enable the dynamic relationship between context and intervention implementation to be captured and understood. Methods: In this paper I propose an alternative approach to the design, implementation and analysis of process evaluations for complex health interventions through a consideration of trial protocols as textual documents, distributed and enacted at multiple contextual levels. As an example, I conduct retrospective analysis of a sample of field notes and transcripts collected during the ESTEEM study - a cluster randomised controlled trial of primary care telephone triage. I draw on theoretical perspectives associated with Linguistic Ethnography to examine the delivery of ESTEEM through staff orientation to different texts. In doing so I consider what can be learned from examining the flow and enactment of protocols for notions of implementation and theoretical fidelity (i.e. intervention delivered as intended and whether congruent with the intervention theory). Results: Implementation of the triage intervention required staff to integrate essential elements of the protocol within everyday practice, seen through the adoption and use of different texts that were distributed across staff and within specific events. Staff were observed deploying texts in diverse ways (e.g. reinterpreting scripts, deviating from standard operating procedures, difficulty completing decision support software), providing numerous instances of disruption to maintaining intervention fidelity. Such observations exposed tensions between different contextual features in which the trial was implemented, offering theoretical explanations for the main trial findings. Conclusions: The value of following how trial protocols produce new texts is that we can observe the flow of 'the intervention as intended' across a series of events which are enacted to meet specific demands of intervention delivery. Such observations are not solely premised on identifying routines or practices of implementation, but where 'protocols as intended' breaks down. In doing so, I discuss whether it is here where we might expose the 'active ingredients' of interventions in action

Structural Basis for Apoptosis Inhibition by Epstein-Barr Virus BHRF1

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is associated with human malignancies, especially those affecting the B cell compartment such as Burkitt lymphoma. The virally encoded homolog of the mammalian pro-survival protein Bcl-2, BHRF1 contributes to viral infectivity and lymphomagenesis. In addition to the pro-apoptotic BH3-only protein Bim, its key target in lymphoid cells, BHRF1 also binds a selective sub-set of pro-apoptotic proteins (Bid, Puma, Bak) expressed by host cells. A consequence of BHRF1 expression is marked resistance to a range of cytotoxic agents and in particular, we show that its expression renders a mouse model of Burkitt lymphoma untreatable. As current small organic antagonists of Bcl-2 do not target BHRF1, the structures of it in complex with Bim or Bak shown here will be useful to guide efforts to target BHRF1 in EBV-associated malignancies, which are usually associated with poor clinical outcomes