The changing face of urban air pollution : volatile organic compounds in u.S. urban air increasingly derive from consumer products

Volatile organic compounds in U.S. urban air increasingly derive from consumer products</jats:p

'“When you told people... you were a poet, didn’t you get your head kicked in?”: Precarious Manhood in the Poetry of Don Paterson and Simon Armitage' & 'By Twos': A Critical Dissertation and Creative Portfolio

This thesis comprises a critical dissertation and a collection of poetry, 'By Twos'. In the dissertation, I focus on the relationship between poetry and masculinity in the work of Don Paterson and Simon Armitage. Throughout, I rely on Bosson’s Precarious Manhood Paradigm (PMP). This theory states that manhood is widely regarded as a fragile status, which is hard-won, easily lost, and requires public proof. In this context, I argue that poetry is viewed as an effeminate art, and that this acts as a “gender threat” to men poets. According to the PMP, men typically respond to gender threats with a “reparative response”, which aims to reestablish their masculinity in the eyes of others. This thesis is concerned with men poets’, and particularly Paterson’s and Armitage’s, reparative responses. To work out what these responses are likely to be, it is necessary to understand how and why poetry – an art which has been dominated by men – has come to be associated with effeminacy. I argue, first, that Romantic changes led to a new feminised conception of the poet; second, that industrialisation gave rise to an ‘entrepreneurial manhood’, which valorised labour, utility, and rationality, and so clashed with this Romantic ideal; and third, that men poets are “excused by success”. I use these answers as a framework. In chapters three and four, I argue that both poets confound the post-Romantic expectation that a poet’s subject matter will be a sensitive exploration of their own emotions. In chapter five, I show that they represent poetry as rational, useful, skilful labour, by casting the poet in the roles of craftsman and industrial worker. Finally, in chapter six, I set out the ways both poets emphasise their professionalism, and draw a line between the feminine act of writing poetry and the masculine role of being a poet

End-to-end loading of new music libraries to F-Tempo via IIIF

This poster shows the completion of the work that we presented in last year’s IAML-DLfM joint session. F-Tempo provides an online interface to search full-page scores of renaissance and early baroque music scores. During initial development, F-Tempo consisted of only one database of scores, manually curated and added to the search index. Subsequently, further databases were manually curated and integrated to the index. Any new content needed to be manually curated and added to the application, a process which involved image manipulation, manually executing processes to transform data, and the manual editing of the website source code. We have finished our work to make the F-Tempo database extensible by automatically importing the contents of a music library based on IIIF manifests provided by libraries. Our initial proof of concept imports data from the Music collection of the British Library. Because the IIIF manifest does not include structured metadata for documents, we additionally developed individual data lookup methods for each library that we wished to import. For example, for the British Library we are able to obtain the MARC record for a book and obtain other metadata including a description of the work, the composer (linked to a VIAF record where possible), and the RISM identifier if it exists. An automatic pipeline can take a list of URLs of IIIF manifests and download the manifest and any associated metadata, download each image in the manifest, identify which images contain music, perform OMR on those pages, perform the MAWs computation used for the search process used in F-Tempo (Crawford 2018), and add all of the metadata for the IIIF document to our search index. Scores in symbolic formats can also be imported to the F-Tempo index. We have imported 19,000 scores of music in MusicXML format from the Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL). This process also obtains metadata of the scores, but does not include images. The search interface of F-tempo previously allowed for the search of music by choosing an existing page from the database, or uploading a previously unseen page of music. This interface has been extended to take advantage of the metadata collected by each library lookup. It is now possible to navigate content by Library, Book, Composer (even if their works are in different libraries), shelf numbers, or RISM identifiers. Metadata that is present in the IIIF manifest is indexed, and a free-form search box allows for users to identify works by performing a search. Search results that match images from libraries are presented as images. Search results that match symbolic scores are rendered using the Verovio engraving library

Exploring early vocal music and its lute arrangements: Using F-TEMPO as a musicological tool

In its earliest state, F-TEMPO (Full-Text searching of Early Music Prints Online) enabled searching in the musical content of about 30,000 page-images of early printed music from the British Library's Early Music Online collection (GB-Lbl). The images were processed using the Optical Music Recognition (OMR) program, Aruspix, whose output is saved in the MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) format. To enable fast searches of the MEI, we adopted an indexing strategy that is both scalable and substantially robust to the inevitable errors in the process. In this paper we show how searches using these indexes may be used as a first step in two useful musicological tasks without exhaustively processing the full encodings. The F-TEMPO resource has subsequently been augmented to about 500,000 images including a large number from the Bavarian State Library in Munich (D-Mbs), and other libraries (D-Bsb, PL-Wn and F-Pn). Most recently, a new and more robust system architecture is in development, together with a new interface conforming better to modern web standards. The simple, yet robust, indexing method we use can be applied to scores encoded in any format from which strings of pitches each corresponding to a voice or instrument in the score can be derived. In addition to page-images, in its current form F-TEMPO now includes a collection of over 10,000 scores encoded in MusicXML, largely of early music, from the online Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL). To show the potential for F-TEMPO as a tool for musicologists to explore the full-text content of the collections, we look at two simple tasks: (a) finding pages which contain similar music to a given query page; and (b), given a query representing an approximation to the highest-sounding voice from a lute arrangement of a popular vocal item from the 16th century, finding a likely vocal model within the F-TEMPO index

Optimising air quality co-benefits in a hydrogen economy: a case for hydrogen-specific standards for NOx emissions

A global transition to hydrogen fuel offers major opportunities to decarbonise a range of different energy-intensive sectors from large-scale electricity generation through to heating in homes. Hydrogen can be deployed as an energy source in two distinct ways, in electrochemical fuel cells and via combustion. Combustion seems likely to be a major pathway given that it requires only incremental technological change. The use of hydrogen is not however without side-effects and the widely claimed benefit that only water is released as a by-product is only accurate when it is used in fuel cells. The burning of hydrogen can lead to the thermal formation of nitrogen oxides (NOx – the sum of NO + NO2) via a mechanism that also applies to the combustion of fossil fuels. NO2 is a key air pollutant that is harmful in its own right and is a precursor to other pollutants of concern such as fine particulate matter and ozone. Minimising NOx as a by-product from hydrogen boilers and engines is possible through control of combustion conditions, but this can lead to reduced power output and performance. After-treatment and removal of NOx is possible, but this increases cost and complexity in appliances. Combustion applications therefore require optimisation and potentially lower hydrogen-specific emissions standards if the greatest air quality benefits are to derive from a growth in hydrogen use