Making Sound Decisions: Institutional Responses to the Crisis in Audio Preservation

Some archives have been quick to respond to the crisis in audio preservation brought on by the combined forces of obsolescence and degradation inherent in legacy audio formats and their playback equipment. These archives have undertaken digitization projects for particular collections or, in a few cases, have digitized the bulk of their audio holdings for preservation. Based on an examination of the literature on audio preservation, however, the responses of some institutions—particularly small and midsized institutions—have been stymied by roadblocks related to cost and expertise. Given the limited time available for archives to migrate audio content, this uneven response threatens to leave an incomplete audio legacy, weighted toward grant-worthy collections with few copyright restrictions at larger, better-resourced institutions. After a review of relevant literature, this article suggests interventions institutions of all sizes can undertake to respond to the crisis in audio preservation including stringent selection and reappraisal projects, strategies for tiered audio digitization using a combination of in-house and vendor-based services, and suggestions for increasing access to high-quality digitization for worthy audio materials

Magnetic Actuators and Suspension for Space Vibration Control

The research on microgravity vibration isolation performed at the University of Virginia is summarized. This research on microgravity vibration isolation was focused in three areas: (1) the development of new actuators for use in microgravity isolation; (2) the design of controllers for multiple-degree-of-freedom active isolation; and (3) the construction of a single-degree-of-freedom test rig with umbilicals. Described are the design and testing of a large stroke linear actuator; the conceptual design and analysis of a redundant coarse-fine six-degree-of-freedom actuator; an investigation of the control issues of active microgravity isolation; a methodology for the design of multiple-degree-of-freedom isolation control systems using modern control theory; and the design and testing of a single-degree-of-freedom test rig with umbilicals

Sequence analysis of the cis-regulatory regions of the bithorax complex of Drosophila

The bithorax complex (BX-C) of Drosophila, one of two complexes that act as master regulators of the body plan of the fly, has now been entirely sequenced and comprises approximate to 315,000 bp, only 1.4% of which codes for protein. Analysis of this sequence reveals significantly overrepresented DNA motifs of unknown, as well as known, functions in the nonprotein-coding portion of the sequence. The following types of motifs in that portion are analyzed: (i) concatamers of mono-, di-, and trinucleotides; (ii) tightly clustered hexanucleotides (spaced less than or equal to 5 bases apart); (iii) direct and reverse repeats longer than 20 bp; and (iv) a number of motifs known from biochemical studies to play a role in the regulation of the BX-C. The hexanucleotide AGATAC is remarkably overrepresented and is surmised to play a role in chromosome pairing. The positions of sites of highly overrepresented motifs are plotted for those that occur at more than five sites in the sequence, when <0.5 case is expected. Expected values are based on a third-order Markov chain, which is the optimal order for representing the BXCALL sequence

An Empirical Analysis of the Economic Impact of Federal Terrorism Reinsurance

This paper examines the role of the federal government in the market for terrorism reinsurance. We investigate the stock price response of affected industries to a sequence of thirteen events culminating in the enactment of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) of 2002. In the industries most likely to be affected by TRIA banking, construction, insurance, real estate investment trusts, transportation, and public utilities the stock price effect was primarily negative. The Act was at best value-neutral for property-casualty insurers because it eliminated the option not to offer terrorism insurance. The negative response of the other industries may be attributable to the Act's impeding more efficient private market solutions, failing to address nuclear, chemical, and biological hazards, and reducing market expectations of federal assistance following future terrorist attacks.

Illusions of gunk

The possibility of gunk has been used to argue against mereological nihilism. This paper explores two responses on the part of the microphysical mereological nihilist: (1) the contingency defence, which maintains that nihilism is true of the actual world; but that at other worlds, composition occurs; (2) the impossibility defence, which maintains that nihilism is necessary true, and so gunk worlds are impossible. The former is argued to be ultimately unstable; the latter faces the explanatorily burden of explaining the illusion that gunk is possible. It is argued that we can discharge this burden by focussing on the contingency of the microphysicalist aspect of microphysical mereological nihilism. The upshot is that gunk-based arguments against microphysical mereological nihilism can be resisted

Technical Note: Desktop Management in Practice

Desktop management is the set of activities employed to manage distributed IT resources within an organization. Reports from the late 1990s indicated that desktop management was not widely used. This article presents the results of a survey about the extent to which desktop management functions and policies are currently implemented in practice and about the perception of the benefits of desktop management. The primary conclusion of this technical note is that desktop management, despite moderately favorable perceptions of its benefits, is still not extensively implemented. However, when our data are evaluated relative to earlier reports, it appears that the level of implementation increased somewhat between 1998 and 2002

Desktop Management

Desktop management consists of the systematic activities performed by IS professionals to manage distributed computing resources throughout an organization. However, it does not appear that desktop management is being practiced extensively by organizations at this time. This paper, a comprehensive tutorial whose purpose is to raise awareness concerning the importance and potential of desktop management, examines the following issues: (1) What is the significance of desktop management? (2) What management practices constitute desktop management? (3) What are the benefits associated with implementing desktop management practices? (4) Why is desktop management not implemented? (5) What is the future of desktop management? The significance of desktop management is explored relative to total cost of ownership and the actions by the computer industry to support desktop management. Desktop management practice is described from two perspectives: (1) the software tools that enable and facilitate desktop management, and (2) the managerial activities associated with the discipline of desktop management. The benefits of desktop management covered in this paper include reduced cost of ownership, improved user productivity, and enhanced competitive advantage. However, desktop management is not widely practiced at this time, and the reasons for this state of affairs are examined briefly. Sales projections for desktop management software and interest in the topic on the Internet provide evidence that desktop management will be an important issue in the future. Issues that will impact that future include alternate ways of reducing total cost of ownership, increased use of mobile devices, and the emergence of enterprise system management tools

Bringing the concert hall into the living room: digital scholarship of small-scale arrangements of large-scale musical works

We present a study into nineteenth century arrangements of operatic and orchestral works for domestic use, supported by tools designed to support digital musicological research. These tools are built on web standards – Linked Data (particularly Web Annotations), IIIF and MEI – along with a new ontology designed to support the annotation of musical materials that appear in different forms across different resources