Innovation Strategies for Musicians

In this thesis I describe the old and new music industry models from different perspectives. Included is a brief interview with CD Baby founder Derek Sivers with his advice for musicians. Modular strategies for independent artists to learn, record, digital distribution (CDBaby, TuneCore), branding, and monetize their music are presented. I also present academic and applied perspectives in creativity, project management (Iron Triangle, Systems Perspective of Success, SMART Strategy), and VARK learning preference that can affect the strategies selected by musicians

Using gamification to teach and engage students in the act of summary writing

This study uses the concept of gamification to engage first-year students in the act of summary writing. The researcher argues that writing instructors should consider ways to gamify concepts in their curriculum to bring novelty and active involvement to course materials. The researcher uses Robson et al.’s (2015) mechanics, dynamics, and emotions framework and Groh’s (2012) principles of relatedness, competence, and autonomy to explain and justify the integration of gamification to the summary genre. Of the typical gaming elements used in gamification, the researcher relies on the uses of digital badges as a motivator and as a sign of credentials for students. Using data from 17 students, 88.2% strived to earn the badges. The survey revealed that 64.7% found the use of badges to be one of the driving forces behind their understanding of the summary conventions, and 47% believed the use of gamification helped them write better summaries overall

The Impact of Indonesia's Mining Industry Regulation on the Protection of Indigenous Peoples

The government has established various policies regarding mining in Indonesia. Still, an important question that needs to be asked is whether these policies have provided benefits, justice, and balance for indigenous and tribal peoples. This study aims to analyze the impact of Indonesian mining regulations on the protection of indigenous peoples. This is a normative legal research effort. The literature review gathers information from document analysis, which is analyzed qualitatively. Data analysis is descriptive-analytic in nature. The study results show that the impact of mining regulations still needs to reflect the recognition and protection of the rights of indigenous peoples. There is a need to improve mining management legislation and systems. Standardization of reclamation and post-mining management is required to provide implementation guidelines that meet the needs of the community. It has no negative impact on the community surrounding the mine. Licensing is one policy that can be used to implement standardization, which means keeping an eye on how the land is managed after mining, how waste is handled, and how policies are made to encourage mining and conservation activities that are good for the environment

Optimized design of source energy for manufacturing machine by digital numerical control

The quality of the power supplied to the machining center is a key factor in determining the accuracy of the machine’s operation. The precision of the machining center is to ensure that the spindle accuracy is less than 3 microns. This study proposes a digital numerical control system to control the quality of the power supply and control the accuracy of the spindle axis of the machining center to monitor the measurement results in real time. The computer vision system is set up according to the artificial intelligent (AI) technique to recognize human face objects and control the position of the processor respectively on each line. The online measurement system follows the digital numerical control (DNC) system applied at each processing line, measuring product dimensions, measuring conditions for setting up machining tools, and measuring machine coordinates. The system operates fully automatically, eliminating dependence on operator skill, and facilitating operation in control of machining conditions. Improve machining center operator satisfaction. After implementation of the improvement options, total cost down 1.740 USD per year, the monthly repair cost due to broken drill, spindle alignment decreased from $5000 to$3,300 per month. The scrap rate related to the hole size decreased from 0.47% to 0.23% (cost down $35 per month). Downtime for repair reduced from 20 hours per month to 7.5 hours per month (cost down$10 per month). Broken drill rate was reduced from 0.20% to 0.06% (cost down $100 per month).Web of Science201103211030

HybridMingler: Towards Mixed-Reality Support for Mingling at Hybrid Conferences

Mingling, the activity of ad-hoc, private, opportunistic conversations ahead of, during, or after breaks, is an important socializing activity for attendees at scheduled events, such as in-person conferences. The Covid-19 pandemic had a dramatic impact on the way conferences are organized, so that most of them now take place in a hybrid mode where people can either attend on-site or remotely. While on-site attendees can resume in-person mingling, hybrid modes make it challenging for remote attendees to mingle with on-site peers. In addressing this problem, we propose a collaborative mixed-reality (MR) concept, including a prototype, called HybridMingler. This is a distributed MR system supporting ambient awareness and allowing both on-site and remote conference attendees to virtually mingle. HybridMingler aims to provide both on-site and remote attendees with a spatial sense of co-location in the very same venue location, thus ultimately improving perceived presence

The Oxygen Reduction Reaction on Graphene from Quantum Mechanics: Comparing Armchair and Zigzag Carbon Edges

Using density functional theory (PBE-D2 flavor), we report the mechanism for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) on graphene sheets. We find that ORR starts with OO chemisorbing onto the carbon edges, rather than the basal plane face, which is not energetically favorable. The carbon edges were described as one-dimensional periodic graphene ribbons with both armchair and zigzag edges. We calculated the binding energies of the ORR products (OO, OOH, O, OH, HOH, HOOH) for the zigzag and armchair edges, examining both the Langmuir–Hinshelwood (LH) and Eley–Rideal (ER), to understand how OO is reduced. For the armchair edge, we calculate an onset potential of 0.55 V vs reversible hydrogen electrode (RHE), which corresponds to −0.22 V at pH 13 in agreement with experiments. We find that the rate-determining step (RDS) to form peroxide (a 2e– process) is hydrogenation of adsorbed OO with a barrier of 0.92 eV. The process to make water (a 4e– process) was found to be unfavorable at the onset potential but becomes more favorable at lower potentials. Thus, undoped carbon catalysts prefer the 2e– mechanism to form peroxide, rather than the 4e– process to form water, which agrees with experiment. The predictions open the route for experimental studies to improve the sluggish ORR on carbon catalysts

Vehicle Type Classification with Small Dataset and Transfer Learning Techniques

This study delves into the application of deep learning training techniques using a restricted dataset, encompassing around 400 vehicle images sourced from Kaggle. Faced with the challenges of limited data, the impracticality of training models from scratch becomes apparent, advocating instead for the utilization of pre-trained models with pre-trained weights. The investigation considers three prominent models—EfficientNetB0, ResNetB0, and MobileNetV2—with EfficientNetB0 emerging as the most proficient choice. Employing the gradually unfreeze layer technique over a specified number of epochs, EfficientNetB0 exhibits remarkable accuracy, reaching 99.5% on the training dataset and 97% on the validation dataset. In contrast, training models from scratch results in notably lower accuracy. In this context, knowledge distillation proves pivotal, overcoming this limitation and significantly improving accuracy from 29.5% in training and 20.5% in validation to 54% and 45%, respectively. This study uniquely contributes by exploring transfer learning with gradually unfreeze layers and elucidates the potential of knowledge distillation. It highlights their effectiveness in robustly enhancing model performance under data scarcity, thus addressing challenges associated with training deep learning models on limited datasets. The findings underscore the practical significance of these techniques in achieving superior results when confronted with data constraints in real-world scenario

Nitrogen-Fixing Purple Nonsulfur Bacteria Originating from Acid Saline Soils of a Rice-Shrimp Farm

The study was conducted to (i) isolate, select, and identify strains of purple nonsulfur bacteria (PNSB), which can fix nitrogen (N), from soil and water in a rice-shrimp integrated system, (ii) to determine the capacity of the selected potent PNSB strains in producing plant growth promoting substances. The isolation resulted in 57 pure PNSB strains from 36 soil samples and 36 water samples of rice-shrimp paddy fields in Thanh Phu - Ben Tre. Among them, 49 strains survived under pH 5.0 conditions, 24 of which grew well under microaerobic light (ML) and aerobic dark (AD) conditions in a basic isolation medium (BIM) containing NaCl 5‰. Two strains (S01 and S06) with the greatest N fixation were identified by 16S rRNA techniques as Rhodobacter sphaeroides. Their N production was 16.9 mg L-1 under the ML condition and 32.1 mg L-1 under the AD condition. Moreover, two R. sphaeroides S01 and S06 strains performed P solubilization at 0.382-2.954 mg L-1 from Al-P, 3.81-4.28 mg L-1 from Fe-P, and 3.87-4.74 mg L-1 from Ca-P, and production of plant growth promoting substances, such as IAA (12.3-15.5 mg L-1), EPS (1.09-1.58 mg L-1), siderophores (10.7-53.6%) and ALA (1.68-2.82 mg L-1) under both the incubating conditions

Culturally adaptive storytelling intervention versus didactic intervention to improve hypertension control in Vietnam- 12 month follow up results: A cluster randomized controlled feasibility trial

INTRODUCTION: Vietnam is experiencing an epidemiologic transition with an increased prevalence of non-communicable diseases. The country needs novel, large-scale, and sustainable interventions to improve hypertension control. We report the 12 month follow-up results of a cluster randomized feasibility trial in Hung Yen province, Vietnam, which evaluated the feasibility and acceptability of two community-based interventions to improve hypertension control: a storytelling and a didactic intervention. METHODS: The storytelling intervention included stories in the patients\u27 own words about coping with hypertension and didactic content about the importance of healthy lifestyle behaviors in controlling elevated blood pressure levels. The didactic intervention included only didactic content, which were general recommendations for managing several important risk factors for hypertension and other non-communicable diseases. The storytelling intervention was delivered by two DVDs three months apart; the didactic intervention included only one DVD. The trial was conducted in patients with poorly controlled hypertension from 4 communes (communities), which were equally randomized to the two interventions. RESULTS: The mean age of the 160 patients was 66 years and 54% were men. Between baseline enrollment and the 12 month follow-up, mean systolic blood pressure declined by 10.8 mmHg (95% CI: 6.5-14.9) in the storytelling group and by 5.8 mmHg (95% CI: 1.6-10.0) in the didactic content group. The storytelling group also experienced more improvement in several health behaviors, including increased levels of physical activity and reduced consumption of salt and alcohol. CONCLUSIONS: We observed considerable long-term beneficial effects of both interventions, especially of our storytelling intervention, among patients with inadequately controlled hypertension. A large scale randomized trial should more systematically compare the short and long-term effectiveness of the two interventions in controlling hypertension. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02483780

Effect of time and temperature on the survival rate of mouse sperm (Mus musculus var. Albino) in short-term preservation without cryoprotectant agents

In this study, we studied the use of physiological saline solution (NaCl 0,9%) or dulbecco’s phosphatebuffered saline (D-PBS) for mature sperms short-term preservation. After being collected from epididymides, sperms were adjusted to desired concentration (2x106 sperms/ml) with NaCl 0.9% solution or D-PBS solution (the dishes containing sperms were covered by mineral oil) and stored at 4oC, iooC and room temperature (RT/26oC