WANMA: The Western Australian New Music Archive

In 2013, Edith Cowan University partnered with The State Library of Western Australia, The National Library of Australia, Western Australian music advocacy body Tura New Music, The National Library of Australia and ABC Classic FM on the Western Australian New Music Archive (WANMA), an online archive of Western Australian music from 1970 to the present day. This paper discusses the initial phases of the project and the challenges inherent in creating a digital archive that includes materials which reflect contemporary recognition of improvisation and sound art as composition, recordings as an alternative score, and video as an important documentation device for sound art and installations. Complex copyright and intellectual property issues are also being addressed, as is the future of the archive beyond its period of project funding

WANMA: The Western Australian New Music Archive

In 2013, Edith Cowan University partnered with The State Library of Western Australia, The National Library of Australia, Western Australian music advocacy body Tura New Music, The National Library of Australia and ABC Classic FM on the Western Australian New Music Archive (WANMA), an online archive of Western Australian music from 1970 to the present day. This paper discusses the initial phases of the project and the challenges inherent in creating a digital archive that includes materials which reflect contemporary recognition of improvisation and sound art as composition, recordings as an alternative score, and video as an important documentation device for sound art and installations. Complex copyright and intellectual property issues are also being addressed, as is the future of the archive beyond its period of project funding

Accelerating Large-Scale Data Analysis by Offloading to High-Performance Computing Libraries using Alchemist

Apache Spark is a popular system aimed at the analysis of large data sets, but recent studies have shown that certain computations---in particular, many linear algebra computations that are the basis for solving common machine learning problems---are significantly slower in Spark than when done using libraries written in a high-performance computing framework such as the Message-Passing Interface (MPI). To remedy this, we introduce Alchemist, a system designed to call MPI-based libraries from Apache Spark. Using Alchemist with Spark helps accelerate linear algebra, machine learning, and related computations, while still retaining the benefits of working within the Spark environment. We discuss the motivation behind the development of Alchemist, and we provide a brief overview of its design and implementation. We also compare the performances of pure Spark implementations with those of Spark implementations that leverage MPI-based codes via Alchemist. To do so, we use data science case studies: a large-scale application of the conjugate gradient method to solve very large linear systems arising in a speech classification problem, where we see an improvement of an order of magnitude; and the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) of a 400GB three-dimensional ocean temperature data set, where we see a speedup of up to 7.9x. We also illustrate that the truncated SVD computation is easily scalable to terabyte-sized data by applying it to data sets of sizes up to 17.6TB.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, London, UK, 201

Caloric restriction in C57BL/6J mice mimics therapeutic fasting in humans

BACKGROUND: Caloric restriction (CR) has long been recognized as a dietary therapy that improves health and increases longevity. Little is known about the persistent effects of CR on plasma biomarkers (glucose, ketone bodies, and lipids) following re-feeding in mice. It is also unclear how these biomarker changes in calorically restricted mice relate to those observed previously in calorically restricted humans. RESULTS: Three groups of individually housed adult female C57BL/6J (B6) mice (n = 4/group) were fed a standard rodent chow diet either: (1) unrestricted (UR); (2) restricted for three weeks to reduce body weight by approximately 15–20% (R); or (3) restricted for three weeks and then re-fed unrestricted (ad libitum) for an additional three weeks (R-RF). Body weight and food intake were measured throughout the study, while plasma lipids and levels of glucose and ketone bodies (β-hydroxybutyrate) were measured at the termination of the study. Plasma glucose, phosphatidylcholine, cholesterol, and triglycerides were significantly lower in the R mice than in the UR mice. In contrast, plasma fatty acids and β-hydroxybutyrate were significantly higher in the R mice than in the UR mice. CR had no effect on plasma phosphatidylinositol levels. While body weight and plasma lipids of the R-RF mice returned to unrestricted levels upon re-feeding, food intake and glucose levels remained significantly lower than those prior to the initiation of CR. CONCLUSION: CR establishes a new homeostatic state in B6 mice that persists for at least three weeks following ad libitum re-feeding. Moreover, the plasma biomarker changes observed in B6 mice during CR mimic those reported in humans on very low calorie diets or during therapeutic fasting

The Western Australian New Music Archive: performing as remembering

The curation of WANMA is guided by, and confronts the challenges presented by, such a broad definition, with a focus on constructing a representative canon of Western Australian new music history from 1970 to the present day. A drawback of the Western Australian music collection at the State Library of Western Australia (SLWA), and indeed of many other Australian music collections (such as that at the Australian Music Centre and UWA’s Callaway Collection)

Spitzer Warm Mission Transition and Operations

Following the successful dynamic planning and implementation of IRAC Warm Instrument Characterization activities, transition to Spitzer Warm Mission operations has gone smoothly. Operation teams procedures and processes required minimal adaptation and the overall composition of the Mission Operation System retained the same functionality it had during the Cryogenic Mission. While the warm mission scheduling has been simplified because all observations are now being made with a single instrument, several other differences have increased the complexity. The bulk of the observations executed to date have been from ten large Exploration Science programs that, combined, have more complex constraints, more observing requests, and more exo-planet observations with durations of up to 145 hours. Communication with the observatory is also becoming more challenging as the Spitzer DSN antenna allocations have been reduced from two tracking passes per day to a single pass impacting both uplink and downlink activities. While IRAC is now operating with only two channels, the data collection rate is roughly 60% of the four-channel rate leaving a somewhat higher average volume collected between the less frequent passes. Also, the maximum downlink data rate is decreasing as the distance to Spitzer increases requiring longer passes. Nevertheless, with well over 90% of the time spent on science observations, efficiency has equaled or exceeded that achieved during the cryogenic mission

The 2009 US Federal Cigarette Tax Increase and Quitline Utilization in 16 States

Background. On April 1, 2009, the federal cigarette excise tax increased from 39 cents to $1.01 per pack. Methods. This study describes call volumes to 16 state quitlines, characteristics of callers and cessation outcomes before and after the tax. Results. Calls to the quitlines increased by 23.5% in 2009 and more whites, smokers ≥ 25 years of age, smokers of shorter duration, those with less education, and those who live with smokers called after (versus before) the tax. Quit rates at 7 months did not differ before versus after tax. Conclusions. Descriptive analyses revealed that the federal excise tax on cigarettes was associated with increased calls to quitlines but multivariate analyses revealed no difference in quit rates. However, more callers at the same quit rate indicates an increase in total number of successful quitters. If revenue obtained from increased taxation on cigarettes is put into cessation treatment, then it is likely future excise taxes would have an even greater effect

A Pilot Study of Ketamine versus Midazolam/Fentanyl Sedation in Children Undergoing GI Endoscopy

Background. Ketamine sedation has been found superior by physician report to traditional sedation regimens for pediatric endoscopy. Goal. To objectively compare sedation with ketamine versus midazolam/fentanyl for children undergoing gastrointestinal endoscopy. Study. Patients received one of two regimens and were independently monitored using a standardized rating scale. Results. There were 2 episodes of laryngospasm during ketamine sedation. Univariate analyses showed patients sedated with ketamine (n = 17) moved more (median 25% of procedure time versus 8%, P = .03) and required similar low levels of restraint (0.83% versus 0.25%, P = .4) as patients sedated with midazolam/fentanyl (n = 20). Age-adjusted analyses suggested that patients sedated with ketamine were comparably more quiet (P = .002). Conclusions. A pilot trial of ketamine at our institution was associated with episodes of laryngospasm. In addition, children sedated with ketamine moved and required restraint similarly to patients sedated with midazolam/fentanyl. Physician perceptions may be affected by the fact that children who received ketamine were less likely to vocalize distress

Matrix Factorization at Scale: a Comparison of Scientific Data Analytics in Spark and C+MPI Using Three Case Studies

We explore the trade-offs of performing linear algebra using Apache Spark, compared to traditional C and MPI implementations on HPC platforms. Spark is designed for data analytics on cluster computing platforms with access to local disks and is optimized for data-parallel tasks. We examine three widely-used and important matrix factorizations: NMF (for physical plausability), PCA (for its ubiquity) and CX (for data interpretability). We apply these methods to TB-sized problems in particle physics, climate modeling and bioimaging. The data matrices are tall-and-skinny which enable the algorithms to map conveniently into Spark's data-parallel model. We perform scaling experiments on up to 1600 Cray XC40 nodes, describe the sources of slowdowns, and provide tuning guidance to obtain high performance