Creative layers and continuities: a case study of Nicole Lizée and the Kronos Quartet

This study examines the creative layers and continuities evident within the composition and rehearsal processes of Nicole Lizée’s Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop (Fibre-Optic Flowers), written for the Kronos Quartet in 2012. Lizée’s compositional approach to the historic and the new, and the mechanical and the human, are interpreted through Simon Emmerson’s three themes of combination, transformation, and control, and his three “impulses within composition” that combine live and acousmatic soundworlds – integration, antithesis, and co-existence. These concepts also help to articulate the way the players engage with the physical, psychological, and expressive demands of the piece. Discussions arising from the Kronos Quartet rehearsing the piece with the composer reveal how extensions are made to the performers’ mind and body experiences when they are required both to initiate and integrate sounds emanating from unfamiliar, analogue machines into their acoustic, yet amplified soundworld. Creative layers and continuities are seen to evolve from compositional experimentation and from composer–performer and co-performer dialogues in rehearsal in the BBC Maida Vale studio prior to the world premiere at a BBC Prom concert on 24 July 2012

Communicating through notation: Michael Finnissy’s Second String Quartet from composition to performance

This article looks behind the scenes at the notational and interpretative issues arising from the compositional and rehearsal processes embodied in the Second String Quartet by Michael Finnissy, written for the Kreutzer Quartet in 2006-07. The relationship between the individual parts and corporate whole, as represented by the score, or quasi-score, or even the absence of a score, has been of central importance in all of Finnissy’s quartet music to date. Recorded evidence from the rehearsal of the piece is evaluated from both ‘insider’and ‘outsider’ perspectives to demonstrate the extent to which players need to devise new interpretative strategies in response to the specific demands of the notation. Examination of composer-performer interactions reveals how the limits of notation can provide creative tension and imaginative interpretation that contribute to a developing contemporary performance practice

Why Do Cascade Sizes Follow a Power-Law?

We introduce random directed acyclic graph and use it to model the information diffusion network. Subsequently, we analyze the cascade generation model (CGM) introduced by Leskovec et al. [19]. Until now only empirical studies of this model were done. In this paper, we present the first theoretical proof that the sizes of cascades generated by the CGM follow the power-law distribution, which is consistent with multiple empirical analysis of the large social networks. We compared the assumptions of our model with the Twitter social network and tested the goodness of approximation.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, accepted to WWW 201

A continuous model for microtubule dynamics with catastrophe, rescue and nucleation processes

Microtubules are a major component of the cytoskeleton distinguished by highly dynamic behavior both in vitro and in vivo. We propose a general mathematical model that accounts for the growth, catastrophe, rescue and nucleation processes in the polymerization of microtubules from tubulin dimers. Our model is an extension of various mathematical models developed earlier formulated in order to capture and unify the various aspects of tubulin polymerization including the dynamic instability, growth of microtubules to saturation, time-localized periods of nucleation and depolymerization as well as synchronized oscillations exhibited by microtubules under various experimental conditions. Our model, while attempting to use a minimal number of adjustable parameters, covers a broad range of behaviors and has predictive features discussed in the paper. We have analyzed the resultant behaviors of the microtubules changing each of the parameter values at a time and observing the emergence of various dynamical regimes.Comment: 25 pages, 12 figure

Educational outcomes in extremely preterm children : neuropsychological correlates and predictors of attainment

This study assessed the impact of extremely preterm birth on academic attainment at 11 years of age, investigated neuropsychological antecedents of attainment in reading and mathematics, and examined early predictors of educational outcomes. Children born extremely preterm had significantly poorer academic attainment and a higher prevalence of learning difficulties than their term peers. General cognitive ability and specific deficits in visuospatial skills or phoneme deletion at 6 years were predictive of mathematics and reading attainment at 11 years in both extremely preterm and term children. Phonological processing, attention, and executive functions at 6 years were also associated with academic attainment in children born extremely preterm. Furthermore, social factors, neonatal factors (necrotizing enterocolitis, breech delivery, abnormal cerebral ultrasound, early breast milk provision), and developmental factors at 30 months (head circumference, cognitive development), were independent predictors of educational outcomes at 11 years. Neonatal complications combined with assessments of early cognitive function provide moderate prediction for educational outcomes in children born extremely preterm

Emotional engagements predict and enhance social cognition in young chimpanzees

Social cognition in infancy is evident in coordinated triadic engagements, that is, infants attending jointly with social partners and objects. Current evolutionary theories of primate social cognition tend to highlight species differences in cognition based on human-unique cooperative motives. We consider a developmental model in which engagement experiences produce differential outcomes. We conducted a 10-year-long study in which two groups of laboratory-raised chimpanzee infants were given quantifiably different engagement experiences. Joint attention, cooperativeness, affect, and different levels of cognition were measured in 5- to 12-month-old chimpanzees, and compared to outcomes derived from a normative human database. We found that joint attention skills significantly improved across development for all infants, but by 12 months, the humans significantly surpassed the chimpanzees. We found that cooperativeness was stable in the humans, but by 12 months, the chimpanzee group given enriched engagement experiences significantly surpassed the humans. Past engagement experiences and concurrent affect were significant unique predictors of both joint attention and cooperativeness in 5- to 12-month-old chimpanzees. When engagement experiences and concurrent affect were statistically controlled, joint attention and cooperation were not associated. We explain differential social cognition outcomes in terms of the significant influences of previous engagement experiences and affect, in addition to cognition. Our study highlights developmental processes that underpin the emergence of social cognition in support of evolutionary continuity

Conformational changes of calmodulin upon Ca2+ binding studied with a microfluidic mixer

A microfluidic mixer is applied to study the kinetics of calmodulin conformational changes upon Ca2+ binding. The device facilitates rapid, uniform mixing by decoupling hydrodynamic focusing from diffusive mixing and accesses time scales of tens of microseconds. The mixer is used in conjunction with multiphoton microscopy to examine the fast Ca2+-induced transitions of acrylodan-labeled calmodulin. We find that the kinetic rates of the conformational changes in two homologous globular domains differ by more than an order of magnitude. The characteristic time constants are ≈490 μs for the transitions in the C-terminal domain and ≈20 ms for those in the N-terminal domain of the protein. We discuss possible mechanisms for the two distinct events and the biological role of the stable intermediate, half-saturated calmodulin

Lateralization of infant holding by mothers: a longitudinal evaluation of variations over the first 12 weeks

The maternal preference to hold infants on the left rather than right side of the body was examined longitudinally, with attention to four explanations: maternal monitoring of infant state, maternal handedness, infant proximity to the mother’s heartbeat, and preferred infant head position. The side and site of holding were measured over the first twelve weeks of the lives of 24 infants. Information about group and individual consistency in holding side allowed novel evaluation of the theories. A strong bias to hold on the left dropped below significance when the infants were aged twelve weeks and was limited to specific holding positions. Findings were generally consistent with the monitoring hypothesis, and little support was found for the three alternative explanations

All-sky search for short gravitational-wave bursts in the second Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo run

We present the results of a search for short-duration gravitational-wave transients in the data from the second observing run of Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo. We search for gravitational-wave transients with a duration of milliseconds to approximately one second in the 32-4096 Hz frequency band with minimal assumptions about the signal properties, thus targeting a wide variety of sources. We also perform a matched-filter search for gravitational-wave transients from cosmic string cusps for which the waveform is well modeled. The unmodeled search detected gravitational waves from several binary black hole mergers which have been identified by previous analyses. No other significant events have been found by either the unmodeled search or the cosmic string search. We thus present the search sensitivities for a variety of signal waveforms and report upper limits on the source rate density as a function of the characteristic frequency of the signal. These upper limits are a factor of 3 lower than the first observing run, with a 50% detection probability for gravitational-wave emissions with energies of ∼10-9 Mc2 at 153 Hz. For the search dedicated to cosmic string cusps we consider several loop distribution models, and present updated constraints from the same search done in the first observing run