Professional Profiles, Pedagogic Practices, and the Future of Guitar Education

In recent decades, guitar education has emerged as a discipline in PreK-12 institutions alongside “traditional” music education such as band, orchestra, and chorus. Despite the substantial body of literature containing practical advice on teaching guitar, research-supported scholarship is lacking. Additionally, this body of literature suggests a lack of congruency between curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher preparation among guitar educators. The purpose of this study was to provide an evidentiary-based understanding of the professional profiles and pedagogic practices of guitar educators. A multi-phase investigation was conducted. In Phase One, a large sample (n = 1,269) of guitar educators participated in the Guitar Educator Questionnaire (GEQ). Findings from the GEQ suggest a low (7.9) percent of music educators who teach guitar class consider themselves to be “guitar specialists.” A substantial number of respondents (68.5 percent) indicated that they rarely or never participated in guitar related professional development, and 76.1 percent of respondents reported that their pre-service training provided little or no preparation for a career in guitar education. A purposeful sample of six “exemplary” guitar educators contributed pedagogy-focused interviews and video teaching samples in Phases Two and Three. Data from the three phases were analyzed according to principles of thematic analysis in order to identify potential pathways toward the continued growth and maturation of guitar education

Limiter Control of a Chaotic RF Transistor Oscillator

We report experimental control of chaos in an electronic circuit at 43.9 MHz, which is the fastest chaos control reported in the literature to date. Limiter control is used to stabilize a periodic orbit in a tuned collector transistor oscillator modified to exhibit simply folded band chaos. The limiter is implemented using a transistor to enable monitoring the relative magnitude of the control perturbation. A plot of the relative control magnitude vs. limiter level shows a local minimum at period-1 control, thereby providing strong evidence that the controlled state is an unstable periodic orbit (UPO) of the uncontrolled system

Athens of the South: College Life in Nashville, A New South City, 1897-1917

The Progressive Era affected the South in different ways from other regions of the United States. Because Southern society was more entrenched in patriarchy and traditional social strictures, Nashville provides an excellent lens in which to assess the vision of a New South city. Known as “Athens of the South,” Nashville legitimized this title with the emergence of several colleges and universities of regional and national prominence in the 1880s and 1890s. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Nashville’s universities solidified their status as reputable institutions, with Vanderbilt and Fisk Universities garnering national prominence. Within Nashville, local colleges, including Ward Belmont College, David Lipscomb University, Peabody College, Roger Williams University, and Meharry Medical College shaped and were shaped by the growing city. Higher education and urbanization created a dialectic that produced a new generation and a new monied class of young adults who thought and acted differently from their parents. Moreover, women became more active participants in public spheres because of opportunities provided by higher education. In most cases, Nashville’s women continued to use their husband’s prominence to earn greater success. In regard to race, the city’s African American colleges helped to produce men and women who formed the backbone of the rising black middle class and elite in the South. Nashville endured great change, formally beginning with the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition, whereby the city’s trajectory followed a more modern approach, albeit southern style. Higher education played a large role in the direction of the city, both literally and figuratively. Shifts in attitude toward race, gender, and leisure combined to create a new youth culture. Young women and men socialized on and off campus through a variety of new forms of recreation. The experience of “college life” was more than attending classes but rather a fluid phase beginning with youthfulness and ending with adulthood. Social interaction increasingly became a major component of college life; the city of Nashville simply provided the stage. By U.S. entrance into World War I, Nashville had legitimized its position as a Southern urban center of entertainment and higher education

Symbolic dynamics and synchronization of coupled map networks with multiple delays

We use symbolic dynamics to study discrete-time dynamical systems with multiple time delays. We exploit the concept of avoiding sets, which arise from specific non-generating partitions of the phase space and restrict the occurrence of certain symbol sequences related to the characteristics of the dynamics. In particular, we show that the resulting forbidden sequences are closely related to the time delays in the system. We present two applications to coupled map lattices, namely (1) detecting synchronization and (2) determining unknown values of the transmission delays in networks with possibly directed and weighted connections and measurement noise. The method is applicable to multi-dimensional as well as set-valued maps, and to networks with time-varying delays and connection structure.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Exact Test of Independence Using Mutual Information

Using a recently discovered method for producing random symbol sequences with prescribed transition counts, we present an exact null hypothesis significance test (NHST) for mutual information between two random variables, the null hypothesis being that the mutual information is zero (i.e., independence). The exact tests reported in the literature assume that data samples for each variable are sequentially independent and identically distributed (iid). In general, time series data have dependencies (Markov structure) that violate this condition. The algorithm given in this paper is the first exact significance test of mutual information that takes into account the Markov structure. When the Markov order is not known or indefinite, an exact test is used to determine an effective Markov order

Expanding the ROK Navy : implications for the U.S.-ROK alliance

Stability on the Korean peninsula is a goal for several countries. The Republic of Korea (ROK) has depended on the United States to maintain stability on the Korean peninsula, but realizes its greater independence from a long time ally may be inevitable, especially after reunification. Measures now required afford the ROK every opportunity to provide for its own security and stability, including the need for modernizing the ROK Navy (ROKN). Present and future South Korean naval commitments to regional and international maritime environments support the transition from a brown water navy to a blue water navy capable of meeting future challenges. The ROK intends to achieve a naval force capable of projecting power, carrying out its strategic objectives, and ultimately guaranteeing vital defense for ROK sea lanes of communications. South Korea borders on the East Sea and the West Sea, dictating the need for a maritime force, to protect the lifeblood of the South Korean economy. Currently, the ROKN cannot compete against large modern navies, capable of conducting sustained naval operations while concurrently maintaining various platforms assigned numerous tasks. The ROKN's opportunity is ripe to expand its existing force into a modern blue water navy.http://archive.org/details/expandingroknavy109451242US Navy (USN) autho