Sound effects : The oral/aural dimensions of literature in English : Introduction

This collection derives from a conference held at the University of St. Andrews in 2006, one of an occasional series on the media in history as a context for literary interpretation.1 The aim of the conference was to extend our discussion of the literary media from printed text and script back to the most basic medium of all: speech. But we also wanted to explore points of contact between the established field of oral tradition and the emerging field of sound studies.Issue title: Sound Effects

False Advertising

There is widespread evidence that some firms use false advertising to overstate the value of their products. Using a model in which a policymaker is able to punish such false claims, we characterize a natural equilibrium in which false advertising actively influences rational buyers. We analyze the effects of policy under different welfare objectives and establish a set of demand and parameter conditions where policy optimally permits a positive level of false advertising. Further analysis considers some wider issues including the implications for product investment and industry self-regulation

A review of the research literature relating to ICT and attainment

Summary of the main report, which examined current research and evidence for the impact of ICT on pupil attainment and learning in school settings and the strengths and limitations of the methodologies used in the research literature

Towards Developing a Virtual Guitar Instructor through Biometrics Informed Human-Computer Interaction

Within the last few years, wearable sensor technologies have allowed us to access novel biometrics that give us the ability to connect musical gesture to computing systems. Doing this affords us to study how we perform musically and understand the process at data level. However, biometric information is complex and cannot be directly mapped to digital systems. In this work, we study how guitar performance techniques can be captured/analysed towards developing an AI which can provide real-time feedback to guitar students. We do this by performing musical exercises on the guitar whilst acquiring and processing biometric (plus audiovisual) information during their performance. Our results show: there are notable differences within biometrics when playing a guitar scale in two different ways (legato and staccato) and this outcome can be used to motivate our intention to build an AI guitar tutor

Noise and Bias In Square-Root Compression Schemes

We investigate data compression schemes for proposed all-sky diffraction-limited visible/NIR sky surveys aimed at the dark-energy problem. We show that lossy square-root compression to 1 bit pixel^(-1) of noise, followed by standard lossless compression algorithms, reduces the images to 2.5–4 bits pixel^(-1), depending primarily upon the level of cosmic-ray contamination of the images. Compression to this level adds noise equivalent to ≤ 10% penalty in observing time. We derive an analytic correction to flux biases inherent to the square-root compression scheme. Numerical tests on simple galaxy models confirm that galaxy fluxes and shapes are measured with systematic biases ≾ 10^-4 induced by the compression scheme, well below the requirements of supernova and weak gravitational lensing dark-energy experiments. In a related investigation, Vanderveld and coworkers bound the shape biases using realistic simulated images of the high-Galactic–latitude sky. The square-root preprocessing step has advantages over simple (linear) decimation when there are many bright objects or cosmic rays in the field, or when the background level will vary