The fall of Constantinople

In my article I present a comparative analysis of Manolis Kalomiris's opera the Constantine Palaeologus and Cemal Resid Rey's symphonic poem Fatih Sultan Mehmet from the point of view of national canons, political backgrounds and aesthetics. Both pieces deal with the last siege of Constantinople (1453), which ended in the victory of the Ottoman army. This historic turning point inspired very sophisticated, interpretative compositions on both of sides of the former frontline. In the epilogue of my article this horizon is widened by the Hungarian musical reading of this great historical event. In 1953 - 500 years after the siege - the contemporary artistic remembrance turned the fall of Constantinople into an important part of both national mythologies. These mythologies can demonstrate that Turkey belongs to Europe, and Europe is in debt to Greece. Both nations and even both states have problems with their respective political identities, with the acceptance of their near past and with their vulnerability to the new superpowers. Of course, the artistic pieces analysed below were composed not for political reasons, although their plots and receptions are understandable only with attention to the political background of their births

The fall of Constantinople : its musical remembrance in the 1950's

In my article I present a comparative analysis of Manolis Kalomiris's opera the Constantine Palaeologus and Cemal Resid Rey's symphonic poem Fatih Sultan Mehmet from the point of view of national canons, political backgrounds and aesthetics. Both pieces deal with the last siege of Constantinople (1453), which ended in the victory of the Ottoman army. This historic turning point inspired very sophisticated, interpretative compositions on both of sides of the former frontline. In the epilogue of my article this horizon is widened by the Hungarian musical reading of this great historical event. In 1953 - 500 years after the siege - the contemporary artistic remembrance turned the fall of Constantinople into an important part of both national mythologies. These mythologies can demonstrate that Turkey belongs to Europe, and Europe is in debt to Greece. Both nations and even both states have problems with their respective political identities, with the acceptance of their near past and with their vulnerability to the new superpowers. Of course, the artistic pieces analysed below were composed not for political reasons, although their plots and receptions are understandable only with attention to the political background of their births

How to analyze dynamic network patterns of high performing teams

AbstractThe dynamic communication network within teams affects the performance of teams. But how can we analyze these emerging networks? We identified three research areas that have to be included for this purpose. First we summarize empirical studies concerning team networks and performance to point out the need of longitudinal investigations. Second we present the multi-level multi-theoretical model by Monge and Contractor (2003) which provides a theoretical framework to explain the evolution of communication networks within teams. Third a stochastic model is introduced that allows analyzing event based data, like e-mail streams, using exponential random graph models. We propose to include these three research areas that enable researchers and practitioners to analyze dynamic network patterns of virtual teams

Refining Ensembles of Predicted Gene Regulatory Networks Based on Characteristic Interaction Sets

Different ensemble voting approaches have been successfully applied for reverse-engineering of gene regulatory networks. They are based on the assumption that a good approximation of true network structure can be derived by considering the frequencies of individual interactions in a large number of predicted networks. Such approximations are typically superior in terms of prediction quality and robustness as compared to considering a single best scoring network only. Nevertheless, ensemble approaches only work well if the predicted gene regulatory networks are sufficiently similar to each other. If the topologies of predicted networks are considerably different, an ensemble of all networks obscures interesting individual characteristics. Instead, networks should be grouped according to local topological similarities and ensemble voting performed for each group separately. We argue that the presence of sets of co-occurring interactions is a suitable indicator for grouping predicted networks. A stepwise bottom-up procedure is proposed, where first mutual dependencies between pairs of interactions are derived from predicted networks. Pairs of co-occurring interactions are subsequently extended to derive characteristic interaction sets that distinguish groups of networks. Finally, ensemble voting is applied separately to the resulting topologically similar groups of networks to create distinct group-ensembles. Ensembles of topologically similar networks constitute distinct hypotheses about the reference network structure. Such group-ensembles are easier to interpret as their characteristic topology becomes clear and dependencies between interactions are known. The availability of distinct hypotheses facilitates the design of further experiments to distinguish between plausible network structures. The proposed procedure is a reasonable refinement step for non-deterministic reverse-engineering applications that produce a large number of candidate predictions for a gene regulatory network, e. g. due to probabilistic optimization or a cross-validation procedure

An Assessment of the Use of Seeding, Mowing, and Burning in the Restoration of an Oldfield to Tallgrass Prairie in Lewisville, Texas

An examination of the effectiveness of seeding, burning, and mowing in the reestablishment of tallgrass prairie species on overgrazed and abandoned pastureland. The study site is a 20 acre tract on U.S. Corps of Engineers land below Lake Lewisville in Denton County, Texas. The site was partitioned into thirty-nine 40 by 40 meter plots with seeding (carried out in 1996) and management treatment (burning, mowing, and no maintenance carried out in 1998) randomly applied following a two level design. For each plot, nine stratified-random 0.1 m2 subplots were examined and shoot counts for each species recorded. The effects of the treatments on individual species and species richness were analyzed with a two-way ANOVA followed by a SNK multiple range test, both on ranked data. Community level analysis was conducted with both a MANOVA on ranked data and a Canonical Correspondence Analysis on raw data. Results indicate that seeding positively affected species richness, particularly when combined with either burning or mowing in the early spring. Mowing also significantly increased species richness in areas that were not seeded, while burning negatively affected species richness on unseeded plots. Treatments significantly affected community composition with treatments having the most clear effect on spring and summer forbs

Modeling of dynamic systems with Petri nets and fuzzy logic

Aktuelle Methoden zur dynamischen Modellierung von biologischen Systemen sind für Benutzer ohne mathematische Ausbildung oft wenig verständlich. Des Weiteren fehlen sehr oft genaue Daten und detailliertes Wissen über Konzentrationen, Reaktionskinetiken oder regulatorische Effekte. Daher erfordert eine computergestützte Modellierung eines biologischen Systems, mit Unsicherheiten und grober Information umzugehen, die durch qualitatives Wissen und natürlichsprachliche Beschreibungen zur Verfügung gestellt wird. Der Autor schlägt einen neuen Ansatz vor, mit dem solche Beschränkungen überwunden werden können. Dazu wird eine Petri-Netz-basierte graphische Darstellung von Systemen mit einer leistungsstarken und dennoch intuitiven Fuzzy-Logik-basierten Modellierung verknüpft. Der Petri Netz und Fuzzy Logik (PNFL) Ansatz erlaubt eine natürlichsprachlich-basierte Beschreibung von biologischen Entitäten sowie eine Wenn-Dann-Regel-basierte Definition von Reaktionen. Beides kann einfach und direkt aus qualitativem Wissen abgeleitet werden. PNFL verbindet damit qualitatives Wissen und quantitative Modellierung.Current approaches in dynamic modeling of biological systems often lack comprehensibility,n especially for users without mathematical background. Additionally, exact data or detailed knowledge about concentrations, reaction kinetics or regulatory effects is missing. Thus, computational modeling of a biological system requires dealing with uncertainty and rough information provided by qualitative knowledge and linguistic descriptions. The author proposes a new approach to overcome such limitations by combining the graphical representation provided by Petri nets with the modeling of dynamics by powerful yet intuitive fuzzy logic based systems. The Petri net and fuzzy logic (PNFL) approach allows natural language based descriptions of biological entities as well as if-then rule based definitions of reactions, both of which can be easily and directly derived from qualitative knowledge. PNFL bridges the gap between qualitative knowledge and quantitative modeling