Projecting the voice : audience responses to ICT-mediated contemporary opera

This paper examines how audiences experience live opera performance and the behaviours they exhibit during live-streaming of the performance. It aims to contribute to our understanding of how audiences, who increasingly inhabit an environment saturated with digital media, respond to contemporary opera performance. Based on a comparative study of audience experiences and behaviours during a live opera performance and the streamed opera screening, we investigate whether digital mediation affects audience appreciation, and whether streaming live opera means the same thing to an audience as the unmediated performance. We firstly outline the conception, design and performance of a contemporary opera and its simultaneous streaming to nearby digital screens. Then, we report the evaluation of the project as measured by a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods during the rehearsals, the live performance and the screening. As one of the few social studies of contemporary classical music in Britain, our study of opera audience behaviours sheds light on the challenges and opportunities afforded by digital technologies for opera companies. Understanding how audiences appreciate digital operas offers practical advice on how theatres and opera companies could respond to new forms of digital activities

Epigenetic and genetic deregulation in cancer target distinct signaling pathway domains

Cancer is characterized by both genetic and epigenetic alterations. While cancer driver mutations and copy-number alterations have been studied at a systems-level, relatively little is known about the systems-level patterns exhibited by their epigenetic counterparts. Here we perform a pan-cancer wide systems-level analysis, mapping candidate cancer-driver DNA methylation (DNAm) alterations onto a human interactome. We demonstrate that functional DNAm alterations in cancer tend to map to nodes of lower connectivity and inter-connectivity, compared to the corresponding alterations at the genomic level. We find that epigenetic alterations are relatively over-represented in extracellular and transmembrane signaling domains, whereas cancer genes undergoing amplification or deletion tend to be enriched within the intracellular domain. A pan-cancer wide meta-analysis identifies WNT and chemokine signaling, as two key pathways where epigenetic deregulation preferentially targets extracellular components. We further pinpoint specific chemokine ligands/receptors whose epigenetic deregulation associates with key epigenetic enzymes, representing potential targets for epigenetic therapy. Our results suggest that epigenetic deregulation in cancer not only targets tissue-specific transcription factors, but also modulates signaling within the extra-cellular domain, providing novel system-level insight into the potential distinctive role of genetic and epigenetic alterations in cancer

Nash bargaining in ordinal environments

We analyze the implications of Nash’s (1950) axioms in ordinal bargaining environments; there, the scale invariance axiom needs to be strenghtened to take into account all order-preserving transformations of the agents’ utilities. This axiom, called ordinal invariance, is a very demanding one. For two-agents, it is violated by every strongly individually rational bargaining rule. In general, no ordinally invariant bargaining rule satisfies the other three axioms of Nash. Parallel to Roth (1977), we introduce a weaker independence of irrelevant alternatives axiom that we argue is better suited for ordinally invariant bargaining rules. We show that the three-agent Shapley-Shubik bargaining rule uniquely satisfies ordinal invariance, Pareto optimality, symmetry, and this weaker independence of irrelevant alternatives axiom. We also analyze the implications of other independence axioms

The relationship between musical preferences and Type D personality

Emotion regulation is one of the main reasons that people listen to music, and personality traits have been shown to exert significant influence in shaping musical preferences. Type D personality is a psychological risk factor for adverse health outcomes. However, no music studies have yet examined the effect of Type D personality on musical preferences, which may provide some preliminary insight into clinical applications. Therefore, this study investigated the relationship between Type D personality and musical preferences. An online survey investigating musical preferences (Revised version of the Short Test of Musical Preferences [STOMP-R]) and Type D personality was administered. In total, 196 participants completed the survey, of which half were from an Eastern culture and half from a Western culture. Forty per cent of the participants were categorised as having Type D personality, and no significant association of gender or nationality with Type D classification was observed. However, the links between Type D personality and the Punk genre (p = .047), and between non-Type D personality and the Jazz genre (p = .008) were indicated. Moreover, differences were observed in the factor structure of STOMP-R. The exploratory results facilitate the understanding of links between personality traits and music listening and provide new insight into musical preference dimensions

Distributive radiation characterization based on the PEEC Method

The Conference program's website is located at http://www.2014apsursi.org/Papers/ViewPapers.asp?PaperNum=1977Session: Electromagnetic Interaction and CouplingOral Presentation: paper no. 430.3Summary form only given. The intentional and unintentional radiations are of great importance to wireless power transfer at the low frequency regime and antenna signal transportation at the higher frequency regime. Due to the rising speed of digital systems and thereby broad bandwidth of signal channels at all levels of electronic devices, it becomes more essential than ever to quantitively analyze, model, and illustrate how the energy is leaked out and which part is a greater contributor to the wanted or unwanted radiation. However, conventional computational methods seem to be not sufficient to answer these questions. They mostly focused on characterizing port based properties such as matching condition and insertion losses, or gave general efficiency description and radiation patterns. But it is not clear how the energy is radiated and coupled from different parts of the radiator. For computational electromagnetics algorithms, they blended all physical phenomena together and made the radiation property extraction and analysis not straightforward. In this work, we extend the partial element equivalent circuit (PEEC) method to distributive radiation analysis so that the radiation and coupling contributions from each segment of the whole radiator can be singled out. Instead of focusing on the conventional circuit modeling method of PEEC, we focus on distributive radiated power and transferred power calculation. To fully stick to the first principle without sacrificing reliability, dynamic Green's function is used throughout the proposed method, not only for the coupling term, but also for the self term. A great significance of this work is that it can help to provide eligible lossy model of antenna structures and meta surfaces more accurately, which avoids approximations and curve fitting methods frequently used in RF and microwave engineering designs to make the circuit model more physical. For example, we can benchmark the idea through the coupling and radiation- mechanism of arbitrarily electrical radiators and magnetic radiators. The radiated power and coupled power between coupled structure will be systematically calculated and analyzed using the proposed method. It gives much more insights than the conventional radiation impedance concept. This work was supported in part by Hong Kong GRF 713011, GRF 712612, and NSFC 61271158.published_or_final_versio

Integer programming methods for special college admissions problems

We develop Integer Programming (IP) solutions for some special college admission problems arising from the Hungarian higher education admission scheme. We focus on four special features, namely the solution concept of stable score-limits, the presence of lower and common quotas, and paired applications. We note that each of the latter three special feature makes the college admissions problem NP-hard to solve. Currently, a heuristic based on the Gale-Shapley algorithm is being used in the application. The IP methods that we propose are not only interesting theoretically, but may also serve as an alternative solution concept for this practical application, and also for other ones

Unified treatment of synchronization patterns in generalized networks with higher-order, multilayer, and temporal interactions

When describing complex interconnected systems, one often has to go beyond the standard network description to account for generalized interactions. Here, we establish a unified framework to simplify the stability analysis of cluster synchronization patterns for a wide range of generalized networks, including hypergraphs, multilayer networks, and temporal networks. The framework is based on finding a simultaneous block diagonalization (SBD) of the matrices encoding the synchronization pattern and the network topology. As an application, we use SBD to discover a novel type of chimera states that only appear in the presence of higher-order interactions. The unified framework established here can be extended to other dynamical processes and can facilitate the discovery of novel emergent phenomena in complex systems with generalized interactions

Concealing or Revealing Mobile Medical Devices? Designing for Onstage and Offstage Presentation

Adults with Type 1 Diabetes have choices regarding the technology they use to self-manage their chronic condition. They can use glucose meters, insulin pumps, smartphone apps, and other technologies to support their everyday care. However, little is known about how their social lives might influence what they adopt or how they use technologies. A multi-method study was conducted to examine contextual factors that influence their technology use. While individual differences play a large role in everyday use, social factors were also found to influence use. For example, people can hide their devices in uncertain social situations or show them off to achieve a purpose. We frame these social behaviours using Goffman's theatre metaphor of onstage and offstage behaviour, and discuss how this kind of analysis can inform the design of future mobile medical devices for self-management of chronic conditions

Earliest Holocene south Greenland ice sheet retreat within its late Holocene extent

Early Holocene summer warmth drove dramatic Greenland ice sheet (GIS) retreat. Subsequent insolation-driven cooling caused GIS margin readvance to late Holocene maxima, from which ice margins are now retreating. We use 10Be surface exposure ages from four locations between 69.4°N and 61.2°N to date when in the early Holocene south to west GIS margins retreated to within these late Holocene maximum extents. We find that this occurred at 11.1 ± 0.2 ka to 10.6 ± 0.5 ka in south Greenland, significantly earlier than previous estimates, and 6.8 ± 0.1 ka to 7.9 ± 0.1 ka in southwest to west Greenland, consistent with existing 10Be ages. At least in south Greenland, these 10Be ages likely provide a minimum constraint for when on a multicentury timescale summer temperatures after the last deglaciation warmed above late Holocene temperatures in the early Holocene. Current south Greenland ice margin retreat suggests that south Greenland may have now warmed to or above earliest Holocene summer temperatures

TarTar: A Timed Automata Repair Tool

We present TarTar, an automatic repair analysis tool that, given a timed diagnostic trace (TDT) obtained during the model checking of a timed automaton model, suggests possible syntactic repairs of the analyzed model. The suggested repairs include modified values for clock bounds in location invariants and transition guards, adding or removing clock resets, etc. The proposed repairs are guaranteed to eliminate executability of the given TDT, while preserving the overall functional behavior of the system. We give insights into the design and architecture of TarTar, and show that it can successfully repair 69% of the seeded errors in system models taken from a diverse suite of case studies.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figure