Painting with sound: the kaleidoscopic world of Lance Sieveking, a British Radio Modernist

In the late 1920s, British Radio became briefly and creatively entwined with a broader modernist culture. Largely through a series of spectacular programmes such as The Kaleidoscope (1928), made by the producer Lance Sieveking, the BBC started to develop an ‘art’ of sound. This episode has generally been passed over in histories of modernism and broadcasting: at best, it has been seen as a brief and whimsical piece of formal experimentation. But through examining Sieveking’s private papers, this article shows that this new art of sound was rich in meanings and symbolism, and had a wider influence than has hitherto been assumed. Sieveking drew heavily on his own life, which encompassed imprisonment and flying during the First World War, and a glittering array of social acquaintances, which connected him with the most advanced artistic thinking. This led him to find ways of representing in sound the subjective mental experiences and jumble of memories that so fascinated modernist artists in an age influenced by popular Freudianism. Sieveking’s life and writing also shows how he drew boldly from the visual language of experimental silent cinema at a critical moment in its own development. In creating a complex montage style for radio, Sieveking also anticipated some of the aesthetic devices that would be deployed in the coming era of sound on film. Sieveking and his programmes therefore illustrate a particular moment of British cultural history when the creative boundaries between different media were especially porous, with highly creative results

Compressing DNA sequence databases with coil

Background: Publicly available DNA sequence databases such as GenBank are large, and are growing at an exponential rate. The sheer volume of data being dealt with presents serious storage and data communications problems. Currently, sequence data is usually kept in large "flat files," which are then compressed using standard Lempel-Ziv (gzip) compression – an approach which rarely achieves good compression ratios. While much research has been done on compressing individual DNA sequences, surprisingly little has focused on the compression of entire databases of such sequences. In this study we introduce the sequence database compression software coil. Results: We have designed and implemented a portable software package, coil, for compressing and decompressing DNA sequence databases based on the idea of edit-tree coding. coil is geared towards achieving high compression ratios at the expense of execution time and memory usage during compression – the compression time represents a "one-off investment" whose cost is quickly amortised if the resulting compressed file is transmitted many times. Decompression requires little memory and is extremely fast. We demonstrate a 5% improvement in compression ratio over state-of-the-art general-purpose compression tools for a large GenBank database file containing Expressed Sequence Tag (EST) data. Finally, coil can efficiently encode incremental additions to a sequence database. Conclusion: coil presents a compelling alternative to conventional compression of flat files for the storage and distribution of DNA sequence databases having a narrow distribution of sequence lengths, such as EST data. Increasing compression levels for databases having a wide distribution of sequence lengths is a direction for future work

Potential research priorities arising from proposals for NHS reforms in England

This report, undertaken as part of the 2011 work programme of the Department of Health-funded Policy Research Unit in Policy Innovation Research (PIRU), outlines emerging trends and issues within the current health care policy landscape in England. It is designed to help PIRU anticipate potential priority areas where new research to support policy development might be required. We have assessed the overall landscape, as well as debate around that landscape, reviewed existing and emergent policy issues, and synthesized available evidence around these issues, to identify gaps in knowledge which may merit new research

Managing major health service and infrastructure transitions: A comparative study of UK, US and Canadian hospitals

increasingly common as health systems evolve in response to innovations and process improvements, and to the changing demands for healthcare. Sometimes new health service designs need to be supported by changes to the healthcare infrastructure if they are to be successfully implemented and sustained ? service delivery models and its built and technical infrastructure must be transformed simultaneously. Just tackling one of these issues is challenging for all involved. Doing both these tasks at the same time can be overwhelming and risky. But there can also be advantages in such radical change. It can provide an opportunity to radically rethink ways of delivering healthcare. Conducting simultaneous infrastructure renewal and service redesign means that care processes, not plausible in the old infrastructure, may be more easily designed into the new facility. Major restructuring efforts are rarely systematically evaluated with outcomes measured or best practice shared (Walston and Chadwick, 2003). However, we do know that ?whole system? organisational change in healthcare ? change which impacts on all areas of the organisation across all levels and stakeholder groups ? is often hampered by a failure to plan effectively (NHS, 2008). It is generally accepted that the successful introduction of healthcare innovations requires the approval of relevant stakeholders (e.g. physicians, government bodies, primary care providers), and that planning and implementing major changes in healthcare service or infrastructure design requires practice- based examples to learn from. While there is considerable experience in the planning and implementation of health services changes, there is little written about combined services and infrastructure change. Organisations searching for such information may have to look for examples beyond those found in their own country. Studying similar cases across different organisational and international contexts also increases the likelihood of determining pivotal factors that underpin success

Aplikasi AHP dalam Menentukan Kandidat Gubernur DKI Jakarta 2012-2017

July 11, 2012 was chosen as an appropriate day in constitution terms to hold the election of Jakarta\u27s regional head for the next five years. There are many assumptions and opinions from some people about who would be elected as the governor of Jakarta. A lot of criteria from the candidates of governor and vice governor can be the parameters to be the success key in becoming Jakarta\u27s number one man. This research is discussing about decision making methods from many options by using AHP (analytical hierarchy process) method. Tthe case model is the election of Jakarta\u27s governor. The research utilizes two comparative components namely Jakarta\u27s governor and candidate of vice governor, as well as five criteria such as issues about flood, transportation, economic, public services and credibility. The result of this research is the candidate with number six that should be most chosen in the election

The dynamic nature of social accounts: an examination of how interpretive processes impact on account effectiveness

Social accounts are a powerful tool in influencing the behavior of organizational members during major change. Examination of their effectiveness has largely focused on the design of accounts to influence behavioral and affective responses. However, when used in real life practice, more individualized, interpretive and agentic responses to social accounts have been found to influence effectiveness. Using an example of large-scale organizational change, moving from one hospital facility to another, we explore the dynamic and contextual interpretation of social accounts over time. Our findings expand social account theory by examining how potentially successful change communications are derailed by the relevance of the account in relation to an individual's past, by the individuals' ability to express agency and by temporality; how over time, lived experience can alter the perceived truthfulness of an account and alter its potency

Climate and Anthropogenic Controls of Coastal Deoxygenation on Interannual to Centennial Timescales

Understanding dissolved oxygen variability in the ocean is limited by the short duration of direct measurements; however, sedimentary oxidation‐reduction reactions can provide context for modern observations. Here we use bulk sediment redox‐sensitive metal enrichment factors (MoEF, ReEF, and UEF) and scanning X‐ray fluorescence records to examine annual‐scale sedimentary oxygen concentrations in the Santa Barbara Basin from the Industrial Revolution (Common Era ~1850) to present. Enrichments are linked to measured bottom water oxygen concentrations after 1986. We reveal gradual intensification of the coastal oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) on the southern California margin coinciding with the twentieth century anthropogenic warming trend that leads to reduced oxygen solubility and greater stratification. High‐frequency interannual oscillations become more prominent over the last three decades. These are attributed to local “flushing events” triggered by the transition from El Niño to La Niña conditions, which further amplify changes in the extratropical southern Californian OMZ.Key PointsDirect bottom water observations corroborate the annual reconstruction of Southern California OMZ through sedimentary redox proxy recordsAnthropogenic warming intensifies coastal OMZs, reducing oxygen solubility and aggravating stratificationEl Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) plays a role in interannual oxygen variability in extratropical coastal OMZPlain Language SummaryBecause we have only been measuring the amount of oxygen in seawater for a few decades, we do not know whether humans have caused oxygen in the ocean to decrease. The chemistry of some metals in sediments records how much oxygen was present in the ocean in the past, as these metals form solids when oxygen is low. We use these metals to determine that the oxygen in the bottom water of the Santa Barbara Channel, California, has decreased since about 1850. This occurs because warmer water reduces the amount of oxygen that can dissolve with in it, while also creating a barrier that reduces contact with the oxygen‐rich atmosphere. Over the last 35 years oxygen in the bottom water of the Santa Barbara Channel has briefly increased when El Niño weather conditions shift to La Niña conditions allowing cool, dense water into the depths of the channel.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141972/1/grl56641.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141972/2/grl56641_am.pd