Looking Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Power, Leadership and the Black Female Professional

Despite a historical record of activism and leadership, African American women have largely gone unnoticed. Authors Allen and Lewis point out that this same treatment is widely evident today in all fora: the workplace, the classroom, academia, and government. Rather, intelligence, hard work, and technical competencies have either been dismissed or displaced, relegating the African American female leader to inferior status or resulting in wholly disparate and demeaning characterizations

Interoperability between Multimedia Collections for Content and Metadata-Based Searching

Artiste is a European project developing a cross-collection search system for art galleries and museums. It combines image content retrieval with text based retrieval and uses RDF mappings in order to integrate diverse databases. The test sites of the Louvre, Victoria and Albert Museum, Uffizi Gallery and National Gallery London provide their own database schema for existing metadata, avoiding the need for migration to a common schema. The system will accept a query based on one museum’s fields and convert them, through an RDF mapping into a form suitable for querying the other collections. The nature of some of the image processing algorithms means that the system can be slow for some computations, so the system is session-based to allow the user to return to the results later. The system has been built within a J2EE/EJB framework, using the Jboss Enterprise Application Server

Fantini and Frescobaldi in Rome, Circa 1634: A Study of Context and Practice

ABSTRACT This study clarifies historical evidence as applied to Italian baroque performance practices and repertoire for trumpet and pipe organ, circa 1630. It focuses upon a specific concert; the first historical record of a trumpet and pipe organ duo performing whereby the trumpeter takes a soloistic role. The details surrounding the performance, one involving trumpeter Girolamo Fantini and organist Girolamo Frescobaldi, make wonderful fodder for a more detailed musical look into 17th century Italy. Perhaps most importantly, the process outlined here can be modified and used in the study of music from virtually any genre from any musical period. Ultimately, it is my hope that the details surrounding this historic concert can be leveraged in the service of forming a more consistent intention as applied to the study and live performance of ancient music. In the larger trumpet community, Baroque music of nearly any nationality has often been performed with a loose set of guidelines regarding the various facets of performance: articulation, phrasing, dynamics, and so forth. My process takes into account organology, acoustics, historical information gleaned from the Vatican Library, and architectural factors based upon site visits in Rome. This document is composed of five (5) major sections: 1) the roles and typologies of trumpets in Italy in the early 17th century; 2) the typologies of pipe organs in Italy in the early 17th century with special emphasis given to the unique approach to tonal design in the Baroque Italian organ; 3) historical details uncovered through research in the USA and Rome which paint a clearer picture of where the famed concert might have taken place, and at whose behest; 4) acoustical and architectural details of the historic spaces potentially utilized in Fantini’s and Frescobaldi’s fabled concert; and 5) insights into further directions for research including the integration of sampling, sequencing, recording technologies, and digital acoustic simulation into the study of ancient – and potentially all – music

Efficient Computation of CMB anisotropies in closed FRW models

We implement the efficient line of sight method to calculate the anisotropy and polarization of the cosmic microwave background for scalar and tensor modes in almost-Friedmann-Robertson-Walker models with positive spatial curvature. We present new results for the polarization power spectra in such models.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure. Corrected/updated references. Accepted by ApJ. For the F90 source code see http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~aml1005/cmb

Particle motion and stain removal during simulated abrasive tooth cleaning

Stain removal from teeth is important both to prevent decay and for appearance. This is usually achieved using a filament-based toothbrush with a toothpaste consisting of abrasive particles in a carrier fluid. This work has been carried out to examine how these abrasive particles interact with the filaments and cause material removal from a stain layer on the surface of a tooth. It is important to understand this mechanism as while maximum cleaning efficiency is required, this must not be accompanied by damage to the enamel or dentine substrate. In this work simple abrasive scratch tests were used to investigate stain removal mechanism of two abrasive particles commonly used in tooth cleaning, silica and perlite. Silica particles are granular in shape and very different to perlite particles, which are flat and have thicknesses many times smaller than their width. Initially visualisation studies were carried out with perlite particles to study how they are entrained into a filament/counterface contact. Results were compared with previous studies using silica. Reciprocating scratch tests were then run to study how many filaments have a particle trapped at one moment and are involved in the cleaning process. Stain removal tests were then carried out in a similar manner to establish cleaning rates with the two particle types. Perlite particles were found to be less abrasive than silica. This was because of their shape and how they were entrained into the filament contacts and loaded against a counterface. With both particles subsurface damage during stain removal was found to be minimal. A simple model was built to predict stain removal rates with silica particles, which gave results that correlated well with the experimental data