Youthful Internationalism in the Age of ‘Socialism in One Country’: Komsomol'tsy, Pioneers and ‘World Revolution’ in the Interwar Period

This article examines the complex and multifaceted engagement of young Soviet communists with the idea of revolutionary internationalism and international solidarity in the interwar period. In spite of the introduction of the official doctrine of ‘Socialism in One Country’ and the ritualization of internationalism in in the 1920s, youth activists continued to encounter the powerful charismatic idea of ‘world revolution’. Moscow’s central role in the Communist International and developments in Asia and Europe meant that the members of the Pioneer organization and the Komsomol had to engage with revolutionary events abroad through the official discourse as well as through their league’s practices. The article seeks to reveal the interplay and tensions between the Komsomol’s official rhetoric and policies concerning its leading role in the international communist youth movement and the idiosyncratic revolutionary identities and beliefs of young activists. By examining the shifting rhetoric and realities in expressions and enactments of international solidarity by young communists, the paper will question the potency of the idea of ‘revolutionary internationalism’ amongst the communist youth movement and its significance in the intergenerational discourse

A Novel Framework for Efficient Automated Singer Identification in Large Music Databases

10.1145/1508850.1508856ACM Transactions on Information Systems273ATIS

Polypeptide-grafted macroporous polyHIPE by surface-initiated N-Carboxyanhydride (NCA) polymerization as a platform for bioconjugation

A new class of functional macroporous monoliths from polymerized high internal phase emulsion (polyHIPE) with tunable surface functional groups was developed by direct polypeptide surface grafting. In the first step, amino-functional polyHIPEs were obtained by the addition of 4-vinylbenzyl or 4-vinylbenzylphthalimide to the styrenic emulsion and thermal radical polymerization. The obtained monoliths present the expected open-cell morphology and a high surface area. The incorporated amino group was successfully utilized to initiate the ring-opening polymer- ization of benzyl-L-glutamate N-carboxyanhydride (BLG NCA) and benzyloxycarbonyl-L-lysine (Lys(Z)) NCA, which resulted in a dense homogeneous coating of polypeptides throughout the internal polyHIPE surfaces as confirmed by SEM and FTIR analysis. The amount of polypeptide grafted to the polyHIPE surfaces could be modulated by varying the initial ratio of amino acid NCA to amino-functional polyHIPE. Subsequent removal of the polypeptide protecting groups yielded highly functional polyHIPE-g-poly(glutamic acid) and polyHIPE-g- poly(lysine). Both types of polypeptide-grafted monoliths responded to pH by changes in their hydrohilicity. The possibility to use the high density of function (−COOH or −NH2) for secondary reaction was demonstrated by the successful bioconjugation of enhanced green fluorescent protein (eGFP) and fluorescein isocyanate (FITC) on the polymer 3D-scaffold surface. The amount of eGFP and FITC conjugated to the polypeptide-grafted polyHIPE was significantly higher than to the amino- functional polyHIPE, signifying the advantage of polypeptide grafting to achieve highly functional polyHIPEs

A computational study on outliers in world music

The comparative analysis of world music cultures has been the focus of several ethnomusicological studies in the last century. With the advances of Music Information Retrieval and the increased accessibility of sound archives, large-scale analysis of world music with computational tools is today feasible. We investigate music similarity in a corpus of 8200 recordings of folk and traditional music from 137 countries around the world. In particular, we aim to identify music recordings that are most distinct compared to the rest of our corpus. We refer to these recordings as ‘outliers’. We use signal processing tools to extract music information from audio recordings, data mining to quantify similarity and detect outliers, and spatial statistics to account for geographical correlation. Our findings suggest that Botswana is the country with the most distinct recordings in the corpus and China is the country with the most distinct recordings when considering spatial correlation. Our analysis includes a comparison of musical attributes and styles that contribute to the ‘uniqueness’ of the music of each country

A neurally-inspired musical instrument classification system based upon the sound onset

Physiological evidence suggests that sound onset detection in the auditory system may be performed by specialized neurons as early as the cochlear nucleus. Psychoacoustic evidence shows that the sound onset can be important for the recognition of musical sounds. Here the sound onset is used in isolation to form tone descriptors for a musical instrument classification task. The task involves 2085 isolated musical tones from the McGill dataset across five instrument categories. A neurally inspired tone descriptor is created using a model of the auditory system's response to sound onset. A gammatone filterbank and spiking onset detectors, built from dynamic synapses and leaky integrate-and-fire neurons, create parallel spike trains that emphasize the sound onset. These are coded as a descriptor called the onset fingerprint. Classification uses a time-domain neural network, the echo state network. Reference strategies, based upon mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, evaluated either over the whole tone or only during the sound onset, provide context to the method. Classification success rates for the neurally-inspired method are around 75%. The cepstral methods perform between 73% and 76%. Further testing with tones from the Iowa MIS collection shows that the neurally inspired method is considerably more robust when tested with data from an unrelated dataset

Communist Party in the Power System of the USSR

In this article major mechanisms and different stages of the  Bolshevik party’s transformation into a “party-state” are examined.  The Communist party has been brought to the surface of political life and power by the Russian revolution; the organizational  principles of the Party along with its approaches to political process  have to a larger extent evolved as results of the revolution.  Therefore the system of power which has reached its peak during  Stalin’s rule has both been the product of continuity as well as  change of the Russian political tradition. The Communist ideology  has served as main instrument of communication between the  authorities and the people. The Party occupied central position in  that system of communication; one of the most important tools of  the Party’s control over the Soviet society was propaganda. However the process of the communist regime acquiring legitimacy  has been rather lengthy; it was completed only by the late 1920s.  The basic principles of “unity” within a ruling group were rejected  when rivalry for power ended in Stalin’s favor. The central element in  the Communist party’s system of power was the ruling  elite – nomenclature. During World War II the institution of “party- state” has reached the highest degree of centralization; but  on the other hand, the decision-making system was rather flexible and adaptable as compared with the previous period. After  the War even within Stalin’s dictatorship the contours of oligarchic “collective leadership” were emerging. N. Khrushchev used  the same instrument as Stalin did – control over the Party apparatus – while consolidating his power. One of the important  results of Khrushchev’s rule was the institutionalization of the ruling  bureaucracy. Maintaining “stability” became the slogan for the new  stage of the Communist regime’s evolution. Socio- economic system  was getting increasingly complex and less manageable; different hierarchies, including local and industrial elites, have been failing to  make timely and correct decisions due to their rigidness and  sluggishness. The Party was attempting to compensate those  deficiencies, but was less and less capable of doing so. Gorbachev’s “Perestroika” which was based on the idea of democratic socialism  has finally ended the rule of the “party-state”. Having lost its internal  integrity the system of power has rapidly deteriorated

Musical instrument identification in continuous recordings

Recognition of musical instruments in multi-instrumental, polyphonic music is a difficult challenge which is yet far from being solved. Successful instrument recognition techniques in solos (monophonic or polyphonic recordings of single instruments) can help to deal with this task. We introduce an instrument recognition process in solo recordings of a set of instruments (bassoon, clarinet, flute, guitar, piano, cello and violin), which yields a high recognition rate. A large and very diverse solo database (108 different solos, all by different performers) is used in order to encompass the different sound possibilities of each instrument and evaluate the generalization abilities of the classification process. First we bring classification results using a very extensive collection of features (62 different feature types), and then use our GDE feature selection algorithm to select a smaller feature set with a relatively short computation time, which allows us to perform instrument recognition in solos in real-time, with only a slight decrease in recognition rate. We demonstrate that our real-time solo classifier can also be useful for instrument recognition in duet performances, and improved using simple “source reduction”. 1

Instrument Recognition Beyond Separate Notes -- Indexing Continues Recordings

Some initial works have appeared that began to deal with the complicated task of musical instrument recognition in multi-instrumental music. Although quite a few papers have already appeared on instrument recognition of single instrument musical phrases ("solos"), the work on solo recognition is not yet exhausted. The knowledge of how to deal well with solos can also help in recognition of multi instrumental music. We present

Elimination of Descriptors using Discriminant

In this article we shall deal with automatic classification of sound samples and ways to improve the classification results: We describe a classification process which produces high classification success percentage (over 95 % for musical instruments) and compare the results of three classification algorithms: Multidimensional Gauss, KNN and LVQ. Next, we introduce several algorithms to improve the sound database self-consistency by removing outliers: LOO, IQR and MIQR. We present our efficient process for Gradua