Utilizing Minangkabau “Gandang Tambua” Traditional Music Repertoire in Engineering the New Genre of Ensemble and Outdoor Music “Gong Tambur

Gandang tambua is one of the Indonesian traditional music (esp. Minangkabau – West Sumatera) ensembles. It is primarily used in traditional activities and custom ceremonies performed out-door by their communities. The musical genre is potential to be improved become a new musical ensemble built based on several musical instruments and the arrangements of their tones horizontally and vertically. In addition, there are some new instruments to be completed in order to become a musical system and an ensemble. The ensemble is called Gong Tambur Madi. The ensemble can function as a musical expression based on the Indonesian local aesthetics, so that it becomes a global aesthetic commonly needed right now everywhere, especially in Indonesia. Key words: gandang tambua, improved, ensemble, out-door music, aesthetics

Derandomization and Group Testing

The rapid development of derandomization theory, which is a fundamental area in theoretical computer science, has recently led to many surprising applications outside its initial intention. We will review some recent such developments related to combinatorial group testing. In its most basic setting, the aim of group testing is to identify a set of "positive" individuals in a population of items by taking groups of items and asking whether there is a positive in each group. In particular, we will discuss explicit constructions of optimal or nearly-optimal group testing schemes using "randomness-conducting" functions. Among such developments are constructions of error-correcting group testing schemes using randomness extractors and condensers, as well as threshold group testing schemes from lossless condensers.Comment: Invited Paper in Proceedings of 48th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, 201

Large-eddy Simulation of NASA LaRC Coaxial He-O2/Air Jet

Large-eddy simulation (LES) is conducted of a coaxial jet flow configuration. This configuration was previously considered in the laboratory experiments at the Hypersonic Air-breathing Propulsion Branch at the NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC). It consists of a coaxial jet discharging into stagnant air with a main stream of He-O2 (95% helium and 5% oxygen by volume) and a coflow of air. The objective of this work is to investigate the performance of conventional LES models for supersonic flows. In the simulations, the filtered, compressible, 3-dimensional Nevier-Stokes equations for a multi-species system are solved. The subgrid scale closure is attained using the generalized Smagorinsky model and the dynamic model. The predicted results are assessed via comparison with data from the NASA LaRC