“You Got To Know Us”: A Hopeful Model for Music Education in Urban Schools

Urban schools, and the students and teachers within, are often characterized by a metanarrative of deficit and crisis, causing the complex realities of urban education to remain unclear behind a wall of assumptions and stereotypes. Within music education, urban schools have received limited but increasing attention from researchers. However, voices from practitioners are often missing from this dialogue, and the extant scholarly dialogue has had a very limited effect on music teacher education. In this article, five music educators with a combined thirty years of experience in urban schools examine aspects of their experiences in the light of critical pedagogy in an attempt to disrupt the metanarrative of deficit, crisis, and decline that continues to surround urban music education. By promoting the lived-stories of successful urban music students, teachers, and programs, the authors hope to situate urban music education as a site of renewal, reform, and meaningful learning. This paper emerged from a panel discussion regarding promising practices in secondary general music with urban youth that took place at the New Directions in Music Education conference held at Michigan State University in October of 2011

The Concept of Affective Tonality, and the Role of the Senses in Producing a Cinematic Narrative

The practice based research project presented in this thesis draws upon theoretical research in affect studies and film-­philosophy. The aim of the thesis is to reconsider the pre-­production and production process of narrative cinema and involve the rich and varied research into the area of affect and the body in the field of film studies that is currently being used to analyse the reception and meaning making process used as the foundation for producing a series of narrative films that privilege affect over traditional storytelling structures. Four films were made as part of an investigation into affective film practice. These films accompany the written exegesis and serve as a testing ground for concepts developed in the written component of the thesis. Each piece of practice is formally and conceptually more complex than the last. The fourth and final film serves as an example for the cinema of affective tonality and as such constitutes the central, visual argument. The theoretical research and experimental moving-­image practice result in the outlining of five conditions for the production of a cinema of affective tonality, which are combined with a taxonomy of affect developed by the author of the thesis. The taxonomy and guidelines offer filmmakers and researchers -­ engaged in moving-­image practice and visual methods -­ a proposition to construct cinema through affect rather than linguistics and ideology of film grammar

Avifauna from the Teouma Lapita Site, Efate Island, Vanuatu, Including a New Genus and Species of Megapode

Copyright 2015 University of Hawaii Press. Published version of the article is reproduced here with permission from the publisher.The avifauna of the Teouma archaeological site on Efate in Vanuatu is described. It derives from the Lapita levels (3,000 – 2,800 ybp) and immedi-ately overlying middens extending to ∼2,500 ybp. A total of 30 bird species is represented in the 1,714 identiï¬ ed specimens. Twelve species are new records for the island, which, added to previous records, indicates that minimally 39 land birds exclusive of passerines were in the original avifauna. Three-fourths of the 12 newly recorded species appear to have become extinct by the end of Lapita times, 2,800 ybp. The avifauna is dominated by eight species of columbids (47.5% Minimum Number Individuals [MNI ]) including a large extinct tooth-billed pigeon, Didunculus placopedetes from Tonga, and a giant Ducula sp. cf. D. goliath from New Caledonia. Seabirds are rare despite the coastal location of the site. Fowl are important contributors to the Teouma avifauna, with the human-introduced Red Junglefowl Gallus gallus accounting for 15% MNI and present in all sampled layers. There are two species of megapodes (∼10% of MNI ), with the extant Vanuatu Megapode Megapodius layardi most abundant and represented at all levels in the deposits. A substantially larger extinct megapode, Mwalau walter-linii, n. gen., n. sp., is present only in the Lapita midden area, where it is rela-tively rare. This extinct species was larger than all extant megapodes but smaller than the extinct Progura gallinacea from Australia, with proportions most similar to those of Alectura, and was a volant bird. The remaining signiï¬ cant faunal component is rails, with four species present, of which Porphyrio melanotus was the most abundant. Rare but notable records include an undescribed large rail; a parrot, Eclectus sp. cf. E. infectus; a hornbill, Rhyticeros sp. cf. R. plicatus; and a coucal, Centropus sp. indet., all conservatively considered likely to be conspeciï¬ c with known taxa elsewhere in Melanesia

Quantifying the art of retail site selection : a retail case study

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-89).Although there have been great strides in attempting to identify the locations that will yield the highest sales, the opinion among retailers remains that once the demographic, market, and sub-market analysis is complete, the choice of where to open a store within a sub-market is a matter of "feeling". Science can help a retailer pinpoint an optimal intersection that will enable it to place its goods and/or services in front of the largest number of potential customers, but it is the "art" of site selection that will enable a retailer to choose the best of the available locations surrounding the targeted intersection. There are invariably a number of appropriate alternative sites within a qualified trade area. Choosing the best location among these alternative sites is subjective. This "feeling" or "art" of selecting the relatively better location is something that is usually refined through years of developing the intuition for what will work the best. The purpose of this paper is to look at and then quantify the real estate variables that affect the relative attractiveness of available locations that exist within a delineated trade area. This is in an attempt to replace the subjectivity or "art" of selecting the best location with that of quantifiable results that prove that one site will result in higher sales than that of another. The results of the analysis show that the independent variables fail to predict sales per square foot with a requisite statistical significance. While the data failed to prove the hypothesis that the "art" of selecting retail locations can be replaced with quantitative analysis, the authors believe that with a larger sample size real estate factors can provide valuable insight into sales per square foot forecasts.by Matthew Lane Hawkins and Christian Eyre Foulger.S.M

Introduction to Asian American Studies: Final Zine Project (1)

This zine is an accumulation of all of the zines that our group has made throughout the semester based upon reading assignments covering a wide variety issues that affect Asian Americans in the United States. The following are some of the zine topics within this final accumulation of our zines throughout the semester, to give you an idea of what follows this introduction page. The first zine is based off a text from Erika Lee, titled “The Chinese Must Go!” which touches upon the anti-Chinese movement in the United States and the issues associated with movements against Chinese immigrant labor in the states around the turn of the 20th century. Next, is a zine about a text from Nerissa Balce titled, “Filipino Bodies, Lynching, and the Language of Empire which focuses on American colonialism in the Philippine Islands and the framing of Filipinos as degenerate and savage by US imperialists which led to racialized atrocities such as lynching’s and beatings of Filipinos. It also addresses the irony of sending black soldiers to fight in the Philippines for the United States while the United States failed to protect black Americans back at home. A few pages after is a zine that is created based on a text written by Diane Fujino, called “Concentration Camps and a Growing Awareness of Race.” This text is about life in internment camps for Japanese Americans during the Second World War following the attack on Pearl Harbor. Next is a zine created from the text “Militarized Migrations” by Crystal Mun-hye Baik which is about the Korean War and the subsequent masses of migrations that followed, specifically addressing Korean brides migrating to the States in order to marry American soldiers they met while on deployment in Korea and Korean children being brought to the U.S. for adoption purposes. Another zine included is based off the text “Militarized refugees” by Yen Le Espiritu which focuses on three major military installations during the Vietnam War and the role they played in both creating refuges and transporting refugees to a new life in America. These are just a few topics of the many zines that you will find in this accumulation of our group’s zines from this past semester. We want our readers to be able to read through these zines and be able to understand what the reading was about, specifically any key points and how the topic of each specific text is significant in its own social or political respect. However, what we want our readers to understand is not limited to this, but also includes how each specific text significance relates to contemporary America and the issues that stem from these topics.https://digital.sandiego.edu/ethn-zines/1001/thumbnail.jp

Node and Edge Differential Privacy for Graph Laplacian Spectra: Mechanisms and Scaling Laws

This paper develops a framework for privatizing the spectrum of the graph Laplacian of an undirected graph using differential privacy. We consider two privacy formulations. The first obfuscates the presence of edges in the graph and the second obfuscates the presence of nodes. We compare these two privacy formulations and show that the privacy formulation that considers edges is better suited to most engineering applications. We use the bounded Laplace mechanism to provide differential privacy to the eigenvalues of a graph Laplacian, and we pay special attention to the algebraic connectivity, which is the Laplacian's second smallest eigenvalue. Analytical bounds are presented on the the accuracy of the mechanisms and on certain graph properties computed with private spectra. A suite of numerical examples confirms the accuracy of private spectra in practice.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2104.0065