Annotated bibliography of community music research review, AHRC connected communities programme

This research review, consisting of a 90-entry annotated bibliography, was produced as part of an AHRC Connected Communities programme project entitled Community Music, its History and Current Practice, its Constructions of ‘Community’, Digital Turns and Future Soundings. It supports a 2,500 word report written with this same title for the AHRC

Community music: history and current practice, its constructions of ‘community’, digital turns and future soundings

The UK has been a pivotal national player within the development of community music practice. In the UK community music developed broadly from the 1960s and had a significant burgeoning period in the 1980s. Community music nationally and internationally has gone on to build a set of practices, a repertoire, an infrastructure of organisations, qualifications and career paths. There are elements of cultural and debatably pedagogic innovations in community music. These have to date only partly been articulated and historicised within academic research. This document brings together and reviews research under the headings of history and definitions; practice; repertoire; community; pedagogy; digital technology; health and therapy; policy and funding, and impact and evaluation. A 90-entry, 22,000 word annotated bibliography was also produced (McKay and Higham 2011). An informed group of 15 practitioners and academics reviewed the authors’ initial findings at a knowledge exchange colloquium and advised on further investigation. Some of the gaps in research identified are: an authoritative history, an examination of repertoire, the relationship with other music (practice), the freelance practitioner career, evidence of impact and value, the potential for a pedagogy

Ex-ante measure of patent quality reveals intrinsic fitness for citation-network growth

We have constructed a fitness parameter, characterizing the intrinsic attractiveness for patents to be cited, from attributes of the associated inventions known at the time a patent is granted. This exogenously obtained fitness is shown to determine the temporal growth of the citation network in conjunction with mechanisms of preferential attachment and obsolescence-induced ageing that operate without reference to characteristics of individual patents. Our study opens a window on understanding quantitatively the interplay of the rich-gets-richer and fit-gets-richer paradigms that have been suggested to govern the growth dynamics of real-world complex networks.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, RevTex4.1, v2: minor changes, version to appear as a Rapid Communication in Phys. Rev.

Unraveling the dynamics of growth, aging and inflation for citations to scientific articles from specific research fields

We analyze the time evolution of citations acquired by articles from journals of the American Physical Society (PRA, PRB, PRC, PRD, PRE and PRL). The observed change over time in the number of papers published in each journal is considered an exogenously caused variation in citability that is accounted for by a normalization. The appropriately inflation-adjusted citation rates are found to be separable into a preferential-attachment-type growth kernel and a purely obsolescence-related (i.e., monotonously decreasing as a function of time since publication) aging function. Variations in the empirically extracted parameters of the growth kernels and aging functions associated with different journals point to research-field-specific characteristics of citation intensity and knowledge flow. Comparison with analogous results for the citation dynamics of technology-disaggregated cohorts of patents provides deeper insight into the basic principles of information propagation as indicated by citing behavior.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, Elsevier style, v2: revised version to appear in J. Informetric

Reduced Ambiguity Calibration for LOFAR

Interferometric calibration always yields non unique solutions. It is therefore essential to remove these ambiguities before the solutions could be used in any further modeling of the sky, the instrument or propagation effects such as the ionosphere. We present a method for LOFAR calibration which does not yield a unitary ambiguity, especially under ionospheric distortions. We also present exact ambiguities we get in our solutions, in closed form. Casting this as an optimization problem, we also present conditions for this approach to work. The proposed method enables us to use the solutions obtained via calibration for further modeling of instrumental and propagation effects. We provide extensive simulation results on the performance of our method. Moreover, we also give cases where due to degeneracy, this method fails to perform as expected and in such cases, we suggest exploiting diversity in time, space and frequency.Comment: Draft version. Final version published on 10 April 201

Radiometric dates of uplifted marine fauna in Greece:Implications for the interpretation of recent earthquake and tectonic histories using lithophagid dates

n AD 365 a great (Mw N 8) earthquake lifted up western Crete, exposing a shoreline encrusted by marine organisms, and up to 10 m of marine substrate beneath it. Radiocarbon ages determined for corals and bryozoans exposed between the paleo-shoreline and present sea level are consistent, within measurement error, with each other and with the date of the earthquake. But radiocarbon ages determined for the boring bivalve Lithophaga lithophaga found on the same substrate are at least 350 years, and up to 2000 years, older than the date of the earthquake that lifted them above sea level. These observations reveal two important effects that limit the use of radiocarbon lithophagid ages in tectonic and paleoseismological studies. The first is that the exceptional preservation potential of lithophagids allows them to remain intact and in situ long after natural death, while the substrate continues to be colonised until eventual uplift. The second, which we confirm with radiocarbon analysis of museum specimens of known age, is the incorporation of old (14C-free) carbon into lithophagid shells from the limestone host rock into which the lithophagids bored. The two effects are both significant in Crete and central Greece, and can cause the radiocarbon lithophagid ages to be up to 2000 years older than the uplift event which exposed them. Understanding these effects is important because lithophagids are far more abundantly preserved, and used to date uplift, than most other marine organisms. This study shows that they can rarely be used to distinguish uplift events, or date them to better than 1000 years, or even to distinguish whether observed uplift occurred in a single or in multiple events. After taking account of these uncertainties, the ages of the lithophagids are, however, consistent with the hypothesis that the highest prominent marine notches and exposed lithophagid holes within a few metres of sea level in Greece formed when sea level became relatively stable ~ 6000 years ago, following rapid rise after the last glacial maximum

An iterative method to compute the overlap Dirac operator at nonzero chemical potential

The overlap Dirac operator at nonzero quark chemical potential involves the computation of the sign function of a non-Hermitian matrix. In this talk we present an iterative method, first proposed by us in Ref. [1], which allows for an efficient computation of the operator, even on large lattices. The starting point is a Krylov subspace approximation, based on the Arnoldi algorithm, for the evaluation of a generic matrix function. The efficiency of this method is spoiled when the matrix has eigenvalues close to a function discontinuity. To cure this, a small number of critical eigenvectors are added to the Krylov subspace, and two different deflation schemes are proposed in this augmented subspace. The ensuing method is then applied to the sign function of the overlap Dirac operator, for two different lattice sizes. The sign function has a discontinuity along the imaginary axis, and the numerical results show how deflation dramatically improves the efficiency of the method.Comment: 7 pages, talk presented at the XXV International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 30 - August 4 2007, Regensburg, German

Information mobility in complex networks

The concept of information mobility in complex networks is introduced on the basis of a stochastic process taking place in the network. The transition matrix for this process represents the probability that the information arising at a given node is transferred to a target one. We use the fractional powers of this transition matrix to investigate the stochastic process at fractional time intervals. The mobility coefficient is then introduced on the basis of the trace of these fractional powers of the stochastic matrix. The fractional time at which a network diffuses 50% of the information contained in its nodes (1/ k50 ) is also introduced. We then show that the scale-free random networks display better spread of information than the non scale-free ones. We study 38 real-world networks and analyze their performance in spreading information from their nodes. We find that some real-world networks perform even better than the scale-free networks with the same average degree and we point out some of the structural parameters that make this possible