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The Men on the Line
No full textThe Men on the Line is a memoir that explores the intersections of masculinity, labor, and identity through the lens of food and family. Raised in California’s Central Valley by a single mother and a lineage of strong-willed women, the author grows up in a world where men work until they die, and women sustain the household through tradition and food. Without a father to model manhood, he pieces together an identity from the men around him—uncles, kitchen coworkers, and transient father figures—while resisting the path of manual labor that seems inevitable. From watching his great-grandmother command the kitchen with military precision to working back-of-house in a small-town Mexican restaurant as a teenager, he enters the chaotic world of restaurant kitchens—a realm where discipline and destruction coexist. The memoir follows his journey from underpaid line cook to fine-dining kitchens in New Orleans and New York, ultimately confronting the question of whether food is just work or something more. Through vivid storytelling and a deep reverence for the labor of cooking, The Men on the Line examines how class, family, and inheritance shape identity. At its core, it is a meditation on the weight of expectation, the search for belonging, and the tension between the work one is born into and the work one chooses
Ad Valorem Vita
Get PDFAd Valorem Vita is an orchestral work in four movements. My aim for this work was to capture four separate moments in the life of a person in power with diabolical intentions. In this composition, the listener will find agony, despair, fear, rage, depression, and a myriad of other imbued emotions. Each movement is impressed with a feeling of a world gone wrong. Movement I: devil on the shoulder. The composition begins with a movement filled with march-like textures that represent movement or action with dark motives. There is a moment in the piece where only the bassoons are performing. They play a melodic phrase that calls seductively. This represents a devil whispering on the shoulder and inviting evil actions. The movement culminates with big chords playing long notes. This wall of sound makes a statement in which the deed is done. The malicious act has been carried out. Movement II: Death Engine. This movement represents the grinding and gruesome sounds of the war machine. The themes oscillate back and forth building on one another. Near the middle, the Dies irae or “day of wrath” material from the Catholic Mass of the Dead enters. This melodic material is paired with a quick driving theme that represents an expression of attack. Movement III: Last Breaths. Ideas about a person’s last breath of life are explored in this part of the composition. The music is much more subdued and introspective. The moments that do build represent a sense of panic and paranoia. The tubular bells ring ominously with the piano in a foreboding of what is to come. Movement IV: Time Will Tell. The final movement breaks out fast and moves furiously towards the end. This movement deals with the period after a person’s time stops and death has come. It is the shortest part of the composition and with a very slow and disjointed piano part at the end. The slow playing of the keys is meant to indicate the end of all things
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting: Geometric Techniques in Incremental Machine Learning
Get PDFNeural network (NN) models have made remarkable strides in outperforming humans in a wide array of discrete tasks. These models excel in specific, well-defined domains where they can leverage vast amounts of data to make highly accurate predictions. However, despite impressive achievements, the scope of NN remains limited when compared to the vast, multifaceted cognitive abilities of humans. While machine learning models excel at specialized tasks, humans possess an extraordinary capacity to acquire knowledge and perform a nearly infinite variety of tasks across diverse domains. The ability to learn over time is a core attribute of human cognition. This lifelong process allows humans to integrate new information while retaining prior knowledge. In contrast, machine learning models struggle, especially in dynamic environments. Continual learning (CL) addresses this challenge, enabling models to learn from a stream of data, whether online or offline, without forgetting past knowledge. A critical challenge in CL is the phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting (CF). CF occurs when an NN, after learning new information, forgets previously acquired knowledge, often leading to a degradation in performance on earlier tasks. This problem has been extensively studied and remains one of the most significant hurdles in deep neural networks (DNNs). In this dissertation, the focus has been on presenting novel solutions to mitigate CF in the continual and incremental learning (CL and IL) domain. The solutions proposed in this dissertation address several crucial aspects of CL. By exploring different strategies and techniques, the research advances the field by addressing key challenges such as balancing the retention of old knowledge while incorporating new data. These contributions reflect significant progress in the development of CL techniques and underscore the obstacles that still need to be overcome for the effective implementation of CL in real-world applications. Through these efforts, this research aims to enhance the practical viability of CL and make it more applicable to complex, dynamic environments
LINKING NEURAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL INDICATORS OF TURN-TAKING: THE IMPORTANCE OF LIVE ENGAGEMENT
Get PDFIntroduction: Many turn-taking studies examine measures from temporal, neural, or respiratory domains separately as well as limit the turn-taking behaviors participants can engage in by dictating when and for how long they are allowed to speak. A multi-domain approach that does not restrict when participants are allowed to respond would be able to bridge these gaps. Objectives: Determine whether the presence of a live presenter elicits more ecologically valid response times in a question-answer paradigm than the use of pre-recorded audio. Also, determine whether participants begin executing speech motor plans upon recognition of answer-relevant information or upon detection of a turn-yielder’s end of turn. Lastly, investigate neural signals that correspond with the onset of response planning and determine how these signals correlate temporally to speech planning. Methods: 29 participants had their electrical brain activity, respiratory volume changes, and response times measured while being presented two rounds of 232 short answer questions. 116 matching pairs of questions adapted from Bögels et al. (2015) contained information necessary to answer either halfway through (EARLY-type) or at the end (LATE-type). These questions were presented in two styles: as pre-recorded audio (recorded) or by a live presenter (live). Results: Response times for the recorded condition for both EARLY and LATE question types were significantly larger than both the live presentation style as well as when compared to Bögels et al. (2015). Neural data contained too much individual variation for any significant differences between conditions to be able to be extracted. Participants did not inhale in a typical pre-speech manner before responding a majority of the time. A respiratory sub-analysis, however, showed a positive correlation between participant age and number of speech-like inhalations. Conclusion: Question-answer response times were representative of natural turn-taking times only when presented by a live examiner, when compared to a pre-recorded audio-only condition. The circumstances of presentation appears to have a large effect on question response time, suggesting that the presentation of stimuli in a more or less ecologically valid environment has a significant impact on how participants respond to them. Short responses led to a reduced prevalence of sharp, turn-taking inhalations
Incorporating African American Spirituals Into Solo Low Brass Repertoire
Get PDFThe African American spiritual is a sacred folk genre that was created by African American slaves in the 18th century. These songs are the foundation of past and present forms of American Popular Music. Throughout my studies as a classical musician (Euphonium and Trombone), I have not had the opportunity to learn about or play solo literature based on this unique form of American music within traditional music academia. I was first exposed to African American spirituals while studying at Florida A&M University. I joined the choir during the fall semesters, after resigning from the marching band. It was there, through a vocal tradition that I was introduced to this genre by another classically trained musician. This introduction spurred my musical curiosity but also uncovered a rich and complex history surrounding the creation and development of the African American spiritual. This is not the first paper on African American spirituals, but I do want to carefully highlight its origins and evolutions with consideration to American social and political culture of its time. In each chapter, the reader will find important historical and social context surrounding the creation and development of the African American spiritual. Unfortunately, a major theme in this paper is the dehumanization of Africans which evolved into racism in the United States. This cannot be hidden or overlooked because it is simply apart of the experiences of the creators and preservers of this body of music. What is astonishing is that from the African American spirituals creation to its evolutions in art music, is it served a larger purpose than other forms of Western Music. It affirmed the humanity and suffering of its creators and preservers and ultimately gave each generation hope. The first three chapters trace the history and development of the African American spiritual from its creation as a folk tradition, to its evolution in an arranged choral format to the last evolution of the art song. Chapter Four is an anthology of existing recordings and arrangements of African American spirituals for low brass. The final chapter discusses my pedagogical approach of performing and arranging the African American spiritual for low brass before arriving at the conclusion. The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, to provide a thorough yet concise history of the development of African American spirituals from its folk origins to its evolutions in Art Music; Second, to examine the need of preserving African American spirituals in solo low brass repertoire. I believe as a musician it is important to understand the history and vocal tradition of this music to properly integrate it into low brass repertoire
Improved H1–Theory for a Higher-Order Water-Wave Model
No full textBoussinesq and Korteweg-de Vries models; High-order water-wave models; local and global well-posedness; unidirectional propagatio
Numerical Approximation of Riccati-Based Hyperbolic-Like Feedback Controls
No full textFinite dimensional approximation; Optimal control; Riccati equation
Stabilization of a weak viscoelastic wave equation in Riemannian geometric setting with an interior delay under nonlinear boundary dissipation
No full textDelay; Faedo–Galerkin method; Monotone operator theory; Riemannian geometry method; Variable coefficient; Weak viscoelastic wave equatio
Mobility equity and transportation in pursuit of social work\u27s Grand Challenges
No full textaccess to services; equalities; inter-professional; qualitative research; social theory; Social wor