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The effect of Mindfulness and its Constructs on the Dimensions of Flow During Musical Instrument Playing
Get PDFAchtsamkeit und Flow sind zwei optimale, therapeutische und produktive Bewusstseinszustände, die in jüngster Zeit in verschiedenen Bereichen wie Klinik, Kognitionswissenschaft, Psychologie, Sport, Musik, Mensch-Computer-Interaktion usw. große Aufmerksamkeit erlangt haben. Es gibt eine anhaltende Diskussion über die Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede zwischen diesen beiden Zuständen, und es sind zahlreiche Studien erschienen, die die beiden anhand verschiedener Parameter wie gegenwärtiges Bewusstsein und die Art von Selbst vergleichen, die beide zu fördern versuchen. Die Forschung zur Integration von Achtsamkeit zur Beeinflussung des Flow-Phänomens hat sich als vielversprechendes Feld erwiesen, aber es gibt nur wenig Wissen über die Beziehung zwischen diesen beiden Zuständen im Allgemeinen und insbesondere im musikalischen Kontext. Ziel dieser Studie war es, die Beziehung zwischen den Konstrukten der Achtsamkeit und den Dimensionen des Flows während des Prozesses des Spielens eines Musikinstruments zu untersuchen. Das Spielen eines Musikinstruments ist einer der wichtigsten Bereiche, um in den Flow-Zustand zu gelangen, und die Forschung zur Relevanz von Achtsamkeit während des Flow-Phänomens in einem musikalischen Kontext steckt noch in den Kinderschuhen. Diese Arbeit ist in zwei Hauptstudien unterteilt. Die erste Studie zielt darauf ab, zu untersuchen, ob das dispositionelle Merkmal der Achtsamkeit eine prädiktive Beziehung zu verschiedenen Dimensionen des Flows hat. Eine solche Untersuchung sollte die Natur optimaler Erfahrungen von Achtsamkeit und Flow verstehen und versuchen, die Probleme in Bezug auf ihr Zusammenleben und ihre gegenseitige Abhängigkeit aufzuklären. Die zweite Studie war eine qualitative Studie, die darauf abzielte, die Veränderungen in der gelebten Erfahrung des Flows durch Veränderung der Achtsamkeitsniveaus bei Musikern zu beobachten. Ein einmonatiges musikalisches Einführungsprogramm war mit zwei Musikstudenten und zwei Musikern geplant.Mindfulness and flow are two optimal, therapeutic and productive states of consciousness that have recently gained a great deal of attention in various fields such as clinical, cognitive science, psychology, sports, music, human-computer interaction, etc. There is an ongoing discussion about the similarities and differences between these two states, and numerous studies have appeared comparing the two based on various parameters such as present awareness and the type of self that both seek to promote. Research on integrating mindfulness to influence the flow phenomenon has proven to be a promising field, but there is little knowledge about the relationship between these two states in general and in a musical context in particular. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the constructs of mindfulness and the dimensions of flow during the process of playing a musical instrument. Playing a musical instrument is one of the most important areas for entering the flow state, and research on the relevance of mindfulness during the flow phenomenon in a musical context is still in its infancy. This work is divided into two main studies. The first study aims to investigate whether the dispositional trait of mindfulness has a predictive relationship with different dimensions of flow. Such an investigation should understand the nature of optimal experiences of mindfulness and flow and try to elucidate the issues related to their coexistence and interdependence. The second study was a qualitative study aimed at observing the changes in the lived experience of flow by changing mindfulness levels in musicians. A one-month musical induction program was planned with two music students and two musicians. In summary, the results of the experiments presented in this thesis provide a preliminary understanding of how mindfulness is related to various dimensions of flow and how a mindfulness training program has an ability to influence flow in musical instrument playing context. This thesis contributes to the literature at a conceptual level by identifying which constructs of mindfulness that have a greater influence on different dimensions of flow as well as outlining relevant mindfulness-based intervention techniques
Towards integration? Considering social aspects with large-scale computational models for nature-based solutions
Get PDFInformation on social aspects of climate change intervention, such as behavioral choices and public acceptance, are often not included in global climate models. As a result, they have been critiqued for not adequately reflecting ‘real world’ conditions. At the same time, these models are important and influential policy tools. To improve these models, calls are being made for more interaction – or integration – between the social science and modelling research communities. Yet, it remains unclear how to achieve this. Responding to this gap, we explore what kind of integration is currently taking place, how, and opportunities for further development.The importance of social drivers of climate change interventions, or social aspects, is currently underrepresented in computational modelling projections. These parameters are largely excluded from estimates of technical mitigation potential, feasibility, and tools like integrated assessment models (IAMs) and other large-scale models that influence the development of climate policies and notable bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This paper contributes to calls being made within the research community to address this gap and strengthen linkages between modelling practices and social science insights. Using nature-based solutions (NbS) as a framing, we present the results of a critical literature review and interviews with multidisciplinary experts reflecting on the current state of integration around IAMs and opportunities to better capture social aspects within large-scale modelling processes. Our findings confirm the need to incorporate social aspects in IAMs, but highlight that how this happens in practice may depend on context, project objectives, or pragmatic choices rather than conceptual notions about what ‘good’ integration is. Nevertheless, some integration strategies are better than others, and concerns about data limitations and low capacity of the IAM community for engaging in integration can be overcome with sufficient support and complementary efforts from the broader research community.Peer Reviewe
Coordination work – Tuning and timing rice production in Burkina Faso
Get PDFAgricultural growth poles and development corridors are key instruments for fostering economic growth in rural areas and widely employed across the African continent. This paper contributes to the growing body of scholarship that empirically investigates how these large-scale spatial development strategies ‘hit the ground’. Drawing on ethnographic research within the Bagré Growth Pole Project in Burkina Faso and focusing on its key sector, rice, we develop the notion of coordination work. Coordination work captures the quotidian dimension of a growth pole project that is the instruments and interventions aimed at aligning different actors, activities, and arrangements in the project zone. Deploying a practice theoretical lens, we empirically unfold three modes of coordination work, namely the work of agricultural advisors on demonstration fields, consultancy support to farmer groups and unions, and the setting up of a binding agricultural calendar. We contend that a focus on coordination work illuminates the underlying assumptions and effects of distinct measures and instruments while also pointing to the cross connections between them. Ultimately, we show how specific project components change socio-ecological rhythms by tuning and timing practices at the center of megaprojects.Peer Reviewe
Fertility after photodynamic inactivation of bacteria in extended boar semen
Get PDFAntimicrobial resistance is an increasing challenge in semen preservation of breeding animals, especially in the porcine species. Bacteria are a natural component of semen, and their growth should be inhibited to protect sperm fertilizing capacity and the female’s health. In pig breeding, where semen is routinely stored at 17°C in the liquid state, alternatives to conventional antibiotics are urgently needed. Photodynamic inactivation (PDI) of bacteria is a well-established tool in medicine and the food industry but this technology has not been widely adopted in semen preservation. The specific challenge in this setting is to selectively inactivate bacteria while maintaining sperm integrity and functionality. The aim of this study was to test the principle of PDI in liquid stored boar semen using the photosensitizer 5,10,15,20-tetrakis(N-methyl-4-pyridyl)-21H,23H-porphine (TMPyP) and a white light LED-setup. In the first step, photophysical experiments comprising singlet oxygen phosphorescence kinetics of TMPyP and determination of the photosensitizer triplet time revealed a sufficiently high production of reactive singlet oxygen in the Androstar Premium semen extender, whereas seminal plasma acted as strong quencher. In vitro experiments with extended boar semen showed that the established PDI protocol preserves sperm motility, membrane integrity, DNA integrity, and mitochondrial activity while efficiently reducing the bacteria below the detection limit. A proof-of-concept insemination study confirmed the in vivo fertility of semen after photodynamic treatment. In conclusion, using the PDI approach, an innovative tool was established that efficiently controls bacteria growth in extended boar and maintains sperm fertility. This could be a promising contribution to the One Health concept with the potential to reduce antimicrobial resistance in animal husbandry.Peer Reviewe
Forecasting of Bitcoin Illiquidity Using High-Dimensional and Textual Features
Get PDFLiquidity is the ease of converting an asset (physical/digital) into cash or another asset without loss and is shown by the relationship between the time scale and the price scale of an investment. This article examines the illiquidity of Bitcoin (BTC). Bitcoin hash rate information was collected at three different time intervals; parallel to these data, textual information related to these intervals was collected from Twitter for each day. Due to the regression nature of illiquidity prediction, approaches based on recurrent networks were suggested. Seven approaches: ANN, SVM, SANN, LSTM, Simple RNN, GRU, and IndRNN, were tested on these data. To evaluate these approaches, three evaluation methods were used: random split (paper), random split (run) and linear split (run). The research results indicate that the IndRNN approach provided better results.Peer Reviewe
Drug-target identification in COVID-19 disease mechanisms using computational systems biology approaches
Get PDFIntroduction: The COVID-19 Disease Map project is a large-scale community effort uniting 277 scientists from 130 Institutions around the globe. We use high-quality, mechanistic content describing SARS-CoV-2-host interactions and develop interoperable bioinformatic pipelines for novel target identification and drug repurposing.
Methods: Extensive community work allowed an impressive step forward in building interfaces between Systems Biology tools and platforms. Our framework can link biomolecules from omics data analysis and computational modelling to dysregulated pathways in a cell-, tissue- or patient-specific manner. Drug repurposing using text mining and AI-assisted analysis identified potential drugs, chemicals and microRNAs that could target the identified key factors.
Results: Results revealed drugs already tested for anti-COVID-19 efficacy, providing a mechanistic context for their mode of action, and drugs already in clinical trials for treating other diseases, never tested against COVID-19.
Discussion: The key advance is that the proposed framework is versatile and expandable, offering a significant upgrade in the arsenal for virus-host interactions and other complex pathologies.Peer Reviewe
Mathilde Fasting, Øystein Sørensen: The Norwegian Exception? Norway’s Liberal Democracy Since 1814, London: Hurst Publishers 2021, 278 S.
Get PDFEarly stopping for iterative estimation procedures
Get PDFDiese Dissertation ist ein Beitrag zum Forschungsfeld Early stopping im Kontext iterativer Schätzverfahren. Wir betrachten Early stopping dabei sowohl aus der Perspektive impliziter Regularisierungsverfahren als auch aus der Perspektive adaptiver Methoden Analog zu expliziter Regularisierung reduziert das Stoppen eines Schätzverfahrens den stochastischen Fehler/die Varianz des endgültigen Schätzers auf Kosten eines zusätzlichen Approximationsfehlers/Bias. In diesem Forschungsbereich präsentieren wir eine neue Analyse des Gradientenabstiegsverfahrens für konvexe Lernprobleme in einem abstrakten Hilbert-Raum. Aus der Perspektive adaptiver Methoden müssen iterative Schätzerverfahren immer mit einer datengetriebenen letzten Iteration m kombiniert werden, die sowohl under- als auch over-fitting verhindert. In diesem Forschungsbereichpräsentieren wir zwei Beiträge: In einem statistischen inversen Problem, das durch iteratives Trunkieren der Singulärwertzerlegung regularisiert wird, untersuchen wir, unter welchen Umständen optimale Adaptiertheit erreicht werden kann, wenn wir an der ersten Iteration m stoppen, an der die geglätteten Residuen kleiner sind als ein kritischer Wert. Für L2-Boosting mittels Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) in hochdimensionalen linearen Modellen beweisen wir, dass sequenzielle Stoppverfahren statistische Optimalität garantieren können. Die Beweise beinhalten eine subtile punktweise Analyse einer stochastischen Bias-Varianz-Zerlegung, die durch den
Greedy-Algorithmus, der OMP unterliegt, induziert wird. Simulationsstudien
zeigen, dass sequentielle Methoden zu deutlich reduzierten Rechenkosten die
Leistung von Standardalgorithmen wie dem kreuzvalidierten Lasso oder der
nicht-sequentiellen Modellwahl über ein hochdimensionales Akaike- Kriterium
erbringen können.This dissertation contributes to the growing literature on early stopping in modern statistics and machine learning. We consider early stopping from the perspective of both implicit regularization and adaptive estimation. From the former, analogous to an explicit regularization method, halting an iterative estimation procedure reduces the stochastic error/variance of the final estimator at the cost of some bias. In this area, we present a novel analysis of gradient descent learning for convex loss functions in an abstract Hilbert space setting, which combines techniques from inexact optimization and concentration of measure. From the perspective of adaptive estimation, iterative estimation procedures have to be combined with a data-driven choice m of the effectively selected iteration in order to avoid under- as well as over-fitting. In this area, we present two contributions: For truncated SVD estimation in statistical inverse problems, we examine under what circumstances optimal adaptation can be achieved by early stopping at the first iteration at which the smoothed residuals are smaller than a critical value. For L2-boosting via orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) in high dimensional linear models, we prove that sequential early stopping rules can preserve statistical optimality in terms of a general oracle inequality for the empirical risk and recently established optimal convergence rates for the population risk
Photoswitchable Kinase Inhibitors to Reversibly Control Kinase Activity
No full textIn dieser Arbeit wurden zwei Klassen von analog-sensitiven (AS) Kinaseinhibitoren, welche wichtige pharmakologische Instrumente für die Untersuchung von Signalwegen darstellen, durch den Einbau von lichtempfindlichen Komponenten in ihre Struktur photoschaltbar gemacht.
Die Einführung eines Cyclohexa-1,3-diens anstelle des zentralen Benzolrings im Staralog-Grundgerüst ermöglicht eine reversible 6π Elektrozyklisierung analog zu Diarylethenen (DAEs). Nach der Entwicklung eines Synthesewegs führte die iterative Verbesserung des strukturellen Designs schließlich zu einer Reihe von Photoschaltern, die in reinem Wasser bestrahlt werden können. Eine detaillierte Untersuchung des photochemischen Verhaltens ergab effizientes Schalten für beide Bestrahlungsprozesse, was auf hohe Quantenausbeuten und eine ausreichende Bandenseparation zwischen beiden Isomeren zurückzuführen ist. Die vorgestellte Studie demonstriert das Potenzial von DAE-basierten Kinaseinhibitoren und stellt eine vielversprechende Möglichkeit dar, um die momentanen Einschränkungen anderer Photoschalterklassen zu überwinden.
Um die katalytische Aktivität von TgCDPK1 zu kontrollieren, wurden auf Grundlage des 5-Aminopyrazol-4-carboxamid Gerüsts photoschaltbare Kinaseinhibitoren entwickelt, die auf einer lichtinduzierten E/Z Isomerisierung eines Arylazopyrazols basieren. Aus einer Bibliothek von synthetisierten Inhibitoren wurden die effektivsten Derivate identifiziert, die ein optimales Verhältnis zwischen guten photochemischen Eigenschaften und Affinität gegenüber der Kinase aufweisen. Tatsächlich konnte so eine reversible Kontrolle der katalytischen Aktivität von TgCDPK1 durch die Anwendung von Licht verschiedener Wellenlängen erreicht werden. Es wurde gezeigt, dass die Wirksamkeit dieser Inhibitoren stark mit der Größe des Gatekeeper-Rests korreliert, was die Möglichkeit einer universellen Anwendung dieses Konzepts für die selektive lichtinduzierte Kontrolle von AS Kinasen in der Zukunft eröffnet.In this work two general classes of analog-sensitive (AS) kinase inhibitors, which constitute pharmacological key elements for studying kinase-mediated signaling pathways, were rendered photoresponsive by implementing two photoswitchable moieties into the scaffold of their corresponding parent inhibitors.
Photoswitchability was introduced to the staralog inhibitor scaffold by implementing a cyclohexa-1,3-diene capable of undergoing 6πelectrocyclization analog to diarylethenes (DAEs). A robust synthetic route was established, and iterative improvement of the structural design eventually led to a set of photoswitches which can be readily operated in pure water. In depth investigation of the photochemical behavior revealed high quantum yields for both processes resulting in efficient photoswitching and sufficient band separation between both isomers. This investigation illustrates the potential of DAE-based kinase inhibitors and presents an attractive strategy to address current limitations of other photoswitch classes and currently employed DAE motifs.
Furthermore, photoswitchable kinase inhibitors based on the 5-aminopyrazolo-4-carboxamide (PCA) scaffold were used to control the catalytic activity of TgCDPK1 utilizing light-induced structural changes of an arylazopyrazole. Within a library of synthesized small molecule inhibitors, the best candidates exhibiting an optimal balance between good photochemical properties and target affinity were identified. A substantial difference in IC50 values was achieved between both photostationary states and consequently, the catalytic activity of TgCDPK1 was controlled effectively in a reversible fashion by applying light of different wavelengths. The potency of these inhibitors strongly correlates with the size of the gatekeeper residue, highlighting the potential of these photoswitchable inhibitors for the selective light-induced control over AS kinases in the future
Еще раз о финско-русском двуязычии: соответствие желаний родителей и ресурсов педагогов
Get PDFThis study explores the attitudes of Russophone parents in Finland towards family language policies and bilingual ed-ucation. The results show that most parents would like their children to become independent multilingual citizens inte-grated into European society and at the same time maintain their family culture and language. The opinion of educators is taken into account.Данное исследование посвящено отношению русско-говорящих родителей в Финляндии к языковой поли-тике семьи и двуязычному образованию. Результаты показывают, что большинство родителей хотели бы, чтобы их дети стали независимыми многоязычными гражданами, интегрированными в европейское общество, а также сохраняли свою семейную культуру и язык. Учитывается также мнение педагогов