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Seeking A Feminist Approach to Scholarly Innovations in Music Teacher Education
No full textThe marketization (Marchand & Orsorno Velázquez, 2016) of higher education impacts faculty through hiring practices, workload structures, and reappointment and promotion policies. Women faculty in fields such as music education need to negotiate masculine discourses and gendered constructions of innovation (Alsos et al., 2013) in a STEM focused economy. Values held by feminist pedagogues could serve as a framework through which to consider a more feminist approach to research and scholarship. Qualities such as equalization of power, collaboration, affective learning, inclusiveness of diversity, and social responsibility may surface through a researcher’s approach to inquiry or in the content itself. This paper reflects on the work of Hal Abeles from the perspective of a mother-scholar in an attempt to see possibilities for feminist approaches to scholarly innovation in music education
Murmurations and Root Numbers
No full textWe report on a machine learning investigation of large datasets of elliptic curves and L-functions. This leads to the discovery of murmurations, an unexpected correlation between the root numbers and Dirichlet coefficients of L-functions. We provide a formal definition of murmurations, describe the connection with 1-level density, and provide three examples for which the murmuration phenomenon has been rigorously proven. Using our understanding of murmurations, we then build new machine learning models in search of a polynomial time algorithm for predicting root numbers. Based on our models and several heuristic arguments, we conclude that it is unlikely for a straightforward machine learning approach to yield a model that can predict root numbers in polynomial time
\u27A Very Murky Process\u27: Embracing the Intermediacy of International Justice and Human Rights
No full textWilson, Richard Ashby. 2024. “’A Very Murky Process:’ Embracing the Indeterminacy of International Justice and Human Rights.” In Philip Alston, ed., The Complexity of Human Rights: From Vernacularization to Quantification. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing
Reinvestigating the Role of Observational Contexts in Learning Hard Nouns
No full textDevelopmental scientists have long been fascinated by children’s prodigious word learning capacities and by patterns in the composition of children’s early vocabularies that reveal that certain types of words are learned earlier than others. One notable pattern has been that words that denote more abstract concepts (e.g., “story”) are learned later than words that denote concrete objects (e.g., “ball”). In fact, prior studies have concluded that different kinds of abstract words, including nouns whose referents are not whole, concrete objects (or “hard nouns”; Kako, 2005), are not learnable from observational contexts alone and necessitate linguistic information to be learned. In line with the field’s emerging understanding that the trajectory of learning the meaning of many types of words is a long, protracted one (see Ameel et al., 2008), the current study provides empirical evidence that learners may extract systematic partial knowledge of hard noun meanings from the observational contexts these words occur in despite the absence of linguistic information. This partial knowledge may lay the foundation for full meaning acquisition upon the incorporation of linguistic and social information. The current study also highlights the need to carefully consider the tasks used in word learning, and thus our definition of learning
Measuring Soot in a Novel Configuration for Diffusion Flames Fueled by Ethylene Doped with Iso-dodecane
No full textSustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs) are seen as the path forward for decarbonizing hard-to-electrify sectors. Using SAFs over traditional fossil fuels abates carbon dioxide emissions but still may present soot emission problems. A milestone in the abatement of soot would be understating its formation mechanisms.
This study aims to quantify soot products resulting from an ethylene flame doped with iso-dodecane, a surrogate SAF component. The burner selected for the investigation is the novel Planar Mixing Layer Flame (PMLF) which allows the tracking of soot formation with the height above the burner (HAB) in a stable diffusion flame. A baseline ethylene-fueled flame and a seeded flame where 1500 ppmv of ethylene is replaced with iso-dodecane are studied. Both flames have the same carbon flux in the reactants, stoichiometric mixture fraction, and are studied at HAB = 50 mm and HAB = 25 mm to track soot growth. Laser Induced Incandescence (LII) and Elastic Laser Light Scattering (E-LLS) are used to measure soot volume fraction and scattering coefficient respectively, and the light scattering equivalent soot diameter is calculated from a combination of the techniques.
When iso-dodecane is seeded into the flame, the soot volume fraction increases by 50% compared to the baseline case at both HAB and across all horizontal positions in the sooting region. The scattering equivalent diameter of the soot nanoparticles is 2-3 times larger in the doped flame at HAB = 50 mm when compared to the baseline. Overall, this work demonstrates that SAF combustion results in exacerbated soot impact
Importance Sampling to Learn Vasopressor Dosage to Optimize Patient Mortality in an Interpretable Manner
No full textSepsis is a life-threatening organ dysfunction resulting from an improperly compensated bodily response to infection. There is a high urgency among clinicians to develop a set of real-time explainable treatment guidelines and tools to address the high mortality rate of sepsis patients. We present a reinforcement learning approach for vasopressor drug dosage in intensive care unit sepsis patients to achieve a better-than-expert treatment policy. We preserved interpretability with a prototype learning layer and learn actions in an off-policy manner with importance sampling. We evaluated our design on the MIMIC-IV deidentified electronic health record dataset with an 80%-20% training-validation split for 300 epochs. For patient trajectories where expert actions agreed with over 80% of model policy actions, we achieved a mortality rate of approximately 35%, outperforming the expert policy mortality rate of 38%. Where expert actions agreed with the model policy for less than 80% of states, patient mortality reached 92%. This work indicates the model policy outperformed the expert policy by a significant margin while preserving interpretability. Future directions include improved data cleaning and extraction techniques, more tailored patient feature selection, exploring solutions to address limited trajectory exploration in training data, and improved evaluation metrics
The Heart and Soul of Music Education: Towards Sonic Egalitarianism in Classroom Practice
No full textAs public high school teachers, we have independently come to the realization that we are both searching for ways that our music rooms can be spaces where everyone has a chance to sound (speak, sing, play an instrument), and students and teachers have the opportunity to hear others in the room. At the center of this realization stands the classroom piano: it could be an instrument of communal sonic enjoyment but, in our experiences, tends to be dominated by a few. What we are here calling sonic egalitarianism is about creating conditions whereby students have equal opportunities to sound out, be loud, and perform in an environment without the expectation or demand of occupying such space sonically. In the tradition of co-writing (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2017), we share our individual critical narratives, adopting critical listening positionality (Robinson, 2020). Next, we respond to one another’s narratives, drawing out commonalities for exploration through relevant literature and delve into analysis. We conclude with describing implications for classroom practices and making suggestions for a sonic constitution. By applying critical listening positionality through a reflective and critical practitioner approach we hope to move beyond defaults within our practices
A Reimagining of Popular Music Interpretation Through Barthes’s Third Meaning: Implications for General Music Teacher Education
No full textPopular music is valuable in music teacher education because it can allow the considering of divergent and unique perspectives. However, viewing popular music making as a static process can constrain its values. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes (1977), the purpose of this philosophical inquiry is to examine the limitations of current ways of interpreting popular music and to reimagine popular music interpretation in general music teacher education. After providing an overview of Barthes’s (1977) three levels of meaning—the information level of meaning, the symbolic level of meaning, and the third meaning—I problematize popular music interpretation at the first two levels because it reassures individuals’ current ways of being, reinforcing what is. In response to the closed ways of interpreting popular music that confine how popular music can be valued and engaged, I propose interpreting popular music through the third meaning during which individuals no longer passively receive what is, but actively explore what might be as well as whom they might connect with and become. Additionally, I offer practical applications on how one can relate, express, connect, and become through the third meaning in the context of general music teacher education
