301,843 research outputs found
The Profundity of Polychoralism: Exploring the work of Jonathan David Little [Interview and CD review]
No full textExtended (7000-word) composer interview and CD review of "Woefully Arrayed: Sacred & Secular Choral & Polychoral Music of Jonathan David Little", by London-based international music critic, Colin Clarke.
[INTERVIEW:] "The disc of sacred and secular choral and polychoral music by Jonathan David Little, Woefully Arrayed … is nothing short of remarkable. Stunningly recorded, the pure sonic joy is visceral. On a personal level, I haven’t experienced such revelation in choral terms since the Tallis Scholars’ first recording of the Allegri Miserere. As an interviewee, it turns out, Little is every inch as fascinating as his music. The following in-depth interview may be seen as an indispensable complement to the listening experience itself."
[CD REVIEW:] "Jonathan David Little is a composer whose music is vital, urgent and yet somehow timeless at the same time. … Woefully Arrayed has a mesmeric element to it … [and] is a masterpiece of time-stretching. As lines float and interact throughout the soundspace, there is a distinct impression of atemporality, of altering the way the listener experiences time. … sound is superb, full and reverberant … magnificently handled … A superb disc, one that simply gets better on each and every listening. There is a radiance to Little’s writing that seems shot through with spiritual light and which speaks on a very deep level to the listener."
PROJECT OVERVIEW: International Polychoral Music Composition, Recording and Dissemination Project (2015-17)
“The lost potential of the acoustics of performing spaces begins to be rediscovered in these works.”
A complex and ambitious, large-scale, two-year “polychoral” music creation and recording project was commissioned by the Australia Council – involving communicating how “re-discovered” ancient Renaissance and Baroque techniques of acoustically-innovative performer placement may be revived within new, original, contemporary contexts. One aim was to generate interest in largely long-forgotten, but still hugely useful and aurally impressive composition methods. Following a period of research and experimentation, several new, accessible choral works were created – most featuring intricate, a cappella, polychoral-inspired techniques. Therefore different sections of the choir, or different “sub-choirs” and/or vocal soloists, are sometimes placed in various arrangements around and above the audience (occasionally also involving movement). Due to the incorporation of such techniques, a striking extra dimension is added both to recordings and live performances – where the aural “spatial” interest creates a quasi-theatrical effect.
OPEN-ACCESS ONLINE CD BOOKLET (including contextual essay, spatial configuration diagrams, lyrics, pictures and notes): http://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6113/booklet---woefully-arrayed---jonathan-little.htm
Citizen participation in news
No full textThe process of producing news has changed significantly due to the advent of the Web, which has enabled the increasing involvement of citizens in news production. This trend has been given many names, including participatory journalism, produsage, and crowd-sourced journalism, but these terms are ambiguous and have been applied inconsistently, making comparison of news systems difficult. In particular, it is problematic to distinguish the levels of citizen involvement, and therefore the extent to which news production has genuinely been opened up. In this paper we perform an analysis of 32 online news systems, comparing them in terms of how much power they give to citizens at each stage of the news production process. Our analysis reveals a diverse landscape of news systems and shows that they defy simplistic categorisation, but it also provides the means to compare different approaches in a systematic and meaningful way. We combine this with four case studies of individual stories to explore the ways that news stories can move and evolve across this landscape. Our conclusions are that online news systems are complex and interdependent, and that most do not involve citizens to the extent that the terms used to describe them imply
Coordinated Targeting of Mobile Sensor Networks for Ensemble Forecast Improvement
No full textThis paper presents an efficient targeting algorithm to coordinate a team of mobile sensor platforms in order to extract information from the natural environment for the purpose of improved forecasting. This coordinated targeting is complicated by the large dimensionality of the natural dynamic systems (and thus of the decision space), as well as by the constraints in the vehicle motions. While the backward formulation developed by the present authors provides a baseline framework to efficiently address the dimensionality challenge in an unconstrained setting, the key contributions of this paper are twofold: (a) to delineate how to effectively incorporate the sensor platform constrained mobility in the targeting process and (b) to demonstrate the importance of the interteam information sharing to achieve good targeting performance. Numerical examples of simplified weather forecasting verify that the presented method renders good targeting solutions while retaining computational tractability, which is crucial for the design of sensor networks that tightly interact with, and rapidly adapt to, large-scale dynamic environments.This work is funded by NSF CNS-0540331 as part of the DDDAS program with Dr. Frederica Darema as the overall program manager. The authors thank Dr. James A. Hansen for invaluable discussions on ensemble-based targeting and weather models
Chance Constrained RRT for Probabilistic Robustness to Environmental Uncertainty
No full texturl is to conference schedule where talk is listed.For motion planning problems involving many or unbounded forms of uncertainty, it may not be possible to identify a path guaranteed to be feasible, requiring consideration of the trade-off between planner conservatism and the risk of infeasibility. This paper presents a novel real-time planning algorithm, chance constrained rapidly-exploring random trees (CC-RRT), which uses chance constraints
to guarantee probabilistic feasibility for linear systems subject to process noise and/or uncertain, possibly dynamic obstacles. By using RRT, the algorithm enjoys the computational benefits of sampling-based algorithms, such as trajectory-wise constraint checking and incorporation of heuristics, while explicitly incorporating uncertainty within the formulation. Under the assumption of Gaussian noise, probabilistic feasibility at each time step can be established through simple simulation of the state conditional mean and the evaluation of linear constraints. Alternatively,
a small amount of additional computation can be used to explicitly compute a less conservative probability bound at each time step. Simulation results show that this algorithm can be used for efficient identification and execution of probabilistically safe paths in real time.United States. Dept. of the Air Force (AFOSR grant FA9550-08-1-0086
A multi-UAV targeting algorithm for ensemble forecast improvement
No full textThis work is funded by NSF CNS-0540331 as part of the DDDAS program with Dr. Frederica
Darema as the overall program manager
Efficient Targeting of Sensor Networks for Large-Scale Systems
No full textThis paper proposes an efficient approach to an observation targeting problem that is complicated by a combinatorial number of targeting choices and the large dimension of the system state, when the goal is to minimize the uncertainty in some quantities of interest. The primary improvements in the efficiency are obtained by computing the impact of each possible measurement choice on the uncertainty reduction backwards. This backward method provides an equivalent solution to a traditional forward approach under some standard assumptions, while removing the requirement of calculating a combinatorial number of covariance updates. A key contribution of this paper is to prove that the backward approach operates never slower than the forward approach, and that it works significantly faster than the forward one for ensemble-based representations. The primary benefits are shown on a simplified weather problem using the Lorenz-95 model.This work is funded by NSF CNS-0540331 as part of the DDDAS program with Dr. Frederica Darema as the overall program manager. The authors thank Dr. James A. Hansen for invaluable discussions on ensemble-based
targeting and weather models
Replication Data for: How Membership in the European Union Can Undermine the Rule of Law in Emerging Democracies
No full textJonathan B. Slapin (2015) “How Membership in the EuropeanUnion Can Undermine the Rule of Law in Emerging Democracies”West European Politics 38(3)
Replication Data for: How Membership in the European Union Can Undermine the Rule of Law in Emerging Democracies
No full textJonathan B. Slapin (2015) “How Membership in the EuropeanUnion Can Undermine the Rule of Law in Emerging Democracies”West European Politics 38(3)
Continuous Motion Planning for Information Forecast
No full textThis work is funded by NSF CNS-0540331 as part of the DDDAS program with Dr. Frederica Darema as the overall program manager. The authors thank Luca Bertuccelli for
insightful discussions
Continuous Trajectory Planning of Mobile Sensors for Informative Forecasting
No full textThis paper addresses planning of continuous paths for mobile sensors to reduce uncertainty in some quantities of interest in the future.
The mutual information between the continuous measurement path and the future verification variables defines the information reward.
Two expressions for computing this mutual information are presented: the filter form extended from the state-of-the-art and the smoother
form inspired by the conditional independence structure. The key properties of the approach using the filter and smoother strategies are
presented and compared. The smoother form is shown to be preferable because it provides better computational efficiency, facilitates easy
integration with existing path synthesis tools, and most importantly, enables correct quantification of the rate of information accumulation.
A spatial interpolation technique is used to relate the motion of the sensor to the evolution of the measurement matrix, which leads to
the formulation of the optimal path planning problem. A gradient-ascent steering law based on the concept of information potential field
is also presented as a computationally efficient suboptimal strategy. A simplified weather forecasting example is used to compare several
planning methodologies and to illustrate the potential performance benefits of using the proposed planning approach.National Science Foundation (CNS-0540331
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