1,720,998 research outputs found
Chicks run harder toward a consonant over a dissonant clucking hen: Biological roots for the appreciation of consonant sounds
No full textMusic is an ancient and pervasive human artistic product. With the aim of understanding whether some musical features present common biological roots, the issue of consonance over dissonance preference has been particularly debated1-2. Recently, a study investigating Amazonian populations showed that the less the exposure to Western music, the more the consonant and dissonant chords are rated as equally pleasant3. In this sense, our aesthetic response to consonance is the consequence of massive experience to cultural-specific musical rules. However, different BOLD responses in 3-day olds new-borns to consonant and dissonant music seem to indicate a predisposed differential sensitivity of the auditory cortex for the two kinds of sounds4. Alongside with this finding, comparative studies have shown that a baby chimp5 and newly hatched domestic chicks6, before any exposure to music, prefer the consonant versions with respect to the dissonant versions of the same melodies.
We further investigated chicks’ spontaneous response to consonant and dissonant sounds by adopting a different paradigm and by preparing an ad hoc stimulation. Broody hens keep clucking while walking around to stimulate chicks’ following behaviour; we simulated this situation in the laboratory by placing each chick in a running-wheel and an imprinting object 50cm apart. We then manipulated an adult hen’s vocalization to have a consonant and a dissonant clucking (two clucks were overlapped to the original cluck: one at perfect fifth and one at an octave above for the consonant and one at major second and one triton for the dissonant) presented within the hen’s rhythmical specie-specific pattern.
We tested 20 chicks immediately after hatching when they were exposed to any other sound but that of the incubator and scored their running activity in response to both the consonant and dissonant clucking presented in randomized order between animals. The results show that chicks ran significantly more while listening to consonant as compared to dissonant clucking (p=0.03). The results therefore show, with a novel paradigm, that chicks prefer consonance.
With this finding we add evidence to the idea that harmonics appreciation could be a valuable evolutionary mechanism to detect other living organisms
Identifying collapsed buildings
Full text linkTHE WORK TO RECOVER AND REBUILD FOLLOWING an earthquake requires reliable information on the condition of structures in the affected areas. In developed areas, efforts to gather this information can be time-consuming and prone to errors, often resulting in incomplete or inaccurate information.
A new, software-based methodology to recognize collapsed buildings utilizes classification of satellite images combined with height variation information. The methodology was demonstrated in a full-scale, real-life scenario by a team led by Prof. Valerio Baiocchi of the University of Rome. According to Baiocchi, the team’s work was intended to demonstrate the methodology on actual data available for the entire city of L’Aquila in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, in an actual and complete simulation of quick damage assessment in a real emergency. The team utilized satellite imagery of the city of L’Aquila, which experienced a magnitude 6.3 earthquake on April 6, 2009. The work demonstrated a robust classification of collapsed structures that was completed quickly and with good confidence
An Application of COSMO-SkyMed to coastal erosion Studies
No full textStarted in 2009, the Cosmocoast project aims to the investigation of the potential of Remote Sensing in support to the management of coastal areas. Particular attention is paid to the contribution of data acquired from the COSMO-Skymed constellation, in view of their frequency of acquisition and ground resolution; in particular this paper aims at assessing the potential of COSMO-Skymed data for coastline delineation.The results are conceived to be of particular interest for public administration bodies in change of coastal defense
Improving traditional change detection with dsm for update cartography in urbanized areas after seismic events
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Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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