Heightening Levels of Activity and J. S. Bach's Parallel-Section Constructions

2001 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Lester

Abstract Three constructive principles underlie the large-scale thematic and organizational aspects of J. S. Bach's compositions: (1) the opening of a piece states a core of material that is worked with throughout the composition; (2) recurrences of material almost invariably exhibit a heightening level of activity in some or all musical elements; and (3) movements quite frequently subdivide into roughly parallel sections within which these heightened recurrences appear. The interaction of these three principles, all pertinent to contemporaneous theoretical perspectives, provides a unified perspective on Bach's creations in all genres. This essay explores interactions of the latter principles with the more familiar first one.

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (S264) ◽  
pp. 356-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. K. Manoharan

AbstractIn this paper, I present the results on large-scale evolution of density turbulence of solar wind in the inner heliosphere during 1985–2009. At a given distance from the Sun, the density turbulence is maximum around the maximum phase of the solar cycle and it reduces to ~70%, near the minimum phase. However, in the current minimum of solar activity, the level of turbulence has gradually decreased, starting from the year 2005, to the present level of ~30%. These results suggest that the source of solar wind changes globally, with the important implication that the supply of mass and energy from the Sun to the interplanetary space has significantly reduced in the present low level of activity.


Energies ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 357
Author(s):  
Edyta Małecka-Ziembińska ◽  
Izabela Janicka

One of the currently promoted methods of counteracting climate change is nature-based climate solutions, which harness the power of nature to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Sustainable management of ecosystems is a guarantee for sustained human well-being. This underestimated, but extremely efficient and cheap method of integrating nature resources into the urban fabric is an economic “injection” for communal authorities. These “green” benefits should be standard in land-use planning in the era of anthropocentrism. Solutions based on nature were the reason for investigating their perception by Polish municipalities. The survey covered the entire country (all 2477 municipalities) from 20 July to 31 August 2021 through an electronic survey, obtaining 2128 responses (85.9% return rate). In the final result, data were obtained that support the hypotheses posed in the study. The main objective of the research was to check the level of activity of municipalities in Poland in the field of proecological activities using nature-based solutions (NbS). The survey results confirmed little knowledge of nature-based solutions, at the same time giving it an educational dimension. Half of the respondents declared that they learned about NbS only from the survey. Polish decision makers and municipal authorities introduce some solutions based on nature without being aware of their European classification and adequate nomenclature. Environmental awareness in Poland remains largely the domain of urban municipalities, with higher current budget revenues per capita and in the central and western parts of the country. NbS are marginal in rural municipalities, which can be explained by the lack of ecological specialists, less car traffic and more single-family houses and thus modest public areas. The following surveys covering the entire territory of Poland are the first to be carried out on such a large scale.


Hipertext.net ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 105-114
Author(s):  
Roger Soler i Martí ◽  
Mariona Ferrer-Fons ◽  
Ludovic Terren

The lockdown imposed in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak as well as the resulting surge in the use of digital technologies and social media for activism or social life all represent a unique opportunity to study the relationship between online and offline activism. To do so, we focus on the Barcelona branch of Fridays For Future, the recent and global youth climate movement that expanded through social networks and organised several large-scale global protests. Based on data from Fridays For Future-Barcelona’s Twitter account, the analysis looks at and compares the level of activity and interactions during normal times and during the lockdown. The results suggest a close and mutually-reinforcing relationship between offline and online activism, with peaks of Twitter activity and interactions usually revolving around offline protest actions. They also show that the lockdown period was characterised by an increase in the number of tweets but a decrease in the number of interactions and thus in the repercussion of the movement on social networks.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 21-58
Author(s):  
Gaston Gross

A given predicate is defined by a set of properties which combine and which automatically generate all the sentences it allows. Among them, we note the number and the semantic class of the arguments which characterize it, the adjectival and adverbial modifiers which can be added tothe scheme of arguments as well as all the transformations which affect each of these units. The speaker is responsible for attributing to sentences the set of all the forms that language allows him to generate. What has just been said can be considered as a definition of syntax.But this situation is far from exhausting the description of a language. J. Dubois and especially Maurice Gross have devoted large-scale work to fixed expressions, that is to say, to the restrictions relating to the combinatorics usually observed around a given predicate. These studies have focused on the limitations of grammar rules as they are generally described. These two authors have drawn up lists of tens of thousands of “fixed” verbs and have highlighted the limits of this fixing. However, they made an observation without highlighting the causes of the fixing, which is a much more complex linguistic fact than this work suggests. The purpose of this article is twofold. On the one hand, it emphasizes what can be called discursive equivalences: in a given situation, the same idea can be translated by expressions which have no obvious link between them, as in: con comme la lune, con comme un balai, con comme une baleine, con comme une bite, con comme une valise. Another example: voici belle lurette, voici longtemps, voici un temps fou, voici une paille, voici une paye. It goes without saying that the speaker is not master of these expressions, because they are written in the language. This article shows that these equivalences are very numerous. On the other hand, I. Mel’čuk initiated important work on pragmatemes. Again the “regular” syntax is defective. All these cases are in fact examples of pre-constructed sequences, of which this article attempts to make a first classification. These sequences are explained by specific communication conditions as seen with these examples:a) Doubt or reluctance in the face of information that one can hardly believe:à d’autres !, à d’autres mais pas à moi !, à d’autres mais pas à nous ! b) Criticism of a work that is considered null and uninteresting:c’est de la bouillie pour les chats, c’est de la bricole, c’est de la briquette, c’est de la couille,c’est de la merde, c’est de la piquette, c’est du flan, c’est du pipeau, c’est du vent.This is long-term work, which allows us to renew certain theoretical perspectives.  


2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 562-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis D. Boateng

Fear of crime has been well studied; however, there has yet not been widespread consideration of the potential impact of both individual- and neighborhood-level factors on residents’ level of fear of crime. From a logistic-regression analytical standpoint, the present study empirically explores the contribution of several factors in explaining residents’ propensity for being fearful of crime. Precisely, the study tests the applicability and generalizability of three theoretical perspectives of fear of crime in the Ghanaian context and examines the effects of residents’ attitudes toward the police on their levels of fear of crime. Using large-scale cross-sectional data collected on more than 1,000 residents from 25 neighborhoods in Ghana, the results demonstrate significant predictive effects of both individual- and neighborhood-level factors on citizens’ rate of fearfulness. Findings from this study have both theoretical and practical implications, and provide important insights for the police to reduce levels of fear of crime in the community.


Author(s):  
Anders Böök

This chapter deals with the question of how adults process information about large-scale physical features and their spatial relations during navigation between places. The presentation is based on the presumption that single acts of cognition are comparatively unimportant in real-life travel. Accordingly, sequential relations between acts are emphasized, which is the reason for the term event in the title. In general, ways of seeing how spatial cognition is organized in time and space should further the search for connections between the fields of spatial cognition, environmental assessment and action. However, the latter prospect is beyond the scope of this chapter. The aim—to make explicit the sequence aspect of cognitive acts in several problem areas of spatial cognition—is pursued in a spirit of inductive analysis in that a number of act sequences are discussed as examples of important spatial cognition events. The approach is first described in broad outline. Processing of large-scale spatial information may entail different theoretical perspectives on levels of mental functioning. Basic mechanisms and operations that underlie the occurrence of cognitive acts represent one level, being the main focus of contemporary theory construction and model building. Further, cognitive acts are reflected in conscious activity and self-consciousness, which represent a second level. Finally, a third level emerges to the extent that cognitive acts are reliably ordered continuously in time and space. Common categories of acts in large-scale spatial cognition are perceptual identification, encoding, recognition, and recall of environmental information, judgments of topological, projective, and metric spatial relations, spatial inference, visual-spatial imagery, and spatial choice. Detailed processing underlying these cognitive acts is progressively unraveled by means of refined task paradigms, deductive reasoning, mathematics, and procedures for controlling subjects’ behavioral and mental activities. This kind of knowledge is sparse in the field of large-scale spatial cognition (Pick, 1985). Independent variables in experiments have been related as often to issues of development, the structure of location information in cognitive maps, methodology, or application as to the nature of processing per se (cf. Evans, 1980). In the long run, theory about underlying processing is indispensible for any of these concerns, including the event approach to be presented here.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 205920432096506
Author(s):  
Psyche Loui

Music therapy is an evidence-based practice, but the needs and constraints of various stakeholders pose challenges towards providing the highest standards of evidence for each clinical application. First, what is the best path from clinical need to multi-site, widely adopted intervention for a given disease or disorder? Secondly, how can we inform policy makers that what we do matters for public health––what evidence do we have, and what evidence do we need? This article will review the multiple forms of evidence for music-based interventions in the context of neurological disorders, from large-scale randomized controlled trials (RCT) to smaller-scale experimental studies, and make the case that evidence at multiple levels continues to be necessary for informing the selection of active ingredients of interest in effective musical interventions. The current article reviews some of the existing literature on music-based interventions for neurodegenerative disorders, with particular focus on neural structures and networks that are targeted by specific therapies for disorders including Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, and aphasia. This is followed by a focused discussion of principles that are gleaned from studies in cognitive and clinical neuroscience, which may inform the active ingredients of music-based interventions. Therapies that are driven by a deeper understanding of the musical elements that target specific disease mechanisms are more likely to succeed, and to increase the chances of widespread adoption. The article closes with some recommendations for future research.


Author(s):  
Richard Bradley ◽  
Colin Haselgrove ◽  
Marc Vander Linden ◽  
Leo Webley

In 2008, the Danish prehistorian Kristian Kristiansen considered the need for an ‘archaeology of Europe’. The article was one of a series in which he discussed intellectual developments in the discipline. His argument is directly relevant to our project. Kristiansen (2008) identified a series of changes in the practice of archaeology and, in particular, in the scale at which research has been conducted. Such changes reflected broader theoretical trends in the discipline. There was the alternation between ‘rational’ and ‘romantic’ approaches that had been identified by Andrew Sherratt (1997). It operated on a twenty-five to thirty-year cycle and extended from the nineteenth century to the present day. There was a political cycle in which prehistoric archaeology was influenced to varying extents by broader developments in contemporary society. In particular, it was coloured by different conceptions of cultural heritage, beginning with the rise of the nation-state. Finally, there was a funding cycle to which these features were closely related. At different times research was confined within modern borders, or scholars were encouraged to work in larger teams and over a more extensive area. All these trends could be illustrated by the scope of regional, national, and international journals and by the languages in which the results of the research were published. Such issues were particularly relevant to intellectual history. Kristiansen suggested that the adoption of particular theoretical perspectives was closely related to that question of scale. Approaches which looked for general patterns among prehistoric societies tended to discuss large regions, as might be expected of projects which adopted a comparative approach. They were characterized by rationalism, and in Britain, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia were influenced by American processual archaeology. At the same time the emphasis on large-scale regularities existed in a certain tension with approaches coloured by romanticism. They showed a greater concern with the practices and beliefs of individual communities and are sometimes described as post-processual. Because these different approaches were favoured at different times, it was hard to bring them into alignment, so that the work of one generation might be geographically extensive, while its successors would focus on a single region.


2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Man ◽  
Hannah U. Nohlen ◽  
Hans Melo ◽  
William A. Cunningham

We review the psychological literature on the organization of valence, discussing theoretical perspectives that favor a single dimension of valence, multiple valence dimensions, and positivity and negativity as dynamic and flexible properties of mental experience that are contingent upon context. Turning to the neuroscience literature that spans three levels of analysis, we discuss how positivity and negativity can be represented in the brain. We show that the evidence points toward both separable and overlapping brain systems that support affective processes depending on the level of resolution studied. We move from large-scale brain networks that underlie generalized processing, to functionally specific subcircuits, finally to intraregional neuronal distributions, where the organization and interaction across levels allow for multiple types of valence and mixed evaluations.


2011 ◽  
pp. 165-179
Author(s):  
Kathy Arsenault ◽  
Ardis Hanson ◽  
Joan Pelland

Change, by its very nature, is unpredictable, and often unmanageable, yet an organization’s success depends on an ability to predict and control change in some way. To derive maximum benefit from new opportunities and to avoid reactive situations, it is essential to manage organizational change. Further, as change accelerates, the more difficult and stressful it is to manage. The proliferation of change management literature in the library and information field indicates that these issues are becoming increasingly important as more academic libraries develop a virtual presence (Higuchi, 1990; Lee, 1993; Riggs, 1997; Meyer, 1997; Nozero & Vaughn, 2000). Nearly a decade ago, Dougherty and Dougherty (1993) observed that the current rate of change in the information field was higher than ever before, while libraries’ ability to respond quickly and decisively had never been more constrained. Academic libraries, like other organizations, must respond proactively to their changing environment in order to take advantage of the opportunities for increasing their visibility, restructuring to meet the needs of their users, and achieving their objective of remaining the preeminent source of information within the academy. This chapter begins with an overview of the theoretical perspectives of change. Using Burke, Church and Waclawski’s (1993) Managing Change model, the authors will discuss the structure of change, the culture of change, and the individual response to change within a case study framework.


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