Equivalent sound level (Leq), sound pressure level (SPL), and fundamental frequency (F0) are analyzed in each of five Kunqu Opera roles, Young girl and Young woman, Young man, Old man, and Colorful face. Their pitch ranges are similar to those of some western opera singers (alto, alto, tenor, baritone, and baritone, respectively). Differences among tasks, conditions (stage speech, singing, and ...

Scaffolding, the problem of ordering and orienting contigs, typically using paired-end reads, is a crucial step in the assembly of high-quality draft genomes. Even as sequencing technologies and mate-pair protocols have improved significantly, scaffolding programs still rely on heuristics, with no guarantees on the quality of the solution. In this work, we explored the feasibility of an exact s...

In composer Tod Machover’s new opera Death and the Powers, the main character uploads his consciousness into an elaborate computer system to preserve his essence and agency after his corporeal death. Consequently, for much of the opera, the stage and the environment itself come alive as the main character. This creative need brings with it a host of technical challenges and opportunities. In or...

The OPERA long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment is located in the underground Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy. OPERA has been designed to give the first direct proof of ντ appearance, looking at the CNGS νμ beam 730 km away from its source at CERN. The apparatus consists of a large set of emulsion-lead targets combined with electronic detectors. First runs in 2007 and 2008 helped checkin...

In the TMC435-C101 study, 6 patients infected with hepatitis C virus genotype 1 were treated with the protease inhibitor TMC435 (200 mg once daily) as monotherapy for 5 days. Approximately 1.5 years later, 5 of these patients were re-treated with TMC435 (200 mg once daily) plus pegylated interferon alfa-2a and ribavirin (PegIFNα-2a and RBV) for 4 weeks, followed by PegIFNα-2a and RBV until week...

The OPERA experiment aims at observing the ν τ appearance from the CNGS ν µ beam. The ν τ CC interactions are identified by reconstructing the τ decay topology using an Emulsion Cloud Chamber (ECC). OPERA is the first experiment to use emulsion at an industrial scale. It could therefore serve as a model for a future neutrino detector for the so called silver channel of a neutrino factory.

How can we re-empower opera singers, extending their control over accompaniment and vocal expressivity? To answer this question, I have opened a novel design space, Extending Opera, consisting of interactive artist–operated tools to be used on-stage. The research has its methodological groundings in Research through Design (RtD) and Research through the Arts (RttA). This particular method is co...

I observe that, as the physics side of the OPERA-anomaly story is apparently unfolding, there can still be motivation for philosophy of science to analyze the six months of madness physicists spent chasing the dream of a new fundamental-physics revolution. I here mainly report data on studies of the OPERA anomaly that could be relevant for analyses from the perspective of phenomenology of philo...

Features of linguistic tone contours are important factors that shape the distinct melodic characteristics of different genres of Chinese opera. In Beijing opera, the presence of a two-dialectal tone system makes the tone-melody relationship more complex. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven approach to analyze syllable-sized tone-pitch contour similarity in a corpus of Beijing Opera (...