Inspecting the teaching of singing in the teacher training colleges of England, Wales and Scotland 1883-1899

This paper investigates the links between the teaching of singing, training and inspection during the late Victorian era. It utilises as a primary source the annual inspection reports of the music inspector, Sir John Stainer. More specifically it focuses upon the musical background of the students in the training colleges of England, Wales and Scotland, the methods employed to teach sight singing and voice production, the vocal repertoire and preparation for the teaching of singing in schools. Finally, some comparison is made with the present day and the relationship between the teaching of singing, training and inspection.

Morphology of polymer networks formed in the chiral and non chiral phases of an anti-ferroelectric liquid crystal

We introduced photo-polymer networks into the various liquid crystalline phases of the antiferroelectric liquid crystal AS612 and studied the effects of these networks by measuring the temperature dependence of the Bragg wavelengths selectively reflected. After polymerization, the decrease in Bragg wavelengths with respect to the original values is consistent with a shorter helical pitch due to polymer network shrinkage. Also, by removing the liquid crystalline material, we are able to image the residual polymer network using scanning electron microscopy and polarized light microscopy. The polymer strands are a few microns thick and the networks show both chiral and non-chiral features.

A practical approach for training dynamic recurrent neural networks: use of Apriori information

Presents a technique for incorporating a priori knowledge from a state space system into a neural network training algorithm. The training algorithm considered is that of chemotaxis and the networks being trained are recurrent neural networks. Incorporation of the a priori knowledge ensures that the resultant network has behaviour similar to the system which it is modelling.

Cultured neural networks

This article looks at the use of cultured neural networks as the decision-making mechanism of a control system. In this case biological neurons are grown and trained to act as an artificial intelligence engine. Such research has immediate medical implications as well as enormous potential in computing and robotics. An experimental system involving closed-loop control of a mobile robot by a culture of neurons has been successfully created and is described here. This article gives a brief overview of the problem area and ongoing research. Questions are asked as to where this will lead in the future.

Complex-valued b-spline neural networks for modelling and inverse of wiener systems

Communication signal processing applications often involve complex-valued (CV) functional representations for signals and systems. CV artificial neural networks have been studied theoretically and applied widely in nonlinear signal and data processing [1–11]. Note that most artificial neural networks cannot be automatically extended from the real-valued (RV) domain to the CV domain because the resulting model would in general violate Cauchy-Riemann conditions, and this means that the training algorithms become unusable. A number of analytic functions were introduced for the fully CV multilayer perceptrons (MLP) [4]. A fully CV radial basis function (RBF) nework was introduced in [8] for regression and classification applications. Alternatively, the problem can be avoided by using two RV artificial neural networks, one processing the real part and the other processing the imaginary part of the CV signal/system. A even more challenging problem is the inverse of a CV

Global exponential periodicity of a class of neural networks with recent-history distributed delays

In this paper, we propose to study a class of neural networks with recent-history distributed delays. A sufficient condition is derived for the global exponential periodicity of the proposed neural networks, which has the advantage that it assumes neither the differentiability nor monotonicity of the activation function of each neuron nor the symmetry of the feedback matrix or delayed feedback matrix. Our criterion is shown to be valid by applying it to an illustrative system. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Age-related changes in the functional neuroanatomy of overt speech production

Alterations of existing neural networks during healthy aging, resulting in behavioral deficits and changes in brain activity, have been described for cognitive, motor, and sensory functions. To investigate age-related changes in the neural circuitry underlying overt non-lexical speech production, functional MRI was performed in 14 healthy younger (21–32 years) and 14 healthy older individuals (62–84 years). The experimental task involved the acoustically cued overt production of the vowel /a/ and the polysyllabic utterance /pataka/. In younger and older individuals, overt speech production was associated with the activation of a widespread articulo-phonological network, including the primary motor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the cingulate motor areas, and the posterior superior temporal cortex, similar in the /a/ and /pataka/ condition. An analysis of variance with the factors age and condition revealed a significant main effect of age. Irrespective of the experimental condition, significantly greater activation was found in the bilateral posterior superior temporal cortex, the posterior temporal plane, and the transverse temporal gyri in younger compared to older individuals. Significantly greater activation was found in the bilateral middle temporal gyri, medial frontal gyri, middle frontal gyri, and inferior frontal gyri in older vs. younger individuals. The analysis of variance did not reveal a significant main effect of condition and no significant interaction of age and condition. These results suggest a complex reorganization of neural networks dedicated to the production of speech during healthy aging.

Wnt6 controls amniote neural crest induction through the non-canonical signaling pathway

The neural crest is a multipotent embryonic cell population that arises from neural ectoderm and forms derivatives essential for vertebrate function. Neural crest induction requires an ectodermal signal, thought to be a Writ ligand, but the identity of the Wnt that performs this function in amniotes is unknown. Here, we demonstrate that Wnt6, derived from the ectoderm, is necessary for chick neural crest induction. Crucially, we also show that Wnt6 acts through the non-canonical pathway and not the beta-catenin-dependant pathway. Surprisingly, we found that canonical Wnt signaling inhibited neural crest production in the chick embryo. In light of studies in anamniotes demonstrating that canonical Wnt signaling induces neural crest, these results indicate a significant and novel change in the mechanism of neural crest induction during vertebrate evolution. These data also highlight a key role for noncanonical Wnt signaling in cell type specification from a stem population during development.

An fMRI study of parietal cortex involvement in the visual guidance of locomotion

Locomoting through the environment typically involves anticipating impending changes in heading trajectory in addition to maintaining the current direction of travel. We explored the neural systems involved in the “far road” and “near road” mechanisms proposed by Land and Horwood (1995) using simulated forward or backward travel where participants were required to gauge their current direction of travel (rather than directly control it). During forward egomotion, the distant road edges provided future path information, which participants used to improve their heading judgments. During backward egomotion, the road edges did not enhance performance because they no longer provided prospective information. This behavioral dissociation was reflected at the neural level, where only simulated forward travel increased activation in a region of the superior parietal lobe and the medial intraparietal sulcus. Providing only near road information during a forward heading judgment task resulted in activation in the motion complex. We propose a complementary role for the posterior parietal cortex and motion complex in detecting future path information and maintaining current lane positioning, respectively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)

Towards optimizing the selection of neurons in affordable neural networks

This paper considers variations of a neuron pool selection method known as Affordable Neural Network (AfNN). A saliency measure, based on the second derivative of the objective function is proposed to assess the ability of a trained AfNN to provide neuronal redundancy. The discrepancies between the various affordability variants are explained by correlating unique sub group selections with relevant saliency variations. Overall this study shows that the method in which neurons are selected from a pool is more relevant to how salient individual neurons are, than how often a particular neuron is used during training. The findings herein are relevant to not only providing an analogy to brain function but, also, in optimizing the way a neural network using the affordability method is trained.

Stability criteria for the contextual emergence of macrostates in neural networks

More than thirty years ago, Amari and colleagues proposed a statistical framework for identifying structurally stable macrostates of neural networks from observations of their microstates. We compare their stochastic stability criterion with a deterministic stability criterion based on the ergodic theory of dynamical systems, recently proposed for the scheme of contextual emergence and applied to particular inter-level relations in neuroscience. Stochastic and deterministic stability criteria for macrostates rely on macro-level contexts, which make them sensitive to differences between different macro-levels.