Creating a Circus of Words, Music, and Sound: From Roaratorio to Owenvarragh

This article documents the creation of a work by the authors based on a score written by the composer John Cage entitled 'Owenvarragh: A Belfast Circus on The Star Factory.' The article is part of a documentary portfolio in the journal which also includes a volume of the poetry created by Dowling in accordance with the instructions of the Cage score, and a series of documentary videos on the creation of the work and its first performance. Cage's score is based on his work 'Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegan's Wake' (1979) and it provides a set of detailed instructions for the musical realisation of a literary work. The article documents this first fully realised version of the score since Cage first produced 'Roaratorio' in 1979. The work, which was motivated by the Cage centenary year in 2012, musically realises Carson's book 'The Star Factory' (1998), a novelestic autobiography of Carson's Belfast childhood. The score required the creation of a fixed media piece based on over 300 field recordings of the sounds and places mentioned in the book, a volume of poetry created from the book which is recited to form the rhythmic spine of the work, and the arrangement of a performance including these two components along with live musical performance by the authors in collaboration with three other musicians under their direction, and a video installation created for the work. The piece has been performed three times: in association with the Sonorities 2012 Festival at Queen's University of Belfast (March 2012), at The Belfast Festival at Queen's (October 2012), and in the Rymer Auditoium of the University of York (June 2013).

Additional information:

The work which the article documents was conceived by Monaghan and Dowling, and the project was initiated by Monaghan after a she received a student prize to support its development and first performance. Elements of the project will be included in her PhD dissertation for which Dowling is a supervisor. Monaghan created the fixed media piece based on over 300 field recordings, the largest single aspect of realising Cage's score. Dowling was responsible for initiating the collaboration with Ciaran Carson, and for two other components: the creation of a volume of poetry derived from the literary work which is recited in the performance, and the creation of and supervision of the technical work on a video which accompanies the piece. The co-authors consulted closely during the work on these large components from May 2011 until March 2012 when the first performance took place. The co-authors also shared in numerous other artistic and organisational aspects of the production, including the arrangement and performnance of the music, musical direction to other performers, and marketing.

Reading Elizabeth Bishop's "Artifact of [Words]"

As Emerson noted in his essay 'The Poet' "we are not pans and barrows, not even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or three removes, when we least know about it." For Emerson, the fire is poetry, an elemental force capable of transmutation, transformation and enduring relevance. Moving from Emerson, Elizabeth Bishop rises as the twentieth-century poet most aligned with the possibility of poetry and the powers of its practice, as 'At The Fishhouses' indicates in her clear referencing of Emerson:

"If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame."

This essay will look in detail at Bishop's understanding of the possibility of poetry and how art functions as a multi-dimensional structure that is unsettled as much as it unsettles. In particular, Bishop's poem 'The Monument' will be unpicked as testament both to the practice of Bishop's art and also the role of the poet critic responding to what they uncover

Will your article be found? Authors choose a confusing variety of words to describe dental survival analyses

OBJECTIVES: Identify the words and phrases that authors used to describe time-to-event outcomes of dental treatments in patients.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: A systematic handsearch of 50 dental journals with the highest Citation Index for 2008 identified articles reporting dental treatment with time-to-event statistics (included "case" articles, n = 95), without time-to-event statistics (active "control" articles, n = 91), and all other articles (passive "control" articles n = 6796). The included and active controls were read, identifying 43 English words across the title, aim and abstract, indicating that outcomes were studied over time. Once identified, these words were sought within the 6796 passive controls. Words were divided into six groups. Differences in use of words were analyzed with Pearson's chi-square across these six groups, and the three locations (title, aim, and abstract).

RESULTS: In the abstracts, included articles used group 1 (statistical technique) and group 2 (statistical terms) more frequently than the active and passive controls (group 1: 35%, 2%, 0.37%, P < 0.001 and group 2: 31%, 1%, 0.06%, P < 0.001). The included and active controls used group 3 (quasi-statistical) equally, but significantly more often than the passive controls (82%, 78%, 3.21%, P < 0.001). In the aims, use of target words was similar for included and active controls, but less frequent for groups 1-4 in the passive controls (P < 0.001). In the title, group 2 (statistical techniques) and groups 3-5 (outcomes) were similar for included and active controls, but groups 2 and 3 were less frequent in the passive controls (P < 0.001). Significantly more included articles used group 6 words (stating the study duration) (54%, 30%, P = 0.001).

CONCLUSION: All included articles used time-to-event analyses, but two-thirds did not include words to highlight this in the abstract. There is great variation in the words authors used to describe dental time-to-event outcomes. Electronic identification of such articles would be inconsistent, with low sensitivity and specificity. Authors should improve the reporting quality. Journals should allow sufficient space in abstracts to summarize research, and not impose unrealistic word limits. Readers should be mindful of these problems when searching for relevant articles. Additional research is required in this field.

Executing bag of distributed tasks on the cloud: Investigating the trade-offs between performance and cost

Bag of Distributed Tasks (BoDT) can benefit from decentralised execution on the Cloud. However, there is a trade-off between the performance that can be achieved by employing a large number of Cloud VMs for the tasks and the monetary constraints that are often placed by a user. The research reported in this paper is motivated towards investigating this trade-off so that an optimal plan for deploying BoDT applications on the cloud can be generated. A heuristic algorithm, which considers the user's preference of performance and cost is proposed and implemented. The feasibility of the algorithm is demonstrated by generating execution plans for a sample application. The key result is that the algorithm generates optimal execution plans for the application over 91% of the time.

Minimising the Execution of Unknown Bag-of-Task Jobs with Deadlines on the Cloud

Scheduling jobs with deadlines, each of which defines the latest time that a job must be completed, can be challenging on the cloud due to incurred costs and unpredictable performance. This problem is further complicated when there is not enough information to effectively schedule a job such that its deadline is satisfied, and the cost is minimised. In this paper, we present an approach to schedule jobs, whose performance are unknown before execution, with deadlines on the cloud. By performing a sampling phase to collect the necessary information about those jobs, our approach delivers the scheduling decision within 10% cost and 16% violation rate when compared to the ideal setting, which has complete knowledge about each of the jobs from the beginning. It is noted that our proposed algorithm outperforms existing approaches, which use a fixed amount of resources by reducing the violation cost by at least two times.

Distributional Similarity of Words with Different Frequencies

Distributional semantics tries to characterize the meaning of words by the contexts in which they occur. Similarity of words hence can be derived from the similarity of contexts. Contexts of a word are usually vectors of words appearing near to that word in a corpus. It was observed in previous research that similarity measures for the context vectors of two words depend on the frequency of these words. In the present paper we investigate this dependency in more detail for one similarity measure, the Jensen-Shannon divergence. We give an empirical model of this dependency and propose the deviation of the observed Jensen-Shannon divergence from the divergence expected on the basis of the frequencies of the words as an alternative similarity measure. We show that this new similarity measure is superior to both the Jensen-Shannon divergence and the cosine similarity in a task, in which pairs of words, taken from Wordnet, have to be classified as being synonyms or not.

Appreciating the power of words and imaginative organizing: A triadic model of ethics practiced in everyday conversations

This thesis provides an alternative framework to analyze power and ethics practiced in everyday conversations, which constitute processes of organizing. Drawing upon narrative frameworks, the analyses of messages posted on an online message board demonstrate people’s imaginative capacity to create relevant stories, in respect of their precise grasp of factual understandings, contextual relevance and evaluative/moral appropriateness, by appropriating others’ words. Based on the empirical analyses, the thesis indicates that studies on power and ethics in organizations can be re-oriented towards appreciating irremediable power imbalances by offering alternative ways of member’s denoting experiences of power.

The sound of words.

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Multiple meanings of words in arithmetic textbooks

This paper discusses the differences among arithmetic textbooks and how this poses problems for hearing impaired children.