Meaning in Electroacoustic Music and the Everyday Mind

The key question posed here is how listeners experience meaning when listening to electroacoustic music, especially how they experience it as art. This question is addressed by connecting electroacoustic listening with the ways that the mind constructs meaning in everyday life. Initially, the topic of the everyday mind provides a framework for discussing cognitive schemas, mental spaces, the Event schema and auditory gist. Then, specific idioms of electroacoustic music are examined that give rise to artistic meaning. These include the creative binding of circumstances with events and the conceptual blending that creates metaphorical meaning. Finally, the listener's experience of long-term events is discussed is relation to the location event-structure metaphor.

Accelerated degradation behaviour of poly(epsilon-caprolactone) via melt blending with poly(aspartic acid-co-lactide) (PAL)

Poly(epsilon-caprolactone) (PCL) has many favourable attributes for tissue engineering scaffold applications. A major drawback, however, is its slow degradation rate, typically greater than 3 years. In this study PCL was melt blended with a small percentage of poly(aspartic acid-co-lactide) (PAL) and the degradation behaviour was evaluated in phosphate buffer solution (PBS) at 37 degrees C. The addition of PAL was found to significantly enhance the degradation profile of PCL. Subsequent degradation behaviour was investigated in terms of the polymer's mechanical properties, Molecular weight (M-w), mass changes and thermal characteristics. The results indicate that the addition of PAL accelerates the degradation of PCL, with 20% mass loss recorded after just 7 months in vitro for samples containing 8 wt% PAL. The corresponding pure PCL samples exhibited no mass loss over the same time period. In vitro assessment of PCL and PCL/PAL composites in tissue Culture medium in the absence of cells revealed stable pH readings with time. SEM studies of cell/biomaterial interactions demonstrated biocompatibility of C3H10T1/2 cells with PCL and PCL/PAL composites at all concentrations of PAL additive. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Crossing Thresholds and Expanding Conceptual Spaces: Using Arts-Based Methods to Extend Teachers’ Perceptions of Literacy

The context for this paper is a teacher education program for adult literacy practitioners at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. This paper describes and reflects on the use of arts-based approaches to enhance these practitioners’ conceptualizations of literacy, presenting their arts-based responses and their evaluations of the methods and their contrasting definitions of literacy at the start and the end of the course. The discussion raises questions about the inclusion of visual literacy in adult literacy teacher education programmes.

Conceptual and Perceptual Priming and Dissociation in Chronic Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

Cognitive models of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) assert that memory processes play a significant role in PTSD (see e.g., Ehlers & Clark, 2000). Intrusive reexperiencing in PTSD has been linked to perceptual processing of trauma-related material with a corresponding hypothesized lack of conceptual processing. In an experimental study that included clinical participants with and without PTSD (N = 50), perceptual priming and conceptual priming for trauma-related, general threat, and neutral words were investigated in a population with chronic trauma-induced complaints as a result of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The study used a new version of the word-stem completion task (Michael, Ehlers, & Halligan, 2005) and a word-cue association task. It also assessed the role of dissociation in threat processing. Further evidence of enhanced perceptual priming in PTSD for trauma stimuli was found, along with evidence of lack of conceptual priming for such stimuli. Furthermore, this pattern of priming for trauma-related words was associated with PTSD severity, and state dissociation and PTSD group made significant contributions to predicting perceptual priming for trauma words. The findings shed light on the importance of state dissociation in trauma-related information processing and posttraumatic symptoms.

Networks for systems biology: conceptual connection of data and function

The purpose of this study is to survey the use of networks and network-based methods in systems biology. This study starts with an introduction to graph theory and basic measures allowing to quantify structural properties of networks. Then, the authors present important network classes and gene networks as well as methods for their analysis. In the last part of this study, the authors review approaches that aim at analysing the functional organisation of gene networks and the use of networks in medicine. In addition to this, the authors advocate networks as a systematic approach to general problems in systems biology, because networks are capable of assuming multiple roles that are very beneficial connecting experimental data with a functional interpretation in biological terms.