Musical Expertise and Melodic Structure in Memory for Musical Notation

Two experiments plus a pilot investigated the role of melodic structure on short-term memory for musical notation by musicians and nonmusicians. In the pilot experiment, visually similar melodies that had been rated as either "good" or "bad" were presented briefly, followed by a 15-sec retention interval and then recall. Musicians remembered good melodies better than they remembered bad ones: nonmusicians did not distinguish between them. In the second experiment, good, bad, and random melodies were briefly presented, followed by immediate recall. The advantage of musicians over nonmusicians decreased as the melody type progressed from good to bad to random. In the third experiment, musicians and nonmusicians divided the stimulus melodies into groups. For each melody, the consistency of grouping was correlated with memory performance in the first two experiments. Evidence was found for use of musical groupings by musicians and for use of a simple visual strategy by nonmusicians. The nature of these musical groupings and how they may be learned are considered. The relation of this work to other studies of comprehension of symbolic diagrams is also discussed.

Insertion of totally implantable venous access devices: an expertise-based, randomized, controlled trial (NCT00600444)

Comparison of two different insertion techniques for implantation of totally implantable access ports (TIAP).

Clinical forensic radiology in strangulation victims: forensic expertise based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) findings

Based on only one objective and several subjective signs, the forensic classification of strangulation incidents concerning their life-threatening quality can be problematic. Reflecting that it is almost impossible to detect internal injuries of the neck with the standard forensic external examination, we examined 14 persons who have survived manual and ligature strangulation or forearm choke holds using MRI technique (1.5-T scanner). Two clinical radiologists evaluated the neck findings independently. The danger to life was evaluated based on the "classical" external findings alone and in addition to the radiological data. We observed hemorrhaging in the subcutaneous fatty tissue of the neck in ten cases. Other frequent findings were hemorrhages of the neck and larynx muscles, the lymph nodes, the pharynx, and larynx soft tissues. Based on the classical forensic strangulation findings with MRI, eight of the cases were declared as life-endangering incidents, four of them without the presence of petechial hemorrhage but with further signs of impaired brain function due to hypoxia. The accuracy of future forensic classification of the danger to life will probably be increased when it is based not only on one objective and several subjective signs but also on the evidence of inner neck injuries. However, further prospective studies including larger cohorts are necessary to clarify the value of the inner neck injuries in the forensic classification of surviving strangulation victims.

Assigning Bug Reports using a Vocabulary-Based Expertise Model of Developers

For popular software systems, the number of daily submitted bug reports is high. Triaging these incoming reports is a time consuming task. Part of the bug triage is the assignment of a report to a developer with the appropriate expertise. In this paper, we present an approach to automatically suggest developers who have the appropriate expertise for handling a bug report. We model developer expertise using the vocabulary found in their source code contributions and compare this vocabulary to the vocabulary of bug reports. We evaluate our approach by comparing the suggested experts to the persons who eventually worked on the bug. Using eight years of Eclipse development as a case study, we achieve 33.6\% top-1 precision and 71.0\% top-10 recall.