Fit to Perform: A Profile of Higher Education Music Students’ Physical Fitness

Musicians are often called athletes of the upper body, but knowledge of their physical and fitness profiles is nonetheless limited, especially those of advanced music students who are training to enter music’s competitive professional landscape. To gain insight into how physical fitness is associated with music making, this study investigated music students’ fitness levels on several standardized indicators. 483 students took part in a fitness screening protocol that included measurements of lung function, flexibility (hypermobility, shoulder range of motion, sit and reach), strength and endurance (hand grip, plank, press-up), and sub-maximal cardiovascular fitness (3-min step test), as well as self-reported physical activity (IPAQ-SF). Participants scored within ranges appropriate for their age on lung function, shoulder range of motion, grip strength, and cardiovascular fitness. Their results for the plank, press up, and sit and reach were poor by comparison. Reported difficulty (22%) and pain (17%) in internal rotation of the right shoulder were also found. Differences between instrument groups and levels of study were observed on some measures. In particular, brass players showed greater lung function and grip strength compared with other groups, and postgraduate students on the whole were able to maintain the plank for longer but also demonstrated higher hypermobility and lower lung function (FEV1) and cardiovascular fitness than undergraduates. 79% of participants exceeded the minimum recommended weekly amount of physical activity, with singers the most physically active group and keyboard players, composers, and conductors the least active. IPAQ-SF scores correlated positively with lung function, sit and reach, press-up and cardiovascular fitness suggesting that, in the absence of time and resources to carry out comprehensive physical assessments with musicians, this one measure alone can provide useful insights. The findings indicate that music students have adequate levels of general health-related fitness, and we discuss whether adequate fitness is enough for people undertaking physically and mentally demanding activities such as making music. We argue that musicians could benefit from strengthening their supportive musculature and enhancing their awareness of strength imbalances

Oral History Interview: Lucy Quarrier

Lucy Quarrier was a renowned weaver and a member of the Southern Highlands Handicraft Guild. During the Depression, representatives from the state of West Virginia chose Mrs. Quarrier to teach rural women how to weave. She was also an accomplished gardener and used her green thumb to create vegetable dyes for her thread and weaving materials. Mrs. Quarrier taught weaving classes and her pupils became known as “The Lucy Quarrier Weavers.” She showcased her talents at arts and crafts festivals and often gave tutorials during the festivals. In her interview, Mrs. Quarrier discusses how she learned to weave. She focuses on different techniques to making thread and weaving. She also discusses the process of vegetable dying. In the audio clip provided, she discusses her technique for working up a loom using a warp board.https://mds.marshall.edu/oral_history/1020/thumbnail.jp

Significant modern interpretations of Joan of Arc.

Five hundred years have passed, and Joan remains a living breathing presence, when those others of her day have become little more than names, a museum of labelled shadows. What is the explanation of this continued interest in a young girl who lived for only nineteen short years in the first part of the fifteenth century? Before attempting to answer this question, let us briefly summarize the facts of her life: she was born, it is believed, on January 6, 1412 in Domremy, a small town in north-eastern France. There, at the age of thirteen, she first heard voices and saw visions of saints and angels who, in the years that followed, instructed her to go to the aid of the city of Orleans which was besieged by the English, am afterwards crown the Dauphin at Rheims. Within three short months she fulfilled her mission, though she continued in the service of the king for the next year, until taken prisoner by the Burgundians while fighting before Compiegne. Sold to the English, she was tried for sorcery and heresy, and burned at the stake in Rouen on May 30, 1431 - just a year after her capture. These main facts of Joan of Arc\u27s life have never been seriously questioned, yet their interpretation has continually changed throughout the years. In the age of Shakespeare, the Maid\u27s character was distorted by nationalistic prejudice; in the eighteenth century~ by the new rationalism; and, in the nineteenth, by the romantic reaction. With the coming of modern times, however, there was no longer one ~enera1ly accepted interpretation, but instead four distinct attitudes were widely expressed: the romantic, the scholarly, the sceptical, and the pragmatic, to each of which one chapter of this thesis will be devoted. That a vital interest in Joan of Arc has continued into the twentieth century is due, in large measure, to a desire, on the part of several great writers of our present age, to explain her voices and visions, as well as her entire personality; on the basis of recent findings in science and psychology. Furthermore, in France, her name became important in both a political and a religious way as was never the case in England or America. In all countries, though, men were inspired to reinterpret the J4aid I s story, since her canonization caused them once again to wonder about her remarkable achievements. The fundamental reason, though, for a continued interest in the deeds of Joan of Arc lies in the fact that 8D1\u27 interpretation of her accomplishments invariably rests upon the author\u27s beliefs about theology, pathology, and metaphysics. And this explains the fascination of France\u27s national saint - not just the subject of a biography, not merely a picturesque figure in armour and a scarlet cloak, but a figure who challenges some of the profoundest tenets of what we do or do not believe. More, perhaps, than any other military figure in history, she forces us to think

The Rocky Hill Dinosaurs

Guidebook for field trips in Connecticut: New England Intercollegiate Geological Conference 60th annual meeting, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, October 25-27, 1968: Trip C-

Mineral Deposits of the Central Connecticut Pegmatite District

Guidebook for field trips in Connecticut: New England Intercollegiate Geological Conference 60th annual meeting, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, October 25-27, 1968: Trip F-

RNA Folding with Soft Constraints: Reconciliation of Probing Data and Thermodynamic Secondary Structure Prediction

Thermodynamic folding algorithms and structure probing experiments are commonly used to determine the secondary structure of RNAs. Here we propose a formal framework to reconcile information from both prediction algorithms and probing experiments. The thermodynamic energy parameters are adjusted using ‘pseudo-energies’ to minimize the discrepancy between prediction and experiment. Our framework differs from related approaches that used pseudo-energies in several key aspects. (i) The energy model is only changed when necessary and no adjustments are made if prediction and experiment are consistent. (ii) Pseudo-energies remain biophysically interpretable and hold positional information where experiment and model disagree. (iii) The whole thermodynamic ensemble of structures is considered thus allowing to reconstruct mixtures of suboptimal structures from seemingly contradicting data. (iv) The noise of the energy model and the experimental data is explicitly modeled leading to an intuitive weighting factor through which the problem can be seen as folding with ‘soft’ constraints of different strength. We present an efficient algorithm to iteratively calculate pseudo-energies within this framework and demonstrate how this approach can be used in combination with SHAPE chemical probing data to improve secondary structure prediction. We further demonstrate that the pseudo-energies correlate with biophysical effects that are known to affect RNA folding such as chemical nucleotide modifications and protein binding.Austrian Science Fund. Erwin Schrodinger Fellowship (J2966-B12

Ameliorating Empire: Slavery and Protection in the British Colonies, 1783-1865

This dissertation examines the era of slavery amelioration while situating the significance of this project to reform slavery within the longer history of the British Empire. While scholars of British slavery have long debated the causes of both the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and the abolition of slavery (1833), they have overlooked the ways that both abolitionists and politicians attempted to "reform" slavery - extending both baseline protections and a civilizing mission toward slaves - as a prelude toward broader emancipation. This attempted amelioration of slavery influenced both the timing and form that emancipation took. By focusing on the island where metropolitan officials first attempted to exert an ameliorative agenda, this dissertation uncovers the forgotten influence of Spanish laws and practices on British abolitionism. Trinidad was captured from Spain in 1797 during the heyday of abolitionist agitation, during an era when Spanish slave codes were gaining newfound attention among British reformers for their reputed benevolence. Despite local planter opposition, metropolitan officials elected to retain the island's Spanish legal structure following the Peace of Amiens. The Trinidad template for amelioration would be framed around the island's Spanish laws, notably the office of Protector of Slaves. This individual was imagined as an intermediary between master and slave, metropole and colony, epitomizing an attempt to infuse the slave regime with a modicum of imperial regulation. The ideas behind amelioration survived the abolition of slavery. After Caribbean slavery was abolished between 1833 and 1838, the reforms that had been attempted in Trinidad and elsewhere over the previous decades came to inform the regulation of labor relationships, particularly immigrant labor, following in its wake. The process of negotiating reform - of slavery, indentured labor, and relations with indigenous peoples - had taught Colonial Office officials to distrust the instincts and activities of white colonial subjects. The Protector model proliferated in contexts of continued distrust during an era when metropolitan officials remained reluctant to exert more direct authority than necessary. This model would break down only in the wake of repeated failure. Until then, metropolitan officials hoped that local watchdogs would "protect" nonwhite and laboring subjects from abuse.Histor

Guidebook for field trips in Connecticut and south central Massachusetts: New England Intercollegiate Geological Conference 74th annual meeting, University of Connecticut, Storrs Connecticut , October 2 and 3, 1982: title pages, table of contents, foreword

front matte

Map Showing the Distribution of Surficial Sediments in Fishers Island Sound, New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island

The data presented on this map were collected as part of a State of Connecticut and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) cooperative program intended to further understand the marine geology of Connecticut and Long Island Sound. The purpose of this cooperative program is (1) to resolve sedimentologic and oceanographic problems and data gaps in Long Island Sound, (2) to integrate these findings with terrestrial data and the Pleistocene histories of Long Island and Connecticut, and (3) to initiate investigations of offshore resources that are keyed to the better management of Long Island Sound. With this in mind, the fundamental objectives of this study were to determine the distribution of surficial sediments in Fishers Island Sound and to describe the active sedimentary processes