The automated extraction of tempo and beat information from music recordings is a challenging task. Especially in the case of expressive performances, current beat tracking approaches still have significant problems to accurately capture local tempo deviations and beat positions. In this paper, we introduce a novel evaluation framework for detecting critical passages in a piece of music that ar...

Orthodox Christian ethics is grounded in the sacredness of life principle. Yet, it can accept a quality of life approach where "quality" refers not to capacities or states, but to the relationship between the patient's condition and the quest for transcendent life goals (Walter and Shannon, 1990). The true quality of human life derives from the vocation to stewardship, which enjoins an attitude...

The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are described. Although the infinity of pocket universes produced by eternal inflation are unobservable, it is argued that eternal inflation has real consequences in te...

How do temporal and eternal beliefs interact? I argue that acquiring a temporal belief should have no effect on eternal beliefs for an important range of cases. Thus, I oppose the popular view that new norms of belief change must be introduced for cases where the only change is the passing of time. I defend this position from the purported counter-examples of the Prisoner and Sleeping Beauty. I...

The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. I describe the quantum origin of density perturbations, giving a heuristic derivation of the scale invariance of the spectrum and the leading corrections to scale invariance. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic ...

We relate the Eternal Symmetree model of Harlow, Shenker, Stanford, and Susskind to constructions of stochastic processes related to quantum statistical mechanical systems on Cuntz– Krieger algebras. We extend the eternal inflation model from the Bruhat–Tits tree to quotients by p-adic Schottky groups, again using quantum statistical mechanics on graph algebras.

Cosmological inflation, if it occurred, radically alters the picture of the ‘big bang’, which would merely point to reheating at the end of inflation. Moreover, this reheating may be only local so that inflation continues elsewhere and forever, continually spawning big-bang-like regions. This chapter reviews this idea of ‘eternal inflation’, then focuses on what this may mean for the ultimate b...

Accents are local events that attract a listener’s attention and are either evident from the score (immanent) or added by the performer (performed). Immanent accents are associated with grouping, meter, melody, and harmony. In piano music, performed accents involve changes in timing, dynamics, articulation, and pedaling; they vary in amplitude, form, and duration. Performers tend to “bring out”...

This paper describes a numerical method for examining similarities among tempo and loudness features extracted from recordings of the same musical work and evaluates its effectiveness compared to Pearson correlation. Starting with correlation at multiple timescales, other concepts such as a performance “noise-floor” are used to generate measurements which are more refined than correlation alone...

Although online communities often regard membership growth as an important goal of their development, research has shown that large influx of new users may interrupt a community’s wellness by introducing information overload and lowering content quality [1], [2], which is also know as “Eternal September”1 from the infamous case of Usenet’s fall[3]. Founded in 2005, Reddit, as one of the most po...