SOIRE 2017

This writing examines the phenomenon of Vocal Fold Paresis, one of several possible neurogenic disorders of the voice, from the perspective of a professional voice user. It investigates the potential denervation of the muscles of the larynx and the constellation of symptoms, both auditory and physical, that can result from neurological injury. In addition, it examines the diagnostic process and considers possible avenues of therapeutic and surgical intervention for persons who have been diagnosed with neurogenic disorders of the voice. Finally, it suggests preventive measures that educators may take to protect both themselves and their students from voice disorder.

One Professor’s Experience of Neurogenic Voice Disorder:  Implications for Music Educators

August Wilson’s decalogue dubbed the Pittsburgh Cycle is one of the most celebrated achievements in contemporary American literature. Nine of the ten dramas are set in the Hill District, a small, historically African American neighborhood in Pittsburgh. August Wilson’s Hill District is a Google Map designed by Christopher B. Bell, Associate Professor of English at the University of North Georgia and educational coordinator of the August Wilson Society, and current UNG English major William Hollis, which labels more than forty locations in and around Pittsburgh the playwright mentions in his plays, along with some important biographical designations. More than one hundred photographs and brief description of the literary and/or historical significance accompanies each label. The goal of this digital humanities project is to serve as a foundation of information about Wilson’s work and life for students and scholars, and help to preserve a sense of the Hill District as Wilson once knew it, as the area faces the elimination of the vibrant locales the playwright celebrates in his dramas. The map is also a dynamic teaching tool, particularly for those who are first reading Wilson, and individuals familiar with the dramatist who have never had the opportunity to travel to the Hill District. The aim of this presentation is to explain the origin and construction of the map, and its application as a dynamic classroom teaching tool.

Using Google Maps to Read, Teach, and Preserve August Wilson’s Hill District

The widespread use of smart mobile devices brings a lot of benefits to people’s lives and increases the popularity of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Along with BYOD, there are also several challenge issues (e.g., limited hardware capacity, frequent upgrades of applications and security and privacy concerns). In this paper, we propose Virtual Mobile Infrastructure (VMI), a general framework that provides more reliable and secure solution for BYOD. VMI is specifically designed for mobile users. The idea of VMI is to host a mobile Operating System (OS) on a remote server in a cloud data center, and run mobile applications on it. It enables mobile users to access the virtual mobile desktops via mobile optimized display protocols through the network. Particularly, we focus on the design and implementation of vMobiDesk, a prototype system for VMI. It provides an implementation of VMI desktop virtualization on Android OS which is one of the most popular mobile operating systems. vMobiDesk focuses on virtualizing the display of Android desktops, redirecting users’ input events, providing audio support and remote camera. The experimental results show that vMobiDesk has a low virtualization overhead, and meanwhile enables mobile users to obtain good user experience on remotely accessing Android virtual desktops.

vMobiDesk: Desktop Virtualization for Mobile Operating System

GESTURE ANALYSIS OF YOGA FOR EXERGAME DEVELOPMENT USING 3-D ROOM SENSOR

Paraspinal muscles support the spine and are the source of movement force. The size, shape, density and volume of the paraspinal muscles cross section area (CSA) are affected by many factors, such as age, health condition, exercise, and low back pain. It is invaluable to segment the paraspinal muscle regions in CT images in order to measure and study them. Manual segmentation of the paraspinal muscle CSA is time consuming and inaccurate. In this work, an atlas-based image segmentation algorithm is proposed to segment the paraspinal muscles in CT images automatically. To address the challenges of variations of muscle shape and its relative spatial relationship to other organs in CT images, mutual information (MI) is used as the similarity measure in the registration step to estimate the two dimensional affine transformation between the atlas and target. The affine transformation is then used to warp the boundaries of the paraspinal muscle regions from the atlas to target images. Due to the robustness of the MI-based registration in handling the variations of shape, size, relative spatial relationships among tissues and organs, and its capability in handling intersubject variations, the proposed algorithm can align the atlas with targets accurately, and the algorithm can do so without the help of the computationally expensive iterative local contour optimization to bring the mapped contours close to their truth locations in target images. These are the two salient features of the proposed algorithm. The GVF snake algorithm deforms muscle contours to refine the segmentation results after image registration.
Experimental results show the proposed algorithm can segment the paraspinal muscle regions in CT images automatically, in both intrapatient and interpatient cases. Only a single atlas is needed to process sequences of images from different patients. Furthermore, using mutual information to register atlas and target images outperforms the method using spine-spine registration. It segments the muscle regions accurately without the need of the computationally expensive iterative local contour optimization. The results provide physicians a solid foundation to estimate muscle volume in order to evaluate tissue damage due to spine surgery and monitor patient recovery progress.

Two Dimensional Paraspinal Muscle Segmentation in CT Images

The Blue Ridge Scholars Program

In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft defines a new subgenre of speculative fiction: the weird tale or cosmic horror. This form of horror differs from more traditional horror tales primarily in scope. Instead of unavenged murder and ghosts, the weird tale focuses on an “atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces […] and there must be a hint [of] a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space” (23).
My essay draws an important distinction between the Southern and New England weird traditions. In the latter, the weird element is most often an element from outside such as voodoo rituals from the Caribbean or cosmic horrors summoned from other stars or dimensions. The heroes of these tales, usually learned men of an academic or scientific background, must then fight off these horrors in order to preserve their world from invasion or destruction.
With the weird South, though, the horrific elements are already here: connected to old family curses, Civil War ghosts, or crazy shut-ins. And while the true nature of the horror may be unknown, there's no secret that something strange is going on and has been since before anyone's memory. The horrors become symbolic of the worst aspects of Southern culture: things like religious fundamentalism, institutionalized racism, cronyism, political violence.
If the protagonist is a Southerner, he/she then comes to represent the positive aspects of Southern culture: a healthy appreciation of history/traditions, self-reliance, and adherence to a personal code of ethics, morals, or justice. These heroes, while often learned, are everyday people, and often from classes not usually represented in New England weird fiction: the poor, women, or minorities.
In other words, weird New England most often becomes a metaphor for the xenophobic threat of chaotic outside forces destroying our peaceful ordered world. The weird South, however, becomes a metaphor for our internal struggle to overcome the destructive aspects of our own natures.

This paper explores this aspect of the Southern weird, taking as its primary texts Cherie Priest’s first novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, about a young woman in Chattanooga haunted by three ghosts and destined to confront the heritage of an evil great-grandfather, and her novel, Chapelwood, in which a strange cult summons eldritch horrors in 1920’s Birmingham, Alabama.
In his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft defines a new subgenre of speculative fiction: the weird tale. This form of horror, also referred to as cosmic horror, differs from more traditional horror tales primarily in scope. Instead of unavenged murder, ghosts, and clanking chains, he explains, the weird tale focuses on an “atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces […] and there must be a hint [of] a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space” (23).
My essay, “Fear of the Unacknowledged,” draws an important distinction between the Southern and New England weird traditions. In the latter, the weird element is most often an element from outside such as voodoo rituals from the Caribbean or cosmic horrors summoned from other stars or dimensions. The heroes of these tales, usually learned men of an academic or scientific background, must then fight off these horrors in order to preserve their world from invasion or destruction.
With the weird South, though, the horrific elements are already here: connected to old family curses, Civil War ghosts, crazy shut-ins. And while the true nature of the horror may be unknown, there's no secret that something strange is going on and has been since before anyone's memory. They become symbolic of the worst aspects of Southern culture: things like religious fundamentalism, institutionalized racism, cronyism, political violence.
If the protagonist is a Southerner, he/she then comes to represent the positive aspects of Southern culture: a healthy appreciation of history/traditions, self-reliance, and adherence to a personal code of ethics, morals, or justice. These heroes, while often learned, are predominantly everyday people, and often from classes not usually represented in New England weird fiction: women or minorities.
In other words, weird New England most often becomes a metaphor for the xenophobic threat of chaotic outside forces destroying our peaceful ordered world. The weird South, however, becomes a metaphor for our internal struggle to overcome the destructive aspects of our own natures.
This paper seeks to explore this aspect of the Southern weird by taking as its primary texts Cherie Priest’s first novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, about a young woman in Chattanooga haunted by three ghosts and destined to confront the heritage of an evil great-grandfather, and her latest novel, Chapelwood, in which a strange cult seeks to raise eldritch horrors in 1920’s Birmingham.

Fear of the Unacknowledged: The Weird Tradition in the Fiction of Cherie Priest

'Presidents and Vice Presidents and the U.S. Elections of 1796 and 1800...' well, probably not the first subject when you think of modern art song in 2016. The second and third elections produced interesting results: in 1796, a President and Vice President from differing parties; in 1800, the President had to campaign against his own running mate. So, the twelfth amendment was introduced to the constitution, changing the electorate and defining elections in the future. This amendment was worked into a new art song (a musical composition featuring solo voice with accompaniment), inspired by the history involving the U.S. elections of 1796 and 1800.
'Amendment XII' is a new composition for baritone and fixed media (sometimes called electro-acoustic). In this work, a live performer sings with fixed (pre-recorded) elements. These elements are not able to be presented live with other performers, because the performer will sing with pre-recordings of themselves or other heavily manipulated recordings.
This lecture/demonstration, with performance, will feature (as presented by the composer):
<ol>
<li>The artistic process and creation of the musical composition. We will define some of the textual/story elements and abstract ideas that were used to generate the core creative concepts, exploring the text from the constitution and how they led to structures and choices for musical elements.</li>
<li>How the music was realized - from monophonic notated sheet music, a recording of that music, using the recording as source material, adding synthesizers to augment the accompanying texture, and bringing the live performer back to interact with the resulting fixed electronic accompaniment. There will be live demonstrations to show the electronic manipulations used in the fixed accompaniment and how a commercial product (primarily used for film composition) was flipped into a tool for creating this art song.</li>
<li>A live performance of 'Amendment XII' by vocal artist, Benjamin Schoening.</li>
</ol>

Singing the Twelfth Amendment

Choice, responsibility, and the perception of time

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a compound that mimics estrogen in the body and disrupts typical neuroendocrine functioning. Most research protocols investigating the impact of BPA and other endocrine disruptors (BPAOED) expose an animal model through invasive means, such as injection, gavaging, and subcutaneous methods of exposure. These methods serve to increase stress levels in the animal model, creating the potential for serious confounds in behavioral research. Additionally, these paradigms are not ecologically valid in comparison to studies investigating exposure to BPAOED in human populations; humans are not under stress when interacting with BPAOED, and we interact with these substances unwittingly. In order to produce a laboratory exposure paradigm that mirrors human exposure, mice were exposed solely through environmental influences in a BPAOED-rich environment from conception until adulthood. Upon reaching adulthood, half of the mice remained in the BPAOED-rich environment to determine the long-term impact of continued exposure. The other half were placed in a BPAOED-free environment in order to determine if efforts to reduce exposure to this class of toxins, even after continued exposure through critical periods of development, would lead to improvements in psychological and physiological health. Physiological health measures for both groups were collected to determine the effects of exposure to BPAOED on indices of toxicity, including liver weight, brain weight, and thymus weight relative to body weight. Anxiety-like-behavior and depressive-like-behaviors were measured using the elevated plus maze and the forced swim test, respectively. Results show health-dependent benefits of adopting a BPAOED-free lifestyle following a life-time of exposure.