abstract: This study examined directors’, master teachers’, graduate and undergraduate String Project teachers’ perspectives of the skills and behaviors important for teaching strings. Participants were from the 40 String Projects listed on the National String Project Consortium website, including String Project directors (n = 16), master teachers (n = 7), graduate (n = 6) and undergraduate string teachers (n = 46) involved in String Projects across the United States. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 72 years old. The survey for this study was based on Teachout’s 1997 survey pertaining to teachers’ skills and behaviors in three categories: teaching, personal, musical. A cover letter containing a link to the electronic survey was sent to directors and master teachers for the 40 String Projects, requesting their participation and the participation of their string teachers. Seventy-five participants from 19 String Projects completed the survey. Means and standard deviations were calculated for each item for each of the four participant groups. Overall means for each category of skills and behaviors were calculated followed by a one-way Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) to determine which of the three categories the teachers and directors believed most important. Three one-way MANOVAs were used to analyze participants’ perspectives for three broad categories of skills and behaviors (personal, teaching, and musical) across the four participant groups. No significant differences were found across all three MANOVA analyses. Additionally, descriptive statistics were used to determine the rankings of importance for the four participant groups on 40 survey items. Results showed that participants in all four groups believed that personal skills and behaviors were more important than teaching and musical skills and behaviors. Also conducted were Pearson Product-Moment Correlations, which analyses revealed a strong positive relationship between the ranked perceptions of musical and teaching skills and behaviors (r = .78, p = .00), between musical and personal skills and behaviors (r = .65, p = .00), and between personal and teaching skills and behaviors (r = .84, p = .00). Strong positive correlations were found between the three categories. Recommendations for research and practice were given. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Music Education 2019

To increase the trend of placing more importance on arts and humanity in the current wave of educational reform, Ministry of Education endeavors to promote the "one school, one art group" project to realize the education of the arts and humanity and to urge the necessity of interdisciplinary teaching in the art category, in combination with the "One person, one musical instrument" project to pursue a wider range of learning. In an environment that art subject and after class activities used to be neglected but now attract more attention, string orchestra is gradually being developed. The members of junior high school and elementary school string orchestras are mostly the basic members of senior high school orchestras and even the music majors in universities. The promotion of basic string education will be beneficial to a higher level of the string music. The first chapter mainly researches into the motivation, purpose, objects, scope and method of this study. The second chapter primarily focuses on the understanding of the development of string orchestras in other countries, and the approach of development, function and meaning of string orchestras in Taiwan. The third chapter introduces string orchestras in junior high school and elementary school, including the preparation of the string orchestra, the recruitment of members, the training and the teaching materials applied in an orchestra, and so on. The fourth chapter explores the current situation of the junior high school and elementary school string orchestras in Kaohsiung city, including current teaching conditions, practicing repertoires, teaching materials, the problems encountered, and so on. Conclusion and suggestions are proposed in the fifth chapter .The development of string orchestras in Taiwan have gradually matured with an effort from many forerunners and string teachers in recent years. As a music educator, I hope that more relevant information about the teaching situations in junior high school and elementary school string orchestras in Kaohsiung City can be acquired through this study and that I can make a contribution to string music.

Our research is in the general area of String Algorithms and Combinatorics on Words. Specifically, we study a generalization of square-free strings, shuffle properties of strings, and formalizing the reasoning about finite strings. The existence of infinitely long square-free strings (strings with no adjacent repeating word blocks) over a three (or more) letter finite set (referred to as Alphabet) is a well-established result. A natural generalization of this problem is that only subsets of the alphabet with predefined cardinality are available, while selecting symbols of the square-free string. This problem has been studied by several authors, and the lowest possible bound on the cardinality of the subset given is four. The problem remains open for subset size three and we investigate this question. We show that square-free strings exist in several specialized cases of the problem and propose approaches to solve the problem, ranging from patterns in strings to Proof Complexity. We also study the shuffle property (analogous to shuffling a deck of cards labeled with symbols) of strings, and explore the relationship between string shuffle and graphs, and show that large classes of graphs can be represented with special type of strings. Finally, we propose a theory of strings, that formalizes the reasoning about finite strings. By engaging in this line of research, we hope to bring the richness of the advanced field of Proof Complexity to Stringology. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Exocytosis, the fusion of intracellular vesicles with the plasma membrane, is fundamental to intercellular communication in multicellular organisms. This pathway facilitates the release or secretion of molecules from the cell. In addition, exocytosis is essential for delivery of resident proteins to the plasma membrane. There are two different pathways of exocytosis, constitutive and regulated exocytosis. Constitutive exocytosis occurs without regulation, e.g. pathways regulating the delivery of lipids and ‘house-keeping’ proteins to the plasma membrane or the secretion of antibodies and extra-cellular matrix components from the cell. In contrast, regulated exocytosis facilitates the controlled release of extra-cellular molecules or insertion of new membrane components only in response to a physiological signal. The most common signal for regulated exocytosis is an increase in intracellular Ca2+ concentration. Several proteins function in exocytosis, and the membrane fusion step is widely believed to result from an interaction between SNARE (SNAP receptor) proteins on the vesicle membrane and plasma membrane. In neuroendocrine cells, these SNARE proteins are VAMP2, which is bound to vesicle membranes and syntaxin1A and SNAP25, which are associated with the plasma membrane. Several proteins have been implicated as SNARE regulators, such as NSF (N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor) and its cofactor α-SNAP, Munc18 and synaptotagmin. Another possible SNARE regulator is the cysteine string protein (CSP). CSPα was first identified in Drosophila melanogaster and was later identified in Torpedo as a possible Ca2+-channel regulator. Inactivation of the CSPα gene in Drosophila is lethal at an embryonic stage and in embryos synaptic vesicle exocytosis was decreased by ~50% at 22°C and was abolished at higher temperatures. These results provided strong evidence that CSPα has an important role in presynaptic neurotransmission. However, more recent work on CSPα null mice uncovered an important neuroprotective function for CSPα in brain, but also challenged the proposed function of CSPα in neuronal exocytosis, as no defect in this pathway was evident, at least in young animals. The only reported developmental abnormality of CSPα null mice was bilateral cryptorchidism, a failure of testicular descent during development. Interestingly, two additional CSP isoforms were recently identified in mouse and human testis, CSPβ and CSPγ. One consequence of the identification of CSPβ and CSPγ is that they may complicate analysis of CSPα knockout mice. Here, we have used a combination of techniques, cell systems and human brain samples to examine the function of CSPα in exocytosis, the expression of novel CSPα isoforms in testis, and expression changes of CSPα and its partner proteins in neurological disorders. Furthermore, we have initiated studies to examine how CSPα function is linked to cryptorchidism at the molecular level. My results show that CSPα depletion perturbs regulated exocytosis in neuroendocrine cells, but has no consistent effect on constitutive exocytosis. CSPα has been reported to have an important neuroprotective function; however, no significant changes in CSPα expression were detected in brain samples for schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder. Nevertheless the expression of specific CSPα binding partners was found to be significantly changed in some of these disorders. In addition to these studies focussing on CSPα function and expression in neuronal and neuroendocrine cells, studies were undertaken to analyse expression profiles of CSP isoforms in testis. This analysis found that CSPβ and CSPγ are exclusively expressed in testis, and that mRNA transcription of both isoforms is initiated with sexual maturation. Furthermore expression of both isoforms is restricted to germ cells, whereas CSPα is expressed throughout testes. Previous work has shown that the secretory hormone INSL3, which is exclusively expressed in testicular Leydig cells, is involved in the development of cryptorchidism. Confocal microscopic analysis revealed that CSPα and INSL3 colocalise on vesicles in Leydig cells, suggesting the intriguing possibility that CSPα inactivation might cause cryptorchidism due to a loss of INSL3 secretion.

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The aim of this bachelor's thesis has been to investigate surfaces that are the main contributions to scattering amplitudes in a type of string theory. These are constant mean curvature surfaces in hyperbolic 3-space. Classically the way to find such surfaces has been to solve a non-linear partial differential equation. In many spaces constant mean curvature surfaces are intimately connected to certain harmonic maps, known as the Gauss maps. In 1995 Dorfmeister, Pedit, and Wu established a method for constructing harmonic maps into so-called symmetric spaces. I investigate a generalization of this method that can be applied to find constant mean curvature surfaces in hyperbolic 3-space by using the intimate connection between these surfaces and harmonic maps. This method relies on a factorization of a Lie-group valued map. I show an explicit method for finding the factorization in terms of what is known as the Birkhoff factorization. Because approximation methods for the Birkhoff factorization are known, this allowed me to use the method constructively to find constant mean curvature surfaces in hyperbolic 3-space.