This report provides a broad technical and pedagogical overview of Paul Rolland's teaching method, as found in The Teaching of Action in String Playing (1974), and accompanying film series of the same title. Through this report, the reader will come to understand important fundamental violin playing techniques, which may be applied at all levels of violin playing. Rolland's unique movement training exercises, called “Action Studies,” present material in a carefully organized sequence of objectives designed to optimize learning and performance in all facets of instruction (Action Studies are distinguished from other tasks by use of quotation and capitalization throughout the report). The Rolland method is pedagogically unique in that it emphasizes basic concepts and ideas and cultivates an acute awareness of the body's movements. While pedagogically innovative, Rolland's violin playing principles drew influence from many great string pedagogues of the past, including Dr. F.A. Steinhausen, Carl Flesch, and Shinichi Suzuki. Additionally, Rolland was greatly influenced by the work of British Speech Teacher Frederick Matthias Alexander, and kinesiology scientist Frances A. Hellebrandt, M.D. For the purpose of accurately expounding Rolland's topical thirty-two unit course of study, this report is organized in sections corresponding with the chapters of The Teaching of Action in String Playing. / text

Not available / text

No description available.

No description available.

The object of this thesis is to present various applications of the theory of cosmological perturbations. Within are contained a number of manuscripts, each concerned with a separate aspect of the theory. The thesis itself begins with a general overview of cosmological perturbation theory designed to be accessible to the non-specialist. Both the classical and quantum first order theory are considered. Back-reaction, via the formalism of the Effective Energy Momentum Tensor (EEMT) is reviewed. Subsequent chapters are more specialized dealing with various applications of the theory. At first order, topics discussed include the classicalization of cosmological perturbations (chapter 2), and the effects of including the dilaton and its fluctuations on a novel mechanism for the production of inhomogeneities in string gas cosmology (chapter 3). At second order, an original solution to the Dark Energy problem is proposed (chapter 4), and the effects of back-reaction on the power spectrum, including the spectral index and the gaussianity, are examined (chapter 5).

This creative project has made a survey of chamber music for bassoon and strings. A representative listing of chamber works for this combination has been included in the work. The listing tells the name of the Composer, his dates, the title of the composition, instrumentation, publisher, and. the composer's nationality.The project has made an analysis of two significant chamber compositions for bassoon and strings. The works analyzed in this project area: Variations on an Ancient Melody, and Karl Almenrader, and Quartet in C Major Opus 73 No. 1, Francois Devienne.In addition to a survey of chamber music for bassoon and strings, the project has male a comparison to other wind-string combinations.The final part has made an analysis of the preparation and performance aspects of the Gordon Jacob Suits for Bassoon and String Quartet. / School of Music

We consider linear perturbations of the background type IIB SUGRA solutions and find the equations of motion for the moduli. In particular, we allow for spacetime fluctuations of the positions of D3-branes in the compact dimensions. We postulate an ansatz for the 5-form flux due to the motion of the D3-branes, and a corresponding first-order part of the metric. The movement of the D3-branes is then shown to affect the warp factor at linear order. Using the equations of motion for the D3-branes, the universal volume modulus, and the universal axion, we construct a second-order, effective action. Finally, based on the form of the effective action, we examine a Kahler potential for the moduli space.

Parameterized string correction decision problems investigate the possibility of transforming a given string X into a target string Y using a fixed number of edit operations, k. There are four possible edit operations: swap, delete, insert and substi- tute. In this work we consider the NP--complete STRING-TO-STRING CORREC- TION problem restricted to deletes and swaps and parameterized by the number of allowed operations. Specifically, the problem asks whether there exists a trans- formation from X into Y consisting of at most k deletes or swaps. We present a fixed parameter algorithm that runs in O(2k(k + m)), where m is the length of the destination string. Further, we present an implementation of an extended version of the algorithm that constructs the transformation sequence ! of length ay most k, given its existence. This thesis concludes with a discussion comparing the practical run times obtained from our implementation with the proposed theoretical results. Efficient string correction algorithms have applications in several areas, for example computational linguistics, error detection and correction, and computational biology. / Graduate

This thesis is concerned with so called chiral gauge theories, also known as self dual gauge theories. In particular, the aim of this thesis to investigate the role that chiral gauge theories play in duality symmetries in lower dimensions through dimensional reduction. Chapter one serves as an introduction to the notions of duality in field and string theory. The problems of formulating well defined actions for self-dual gauge theories are introduced as well as a brief presentation of the different approaches used to over come these problems. Chapter two introduces dimensional reduction and demonstrates how duality symmetries arise from the dimensional reduction of self-dual theories in a variety of dimensions and on different compact spaces. Examples are presented where the couplings of the resulting theories are calculated explicitly in terms of the geometrical data of the compact space. The duality generators acting on these couplings are also calculated explicitly and related to the geometry/topology of the compact space. Chapter three deals with the idea of duality manifest actions and their relation to the self-dual theories in higher dimensions. Non-linear Born-Infeld type actions are introduced and again dimensional reduction is shown to play a role in the duality of the Born-Infeld action. This leads to a duality manifest version of the Born-Infeld action. Chapter four describes perhaps the main application of this thesis. The effective action of the M-theory five brane wrapped on a torus is identified with the effective action of the IIB D-3 brane dimensionally reduced on a circle (after some appropriate world volume dualizations). The IIB S-duality then arises as a result of the modular symmetry of the torus. The final chapter contains a brief summary and a hint of further directions for research that were outside the scope of this thesis.

A simple two scale compactification scheme for the E(8) x E(8) heterotic string is studied. The internal space used is a direct product of two compact spaces, each with its own length scale. Compactification on the smaller 4-dimensional (4d) manifold is carried out to obtain 6d theories with simple supersymmetry (SUSY). Assuming the background torsion vanishes, we show that this manifold must be K3. Compactification on K3 is studied in detail. Also analyzed are the two possible torsion-free compactifications on the orbifold K3$ sp prime$ (the limit of the manifold K3). The compactification from 6d to 4d on the larger scale 2d manifold results in Grand Unified Theories (GUT's) with broken SUSY. We show that it is not possible to generate a realistic theory using our scheme. Strings exclude what is conceivable from the perspective of point field theories: getting a realistic GUT from a 6d theory with simple SUSY.