Posts tagged CU news
CU’S GLENN MILLER ARCHIVE ACQUIRES ONE OF WORLD’S BEST BIG BAND ERA COLLECTIONS
Feb 21st
Feb. 21, 2011
The Glenn Miller Archive at the University of Colorado Boulder American Music Research Center has acquired one of the world’s most significant collections of Big Band Era recordings and memorabilia.
The Ed Burke Collection – named for its shepherd and founder – contains approximately 1,400 reel-to-reel tapes containing hundreds of hours of live radio programs featuring virtually every musician of major importance during the Big Band Era.
“This collection is especially extraordinary as the material is in a live radio context,” said Professor Tom Riis, director of the American Music Research Center in the College of Music. “We have the announcer’s voice, the advertising, everything. It is also in remarkably good condition, as the tapes were made directly from the transcription discs loaned to Ed by the radio stations.”
The vast collection includes performances by almost every Big Band musician and entertainer who appeared on records or radio between 1930 and 1960, including broadcasts by Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. The collection has been transferred in its entirety to the Glenn Miller Archive for permanent preservation.
In addition to the historically valuable collection of live recordings – which includes original material never distributed commercially – the collection also includes photographs, magazines, documents and other memorabilia from the unique era in American popular music. An avid fan and collector, Ed Burke founded and operated the independent record and compact discs labels Fanfare, Jazz Hour and Soundcraft.
“The Glenn Miller Archive honors and preserves the legacy of our distinguished alumnus, Glenn Miller,” said archive curator Alan Cass, “and we are grateful to Ed Burke for his lifelong dedication to preserving an important segment of American popular music.”
To view a short sound slide on the Ed Burke Collection visit http://www.colorado.edu/news and click on the story headline.
For those interested in hearing the music of the era brought to life, the award-winning musicians of CU Jazz Ensemble I from the College of Music are staging the inaugural Spring Swing concert Feb. 27 at 2 p.m. in Macky Auditorium. Big Band Era favorites scheduled for the performance include “In the Mood,” “Moonlight Serenade” and “A String of Pearls.”
For more information on the concert visit http://music.colorado.edu/events.
-CU-
EXTENT OF CORRUPTION IN COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD TIED TO EARTHQUAKE FATALITIES
Jan 12th
A new assessment of global earthquake fatalities over the past three decades indicates that 83 percent of all deaths caused by the collapse of buildings during earthquakes occurred in countries considered to be unusually corrupt.
Authored by Professor Nicholas Ambraseys of the Imperial College of London and Professor Roger Bilham of the University Colorado at Boulder, the study also found that in some relatively wealthy countries where knowledge and sound business practices would be expected to prevail, the collapse of many buildings is nevertheless attributable to corrupt building practices.
A commentary piece on the subject is being published in the Jan. 13 issue of Nature.
Corrupt building practices — which are generally covert and hard to quantify — can include the use of substandard materials, poor assembly methods, the inappropriate placement of buildings and non-adherence to building codes, said the authors.
Ambraseys and Bilham used data gathered by Transparency International, a global organization based in Berlin that operates through more than 70 national chapters around the world. Transparency International annually generates a Corruption Perception Index, or CPI, as determined by expert assessments and opinion surveys.
The CPI index — which defines corruption as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain — is determined by an aggregate of 13 opinion polls averaged over two years from 10 institutions monitoring the frequency and extent of bribes paid within various countries, said Bilham, a professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department. A CPI score of 0 indicates a highly corrupt nation with zero transparency, while a score of 10 indicates an absence of perceived corruption with total transparency.
The authors determined that there is roughly a one-to-one relationship between a nations’ wealth and its perceived level of corruption. “Less wealthy nations are the most corrupt,” said Bilham, also a fellow in the CU-Boulder based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. “We found that fully 83 percent of all deaths from earthquakes in the last 30 years have occurred in nations where corruption is both widespread and worse than expected.”
Relative wealth is the most obvious parameter that influences a country’s corruption, according to the authors. Bilham and Ambraseys chose the gross national income per capita to compare the relative wealth of the countries. High wealth is strongly linked to countries with a stable government conducive to the rule of law, they said.
The authors noted that while a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck in New Zealand in 2010 resulted in zero fatalities, an identical 2010 quake in Haiti resulted in a death toll reaching six figures. “Widespread anecdotal evidence points to the collapse of structures in devastating earthquakes as a result of corrupt building practices,” said Bilham. “In this study we have attempted to quantify that perception.
“Corruption is found to be far worse in some countries than others, despite a measure of wealth that tells us they should do better,” said Bilham. “It is in the countries that have abnormally high levels of corruption where we find most of the world’s deaths from earthquakes.”
The global construction industry, currently worth $7.5 trillion annually and which is expected to double in the next decade, is recognized by experts as being the most corrupt segment of the world economy, said the authors.
Since 1980, deaths due to an absence of effective earthquake engineering activity have averaged about 18,300 per year, according to the authors.
Poverty and poor education also contribute to building collapse through a lack of strong, available building materials and a lack of education that otherwise would help guide safe building practices, the authors said.
The number of deaths attributable to collapsed dwellings is influenced both by the population density and the vulnerability of buildings near earthquake epicenters, said the authors. In the past 30 years, the rapid increases in urban populations — particularly in developing countries — have been adversely affected by building quality.
The authors said even if corrupt building practices were halted today, those residing in impoverished nations would inherit at least some structures and dwellings that were constructed while corrupt construction practices were under way.
“The structural integrity of a building is no stronger than the social integrity of the builder, and each nation has a responsibility to its citizens to ensure adequate inspection,” the authors wrote in Nature. “In particular, nations with a history of significant earthquakes and known corruption issues should stand reminded that an unregulated construction industry is a potential killer.”
SOIURCE: CU MEDIA RELEASE
CU-BOULDER FACULTY MEMBER TO MAKE STELLAR OBSERVATIONS WITH AIRBORNE OBSERVATORY
Dec 1st
A University of Colorado at Boulder faculty member is one of two scientists who will use data gathered by a world-class telescope flying aboard a modified Boeing 747 to peer at a distant star-forming region during its inaugural science flight this week.
Known as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, the jet was significantly modified in order to mount a 2.5-meter reflecting telescope in the rear fuselage, said Senior Research Associate Paul Harvey of CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, one of the scientists involved in the mission.
The jet will fly at 40,000 to 45,000 feet in altitude, putting it above more than 99 percent of the water vapor in the atmosphere — which blocks infrared light from reaching the ground — and will allow scientists to observe stellar targets in wavelengths of light that can’t be observed by ground-based telescopes, said Harvey.
The aircraft and telescope were successfully tested in the summer of 2009. SOFIA’s Faint Object InfraRed Camera, known as FORCAST, is a versatile camera that collects light from the visible, infrared and sub-millimeter portions of the electromagnetic spectrum, Harvey said.
Harvey will be observing and analyzing the distribution of dust and gas in a young, star-forming cluster known as Sharpless 140 that is roughly 3,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cepheus. One light-year is equal to about 6 trillion miles.
“Observing the birth of stars in our own galaxy is critical because planetary systems form at the same time that a central star is formed,” said Harvey. “In addition, some of the most luminous galaxies in the universe appear to be powered by extreme bursts of star formation.”
Harvey flew on several hundred flights of SOFIA’s predecessor, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, but will not be aboard the first science flight of SOFIA. The second set of observations on this week’s SOFIA science flight will be led by Mark Morris of UCLA, who will be targeting star-forming regions in the Orion nebula.
Harvey said the FORCAST camera on the telescope has large, two-dimensional array detectors that are similar to charge-coupled devices found in digital cameras. The goal is to obtain a sequence of images of the star cluster with the telescope, which will move almost imperceptibly between each image in order to sample “sub-pixels.”
One advantage of the SOFIA observatory is that scientists can make changes and improvements to the craft’s instruments between flights as well as change observing techniques, said Harvey. “These are impossible tasks for orbiting telescopes that have very fixed procedures for the instruments and observations.”
He also is working with the FORCAST team to interpret data gathered during the first science flight in order to carefully characterize SOFIA’s imaging capabilities for future users.
Harvey said he hopes to build a long-term program of specialized observations on SOFIA that eventually will involve data analysis by CU-Boulder students.
NASA hopes SOFIA will continue to fly astronomical science observations for the next two decades, with research flights expected to ramp up to two or three flights a week by 2015. SOFIA’s suite of instruments are expected to gather new information on a wide variety of astronomical targets, including black holes, distant galaxies, the formation of stars and planets, and up close views of comets and asteroids.
SOFIA is a joint project between NASA and the German Aerospace Center. SOFIA’s science and mission operations are managed by NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association in Columbia, Md., and the Deutsches SOFIA Institut in Stuttgart, Germany.
SOURCE: CU PRESS RELEASE
