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Operating in Washington, DC from 1903 to 1960, the Washington Conservatory of Music was the first conservatory established by and for Black Americans in the United States. In this article we demonstrate the significant, continuing impact of the Washington Conservatory of Music through a study of the lives and contributions of the conservatory's first thirty graduates, from the inaugural classes of 1910 through 1914. As teachers, performers, composers, activists, and leaders, the graduates of the Washington Conservatory were cornerstones of musical communities across the United States. Graduates of the Washington Conservatory rarely achieved fame as concert artists, but their lack of fame ultimately says less about the extent of their accomplishments than it says about longstanding silences in music historiography that privileges composers and performers over educators and church musicians. Drawing on physical and digitized primary sources including newspapers, city directories, census records, and extensive archival material, we further the critical historical recovery undertaken by Doris McGinty, Sarah Schmalenberger, Maud Cuney-Hare, and Eileen Southern that answers basic--but frustratingly elusive--questions about a relatively quotidian matter: who did what in Black musical communities. We argue that Washington Conservatory alumni were not only anchors in musical networks that extend through the present but representative figures who built lasting institutions and who exemplify the ubiquity of Black classical musicianship through American music history. Keywords: Black classical musicians, American music, Washington Conservatory of Music, historiography, historical recovery, The Washington Conservatory of Music and School of Expression was the first conservatory founded by and for Black musicians in the United States. (1) Established in Washington, DC in 1903 [...]

Anthracnose and grain mold are two of the most significant diseases of sorghum, a versatile crop that plays an important part in the daily lives of millions of inhabitants, especially in the drier tropical regions. The aim of this study was to determine the influence of four agronomic traits in selected sorghum germplasms on the two diseases using Spearman’s ρ test to identify significant pairwise correlations. Both anthracnose and grain mold scores were significantly and negatively correlated with seed weight and germination rate. The grain mold infection score also demonstrated negative correlations with plant height (Spearman ρ = −0.61 and p-value = p-value = 0.0022). In this investigation, principal component analysis and clustering variables analysis revealed that seed weight and germination rate exhibited a directional alignment, suggesting a positive association. Similarly, panicle length and plant height clustered together, suggesting a shared variation pattern. Additionally, a support vector machine and random forest models effectively predicted the germination rate based on the studied traits, highlighting the potential of machine learning in understanding complex trait relationships in sorghum. This work provides insights into the relationship between agronomic traits and disease resistance, thus contributing to sorghum improvement efforts.

The Promise and Peril of Making Digital Maps Sing As geographer Mark Monmonier has noted in his popular textbook How to Lie with Maps, all maps necessarily reduce and distort [...]

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L.) ranks fifth as the most crucial cereal crop globally, yet its seed morphology remains relatively unexplored. This study investigated seed morphology in sorghum based on 115 mini-core and 130 Senegalese germplasms. Eight seed morphology traits encompassing size, shape, and color parameters were assessed. Statistical analyses explored potential associations between these traits and resistance to three major sorghum diseases: anthracnose, head smut, and downy mildew. Furthermore, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) were conducted using phenotypic data from over 24,000 seeds and over 290,000 publicly available single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) through the Genome Association and Prediction Integrated Tool (GAPIT) R package. Significant SNPs associated with various seed morphology traits were identified and mapped onto the reference sorghum genome to identify novel candidate defense genes.

Purpose: People who stutter experience societal misconceptions and negative stereotypes due to cultural prejudices. The present study aimed to compare attitudes toward stuttering of Indian teachers, students, and members of the public and to further compare their attitudes to comparable samples regionally and internationally. Method: Five hundred eighteen adults completed the Public Opinion Survey of Human Attributes--tuttering (POSHA-S), translated into Kannada, which was analyzed according to standard protocol. Summary and selected item scores were compared from samples of teachers (n = 125), students (n = 233), and the public (n = 160). Additionally, the scores were compared to those from South Asian samples and an international POSHA-S database. Results: Teachers in the current study had the most positive stuttering attitudes, followed by the public and then by students. The summary attitude scores obtained by all three groups were more positive attitudes compared to other South Asian samples and either similar to or slightly less positive than the international POSHA-S database average sample rating. Education and income were small but significant predictors of more--or less--positive attitudes, but gender, age, and familiarity with stuttering were not. Conclusions: While teachers demonstrated a greater understanding of stuttering compared to the public and students, the lack of understanding among the latter groups highlights the need for increased awareness and education about stuttering across various segments of society. Negative social reactions toward stuttering, observed in different cultural contexts, further emphasize the need for awareness about stuttering. Supplemental Material: https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.27855195 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using the quantum mechanics phenomenon, quantum computers provide a new dimension of computational power that drastically accelerates solving complex and resource-intensive problems. One of the most evolving but, due to the computation power of standard computers, reasonably limited application domain is natural language processing (NLP). NLP seeks to give interactive systems the ability to understand and manipulate human language. Making systems understand and manipulate human languages requires large amounts of data and computational power during learning as well as during the execution of NLP. For handling these amounts of data like text and audio recordings and the complexity of classical NLP algorithms, quantum computation has emerged as a promising solution. This work gives an extensive overview of this new field, known as quantum natural language processing (QNLP). Introducing the basics of quantum computing, we discuss its use in NLP by explaining the different proposed embedding models, quantum algorithms, and other methods of QNLP. As QNLP is still in its infancy, this comprehensive overview is the foundation that points to the upcoming research direction.

This article includes 13 letters from Democrat Louis K. Church (1846-97), governor of Dakota Territory during 1887-89, to President Grover Cleveland, who appointed him. Despite a promising start, Church's administration fell prey to enervating, controversial squabbling - often with other Democrats - over patronage, appropriations, and "division," wherein one faction wanted a single Dakota with considerable Congressional clout to enter the Union, while the ultimately victorious "home rule" faction preferred splitting the territory into two states. To the end of his term, Church barely managed to control Dakota's Democrats and keep his office, but he alienated so many people in the process that he destroyed his political effectiveness. The letters expand on territorial factionalism and reveal Church as a most impolitic politician, a somewhat paranoid, snobbish man who lavished incessant, flowery praise on Cleveland while describing his own goals in the overblown rhetoric of a self-appointed messiah.

Anthracnose and grain mold are two of the most significant diseases of sorghum, a versatile crop that plays an important part in the daily lives of millions of inhabitants, especially in the drier tropical regions. The aim of this study was to determine the influence of four agronomic traits in selected sorghum germplasms on the two diseases using Spearman's ρ test to identify significant pairwise correlations. Both anthracnose and grain mold scores were significantly and negatively correlated with seed weight and germination rate. The grain mold infection score also demonstrated negative correlations with plant height (Spearman ρ = −0.61 and p-value = <0.0001) and panicle length (Spearman ρ = −0.27 and p-value = 0.0022). In this investigation, principal component analysis and clustering variables analysis revealed that seed weight and germination rate exhibited a directional alignment, suggesting a positive association. Similarly, panicle length and plant height clustered together, suggesting a shared variation pattern. Additionally, a support vector machine and random forest models effectively predicted the germination rate based on the studied traits, highlighting the potential of machine learning in understanding complex trait relationships in sorghum. This work provides insights into the relationship between agronomic traits and disease resistance, thus contributing to sorghum improvement efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From infrared body temperature surveillance to lifeguarding, real-life visual search is usually continuous and comes with rare targets. Previous research has examined realistic search tasks involving separate slides (such as baggage screening and radiography), but search tasks that require continuous monitoring have generally received less attention. In this study, we investigated whether continuous visual search would display a target-rate effect similar to the low-prevalence effect (LPE) in regular visual search. We designed a continuous detection task for a target feature (e.g., a green color) among items of continuously and gradually changing features (e.g., other colors). In four experiments, we demonstrated target-rate effects in terms of slower hit response times (RTs) and higher miss rates when targets were rare. Similar to regular search, target-rate effects were also observed for relative frequencies across two target features. Taken together, these results suggest a target-rate effect in continuous visual search, and its behavioral characteristics are generally similar to those of the LPE in regular visual search.

Sweet sorghum is an attractive feedstock for the production of renewable chemicals and fuels due to the readily available fermentable sugars that can be extracted from the juice, and the additional stream of fermentable sugars that can be obtained from the cell wall polysaccharides in the bagasse. An important selection criterion for new sweet sorghum germplasm is resistance to anthracnose, a disease caused by the fungal pathogen Colletotrichum sublineolum. The identification of novel anthracnose-resistance sources present in sweet sorghum germplasm offers a fast track towards the development of new resistant sweet sorghum germplasm. We established a sweet sorghum diversity panel (SWDP) of 272 accessions from the USDA-ARS National Plant Germplasm (NPGS) collection that includes landraces from 22 countries and advanced breeding material, and that represents ~15% of the NPGS sweet sorghum collection. Genomic characterization of the SWDP identified 171,954 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) with an average of one SNP per 4,071 kb. Population structure analysis revealed that the SWDP could be stratified into four populations and one admixed group, and that this population structure could be aligned to sorghum’s racial classification. Results from a two-year replicated trial of the SWDP for anthracnose resistance response in Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Puerto Rico showed 27 accessions to be resistant across locations, while 145 accessions showed variable resistance response against local pathotypes. A genome-wide association study identified 16 novel genomic regions associated with anthracnose resistance. Four resistance loci on chromosomes 3, 6, 8 and 9 were identified against pathotypes from Puerto Rico, and two resistance loci on chromosomes 3 and 8 against pathotypes from Texas. In Georgia and Florida, three resistance loci were detected on chromosomes 4, 5, 6 and four on chromosomes 4, 5 (two loci) and 7, respectively. One resistance locus on chromosome 2 was effective against pathotypes from Texas and Puerto Rico and a genomic region of 41.6 kb at the tip of chromosome 8 was associated with resistance response observed in Georgia, Texas, and Puerto Rico. This publicly available SWDP and the extensive evaluation of anthracnose resistance represent a valuable genomic resource for the improvement of sorghum.

A newly documented pathotype 5 of the soil-borne fungus Sporisorium reilianum, causing head smut in sorghum, was tested against 153 unexplored Senegalese sorghum accessions. Among the 153 sorghum accessions tested, 63 (41%) exhibited complete resistance, showing no signs of infection by the fungus. The remaining 90 accessions (59%) displayed varying degrees of susceptibility. Sorghum responses against S. reilianum were explored to analyze the potential link with previously known seed morphology-related traits and new phenotype data from 59 lines for seed weight. A genome-wide association study (GWAS) screened 297,876 SNPs and identified highly significant associations (p < 1 × 10−5) with head smut resistance in sorghum. By mapping these significant SNPs to the reference genome, this study revealed 35 novel candidate defense genes potentially involved in disease resistance.