astronomy

Mary Florentine

Mary Florentine is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Mary Florentine rather than just read about it. In short: Mary Florentine is a Matthews Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University specialising in psychoacoustics with interests in models of hearing (normal and impaired), non-native speech comprehension in background noise, cross-cultural attitudes towards noise, and hearing loss prevention. Her primary collaborator is Søren Buus.

Key takeaways

Mary Florentine belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Mary Florentine to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Mary Florentine from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Mary Florentine is a Matthews Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University specialising in psychoacoustics with interests in models of hearing (normal and impaired), non-native speech comprehension in background noise, cross-cultural attitudes towards noise, and hearing loss prevention. Her primary collaborator is Søren Buus.

Biography

Career Florentine completed her undergraduate degree in experimental psychology at Northeastern University in 1973. She continued her graduate study at Northeastern University, earning a master's degree in experimental psychology and auditory perception in 1975. After some time spent studying pre-doctoral electronic engineering at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and at the Audiology and ENT Department at Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark, she completed her PhD at Northeastern University in 1978. She then went on to work as a post-doctoral research fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since then, she has also worked as a visiting scientist at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Marseille, France; the Osaka University in Toyonaka, Japan; and, on several occasions, at the acoustics laboratory at the Danish Technical University. In 1980 she returned to Northeastern University as the director of the Communication Research Laboratory and in 1986 commenced a long-term collaboration with her husband, Søren Buus, at the Hearing Research Laboratory until he died in 2004. At Northeastern University, Florentine is an effective and popular teacher, securing the Excellence-in-Teaching Award only a few years after starting her faculty position. Her academic work has also appealed to more general audiences and she has been interviewed for TIME, Redbook and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Florentine co-edited and (co-)wrote a few chapters in the recently published textbook Loudness (Springer Handbook of Auditory Research), which explains some conceptual thinking relating to loudness, issues of loudness study and measurement, hearing and hearing loss models, and physiological effects of loud sounds.

Personal Florentine was born in Nutley, New Jersey, and was the eldest in a family with five children. She moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to take up her undergraduate study, which was fully supported by a merit grant, and has lived there ever since, except for brief periods of study and work abroad. While abroad, she met her husband Søren Buus, who also became her primary collaborator, and they married in 1980. They have one daughter, born in 1987.

Notable work

Softness Imperception Softness Imperception (SI) is a term coined by Florentine and colleagues to describe the inability to hear quiet sounds that are audible to normal listeners. This phenomenon is particularly common among people with cochlear hearing loss. When a person with SI hears a sound at threshold, it sounds louder than a sound at threshold would do for a normal listener. Therefore, people with hearing loss may find softer sounds more intrusive when fitted with hearing aids that simply amplify all soft sounds to threshold.

Binaural Loudness Summation Florentine's most recent work has been on binaural loudness summation, and her research with Michael J. Epstein has indicated that, in more ecologically valid experiments, the binaural loudness summation ratio is found to be significantly lower than previously thought.

References

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Mary Florentine

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Mary Florentine claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Mary Florentine before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Mary Florentine ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Mary Florentine

In research: Mary Florentine appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Mary Florentine in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Mary Florentine is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 21st-century American psychologists, Academic staff of the University of Osaka, American cognitive scientists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Mary Florentine outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Mary Florentine in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Mary Florentine means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Mary Florentine out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Mary Florentine in simple terms?

Why does Mary Florentine matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Mary Florentine?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Mary Florentine.