Computer program ‘evolves’ music from noise Evolutionary processes in DarwinTunes. Songs are represented as tree-like structures of code. Each generation starts with 100 songs; however, for clarity, it only follows one-fifth of them. Bioinformaticist Robert MacCallum of Imperial College London and colleagues have adapted DarwinTunes — a program that produces 8-second sequences of randomly generated sounds, or loops, from a database of digital “genes” — to be accessed online. Almost 7000 participants rated each sound loop, played in a random order, on a 5-point scale from “can’t stand it” to “love it.” In a musical take on survival of the fittest, the highest-scored loops went on to pair up with others and replicate. MacCallum and colleagues hope future incarnations will enable up to a million users to log on and participate. Readers can cast their votes at the DarwinTunes Web site. Ref.: Robert M. See also: Triumph of the Cyborg Composer
Education is Ignorance, by Noam Chomsky (Excerpted from Class Warfare) DAVID BARSAMIAN: One of the heroes of the current right-wing revival... is Adam Smith. You've done some pretty impressive research on Smith that has excavated... a lot of information that's not coming out. You've often quoted him describing the "vile maxim of the masters of mankind: all for ourselves and nothing for other people." NOAM CHOMSKY: I didn't do any research at all on Smith. I just read him. He did give an argument for markets, but the argument was that under conditions of perfect liberty, markets will lead to perfect equality. He also made remarks which ought to be truisms about the way states work. This truism was, a century later, called class analysis, but you don't have to go to Marx to find it. The version of him that's given today is just ridiculous. But even more interesting in some ways was the index. I want to be clear about this. This is true of classical liberalism in general. It's the same when you read Jefferson. CHOMSKY: ... ...
El Patrón de los Números Primos: Prime Number Patterns by Jason Davies. For each natural number n, we draw a periodic curve starting from the origin, intersecting the x-axis at n and its multiples. The prime numbers are those that have been intersected by only two curves: the prime number itself and one. Below the currently highlighted number, we also show its sum of divisors σ(n), and its aliquot sum s(n) = σ(n) - n, which indicate whether the number is prime, deficient, perfect or abundant. Based on Sobre el patrón de los números primos by Omar E.
OBAMA vs ROMNEY: Here's Who's Right About The Economy Brain Workshop - a Dual N-Back game Introduction - Download - Tutorial - Details & Options - Donate Dual N-Back exercise featured in Brain Workshop was the subject of an April 2008 peer-reviewed scientific study which shows that practicing the Dual N-Back task for 20 minutes 4-5 days per week will improve your working memory (short term memory) and fluid intelligence. This Wired article has a good summary of its benefits. If you've never tried Dual N-Back before, here's a quick tutorial to get you started. Dual 1-Back It's best to begin with Dual 1-Back, the simplest mode. Launch Brain Workshop.Press Space to enter the Workshop.Press M to switch to Manual mode.Press F1 to decrease the N-back level to 1.Press Space to begin a Dual 1-Back session. You will see a blue square appear every 3 seconds accompanied by the sound of a letter. It's easy to perform this task when focusing only on a single cue (either the square's position or the letter). Dual 2-Back Brain Workshop starts in Dual 2-Back mode by default.
Why Americans doubt man-made climate change - Inside Story: US 2012 It was 42 years ago that the first Earth Day was organised in the US, drawing millions of Americans to rallies across the country calling for a sustainable environment. Some consider that day to be the birth of the modern environmentalist movement in the US. Today the day is marked by millions around the world but its impact in the US seems to have fizzled, with only dozens turning out at the National Mall in Washington DC on Sunday. While the first Earth Day helped lead to the establishment of the US Environmental Protection agency, this year it was largely ignored by politicians and the public. The issue of climate change has barely come up on the US presidential campaign trail. And for the Republicans it is something they would rather distance themselves from. So why do most Americans still doubt that climate change is man-made?
Tweets vs. Likes: What gets shared on Twitter vs. Facebook? It always strikes me as curious that some posts get a lot of love on Twitter, while others get many more shares on Facebook: What accounts for this difference? Some of it is surely site-dependent: maybe one blogger has a Facebook page but not a Twitter account, while another has these roles reversed. But even on sites maintained by a single author, tweet-to-likes ratios can vary widely from post to post. So what kinds of articles tend to be more popular on Twitter, and which spread more easily on Facebook? tl;dr Twitter is still for the techies: articles where the number of tweets greatly outnumber FB likes tend to revolve around software companies and programming. The first site I looked at was Nathan Yau’s awesome FlowingData website on data visualization. Here are the 10 posts with the lowest tweets-to-likes ratio (i.e., the posts that were especially popular with Facebook users): Notice any differences between the two? What do we find? Here’s a graph of the result: Notice that:
Faller musikkens verdi? Faller musikkens verdi? Tom Skjeklesæther betrakter det som et endetidstegn at øl blir mer verdt enn musikk. Tom Skjeklesæther betrakter det som et endetidstegn at øl blir mer verdt enn musikk. (ABC Nyheter:) I sommer har debatten om musikkens fremtid, vilkår og verdi tatt fatt igjen. Den svenske streamingtjenesten Spotify tilbyr både gratis, reklameavbrudt lytting og abonnement. Det kan uansett være gode grunner til å reflektere over hva streamingtjenestene innebærer, også utover den umiddelbare situasjonen med minimale inntekter for opphavsmenn og selskaper. Det har vært påpekt at streaming kan ha et potensiale som kan sammenlignes med omsetningen av innspilt musikk da den var på toppen, for fem år siden. Men det fortsatt uklart hvilke andre konsekvenser det har for selve musikken at den finnes i et slikt omfang, bare tastetrykk unna. Ender vi som mer aktive eller mer passive musikklyttere i streamingæraen?
biologist and computer scientist discover the 'anternet' | School of Engineering A collaboration between a Stanford ant biologist and a computer scientist has revealed that the behavior of harvester ants as they forage for food mirrors the protocols that control traffic on the Internet. On the surface, ants and the Internet don't seem to have much in common. But two Stanford researchers have discovered that a species of harvester ants determine how many foragers to send out of the nest in much the same way that Internet protocols discover how much bandwidth is available for the transfer of data. The researchers are calling it the "anternet." Deborah Gordon, a biology professor at Stanford, has been studying ants for more than 20 years. When she figured out how the harvester ant colonies she had been observing in Arizona decided when to send out more ants to get food, she called across campus to Balaji Prabhakar, a professor of computer science at Stanford and an expert on how files are transferred on a computer network. Harvester ants.
Islamofobi og antisemittisme - tvillingideologier I denne artikkelen vil jeg vise hvordan den ideverdenen som selverklært kalles ”islamkritikk” sammenfaller med antisemittismens ideverden. Men først vil jeg grunngi hvorfor det å sammenstille disse ideene ikke bare er legitimt men også nødvendig. Aldri mer Holocaust Etter 2. De aller fleste elever kjenner både begrepet Holocaust og hovedtrekkene i hvordan dette artet seg i form av konsentrasjonsleire, gasskamre og forbrenningsovner. Empati og moralsk avstandtakelse er nødvendig men ikke tilstrekkelig som politisk vaksinering mot nye Holocaust. Forståelsen av hvorfor jødehatet kunne blomstre så sterkt i store deler av Europa i denne tida er også svært begrensa. Nå er jeg heller ikke av den oppfatninga at slik detaljkunnskap bør forutsettes fra elevene når de går ut av ungdomsskolen. Konkret kunnskap om den forestillingsverdenen som levde og florerte i Europa før 2. Forfølgelse og i verste fall folkemord har også ramma, og kan også ramme, andre folkegrupper og religiøse minoriteter.