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"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." -- Marshall McLuhan, 1969 |
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Topic: Science |
12:43 pm EST, Mar 17, 2003 |
Move your mouse over any element in the table to learn more about it. The Haiku field will have either a 'Y' or an 'N' to indicate if that element has a haiku associated with it. Click on the element to open a pop-up window and read the haiku. For ease of use, a "flattened" table of all elements is below the periodic Table. You can click on an element name there to view the haiku associated with it there as well. Additionally, there is a link for browsers that do not support javascript for the pop-up window Haiku Periodic Table |
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All Your Singles Are Hits To Us |
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Topic: Music |
7:36 pm EST, Mar 16, 2003 |
Polyphonic HMI has developed Hit Song Science, an artificial intelligence application that helps music labels determine the hit potential of music prior to its release. The new application is to music what x-rays are to medicine, allowing labels to see mathematical patterns and structures in music that until now have been hidden. ... Polyphonic also has begun to experiment with the technology at the production level of music creation. From Jeremy: There are two possible futures here, and neither is particularly bright for traditional artists and their fans. 1) However impossible it may have seemed before, "pop" music takes a still further dive into homogeneity. Frustated by the turn of events, smart mobs of teens with angst deliberately seek out the rejects, and the new genre of "unpop" is born. It all begins with dumpster diving for discarded hard drives in the alleys behind recording studios. 2) This software is truly as amazing as the hype suggests. In the future, your embedded biocomputer will let you "sample" new music, instantaneously filling you with the emotional impact of an hour's worth of listening to the album. If you like the feeling, you'll buy the album. Shortly thereafter, people will cut the audio out of the loop entirely; instead, already overstimulated teens will flock to Tower Records to pick up the new "essence of post-Britney." Think of it as a kind of digitally encoded musical perfume. Recording studios rapidly evolve into urban laboratories for neurochemistry and bioinformatics. Eye candy and gangstas are replaced as pop stars by thirty-something MD-PhDs who seem more interested in patenting their instruments than copyrighting their music. --- /me wonders if he is still under a NDA to talk about some of the things that were going on at a previous job.. All Your Singles Are Hits To Us |
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Special Force - Islamist Video Game |
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Topic: Games |
7:04 pm EST, Mar 16, 2003 |
] Beginning, we must say that we cannot seriously talk ] about Arab Electronic Games, since this sort of games ] is unavailable in the market. If there were some, they would ] rather be simple, sloppy, and unable to meet the ambition of ] the young generation, where it can present a 3D game that ] converses with the reality and draws ahead a picture of a ] complete world via which a young man can move, as happens ] in the foreign games. ] ] This gap is one of the gaps that face Arab programming ] production. This gab must not be underestimated and it heads ] the top of the Arab programmers agenda. These programmers ] give priority fairly to other grave issues they are ] working on, trying to find solutions for them, especially ] that which concerns the great development of worlds ] programming, which requires updates via exerted huge efforts, ] where Arab programmers seem unable to exert, due to the lack ] of the possibilities. ] ] Ahead of this Arab weakness, there was a continuous ] American-western attack on our boys. There are different ] types of games their hands can reach everyday amongst who ] some can be considered as scandalous by all means, such as ] that game in which a player destroys the terrorist camps ] that were established by the terrorist organizations in the ] south of Lebanon! ] ] Ahead of this two-complicated-trends reality, western attack ] and Arab defeat. It was necessary to oppose this problem via ] one of two solutions: banning these games exclusively, ] knowing this issue is not possible since some of its aspects ] are illogic, or working towards the opposite direction by ] finding an alternative issue that can offer fun to our ] boys . In addition, this presents games, which can suite ] our reality and does not crash against the moderm and ] struggling values of our nation. So Hizbullah has released a video game.. Its a windows platform first person shooter. It appears to be available for download here. Special Force - Islamist Video Game |
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The darkest side of ID theft |
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Topic: Miscellaneous |
6:35 pm EST, Mar 16, 2003 |
] This is the worst-case scenario for identity theft ] victims. Losing your clean credit history is one thing; ] losing your freedom is another. And victims of America's ] fastest-growing crime are discovering they often have ] much more to worry about than the hundreds of hours of ] paperwork necessary to clean up the financial mess ] associated with ID theft. Sometimes, they have to worry ] about ending up in jail again and again. The darkest side of ID theft |
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U.S. Missteps Led to Failed Diplomacy (washingtonpost.com) |
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Topic: War on Terrorism |
4:20 am EST, Mar 16, 2003 |
] Six months after President Bush first appeared before the ] United Nations and urged a confrontation with Iraq, the ] United States appears to have lost diplomatic ground, not ] gained it, leaving it in a precarious international ] position as it prepares to launch a war. Bush runs his house evil villan style. Take the Azores summit coming up as example. Has a sort of James Bond vibe to it all. And you know Bush is the type of guy who spent more brain cycles thinking about the villans in all those movies.. Maybe the bond girls, but most defintally not bond. I envision him doing that Dr. Evil pinky thing.. Ok, maybe not.. But I'm sure at these meetings Bush does all the talking.. Mostly telling what he wants to happen.. You know, CEO style.. That was his stich when he first got into office, wasn't it? And then we got Dick running the country from the switchboard in his bunker 500ft underground.. They really _do_ have that Hollywood movie global villan org vibe to them. I can picture Bush bumping coke and watching those movies with his frat buddies, smiling and thinking to himself, "some day.. some day.. I'll do it right.." U.S. Missteps Led to Failed Diplomacy (washingtonpost.com) |
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Creative Loafing Atlanta | COVER | THE BRAIN OF THE FUTURE |
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Topic: Science |
2:18 am EST, Mar 16, 2003 |
] On the one hand, there is a medical phenomenon growing ] out of Kennedy's work. His electrodes could enable ] patients frozen by disease or injury to circumvent the ] spinal cord, re-establishing a decent range of speech and ] motion. So far, three of Kennedy's six implantees have ] learned to move a cursor across a computer screen and ] spell words just by thinking about it. Creative Loafing Atlanta | COVER | THE BRAIN OF THE FUTURE |
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Emerging Technology: Who Loves Ya, Baby? |
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Topic: Software Development |
9:11 pm EST, Mar 15, 2003 |
This feature article by Steven Johnson appears in the April 2003 issue of Discover magazine. It's about Valdis Krebs and his InFlow software for visualization of social networks. Emerging Technology: Who Loves Ya, Baby? |
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China's New Leaders Try to Change Tack (washingtonpost.com) |
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Topic: Current Events |
5:23 pm EST, Mar 15, 2003 |
] Wen Jiabao spent Chinese New Year's Eve in a coal mine ] sharing dumplings with miners. Hu Jintao spent the night ] shivering with herders in Inner Mongolia. ] ] There was a dual message: We care, and we're different ] from Jiang Zemin, the departing Chinese leader. ] ] Hu became China's president today, appointed by the ] rubber-stamp legislature. Wen will become premier on ] Sunday in the smoothest transfer of power in Communist ] China's 54-year history. But their crowning glory will be ] overshadowed by China's current president, Jiang, who ] today held onto his post as head of the army, ] guaranteeing him continued influence in Beijing. China has to urbanize about a billion people.. These are the guys that are going to lead that. China's New Leaders Try to Change Tack (washingtonpost.com) |
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Topic: Local Information |
4:58 pm EST, Mar 15, 2003 |
"After the collapse of communism, the KGB was broken up into five separate agencies, but it was not fully disbanded nor was the successor organizations' mode of operation seriously reformed. Now President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative, is reassembling the dreaded Soviet secret police. The president announced that two former KGB agencies, the Federal Border Service and Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information, will be reintegrated with the main KGB successor agency, the FSB." ----------------------------------------------------------------- From Jello: Now the FSB regulates elections as well... I think Putin will be president of the RF for life (or close to it), whether he gets an amendment passed to grant him a third term, or not. I actually know some monarchists that prey this happens. KGB: Big, Bad and Back? |
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Email as Spectroscopy [PDF] |
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Topic: Society |
4:41 pm EST, Mar 15, 2003 |
We describe a methodology for the automatic identification of communities of practice from email logs within an organization. We use a betweeness centrality algorithm that can rapidly find communities within a graph representing information flows. We apply this algorithm to an email corpus of nearly one million messages collected over a two-month span, and show that the method is effective at identifying true communities, both formal and informal, within these scale-free graphs. This approach also enables the identification of leadership roles within the communities. Email as Spectroscopy [PDF] |
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