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"music" entries
Infographics Game, Streaming Money, Robot Interviews, and Inefficient Science Funding
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Metrico — puzzle game for Playstation centered around infographics (charts and graphs). (via Flowing Data)
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The Lease They Can Do (Business Week) — excellent Paul Ford piece on money, law, and music streaming services. So this is not about technology. Nor is it really about music. This is about determining the optimal strategy for mass licensing of digital artifacts.
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How Effective Is a Humanoid Robot as a Tool for Interviewing Young Children? (PLosONE) — The results reveal that the children interacted with KASPAR very similar to how they interacted with a human interviewer. The quantitative behaviour analysis reveal that the most notable difference between the interviews with KASPAR and the human were the duration of the interviews, the eye gaze directed towards the different interviewers, and the response time of the interviewers. These results are discussed in light of future work towards developing KASPAR as an ‘interviewer’ for young children in application areas where a robot may have advantages over a human interviewer, e.g. in police, social services, or healthcare applications.
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Funding: Australia’s Grant System Wastes Time (Nature, paywalled) — We found that scientists in Australia spent more than five centuries’ worth of time preparing research-grant proposals for consideration by the largest funding scheme of 2012. Because just 20.5% of these applications were successful, the equivalent of some four centuries of effort returned no immediate benefit to researchers.
Indiepocalypse Continued, Unblockable p2p Twitter, Disposable Satellites, and iOS to HTML5
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Indiepocalypse: Harlem Shake Edition (Andy Baio) — “After four weeks topping the Billboard Hot 100, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop” was replaced this week by Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” the song that inspired the Internet meme.”
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SplinterNet — an Android app designed to create an unblockable Twitter like network that uses no cellular or Internet communications. All messages are transmitted over Bluetooth between users, creating a true peer-to-peer messaging system. All messages are anonymous to prevent retaliation by government authorities. (via Ushahidi)
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Disposable Satellites (Forbes) — “tiny, near-disposable satellites for use in getting battlefield surveillance quickly […] launched from a jet into orbit, and within a few minutes […] provide soldiers on the ground with a zoomed-in, birds-eye view of the battlefield. Those image would be transmitted to current communications devices, and the company is working to develop a way to transmit them to smartphones, as well.”
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Native iOS to HTML5 Porting Tool (Intel) — essentially a source-to-source translator that can handle a number of conversions from Objective-C into JavaScript/HTML5 including the translation of APIs calls. A number of open source projects are used as foundation for the conversion including a modified version of Clang front-end, LayerD framework and jQuery Mobile for widgets rendering in the translated source code. A porting aid, not a complete translator but a lot of the dog work is done. Requires one convert to Microsoft tools, however. (via Kevin Marks)
Cheap Attack Drones, Truth Filters, Where Musicians Make Money, and Dynamic Pricing From Digitized Analogue Signals
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Chinese Attack UAV (Alibaba) — Small attack UAV is characterized with small size, light weight, convenient carrying, rapid outfield expansion procedure, easy operation and maintenance; the system only needs 2-3 operators to operate, can be carried by surveillance personnel to complete the attack mission. (via BoingBoing)
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TruthTeller Prototype (Washington Post) — speech-to-text, then matches statements against known facts to identify truth/falsehoods. Still a prototype but I love that, in addition to the Real Time Coupon Specials From Hot Singles Near You mobile advertising lens, there might be a truth lens that technology helps us apply to the world around us.
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Money from Music: Survey Evidence on Musicians’ Revenue and Lessons About Copyright Incentives — 5,000 American musicians surveyed, For most musicians, copyright does not provide much of a direct financial reward for what they are producing currently. The survey findings are instead consistent with a winner-take-all or superstar model in which copyright motivates musicians through the promise of large rewards in the future in the rare event of wide popularity. This conclusion is not unfamiliar, but this article is the first to support it with empirical evidence on musicians’ revenue. (via TechDirt)
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Max Levchin’s DLD13 Keynote — I believe the next big wave of opportunities exists in centralized processing of data gathered from primarily analog systems. […] There is also a neat symmetry to this analog-to-digtail transformation — enabling centralization of unique analog capacities. As soon as the general public is ready for it, many things handled by a human at the edge of consumption will be controlled by the best currently available human at the center of the system, real time sensors bringing the necessary data to them in real time.
Kenyan Entrepreneur, Spooky Open Source, Typing Tutor, and Hacker's Bagpipes
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Kenyan Women Create Their Own Geek Culture (NPR) — Oguya started spending some Saturday mornings with Colaco and other women, snipping code and poring through hacker cookbooks. These informal gatherings became the Akirachix. Oguya graduated and turned her mobile phone idea into a company called M-Farm. At 25 years old, she now has a staff of 18. And 7,000 African farmers use her app.
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Ozone Widget Framework (Github) — open source webapp integrator. The Ozone Widget Framework is released to the public as Open Source Software, because it’s the Right Thing To Do. Also, it was required by Section 924 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Spook-made, citizen played.
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gtypist — open source universal typing tutor. You can learn correct typing and improve your skills by practising its exercises on a regular basis.
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Open Source Hardware Bagpipes — to practice your fingerings without actually killing the neighbours. (via Hacked Gadgets)
Hologram Headliners, Javascript Stack, HTML to PDF, and Software Defined Networking
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Tupac Coachella Behind the Technology (CBS) — interesting to me is Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were considering taking Shakur with them on tour. Just as Hobbit, Tintin, etc. are CG-ing characters to look normal, is the future of “live” spectacle to be this kind of CG show? Will new acts be competing against the Rolling Stones forever?
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Javascript All The Way Down (Alex Russell) — points out that we’re fixing so much like compatibility, performance, accessibility, all this stuff with Javascript. We’re moving further and further from declarative programming and more and more back to the days of writing heaps of Xlib or Motif toolkit code to implement our UIs and apps.
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wkhtmltopdf (Google Code) — Simple shell utility to convert html to pdf using the webkit rendering engine, and qt. My first piece of “I wrote this, now you can use it too” open source was an HTML to PS converter (this was 1994 or so) via LaTeX. It’s a useful thing, no really.
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Nicira (Wired) — moving network management into software so the network hardware is as dumb as possible. Interesting continuation of the End-to-End principle, whereby smarts live at the edges of the network and the conduits are dumb.
Healthcare Ain't Silicon Valley, Math for Makers, Open Source Musician Tools, and Learn to Make Languages
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Five Tough Lessons I Had To Learn About Healthcare (Andy Oram) — I don’t normally link to things from Radar but this gels 110% with my limited experience with the healthcare industry.
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Makematics: Math for Makers — I want the hardware hackers who are building the next generation of DIY 3D printers to be able to turn topological algorithms and concepts into open source tool path generation software that creates more efficient gcode and enables the fabrication of previously impossible physical forms. I don’t know the best way to go about this, but this site is intended to act as home for my experiments.
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CASH Music — they build open source tools for musicians and labels to make money. What WordPress did for bloggers, we’re doing for musicians. (via New York Times)
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PL101: Create Your Own Programming Language — you’ll build it in Javascript as you learn how programming languages and compilers work. It’ll run on AppEngine and be hosted on GitHub.
Open Access, Retro Crypto, Open Source Q&A, and Music Visualization
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Open Access Week — a global event promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research.
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The Copiale Cipher — cracking a historical code with computers. Details in the paper: The book describes the initiation of “DER CANDIDAT” into a secret society, some functions of which are encoded with logograms. (via Discover Magazine)
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Coordino — open source Quota-like question-and-answer software. (via Smashing Magazine)
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Baroque.me — visualization of the first prelude from the first Cello Suite by Bach. Music is notoriously difficult to visualize (Disney’s Fantasia is the earliest attempt that I know of) as there is so much it’s possible to capture. (via Andy Baio)
Library Licensing, Mac Graphics, Coal Computing, and Human Augmentation
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Just Say No To Freegal — an interesting view from the inside, speaking out against a music licensing system called Freegal which is selling to libraries. Libraries typically buy one copy of something, and then lend it out to multiple users sequentially, in order to get a good return on investment. Participating in a product like Freegal means that we’re not lending anymore, we’re buying content for users to own permanently so they don’t have to pay the vendor directly themselves. This puts us in direct competition with the vendor’s sales directly to consumers, and the vendors will never make more money off of libraries than they will off of direct consumer sales. What that does is put libraries in a position of being economic victims of our own success. I would think that libraries would remember this lesson from our difficulties with the FirstSearch pay-per-use model that most of us found to be unsustainable.
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Radi — a Mac app that can produce pretty much any kind of visual content for the web. Images, animations, vector graphics, video clips, realtime visual effects, JavaScript programming…. (via Hacker News)
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Cost of Computing in Coal (Benjamin Mako Hill) — back-of-the-envelope estimation of the carbon costs of running an overnight multicore Amazon number-crunching job. Thinking about the environmental costs of your crappy coding might change the way you code, much as punched cards encouraged you to model and test the program by hand before you ran it. How many tons of coal are burnt to support laziness or a lack of optimization in my software?
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Friction in Computer Human Symbiosis (Palantir blog) — Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process. (via Tim O’Reilly)
Eliza Aftermath, Open Textbook, Crowdsourcing Music Fingerprinting, Singularity Skepticism
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Eliza pt 3 — delightful recapitulation of the reaction to Eliza and Weizenbaum’s reaction to that reaction, including his despair over the students he taught at MIT. Weizenbaum wrote therein of his students at MIT, which was of course all about science and technology. He said that they “have already rejected all ways but the scientific to come to know the world, and [they] seek only a deeper, more dogmatic indoctrination in that faith (although that word is no longer in their vocabulary).”
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Computer Vision Models — textbook written in the open for public review. (via Hacker News)
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Echoprint — open source and open data music fingerprinting service from MusicBrainz and others. I find it interesting that doing something new with music data requires crowdsourcing because nobody has the full set.
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Three Arguments Against The Singularity (Charlie Stross) — We clearly want machines that perform human-like tasks. We want computers that recognize our language and motivations and can take hints, rather than requiring instructions enumerated in mind-numbingly tedious detail. But whether we want them to be conscious and volitional is another question entirely. I don’t want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today. I don’t want my robot housekeeper to spend all its time in front of the TV watching contact sports or music videos. And I certainly don’t want to be sued for maintenance by an abandoned software development project.
PC in JS, Musical Visualization, S3 Parallel, and Tech-led Ed
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PC Emulator in Javascript — days later and it’s mindboggling.
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US Home Prices as Opera (Flowing Data) — reminded me of Douglas Adams’s “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” which has software that turns your company’s performance numbers into music. The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged sounding like the Dead March from “Saul”, but in Japan they went for it like a pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company anthems that started well, but if you were going to criticise you’d probably say that they tended to get a bit loud and squeaky at the end.
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s3cmd Parallel — command-line tool with parallel uploads to s3. (via Nelson Minar)
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Eight of China’s Top Nine Government Officials are Scientists (Singularity Hub) — the article’s idiotic reduction to performance on standardised tests misses America’s primary strength against China, namely creative and flexible workforce. China will get there, but it’s not there yet.