Lifeboat Foundation

Video-sharing platform, YouTube, is to start cracking down on AI clones of musicians, giving music labels the ability to take down content.

There are examples of this type of design all over the city, some by private companies, and others by the city itself.

Ruby’s saga — ryan james carr // working for the man — aesyme.

Continue reading “‘Hostile Architecture’ has many purposes, but should it be used against NYC’s most vulnerable?” »

Researchers have discovered that patterns of activity in our neurons are more influenced by the shape of the brain – its grooves, contours, and folds – than by its complex interconnections. ⁠

“The conventional view is that specific thoughts or sensations elicit activity in specific parts of the brain. However, our study reveals structured patterns of activity across nearly the entire brain, relating to thoughts and sensations in much the same way that a musical note arises from vibrations occurring along the entire length of a violin string, not just an isolated segment.”⁠

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Continue reading “Have we got the brain all wrong? Study shows its shape is more important than its wiring” »

If you’ve ever drizzled honey on a piece of toast, you’ve noticed how the amber liquid folds and coils in on itself as it hits the toast. The same thing can happen with 3D and 4D printing if the print nozzle is too far from the printing substrate. Harvard scientists have taken a page from the innovative methods of abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock —aka the “splatter master”—to exploit the underlying physics rather than try to control it to significantly speed up the process, according to a new paper published in the journal Soft Matter. With the help of machine learning, the authors were able to decorate a cookie with chocolate syrup to demonstrate the viability of their new approach.

As reported previously, Pollock early on employed a “flying filament” or “flying catenary” technique before he perfected his dripping methods. The paint forms various viscous filaments that are thrown against a vertical canvas. The dripping technique involved laying a canvas flat on the floor and then pouring paint on top of it. Sometimes, he poured it directly from a can; sometimes he used a stick, knife, or brush; and sometimes he used a syringe. The artist usually “rhythmically” moved around the canvas as he worked. His style has long fascinated physicists, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding the question of whether or not Pollock’s paintings show evidence of fractal patterns.

Back in 2011, Harvard mathematician Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan collaborated with art historian Claude Cernuschi on an article for Physics Today examining Pollock’s use of a “coiling instability” in his paintings. The study mathematically describes how a viscous fluid folds onto itself like a coiling rope—just like pouring cold maple syrup on pancakes.

Music for pain relief and anxiety. I think somewhere else I read it helps heal brain injuries.

Further, subject-preferred music appears to induce a superior effect in relieving pain. This can be approached by allowing participants to select the most pleasant music from a prespecified list of songs or listen to their favorite music during the study. Nevertheless, the richness of emotions, meanings, and associations involved when listening to favorite music is poorly understood, especially regarding pain relief.

About the study

Continue reading “Study finds pleasurable music and ‘chills’ predict music-induced hypoalgesia” »

Gaming is a $193 billion industry — nearly double the size of the film and music industries combined — and there are around three billion gamers worldwide. While online gaming can improve wellbeing and foster social relations, privacy and awareness issues could potentially offset these benefits and cause real harm to gamers.

The new study, by scientists at Aalto University’s Department of Computer Science, reveals potentially questionable data collection practices in online games, along with misconceptions and concerns about privacy among players. The study also offers risk mitigation strategies for players and design recommendations for game developers to improve privacy in online games.

‘We had two supporting lines of inquiry in this study: what players think about games, and what games are really up to with respect to privacy,’ says Janne Lindqvist, associate professor of computer science at Aalto. ‘It was really surprising to us how nuanced the considerations of gamers were. For example, participants said that, to protect their privacy, they would avoid using voice chat in games unless it was absolutely necessary. Our game analysis revealed that some games try to nudge people to reveal their online identities by offering things like virtual rewards.’

Something good about AI.

Sitting down with Bill gates to see how AI can be also be used for something good!

Continue reading “Can AI really save the World? ft. Bill Gates” »

“There is this kind of power the images have. It really isn’t from us. We’re creating the context in which you can appreciate them, but we’re not forcing it,” Kahn said.

In the background, award-winning actress Michelle Williams narrates what we see, which, Kahn admits, was a bit of a deviation from his usual filmmaking blueprint.

“Many of my films are done just through putting together interviews with people or encounters with people,” he said. Or in other words, there is no doctored narrative.

The Georgia Institute of Technology course teaches engineering students to create art using brainwaves, either their own or someone else’s.

An uncanny course is being taught in the halls of the Georgia Institute of Technology. While the course, called Arts and Geometry, itself isn’t uncanny, it’s the distinct approach taken by the professor that is making waves, literally and figuratively.

The course teaches engineering students to create art using brainwaves, either their own or someone else’s. When the ions and neurons go about their business inside our brains, brainwaves are created in a pattern of electrical activity in the brain.