Bob Dylan At 77
The musician turned 77 this year, a similar age to many of the artists who recently have announced retirement such as Neil Diamond, Joan Baez, Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Paul Simon. Even though Dylan hasn’t so much as hinted at ending his career, it’s difficult not to take his line as some sort of protest when he sings‚ “I ain’t dead yet.” …Read More
‘We Want To Use Music To Create Better People’ — Philadelphia’s Project 440
Writers Union: Canadian Writers Earn 27 Percent Less Than Three Years Ago
World’s first full-body medical scanner generates astonishing 3D images New Atlas
A First? Digital Avatar Stars In Ballet
Why Silicon Valley Tech Giants Are Drawn To China’s Future
China’s rise as a tech powerhouse has dovetailed with Silicon Valley’s growing, and often vividly expressed, distrust toward democracy itself. Always steeped in libertarian pique—not long ago, technologists expressed hope for floating ad-hoc nation-states or, as Larry Page put it, referencing Burning Man, “some safe places where we can try out some new things”— Silicon Valley now toys with Californian secessionism and Singapore-style authoritarian technocracy. That new horizon, that place of raucous experimentation with a frontier-like possibility at striking it rich, they believe, is in China. … Read More
The Music of the Algorithms: Tune-ing Up Creativity with Artificial Intelligence – In this article, Alan Rothman engages us with significant insights into how the music business is using artificially intelligent music composers, producers and performers that challenge the boundaries of intellectual property and human versus AI musical production. Rothman offers perspective and resources that address whether the dawn of new music produced by AI is upon us, what are the consequences for the artists, the consumers, and the legal system that may be called up to deal with conflicts that will invariably arise.
Imagine if an alien came to earth and told us some new scientific fact that no human had ever known. Artificial intelligence is starting to do just that. Computers and AI have long given us solutions to problems that humans could not have worked out for themselves but AI is going beyond optimization to tell us facts about the world that no one suspected. Eric Topol on twitter points us to a paper in Nature that used deep learning to analyze retinal images to predict heart disease–it’s long been known that this can be done which is one reason why ophthalmologists take a close look at your retinas when fitting lenses but not surprisingly the AI can see more than can ophthalmologists. What was surprising, however, was that the AI could also tell gender from retinal images, a fact no one had ever previously considered! As asummary notes:
…that information in a retinal image can be used for the prediction of a person’s gender is surprising and puzzling. This underscores the potential of artificial intelligence to revolutionize the way medicine is practiced and to help discover hidden associations.
The World Cities Culture Report 2018 is now available for download here.
“Launched today at the 2018 World Cities Culture Summit in San Francisco, the World Cities Culture Report 2018, supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, is the most comprehensive report ever published about culture and the role it plays in shaping life in major cities worldwide.