Virtual composer makes beautiful music—and stirs controversy

When most of us think about a machine composing musical pieces, we think of primitive songs coming out of a HAL 9000 that could be suitable for a child's toy, but nothing that music lovers would actually enjoy. That's because most of us haven't heard of Emily Howell. No, that's not a person—it's the name of a computer program written by University of California, Santa Cruz professor David Cope that, after nearly three decades of work, is about to release, uh, "her" first CD through Centaur Records.


ars technica

Microchip in the Eye Seeks to Restore Vision

A chip inside the eye that can help blind people see again is moving closer to reality as researchers at MIT work on a retinal implant that can bypass damaged cells and directly offer visual input to the brain.

Wired

The Future of Smoking

Have you heard of the "E-Cigarette"? If you haven't and you're a smoker or even a non-smoker, you're seriously missing out! It looks like a cigarette, feels like a cigarette, taste like a cigarette, but isn't! It's so much more! The E-Cigarette is really the healthier future of smoking. This high-tech electronic smoking device provides the nicotine you crave, in a completely non harmful manner! Non-harmful to yourself and to others around you!

The Future of Smoking

Thanks to Jonathan for this gem

Addicted to the Internet?

http://netaddictionrecovery.blogspot.com/

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The rest from Nicholas Carr

Blogging begins turnaround for homeless woman

It may have a fairy tale ending -- a story of perseverance and second chances that's playing out live on the public stage of online networking.

Brianna Karp's trailer now sits outside a friend's home near Los Angeles

But 24-year-old Brianna Karp's story started as a nightmare.

In a rocky economy, Karp was laid off from her Irvine, California, job as an executive assistant in July 2008.

She got by for a while on temp jobs and unemployment benefits. But when her savings dried up, she was no longer able to afford her rent.

The only answer she saw then was a trailer she'd inherited from her father -- a man she barely knew who had recently committed suicide.

"I was left with a truck and this camper, which I was going to sell but coincidentally this happened to me," she said. "I thought, 'Well, I have this.' "

Karp, who writes that she is also estranged from her mother, ended up camped in a Los Angeles-area Walmart parking lot.

CNN.com

Digital contacts will keep an eye on your vital signs

Forget about 20/20.

"Perfect" vision could be redefined by gadgets that give you the eyes of a cyborg.The tech industry calls the digital enrichment of the physical world "augmented reality." Such technology is already appearing in smartphones and toys, and enthusiasts dream of a pair of glasses we could don to enhance our everyday perception. But why stop there?

Scientists, eye surgeons, professors and students at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens containing one built-in LED, powered wirelessly with radio frequency waves.

Eventually, more advanced versions of the lens could be used to provide a wealth of information, such as virtual captions scrolling beneath every person or object you see. Significantly, it could also be used to monitor your own vital signs, such as body temperature and blood glucose level.

CNN.com

Wikipedia’s Rapid Reaction to Outburst During Obama Speech

If journalism is the first draft of history, what is a Wikipedia entry when it is updated within minutes of an event to reflect changes in a person’s biography?

The New York Times

A new Turing test

IF A computer could fool a person into thinking that he were interacting with another person rather than a machine, then it could be classified as having artificial intelligence. That, at least, was the test proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, a British mathematician. Turing envisaged a typed exchange between machine and person, so that a genuine conversation could happen without the much harder problem of voice emulation having to be addressed.

More recently, the abilities of computers to play games such as chess, go and bridge has been regarded as a form of artificial intelligence. But the latest effort to use machines to emulate the way people interact with one another focuses neither on natural languages nor traditional board and card games. Rather, it concentrates on that icon of modernity, the shoot-’em-up computer game.

Economist.com

Cell Phone Radiation: Top 10 Best and Worst

The Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, thinks you should know. To make things easy, this week the group released a list ranking more than 1,000 cell phones according to the radiation levels they emit.

Questions regarding health risks associated with cell phone radiation have persisted for years. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has stated that scientific evidence does not indicate negative health outcomes from exposure to radio frequency energy from cell phones.

But the Environmental Working Group disagrees.

ABC News