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Sep 30, 2023

I Robot/I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You — The Alan Parsons Project

Posted by in categories: business, entertainment, media & arts, robotics/AI, space

The instrumental title track “I Robot”, together with the successful single “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You”, form the opening of “I Robot”, a progressive rock album recorded by The Alan Parsons Project and engineered by Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson in 1977. It was released by Arista Records in 1977 and re-released on CD in 1984 and 2007. It was intended to be based on the “I, Robot” stories written by Isaac Asimov, and actually Woolfson spoke with Asimov, who was enthusiastic about the concept. However, as the rights had already been granted to a TV/movie company, the album’s title was altered slightly by removing the comma, and the theme and lyrics were made to be more generically about robots rather than specific to the Asimov universe. The cover inlay reads: “I ROBOT… HE STORY OF THE RISE OF THE MACHINE AND THE DECLINE OF MAN, WHICH PARADOXICALLY COINCIDED WITH HIS DISCOVERY OF THE WHEEL… ND A WARNING THAT HIS BRIEF DOMINANCE OF THIS PLANET WILL PROBABLY END, BECAUSE MAN TRIED TO CREATE ROBOT IN HIS OWN IMAGE.” The Alan Parsons Project were a British progressive rock band, active between 1975 and 1990, founded by Eric Woolfson and Alan Parsons. Englishman Alan Parsons (born 20 December 1948) met Scotsman Eric Norman Woolfson (18 March 1945 — 2 December 2009) in the canteen of Abbey Road Studios in the summer of 1974. Parsons had already acted as assistant engineer on The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” and “Let It Be”, had recently engineered Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side Of The Moon”, and had produced several acts for EMI Records. Woolfson, a songwriter and composer, was working as a session pianist, and he had also composed material for a concept album idea based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Parsons asked Woolfson to become his manager and Woolfson managed Parsons’ career as a producer and engineer through a string of successes including Pilot, Steve Harley, Cockney Rebel, John Miles, Al Stewart, Ambrosia and The Hollies. Parsons commented at the time that he felt frustrated in having to accommodate the views of some of the musicians, which he felt interfered with his production. Woolfson came up with the idea of making an album based on developments in the film industry, where directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick were the focal point of the film’s promotion, rather than individual film stars. If the film industry was becoming a director’s medium, Woolfson felt the music business might well become a producer’s medium. Recalling his earlier Edgar Allan Poe material, Woolfson saw a way to combine his and Parsons’ respective talents. Parsons would produce and engineer songs written by the two, and The Alan Parsons Project was born. This channel is dedicated to the classic rock hits that have become part of the history of our culture. The incredible AOR tracks that define music from the late 60s, the 70s and the early 80s… lassic Rock is here!

Check out my newer music videos and other fun stuff at:
www.youtube.com/djbuddylove3000

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Sep 30, 2023

These Adorable Jellyfish Show Learning Doesn’t Even Require a Brain

Posted by in categories: biological, neuroscience

Tiny, brainless jellyfish just did something that on the surface may seem impossible: the adorable creatures showed evidence of learning.

Even with just 1,000 neurons active at a time and no central brain, Caribbean box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) can learn from experience, researchers argue in a new paper published September 22 in the journal Current Biology. The results aren’t surprising, say several scientists not involved in the project, but are a reminder for people to think more broadly about learning.

“If you’re an animal and have to navigate the world, you have to learn cues and consequences. Otherwise you’re dead, and you can’t reproduce,” says Christie Sahley, a… More.

Continue reading “These Adorable Jellyfish Show Learning Doesn’t Even Require a Brain” »

Sep 30, 2023

Researchers extract audio from still images and silent videos

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, robotics/AI

What if you could hear photos? Impossible, right? Not anymore – with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, researchers can now get audio from photos and silent videos.

Academics from four US universities have teamed up to develop a technique called Side Eye that can extract audio from static photos and silent – or muted – videos.

The technique targets the image stabilization technology that is now virtually standard across most modern smartphones.

Sep 30, 2023

Striking rare gold: Researchers unveil new material infused with gold in an exotic chemical state

Posted by in categories: chemistry, particle physics, solar power, sustainability

For the first time, Stanford researchers have found a way to create and stabilize an extremely rare form of gold that has lost two negatively charged electrons, denoted Au2+. The material stabilizing this elusive version of the valued element is a halide perovskite—a class of crystalline materials that holds great promise for various applications including more-efficient solar cells, light sources, and electronics components.

Surprisingly, the Au2+ is also quick and simple to make using off-the-shelf ingredients at .

“It was a real surprise that we were able to synthesize a stable material containing Au2+ —I didn’t even believe it at first,” said Hemamala Karunadasa, associate professor of chemistry at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and senior author of the study published Aug. 28 in Nature Chemistry. “Creating this first-of-its-kind Au2+ perovskite is exciting. The in the perovskite bear strong similarities to the copper atoms in high-temperature superconductors, and heavy atoms with unpaired electrons, like Au2+, show cool magnetic effects not seen in lighter atoms.”

Sep 30, 2023

Everything you need know about the upcoming Apple Car

Posted by in category: transportation

There’s still a lot of mystery surrounding the Apple Car but we know a few things about it, including the fact it won’t be cheap.

Sep 30, 2023

DaVinci Resolve 18

Posted by in categories: business, computing

I have to share this because it is a gem. My Kenyan business is gemstones 🙄 because Kenya is not far from Tanzanite. Anyways, here is free software for all you video creators. If you want to pay for it, it is $300 for the studio version. The same company also makes hardware for color correction, so you don’t drag a mouse you twist knobs.


Professional video editing, color correction, visual effects and audio post production all in a single application. Free and paid versions for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Sep 30, 2023

AI language models can exceed PNG and FLAC in lossless compression, says study

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

Effective compression is about finding patterns to make data smaller without losing information. When an algorithm or model can accurately guess the next piece of data in a sequence, it shows it’s good at spotting these patterns. This links the idea of making good guesses—which is what large language models like GPT-4 do very well —to achieving good compression.

In an arXiv research paper titled “Language Modeling Is Compression,” researchers detail their discovery that the DeepMind large language model (LLM) called Chinchilla 70B can perform lossless compression on image patches from the ImageNet image database to 43.4 percent of their original size, beating the PNG algorithm, which compressed the same data to 58.5 percent. For audio, Chinchilla compressed samples from the LibriSpeech audio data set to just 16.4 percent of their raw size, outdoing FLAC compression at 30.3 percent.

In this case, lower numbers in the results mean more compression is taking place. And lossless compression means that no data is lost during the compression process. It stands in contrast to a lossy compression technique like JPEG, which sheds some data and reconstructs some of the data with approximations during the decoding process to significantly reduce file sizes.

Sep 30, 2023

Are robot waiters the future of the restaurant industry?

Posted by in categories: futurism, robotics/AI

The robot industry is expected to grow significantly in the coming years and with AI powering these machines they are to shape the future.

Sep 30, 2023

ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

Posted by in categories: education, robotics/AI

The narrative around cheating students doesn’t tell the whole story. Meet the teachers who think generative AI could actually make learning better.

Sep 30, 2023

Small Strands of Genetic Code Can Enhance Immunotherapy

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, evolution, genetics

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a molecule which is present in cells and made of genetic material to help build proteins necessary for cell function. RNA provides a template for the construction of proteins and is essential for cell and organism life. Immune cells rely on these proteins, including CD8+ or cytotoxic T cells which are responsible for killing invading pathogens. Importantly, cytotoxic T cells are a major component of the memory immune response. A pool of T cells specifically designed to recognize an invader is stored for future invasion of that particular pathogen. For example, once these cells are exposed to an invading antigen or protein, the immune system will expand T cells specific to that antigen and remember the antigen next time it enters the body. Vaccines work in a similar way by introducing a foreign antigen to the body, so the immune system is ready if the pathogen ever enters your body in the future. Only a small set of T cells that expand survive and it is unclear how this process occurs.

Recently a team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) demonstrated that a single strand of RNA governs a T cells ability to recognize and kill tumors. The single strand of RNA is known as let-7 and is a microRNA, which is responsible for gene expression regulation. The recent discovery may improve vaccine development and cellular memory to enhance immunotherapy against cancers. Immunotherapy is a general term referring to cancer therapies that try to activate the immune system to kill the tumor compared to other drugs that try to directly kill the tumor with chemicals, such as chemotherapy.

The report published in Nature Communications identified that the microRNA, let-7, may enhance memory of T cells. Researchers led by Dr. Leonid Pobezinsky, Associate Professor of Veterinary and Animal Sciences at UMass, further built on our understanding of how T cells form immune memory. Pobezinsky and colleagues found that a small piece of microRNA that has been present throughout evolution is expressed in memory cells. Additionally, they found that more let-7 a cell has, the more likely that cell will recognize a cancer cell and kill it. The increased let-7 also indicates that the cell will turn into a memory cell after being exposed to an antigen. The regulation of enhanced memory T cells by let-7 is an integral process key to fight infections. This is a critical finding, especially because memory cells retain stem-like characteristics and can survive for decades.