Content about Entertainment

Feature - The 1970s in the 21st century: synthesized music returns (via parallel processing)

This Arp 2500 analog modular synthesizer from 1971 had hundreds of inputs and outputs for control of the synthesis processes. Image courtesy of discretesynthesizers.com.

Curtis Roads is a professor, vice chair, and graduate advisor in media arts and technology, with a joint appointment in music at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He also was the editor of the Computer Music Journal (published by MIT Press), and co-founded the International Computer Music Association. He is often a featured speaker at conferences such as Supercomputing. 
 
Music is an interactive, concurrent process. A note or a chord sounds, then is replaced, gradually or sharply, softly or powerfully, by the next one. For electronically produced or enhanced music, real-time technical advances are critical to continued progress and exploration. In the 1970s, I fondly remember learning my first parallel

  Link of the Week: Coming to an i-Phone near you Image courtesy Flickr under Creative Commons licence Since the story in iSGTW last year about Cinefilia, the grid-enabled film recommendation service, it creator and sole webmaster, Leandro Ciuffo, says his user base has increased by 27% — without any direct promotion or advertising. Once a user has signed up for a Cinefilia account they can review whether they like or dislike one of hundreds of films on the database. The system then ‘learns’ that user’s preferences and generates personalized recommendations accordingly. (But in order for the results to be accurate a minimum of 20 films must be rated by a user.)   Ciuffo aims to increase the amount of Brazilian films on the database because 95% of users on his site are Brazilian, possibly because there are currently no recommendation systems for Brazilian films. Ciuffo is looking for partners to help him improve the recommendation software algo

Image of the Week - Google Street View lands in Antarctica

The above picture is of Half Moon Island in the South Shetlands. You can see a 360 degree panoramic view of the island by pressing the arrows in the top-left hand corner of the picture. It has a certain ‘cool’ factor in more ways than one, don’t you think?
Original courtesy Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering, for Google Earth and Maps.

The ubiquity of Google knows no bounds. Their Street View service, first introduced in 2007, with its 360-degree panoramic street-level images has now captured views of our planet’s most southern-most continent – Antarctica.
Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google Earth and Maps, took the Street View images or ‘vacation photos’ while travelling to Antarctica on a cruise ship. More information about his trip can be found here.

Link of the Week - Nobel Prize follows Ig Nobel

Artist's impression of a graphene transistor. Image courtesy physorg

A first has just occurred in the world of Nobel Prize awards: Andre Geim, a Russian-born physicist, who was previously awarded an Ig Nobel for using magnets to levitate a frog, received a Nobel Prize in Physics for his experiments on a 2-D substance called ‘graphene.’ Graphene, which is one-atom thick and entirely made from carbon, comes from the ‘lead’ in a pencil.
 
The substance is made up of a handful of atoms in a honeycomb lattice, akin to atomic scale chicken wire. At this scale,  its properties truly shine as Andre and his team discovered that the material conducts electricity 100 times faster than silicon. Possible future applications of this material could be for the creation of ultra-fast transistors for the next generation of computers, electronics, smart displays and quantum-dot computers.
 
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Link of the Week - Move over, Deep Blue: Watson is here

Watson (center) competes against humans in a mock Jeopardy match. To see the video this image was taken from, click on the image.
Screenshot taken by Miriam Boon. Video courtesy of IBM.

To make artificial intelligence history, Deep Blue had to defeat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov. Now those zany IBM AI researchers are at it again, pitting their latest experiment, Watson, against champions of a much more challenging game: Jeopardy.
Watson, which runs on a Blue Gene computer, uses a variety of separate algorithms to search its memory for answers to the clues posed on the show. Then, it combines the results each algorithm returns - taking certainty into consideration - to come up with an answer. This technique has made a huge difference, according to the team lead, David Ferrucci, as quoted in a great article that appeared in the New York Times in June.

Whether Watson will win when it goes on TV in a real “Jeop

Announcement - “Why Science is Cool” video contest, 15 July deadline

Photo courtesy Why Science is Cool

The USA Science & Engineering Festival’s Kavli Science Video Contest is looking for videos that are creative, surprising, and can be used to share students’ love of science with other kids, from kindergarten through grade 12. Videos can be linked to current curriculum, a science fair project or can be whatever students decide works for them.
Winners will receive cash prizes for their school, electronics prizes, tickets to meet the MythBusters and possibly even a trip to the Expo in Washington, DC. The top videos will be featured during the Expo and at other Festival events. Submission Deadline: July 15, 2010. Learn more here.
The “Why Science is Cool” National K-12 Video Contest is being run in partnership with The Kavli Foundation and SciVee.

Lights, camera, action: FilmGrid

Image courtesy FilmGrid

Film-making is a very labor-intensive craft, relying upon the work of many people.
This is especially true of the part known as “post-postproduction” — traditionally, that portion of the process when all the raw film has been shot and is “in the can.” During this phase, all the editing, natural sound, music, background painting, voiceovers, montages, special effects, and everything else take place.
Because so much of post-production is manual, and because so many hands are involved — and because post-production often involves widely scattered individuals and companies — it can often be very difficult to maintain an up-to-date picture of the status of a film production, leading to inefficiencies, unwanted duplication of effort, and complications. In addition, couriers sometime lose hard disks containing footage with terabytes of information, and security can often be difficul

Video of the Week - “Colliderscope,” a light-artwork at the Niels Bohr Institute

Named after the physicist of the same name, the Niels Bohr Institute investigates astronomy, geophysics, nanophysics, particle physics, quantum physics and biophysics. Its researchers explore everything from the smallest sub-atomic particles to the largest galaxies in the universe. Image courtesy Niels Bohr Institute

The light on the facade of the Niels Bohr Institute (above) in Copenhagen, Denmark, is a representation of what scientists might “see” in the collisions of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. More accurately, the light reflects signals from the Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT) of the ATLAS experiment, which detects the tracks of particles  created when protons collide at very high energies.
The TRT detector consists of many straws, which give a signal when a charged particle passes through. When a lot of signals in a row are seen, that means that a particle h

Feature - The digital story behind the mask

Mak Yong dancer in a 3D body scanner. Courtesy Info Com Development Centre (IDeC) of Universiti putra Malaysia.

Capturing culture in digital form can lead to impressive demands for storage and processing. And grid technology has a role to play in providing those resources. For instance, a 10-minute recording of the movements of a Malay dancer performing the classical Mak Yong dance, using motion-capture equipment attached to the dancer’s body, can take over a week to render into a virtual 3D image of the dancer using a single desktop computer. Once this is done, though, every detail of the dance movement is permanently digitized, and hence preserved for posterity.
The problem, though, is that a complete Mak Yong dance carried out for ceremonial purposes could last a whole night, not just ten minutes. Rendering and storing all the data necessary for this calls for grid computing.
Faridah Noor, an associate professor at the University of

Link of the week - GridJam: live, distributed, art-and-music fusion

The image shows a group of sound visualizations inspired by a desert floor mountain range as viewed from Fonts Point in the Borrego Springs Desert near San Diego. Artist Jack Ox created the original drawings of deserts in California and Arizona, commissioned Richard Rodriguez to model the landscape, and created the hand drawn texture maps appearing in the virtual reality world.
Image courtesy of gridjam

Gridjam brings together a visual artist, a composer, musicians and computer scientists in a live, partly improvised, 3D visualized, musical performance.  It uses the 21st C. Virtual Color Organ™ (VCO), a computational system for translating musical compositions into visual performance, to render music in colored and image-textured shapes. The VCO visually illustrates the information contained in the musical score, the composer’s instructions to the musicians, and the musicians’ contributions to

Feature - For the love of movies: recommendations from the grid Cary Grant in “North by Northwest.” Image courtesy of MGM Alfred Hitchcock once said, “A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.” Tired of wasting your time sifting through DVDs at the rental store only to end up with a mediocre film? Help is on the horizon for all interested in movie recommendations. In a one-man project, Leandro Neumann Ciuffo, offers grid-powered film recommendations through a simple algorithm, his Web portal and EELA-2, the E-science grid facility for Europe and Latin America. “This is a very simple application,” he said. “It’s not going to cure cancer, but it does show that average people can use the grid.” Marilyn Monroe gets fitted for a scene with the help of Hollywood costume designer William Travilla, who custom-made Monroe’s outfits for eight of her films. Image courtesy of  The Travilla Tour Custom-tailored suggestio

Science is awesome, dude "Year of the nerd." Image courtesy of The Boston Phoenix A positive review of physics appeared in a rather unlikely source — the popular, young, hipster, downtown, alternative weekly known as The Boston Phoenix, which we picked up while on the "T," outside Cambridge, Massachusetts. Big Science even made the cover: "Year of the Nerd: Obama! Tina Fey! Tampa Bay Rays! Hadron Collider! Twitter! 2008 was the year we totally geeked out." Amidst the sometimes colorful language, the authors showed they really got the message about the need for basic research on fundamental questions: "When people discussed the LHC, they scarcely mentioned all of the cool **** (expletive deleted) it can do — how it could recreate the conditions extant around the time of the so-called Big Bang, or how it could unlock the secrets of gravity. Most people probably didn't even know about half of that stuff. They just heard 'it could kill us all' and then freaked t