REFERENDUM CONUNDRUM

Someone who supports Remain in the issue of membership of the institutionally undemocratic EU, is happy with the idea that the people's vote shouldn't matter.

So why would they vote in the referendum?

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AI drama

From alphr comes a story about the literary exploits of Google's foray into artificial intelligence.

One of the reasons why the Turing Test continues to be such a steep bar for AI to clear is because artificial intelligences just don’t talk like normal people. Artificial chatter is often grammatically sound, but feels stuffy, formal and just not quite right. Getting artificial intelligences to sound human has been a tough old nut to crack.

Google has an interesting solution to this, and has posted a paper outlining how it taught its artificial intelligence a flair for the dramatic by what I can only describe as cruel and unusual punishment. Inspired, no doubt, by the seemingly endless streams of Mills and Boon style romance novels cluttering up charity shops around the country, Google fed a neural network model 12,000 ebooks, some 2,865 if which were of that much maligned genre.

Here's an example of its output.

“this was the only way. it was the only way. it was her turn to blink. it was hard to tell. it was time to move on. he had to do it again. they all looked at each other. they all turned to look back. they both turned to face him. they both turned and walked away.”

Not impressive, but what if the researchers eventually succeed and we can't tell the difference between human and machine output? I'm not sure, but take another look at the example above. With a few adjustments and a few key words it could easily be turned into an EU referendum argument because the standard is not high is it? 

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Sunday Serenade - British light classical music

We start in the country, as it used to be....

"Pastoral Montage", by Gideon Fagan (1950):



Ronald Binge - "Autumn Leaves"



Then it's into the outskirts of town...

Knightsbridge March by Eric Coates (1933):



... heading for the West End...

Robert Farnon - Westminster Waltz (1958):



... and a glamorous night out:

Trevor Duncan - High Heels (1950):



BONUSES

Long programmes...

"A Little Light Music - Friday Night Is Music Night" (BBC):



"A Little Light Music - Music for Everybody" (BBC):



... a 77-track,  4-CD compilation "British Light Music Classics" by the New London Orchestra, conducted by Ronald Corp, can be sampled and bought here: http://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDS44261/4 ...

... and finally, there's a specialist blog dedicated to British Classical Music:  http://landofllostcontent.blogspot.co.uk/


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Who's leaned on Paul Dacre?

Today's Mail On Sunday front page - moronline edition:

BUT in the influential hmm-must read-this-again-have you-seen-this print version:

And there's more - much more - of that sort of thing inside.


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The Empty Brain

This essay from aeon is worth reading.

Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or 

store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

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Friday Night Is Music Night - Poetry into music

JD presents an unusual selection relating to W B Yeats:



One of the comments beneath the video says "it sounds musical" Not surprising because Yeats himself said the rhythm of the verse was so important and "it took me a devil of a lot of trouble to get this poem into verse and that is why I will not read it as if it were prose!"

His poems are indeed musical and that is why so many singers have set them to music, among them Van Morrison and Loreena McKennitt. The best results, in my view, have come from Mike Scott and here is a selection to fortify your soul:






Lastly, "The Stolen Child"::




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The future of austerity

Here is a clip of Jeremy Hunt giving evidence to a Parliamentary select committee, with commentary.



In it, there is a section from a Michael Moore documentary where a guilt-ridden medical finance director explains how she was heavily incentivised to say no - and how her conscience was salved at the time by being told she was not denying care, only payment.

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? 
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun 

- sang Tom Lehrer:



I think it's a pattern for public services generally. The rich, and those who promote their interests, are cutting their connection to the plebs.

Watch what happens to school-age education, too. And especially, special needs.


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Not welcome in Russia

According to The Moscow Times

Russia is rated the least welcoming country to refugees, according to a survey commissioned by Amnesty International and conducted by consulting firm GlobeScan.

The survey, published Thursday, created a Refugees Welcome Index that ranks countries on a scale from zero to 100, where zero means that all survey respondents would refuse refugees entry to their country and 100 means that all respondents would accept refugees into their neighborhood.

Russia was given an index score of 18, the lowest. China was the most welcoming country for refugees — scoring 85. The median index score was 52.

I wonder if it really matters - do refugees flock to Russia?

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Sunday Serenade - Quirky Classics

Rossini: Cats’ Duet -


Arnold: Padstow Lifeboat March (brass band version) -


Michael Haydn (formerly thought to be Leopold Mozart): Toy Symphony -
 

Now one that can't be embedded here, but it's great fun -

Rollinson: Morning In Noah’s Ark Link (1907 recording) on a free jukebox site set up by the US Library of Congress:
Playable link: http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/recordings/detail/id/1279/ 
A modern (2000) version is on this compilation by the New Columbian Brass Band – the individual track can be downloaded, and the whole album is a pleasure:
Link for scrutiny/purchase (Amazon): https://www.amazon.co.uk/Teddy-Bears-Picnic-Columbian-Brass/dp/B00004STPU?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0 

To play you out, a piece that may leave you feeling aerated and giddy:

Lefébure-Wély: Sortie in E flat -



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Friday Night Is Music Night - Young Jazzers

JD offers a selection of rising talent in the jazz world...

The much maligned younger generation are not all trying to be famous for being famous by caterwauling and prancing about on telly 'talent' shows. Some of them (quite a lot them actually) have real musical ability and are keeping the flame alive in the world of jazz:

Stephanie Trick:



Rachael Price:



Chloe Feoranzo:



Chloe Feoranzo with Stephanie Trick:



Tuba Skinny:

  

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Sanity?

source

source

source

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Brexit to where?

This piece in the Guardian reminds us of something we already know, that there is more to national independence than leaving the EU.

Hinkley Point: UN says UK failed to consult over risks

UN Economic and Social Council says Britain has not met its obligations to discuss the impact of nuclear accident with neighbouring countries.

The Guardian piece links to this UN document.

Economic Commission for Europe 

Meeting of the Parties to the Convention
on Environmental Impact Assessment
in a Transboundary Context

Shaking off the EU is only part of the story. There are UN tentacles too. Ultimately it may be necessary to accept that the world is changing and national self-determination is and probably always was a romantic dream. 

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Friday Night Is Music Night - European musical traditions in America

JD returns with folk music coming to America:

Migrants from Europe to the new world took their traditional music with them. The slaves transported from Africa also took their musical traditions with them. In the course of time these various strands fused and blended and developed into some wonderful new music in both North and South America and here is a small selection from what appears to be a never ending stream of creativity.

Ry Cooder and the Buena Vista Social Club:



John Hartford:



Tish Hinojosa:



John Hartford (see above) said that the banjo was the only truly American instrument, appearing around about 1840. That may or may not be true, there are theories that it is African and other theories that it comes from Portugal or Spain. Whatever, it has evolved to become a 'signature' instrument of Bluegrass music.

One of the best banjo players is undoubtedly Bela Flek who takes it out of Bluegrass and produces something quite extraordinary -



Guadalupe Pineda:




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Friday Night Is Music Night - Celtic collection

In response - or riposte - to the Steeleye Span recording shared here a few days ago, JD offers a "Celtic Connection" selection, commenting, "Music from the Celtic fringe is so exuberant and joyous". Ready for that!

From Scotland:



... Bretagne:



... Asturias:



... Galicia "(yes, I know they are French but the tune is almost the Galician 'national anthem')":



... and finally, from Ireland (with a Scottish singer):



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Show me yours...

Produced by Liberty.

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Morning song

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Where trust is a design problem

From an alphr interview with Michael Gough, chief design officer in the Applications and Services Group (ASG) at Microsoft.

Take sound. There are people here who focus full-time on the personality of sound. Cortana is not going to be successful unless she is trusted, so what’s the voice of trust? What’s the vocabulary of trust? What’s the cadence of interaction to trust a voice? That’s a design problem, a really hard one.

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Spoofing for fun

I love this kind of thing, it sets so many hares running. Via Retraction Watch we have yet another delightful parody of academic pretensions. This one is a spoof philosophy paper which supposedly passed peer review. Almost worthy of the Guardian I thought.

Abstract: 

Since “gender” has been continually the name of a dialectics of the continued institution of gender into an ontological difference and the failure of gendering, it is worth addressing the prospects of any gender-neutral discourse through the tools of Badiousian ontology. As established by Badiou in Being and Event, mathematics – as set theory – is the ultimate ontology. Sets are what gendering processes by reactionary institutions intend to hold, in contradiction to the status of the multiplicities proper to each subject qua subject. This tension between subjectivity and gender comes to the fore through the lens of the ‘count-as-one’, the ontological operator identified by Badiou as the fluid mediator between set-belonging and set-existence. After having specified these ontological preliminaries, this paper will show that the genuine subject of feminism is the “many” that is negatively referred to through the “count-as-one” posited by the gendering of “the” woman. Maintaining the openness of this “many” is an interweaving philosophical endeavour. It is also a political task for any theory receptive to the oppressive load proper to the institutions of sexuation, as deployed through modern capitalism – that is, any queer theory. In its second step, the paper will therefore expose the adequacy of the Badiousian ontology to provide theoretical resources for articulating the field of a genuine queer nomination. It will finally appear that “non-gender” structurally corresponds in the field of a post-capitalist politics of the body to what Francois Laruelle (1984) designated as non-philosophie within the field of metaphysics.

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SCIENCE: A salute - and solution - to the Australian bush fly

(Reposted from The Polynesian Times)

Demonstrating the Aussie wave, aka Australian salute: http://i.imgbox.com/achP9bim.gif

Reporting on the experimental use of a virus to control burgeoning numbers of European carp Down Under, the Wall Street Journal lists "five animals that have gone wild in Australia". Four species are also European imports, but the fifth - flies, of the "bush" type that pesters everyone outdoors  - certainly isn't:

"... it's likely the fly got to Australia in an Aboriginal boat, the same way the dingo got here. In that case, the bush fly might have arrived in Australia as long as 45,000 years ago," says Jim Heath in his Seuss-like-titled 1989 book "The Fly In Your Eye"*

Heath explains that the bush fly needs protein to develop its eggs and is quite happy to find it in human tear ducts, noses, saliva and sweat, not to mention blood and raw meat; hence the plague of them at barbecues. As beef farming grew so did the fly population, feeding and breeding on the droppings of Australia's 28 million cattle. At up to 12 cowpats daily per animal, times up to 2,000 larvae per pat, the herds are potentially fostering quadrillions of flies.

Not just bush flies. Initial efforts to control flies focused on agricultural pests such as the blood-sucking buffalo fly and involved chemicals, to which the insects are increasingly becoming immune. 

So attention turned to biological controls, and this is where the dung-beetle comes in. Dr. George Bornemissza of the Australian CSIRO looked at native beetles and determined that they couldn't cope, so in April 1967 he began a project to import other species:

http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/131790650?searchTerm=Bornemissza&searchLimits=l-category=Article

The first foreign beetles were from Hawaii, released in Queensland on 30 January 1968. The dung-beetles disrupt fly-larval development by shredding and burying manure - which also improves soil quality and helps reduce contamination of run-off water, say the Kiwis, who are using the same strategy.

Because of Australia's diverse climate it was originally estimated that 160 different species would be required; in practice, "a total of 53 species were introduced and of these 23 have established," says CSIRO.

Unfortunately these species tend to cease their activity in early spring before the new season's flies begin to arrive, so two more kinds that are active at that time were introduced in 2012 from France and Spain to southern Australia by Dr Bernard Doube. The entomologist has been calling for a $50 million program to introduce 25 additional species, money which he says will multiply into several billions-worth of extra pastural productivity.

The real salute, then is reserved for the dung-beetle:

http://2bgreener.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Dung-Beetle.jpg

* Full text and illustrations on-line at: http://www.viacorp.com/flybook/fulltext.html


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Why the Government believes...

We received our EU referendum propaganda pamphlet today. Unlikely to be worth reading so I won't, but having a technical mind I weighed it instead. It's about 40 grams by our kitchen scales, so what does that come to if 27 million were printed?

A quick calculation suggests we are talking about roughly 1000 tonnes of paper, so not a trivial operation. How many trees does this equate to if we assume it isn't recycled paper, which it may well be but the pamphlet doesn't say. From one source we are told -

One ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper (used for magazines like National Geographic) uses a little more than 15 trees.

The pamphlet seems to be printed on high quality coated paper so 1000 tonnes of paper equates to about 15000 trees if we also equate a tonne to a ton. Oops - if it isn't recycled paper that's another bout of disgruntlement on the horizon and who would believe them anyway?

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