Dell does an amazing job. They basically have no inventory. They can pretty much wait until someone purchases a computer from them and then have it custom built. Their secret is their IT, of course. With the redundant network of component distributors that they have, there's not much of a worry of some link in the chain failing either.
Walmart just trucks things in and loads everything on to the shelves at it's stores. You are basically shopping at a warehouse, that if you've ever noticed, is kind of sparse. They run out of things all the time there. They can get a way with that because there's 200,000 other things to buy, so you'll probably end up getting a new garden hose, even if you came in to buy a certain gas grill.
Both companies monitor trends and use methods of unsupervised learning to better understand their markets and anticipate demand on incredibly thin margins.
Again, these are all intra-company IT refinements. We of course have refinements to our economy in general. The whole system of securities and commodities trade is one such mechanism, but it doesn't really deal with the fine grained behavior. It's for the big boys and has more of a trickle-down effect on the small business.
There is plenty of room for advancement in the world of statistical computing and applied mathematics. I am very interested in data mining techniques and read a lot of papers. I was surprised to find how many were coming from people either at or now working for Microsoft. I'm sure that Google is hiring plenty of like-minded people, being that PageRank is based on a similar principle, but I never find many published papers from their employees.
Again, Microsoft finds itself in a very important situation by having so many customers, especially the number of small businesses that use their products.
The ability to react to the whims of the consumer depends on how much information you have on those consumers and what you do with that information. Good methods have been found and shown to work well intra-company. Perhaps Microsoft or Google could utilize such methods on an inter-company scale.
Judging by the enormous amount of R&D that Microsoft has been spending on data mining, I think they are just looking for more information to process.
Think about it. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses using Microsoft products to conduct their wares. Data mining techniques could be used to streamline the distribution of goods on an epic scale. Currently, there is no massive central agency handling the supplies and demands of an entire economy.
Information fueled mechanisms are what propel economic giants such as Walmart, although in an non-distributed manner. Similar ideologies are used by many other companies... Dell, Amazon, FedEx, MobilExxon.... What they really focus on is refinement of the supply chain in such a way that maximizes the business response to consumer activities. Any number of indicators can be used and all would point to a more fluid flow of capital, be it the immense reduction in stock inventory, or what have you.
The ability for a business to analyze a supply chain and a customer's need is at the root of our economic machine. The proper study and implementation of this sort of optimization can do wonders for a company's market operations. You can imagine how Microsoft views this sort of analysis over their entire customer base. I'm sure they dream of a day where scraping data off of the distributed structure of a significant proportion of Western culture can be used to refine a whole planet's allocations of goods.
Macroeconomic functions might not be very sexy, but they're the real driving force behind our civilization, for better or worse.
Don't think for a second that Microsoft is not aware of the cards they hold while seated at the all-star table of the capitalist game.
There is a reason that the words "science" and "technology" refer to two different concepts. One pertains to a method used to discover properties of the world around us and the other refers to using those properties to do interesting things.
Was Hans Christian Ørsted doing bad science when he discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism? Should he have waited until he himself discovered the basic laws of electromagnetism? Or is that not enough either? Should he have come up with the electric motor or the telephone before he told anyone?
Actually, the better analogy would be the story of someone like Gian Domenico Romagnosi, who is believed to have discovered the electromagnetic relationship 20 years prior to Ørsted. Strangely, his publishings were overlooked by the scientific community. He was probably discouraged from further research by people around him saying, "So what? Get back to us when you have a practical use for your silly experiments."
There is a symbiotic relationship between science and technology. Much great science is based on discovery. Much great technology is based on someone else noticing the benefits of such discoveries.
I think that linear algebraic and statistical methods of data mining can reveal some rather important things about ourselves. If you look at how it is applied to social network analysis you can find some very interesting results. As of late, sociology has evolved into a rather vague field of study based mainly on opinions, and could benefit from more rigorous methods.
However, it does have it's roots in a more formal approach. Emile Durkheim found some interesting correlations between suicide and social connectivity, which was backed up with various statistical methods from real data.
"According to Durkheim, people have a certain level of attachment to their groups, which he calls social integration. Abnormally high or low levels of social integration may result in increased suicide rates; low levels have this effect because low social integration results in disorganized society, alientation and loneliness in the individual, causing people to turn to suicide as a last resort, while high levels cause people to kill themselves to avoid becoming burdens on society, or because the social pressure becomes too great and oppressive."Wikipedia
These days large data sets of people and their various social connections are being analyzed using various techniques to find mathematical modelings of whole communities. Smaller sub-communities can be found through clustering techniques using singular value decomposition and k-means clustering. The relative importance of certain individual can be calculated using eigenvector centrality, an approach used by Google's PageRank. There are a number of ways to use linear algebraic techniques and to construct matrices from different sets of data.
This approach breathes new life in to an important field of science that has for too long devolved in to nothing more than rhetoric. Is this truly an application of AI? That, my friend, would be one's own opinion.:)
See, we American's are just so afraid of ending up like you European folk that we make things out to be much worse than they actually are. Don't worry, we're still much more free than you guys and can still be a great role model.
While I do agree with you (see my previous post), I don't think you need to be as cynical about the issue as you are.
Of course people are actually responding to something in the music. There is more at work than just mere cultural preference. If this were not the case, then everyone would be writing great music all of the time. At the very core of music is a number of important structures, structures that break through cultural barriers. Most of the musical systems of tuning and harmony on the planet are based around an importance of Perfect 5ths and Octaves (Indonesian Gamelan is a system that is not, and I've always been very intrigued by this kind of music). From the Blues, to Hindustani, to Chinese opera, to Baroque, there are mathematical congruences in their systems of harmony. Rhythms across various types of music tend to have similarities as well. Obviously, the importance of these characteristics change with the fashions of the time, regardless of culture, but there are elements that unite them all.
You might be inclined to bring up the progression of the system of tuning used in Western music, from Pythagorean, to Just, to Well-tempered, and finally ending up at Equal-tempered, but all of these systems were attempts to deal with two competing forms of structuring harmonic systems, those aimed at progressions of the cycle of fifths, and those aimed at equal ratios between various notes. It is very interesting that despite all of the surface differences between various genres and sub-genres, almost all popular music made today in the Western world is based on Equal-tempered music with a 4/4 time signature, going beyond just these core features and sharing chord progressions, grooves, and even melodic structure.
Now, if you're the kind of person who gets very interested in stuff like this, regular old pop songs can get pretty boring. You want to start dealing with all of this intellectual stuff. Well, people have been doing that since time began, hence the presence of more academic or intellectual types of music. Personally, I very much enjoy Jazz and other types of modern intellectual music because my brain yearns for stimulation from music. The standard chord progressions do not excite me anymore. I can sit down at a piano and entertain myself if I want to hear the same old vi-ii-V-I progression with some melody over the top. When I'm listening to something like Giant Steps from John Coltrane, my mind is electrified! The massive amount of musical ideas in there is absolutely stunning. His theoretical approaches and development of new harmonic progressions such as the Augmented cycle are incredibly stimulating. Sure, this is music for musicians, I understand that. I don't judge people based on the fact that they like or dislike Jazz. I know that it can sound like a bunch of notes flying all over the place with no sense of structure or meaning. I'm not going to get hung up on Jazz though. There are many other types of thoughtful or mindless or heartfelt approaches that I very much enjoy.
What I will never do is deny someone their right to enjoy music in their own way. I'd rather try to learn about their understanding of this art form in order to increase my understanding of it. It has been a long journey, and the more I head down this path, the longer the path gets.
Well, for one, knowing what kind of music someone else listens to is a great way to find out a lot of cultural similarities between yourself and them. Pieces of music seem to compact weeks worth of communication in to a short length of time. If you and another individual are in to the same obscure indie rock band, you're probably going to have a lot of cultural connections. The thing is, it's never really about the music. The non-musical aspects are much more important. How we first came to hear a certain piece, who told us about it, who else listens to it, when it was from, why it was made... all of these are more important than the chord structure, lyrics, melody, and form of the song or piece.
IAAMusician, and let me be the first to tell you that coming to this realization was not easy at first, probably due to the fact that I had to first learn and internalize most of the fundamentals of music, which kept me focused on the structural aspects. That being said, I still have no idea what music is or why I enjoy to make or listen to it. I do know that most people refuse to believe that the reason they don't like rap music isn't because of the sonic structures or lyrical content of the music rather the fact that they cannot relate to the culture that is responsible for its creation. Most musicians I know refuse to believe this as well, and while I cannot even come close to proving my thoughts on this, I know that if it is not the most important aspect of music, it is at least partially true.
For example, last night, I was coming back from a friend's place, and I took a cab, not the easiest thing to do right after the Superbowl ends, especially in New York City. I was lucky enough to get a cab almost right away. The driver, as usual, was minding his own business. He was listening to a type of ethnic music typically known as Hindustani, originating from the Northern parts of India, near the Pakistani border, but also closely associated to Bangalore. I'm pretty in to this kind of music, the vocal styles, the tablas, the sitars here and there. However, he was used to the fact that most white dudes would probably rather listen to classic rock and offered to change to a radio station of my choice. I told him that I was enjoying this music, and immediately, he sprung to life! He handed me the album case and started telling me all about who this guy was that had written the songs, who the singer was, and tons of other information about the music and the culture behind it. Apparently, it was all written by this man, Rabindranath Tagore, who my cabbie enthusiastically told me was the first person from Asia to win the Nobel Prize, AND, that he had written all of his work in his native language. He was overflowing with pride. Not wanting to be the cultural hog of the conversation, he grabbed another CD case from the front and passed it back. It was a compilation of the Greatest Love Songs, with stuff like Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, etc... He had grown fond of listening to an Adult Contemporary station here in NYC and bought some albums and he was really in to it! I told him that if he enjoyed these songs, he would love one of my favorite songwriters, Burt Bacharach. At the end of the journey we both exchanged information about the artists we had recommended to each other and completed our cultural exchange.
So your musical preferences will have a direct relation to your cultural preferences. How all of this applies to todays hyper-culture, with it's multitudes of sub genres and opinions scattered left and right, I have no idea. I'm still trying to figure that one out. I wouldn't have a hard time believing that if two people are both into neo-industrial-hardcore-skate-ska that there would be enough of a cultural/personality match for them to make a good couple.
So, no offense to all of you Julie Andrews fans out there, but the sound of music really doesn't seem to be as important as the culture of music.
From their site:
pure:dyne has been created to provide a complete and ready made environment for artists and developers who are looking for a free operating system dedicated to realtime audio and video processing.
pure:dyne is a GNU/Linux live distribution based on the new dyne:II core. You don't need to install anything, pure:dyne is running from the CD itself. It can directly boot from virtually any PC machine, or Intel Mac, and the optional hard-drive or USB-key installation is just a matter of copying one folder.
This particular live cd brings you the latest exotic FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software - read more) such as Supercollider, Icecast, Csound, Packet Forth, Fluxus and much much more, including of course Pure Data and a great collection of essential externals and abstractions (PDP, PiDiP, Gem, GridFlow, RRadical, PixelTango...).
"Seriously, this term "rock and roll" just doesn't make any sense.
In English "rock" refers to either an action of rocking back and forth or a relatively hard, naturally formed mineral or petrified matter. The term "roll" refers to either an action of turning around or revolving on or as if on an axis or a small loaf of bread served with dinner. I just don't see how either of these words have anything to do with a current trend (which will no doubt not be around for very long and not have much influence) in teenage music.
Are there some different meanings for these words? I have checked various dictionaries, including American English ones, but found nothing."
There's a big difference between the data sets used to calculate the patterns seen in the solar cycle compared to the data sets used to calculated the hurricane trends or global temperatures. The sun's activity follows a rather predictable 11-year cycle. If you read the article and look at the graph of the Solar Cycles vs. Geomagnetic Activity, you'll see that the correlation is hard to deny.
From the article:
"Cross correlating sunspot number vs. IHV, they found that the IHV predicts the amplitude of the solar cycle 6-plus years in advance with a 94% correlation coefficient."
This would also suggest that there is a 94% chance that you didn't read the article.
Well, not exactly... In slashdot parlance you're either a registered user or you post as an Anonymous Coward, so there is always at least one possible poster. The number of comments per posters would be 0 divided by the number of registered users + Anonymous Coward.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to start a new business in Sweden?
"Obstacles to job creation are everywhere in Sweden. Although the country's big companies have long thrived, the regulatory and tax climate is chilly to newer and smaller companies. Only one of Sweden's 50 biggest companies was founded after 1970; and Sweden has the lowest rate of self-employment in the OECD. The much-vaunted trilateral partnership between government, employers and unions works if the employer is an established large company; for a new or smaller one, it simply adds to costs. High personal taxes and generous welfare benefits--which pay people who lose their jobs as much as 80% of previous incomes for three years--discourage work. The "tax wedge" (ie, the non-wage cost of employment) is too thick, especially for low earners." - The Economist, September 7th, 2006
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory .cfm?story_id=E1_SRRDTSP
Swedes are pretty fed up with this kind of system. They Social Democrats, which have been in power for many decades, just lost out to the Moderate party in elections a couple of weeks ago.
For all of the problems here in the US, it is still one of the easiest places to start your own business and make something of yourself.
Do you really think we can live in a world without commercials? If you're in the tech industry or a fan of computers in general, you've got to love advertising... it's the fluff that keeps all of this media going strong! We're not out in a field gathering food to barter with for clothing or anything else directly related to keeping us alive. We're engaging in a social and economic world based on the charade of commerce. It's just ones and zeros bouncing around, and something has got to keep up the illusion of a connection to the real world of water, food, clothing, warmth, and shelter. And those illusions are Subaru commercials and Whack-a-bin-Laden games. I know, it doesn't make sense, but just watch them already! Believe!
Living in New York City, I would tend to say that most people there wouldn't be in to robot companions. It's a very social city. I know the guy by the train who sells me coffee in the morning, I know the guy at the deli by work who makes my sandwiches, I know the people in my building and a few down the block as well. That's in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, a predominately black neighborhood, and even in white-bred yuppie Manhattan I've got some friends who live in Tribeca and run an Internet company and they're good pals with the people in their building, their super, and a bunch of other people in the neighborhood.
New York is fast paced, but people don't shy away from social interaction. Someone is going to tell you that you're being a jerk when you don't give up a seat for an old lady or hold the door for someone. You'll get a big genuine smile if you do it instinctively.
Make a robot that you can have a heated argument on the street with and will still leave you with a parting from-the-heart remark like "Have a good one", and you might have some prospective Gotham customers.
Wait wait wait... are you for real? Because this is a pretty cool little bit of dogma and propoganda that I hadn't thought about...
So there are all these Christians out there in the hinterlands of America, buying plastic Santas and milkshakes and riding lawnmowers, who have this idea in their heads that this is the New World, as crytptically predicted by the Bible and elucidated by their preacher/politicians.
Until the Left can start crafting such amazing stories about our origins and our destinies, I don't think we've got a chance in hell. Seriously, how can we compete? This is LoTRs type mythology here, folks.
The biggest fault of modernism was that we abandoned our simple myths. Raw science, raw math, raw art, while very stimulating, are extremely alienating to the general public. Most people don't get things. The Right has been taking advantage of this for awhile.
Well, us geeks got sick of this serious modernist BS as well, and we have our myths. Star Wars, LoTR, The Simpsons... we quote from those bibles all the time in times of stress or in order to quickly sum up a thought, ironically, of course.
People are sick of freaking irony. Sick of all this pomo playtime. They want some seriously kickass myths to beleive in, they want to feel part of something big, and they're not smart enough to get in to something like an Open Source Software movement or particle physics. We need to face the facts, that most people are just not smart enough to cope with a post-modern circus like America... they need to turn to some ancient fairytale with present day tie-ins and storylines.
What you need to understand is that when bands like The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and other super huge rock bands were making their music, they were breaking new ground and the majority of the listening public was willing to accept it. It was a time of massive social change.
Social change did not stop, but it did mutate, getting pushed and pulled by technology. Some of the changes we responded to are central to the entire idea of the distribution of culture. Things are becoming very decentralized. It is no longer a culture and a counter-culture. It is a number of sub-cultures existing, with bits and pieces overlapping here and there.
The mainstream recording industry is locked in to a mode of operation from a bygone era. It could handle the idea of a mass culture and even incorporated the advent of a viable counter-culture, but it can't cope with the almost anarachic nature of todays jumble of culture. Hip-hop, Drum n Bass, Noise Rock, Punk Rock, Jazz, Country... the subdivisions are endless. While most listeners aren't adherants to a specific genre and tend to sample from various approaches to music, this only exemplifies the schizophrenic nature of today.
There is no one voice in the mass mind. There is no one artist that is going to personify the culture as a whole. The mass mind is splintered, due to technology, due to reflection of the past, due to an increasingly global world, due to a many number of things.
Pop is dead. Let us all rejoice.
Out of the major contributors to the world of electronic music, none has done more to shape the technique of composition than Stockhausen. Take a look at the score for Studie II, http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco2/Rec/Stockhausen/I RStudieII.jpg. His timeline visualization on the horizontal axis coupled with the frequency spectrum and amplitude on the vertical is a precursor to all of the major Digital Audio Workstation applications currently in use. Whereas his approach focused on the parameters that he was able to work with, in a contemporary application such as Logic, http://images.apple.com/logic/images/prologicindex graph20040930.jpg, a large number of parameters can be controlled or automated in such a timeline based visual method.
While his approach, known as total serialization, has since been abandoned in aestetic, it's fundamentals are present in practically all electronic music produced today. Obviously, some groups and individuals such as Autechre and Aphex Twin, to name a couple, employ a greater ammount of such modernist Stockhausean aestetic. However, the majority of electronic music borrows most of it's aestetic and form from club and disco music of the past.
I don't think I was flaming anyone in particular. I was merely putting up a defense for something I care very much for. If anything, most of the posts related to this subject were flaming artists that I have a lot of respect for.
You are correct that in my hostility, I am behaving no different than a techno-geek. There really is no difference between a techno-geek and an art-geek, just the content discussed and mainly, the content ignored.
I always forget that personally, I respond to a challenge. I used to be the loner living in a CRT lit existance. Through the constant pestering of friends to exists in other worlds, I got out of my shell. I was hoping to shed light from the windows of the gallery on the situation and set up a challenge for the reader. I am now realizing the faults of such an approach in a world that has matured well beyond Adorno and Horkheimer's Negative Dialectic but has yet to learn how to deal with it.
Let me remind you that a lot of very nice and very pretty girls would rather talk about art than the politics surrounding encryption.
I am still young, still brash, and still hostile, and I hope I never grow out of it.
And once I inevitably do, I will be writing much better posts on slashdot.
Well, I'm assuming that the urinals were in reference to Marcel Duchamp's urinals that he displayed with the name R. Mutt written on them...
One thing that I am noticing that is common to all the threads is a complete lack of understanding of art history. You guys are acting no different than some newbie to the IT world. RTFM, as they say.
Here's a perspective from a thinker I'm sure the philistanical techno-elite of slashdot can relate to.
Marshall McLuhan, and his whole theme of the medium as the message, says this about the Cubists:
"In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on the instant total awareness, suddenly announced that _the medium is the message_. Is it not evident that the moment that the sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication? Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and now we say, "The medium is the message" quite naturally. Before the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that that medium is the message. The message, it seemed, was the "content," as people used to ask what a painting was about. Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was about, nor what a house or a dress was about. " [p.25]
- Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media
So as you can see, coming out of classical realism, and in to impressionism, consider the technological advancements of the time. What use is there for an ultra-realistic painting in the world of the photograph? Of course the answer is found in impressionistic painting, where the artist adds a bit of personal touch and emotion, not only to the choice of what is to be painted, but also in the brush strokes, choice of colors to be made, etc. Progression in to cubism is a natural path to follow. It makes the viewer aware of the fact that this is a painting. There are no tricks of perspective, nothing forcing the viewer to see it in one way, other than forcing the viewer to see it as a painting. The medium is the message.
You see, art is not about and has never been about the final product, floating in the void. It gets its meaning from the infinate contexts that it is interacting with. Obviously you are one of those contextual interactions, so you can take it or leave it. But some contexts are more enveloping than others. This comes out of our histories. They come out of the history of art, of science, of nations, of anything.
So of course, continue your snide snickerings about things you don't understand. Get back to your computer screened chat rooms and imiginary digital girlfriends, get back to contemplating why people can't understand YOU... and then perhaps realize that maybe it's you who can't understand THEM.
Slashdot Mirror
http://data.tumblr.com/zjkgd28711jx576l3otqxduY_500.gif
Dell does an amazing job. They basically have no inventory. They can pretty much wait until someone purchases a computer from them and then have it custom built. Their secret is their IT, of course. With the redundant network of component distributors that they have, there's not much of a worry of some link in the chain failing either.
Walmart just trucks things in and loads everything on to the shelves at it's stores. You are basically shopping at a warehouse, that if you've ever noticed, is kind of sparse. They run out of things all the time there. They can get a way with that because there's 200,000 other things to buy, so you'll probably end up getting a new garden hose, even if you came in to buy a certain gas grill.
Both companies monitor trends and use methods of unsupervised learning to better understand their markets and anticipate demand on incredibly thin margins.
Again, these are all intra-company IT refinements. We of course have refinements to our economy in general. The whole system of securities and commodities trade is one such mechanism, but it doesn't really deal with the fine grained behavior. It's for the big boys and has more of a trickle-down effect on the small business.
There is plenty of room for advancement in the world of statistical computing and applied mathematics. I am very interested in data mining techniques and read a lot of papers. I was surprised to find how many were coming from people either at or now working for Microsoft. I'm sure that Google is hiring plenty of like-minded people, being that PageRank is based on a similar principle, but I never find many published papers from their employees.
Again, Microsoft finds itself in a very important situation by having so many customers, especially the number of small businesses that use their products.
The ability to react to the whims of the consumer depends on how much information you have on those consumers and what you do with that information. Good methods have been found and shown to work well intra-company. Perhaps Microsoft or Google could utilize such methods on an inter-company scale.
Judging by the enormous amount of R&D that Microsoft has been spending on data mining, I think they are just looking for more information to process.
Think about it. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses using Microsoft products to conduct their wares. Data mining techniques could be used to streamline the distribution of goods on an epic scale. Currently, there is no massive central agency handling the supplies and demands of an entire economy.
Information fueled mechanisms are what propel economic giants such as Walmart, although in an non-distributed manner. Similar ideologies are used by many other companies... Dell, Amazon, FedEx, MobilExxon.... What they really focus on is refinement of the supply chain in such a way that maximizes the business response to consumer activities. Any number of indicators can be used and all would point to a more fluid flow of capital, be it the immense reduction in stock inventory, or what have you.
The ability for a business to analyze a supply chain and a customer's need is at the root of our economic machine. The proper study and implementation of this sort of optimization can do wonders for a company's market operations. You can imagine how Microsoft views this sort of analysis over their entire customer base. I'm sure they dream of a day where scraping data off of the distributed structure of a significant proportion of Western culture can be used to refine a whole planet's allocations of goods.
Macroeconomic functions might not be very sexy, but they're the real driving force behind our civilization, for better or worse.
Don't think for a second that Microsoft is not aware of the cards they hold while seated at the all-star table of the capitalist game.
There is a reason that the words "science" and "technology" refer to two different concepts. One pertains to a method used to discover properties of the world around us and the other refers to using those properties to do interesting things.
Was Hans Christian Ørsted doing bad science when he discovered the relationship between electricity and magnetism? Should he have waited until he himself discovered the basic laws of electromagnetism? Or is that not enough either? Should he have come up with the electric motor or the telephone before he told anyone?
Actually, the better analogy would be the story of someone like Gian Domenico Romagnosi, who is believed to have discovered the electromagnetic relationship 20 years prior to Ørsted. Strangely, his publishings were overlooked by the scientific community. He was probably discouraged from further research by people around him saying, "So what? Get back to us when you have a practical use for your silly experiments."
There is a symbiotic relationship between science and technology. Much great science is based on discovery. Much great technology is based on someone else noticing the benefits of such discoveries.
I think that linear algebraic and statistical methods of data mining can reveal some rather important things about ourselves. If you look at how it is applied to social network analysis you can find some very interesting results. As of late, sociology has evolved into a rather vague field of study based mainly on opinions, and could benefit from more rigorous methods.
:)
However, it does have it's roots in a more formal approach. Emile Durkheim found some interesting correlations between suicide and social connectivity, which was backed up with various statistical methods from real data.
"According to Durkheim, people have a certain level of attachment to their groups, which he calls social integration. Abnormally high or low levels of social integration may result in increased suicide rates; low levels have this effect because low social integration results in disorganized society, alientation and loneliness in the individual, causing people to turn to suicide as a last resort, while high levels cause people to kill themselves to avoid becoming burdens on society, or because the social pressure becomes too great and oppressive." Wikipedia
These days large data sets of people and their various social connections are being analyzed using various techniques to find mathematical modelings of whole communities. Smaller sub-communities can be found through clustering techniques using singular value decomposition and k-means clustering. The relative importance of certain individual can be calculated using eigenvector centrality, an approach used by Google's PageRank. There are a number of ways to use linear algebraic techniques and to construct matrices from different sets of data.
This approach breathes new life in to an important field of science that has for too long devolved in to nothing more than rhetoric. Is this truly an application of AI? That, my friend, would be one's own opinion.
It's really not that bad.
See, we American's are just so afraid of ending up like you European folk that we make things out to be much worse than they actually are. Don't worry, we're still much more free than you guys and can still be a great role model.
A couple of astronauts with a huge supply of Marinol pills and a copy of GTA...
"Dude, dude, did you just see that? I jumped that car over that house!"
"Whoa, that's crazy"
-looks out window
"What time is it? Where are we? Ohhh... we're in space... cool...holy crap I jumped that car over that overpass!"
"Whoa, that's crazy"
While I do agree with you (see my previous post), I don't think you need to be as cynical about the issue as you are.
Of course people are actually responding to something in the music. There is more at work than just mere cultural preference. If this were not the case, then everyone would be writing great music all of the time. At the very core of music is a number of important structures, structures that break through cultural barriers. Most of the musical systems of tuning and harmony on the planet are based around an importance of Perfect 5ths and Octaves (Indonesian Gamelan is a system that is not, and I've always been very intrigued by this kind of music). From the Blues, to Hindustani, to Chinese opera, to Baroque, there are mathematical congruences in their systems of harmony. Rhythms across various types of music tend to have similarities as well. Obviously, the importance of these characteristics change with the fashions of the time, regardless of culture, but there are elements that unite them all.
You might be inclined to bring up the progression of the system of tuning used in Western music, from Pythagorean, to Just, to Well-tempered, and finally ending up at Equal-tempered, but all of these systems were attempts to deal with two competing forms of structuring harmonic systems, those aimed at progressions of the cycle of fifths, and those aimed at equal ratios between various notes. It is very interesting that despite all of the surface differences between various genres and sub-genres, almost all popular music made today in the Western world is based on Equal-tempered music with a 4/4 time signature, going beyond just these core features and sharing chord progressions, grooves, and even melodic structure.
Now, if you're the kind of person who gets very interested in stuff like this, regular old pop songs can get pretty boring. You want to start dealing with all of this intellectual stuff. Well, people have been doing that since time began, hence the presence of more academic or intellectual types of music. Personally, I very much enjoy Jazz and other types of modern intellectual music because my brain yearns for stimulation from music. The standard chord progressions do not excite me anymore. I can sit down at a piano and entertain myself if I want to hear the same old vi-ii-V-I progression with some melody over the top. When I'm listening to something like Giant Steps from John Coltrane, my mind is electrified! The massive amount of musical ideas in there is absolutely stunning. His theoretical approaches and development of new harmonic progressions such as the Augmented cycle are incredibly stimulating. Sure, this is music for musicians, I understand that. I don't judge people based on the fact that they like or dislike Jazz. I know that it can sound like a bunch of notes flying all over the place with no sense of structure or meaning. I'm not going to get hung up on Jazz though. There are many other types of thoughtful or mindless or heartfelt approaches that I very much enjoy.
What I will never do is deny someone their right to enjoy music in their own way. I'd rather try to learn about their understanding of this art form in order to increase my understanding of it. It has been a long journey, and the more I head down this path, the longer the path gets.
Well, for one, knowing what kind of music someone else listens to is a great way to find out a lot of cultural similarities between yourself and them. Pieces of music seem to compact weeks worth of communication in to a short length of time. If you and another individual are in to the same obscure indie rock band, you're probably going to have a lot of cultural connections. The thing is, it's never really about the music. The non-musical aspects are much more important. How we first came to hear a certain piece, who told us about it, who else listens to it, when it was from, why it was made... all of these are more important than the chord structure, lyrics, melody, and form of the song or piece.
IAAMusician, and let me be the first to tell you that coming to this realization was not easy at first, probably due to the fact that I had to first learn and internalize most of the fundamentals of music, which kept me focused on the structural aspects. That being said, I still have no idea what music is or why I enjoy to make or listen to it. I do know that most people refuse to believe that the reason they don't like rap music isn't because of the sonic structures or lyrical content of the music rather the fact that they cannot relate to the culture that is responsible for its creation. Most musicians I know refuse to believe this as well, and while I cannot even come close to proving my thoughts on this, I know that if it is not the most important aspect of music, it is at least partially true.
For example, last night, I was coming back from a friend's place, and I took a cab, not the easiest thing to do right after the Superbowl ends, especially in New York City. I was lucky enough to get a cab almost right away. The driver, as usual, was minding his own business. He was listening to a type of ethnic music typically known as Hindustani, originating from the Northern parts of India, near the Pakistani border, but also closely associated to Bangalore. I'm pretty in to this kind of music, the vocal styles, the tablas, the sitars here and there. However, he was used to the fact that most white dudes would probably rather listen to classic rock and offered to change to a radio station of my choice. I told him that I was enjoying this music, and immediately, he sprung to life! He handed me the album case and started telling me all about who this guy was that had written the songs, who the singer was, and tons of other information about the music and the culture behind it. Apparently, it was all written by this man, Rabindranath Tagore, who my cabbie enthusiastically told me was the first person from Asia to win the Nobel Prize, AND, that he had written all of his work in his native language. He was overflowing with pride. Not wanting to be the cultural hog of the conversation, he grabbed another CD case from the front and passed it back. It was a compilation of the Greatest Love Songs, with stuff like Genesis, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner, etc... He had grown fond of listening to an Adult Contemporary station here in NYC and bought some albums and he was really in to it! I told him that if he enjoyed these songs, he would love one of my favorite songwriters, Burt Bacharach. At the end of the journey we both exchanged information about the artists we had recommended to each other and completed our cultural exchange.
So your musical preferences will have a direct relation to your cultural preferences. How all of this applies to todays hyper-culture, with it's multitudes of sub genres and opinions scattered left and right, I have no idea. I'm still trying to figure that one out. I wouldn't have a hard time believing that if two people are both into neo-industrial-hardcore-skate-ska that there would be enough of a cultural/personality match for them to make a good couple.
So, no offense to all of you Julie Andrews fans out there, but the sound of music really doesn't seem to be as important as the culture of music.
Aw man, my Web 3.0 plans are out of the bag.
From their site:
pure:dyne has been created to provide a complete and ready made environment for artists and developers who are looking for a free operating system dedicated to realtime audio and video processing.
pure:dyne is a GNU/Linux live distribution based on the new dyne:II core. You don't need to install anything, pure:dyne is running from the CD itself. It can directly boot from virtually any PC machine, or Intel Mac, and the optional hard-drive or USB-key installation is just a matter of copying one folder.
This particular live cd brings you the latest exotic FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software - read more) such as Supercollider, Icecast, Csound, Packet Forth, Fluxus and much much more, including of course Pure Data and a great collection of essential externals and abstractions (PDP, PiDiP, Gem, GridFlow, RRadical, PixelTango
Hopelessly out of touch guy in the 1950s:
"Seriously, this term "rock and roll" just doesn't make any sense.
In English "rock" refers to either an action of rocking back and forth or a relatively hard, naturally formed mineral or petrified matter. The term "roll" refers to either an action of turning around or revolving on or as if on an axis or a small loaf of bread served with dinner. I just don't see how either of these words have anything to do with a current trend (which will no doubt not be around for very long and not have much influence) in teenage music.
Are there some different meanings for these words? I have checked various dictionaries, including American English ones, but found nothing."
There's a big difference between the data sets used to calculate the patterns seen in the solar cycle compared to the data sets used to calculated the hurricane trends or global temperatures. The sun's activity follows a rather predictable 11-year cycle. If you read the article and look at the graph of the Solar Cycles vs. Geomagnetic Activity, you'll see that the correlation is hard to deny. From the article: "Cross correlating sunspot number vs. IHV, they found that the IHV predicts the amplitude of the solar cycle 6-plus years in advance with a 94% correlation coefficient." This would also suggest that there is a 94% chance that you didn't read the article.
Students WILL do anything for money. Shameless plug of friend's TV show...
Well, not exactly... In slashdot parlance you're either a registered user or you post as an Anonymous Coward, so there is always at least one possible poster. The number of comments per posters would be 0 divided by the number of registered users + Anonymous Coward.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to start a new business in Sweden? "Obstacles to job creation are everywhere in Sweden. Although the country's big companies have long thrived, the regulatory and tax climate is chilly to newer and smaller companies. Only one of Sweden's 50 biggest companies was founded after 1970; and Sweden has the lowest rate of self-employment in the OECD. The much-vaunted trilateral partnership between government, employers and unions works if the employer is an established large company; for a new or smaller one, it simply adds to costs. High personal taxes and generous welfare benefits--which pay people who lose their jobs as much as 80% of previous incomes for three years--discourage work. The "tax wedge" (ie, the non-wage cost of employment) is too thick, especially for low earners." - The Economist, September 7th, 2006 http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory .cfm?story_id=E1_SRRDTSP
Swedes are pretty fed up with this kind of system. They Social Democrats, which have been in power for many decades, just lost out to the Moderate party in elections a couple of weeks ago.
For all of the problems here in the US, it is still one of the easiest places to start your own business and make something of yourself.
Do you really think we can live in a world without commercials? If you're in the tech industry or a fan of computers in general, you've got to love advertising... it's the fluff that keeps all of this media going strong! We're not out in a field gathering food to barter with for clothing or anything else directly related to keeping us alive. We're engaging in a social and economic world based on the charade of commerce. It's just ones and zeros bouncing around, and something has got to keep up the illusion of a connection to the real world of water, food, clothing, warmth, and shelter. And those illusions are Subaru commercials and Whack-a-bin-Laden games. I know, it doesn't make sense, but just watch them already! Believe!
Living in New York City, I would tend to say that most people there wouldn't be in to robot companions. It's a very social city. I know the guy by the train who sells me coffee in the morning, I know the guy at the deli by work who makes my sandwiches, I know the people in my building and a few down the block as well. That's in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, a predominately black neighborhood, and even in white-bred yuppie Manhattan I've got some friends who live in Tribeca and run an Internet company and they're good pals with the people in their building, their super, and a bunch of other people in the neighborhood. New York is fast paced, but people don't shy away from social interaction. Someone is going to tell you that you're being a jerk when you don't give up a seat for an old lady or hold the door for someone. You'll get a big genuine smile if you do it instinctively. Make a robot that you can have a heated argument on the street with and will still leave you with a parting from-the-heart remark like "Have a good one", and you might have some prospective Gotham customers.
Wait wait wait... are you for real? Because this is a pretty cool little bit of dogma and propoganda that I hadn't thought about...
So there are all these Christians out there in the hinterlands of America, buying plastic Santas and milkshakes and riding lawnmowers, who have this idea in their heads that this is the New World, as crytptically predicted by the Bible and elucidated by their preacher/politicians.
Until the Left can start crafting such amazing stories about our origins and our destinies, I don't think we've got a chance in hell. Seriously, how can we compete? This is LoTRs type mythology here, folks.
The biggest fault of modernism was that we abandoned our simple myths. Raw science, raw math, raw art, while very stimulating, are extremely alienating to the general public. Most people don't get things. The Right has been taking advantage of this for awhile.
Well, us geeks got sick of this serious modernist BS as well, and we have our myths. Star Wars, LoTR, The Simpsons... we quote from those bibles all the time in times of stress or in order to quickly sum up a thought, ironically, of course.
People are sick of freaking irony. Sick of all this pomo playtime. They want some seriously kickass myths to beleive in, they want to feel part of something big, and they're not smart enough to get in to something like an Open Source Software movement or particle physics. We need to face the facts, that most people are just not smart enough to cope with a post-modern circus like America... they need to turn to some ancient fairytale with present day tie-ins and storylines.
The Right is freaking amazing at what they do...
Can't do anything but agree with that
What you need to understand is that when bands like The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and other super huge rock bands were making their music, they were breaking new ground and the majority of the listening public was willing to accept it. It was a time of massive social change. Social change did not stop, but it did mutate, getting pushed and pulled by technology. Some of the changes we responded to are central to the entire idea of the distribution of culture. Things are becoming very decentralized. It is no longer a culture and a counter-culture. It is a number of sub-cultures existing, with bits and pieces overlapping here and there. The mainstream recording industry is locked in to a mode of operation from a bygone era. It could handle the idea of a mass culture and even incorporated the advent of a viable counter-culture, but it can't cope with the almost anarachic nature of todays jumble of culture. Hip-hop, Drum n Bass, Noise Rock, Punk Rock, Jazz, Country... the subdivisions are endless. While most listeners aren't adherants to a specific genre and tend to sample from various approaches to music, this only exemplifies the schizophrenic nature of today. There is no one voice in the mass mind. There is no one artist that is going to personify the culture as a whole. The mass mind is splintered, due to technology, due to reflection of the past, due to an increasingly global world, due to a many number of things. Pop is dead. Let us all rejoice.
Out of the major contributors to the world of electronic music, none has done more to shape the technique of composition than Stockhausen. Take a look at the score for Studie II, http://home.swipnet.se/sonoloco2/Rec/Stockhausen/I RStudieII.jpg. His timeline visualization on the horizontal axis coupled with the frequency spectrum and amplitude on the vertical is a precursor to all of the major Digital Audio Workstation applications currently in use. Whereas his approach focused on the parameters that he was able to work with, in a contemporary application such as Logic, http://images.apple.com/logic/images/prologicindex graph20040930.jpg, a large number of parameters can be controlled or automated in such a timeline based visual method.
While his approach, known as total serialization, has since been abandoned in aestetic, it's fundamentals are present in practically all electronic music produced today. Obviously, some groups and individuals such as Autechre and Aphex Twin, to name a couple, employ a greater ammount of such modernist Stockhausean aestetic. However, the majority of electronic music borrows most of it's aestetic and form from club and disco music of the past.
William
I don't think I was flaming anyone in particular. I was merely putting up a defense for something I care very much for. If anything, most of the posts related to this subject were flaming artists that I have a lot of respect for.
You are correct that in my hostility, I am behaving no different than a techno-geek. There really is no difference between a techno-geek and an art-geek, just the content discussed and mainly, the content ignored.
I always forget that personally, I respond to a challenge. I used to be the loner living in a CRT lit existance. Through the constant pestering of friends to exists in other worlds, I got out of my shell. I was hoping to shed light from the windows of the gallery on the situation and set up a challenge for the reader. I am now realizing the faults of such an approach in a world that has matured well beyond Adorno and Horkheimer's Negative Dialectic but has yet to learn how to deal with it.
Let me remind you that a lot of very nice and very pretty girls would rather talk about art than the politics surrounding encryption.
I am still young, still brash, and still hostile, and I hope I never grow out of it.
And once I inevitably do, I will be writing much better posts on slashdot.
Well, I'm assuming that the urinals were in reference to Marcel Duchamp's urinals that he displayed with the name R. Mutt written on them...
One thing that I am noticing that is common to all the threads is a complete lack of understanding of art history. You guys are acting no different than some newbie to the IT world. RTFM, as they say.
Here's a perspective from a thinker I'm sure the philistanical techno-elite of slashdot can relate to.
Marshall McLuhan, and his whole theme of the medium as the message, says this about the Cubists:
"In other words, cubism, by giving the inside and outside, the top, bottom, back, and front and the rest, in two dimensions, drops the illusion of perspective in favor of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Cubism, by seizing on the instant total awareness, suddenly announced that _the medium is the message_. Is it not evident that the moment that the sequence yields to the simultaneous, one is in the world of the structure and of configuration? Is that not what has happened in physics as in painting, poetry, and in communication? Specialized segments of attention have shifted to total field, and now we say, "The medium is the message" quite naturally. Before the electric speed and total field, it was not obvious that that medium is the message. The message, it seemed, was the "content," as people used to ask what a painting was about. Yet they never thought to ask what a melody was about, nor what a house or a dress was about. " [p.25]
- Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media
So as you can see, coming out of classical realism, and in to impressionism, consider the technological advancements of the time. What use is there for an ultra-realistic painting in the world of the photograph? Of course the answer is found in impressionistic painting, where the artist adds a bit of personal touch and emotion, not only to the choice of what is to be painted, but also in the brush strokes, choice of colors to be made, etc. Progression in to cubism is a natural path to follow. It makes the viewer aware of the fact that this is a painting. There are no tricks of perspective, nothing forcing the viewer to see it in one way, other than forcing the viewer to see it as a painting. The medium is the message.
You see, art is not about and has never been about the final product, floating in the void. It gets its meaning from the infinate contexts that it is interacting with. Obviously you are one of those contextual interactions, so you can take it or leave it. But some contexts are more enveloping than others. This comes out of our histories. They come out of the history of art, of science, of nations, of anything.
So of course, continue your snide snickerings about things you don't understand. Get back to your computer screened chat rooms and imiginary digital girlfriends, get back to contemplating why people can't understand YOU... and then perhaps realize that maybe it's you who can't understand THEM.