EKG, NOT GPT MAY BE KEY TO HIT CLIMATE SONGS

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 

Accurately predicting hit songs using neurophysiology and machine learning

Sean H. Merritt1, Kevin Gaffuri1 and Paul J. Zak1,2*

• 1Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA, United States
• 2Immersion Neuroscience, Henderson, NV, United States

Identifying hit songs is notoriously difficult. Traditionally, song elements have been measured from large databases to identify the lyrical aspects of hits. We took a different methodological approach, measuring neurophysiologic responses to a set of songs provided by a streaming music service that identified hits and flops. 

Music is an effective way to influence people's emotional states (Fitch, 2006). Music and language likely co-evolved, with the first evidence of musical instruments appearing in Paleolithic bone flutes 40,000 years ago... 

Examples include:

• Gregorian chants
• The sacred music of Bach 
• The Tridentine Mass sung in Latin
• Navajo priest singers
• Buddhist & Daoist mantras
• Pygmy honey-gathering songs
• Country line dancing
• The Macarena
• Gangnam Style
• Boot camp recruit marching cadences

CAN THE DIAL OF DESTINY TURN BACK THE NEXT ICE AGE?

 Hollywood's bullwhip and bad hat franchise has advanced from         recycling plastic maguffins to making them up out of thin air.

The Dial Of Destiny's maguffin is an Anti-Antikythera Machine a step down from the lucite noggin  Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull's borrowed from the National Inquirer

The rediscovery of the lost jade mines of the Olmecs  was reported in in the December 2001 issue of the archaeological journal  Antiquity.

After the invasion of the Halls of Montezuma  by the forces of Napoleon III, it was easy for the recycling of ancient rock crystal beads to grew into the production of  upscale forgeries  Reflecting antiquarian taste at home, the well-heeled courtiers of Mexico’s short-lived Emperor, Maximilian von Hapsburg asked for, and got, crystal skulls, some made by re-carving ancient quartz beads, and others made to order from freshly imported Brazilian rock crystal. They ranged  from leering golf balls to the momento mori the size of a grapefruit that still holds up the base of a Gothic Revival crucifix in a Paris museum.

Despite the  bogus modern crystal items, the ancient Aztecs did produce crystal skulls, but none much larger than a walnut- about as big as rock crystal comes on the turf of Mesoamerica's ancient civilizations. After losing their jade sources in the dark ages following the Maya collapse, the Aztecs turned to turquoise skulls made by embellishing real ones with  bits of  turquoise stuck to the bone with fragrant Maya copal incense glue. 

 

In perspective, it took 23 years and five seasons by Land Rover, foot and horseback for the field director of the Peabody Museum’s Mesoamerican Jade Project to encounter a grand total of four tarantula, three salt water crocodiles, two really cute coral snakes, and one jaguar.

 

As the Peabody's HR department frowns on bullwhips, the only irate grave robber to fire a pistol at the field director at close range was deterred from further mayhem by offering to buy him a beer.

FEAR OF BREATHING : THE UNBEARABLE FOGO OF FOLGO

A recent report suggests the reflexive attribution of all perceived natural hazards to AGW may give rise to anxiety syndromes in "helicopter parents" and their children

Children’s Health and the Peril of Climate Change 
a recent book by Frederica Perera.

by NEHA PATHAKYALE CLIMATE COMMUNICATION   JUNE 29, 2023

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NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JUNE 7: Visitors at Summit One Vanderbilt look out at a smoke-shrouded Manhattan

 as wildfires in Canada continue to blanket the city on June 7, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

The fondest times of my childhood were the annual burst of flowers each spring. Not so for my kids, who sniffle and sneeze their way through pollen season. 

With average temperatures growing warmer, trees here in Atlanta are flowering earlier in the year, blooming longer, and releasing more pollen than when I was a kid. 

That’s led to what I have dubbed FOGO — “Fear of Going Outside” — for my children.

They live with weeks of nasal congestion, sleepless nights, tears, frustration, missed days of school, poor performance on spring tests, and this year, a refusal to go outside during school — almost an entire month of school recesses spent sitting inside alone with a teacher instead of playing outside with classmates.  

When I discuss these experiences with other parents in my circle, many share the same sentiment. They, too, are feeling FOGO, along with a companion emotion I call “FOLGO” — Fear of Letting (them) Go Outside” during days of extreme heat or air quality alerts in a warming and traffic-congested Atlanta. 

“They’re just more scared to go outside,” a friend told me recently amid record-high mid-spring heat and humidity in Georgia. “And quite honestly, a lot of times I don’t want to let them go play outside either.” 

For friends in New York City, smoke from massive Canadian wildfires recently added yet another climate threat, with clearly visible evidence of risk from hazy air pollution.

And friends in Texas have been sweltering under a weekslong record heat wave, making outdoor time oppressive for their kids.

Why focus on children’s health? 

In her recent book, “Children’s Health and the Peril of Climate Change,” Frederica Perera shares the scientific evidence behind the changing climate’s impacts on the physical and mental health of fetuses, infants, and children. 

The climate is changing, and our journalists are here to help you make sense of it. Sign up for our weekly email newsletter and never miss a story.

Perera, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health and director of the Center for Children’s Environmental Health at Columbia University, notes that almost every child across the globe is already at risk from at least one climate change-related threat. 

IN THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, A SINGLE NOTE SPANS SIXTY YEARS

Science reports that :

Turning networks of dead stars into galaxy-size gravitational wave detectors allows astronomers to tune in to the slowly undulating swells in spacetime arising  from pairs of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that are about to collide.

           A BILLION SECONDS IS A LONG TIME:

NANOHERTZ GRAVITY WAVES TAKE GENERATIONS TO RISE AND FALL

NANOGrav investigators now feel they have strong evidence for nanohertz gravity waves in a 15-year data set of 67 pulsars located up to 20,000 light-years away. They identified anomalies of one part in a quadrillion—comparable to measuring the distance between Earth and the Moon to a micron. 

The results were published in  The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The signal is very different from what ground-based detectors such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) pick up. The background signal could include other, more exotic sources. Primordial gravitational waves might have been generated shortly after the big bang if the universe experienced convulsions from a still-hypothetical breakneck expansion in size known as inflation. Some theorists also posit that the violent emergence of one of the fundamental forces at the dawn of time left defects in spacetime called cosmic strings, which would now stretch across the universe, vibrating like piano wires and emitting gravitational waves in the range that PTAs are sensitive to.

A gravitational wave spectrum

Pulsar timing arrays have now brought long-period gravitational waves into focus. Ground-based interferometers detected the first short-period gravitational waves in 2015. Future detectors in space could probe the wavelengths in between.

DETECTOR TYPE	PERIOD	SOURCES
Pulsar timing arrays	Years to decades	Merging supermassive black holes (SMBHs), big bang ripples, exotic new physics
Space-based interferometers	Hours to seconds	Midsize SMBHs, stellar-size black hole mergers, white dwarf mergers
Ground-based interferometers	Milliseconds	Stellar black hole mergers, merging neutron stars, supernovae

PROPANE DEALERS CELEBRATE AS HAIL HITS HAIL ALLEY

In most of the United States, hail bounces off of solar panels like a duck's back, and most people have never seen a hail-pinged car roof or cracked windowpane. 

The states along the 100th Meridian , which runs close to the Texas towns  of Dunning and Kruger are not so lucky. The same storms that spawn tornados blast rain to freezing heights, and what goes up wet can come down hard. After baseball-sized hail struck the town's solar field, Scottsbluff City Manager Kevin Spencer told Cowboy State Daily:

“Just by looking at it, it looks destroyed to me.  The Federal Emergency Management Agency  ranks this area in its highest category for hail risk on the national index.”

His managerial sang froid reflects a local fact of life : hail insurance is an agricultural and commercial  norm and priced to competitively reflect the rarity of life and property threatening storms :

 

 

One Nebraska paper reported: 

“The hail shattered most of the panels on the
5.2-megawatt solar project, sparing an odd 
panel like missing teeth in a white smile.”

IOWA JOHN AND THE SURFACE STATION OF DESTINY

 

The Heartland Institute   has switched from climate  woo to pseudoarchaeology as Climate Hustle II heartthrob John Lefgren of Salt Lake City's searches for archaeological evidence to prove the climatological soundness of a friend's self-published sequel to the Book of Mormon.

\

 

The object of his quest is the Lost City of Zarahemla, a Pre-pre-Colombian Proto-Mormon tabernacle in the unexplored wilderness southeast of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 

Undaunted by recent developments in Tiatanic archaeology  Heartland's own Indy Jones hopes to avoid  a funding implosion  by recourse to lidar detection , carbon dating, magnetometry and dowsing rods to pinpoint the ancient Nephite capital, which hopefully awaits discovery on the bottom of the Mississippi River

 

VIEWERS ENRAPTURED BY THE PREMIER OF CLIMATE HUSTLE I

IS THAT A POTHOLE IN HER FOREHEAD, OR IS SHE HAPPY TO WRITE FOR MURDOCH AGAIN ?

Wrecking the roads to save the nation from 0.01 degree C?

Electric cars may cause twice as much damage to roads as normal petrol driven cars.

EV’s are heavier, and heavier cars may break bridges and car parks, they wear out tyres 50% faster, increasing pollution, they will cause more road deaths (of other people in smaller cars), and now, they probably wear out roads faster too.

Did anyone think about the carbon emissions of new asphalt and new road surfaces?

Major roads are built to take heavier trucks, but suburban streets were only designed to cope with the occasional truck — not the truck that lives next door. When every car has 300 kilograms more “luggage” there will be consequences.

And remember underlying all this, no one even knows if EV’s will reduce carbon dioxide. 

Pothole damage from electric cars is double that of petrol, Telegraph data show

The country is suffering from a pothole crisis, with half as many filled last year compared to a decade ago amid an estimated £12 billion price tag to fill them all.The Telegraph found that the average electric car puts 2.24 times more stress on roads than its petrol equivalent, and 1.95 more than diesel.

Fourth power formula

The analysis uses the “fourth power formula”, which is widely used by highways engineers and researchers to assess the damage caused to road surfaces by heavier vehicles. It means that if weight on a vehicle’s axle is doubled, it does 16 times the damage to the road.

Cut the subsidies, recover fair costs, and the free market will sort this one out.

TRUTH SOCIAL REPLACES CO2 AS CLIMATE CONTROL KNOB

ROBERT TRACINSKI 

The big bright spot of the Trump administration is the hatchet he’s taking to the Environmental Protection Agency: doing things like packing the agency with global warming skeptics...

The man charge of this is new EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt... In a CNBC interview, the host asked, “Do you believe that it’s been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate?” Pruitt answered:

 “No, I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. 

So no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

This was met with howls of outrage and derision...

NPR, for example, accused Pruitt of questioning “basic facts about climate change…

"The view that CO2 is a major heat-trapping gas is supported by reams of data, including data collected by government agencies such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.” 

Er, which data would that be? "

Obedient to The Federalist's reasonable demand, NASA and NOAA have SINCE reduced their reams of CO2 data to this vividly animated global map of where man-made CO2 comes from, and whence it goes day to day over the course of a year--

It's viral material, but  I somehow doubt you will be seeing much of it on Fox TV, Newsmax, Truth Social or Tuck Carlson's twitter account

REMEMBER, ONLY A COAL-FIRED PIZZA BAN CAN PREVENT FOREST FIRES

The New York Post

“Everyone likes pizza! You see that pie in front of you, you start to get happy,” said New York Mayor Adams, responding to a Post report on the city’s responding to Canadian forest fire smoke with a green crackdown on pizzerias.

“But let’s be clear, every toxic entity that we remove from our air is adding up to the overall desire to deal with shrinking our carbon footprint,”

The city Department of Environmental Protection drafted new rules ordering eateries that use the decades old coal-and-wood-fired ovens to pay tens of thousands in dough to slice carbon emissions by up to 75%.

On Monday morning, fed-up Staten Island resident, artist and activist Scott Lobaido threw 48 slices of pizza  (8 pies) over the City Hall fence to make his point against the latest NYC rules to crack down on coal, which would severely affect wood-fired pizzerias. He likened his action to to the Boston Tea Party.

“Give me pizza or give me death! This is New York!  New York is nothing without pizza.”

HOLLYWOOD CLIMATE SUMMIT EMBRACES WALKING DEAD

From heroic journeys to comedic punchlines, any genre can grapple with climate change. 

We’re kicking off the fourth annual 

Hollywood Climate Summit with writer/producer

 Lindsey Villareal 

(Tales of the Walking Dead, Resident Evil)

Sponsored by YEA! Impact Oscar®-winning team from Everything Everywhere All At Once 

Jane Fonda Nalleli CoboYoNasDa Lonewolf Sylvia Arredondo

Sponsored by 

Fossil Free Media, Gas Leaks, and Earthjustice 

HOW ENTERTAINMENT CAN POWER THE FUTURE OF FOOD

Peter McGuinness      (CEO, Impossible Foods)

 Jennifer Stojkovic       (Vegan Women Summit), 

Heather Mills             (VBites and Paralympian), &

Isaias Hernandez    ( Creator,  QueerBrownVegan)

Sponsored by Vegan Women Summit and QueerBrownVegan... this panel will shed light on the transformative power of entertainment in driving positive change for diet, including food innovation, technology, and more.           

DAY TWO at 

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences

BRINGING OUR WHOLE SELVES: DISABILITY REPRESENTATION IN CLIMATE & MEDIA

This keynote will feature disabled leaders in climate and media who will discuss the extreme importance of integrating disabled voices into every part of the content creation process and the fight against climate change. Moderated by comedian/writer Danielle Perez, panelists include co-chair of the WGA Disabled Writers Committee David Radcliff (Waffles & Mochi, The Rookie), climate activist/storyteller Daphne Frias, Stephanie Nogueras (Actor/Producer), and Keely Cat Wells (CEO, C Talent)

DECOLONIZING CLIMATE STORYTELLING: FROM HIP HOP 50 TO LAND BACK

>SO CLIMATE JUSTICE DEMANDS SOLAR CELLS ON THE HOLLYWOOD SIGN?

In partnership with Hip Hop Caucus and sponsored by The Center for Cultural Power, this session will explore how cultural movements, such as Hip Hop and Land Back, have impacted political change and can be critical to creating climate justice for and with BIPOC communities. 

RED STORM SUBSIDES IN BLACK SEA

UNQUIET FLOWS THE DON

 

CLIMATE OF WEIRD: THE EVER UNENDING AUDIT

SCIENCE INSIDER / SCIENCE AND POLICY

A scientist at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) who has recently faced media allegations that he was the first person with COVID-19 and his research on coronaviruses sparked the pandemic strongly denies that he was ill in late 2019 or that his work had any link to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

Moreover, a newly released U.S. report of declassified information on COVID-19’s origin, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), fails to name him or substantiate that any WIV scientists had the initial cases of COVID-19.

“The recent news about so-called ‘patient zero’ in WIV are absolutely rumors and ridiculous,” Ben Hu emailed Science in his first public response to the charges, which have been attributed to anonymous former and current U.S. Department of State officials. A WIV colleague who has also been named as one of the first COVID-19 cases denies the accusation as well.

Hu and two of his WIV colleagues were thrown into the furious COVID-19 origin debate on 13 June when an online newsletter called Public said the three scientists developed COVID-19 in November 2019. That was prior to the outbreak becoming public when a cluster of cases surfaced at the end of December 2019 that were linked to a Wuhan marketplace. 

Public’s report was quickly embraced by a camp that argues COVID-19 came from a virus stored, and possibly being studied, at WIV, rather than from infected animal hosts, perhaps being sold at the Wuhan market. A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on 20 June that said it had “confirmed” the allegations against the three, without referring to any public evidence or named sources with direct knowledge, fueled the flames even more. Social media and other publications spread the charges—and the scientists’ names.

PROGRESS IN FACT CHECKING AT SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

 Scientific American 2013

How to Not Get Sidetracked

Harvard Business School’s Francesca Gino shares the psychological secrets to finishing what you started.

By Gareth Cook on April 2, 2013

There is an area of self-help devoted to advice on completing tasks… Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, also wants to help you achieve your goals...

In Sidetracked, she argues that to succeed we first need to know our enemy, the often-unconscious factors that stop us from getting things done. Then we can fight back. She answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. 

• Why did you write this book?

  Many of the ideas I study and write about are motivated by my personal experience and by what surrounds me –interesting patterns of behavior that often, at first glance, make little sense. Sidetracked focuses on situations where we set out to accomplish specific goals but ended up reaching different outcomes –outcomes we often regret...

   

  In Sidetracked, I explain how…  Most of us care a good deal about being consistent—we care about following through on our goals and wishes. And we also aim to behave in ways that are consistent with our self-image as capable, competent, and honest individuals.

  
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  CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION 2023

  A Dishonesty Expert Stands Accused of Fraud. 

  Scholars Who Worked With Her Are Scrambling.

  By  Stephanie M. Lee and 

  Nell Gluckman

  JUNE 22, 2023

  

  ILLUSTRATION BY THE CHRONICLE; IMAGE FROM TEDXTRENTOSTUDIO, YOUTUBE

  To Maurice E. Schweitzer, a University of Pennsylvania business professor, it seemed logical to team up with Francesca Gino, a rising star at Harvard Business School. They were both fascinated by the unseemly side of human behavior — misleading, cheating, lying in order to profit — and together, they published eight studies over nearly a decade.

  Now, Schweitzer wonders if he was the one being deceived.

  Gino is on administrative leave from Harvard amid allegations that research she co-authored contains fabricated data, as The Chronicle reported last Friday. The next day, a trio of academics wrote on their blog that they’d found “evidence of fraud” in four of her papers, which they said Harvard was seeking to have retracted. But “we believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” they added, without specifying. “Perhaps dozens.”

  
  

   

   

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