Originally shared by Casey Coffman If you use Linkedin, you may want to take a look at this and uncheck this option. Unless you like your professional networking sites using your info for advertisement. A box you want to uncheck on LinkedIn [Migrated from Google+]
A box you want to uncheck on LinkedIn Read More »
The best hot dogs on the planet, IMHO. Puka Dog Hawaiian Style Hot Dogs, 5300 Punahoa Place, Koloa, HI, United States [Migrated from Google+]
Puka Dog (Koloa, Hawaii) Read More »
Taken using SynthCam on iPhone. Address: State Highway 560, Kilauea, Hawaii. [Migrated from Google+]
Opaekaa Falls, Kauai, Hawaii Read More »
Wow — over 100,000 people have registered for a free online Intro to AI class to be taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig this Fall. Kudos to Stanford for trying out this experiment in education on a mass scale. They’re also offering introductory classes in Databases in Machine Learning. Introduction to Artificial Intelligence – Fall 2011
Free Online Intro to AI class Read More »
I try to avoid using my Inbox as a to-do list, but this still looks like a handy little script… (Originally shared by Ben Bederson) Scripting Gmail to snooze emails (so they come back later) is cool! (Actually, scripting Gmail is cool).http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/gmail-snooze-with-apps-script.html But I bet Boomerang (http://www.boomeranggmail.com/) doesn’t like it so much. On the other
I never thought I’d say this, but I think I preferred Republicans back when its leadership ran the caucus with an iron fist. [Migrated from Google+]
Boehner walks away from debt negotiations Read More »
My father in law goes to clock shows, and recently gave us this piece. It has a lever on the back that you push to wind the spring, and then the gear turns one complete revolution. It also has what looks like two electrical switches. One is closed when stopped and opens while the gear
I’ve started playing with the free SynthCam iPhone app… here’s the description from the app’s webpage (marclevoy): “Cell phones have a small aperture, hence a large depth of field. In other words, most of the scene is in focus at once. However, if you record video while moving the phone slightly, and you add the
A couple years ago, the Australian quiz show “Spicks & Specs” asked its panelists to name the Australian folksong that could be heard in a popular hit single that was first released in 1979. The answer: “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree,” in the flute riff of the Grammy-winning band Men At Work‘s hit single, “Down Under.”
That quiz show prompted Larrikin Publishing, who bought the copyright for the now 68-year-old folk song after its composer’s death in 1988, to sue for copyright. And yesterday a Sydney judge declared yesterday that the 11-note flute riff did indeed copy from the folk song, and will determine what royalties might be owed by the band.
Despite what some breathless news reports are claiming, damages will likely be limited — as CNN reports, the Larrikin is only claiming a percentage of revenues on Australian sales from the past six years, and the judge has already noted that he has not found that the flute riff is “a substantial part of Down Under or that it is the ‘hook’ of that song.” Still, it’s gotten me thinking about how many other copyright land mines might be out there, just waiting for someone (or some thing) to uncover the similarity between some riff and some other previous melody.
Musicians are always borrowing riffs and melodies from previous songs, from little riffs jazz musicians throw in as shout out to other songs to wholesale note-for-note copying. A few well-known examples include The Beach Boys hit “Surfin’ USA,” a note-for-note copy of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.” (Berry was granted writing credits to the former after a successful lawsuit.) The tune to the 1953 song Istanbul (Not Constantinople) is extremely similar to Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ On The Ritz. And the chorus to the 1923 hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas” is almost entirely made up of riffs from other songs.
That’s just a few examples that have come to people’s attention, but how many are out there that borrow from less obvious sources? How many are just waiting for a game show (or a new search engine) to copyright holders to a potential opportunity for some quick royalties? In the past few years it has become possible to search a music database for a recording by playing a snippit of a song or in some cases just by humming a melody. What is not yet possible is to automatically process an audio stream, tease out individual riffs and melody lines, and then find other earlier pieces that contain similar riffs and melody lines. But that kind of research is ongoing, and I have no doubt that it will be solved at some point. When that day comes, we will in essence be able to map out the genome of every music recording ever made, and from that we can lay bare the lineage of every song in history.
When that happens, how many other Kookaburras will we find?
Men at Work vs. Kookaburra: How many other copyright land mines are out there? Read More »
Two of my coworkers, David Stork and Jorge Moraleda, have recently worked out the mathematics for what they call Lake Wobegon Dice. According to their paper (currently submitted for publication), Lake Wobegon Dice are
a set of n non-standard dice that have the following paradoxical property: on every (random) roll of a set, each die is more likely to roll greater than the set average than less than the set average; in a specific statistical sense, then, each die is “better than the set average.”
The name, of course, comes from Garrison Keillor’s famous tag-line about his fictional boyhood town where “all of the women are strong, all of the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average.”
As an example, say I offered to play you in a game using three six-sided dice that have been specially manufactured to have the following number of pips on their faces:
| Blue | Red | Yellow |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 | 6 |
| 1 | 4 | 6 |
| 7 | 4 | 6 |
| 7 | 7 | 6 |
| 7 | 7 | 6 |
| 7 | 7 | 6 |
The rules of the game are as follows: you pick one die which I must roll, and you roll the other two. If my die rolls higher than the average of your two dice (or equivalently, if my die rolls higher than the average of all three dice) then I win. Otherwise, you win.
With the faces chosen as above, there are only four unique ways the dice can fall:
| Blue | Red | Yellow | Probability | Average | I win with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 4 | 6 | 1 in 6 | 3 ⅔ | Red, Yellow |
| 1 | 7 | 6 | 1 in 6 | 3 | Red, Yellow |
| 7 | 4 | 6 | 1 in 3 | 5 ⅔ | Blue, Yellow |
| 7 | 7 | 6 | 1 in 3 | 6 ⅔ | Blue, Red |
As should be clear from the table, I have a two-in-three chance of winning the game, regardless of which die you make me roll.
Their paper presents a proof that there exist such a set of dice for every n ≥ 3, so long as you are free to choose the number of sides on each die and the number of pips on each side, and also provide a method for finding the optimal set. They also show that for any set of n dice it is possible to choose a number of faces and pips for each die such that only one die will ever roll below the mean on any given roll, and each die is equally likely to be the low die. This means in the game described above, for any set of n dice I have a probability of (n-1)/n of winning.
If you want to use similarly-sided dice then for more than three dice the number of sides required gets large very quickly. The optimal set for n=4 requires 12 sides per die, but for n=5 and n=6 you need 60 sides. That’s because their construction method splits each die two groups, each group having a probability of 1-in-1, 1-in-2, 1-in-3, etc. up to 1-in-n. It’s much easier if you allow heterogeneous dice, e.g. for n=6 you could use a combination of six-sided dice and a ten-sided die — a good excuse to break out your old collection of D&D dice.