Automated talent scouts

Spotting the next great music superstar:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

For every rock star who hits it big, there are thousands of artists who never make it out of their own back yards. Before Madonna was “Madonna,” she was a local success in New York clubs. Until Britney Spears became a global pop superstar, she performed in dance revues in her native Louisiana. But how can you tell who will make it onto the Billboard charts and who will never get beyond the local bar circuit? Professor Yuval Shavitt, of Tel Aviv University’s School of Electrical Engineering, has developed software that can accurately predict the next big music phenomenon. His software could become a profitable tool for music producers and record labels ― and a boon to young people who want to be in the know.

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This is a nice idea – letting the grassroots find the great new artists. Of course, this only works if people do not try to game the system. Once people know what is being examined, they can alter the searches to make themselves look more appealing. If simply going from 5 to 10 to 150 hits in a local area is the start, then lots of people could make themselves look more popular. What happens then?

Technorati Tags: Entertainment

The science commons

Supporting the Commons: Jesse Dylan and Richard Bookman:
[Via Science Commons]
[Crossposted SpreadingScience]

Today, we are proud to announce the release of Science Commons’ first informational video. The video was directed by renowned director Jesse Dylan, the director of the Emmy- award winning “Yes We Can” Barack Obama campaign video with musical artist will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas. The video can also be seen on the front of sciencecommons.org.

“I believe Science Commons represents the true aspiration of the web, and I wanted to tell their story,” Dylan said. “They’ve changed the way we think about exploration and discovery; the important and innovative ideas need to be shared. I believe it’s vital to revolutionizing science in the future. I hope this is just the beginning of our collaboration.”

This video is launched in conjunction with a letter of support from Richard Bookman, the Vice Provost for Research and Executive Dean for Research and Research Training at the University of Miami. Bookman joins a group of esteemed Commons supporters featured in this year’s “Commoner Letter” series, including this year: Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center and Columbia University, Renata Avila – CC Guatemala Project Lead, and singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton. More information and an archive of past letters can be found at http://support.creativecommons.org/letters.

In his letter, Bookman writes:

“We need to find ways to make sharing research results and tools easy, trackable, and useable by scientists on a day-to-day basis. Science Commons is working on these problems in a way that few other projects contemplate: they don’t write papers, they release “running code” like contracts for sharing biological materials and open contracts for biological tools like stem cells and genetically modified mice. [...]

I support SC/CC because I think it’s the right approach at the right time. It’s vital that we as a community support the organization – the interstitial nature of what gets done at CC makes it harder than many might think to raise money, which can leave the most important work dying for lack of funds.

I hope everyone in the community can dig deep and support CC during this campaign. When you support CC, whether because of the cultural work, or the education work, or the science work, you’re supporting an organization that is much more than contracts and websites and videos. You’re supporting an umbrella organization working around the world that lives and breathes the “some rights reserved” philosophy.”

Our thanks to Jesse Dylan, Professor Bookman, and the broader CC community for their ongoing support. For more information about the campaign, or to show your support, visit http://support.creativecommons.org. Every little bit counts. Help support the Commons.

Science Commons has a very strong role to play in getting scientists to actively develop the web in ways that can benefit everyone, including themselves. In particular, Health Commons is a project that may provide a place for biologists to ‘remix’ their data in profound ways. If we can only get them to think about the Commons in the pursuit of their work.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

If only women had run Wall Street

from Wikipedia
Are men hardwired to overspend?:
[Via Eureka! Science News - Popular science news]

Bling, foreclosures, rising credit card debt, bank and auto bailouts, upside down mortgages and perhaps a mid-life crisis new Corvette—all symptoms of compulsive overspending. University of Michigan researcher Daniel Kruger looks to evolution and mating for an explanation. He theorizes that men overspend to attract mates. It all boils down, as it has for hundreds of thousands of years, to making babies.

Kruger, an assistant research scientist in the School of Public Health, tested his hypothesis in a community sample of adults aged 18-45 and found that the degree of financial consumption was directly related to future mating intentions and past mating success for men but not for women..

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See the current financial problems are due to men trying to score with the ladies by buying things, like houses, cars and big toys, that are financially risky. The guys that did this had twice the number of sexual partners that conservative men did.

Everyone wants to know how those guys on Wall Street could have been so stupid with their, and our, money.

Now it is revealed. They did it for all the sex they got by taking such financial risks. When it comes down to a choice between financial ruin with lots of sex, or a nice safe pension with less sex, we all know what men will chose.

Research apparently shows that guys who could say they were heavily leveraged into huge numbers of highly volatile CSDs from AIG representing a ginormous number of dollars got twice as much as the guy with a puny little annuity to sell.

So, instead of trying to regulate the industry and treat them like adults, we would have been better off just making sure they got laid. Men don’t have nice pretty tails to spread out to show everyone how ’sexy’ they are. So apparently the men on Wall Street had to show just how sexy they were by being reckless with our money.

There is only one solution: No man should be allowed to run any hedge fund or an publicly traded company, to trade stocks, bonds or any weird sort of ‘opportunity.’ We should only let women do this. Or maybe eunuchs (I’d love that. “Joe, you get to be CEO but we have to take your balls. You’ll get them back when you retire.” See picture above.)

I figure most women would be embarrassed to want a $10 million dollar bonus in a year their company lost $15 billion and got bought out.

Not a guy. He wants that bonus because it makes it more likely he will get laid.

High finance is not so hard. It is all about the sex. Proven by Science!

Technorati Tags: Economy, Science