In an attempt to measure how social media affects the music biz (a different take than the constant attempts to just shut downthe Interwebs), NYU Stern Professor Vasant Dhar looked at how the number of blog items about an album posted before its release could predict its sales. Looking at 108 albums released in early 2007, he found that it worked out pretty well.
With more than 40 "legitimate" blog posts prior to the album's drop, the artist could expect three times as many sales as the average. If that album was associated with a major label, the artist could expect five times as many sales. So, you know, there go the hopes of tastemakers everywhere looking for the next indie band out of Omaha.
Lots of people say they have a favorite number; fewer people would say they have lots and lots of favorite numbers that neatly fit into a favorite number sequence. You know, like primes, Fibonacci numbers, the Extra strong Lucas Pseudoprimes. And even fewer would ever admit to having a favorite number sequence song.
But for those who do...
Neil Sloane, a fellow at AT&T, maintains the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, which contains 136,699 different sequences. The sequence used as an example on the home page is “Busy Beaver problem: maximal number of steps that an n-state Turing machine can make on an initially blank tape before eventually halting.”
Why did they beam the song out into space? Apparently there's a bunch of anniversaries today -- the song that this stupid movie named itself after, NASA's Deep Space Network, and NASA itself.
So, 431 years from now, aliens near Polaris will receive an MP3 encoded with incontrovertible evidence that extraterrestrial life exists, and that it is unimaginative in the extreme. (Not to mention totally philistine when it comes to audio quality-- what, NASA, aliens don't deserve lossless?)
In 2006, invisibility cloaks took the world by storm, thanks to a joint effort by mathematicians, physicists and Harry Potter.
This year, however, the physicists have another surprise: you can be invisible AND silent!
Two independent teams of scientists came up the plans for a “cloak of silence,” a device which will be able to create a pocket of silence around an object by redirecting sound waves. Some physicists used to think such a device was mathematically impossible, but the two teams, one from Duke and the other from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, say their equations check out. (Image courtesy of Duke.)
The technology can be used by engineers to build better concert halls or hide submarines from sonar, but it’s unlikely that the scientists will come up with a cloak you can throw over your neighbor’s noisy dog. (And if a tree fell in the forest and everyone was wearing an acoustic cloak, would it make a noise?)
Jeffrey Howell from Arizona is being sued by Atlantic Records for illegally sharing his digital music, which pretty much accounts to sharing it at all. His particular crime is nothing new: he converted music from his CDs into MP3s and put them in a shared folder for Kazaa to distribute. What's new is that the RIAA is going one step farther than simply saying Howell shouldn't distribute the CDs. In the lobbying organization's brief, they're saying he never should have copied them in the first place. That's right, according to a legal brief filed in the case by the RIAA, any time you put a CD you own into a computer you own and iTunes rips it into MP3 format, you've created "unauthorized" copies.
But this story takes that relationship to a whole new level of awesomeness.
EMI is the parent company of The Beatles’ two record labels, Capitol Records and Apple Records. And it had its fingers in several pies at the time (they gave the BBC its first television transmitter), one of which included R&D in medical imaging technology. So they took the heaps and heaps of money they made off of the sales of some 200 million Beatles singles and used it to fund Sir Godfrey Hounsfield's work on his CT scanner prototype at EMI Central Research Laboratories in Hayes, England. As a result he spent four years tinkering on it. Lo and behold the first EMI-Scanner was installed in a hospital in Wimbledon, England in 1972.
Early today OiNk, an invite-only BitTorrent tracker responsible for leaking 60 major albums already this year, was shut down. Now the site is responding again, but with only one message: "This site has been closed as a result of a criminal investigation by IFPI, BPI, Cleveland Police and the Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police (FIOD ECD) into suspected illegal music distribution. A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site's users." The only other content on a site that used to provide access to gigs of data are the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and British Phonographic Industry (BPI) logos.
