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Post by Deleted on Jul 30, 2018 2:50:56 GMT
Gotta love the judge  |
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Jul 30, 2018 11:09:48 GMT
Good mornin'
Science Alert
This AI Can Predict Your Personality Type Simply by Watching Your Eyes
The windows to the soul?
PETER DOCKRILL
30 JUL 2018
If you're bluffing your way through a game of high-stakes poker, it's a good idea to avoid shifty, nervous eye movements, which just might give your hand away.
But it's not just during poker that our eyes can betray us. A recent study suggests the way our eyes move actually reveals a scary amount about what we feel inside – to the point where AI can predict somebody's personality type simply by watching their eyes.
"Thanks to our machine-learning approach, we not only validate the role of personality in explaining eye movement in everyday life, but also reveal new eye movement characteristics as predictors of personality traits," explains neuropsychologist Tobias Loetscher from the University of South Australia.
There's a body of previous research suggesting our eye movements signal things about the way we think and feel – a trait humans consciously or unconsciously pick up on during interpersonal relations.
But can these eye movements – and what they internally represent – be similarly appreciated by something that isn't human?
That's what Loetscher and his team wanted to find out, so they recruited 50 volunteers to fill out questionnaires that would indicate where each participant fell in terms of the so-called Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and extraversion.
Each of the (student) participants also wore eye-tracking headsets, which recorded their eye movements while they were sent out to visit a store and purchase something. They were wearing the headset for about ten minutes.
When the team had their machine learning AI analyse the data recorded by the eye-tracking software, they found it was able to isolate patterns of eye movements and match them up to the basic psychological profiles.
"One key contribution of our work is to demonstrate, for the first time, that an individual's level of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and perceptual curiosity [another personality type] can be predicted only from eye movements recorded during an everyday task," the authors write in their paper.
It's worth pointing out that while the AI was able to predict these personality types, it wasn't able to do it with particularly high accuracy – but the researchers say it was still reliable (up to 15 percent better than chance) for those traits.
With further refinement, this kind of technology could dramatically improve interactions with machines, the researchers think, giving things like virtual assistants a way of reading our mood or personality.
"People are always looking for improved, personalised services. However, today's robots and computers are not socially aware, so they cannot adapt to non-verbal cues," Loetscher says.
"This research provides opportunities to develop robots and computers so that they can become more natural, and better at interpreting human social signals."
Of course, there's a more dystopian angle to the findings too. If cameras can peer into our psyche using nothing more than optical sensors, there could be disturbing privacy implications – especially if people don't want a machine trying to guess how they're feeling.
"If the same information could be gained from eye recordings or speech frequency then it could easily be recorded and used without people's knowledge," neuroscientist Olivia Carter from the University of Melbourne, who wasn't involved with the research, told New Scientist.
That's something scientists will have to keep in mind as these systems continue to evolve, with Loetscher and co. hypothesising these abilities could one day be incorporated into a wave of socially interactive robots – capable of interpreting tell-tale eye flutters, and even mimicking it to seem more human.
Welcome to the future.
The findings are reported in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
www.sciencealert.com/this-ai-predict-personality-type-simply-watching-eyes-big-five-traits
Crystal
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Post by Deleted on Jul 30, 2018 15:44:31 GMT
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Jul 30, 2018 19:01:41 GMT
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Post by swamprat on Jul 30, 2018 19:30:31 GMT
A Harley Biker is riding by the zoo in Washington, DC when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion's cage. Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the collar of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents. The biker jumps off his Harley, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch. Whimpering from the pain the lion jumps back letting go of the girl, and the biker brings the girl to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly. A reporter has watched the whole event.
The reporter addressing the Harley rider says, “Sir, this was the most gallant and bravest thing I've seen a man do in my whole life.”
The Harley rider replies, “Why, it was nothing, really. The lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger, and acted as I felt necessary.”
The reporter says, “Well, I'll make sure this won't go unnoticed. I'm a journalist, you know, and tomorrow's paper will have this story on the front page. So, what do you do for a living, and what political affiliation do you have?”
The biker replies "I'm a U.S. Marine, a Republican and I’m voting for Trump."
The journalist leaves.
The following morning the biker buys the paper to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on the front page:
“U.S. MARINE ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT & STEALS HIS LUNCH”
And THAT pretty much sums up the media's approach to the news these days!
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Jul 30, 2018 23:23:54 GMT
WLOX ABC
Coast man writes book about his 1970's alien abduction
Monday, July 30th 2018, 12:15 pm MST
By Doug Walker, Reporter
PASCAGOULA, MS (WLOX) -
Calvin Parker was only 19 when he and a fishing friend, Charles Hickson, say they were abducted by aliens on the shores of the Pascagoula River.
It was a story that riveted the nation. Hickson has since died. Now, Parker has written a book about the most harrowing experience he has been through in his 64 years.
Calvin Parker is retired now, enjoying time with his wife Waynett. His new book has just been published. He relived what happened about 9 p.m. on October 11th, 1973, on the edge of a fishing pier. “We got abducted, took aboard, we got an examination, and then we got put back out. We got sent to the Sheriff's department, then we went to Keesler and we went to a hospital to get checked.”
He never sought the limelight, it sought him. “I never really had a steady job. I'd move when people found out where I worked and now I've come to terms with it and I bought a house and I can't move," he said.
At this stage in his life, a book about the alien encounter seemed to be the right thing to do. “Everybody's got an expiration date, and mine's getting close. I just wanted to get the truth there before I expired, and they way to do it is documented in a book and let everybody know exactly what happened.”
A very private man, he found encouragement from friends about telling his story. “I was over at one of my friend’s house, and he heard I was going to write a book. He said, 'You know Calvin, I've heard you tell many a lies in the past, but I've never heard you talk about this UFO incident.'”
Parker passed lie detector tests, and underwent hypnosis. His story always remained the same, right down to the smallest detail.
He has a message for non-believers, “I tell them that they're pretty narrow minded to think that we're the only planet in the solar system that has life on it. But if that's the way they want to believe, that's their business.”
The close encounter was something he never wanted, but knows the choice was not his. “It's hard to have regrets over something you can't control, but I do have regrets about it. The one regret I have is that it happened to me. I had rather not have it happened.”
Still, writing the book and telling his story has been therapeutic. “For the first time in my life, I'm really happy about getting all this out.”
Being happy is what's important now for Parker, with a large weight lifted off his shoulders. If you'd like to buy a copy of Parker's book, Pascagoula, the closet encounter, it's available on Amazon and also on Kindle.
www.wlox.com/story/38768369/coast-man-writes-book-about-his-1970s-alien-abduction
Crystal
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Post by Deleted on Jul 31, 2018 0:39:32 GMT
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Jul 31, 2018 11:56:28 GMT
Good morning lovely UFOCasebookers,
The Conversation
Ancient Greek music: now we finally know what it sounded like
Armand D'Angour
July 31, 2018 6.14am EDT
In 1932, the musicologist Wilfrid Perrett reported to an audience at the Royal Musical Association in London the words of an unnamed professor of Greek with musical leanings: “Nobody has ever made head or tail of ancient Greek music, and nobody ever will. That way madness lies.”
Indeed, ancient Greek music has long posed a maddening enigma. Yet music was ubiquitous in classical Greece, with most of the poetry from around 750BC to 350BC – the songs of Homer, Sappho, and others – composed and performed as sung music, sometimes accompanied by dance. Literary texts provide abundant and highly specific details about the notes, scales, effects, and instruments used. The lyre was a common feature, along with the popular aulos, two double-reed pipes played simultaneously by a single performer so as to sound like two powerful oboes played in concert.
Despite this wealth of information, the sense and sound of ancient Greek music has proved incredibly elusive. This is because the terms and notions found in ancient sources – mode, enharmonic, diesis, and so on – are complicated and unfamiliar. And while notated music exists and can be reliably interpreted, it is scarce and fragmentary. What could be reconstructed in practice has often sounded quite strange and unappealing – so ancient Greek music had by many been deemed a lost art.
Above: An older reconstruction of ancient Greek music.
But recent developments have excitingly overturned this gloomy assessment. A project to investigate ancient Greek music that I have been working on since 2013 has generated stunning insights into how ancient Greeks made music. My research has even led to its performance – and hopefully, in the future, we’ll see many more such reconstructions.
New approaches
The situation has changed largely because over the past few years some very well preserved auloi have been reconstructed by expert technicians such as Robin Howell and researchers associated with the European Music Archaeology Project. Played by highly skilled pipers such as Barnaby Brown and Callum Armstrong, they provide a faithful guide to the pitch range of ancient music, as well as to the instruments’ own pitches, timbres, and tunings.
Central to ancient song was its rhythms, and the rhythms of ancient Greek music can be derived from the metres of the poetry. These were based strictly on the durations of syllables of words, which create patterns of long and short elements. While there are no tempo indications for ancient songs, it is often clear whether a metre should be sung fast or slow (until the invention of mechanical chronometers, tempo was in any case not fixed, and was bound to vary between performances). Setting an appropriate tempo is essential if music is to sound right.
What about the tunes – the melody and harmony? This is what most people mean when they claim that ancient Greek “music” is lost. Thousands of words about the theory of melody and harmony survive in the writings of ancient authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Aristoxenus, Ptolemy, and Aristides Quintilianus; and a few fragmentary scores with ancient musical notation first came to light in Florence in the late 16th century. But this evidence for actual music gave no real sense of the melodic and harmonic riches that we learn of from literary sources.
More documents with ancient notation on papyrus or stone have intermittently come to light since 1581, and now around 60 fragments exist. Carefully compiled, transcribed, and interpreted by scholars such as Martin West and Egert Pöhlmann, they give us a better chance of understanding how the music sounded.
Ancient Greek music performed
The earliest substantial musical document, found in 1892, preserves part of a chorus from the Athenian tragedian Euripides’ Orestes of 408BC. It has long posed problems for interpretation, mainly owing to its use of quarter-tone intervals, which have seemed to suggest an alien melodic sensibility. Western music operates with whole tones and semitones; any smaller interval sounds to our ears as if a note is being played or sung out of tune.
But my analyses of the Orestes fragment, published earlier this year, led to striking insights. First, I demonstrated that elements of the score clearly indicate word-painting – the imitation of the meaning of words by the shape of the melodic line. We find a falling cadence set to the word “lament”, and a large upward interval leap accompanying the word “leaps up”.
Second, I showed that if the quarter-tones functioned as “passing-notes”, the composition was in fact tonal (focused on a pitch to which the tune regularly reverts). This should not be very surprising, as such tonality exists in all the documents of ancient music from later centuries, including the large-scale Delphic Paeans preserved on stone.
With these premises in view, in 2016 I reconstructed the music of the Orestes papyrus for choral realisation with aulos accompaniment, setting a brisk tempo as indicated by the metre and the content of the chorus’s words. This Orestes chorus was performed by choir and aulos-player at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in July 2017, together with other reconstructed ancient scores.
more after the jump:
theconversation.com/ancient-greek-music-now-we-finally-know-what-it-sounded-like-99895
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Jul 31, 2018 12:03:08 GMT
Telegraph
'Bigfoot erotica' accusation plunges US congressional race into farce
Mark Molloy
31 July 2018 • 12:01pm
A US congressional race has been plunged into controversy after the state’s Republican nominee was accused of being “a devotee of Bigfoot erotica”.
The political mudslinging took a bizarre twist on Sunday when Democratic candidate Leslie Cockburn in Virginia accused her opponent Denver Riggleman of being a fan of the little-known Sasquatch subgenre.
Ms Cockburn, a writer and author, also claimed her rival was “caught on camera campaigning with a white supremacist”, which Mr Riggleman has denied.
“Now he has been exposed as a devotee of Bigfoot erotica,” she added in the tweet. “This is not what we need on Capitol Hill.”
The Democratic candidate shared two screengrabs taken from Mr Riggleman’s Instagram account, one showing a sketch with his head superimposed on the body of a Bigfoot.
“From my opponent Denver Riggleman’s Bigfoot erotica collection,” she tweeted alongside the grab. The other Instagram post featured a drawing of the mythical creature with a “censored” bar between his legs.
While Mr Riggleman has dedicated the last decade to researching different groups of Bigfoot believers, co-authoring the self-published 2006 book Bigfoot Exterminators Inc. The Partially Cautionary, Mostly True Tale of Monster Hunt, the US Air Force veteran denied having any interest in monster-themed erotica.
more after the jump:
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/31/bigfoot-erotica-accusation-plunges-us-congressional-race-controversy/
Crystal
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Post by HAL on Jul 31, 2018 21:53:15 GMT
...Hickson has since died...
...Being happy is what's important now for Parker, with a large weight lifted off his shoulders...
I'll bet it has.
Call me an old cynic, but Hickson dying means he can't be questioned on the subject and also he will not be able to claim any royalties on book sales.
HAL
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Jul 31, 2018 22:54:58 GMT
Atlas Obscura
Jinshan Sulphuric Fire Fishing Festival
See Taiwan's dying art of fishing with fire.
Every year, in the midst of typhoon season, several dozen aging fishermen carry out a time-honored practice: the dazzling, more-than-a-century-old art of fire fishing. As the sun sets, the birdsong that normally fills Jinshan’s Huangguang Fishing Harbor disappears and an evening glow fills the sky. The fishermen are working fast, but they’re not racing the light.
At first glance, Huangguang looks like any harbor—the sprawl of rickety boats float in the green-blue waters, and a salty sea breeze wafts in the air. But here in the countryside of Taiwan, things are done differently. Fire fishing is a unique method used only at night in Jinshan, a small port city. The technique relies on the area’s abundant resources of sulphur. The Taiwanese fishermen use soft sulphuric rocks to create flammable gas that travels to a bamboo torch dangling off the rear of the boat. The resulting fire is so bright that it attracts thousands of silver-scaled sardines to the water’s surface. Workers spend up to 12 hours, in the dead of night, scooping up the creatures in mesh nets.
However, the practice is now a slowly dying tradition. Fewer and fewer fishermen use these spectacular (but outdated and tiresome) methods. Local organizers are working to spread awareness of this fire-fishing culture. The result is the Jinshan Sulphuric Fire Fishing Festival, which generally runs from May to July. Depending on the year and available funding, the festival may also feature concerts or other activities. But the consistent, primary draw is nocturnal sightseeing tours that bring boats of onlookers alongside the fire-fishing boats to see the awesome spectacle up close.
Need to Know
From Taipei, the hour-plus trek to Jinshan involves rumbling by abandoned temples and brick factories on a bus, often through steep mountain passes. The tours are only in Mandarin Chinese, are weather-permitting, and take about four hours—enough time for a guided introduction to the history of Jinshan’s fishing industry, a modest dinner of noodle soup, and time on board the boat viewing the fizzling-out practice. Photography is welcome and encouraged. Information about tour times and cancellations are posted regularly on Facebook during the festival.
www.atlasobscura.com/foods/jinshan-sulphuric-fire-fishing-festival
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Aug 1, 2018 11:47:55 GMT
Good morning lovely people 
colourufo
Published on Jul 31, 2018
~
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Aug 1, 2018 11:53:30 GMT
Science News
In a first, physicists accelerate atoms in the Large Hadron Collider
The successful test may mean the particle accelerator could be used as a gamma-ray factory
By Emily Conover
1:42pm, July 31, 2018
Not content with protons and atomic nuclei, physicists took a new kind of particle for a spin around the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.
On July 25, the Large Hadron Collider, located at the laboratory CERN in Geneva, accelerated ionized lead atoms, each containing a single electron buddied up with a lead nucleus. Each lead atom normally has 82 electrons, but researchers stripped away all but one in the experiment, giving the particles an electric charge. Previously, the LHC had accelerated only protons and the nuclei of atoms, without any electron hangers-on.
Scientists hope the successful test means that the LHC could one day be used as a gamma-ray factory. Gamma rays, a type of high-energy light, could be produced by zapping beams of ionized atoms with laser light. That light would jostle the atoms’ electrons into higher energy states, and the accelerated atoms would emit gamma rays when the electrons later returned to lower energy states. Existing facilities make gamma rays from beams of electrons, but the LHC might be able to produce gamma rays at greater intensities.
More powerful beams of gamma rays would be useful for various scientific purposes, including searching for certain types of dark matter — mysterious particles that scientists believe exist in the universe but have yet to detect (SN: 11/12/16, p. 14). The gamma rays could also be used to produce beams of other particles, such as heavy, electron-like particles called muons, for use in new kinds of experiments.
www.sciencenews.org/article/physicists-accelerate-atoms-large-hadron-collider-first-time?tgt=nr
Crystal
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Post by WingsofCrystal on Aug 1, 2018 12:27:36 GMT
Crystal
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Post by Deleted on Aug 1, 2018 14:41:45 GMT
❤
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