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Sixteen-year-old human trafficking victim Sara Kruzan was sentenced to life in prison without parole when, in a desperate act to escape captivity, she shot her pimp. When Sara met G.G., the 31-year-old man who would become her pimp, she was only 11. G.G. groomed Sara two years before he raped her.  By then, his control was complete and he forced her into prostitution.  Sara and the other girls who G.G. exploited were out on the streets from 6pm to 6am, every night.  Twelve hours a night, seven days a week, for three years, Sara was raped by strangers so G.G. could profit.  After three years, she snapped, and she killed him.

Now 32, Sara has spent half her life in prison as a model prisoner, and has asked Gov. Schwarzenegger for clemency. Sara was arrested and tried in 1994, before anyone was using the term "human trafficking" and when the country was still struggling to understand issues like domestic violence and pimp control that give one person coercive control over another. So there was no expert witness at Sara's trial to explain how her years of repeated rape, trauma, and abuse had affected her actions. There was no expert to tell the jury that with counseling, support, and care, Sara could heal from her traumatic past and grow to be a strong and moral woman.

Sara's clemency plea has been submitted to Gov. Schwarzenegger, and the decision of whether or not to release her with time served rests solely with him. Sara Kruzan deserves hope.  She deserves hope that she didn't survive being raped and sold for three years for nothing.  She deserves hope that the darkest chapter of her life has passed, and a horizon lies ahead.  She deserves hope that she can change, grow, and flourish as a woman. But in life without parole, there is no hope.

Tell Gov. Schwarzenegger that human trafficking victims deserve support and care, not prison. Ask him to release Sara with time served.

I signed it. I'd say you probably should too.

In a new study, researchers have developed a method for capturing musical gestures and mapping them to sounds that overcomes some of the disadvantages of previous methods. Adam Tindale, Ajay Kapur, and George Tzanetakis – all trained musicians and computer scientists working at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada – have described the new method in a study to be published in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. The method grew out of the authors' experiences in developing instruments for interactive human-computer music performances. At the time, Tindale and Kapur were both completing their PhDs at the University of Victoria. Tindale now works at the Alberta College of Art and Design and Kapur works at the California Institute of the Arts and the New Zealand School of Music.

As the researchers explain in their study, there are two main approaches for capturing musical gestures. One approach is direct acquisition, which involves attaching permanent sensors to instruments to create “hyper-instruments.” However, this approach is often invasive to performers and requires modification of expensive instruments. The second approach is indirect acquisition, which involves using a microphone to capture the sound, as well as sophisticated signal processing and machine learning algorithms to extract gestures from the sounds, which requires large amounts of training.

The researchers' new method is somewhat of a hybrid of these two approaches. They temporarily attach sensors to an instrument to capture musical gestures and a microphone to capture sound. This data is analyzed, and the gesture-sound mappings are used to train machine learning models to extract gestures from sounds only. These machine models then create what the researchers call a “surrogate sensor,” which behaves like the original invasive sensor but is not attached to the instrument. The surrogate sensor can determine the musical gestures based only on the analyzed sound captured from the microphone.

A demonstration of the gesture recognition system: in the second half of the video, the recognition system is parsing the events. When it detects a rim hit, it changes its pre-set processing on the physical modeling. Video credit: Adam Tindale.

“The main advantage of the method is that it allows large amounts of training data for machine learning algorithms to be acquired without human annotation simply by playing an instrument enhanced with sensors,” Tzanetakis told PhysOrg.com. “Once the surrogate sensor has been trained and its performance evaluated, then it can be used in place of the actual physical sensor on unmodified instruments of the same type.”

The system overcomes the previous difficulties in that it doesn't hinder the performers or their instruments when performing, and doesn't require large amounts of processing and analysis, greatly reducing time requirements. For instance, data from snare drum samples that took nearly a week of manual labor can be processed in less than an hour with the new method.

The researchers demonstrated the system with professional musicians playing electronic sitars and electronic snare drums. The results showed that the trained surrogate sensors can accurately determine musical gestures when different musicians were performing, and not only the performer who was used to train the surrogate sensor. Further, any kind of performing (such as improvisation or playing a song) could be used to train the surrogate sensor.

Video above: Computers, robots, and humans, including coauthor Ajay Kapur, perform together in the Machine Orchestra. Video credit: Ajay Kapur.

In the future, the researchers plan to make the system more sensitive to additional features, such as training it to recognize the type of mouthpiece used by a woodwind instrument and the string on which a note is played on a violin. Both Tindale and Kapur currently use the system during musical performances, as shown in the accompanying videos.

“Basically, the gesture information extracted is typically used in the following ways,” Tzanetakis explained. “(1) To map performance information to sound and a music generation algorithm that react in real-time expressively to the music; (2) to drive animations and visuals; (3) to synthesize sounds parametrically (for example, a synthesized drum sound might change based on where the snare drum is hit); and (4) to do analysis of the music played (for example, automatically tracking the tempo) in the context of computer-controlled robotic instruments interacting with humans.”

Watch the video. I would love to be in a band like that someday! Sitars, video, and dancers. :-)

To better understand bonobo intelligence, I traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, to meet Kanzi, a 26-year-old male bonobo reputedly able to converse with humans. When Kanzi was an infant, American psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh tried to teach his mother, Matata, to communicate using a keyboard labeled with geometric symbols. Matata never really got the hang of it, but Kanzi—who usually played in the background, seemingly oblivious, during his mother’s teaching sessions—picked up the language.

Kanzi learned to combine these symbols in regular ways, or in what linguists call"proto-grammar."Once, Savage-Rumbaugh says, on an outing in a forest by the Georgia State University laboratory where he was raised, Kanzi touched the symbols for"marshmallow"and"fire."Given matches and marshmallows, Kanzi snapped twigs for a fire, lit them with the matches and toasted the marshmallows on a stick.

I really like articles like this. It's exciting to realize how very intelligent animals can be, and at the same time disheartening when one considers what is done to them in some circumstances.

I am floored. Anyone interested in trying to implement this algorithm with me? Anyone?

Kudos to Prince Charles for this one.

A major new research project led by Professor Nick Jennings of the University of Southampton will aim to develop true partnerships between people and computers.

Professor Jennings says: “We are fast approaching an ‘era of ubiquity’ where each of us will become increasingly dependent on multiple smart and proactive computers that we carry with us, access at home and at work, and that are embedded into the world around us.

“This will profoundly change the ways in which we work with computers. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines, we will increasingly work in partnership with highly inter‐connected computational components (agents) that are able to act autonomously and intelligently.”

Professor Jennings, of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton, believes that human-agent collectives – people and computational agents operating at a global scale – offer tremendous potential and, if realised correctly, will help meet key societal challenges.

However, these benefits are mirrored by the threat of equally concerning pitfalls as we shift to become increasingly reliant on systems that interweave human and computational endeavour.

The Orchid Project therefore has ambitious aims: the researchers will tackle the entire lifecycle of systems composed of human‐agent collectives, from the underpinning theory to the application of the systems in the real-world critical domains of energy systems and disaster response. In doing so, they will define the new science of systems composed of human‐agent collectives, demonstrate the commercial, industrial and societal impact of such systems, and enhance the UK’s competitiveness in this key area of the knowledge economy.

This research takes place in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia research group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. If you are interested in undertaking PhD research in this group, see our Research pages for further information.

For further information about this news release contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453.

Posted by Joyce Lewis on 07 Oct 2010.

A very interesting idea, one parallel to the ones I've been having as of late (i.e, the past few years.) The use of technology to mend the ills of society is quite noble, though (as noted in the snippets above) it can be a double-edged sword. More recently the idea of using technology to organize and direct groups of people for the mending of society has begun to take root and blossom. It seems that this is what the Orchid Project intends to study and make a science of. An interesting article, if a bit vague. Vagueness is, however, quite understandable when one takes into account the nascent state of this particular facet of technological change.

My own hopes are that technological progressivism will benefit from this study and will help facilitate the broader shift of focus from improving the lives of those in the richest countries to improving the wealth of humanity as a whole. For while the rich may always be made richer, it is undeniable that we (in the wealthier countries of the world) are at a point of diminishing returns whereas those in the majority world present massive opportunities for the enrichment of humanity.

After all, how many brilliant minds and gains for humanity are lost to a lack of opportunity, or violence and turmoil, or a lack of those things which are necessary for survival? If technology can make labor more productive by bringing forth from the earth greater wealth with less human effort, and at the same time sustain such gains, we ought to reach a point where the wealth of the whole globe is such that even the poorest among us may live comfortably, without fear of the diseases and afflictions endemic to poverty today. Once this has happened humanity may then know its potential.

This marriage of technological and organizational/social progress could very well lead to this dream's realization, though great care must be taken lest our dreams become nightmares and the revolution be betrayed.

"Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard," wrote Sebastian Thrun, a distinguished software engineer at Google, in a Saturday blog post. "They've driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research."

Awesome! Do want!

If you read the article, some concern is voiced about whether Google is losing focus with this new project, and whether entering the automotive arena is a wise move. However, the assumption made there, that they will be competing with the likes of Toyota and Ford, is a false one. I find it more likely that Google will license the technology to car manufacturers who will then adapt it for their own cars.

After all, I think Google is smart enough to realize they could make far more money that way than they ever could trying to own the automotive market. It's akin to Bill Gates realizing he could make more money selling software than anyone could ever make selling hardware (contrary to IBM's opinion at the time.)

At any rate, the self-driving cars are coming. I can't wait until they're safe enough for the consumer market.

In a European-style corporate state, very large corporations (and their unions) get special protections, privileges, and exemptions, to the detriment of consumers, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and taxpayers.  Here we go, via Russ Roberts:

Nearly a million workers won’t get a consumer protection in the U.S. health reform law meant to cap insurance costs because the government exempted their employers.

Thirty companies and organizations, including McDonald’s (MCD) and Jack in the Box (JACK), won’t be required to raise the minimum annual benefit included in low-cost health plans, which are often used to cover part-time or low-wage employees.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which provided a list of exemptions, said it granted waivers in late September so workers with such plans wouldn’t lose coverage from employers who might choose instead to drop health insurance altogether.

Without waivers, companies would have had to provide a minimum of $750,000 in coverage next year, increasing to $1.25 million in 2012, $2 million in 2013 and unlimited in 2014.

“The big political issue here is the president promised no one would lose the coverage they’ve got,” says Robert Laszewski, chief executive officer of consulting company Health Policy and Strategy Associates. “Here we are a month before the election, and these companies represent 1 million people who would lose the coverage they’ve got.”

Actually, the real political question is why McDonald’s gets special treatment, but the folks who run the deli downstairs in my building, who effectively compete with McDonald’s, does not get to operate under the same law, merely because they are not large enough to get the President’s special attention.

What do you think of this?