by Paul Hegarty.......... "Full with Noise,..." is about noise music, specifically the version that has come to be called Japanese Noise -- itself composed of many different strands. The first half deals with the question of noise. What is it, whose is it, and how can we think about it. Also, how does noise inflect our thinking, rather than being an object; at what point does noise lose its noiseness and become meaning, music, signification? Or -- is there even a point where noise can subsist? Mostly, the text below takes the view that noise is a function of not-noise, itself a function of not being noise. Noise is no more original than music or meaning, and yet its position is to indicate the banished, overcome primordiality, and cannot lose this 'meaning'. Noise, then, is neither the outside of language nor music, nor is it simply categorisable, at some point or other, as belonging exclusively to the world of meaning, understanding, truth and knowledge. Read More ...
Dirty HC Punk explosion - Bristol scene Rise up + Disorder 9 free CDs
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A straight shot west out of Boston on I-90 will carry you, in two hours or less, to Western Massachusetts, where the country still looks like it did twenty or even 40 years ago: college towns, I-91 tracing the same lazy ladder from Springfield up through Holyoke and Northampton, Amherst and Deerfield. Out there it's taken for granted that the houses will be drafty, the winters uniformly long, and that, on any given trip to the local supermarket, one might spot Thurston or Lou or Kim or J, on-and-off locals for more than twenty years. {audio}http://www.archive.org/download/DinosaurJrDrawings/07Drawerings_64kb.mp3{/audio} ... Drawerings Read More ...
By way of decrying a society that left its citizens unbearably restrained, Edith Wharton describes how in New York in the 1870s, women would order dresses from their Paris dressmakers and then leave them in tissue paper at least two years before wearing them in public; the thought of showing them "in advance of the fashion" was unforgivably vulgar. Social life has changed, but cultural life seems just as restricted now – even Animal Collective are held back by trends that seem a couple of years old (and that they helped to invent). When I think back on 2009, I’ll first remember how our impoverished aesthetic generation repeatedly scraped the resin from the cultural trash barrel. Every second person is wearing neon leggings, and the ones who aren’t rock a ‘70s aesthetic, with high-waisted jeans and moccasins. Christmas sweaters are getting impossible to find at the thrift store. Ska revival. Garage rock revival. It never ends. Read More ...
Black Punk Time: Blacks in Punk, New Wave and Hardcore 1976-1984 + free albums
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For just over 10 years, London's Guapo has been working in the world of avant and progressive rock. The band's past is a bit hard to track with its numerous lineup changes and guest musicians. The most recent change in roster was the resignation of Matthew Thompson, the founding member of Guapo, which occurred just before the release of 2005's Black Oni. The departure of Thompson has left Guapo with percussionist David Smith and multi-instrumentalist Daniel O'Sullivan. Though O'Sullivan is by no means a founding member of the band, but he was essential in honing the sound on Guapo's last two LPs: Five Suns and Black Oni. These two albums have been pivotal in building Guapo's following of fans, so it's hard not to credit O'Sullivan as an asset to the band.... {audio}http://www.neurotrecordings.com/artists/guapo/audio/Guapo-The%20Selenotrope.mp3 {/audio} ... The Selenotrope Read More ...
Leon Theremin /1896-1993/ - the great forefather of Rock N' Roll /big noise master/
In 1919, in the midst of the Russian Civil War, Theremin invented the musical instrument that bears his name. The theremin is an electronic device that resonates sound when its operator waves his hands near its two antennas. It was the first musical instrument designed to be played without being touched. He invented the theremin (also called the thereminvox) in 1919, when his country was in the midst of the Russian Civil War. After a lengthy tour of Europe, during which he demonstrated his invention to full audiences, Theremin found his way to the United States. He performed the theremin with the New York Philharmonic in 1928. He patented his invention in 1929 (U.S. Patent 1,661,058 ) and subsequently granted commercial production rights to RCA. In 1938 Theremin was kidnapped in the New York apartment he shared with his American wife (the black ballet dancer, Iavana Williams) by the NKVD (forerunners of the KGB). He was transported back to Russia, and accused of propagating anti-Soviet propaganda by Stalin. Read More ...
Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet
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The Peyote Way Church of God - believe that the Holy Sacrament Peyote can lead an individual toward a more spiritual life
The Peyote Way Church of God is a non-sectarian, multicultural, experiential, Peyotist organization located in southeastern Arizona, in the remote Aravaipa wilderness. It is not affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Native American Church, or any other religious organizations, though we do accept people from all faiths. Church membership is open to all races. We encourage individuals to create their own rituals as they become acquainted with the great mystery. We believe that the Holy Sacrament Peyote, when taken according to our sacramental procedure and combined with a holistic lifestyle (see Word of Wisdom), can lead an individual toward a more spiritual life. Peyote is currently listed as a controlled substance and its religious use is protected by Federal law only for Native American members of the Native American Church. Read More ...
Japan’s Annual Penis Festival – Celebrates Fertility
KOMAKI, Japan — It's springtime in Japan and that means one thing. Actually, two things. Penis festivals and vagina festivals. It may sound like a sophomoric gag. But these are folk rites going back at least 1,500 years, into Japan's agricultural past. They're held to ensure a good harvest and promote baby-making. Maybe they should hold more such festivals. Japan has one of the world's lowest birthrates (1.37 children per woman), which experts blame on stagnant incomes and changing gender relations. Read More ...
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The dreamachine (or dream machine) is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and William Burroughs's "systems adviser" Ian Sommerville created the dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain. In its original form, a dreamachine is made from a cylinder with slits cut in the sides. The cylinder is placed on a record turntable and rotated at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. A light bulb is suspended in the center of the cylinder and the rotation speed allows the light to come out from the holes at a constant frequency of between 8 and 13 pulses per second. This frequency range corresponds to alpha waves, electrical oscillations normally present in the human brain while relaxing. Read More ...
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Black-lip Rattail ............ These sorts of rattails feed in the muddy seafloor by gliding along head down and tail up, powered by gentle undulations of a long fin under the tail. The triangular head has sensory cells underneath that help detect animals buried in the mud or sand. The common name comes from the black edges around the mouth. Read More ...
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The moon has allways held a significant place for humanity both as a source for romantic inspiration for poets and the like to outstanding curiosity for scientists. Allthough, it is said to be a shadowy place some say of Aliens others say of Top Secret Moon Bases that are supposed to belong to The Third Reich what do you think ? It is said that in the early nineties that Nazies landed on the moon using some sort of giant flying saucer type object. These Nazi flying Saucers were said to stand about 45 mtrs high, had 10 stories of crew quaters and had a diameter of 60 mtrs. Well here is videos and texts that links that story ........ Read More ...
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A brain–computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain–machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a brain and an external device. BCIs are often aimed at assisting, augmenting or repairing human cognitive or sensory-motor functions. Research on BCIs began in the 1970s at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) under a grant from the National Science Foundation, followed by a contract from DARPA. The papers published after this research also mark the first appearance of the expression brain–computer interface in scientific literature. Read More ...
The giant ALICE detector is already underway at CERN, and researchers are scrambling to add an electromagnetic calorimeter to capture jet-quenching, the newest way to look inside the quark-gluon plasma — the hot, dense state of matter that filled the earliest universe, which the Large Hadron Collider will soon recreate by slamming lead nuclei into one another. CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is known mainly as the accelerator that will soon begin searching for the Higgs particle, and other new physics, in proton collisions at unprecedented energies — up to 14 TeV (14 trillion electron volts) at the center of mass — and with unprecedented beam intensities. But the same machine will also collide massive nuclei, specifically lead ions, to energies never achieved before in the laboratory. Read More ...
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Coral Castle doesn't look much like a castle, but that hasn't discouraged generations of tourists from wanting to see it. That's because it was built by one man, Ed Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant who single-handedly and mysteriously excavated, carved, and erected over 2.2 million pounds of coral rock to build this place, even though he stood only five feet tall and weighed a mere 100 pounds. Ed was as secretive as he was misguided. He never told anyone how he carved and set into place the walls, gates, monoliths, and moon crescents that make up much of his Castle. Some of these blocks weigh as much as 30 tons. Ed often worked at night, by lantern light, so that no one could see him. He used only tools that he fashioned himself from wrecks in an auto junkyard. Read More ...
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Fluid inclusions in modern and ancient buried halite from Death Valley and Saline Valley, California, USA, contain an ecosystem of “salt-loving” (halophilic) prokaryotes and eukaryotes, some of which are alive. Prokaryotes may survive inside fluid inclusions for tens of thousands of years using carbon and other metabolites supplied by the trapped microbial community, most notably the single-celled alga Dunaliella, an important primary producer in hypersaline systems. Deeper understanding of the long-term survival of prokaryotes in fluid inclusions will complement studies that further explore microbial life on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system, where materials that potentially harbor microorganisms are millions and even billions of years old. Read More ...
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A disturbing story in the March, 2005. 1 issue of Pravda suggests that the U. S. Government is working on the discovery of a mysterious point over the South Pole that may be a passageway backward in time. According to the article, some American and British scientists working in Antarctica on January 27, 1995, noticed a spinning gray fog in the sky over the pole. U. S. physicist Mariann McLein said at first they believed it to be some kind of sandstorm. But after a while they noticed that the fog did not change its form and did not move so they decided to investigate. Read More ...
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We still don't have a theory that describes the fundamental nature of the universe, but there are plenty of candidates.
The "theory of everything" is one of the most cherished dreams of science. If it is ever discovered, it will describe the workings of the universe at the most fundamental level and thus encompass our entire understanding of nature. It would also answer such enduring puzzles as what dark matter is, the reason time flows in only one direction and how gravity works. Small wonder that Stephen Hawking famously said that such a theory would be "the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God". But theologians needn't lose too much sleep just yet. Despite decades of effort, progress has been slow. Rather than one or two rival theories whose merits can be judged against the evidence, there is a profusion of candidates and precious few clues as to which (if any) might turn out to be correct. Read More ...
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It was nearly the end of WWII. At that same time, scientist Viktor Schauberger worked on a secret project. Johannes Kepler, whose ideas Schauberger followed, had knowledge of the secret teachings of Pythagoras that had been adopted and kept secret. It was the knowledge of Implosion (in this case the utilization of the potential of the inner worlds in the outer world). Hitler knew - as did the Thule and Vril people - that the divine principle was always constructive. A technology however that is based on explosion and therefore is destructive runs against the divine principle. Thus they wanted to create a technology based on Implosion. Read More ...
The Size Of Our World or How Insignificant the Earth Really Is in the Universe
Compared to you and me, the Earth is really big. But compared to Jupiter and the Sun, the Earth is pretty tiny. There are many ways we can measure the size of the Earth. Let's look at how big the Earth is, and then compare it to other objects in the Solar System. The diameter of the Earth is 12,742 km. In other words, if you dug a hole down into the Earth, passed through the center of the Earth, and came out the other side, you would have dug a hole 12,742 km deep (on average). That's about 4 times longer than the diameter of the Moon. Read More ...
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Project Icarus is a 21st century theoretical study of a mission to another star. Icarus aims to build on the work of the celebrated Daedalus project. Between the period 1973-1978 members of the BIS undertook a theoretical study of a flyby mission to Barnard's star 5.9 light years away. This was Project Daedalus and remains one of the most complete studies of an interstellar probe to date. The 54,000 ton two-stage vehicle was powered by inertial confinement fusion using electron beams to compress the D/He3 fusion capsules to ignition. It would obtain an eventual cruise velocity of 36,000km/s or 12% of light speed from over 700kN of thrust, burning at a specific impulse of 1 million seconds, reaching its destination in approximately 50 years. Read More ...
Mysterious Radio Waves from Unknown Object in M82 Galaxy
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Unsettled Mechanism of Supernova Detonation Gets a New Twist
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Our cosmos was "bruised" in collisions with other universes. Now astronomers have found the first evidence of these impacts in the cosmic microwave background. There's something exciting afoot in the world of cosmology. Last month, Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford and Vahe Gurzadyan at Yerevan State University in Armenia announced that they had found patterns of concentric circles in the cosmic microwave background, the echo of the Big Bang. Read More ...
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Homerecent news Emotion homophily in social network site messages
Emotion homophily in social network site messages
Social network sites (SNS) like MySpace seem to play a role in friendships and wider relationships for many people. Emotion expression can be important in relationship maintenance but little is known about the role of emotion in SNSs, other than positive comments being widespread in MySpace. Is emotion typically reciprocated, and do Friends express and/or receive similar levels of emotion expression to each other? Based upon an analysis of over two million MySpace public comments associated with 2,990 pairs of U.K. and U.S. Friends using a sentiment detection program, statistically significant evidence was found for a weak correlation between the strength of positive emotion exchanged between Friends and received by Friends.
This is consistent with two separate hypotheses: members tend to Friend others with similar levels of public emotion expression, or the expression of emotion in MySpace is contagious. The results may help to identify non–optimal behaviour and at–risk individuals in SNSs. Emotion is now recognised as an important aspect of many areas of our lives. Aside from the obvious relevance of feelings like happiness and sadness to personal well–being, appropriate perception and communication of emotion is important for maintaining human relationships and friendships and not just intimate relationships. Particularly for women, friends are also a source of emotional support, one that can help individuals to cope in difficult times (Stoppard and Gunn Gruchy, 1993). Recently, however, an increasing amount of communication between friends seems to occur online via e–mail, chatrooms and social network sites. Given the importance of emotion in many friendships and fears that online communication is somehow poorer than face–to–face interaction (e.g., BBC, 2009), it is important to understand as much as possible about the properties of online emotion expression and support in friendship, so that appropriate actions can be taken if the important social institution of friendship is under threat or, conversely, if new opportunities are evident.
Many researchers have already investigated the role of emotion in online communication, particularly from the perspective of social psychology and for older communications media like e–mail and chatrooms (e.g., Derks, et al., 2008; Radić–Bojanić, 2006). These studies have typically used interviews or questionnaires to discover perceived communication patterns and emotion factors, such as personality types (Fullwood and Martino, 2007). It seems that no previous published study has investigated the role of emotion in SNS Friendship communication, although some have investigated aspects of emotion in SNSs (Banczyk, et al., 2008). Moreover, no previous study has used a large–scale analysis of communications between friends to investigate the role of emotion, rather than self–reports in interviews or questionnaires. This study partly fills these gaps through an investigation of the strength and polarity of sentiment expressed in messages associated with pairs of MySpace Friends. In particular, it assesses the extent of emotion homophily in public MySpace comments. Whilst traditional studies of homophily in social networks are frequently motivated by identifying the extent to which social, ethnic or educational background influences the choice or strength of relationships (McPherson, et al., 2001) and some studies have studied online homophily (Nowak and Rauh, 2006; Thelwall, 2009; Yuan and Gay, 2006), this is apparently the first large–scale study of emotion homophily and the first study of emotion homophily online. Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site
Research questions
The objective of this research is to assess different kinds of emotion homophily between pairs of Friends in MySpace using an automatic analysis of emotion in public comments, the main available public source of text messages between Friends in MySpace or any other SNS. For practical reasons, described below, it is not possible to address the objective by analysing all public comments written by individual members but it is possible to analyse all comments written to certain members. As a result the following research questions address different aspects of emotion:
Do public comments exchanged between pairs of Friends contain similar strengths of positive and negative emotion?
For a given pair of Friends, do the public comments sent to each of them by other Friends contain similar strengths of positive or negative emotion?
For a given pair of Friends, when they write comments on others’ profiles, do they contain similar strengths of positive and negative emotion?
Data
In order to test the emotion homophily hypothesis, a large sample of MySpace members was generated and the emotional content of their messages was compared with that of their friends. The following summarises the procedure.
A sample of MySpace users was generated by systematically selecting member IDs from those allocated on 3 July 2006. This gives a representative sample of all those who joined before this date. From this sample, the following were excluded: musicians, comedians, filmmakers, ex–members, people with private profiles and people declaring residence outside of the U.K. or U.S. All excluded members either did not reveal the necessary data, were commercial rather than private MySpace users, or were difficult to study due to their country being a relatively low MySpace user. For comparison, a similar sample was taken of members joining on 18 June 2007 and another sample was taken of all members that had joined on any day up to 3 July 2007. Multiple samples were used to assess how consistent the results were over time.
For each selected member, all public comments made to them were extracted from their profiles (and any additional comment pages) and all comments made (by anyone) to one randomly selected commenting friend with a profile matching the above restrictions were also recorded. This rather strange data set, illustrated in Figure 1, was chosen as this is the natural way to collect comment data. In particular, it is not possible to directly collect all comments made by a person, except by filtering them out of the set of comments made to each of their friends. Since some users have thousands of MySpace Friends it is not practical to collect a large data set of comments made by individual members.
Figure 1: Data based upon pairs of Friends A and B that exchange comments, including all comments made to A or to B but not all comments from A or from B.
An emotion categorisation program (Thelwall, et al., submitted) was used to assign a positive and a negative emotion to each comment on a scale of one (no emotion) to five (very strong emotion). The classification was based upon a predefined list of about 500 emotion–bearing words (e.g., hate = negative 4), emoticons and emphatic devices including words (e.g., very), punctuation (e.g., !!!!) and repeated letter emphatic spelling (e.g., soooo).
Homophily was identified directly and indirectly from the data described above as follows:
Figure 2: Comments used for the direct method.
Indirect method: For each pair of Friends A and B, the average emotion strength of comments to A is calculated, except for comments from B. This is compared to the average strength of comments to B except for those from A (see Figure 3). Assuming that emotion is copied between comments in a dialog (i.e., precisely the assumption that makes the direct test invalid) then the average emotion of comments to A is a good estimate of the average emotion of comments from A. Hence comparing the results from A and B approximates a direct test of homophily in emotion between A and B in a way that is not biased by copying in direct communication between A and B.
Figure 3: Comments used for the indirect method.
Pearson correlations were used to assess the extent of homophily. A positive correlation suggests that a higher level of emotion in one member is associated with a higher level of the same type of emotion associated with their partner.
Results
There was a correlation between the emotion of comments associated with MySpace members and the emotion of comments associated with their friends for both positive and negative emotion in all cases except one (the smallest sample size), and whether measured directly or indirectly. For the direct method, this means that the emotion of comments sent by a member to a friend tends to be similar to the emotion of comments returned by that Friend. For the indirect method, this means that the emotion of comments sent to a member tends to be similar to the emotion of comments sent to a friend. Combining the two results, it can be deduced that the emotion of comments sent by a member tends to be similar to the emotion of comments sent by a Friend, whether or not the comments between the two Friends in question are excluded. Hence there is homophily in the emotion of comments of MySpace members and their Friends. Nevertheless, the degree of homophily is relatively weak, ranging from an average correlation of 0.227 to an average correlation of 0.308, showing that the homophily is not a strong tendency in the sense that it would be unreasonable to expect the level of emotion of MySpace Friends to closely follow each other.
"Social Network" and its accompanying research explore the importance of physical and emotional connections to the success of new media art works. By creating a digital installation which addresses and questions whether digital environments can adequately communicate emotions in a similar manner to the aura of the unique art objects discussed by Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," I hope to understand the nature of our transformed social encounters in virtual communications such as Facebook. My research uncovers that communication through digital means can be limiting and that there are larger social repercussions to the emotional discourse in contemporary society. Can computers be used to express emotions and not just communicate information and ideas?
Conclusions
The results show a weak but statistically significant level of homophily for both positive and negative sentiment directly for the first two research questions. This indirectly gives the same answer for the third research question.
A limitation of the research is that it is based upon an automatic analysis of the way in which emotion is expressed. In consequence, the similarity may be partly due to language use. For example, if Friends shared oblique ways of referencing emotion then this would not be captured well by the approach used. Nevertheless, the prevalence of detected emotion suggests that this is not a major issue.
The method does not test whether people Friend others with similar emotional dispositions, personalities or expressive styles. Alternatively, it does not test whether emotion expression strengths are copied within MySpace but one of these two options seems likely to be the explanation for the results.
In terms of applications of the findings, Friendship emotional homophily suggests that posting positive messages to Friends may be a successful strategy to encourage positive emotion. Similarly, SNS members should aim to be sensitive to the emotion conveyed by their Friends and try to reciprocate to some extent: not to do so may make them seem abnormal and hence at risk of losing Friendships.
author .... Mike Thelwall is Professor of Information Science and leader of the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton, U.K. He is also visiting fellow of the Amsterdam Virtual Knowledge Studio, a Docent at Åbo Akademi University Department of Information Studies, and a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. Web: http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/
recent news 
Social network sites (SNS) like MySpace seem to play a role in friendships and wider relationships for many people. Emotion expression can be important in relationship maintenance but little is known about the role of emotion in SNSs, other than positive comments being widespread in MySpace. Is emotion typically reciprocated, and do Friends express and/or receive similar levels of emotion expression to each other? Based upon an analysis of over two million MySpace public comments associated with 2,990 pairs of U.K. and U.S. Friends using a sentiment detection program, statistically significant evidence was found for a weak correlation between the strength of positive emotion exchanged between Friends and received by Friends.
