If you’ve been around the neighborhood lately, you will have notice that a lot of cute new coffee shops are popping up the East Village. One of the best that I’ve tried is the Coyi Cafe (Avenue B between 3rd and 4th streets). It’s adorable inside, although quite small, and the coffee is hard to beat.
Brooklyn is also embracing coffee these days, that is, the song “Coffee” by Brooklyn’s own Motel Motel, a new americana jam that you’re sure to enjoy.
One day the machines will rise up and rule over us all!
It’s not a new fear, it’s just one that keeps coming up in the news and popular culture everywhere lately, maybe because it’s becoming more and more of a possibility. According to a recent Times article, a group of computer scientists who have been “impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence” is debating about whether there should be “limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.”
Although this seems like the opening scene to any number of recentmovies in which the machines rise up, kill everyone, and take over the world, this meeting actually happened last month in California. The group of researchers, which included roboticists, leading computer scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers, generally agreed that it would not be possible for centralized “superintelligences” to spring up spontaneously, although they did acknowledge that robots who can kill on their own are already here, with more advanced versions to come soon. Some of the potential threats of this new technology becoming widespread include the possibility for criminal manipulation/exploitation, and possible threats to human jobs. With The Singularity – the notion that there will come a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, thus ending the “human era” – looming, the panel is looking for ways “to guide research so that technology improve[s] society rather than move[s] it toward a technological catastrophe.” One way they are proposing to keep this technology from getting into the wrong hands is to conduct research in a “high-security laboratory.”
The latest film in this vein, Surrogates, coming out in September, looks sufficiently creepy. From what I gather, the premise is that humans spend their lives in the safety of their own homes and control their surrogates (robotic versions of themselves) who are out in the real world living their lives for them, so that their humans can be free of risk or fear. It’s a movie, so inevitably something must go wrong. These ideas seem crazy now, but maybe one day it could happen. Who thought that we would ever have tiny hand-held drones and robots disarming roadside bombs for the army?
One group who seems unafraid of such a phenomenon, and embraces the machine, is London’s Florence & the Machine. Florence & the Machine is the recording name of Florence Welch and the band of several musicians (the Machine) that plays and records with her. Their first studio album, Lungs, was released in the U.K. on July 6th and will be released in the U.S. on October 20th by Island Records. Florence & The Machine’s music has received wide praise across the British music media, including rave reviews by NME Magazine and the BBC. The general public must be pretty behind them too, seeing as Lungs was at the number 2 position its first five weeks on the U.K. charts, only behind Michael Jackson.
The latest release from, Lungs, “Drumming Song” is catchy in a way that will leave you wanting to listen to it again and again. The video, released earlier this month, is a preview to the release of the “Drumming Song” digital EP that will come out on September 14th. Although it’s not an actual machine playing with Florence here, this hard hitting track could signal the rise of something—hopefully we’ll be hearing a lot more from them soon.
Florence & The Machine – Drumming Song:
-Melissa
Editor’s note: Thanks to our London correspondent Eimear for turning us on to Florence & the Machine in the first place.
Clearly, Twitter and other social networking sites are changing the way that companies interact with and listen to customers, and now, that interaction has also turned into a business of its own! Yesterday the New York Times ran an interesting article about the “virtual currency” of online opinion, and takes a look at some of the early frontrunnrers in this emerging field unsentimentaly dubbed “sentiment analysis.” Companies such as Scout Labs in California and Jodange in Yonkers are powered by increasingly complex algorithms that serve to aggregate feelings, thoughts, and opinions as expressed by users of various online social networks, blogs, and other community web sites. The companies can then theoretically use this information to gain valuable insight into new marketing strategies or products (essentially free market research, replacing 20 random people in a room with 200,000 readers of a blog, say), or to better manage public relations, such as this spring when StubHub used data from Scout Labs to notice brewing discontent over its bad weather policy and was able to avoid any major backlash.
Of course, this all sounds nice until you hear that the accuracy of even the best of the companies’ algorithms are only “70-80% accurate” (as quoted in the Times piece). And as the article points out, “translating the slippery stuff of human language into binary values will always be an imperfect science.” I’m no moral philosopher, so I’m not looking to get into all that right now, but it seems like this article gets it right when it points out that this road may ultimately lead to a dangerous conflation of feeling and fact.
It’s almost like Chris and Thomas are commenting on the potential downsides to this “innovation” in their song “Take These Thoughts,” when they warn:
Take these thoughts /
They’re heavy and they’re old /
Don’t let ’em steal your soul
Chris (Anderson) and Thomas (Hien), a folk duo in the vein of Simon and Garfunkel, met in Liverpool at the same art school where another pretty famous pair first got to know each other (although come on, the comparison is QUITE a stretch, Ms. Dunham, no matter what their PR peeps told you). Their first full album, Land of Sea, generated a lot of interest in the group, and I’m sure that comparisons to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young have helped almost as much as the major success of last year’s Fleet Foxes record, which sounds awfully similar to these guys at times. They don’t seem to have any tour dates up on their myspace or official website, so for now, I guess you’ll have to settle for this video.
The countdown continues and we are down to only three weekends left of summer. It is so quiet in the city today—when has the F train ever had the majority of seats open at 8:00 A.M.? For those of you in town this weekend, more thunderstorms are predicted, so if you go to Central Park, watch out for falling trees.
Here’s the second song of our Friday “Summertime” jam series from the Long Beach, Cali band, Sublime. Sublime finally achieved mainstream success with their self-titled third album in 1996. Sadly, the Sublime album was the group’s last; lead singer Bradley Nowell died of a heroin overdose shortly before its release. This song is a classic and although it’s not officially entitled “Summertime” I’m pretty sure it counts.
Sublime – Doin’ Time:
-Melissa
Editor’s note: Please excuse the randomness of this video, it was the best version of the song available.
According to the results of a recent study out of the University of South Australia and published in the Journal of International Business and Economics, 18-26 year old girls are far less likely to buy products (regardless of what the product might be) from female sales associates that they perceive to be more attractive than themselves. As Stylelist.com points out, this phenomenon is far more damaging if your company is, say, Abercrombie & Fitch, than if you’re Bloomingdale’s. But still, the author of the study finds that “upward social comparison, where individuals compare themselves with people who they believe are socially superior, can create anxiety, lower confidence and create feelings of inadequacy” leading to “avoidance behavior.” As if women didn’t have enough to deal with already!
But if you’re a pretty girl who is starting to worry about her job security, fret not: you’ve got a friend in Wale (and let’s not forget Lil Wayne, who is very clearly not discriminating).
Wale (real name: Olubowale Victor Folarin), who hails from Washington, D.C., began his career back in 2006 with a series of local hits that were largely inspired by/examples of go-go. Go-go is a sub-genre of funk that originated in the D.C. area (and remains mostly unknown outside of D.C.) that is characterized by its syncopated bass/snare pattern as well as the importance of live “call and response” interaction with the audience.
I first heard about Wale in 2007, when his manager gave a copy of his song “Good Girls” to Mark Ronson, who liked it so much that he invited him to spit a few bars on his East Village Radio show, “Authentic Shit.” Since then, Wale has been riding the Ronson train straight to Hitsville. While playing at Ronson’s record release party at the Highline Ballroom, he was interviewed by MTV news and was later asked to perform at the MTV Video Awards in 2007. This led to his teaming up with Lady Gaga on “Chillin,” and on October 20th, Ronson’s Allido Records (an Interscope imprint) will release Wale’s first official record. Not too bad of a ride thus far.
Getting back to the original point, the most recent leak from the record is “Pretty Girls,” which has a great beat and sample (from D.C. go-go group Backyard), and is one of my favorite new hip hop releases of the moment. Not only is it his second song with the word girls in the title, but it is a pretty good example of go-go (hear that call and response in there?) and reps D.C. hard. So to all the pretty girls: put this record on while you pick up the pieces of your shattered retail-sales-associate dreams, and then go find some rappers to love you!
Scene from a rooftop on 106th street last night.
Photo Credit: Melissa Hersh
For any of you that were outside in the city last night, or anywhere near a window, I don’t have to tell you that there was one hell of a thunder and lightning storm. The storm, which only lasted for half an hour, between about 10 and 10:30, knocked down more than 100 trees in Central Park and damaged hundreds more.
Unfortunately, last night was the inaugural night of the seventh annual Central Park Film Festival, and they had to close down early because of the driving rain and powerful winds. The more than 2,400 people that were there had to run for cover as the storm clouds opened up over them, missing the end of the unnecessarily long Sex and the City movie (spoiler alert, they finally do get married in the end). As Adrian Benepe, the city parks commissioner, told the Times, “Central Park has been devastated. It created more damage than I’ve seen in 30 years of working in the parks.” Amazingly, although the storm brought wind gusts of 70 miles an hour, there were no reports of anyone injured around the city. Central Park Conservancy work crews are canvassing the park today to inspect the condition of the park’s more than 24,000 trees for loose and dangerous hanging branches.
Somehow foreshadowing this unfortunate turn of events, Radiohead released their latest song, “These Are My Twisted Words” for download on their website on Monday in response to speculation online that it was indeed a Radiohead track after it surfaced last week. If you dowload the song, you also get an accompanying pdf of artwork depicting scraggly, twisted, jagged tree branches. The artwork file is meant to be printed out on tracing paper for you to “put them in an order that pleases you.” The eerily appropriate sample of the finished product that they included is below.
Twisted Woods
The new song is ominous, the perfect soundtrack to the events of last night. Take a listen to “These Are My Twisted Words” below:
Radiohead – These Are My Twisted Words:
But Radiohead has always been ahead of the curve, even in an arboreal sense. Today’s Jam is one of the band’s best, “Fake Plastic Trees,” from their second album The Bends. It was the third single to be released from that album in the U.K., but it was released as the album’s first here in the U.S.
East Village to Brooklyn 