December 2020 – Page 113 – news.buyenne.com

Two very different approaches to restoring vision

Reprogramming nerve cells and hardware implants both add to visual acuity.

False-color image of a medical image of the interior of a human head.

Our visual system is complex, with photoreceptors that pick up incoming light and at least three types of neurons between those and the brain. Once in the brain, visual input is interpreted by multiple dedicated regions that build a scene out of small pieces of shape and motion. The outcome of that processing may be further interpreted by areas of the brain that handle things like reading or face recognition.

With all that complexity, lots of different things can go wrong. Accordingly, we'll likely need multiple solutions if we want to try to correct these problems. So, it was nice to see the results of two very different approaches to tackling visual problems tested in experimental animals this week. One group manipulated biology to correct problems in the transmission of information between the eye and the brain, while another group used electronics to bypass the need for an eye entirely.

Refreshing nerves

One of the most exciting developments in tissue repair has been the recognition that we could convert many cell types into stem cells just by activating four specific genes. Unfortunately, activating those genes widely in mice kills them, as the genes also promote loss of normal cellular identity and uncontrolled division. A huge, US-based collaboration suspected many of these problems were due to one of those four genes (called MYC), and so it focused on working with the remaining three. The first showed that activating these three in cells from older mice restored properties that were typical of younger cells without any loss of normal cell function.

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Two very different approaches to restoring vision

Reprogramming nerve cells and hardware implants both add to visual acuity.

Refreshing nerves

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Mit Corona-Politik auf dem Weg in den "Obrigkeitsstaat"?

AfD- und FDP-Politiker behaupten das gern. Und auch manche Linksliberale und Linke sprechen vom “autoritären Staat”. Kommentar

AfD- und FDP-Politiker behaupten das gern. Und auch manche Linksliberale und Linke sprechen vom "autoritären Staat". Kommentar

Microsoft: Excel-Formeln werden Turing-vollständig

Microsoft sieht seine Excel-Formeln als meistverbreitete Programmiersprache weltweit. Dank Lambdafunktionen wird dies nun zur Wirklichkeit. (Office, Microsoft)

ePA: Neue E-Patientenakte startet zunächst mit Testphase

Zum neuen Jahr kommt die elektronische Patientenakte. Sie soll vieles vereinfachen, startet am Anfang aber noch mit Einschränkungen. (Medizin, Datenschutz)

Spotify’s Anti-Plagiarism Tool To Protect Copyright is Too Black Mirror

This week it was revealed that Spotify wants to patent a technology that will enable artists to check whether their uploaded songs have elements that are too similar to others. One of the aims is to help artists avoid copyright infringement lawsuits. But, doesn’t the thought of artistic impression being policed by a computer sound like an episode of Black Mirror?

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

When I started writing music in in my teens, I didn’t even think about how to begin. I just did what every other starting writer does – I copied, emulated, plagiarized and otherwise ripped-off everything I’d enjoyed from the music I’d listened to thus far. Badly.

Deprived of divine inspiration, it wouldn’t have been possible any other way. Show me a composer who hasn’t committed at least one of the above at some point and I’ll show you someone who spontaneously learned how to speak as a child without hearing others do so.

It was for these reasons I was horrified when MBW reported this week that Spotify has filed for a patent to scan music uploads so that they can be assessed for potential plagiarism. The theory is that if a track (or part thereof) is deemed to be too similar to a preexisting track, the artist can adjust their creation, thereby avoiding accusations of plagiarism and potential copyright infringement lawsuits in the future.

Without condoning professional musicians who think it’s acceptable (it’s not) to copy large parts of others’ tracks and pass them off as their own, it worries me that a computer program could end up with the power to stop an artist in their tracks and tell them to take another route.

There are dozens of millions of songs on streaming services today and millions more besides. So, go ahead and hum a six-second tune of your own making right now. Guess what – someone, somewhere has done that before. Now hum another original tune without being influenced by any music you’ve ever heard in the past. You can see where this is going.

Of course, we don’t know how or even if this technology will ever be used. It might be deployed moderately but if not, the thought of needing to obtain some kind of permission from an algorithm that could, in the future, have access to a database of every song ever made, sounds a bit like an episode of Black Mirror to me.

Some may be thinking, “You watch too much Black Mirror”, and those people would be right. But imagine if this future technology fell into the wrong hands and was aggressively used to scan all of the music made thus far for ‘plagiarism’? There wouldn’t be enough copyright troll lawyers to go round. Or, imagine it comes pre-installed in your music software, stopping you in your creative tracks whenever it detects a collision.

The thing about music is that it can’t develop or evolve without some kind of plagiarism, or ‘influence’ if you prefer a less loaded word. Proof of that is proudly on display when we search by genre, a particular decade, or music from a geographical region, because these artists copy from each other to perpetuate a style. Indeed, to a certain extent, and when it’s not carried out at the expense of others, music lovers enjoy a bit of copying because we know what we like and we want more of it.

But, apparently, the threat of being subjected to a copyright lawsuit in the future is now so severe, artists might need to double-check with a computer that they haven’t accidentally ‘discovered’ someone else’s combination of notes, chords, or rhythms, having got there too late. Sad really.

Finally, this piece would not be complete without a reference to what I and many others believe is one of the most important few seconds in recent musical history. I’m talking about the ‘Amen Break‘ from The Winston’s 1969 track ‘Amen, Brother’. This snippet of music has been plagiarized, ripped-off, stolen, and otherwise utilized in thousands and thousands of tracks for the last 50 years.

There seems little doubt that had the proposed Spotify system or one like it been around the first time this sample was used without permission, the uploader would’ve been gently advised that this had been done before. Taking that to its logical conclusion, that loop would’ve been denied the chance to inspire thousands of artists to make music people love.

Recycling is good and plagiarism isn’t always bad. Humans are programmed to copy. Let’s not get too carried away when nobody is getting hurt.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The incredible journey of the electronic plastic bottle

Researchers loaded containers with trackers and let them float away.

Someone living along the Ganges River in India recently received a gift that we can safely say no one on Earth had ever gotten before. At first, it must have looked like an ordinary plastic bottle floating down the river, save for the rod poking out of its top, like a sailboat with a mast but no sail. The giftee, who remains anonymous, must have gotten curious and ripped open the 500-milliliter bottle, finding that it was in fact packed with electronics. Those included a SIM card, which the person popped into a mobile device and then logged into Facebook.

“The reason we knew it was in use was when we got the bill,” says Alasdair Davies, a technical specialist at the Zoological Society of London. You see, Davies, along with conservation scientist Emily Duncan of the University of Exeter and other researchers, had not long before released the bottle and nine others into the Ganges as part of a clever experiment to show how plastic pollution moves through rivers and eventually out to sea. SIM cards allowed the ill-fated bottle and its companions to connect to cell towers every three hours as they journeyed down the river, recording in great detail how far and how fast the devices traveled. One sailed 380 miles over 51 days.

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