Tag: Folklore

Music Training Has Biological Impact on Aging Process

The NCFR Video on this page has the quote
National Children’s Folksong Repository
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/NCFR/NCFR.html
Einstein’s thoughts on Musi
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Music/musicsmart.html
Creativity and Dreams
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/IEC/creativity-dream.html
Music Smarts!
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Music/musicsmart2.html
 
Music Training Has Biological Impact on Aging Process
Aging-related hearing loss is not set in stone, study finds
January 30, 2012 | by Wendy Leopold
EVANSTON — Age-related delays in neural timing are not inevitable and can be avoided or offset with musical training, according to a new study from Northwestern University. The study is the first to provide biological evidence that lifelong musical experience has an impact on the aging process.
Measuring the automatic brain responses of younger and older musicians and non-musicians to speech sounds, researchers in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory discovered that older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage.
“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,” said Northwestern neuroscientist Nina Kraus. “This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions.”
Kraus, professor of communication sciences in the School of Communication and professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is co-author of “Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing” published online in the journal “Neurobiology of Aging.”
“These are very interesting and important findings,” said Don Caspary, a nationally known researcher on age-related hearing loss at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. “They support the idea that the brain can be trained to overcome, in part, some age-related hearing loss.”
“The new Northwestern data, with recent animal data from Michael Merzenich and his colleagues at University of California, San Francisco, strongly suggest that intensive training even late in life could improve speech processing in older adults and, as a result, improve their ability to communicate in complex, noisy acoustic environments,” Caspary added.
Previous studies from Kraus’ Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory suggest that musical training also offset losses in memory and difficulties hearing speech in noise — two common complaints of older adults. The lab has been extensively studying the effects of musical experience on brain plasticity across the life span in normal and clinical populations, and in educational settings.
However, Kraus warns that the current study’s findings were not pervasive and do not demonstrate that musician’s have a neural timing advantage in every neural response to sound. “Instead, this study showed that musical experience selectively affected the timing of sound elements that are important in distinguishing one consonant from another.”
The automatic neural responses to speech sounds delivered to 87 normal-hearing, native English-speaking adults were measured as they watched a captioned video. “Musician” participants began musical training before age 9 and engaged consistently in musical activities through their lives, while “non-musicians” had three years or less of musical training.
Kraus, who co-authored the study with Northwestern researchers Alexandra Parbery-Clark, Samira Anderson and Emily Hittner, is available at nk****@**********rn.edu or at (847) 491-3181. For more about the work of Kraus’ Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory on music perception and learning-associated brain plasticity, visit http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/brainvolts/.
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/01/kraus-neural-timing.html
 

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In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots

Robots – Job loss “The Human Use of Human Beings” The automation on human labor “what the ultimate machine age is likely to be”

In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots

By JOHN MARKOFF
May 20 2013
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/science/mit-scholars-1949-essay-on-machine-age-is-found.html>
It was a vision that never saw the light of day.
The year was 1949, and computers and robots were still largely the stuff of science fiction. Only a few farsighted thinkers imagined that they would one day become central to civilization, with consequences both liberating and potentially dire.
One of those visionaries was Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), an American mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1948 he had published “Cybernetics,” a landmark theoretical work that both foreshadowed and influenced the arrival of computing, robotics and automation. Two years later, he wrote “The Human Use of Human Beings,” a popularization of those ideas and an exploration of the potential of automation and the risks of dehumanization by machines.
In 1949, The New York Times invited Wiener to summarize his views about “what the ultimate machine age is likely to be,” in the words of its longtime Sunday editor, Lester Markel.
Wiener accepted the invitation and wrote a draft of the article; the legendarily autocratic Markel was dissatisfied and asked him to rewrite it. He did. But through a distinctly pre-Internet series of fumbles and missed opportunities, neither version ever appeared.
In August, according to Wiener’s papers, which are on file at the M.I.T. Libraries, The Times asked him to resend the first draft of the article so it could be combined with the second draft. (It is not clear why the editors failed to keep a copy of the first draft.)
“Could you send the first draft to me, and we’ll see whether we can combine the two into one story?” wrote an editor in the paper’s Sunday department, then separate from the daily paper. “I may be mistaken, but I think you lost some of your best material.”
But by then Wiener was traveling in Mexico, and he responded:
“I had assumed that the first version of my article was finished business. To get hold of the paper in my office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology would involve considerable cross-correspondence and annoyance to several people.
“I therefore do not consider it a practical thing to do. Under the circumstances I think that it is best for me to abandon this undertaking.”
The following week the Times editor returned the second draft to Wiener, and it eventually made its way to the libraries’ Archives and Special Collections. It languished there until December 2012, when it was discovered by Anders Fernstedt, an independent scholar who is researching the work of Karl Popper, the 20th-century philosopher.
Almost 64 years after Wiener wrote it, his essay is still remarkably topical, raising questions about the impact of smart machines on society and of automation on human labor. In the spirit of rectifying an old omission, here are excerpts from “The Machine Age,” courtesy of the M.I.T. Libraries (all rights reserved).
[snip]

NASA funds 3D food printer, pizza is the first item on the menu

NASA funds 3D food printer, pizza is the first item on the menu

By Melissa Grey May 21st, 2013
<http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/nasa-funds-3d-food-printer/>
Last week we had lab-grown burgers; this week it’s powdered pizza. NASA’s gotten in on the synthesized food action by awarding a $125,000 grant to Anjan Contractor, head of Systems & Materials Research Corporation, to develop a 3D food printer. The first device Contractor plans to build under the six-month grant is based on RepRap’s open-source hardware and will be designed to print a pizza comprised of three layers of nutritional powders mixed with water and oil. As the final frontier gets further and further away, NASA’s need for a nutritious, long-lasting food supply suitable for space travel grows. Since the powders used in Contractor’s design — potentially sourced from insects, grass and algae — have a shelf life of about 30 years, his 3D food printer would be well-suited to the task. If your appetite’s survived the idea of snacks made from pulverized insects, you can watch the grant-winning prototype print some synthesized chocolate after the break. [snip]