Skin Tight Jeans and Syncopation

Explaining the genius of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”—using music theory.

Very cool piece

Uveablues

 I've been challenged by friends on Facebook to write a “not boring” piece that explains a successful pop song using music theory. My bet is that it’ll be boring, but I'm going to do my best not to bore you!

I have picked Katy Perry's “Teenage Dream.” Because: this song's success seems to mystify all the Katy Perry haters in the world. Why did it go to No. 1? Let’s start by talking about the ingenuity of the harmonic content. This song is all about suspension—not in the voice-leading 4–3 sense, but in the emotional sense, which listeners often associate with “exhilaration,” being on the road, being on a roller coaster, travel. This sense of suspension is created simply, by denying the listener any I chords. There is not a single I chord in the song.

(..)

The second key to this song's Enormous Chart Success has to do with the weighting of the melody lines. Perfect balance of tension and release. Each line of the verses begin straight, on the beat, but end with a syncopation: [straight:] “you think I'm pretty without any” [syncopated:] “makeup on.

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=98WtmW-lfeE

Risk score system accurate in predicting macular degeneration risk

1. 8 predictors (age, sex, education level, race, smoking status, presence of pigment abnormality, soft drusen, and maximum drusen size) were utilized to create a macular risk scoring system (MRSS).

2. Area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was excellent (internally validated c-index = 0.88; externally validated c-index = 0.91). Sensitivity and specificity at cutoff of 0 were 87.6% and 73.6% respectively.

Evidence Rating Level: 2 (Good)

Link

Spark Therapeutics and Genable Technologies Announce Collaboration to Advance a Gene Therapy Treatment for a Rare Form of Retinitis Pigmentosa

PHILADELPHIA, March 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Spark Therapeutics andGenable Technologies announced today that they have entered into a collaboration agreement for Genable's lead therapeutic to treat rhodopsin-linked autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa (RHO adRP), GT038. Under the terms of the collaboration, Genable will license certain adeno-associated virus (AAV) vector manufacturing patents from Spark.
Link

Water, Tai Chi, and Mood

"You can't control the waves but you can learn how to surf"
John Kabbat-Zinn

Three Links Follow
Uvealblues

What does it mean to learn how to surf?  When we experience emotions, they tend to multiply on themselves.  For example, let’s say you’re driving in your car and you just miss the green light and get stuck at a red.  This annoys you.  Then you think to yourself ‘This is stupid, why am I getting angry about something so small?’  Now you’re angry at yourself for being angry.

When you surf, you can’t resist the flow of the waves.  If you try to resist, you’ll end up underwater.  The same is true with emotions.  If you resist your emotions and try to fight them, they will consume you.  If instead you accept your emotions, then they lose their grip over you, and you can glide along their surface.

Link

Soft Overcomes Hard: Control Your Emotions with Tai Chi
Read more at http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/soft-overcomes-hard-control-emotions-tai-chi/#6Hwfhde7PR6sLxbb.99

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“In order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.”

Bruce Li

After spending many hours meditating and practicing, I gave up and went sailing alone in a junk. On the sea I thought of all my past training and got mad at myself and punched the water! Right then — at that moment — a thought suddenly struck me; was not this water the very essence of gung fu? Hadn’t this water just now illustrated to me the principle of gung fu? I struck it but it did not suffer hurt. Again I struck it with all of my might — yet it was not wounded! I then tried to grasp a handful of it but this proved impossible. This water, the softest substance in the world, which could be contained in the smallest jar, only seemed weak. In reality, it could penetrate the hardest substance in the world. That was it! I wanted to be like the nature of water.

Link 

(from BrainPickings.Org)

FACES SHOW FEAR AND DISGUST TO HELP EYES SEE

Facial expressions—such as wide-eyed fear or narrow-eyed disgust—are the result of how our eyes have evolved to perceive, not to communicate.

Our eyes widen in fear, boosting sensitivity and expanding our field of vision to locate surrounding danger. When repulsed, our eyes narrow, blocking light to sharpen focus and pinpoint the source of our disgust.

Link

The Government Is a Hitman: Uber, Tesla and Airbnb Are in Its Crosshairs

The real losers are not just the next generation of innovators but also customers who lose out on more ways of getting what they need or want.

What the Invisible Hand of free-market innovation giveth, the Dead Hand of politically motivated regulation desperately tries to taketh away.

That’s the only way to describe what’s happening to three wildly innovative and popular products: the award-winning electric car Tesla, taxi-replacement service Uber, and hotel-alternative Airbnb. These companies are not only revolutionizing their industries via cutting-edge technology and customer-empowering distribution, they’re running afoul of interest groups that are quick to use political muscle to maintain market share and the status quo.

Link

Study Questions Fat and Heart Disease Link

Many of us have long been told that saturated fat, the type found in meat, butter and cheese, causes heart disease. But a large and exhaustive new analysis by a team of international scientists found no evidence that eating saturated fat increased heart attacks and other cardiac events.

The new findings are part of a growing body of research that has challenged the accepted wisdom that saturated fat is inherently bad for you and will continue the debate about what foods are best to eat.

Link

The Science of ‘Paying It Forward’

ONE morning in December of 2012, at the drive-through window of a Tim Hortons coffee shop in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a customer paid for her order and then picked up the tab for the stranger in the car behind her in line. Then that customer paid the bill for the following customer in line — and so on, for the next 226 customers, in a three-hour sequence of spontaneous generosity.

It turns out that such “pay it forward” chains are not unheard-of at Tim Hortons (though they are usually much shorter), and news outlets have reported the emergence of many such chains in a variety of restaurant drive-throughs and tollbooths throughout North America. Last year, a Chick-fil-A in Houston experienced a 67-car chain. A few months later, a Heav’nly Donuts in Amesbury, Mass., had a run of 55 cars.

Why do these things happen? One possibility is that generosity among strangers can be socially contagious.
..
In an experiment the results of which were published last month in the journal PLoS One, we studied both possibilities. We found that receiving and observing generosity can both significantly increase your likelihood of being generous toward a stranger, but that if you observe a high enough level of generosity, your willingness to help suffers — you become a “bystander” who feels that help is no longer needed.

Link

20 Apps You’ll Need for Better Instagram Pics and Videos

Instagram can be a powerful marketing tool when used correctly. But plain cell phone photos with vintage inspired filters can only go so far. Luckily, there are plenty more apps available to enhance Instagram photos and videos even further. We asked around to find some favorites among Instagram users. Below are 20 of them.
Link

via HolyKaw

Malcolm Gladwell: Tell People What It's Really Like To Be A Doctor

When I asked Gladwell what topics he thought I should cover in future Forbes blogs, he said, “Help people understand what it is really like to be a physician.”

I did not see that coming. I figured he’d request an expose on Big Pharma, an in-depth examination of various medical conditions or a portrait of preventive care. But explaining what it’s really like to be doctor is a much more personal request and, as it turned out, much more challenging.

(..)

He also expressed concerns about the economics of medical practice and the consequences for physicians:

“I don’t understand, given the constraints physicians have in doing their job and the paperwork demanded of them, why people want to be physicians. I think we’ve made it very, very difficult for them to perform their job. I think that’s a shame. My principal concern is the amount of time and attention spent worrying about the business side. You don’t train someone for all of those years of medical school and residency, particularly people who want to help others optimize their physical and psychological health, and then have them run a claims-processing operation for insurance companies.”

It’s this side of medical practice that wears down even the best physicians.

(..)

And in 2012, a study found that 9 out of 10 physicians across the country are unwilling to recommend the profession to others.

Where Does That Leave The Future Of Medical Practice?

LINK

In the summer of 2009, three young Americans went for a hike. Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd were living together in Syria, teaching and writing. Their friend Josh Fattal was visiting from the U.S. The three took a tour to a waterfall in the Kurdish highlands of Iraq, and as they hiked along a road that turned out to be the border with Iran, an armed man in uniform waved them over.

The next thing they knew, they had embarked on a two-year ordeal in the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. They join NPR's Renee Montagne to talk about their new memoir, A Sliver of Light.

Link

Photos that Bear Witness to Modern Slavery

Slavery has come back into our sphere of attention with "Twelve Years a Slave." Lisa Kristine poignantly (and painfully) brings attention to modern day slavery in this Ted Talk. It will take 30 minutes of your time to view and in my view will be very worthwhile.
UvealBlues

For the past two years, photographer Lisa Kristine has traveled the world, documenting the unbearably harsh realities of modern-day slavery. She shares hauntingly beautiful images — miners in the Congo, brick layers in Nepal — illuminating the plight of the 27 million souls enslaved worldwide. (Filmed at TEDxMaui)
Link

A Simple Chart That Explains Why You're Addicted To Certain Products

The result of this effort is his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and the creation of the Hook Model: a four-phase process that companies use to form habits.

Through consecutive hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of unprompted user engagement, bringing users back repeatedly, without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.

Read more: http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/03/hooked/#ixzz2w5kz5FAz

A Short Guide to a Happy Life: Anna Quindlen on Work, Joy, and How to Live Rather Than Exist by Maria Popova

“You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.”

(..)

From the fabulous Brain Pickings blog:

There are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a résumé than to craft a spirit. But a résumé is cold comfort on a winter night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve gotten back the chest X ray and it doesn’t look so good, or when the doctor writes “prognosis, poor.”

(..)

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

So I suppose the best piece of advice I could give anyone is pretty simple: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about those things if you developed an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast while in the shower?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Turn off your cell phone. Turn off your regular phone, for that matter. Keep still. Be present.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.

Meet the 'Most Connected Man' in the World

And you thought managing a smartphone and an inbox was exhausting.

45-year-old Chris Dancy is known as the most connected man in the world. He has between 300 and 700 systems running at any given time, systems that capture real-time data about his life.

His wrists are covered with a variety of wearable technology, including the fitness wristband tracker Fitbit and the Pebble smartwatch. He weighs himself on the Aria Wi-Fi scale, uses smartphone controlled Hue lighting at home and sleeps on a Beddit mattress cover to track his sleep.

Even Dancy's dogs are tracked via Tagg, which logs their daily activities.

Link

Beyond Immersion: Learn a New Language with Better Listening Skills

Get on the fast track to accomplishing one of your bucket list items, learning another language. Chris Lonsdale's TEDx talk offers five principles and seven actions that will help anyone learn to speak a new language fluently within just six months. The most important of these is perhaps to become better at observing and listening.P

In the 18-minute video, Lonsdale, who learned to speak Chinese in half a year, busts some myths about language acquisition. For example, immersion per se won't necessarily help you learn the language, and learning a language isn't about acquiring knowledge. Instead, it's in large part about psychology and physiological training: becoming familiar with (and open to) new sounds that our brains tend to filter out, as well as coordinating the muscles in our faces. 

Link

TO REMEMBER A SONG, DON’T JUST LISTEN

The brain’s motor network helps people remember and recognize music that they have performed in the past better than music they have only heard, new research shows.

The study sheds new light on how humans perceive and produce sounds, and may pave the way for investigations into whether motor learning could improve or protect memory or cognitive impairment in aging populations. The work appears in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

..

For the study, researchers recruited twenty skilled pianists from Lyon, France. The group was asked to learn simple melodies by either hearing them several times or performing them several times on a piano. Pianists then heard all of the melodies they had learned, some of which contained wrong notes, while their brain electric signals were measured using electroencephalography (EEG).

“We found that pianists were better at recognizing pitch changes in melodies they had performed earlier,” says the study’s first author, Brian Mathias, a McGill PhD student who conducted the work at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre in France with additional collaborators Barbara Tillmann and Fabien Perrin.

Successful People Start Before They Feel Ready

How I Met Sir Richard Branson (from James Clear)

Two weeks ago, I walked into a conference room in Moscow, Russia and sat down ten feet from Branson. There were 100 other people around us, but it felt like we were having a conversation in my living room. He was smiling and laughing. His answers seemed unrehearsed and genuine.

At one point, he told the story of how he started Virgin Airlines, a tale that seems to capture his entire approach to business and life. Here’s the version he told us, as best I can remember it:

Link

Gadgets to Boost Bike Safety

Driven in part by riders’ demands for a greater sense of comfort and safety on the road, new apps and gadgets are promising to do for the bicycle what air bags and satellite navigation did for the family car. What used to be a simple, healthful mode of transport is fast becoming a tech festival on wheels.
Link

Do Brain Workouts Work? Science Isn’t Sure

For a $14.95 monthly membership, the website Lumosity promises to “train” your brain with games designed to stave off mental decline. Users view a quick succession of bird images and numbers to test attention span, for instance, or match increasingly complex tile patterns to challenge memory.

WIRED WELL

Personal technology for health and fitness.

While Lumosity is perhaps the best known of the brain-game websites, with 50 million subscribers in 180 countries, the cognitive training business is booming. Happy Neuron of Mountain View, Calif., promises “brain fitness for life.” Cogmed, owned by the British education company Pearson, says its training program will give students “improved attention and capacity for learning.” The Israeli firm Neuronix is developing a brain stimulation and cognitive training program that the company calls a “new hope forAlzheimer’s disease.”

And last month, in a move that could significantly improve the financial prospects for brain-game developers, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began seeking comments on a proposal that would, in some cases, reimburse the cost of “memory fitness activities.”

..

The problem, Dr. Doraiswamy added, is that the science of cognitive training has not kept up with the hype.

“Almost all the marketing claims made by all the companies go beyond the data,” he said. “We need large national studies before you can conclude that it’s ready for prime time.”

Link