January 22 Tod Machover, an intriguing futurologist as well as an inventive composer, runs the departments in hyper-instruments (acoustical instruments given spiffy electronic features) and opera of the future at MIT's ultra-high-tech Media Lab. Last week, he was at UC Santa Barbara to speak on "Music, Mind and Health: Diagnosis, Treatment, and Well-being through Active Sound," one of four lectures he's given recently at the university's Sage Center for the Study of the Mind. Music, Machover said, touches on just about every aspect of cognition. There are theories that music exists to exercise the mind and to help coordinate its separate functions. The practical applications of music for healing are irresistible. Cutting-edge music therapy can help Parkinson's patients walk, enables the autistic to rehearse their emotions and provides opportunities for stroke victims to regain speech and motor movement. Music is usually the last thing Alzheimer's sufferers recognize. It is our final way to communicate with them, and now it seems music can play a significant role in forestalling Alzheimer's. In an inspiring feedback loop, Machover and his MIT minions, which include some of the nation's most forward-looking graduate students, are applying their musical gadgets to therapy. The process of making remarkable restorative advances is changing how they think about and make music. It all began with Hyperscore, a program Machover developed to enable children to compose by drawing and painting on a monitor. A sophisticated computer program translates their artwork into a musical score. Machover's team took Hyperscore to Tewksbury Hospital outside of Boston, which serves patients with severe physical and mental disabilities, including the homeless. The residents, many of whom were physically unable to communicate or were otherwise uncommunicative, discovered their inner composer. Through Hyperscore they found they could express themselves in a way that bypassed language. MARK SWED
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/22/entertainment/la-ca-tod-machover-notebook-20120122

Frederica Sagor Maas, one of the last surviving screenwriters, if not the last, with credits dating back to Hollywood's silent era, died Jan. 5 in La Mesa, Calif. She was 111. Maas contributed to the screenplays of 15 films from 1925-28. She was an uncredited contributor to the Greta Garbo-John Gilbert classic "Flesh and the Devil" and to the Clara Bow starrer "It," but perhaps most significantly, she earlier co-adapted "The Plastic Age," a 1925 hit film that proved a huge career break for Bow. She married Fox-based producer Ernest Maas in 1927, after which they teamed on scripts. In 1941 she wrote "Miss Pilgrim's Progress," a sober treatment of women in the workplace that sold for a song and eventually became Fox's 1947 picture "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim," a lighthearted musical comedy vehicle for Betty Grable. Maas felt repeatedly misused by the film industry and detailed her unhappy experiences in the 1999 memoir "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood," published when she was 99.
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118048297?refcatid=25&printerfriendly=true

Freerice is a website where users play various educational, multiple-choice games in order to fight world hunger. For every question the user answers correctly, 10 grains of rice are donated. The categories include English vocabulary (the game the site began with), multiplication tables, pre-algebra, chemical symbols (basic or intermediate), English grammar, basic foreign language vocabulary for English speakers (French, German, Italian, and Spanish), geography (flags of the world, world capitals and country identification), the identification of famous artwork, and literature (popular books). As you answer questions, your total score is displayed as a mound of rice and the amount. The website went live on October 7, 2007 with 830 grains of rice donated on its first day. The second word in its name was originally capitalized as "FreeRice." For a brief while, the amount of rice donated per correct answer was increased to 20 grains, though this was reduced to 10 grains of rice per answer within a few months. In March 2009 the FreeRice website was donated to the UN World Food Programme. In exchange for advertisements on the website, various sponsors donate the money necessary to pay for the rice and other costs to run Freerice. The donations are distributed by the United Nations's World Food Programme (WFP), starting with Bangladesh. Freerice's partner is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In its first ten months of operation, Freerice donated over 42 billion grains of rice. Since its inception, as of October 15, 2010, Freerice players had earned sufficient rice to feed over 4.32 million people for one day. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freerice

Pick a category and play multiple-choice games at: http://freerice.com/category

Daniel Ek always thought he’d be a musician. He grew up in Rågsved, a cluster of three-story row houses on a hill 20 miles south of Stockholm. He drummed with knitting needles on a lampshade at two. He cried when Kurt Cobain died. When he was five, his mother and stepfather bought him a Commodore Vic 20, which was soon replaced by a Commodore 64. If you were born after the Baby Boom and mess with computers, the C 64 carries the fetish value of a first-press of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. One C 64 now sits in the Spotify office in Stockholm, awaiting assembly. By the time Ek was 10, in 1993, his stepfather had retrained as an electrical engineer, and the two strung a local network at home with coaxial cable. When he was 14 he taught himself HTML, began undercutting design firms to build websites for local companies, hired his friends to code for him, then hired them to do his homework, too. He sold his Web hosting business in 2002 and started new companies until he ran out of money. In 2005, Index Ventures, a venture capitalist, approached him with a Finnish website run by a woman who drew paper dolls. She was unemployed and had attracted so many viewers that she couldn’t pay her bandwidth bills. He came on as CTO, hired engineers from his failed ventures, took the site to 10 million users, and left. Now called Stardoll, it attracts an audience of 100 million girls who assemble virtual outfits. In 2006, he became CEO of uTorrent, now the most popular client for Bittorrent, the standard protocol for sharing files. UTorrent and Bittorrent are perfectly legal; the files shared through them aren’t always. Ludvig Strigeus, who created uTorrent, served as chief architect of the Spotify beta. Around the same time, Ek shared an idea with Martin Lorenzton, who had bought one of Ek’s companies for €1 million. Ek’s idea: Anyone should be able, legally, to listen instantly to any song at any time. Lorenzton suggested that the two start a company. According to the filing obtained by ComputerSweden, the two men together retain a controlling interest in Spotify. Ek reached out to a contact in the music industry and asked what he would need to do to make his idea legal. Spotify is slick, intuitive, and fast; it can, for a verifiable fact, instantly serve Graceland to a phone resting in your shirt pocket on a highway in North Carolina at 1 a.m. In Europe, if you want to listen longer than 10 hours per month, avoid ads, or move offline with a music player, you pay a subscription fee that comes to about $15 a month. According to the company, 1.5 million Europeans already do.
Read detailed article at : http://www.businessweek.com/printer/magazine/daniel-eks-spotify-musics-last-best-hope-07142011.html

Q: Which airports have the highest fares?
A: In order: Memphis, Cincinnati, Washington/Dulles, Huntsville (Ala.) and Houston/Bush.
The lowest? Atlantic City, N.J. -- U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Q: Why, when you flip a coin over after looking at the heads side, is the picture on the tails side upside down?
A: All U.S. coins are produced with a "coin turn." That is, the obverse side, or "heads," is upside down to the reverse side, or "tails."
The U.S. Mint doesn't know the reason for this custom. It still produces coins this way as tradition and not to satisfy any legal requirement. -- U.S. Mint.
http://www.thecourier.com/Opinion/columns/2012/Jan/JU/ar_JU_012312.asp?d=012312,2012,Jan,23&c=c_13