Touring internationally since 2008, Play Me, I’m Yours is artwork by British artist Luke Jerram. For three weeks beginning April 12, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra brings Play Me, I’m Yours to Los Angeles.
Thirty pianos, designed and decorated by local artists and community organizations, are featured across Los Angeles County and are available for everyone to play, in celebration of acclaimed conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane’s 15th anniversary as LACO music director.
PDF poster, that includes a map of the piano locations.
There is also a FREE pop-up tribute under the lights of Hollywood on Thursday, April 26th at 8:45PM.
A one night only concert around the piano located outside of the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Kicking off the final week of the pianos’ LA visit, the concert will feature stripped down, unplugged performances by over a dozen local artists. Each artist will perform one song – a cover of their choosing that means “Los Angeles” to them.
The piano tour also includes a website for the public to upload photos, videos, and post comments. Here are a few of them:
What if I offered you a keyhole view into the seedy underbelly of the Internet, a journey into the world of cybercrime, cyber-espionage and other threats? Would you want a look?
If the answer is yes, you’re in luck, because that’s exactly what Charles Koppelman is offering with his film ZERO DAY, a documentary exploring “the dark side of the Internet.”
Embedded with Facebookʼs Security Team at its Menlo Park headquarters, given unprecedented fly-on-the-wall access to intrusions, hacks, and criminal activities, Charles and his crew deep-dive into the most high severity cases of e-crime at Facebook.
Add in the investigative journalism of former Washington Post “Security Fix” reporter, Brian Krebs, who takes the audience on the wild ride of money laundering for the Russian mafia (that sadly prey on “mules” through work-at-home job scams), and you have one compelling narrative.
Now the film is in its final push to completion, looking to Kickstarter to bring in the remaining dollars needed to make the project a theatrical reality. I’ve already kicked in $10 and in return will receive the finished film (in down-loadable format).
If any of this sounds at all interesting to you, I recommend checking out ZERO DAY’s Kickstarter page and help it cross the finish line.
“Love this tip from +Jake Parrillo – I had no idea you could get notified when there was new satellite imagery for your house. Living in the future is pretty great.” – Rick Klau
The full story from Jake:
Last night, I received an email from the “Follow Your World” application of Google Maps that alerted me that there was new imagery for a “point of interest” of mine. Sure enough, I had entered our home address in the tool back when it launched in October of last year and forgot all about it.
The new satellite images are pretty recent – as there’s a new house being constructed on our block and the image has the roof shingles installed and the driveway in; which are both pretty recent events (within the last month or so).
The Follow Your World tool is a neat little app that gives you a heads up when Google updates their imagery of your house. We’re still not on StreetView (our block) so I’m hoping that one day soon, a note like the one above will arrive that will include the details of how our house is now included in the StreetView collection.
Cliplet – a type of image that sits between a still image and video. It allows you to capture a moment-in-time instead of an instant.
Microsoft Research is showing a new project called “Cliplets” that lets users turn video clips into something closer to a moving still image by effectively freezing a portion of the frame and leaving another portion of the video to run as is.
Online educational marketplaces are on the rise, with tools like Udemy and Khan Academy allowing people of all ages to become an expert in any topic.
New company Coursera is targeting higher education by offering university-level courses from top institutions to students all over the world, all for free.
The company launched with $16 million in Series A funding and is announcing partnerships with four schools:
Princeton University
Stanford University
University of Pennsylvania
University of Michigan.
Coursera will offer over 30 courses from its partner schools across a variety of disciplines, including computer science, sociology, medicine, and math.
Classes typically last for five to ten weeks, and during that time students commit to watching the lectures, and completing interactive quizzes and assignments, which are auto-graded or graded by peers. Upon completion, the student receives a statement of accomplishment, a letter from the professor, and a score, but the course doesn’t count for any actual credit with that specific institution. The site also features a Q&A forum where students can ask questions about the course material and get answers from fellow students.
A fascinating article in Fast Company profiles Google Ventures, the company’s venture capital division. Like everything the search giant does they are aiming big with delusions of changing the entire VC industry with data as the vehicle.
They start out with some interesting facts:
Despite the mythology that has built up around venture capital, it has become a slowly moldering investment vehicle. “The past 10 years haven’t been very productive,” Bill Maris points out. According to the research firm Cambridge Associates, during the decade ending last September, VCs as a class earned a 2.6% interest rate for their investors–less than you could have earned in an S&P 500 index fund. The numbers look slightly better over shorter periods; VCs have delivered a 4.9% return the past three years and 6.7% over the past five, still far from terrific.
Then they move on to insights gained through data-crunching:
Joe Kraus says that analysts have discovered research that overturns some of Silicon Valley’s most cherished bits of lore. Take that old idea that it pays to fail in the Valley: Wrong! Google Ventures’ analysts found that first-time entrepreneurs with VC backing have a 15% chance of creating a successful company, while second-timers who had an auspicious debut see a 29% chance of repeating their achievement. By contrast, second-time entrepreneurs who failed the first time? They have only a 16% chance of success, in effect returning them to square one. “Failure doesn’t teach you much,” Kraus says with a shrug.
Location, in fact, plays a larger role in determining an entrepreneur’s odds than failure, according to the Google Ventures data team. A guy who founded a successful company in Boston but is planning to start his next firm in San Francisco isn’t a sure bet. “He’ll revert back to that 15% rate,” Kraus says, “because he’s out of his personal network and that limits how quickly he can scale up.”
The article continues to describe the actions Google is taking to change the game. The most important of which seems to be bringing in ringers rather than partners, challenging the VC model at its core…
HBO is continuing their YouTube experiment after posting Girls online, they are also hosting Veep. The show, which will only be available online until May 21, stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a former senator who’s been asked to be Vice President of the United States
Former Senator Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) has accepted the call to serve as Vice President of the United States. The job is nothing like she imagined and everything she was warned about. ‘Veep’ follows Meyer and her staff as they attempt to make their mark and leave a lasting legacy, without getting tripped up in the day-to-day political games that define Washington.
Created by Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It, In the Loop), a Scottish comedian, director, and writer famous for his satires about British politics.
1. Generic pharmaceuticals
2. Solar panel manufacturing
3. For-profit universities
4. Pilates and yoga studios
5. Self-tanning product manufacturing
6. 3-D printer manufacturing
7. Social network game development
8. Hot sauce production
9. Green and sustainable building construction
10. Online eyeglasses sales
** IBIS World notes thathot sauce sales have exploded thanks to demographic changes, immigration, and the growing popularity of spicier ethnic food in the United States, Canada, and Japan. The industry has grown at a rate of 9.3 percent per year over the past decade.
Fastest-dying U.S. Industries
1. Photofinishing
2. Newspaper publishing
3. Appliance repair
4. DVD, game, and video rental
5. Money market and other banking
6. Recordable media manufacturing
7. Hardware manufacturing
8. Shoe and footwear manufacturing
9. Costume and team uniform manufacturing
10. Women’s and girls’ apparel manufacturing
It’s amazing that this Hypersonic jet was able to travel more than 13,000 mph with heats of over 3,500 degrees.
During flight it experienced shockwaves, 100 times more powerful than expected, which caused it to spin. It then righted itself and flew for twice as long before technicians finally aborted the mission.
The full story:
In August the Pentagon’s research arm, known as DARPA, carried out a test flight of an experimental aircraft capable of traveling at 20 times the speed of sound.
The arrowhead-shaped unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara, into the upper reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere…then glided above the Pacific at 20 times the speed of sound, or Mach 20.
The plan was for the Falcon to speed westward for about 30 minutes before plunging into the ocean near Kwajalein Atoll, about 4,000 miles from Vandenberg.
But it was ended about nine minutes into flight for unknown reasons. The launch had received worldwide attention and much fanfare, but officials didn’t provide much information on why the launch failed.
The flight successfully demonstrated stable aerodynamically-controlled flight at speeds up to Mach 20 for nearly three minutes. Approximately nine minutes into the test flight, the vehicle experienced a series of shocks culminating in an anomaly, which prompted the autonomous flight safety system to use the vehicle’s aerodynamic systems to make a controlled descent and splashdown into the ocean.
“The initial shockwave disturbances experienced during second flight, from which the vehicle was able to recover and continue controlled flight, exceeded by more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand,” said DARPA Acting Director, Kaigham J. Gabriel. “That’s a major validation that we’re advancing our understanding of aerodynamic control for hypersonic flight.”
…larger than anticipated portions of the vehicle’s skin peeled from the aerostructure. The resulting gaps created strong, impulsive shock waves around the vehicle as it travelled nearly 13,000 miles per hour, causing the vehicle to roll abruptly. Based on knowledge gained from the first flight in 2010 and incorporated into the second flight, the vehicle’s aerodynamic stability allowed it to right itself successfully after several shockwave-induced rolls. Eventually, however, the severity of the continued disturbances finally exceeded the vehicle’s ability to recover.
Thirty pianos, designed and decorated by local artists and community organizations, are featured across Los Angeles County and are available for everyone to play, in celebration of acclaimed conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane’s 15th anniversary as LACO music director.
