Listening to Mozart helps you do better on eyesight tests. “Brazilian researchers let 30 patients listen to 10 minutes of Mozart’s sonata for two pianos, while another 30 prepared in silence. The research, in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, found the music improved performance in the tests.”
Tag: 06.05.06
TV Pilots Flee LA
Los Angeles is losing the TV pilot business. A new study reports that filming is down “23 percent from last year’s levels, costing more than 1,000 jobs and draining up to $70 million” from the local economy. “Twenty-five other states have used tax incentives to lure away pilot production, which takes place from February through May.”
Okay To Copy? We Wanna Know
What are consumers allowed to copy and in what form? British MPs want producers to clarify. “The MPs’ report made several recommendations and called on the Office of Fair Trading hasten the introduction of labelling regulations that would let people know what they can do with music and movies they buy online or offline.”
Tom Stoppard’s Czech Roots
Playwright Tom Stoppard left Czechoslovakia 68 years ago. “He has said that he is ‘English now’ but that at some level he has never stopped also being Czech. His mother’s death a few years ago may have subtly freed Stoppard to explore himself for traces of his origins. But no sudden self-discovery led to this play. It seems to have been prompted by reflecting on his friend Vaclav Havel’s moral and philosophical writings, and by reading about the background to the Czech ‘Chartist’ dissidents in the 1970s.”
A Device That Can “Hear” Everything
“Building a general radio that can receive and transmit, and attaching it to a software system that can fill in the gaps of what we normally think of as radio, is kind of like the Enterprise’s deflector dish: Give engineering 20 minutes and it can do anything the captain needs to move the plot along. One of Matt Ettus’ USRPs, with the right daughterboards and radio software, can capture FM, read GPS, decode HDTV, transmit over emergency bands and open garage doors.”
Free E-Books for All
Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library plan to make ‘a third of a million’ e-books available free for a month at the first World eBook Fair. Downloads will be available at the fair’s Web site from July 4, the 35th anniversary of Project Gutenberg’s founding, through Aug. 4. The majority of the books will be contributed by the World eBook Library. It otherwise charges $8.95 a year for access to its database of more than 250,000 e-books, documents and articles.”
Self-Interested – Bands Build Fans By Phone
These days major recording labels want to see musical acts demonstrate they have a fan base before being signed. So bands are turning to promotions for mobile phones and other fan-building ploys to build their careers…
Digital Publishing Makes Industry Nervous
The business model of publishing is sure to change with digital publishing. But that has many in the business anxious…
JMW Turner Sells For Record £5.832 Million
“The Blue Rigi was sold to an anonymous telephone bidder after a 10-minute bidding battle at Christie’s in London. The work, which Christie’s described as “the most important watercolour to appear at auction for over 50 years”, had been expected to fetch about £2m.”