Bad Timing Records are having a fall sale:
As we wrap up the year and begin to look toward 2017, we would like to cut down on our physical warehouse space a bit, making Bad Timing slightly more nimble in regards to maintaining our inventory, picking up new releases when we can, things of that nature. So we’ve gathered together a decently large list of CDs, 7″s, 12″s and more that we’re putting up for sale on this page.
There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election.
He is sure he is going to vote for Donald J. Trump.
And he has been held up as proof by conservatives — including outlets like Breitbart News and The New York Post — that Mr. Trump is excelling among black voters. He has even played a modest role in shifting entire polling aggregates, like the Real Clear Politics average, toward Mr. Trump.
How? He’s a panelist on the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the U.S.C./LAT poll. He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton took a nominal lead.
The Guardian is reporting that the committee that they’ve been unable to get in touch with Bob Dylan after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“Right now we are doing nothing. I have called and sent emails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly replies. For now, that is certainly enough,” the academy’s permanent secretary, Sara Danius, told state radio SR on Monday.
Aimee Mann, Josh Ritter, Franz Ferdinand, and more have all contributed more to the “30 days, 30 songs” project.
Wired, with a great interview with President Obama:
My general observation is that it has been seeping into our lives in all sorts of ways, and we just don’t notice; and part of the reason is because the way we think about AI is colored by popular culture. There’s a distinction, which is probably familiar to a lot of your readers, between generalized AI and specialized AI. In science fiction, what you hear about is generalized AI, right? Computers start getting smarter than we are and eventually conclude that we’re not all that useful, and then either they’re drugging us to keep us fat and happy or we’re in the Matrix. My impression, based on talking to my top science advisers, is that we’re still a reasonably long way away from that. It’s worth thinking about because it stretches our imaginations and gets us thinking about the issues of choice and free will that actually do have some significant applications for specialized AI, which is about using algorithms and computers to figure out increasingly complex tasks.
The Washington Post tracked Facebook’s “Trending Topics” section for three weeks. They found a bunch of fake and inaccurate stories.
Our results shouldn’t be taken as conclusive: Since Facebook personalizes its trends to each user, and we tracked results only during work hours, there’s no guarantee that we caught every hoax. But the observation that Facebook periodically trends fake news still stands — if anything, we’ve underestimated how often it occurs.
Maybe it’s time to re-think this whole thing, yeah?
Dan Rys, at Billboard, sat down with Jimmy Iovine to talk about Apple Music:
Before we get into that, we have to get into the why. It’s a story, it’s complex. Because what everyone’s writing is the obvious right now. They’re writing, “People in the record business are getting into tech so they can talk to people in the record business.” That’s hogwash. And why it’s hogwash is, it takes a certain individual… For example, I met [Apple executives] Steve Jobs and Eddy Cue in 2003. I realized, okay, the future of music is going to be intertwined with distribution through technology companies. It just looked like that to me, and I realized how far behind I personally was. So I set out to really understand. So I worked with those guys for about two years, and I said to Steve, “I’d like to do headphones with Apple with [Dr.] Dre,” about two or three years later. He said, “Do it yourself, you can do it.” So I tried it myself.
Photographer Benedict Redgrove has posted some gorgeous photos of NASA’s rockets and robots.
Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch, on Amazon’s new music streaming service, “Amazon Music Unlimited”:
Rumors have been swirling around Amazon’s plans to launch its own, standalone music streaming service, and now those reports have been proven out: the company is today announcing the launch of Amazon Music Unlimited. This new, on-demand streaming service offers access to tens of millions of songs, and is available for $7.99 per month for Prime members, or $9.99 per month for non-Prime members. Amazon has also launched a “for Echo” subscription plan that lets you listen only on its connected speakers for just $3.99 per month.
Music Feeds is reporting that Bandcamp sales will now count towards the Australian music charts:
An ARIA spokesperson tells Music Feeds, “We are very excited to be able to include Bandcamp sales into the ARIA Charts. This platform that has become increasingly important for artists, in particular independent artists, to sell their music to their fans so it is integral that the ARIA Charts can reflect these sales.”
You’ve heard of the “margin of error” in polling. Just about every article on a new poll dutifully notes that the margin of error due to sampling is plus or minus three or four percentage points.
But in truth, the “margin of sampling error” – basically, the chance that polling different people would have produced a different result – doesn’t even come close to capturing the potential for error in surveys.
Polling results rely as much on the judgments of pollsters as on the science of survey methodology. Two good pollsters, both looking at the same underlying data, could come up with two very different results.
How so? Because pollsters make a series of decisions when designing their survey, from determining likely voters to adjusting their respondents to match the demographics of the electorate. These decisions are hard. They usually take place behind the scenes, and they can make a huge difference.
If you’re interested in polling at all, this is a really great article.
Borys Kit, writing at The Hollywood Reporter, on Guy Ritchie directing a live-action remake of Aladdin.
Guy Ritchie, the stylistic director behind the Robert Downey Jr-starring Sherlock Holmes movies, is in negotiations to helm Disney’s live-action adaptation of its 1992 animated classic Aladdin.
Dan Lin, who was a producer on the Holmes movies for Warner Bros., is producing what Disney touts will be an ambitious and non-traditional take on Aladdin via his Lin Pictures banner. Jonathan Eirich will executive produce the movie and oversee it for Lin Pictures.
TMZ is reporting that Dr. Dre has sent a cease and desist letter to Sony Pictures over their planned release of the TV movie, Surviving Compton:
Sony Pictures is set to release “Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge & Michel’le” … a film that depicts Dre as a woman beater. We’ve learned Dre’s legal team fired off a cease and desist letter … demanding that Sony back off, if it doesn’t want to end up in court.
Entertainment Weekly is reporting that Fraggle Rock will be getting remastered and cleaned up to high-definition and will be re-released on HBO later this year:
“In remastering the series, illuminate has created a contemporary look for the series with meticulous attention paid to every detail — sharpening the images, cleaning up the contrast, increasing the vibrancy of the colors and re-formatting for wide-screen — all under the careful supervision of Brian Henson,” Richard Goldsmith, EVP of Global Distribution for The Jim Henson Company said in a statement. “We’ll engage a whole new audience who will love meeting the Fraggles, Gorgs, and Doozers.”
Emails from Tom DeLonge show up in the latest round of published documents from Wikileaks. This email is between Tom DeLonge and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, are about exactly what you would expect:
Tom DeLonge here, The one who interviewed you for that special documentary not to long ago.
Things are moving with the project. The Novels, Films and NonFiction works are blooming and finishing. Just had a preliminary meeting with Spielberg’s Chief Operating Officer at DreamWorks. More meetings are now on the books-
I would like to bring two very “important” people out to meet you in DC. I think you will find them very interesting, as they were principal leadership relating to our sensitive topic. Both were in charge of most fragile divisions, as it relates to Classified Science and DOD topics. Other words, these are A-Level officials. Worth our time, and as well the investment to bring all the way out to you. I just need 2 hours from you. Just looking to have a casual, and private conversation in person.
Oh, and for the record: Hillary does want more transparency on aliens.
