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From Computational Creativity to Creative AI and Back Again
Simon Colton is a British computer scientist, currently working as Professor of Computational Creativity in the Game AI Research Group at Queen Mary University of London, UK and in the Sensilab at Monash University, Australia. He previously had an appointment at Falmouth University, UK and led the Computational Creativity Research Groups at Goldsmiths, University of London and at Imperial College, London in the positions of Professor and Reader, respectively. Simon is the driving force behind thepaintingfool.com, an artificial intelligence that he hopes will one day be accepted as an artist in its own right.
Simon Colton
I compare and contrast the AI research field of Computational Creativity and the Creative AI technological movement, both of which are contributing to progress in the arts. I raise the sceptre of a looming crisis wherein public opinion moves on from the spectacle of software being creative to viewing the lack of authenticity in creative AI systems as being a major drawback. I propose a roadmap from Creative AI systems to Computationally Creative systems which address this lack of authenticity via the software expressing aspects of its computational life experiences in the art, music, games and literature that it produces. I posit that only by harnessing Creative AI technologies and Computational Creativity philosophies in the pursuit of truly creative software able to express the machine condition, will we gain maximum societal benefit in further understanding the human condition.
This year, we passed a milestone in my field, as the 10th annual International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC) was held in the USA. The conference brings together AI researchers who test the idea of software being independently creative, describing projects with goals ranging from enhancing human creativity to advancing our philosophical understanding of creativity and producing fully autonomous creative machines. The conference series was built on roughly ten years of preceding workshops [1], with interest in the idea of machine creativity going back to the birth of modern computing. For instance, in their 1958 paper [2], AI luminary Alan Newell and Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon hypothesised that: "Within ten years, a digital computer will discover and prove an important mathematical theorem". In [3], we proposed the following working definition of Computational Creativity research as:
"the philosophy, science and engineering of computational systems which, by taking on particular responsibilities, exhibit behaviours that unbiased observers would deem to be creative."
In the last few years, we have seen unprecedented interest across society in generative AI systems able to create culturally interesting artefacts such as pictures, musical compositions, texts and games. Indeed, it's difficult to read a newspaper or magazine these days without stumbling across a story about a new project to generate poems, or a symphony orchestra playing AI-generated music or an art exhibition in which AI systems are purported to be artists.
This wave of interest has been fuelled by a step change in the quality of computer-generated cultural artefacts, brought on largely by advances in machine learning technologies, and in particular the deep learning of artificial neural networks. Such techniques are able to generate new material by learning from data about the structure of existing material – such as a database of images, a corpus of texts or a collection of songs – and determining a way to create more of the same. An umbrella term for this groundswell of interest and activity in generative art/music/literature/games is "Creative AI", and people from arts and sciences, within and outwith academia are actively engaged in producing art using AI techniques. We surveyed different communities engaged in generative arts – including Creative AI practitioners – in a recent ICCC paper [4].
While we might have expected the Creative AI community to have grown from the field of Computational Creativity, this is not the case. Indeed, somewhat of a schism has developed where the two communities have different aims and ambitions. Both communities have a main interest in the development of generative technologies for societal good. The Creative AI movement has an emphasis on quality of output and developing apps to commercial level for mass consumption. There is also a tendency to disavow the idea that software itself could/should be independently creative, in favour of a strong commitment to producing software purely for people to use to enhance their own creativity. In contrast, Computational Creativity researchers tend to be interested in the bigger picture of Artificial Intelligence, philosophical discourse around notions of human and machine creativity, novel ways to automate creative processes, and the idea that software, itself, could one day be deemed to be creative.
To highlight the schism: I personally find it difficult to think of any computational system as being "a Creative AI" if it cannot communicate details about a single decision it has taken, which is generally the case for approaches popular in Creative AI circles, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) [5]. I prefer therefore to describe Creative AI projects as "AI for creative people", because the most literal reading of the phrase "Creative AI" is currently inaccurate for the majority of the projects under that banner. I often go further to point out that many Creative AI applications should be categorised as graphics (or audio, etc) projects which happen to employ techniques such as GANs that were originally developed by AI researchers.
As another example, I've argued in talks and papers many times that the end result of having more computer creativity in society is likely to be an increased understanding and celebration of human creativity, in much the same way that hand-made craft artefacts, like furniture or food, are usually preferred over machine-produced ones. I point out that I've met dozens of artists, musicians, poets and game designers, none of whom have expressed any concern about creative software, because they understand the value of humanity in creative practice. On the other hand, I've also spoken to Creative AI practitioners who remain convinced that truly creative software will lead to job losses, demoralisation and devaluation in the creative industries.
Product versus Process
The Creative AI movement has helped to swing the global effort in engineering creative software systems firmly towards human-centric projects where AI techniques are used purely as tools for human use, with ease of use and quality of output disproportionately more important than any other considerations. I've been trying recently to put together arguments and thought experiments to help explain why I believe this is a retrograde step, and I've been trying to articulate ways in which the wealth of knowledge accrued through decades of Computational Creativity projects could be of use to Creative AI practitioners. Almost every project ever presented within Computational Creativity circles started with building a generative system with similar aims to Creative AI projects. Hence I feel we are well placed to consider the role that AI systems could have in creative practice, and to encourage Creative AI researchers and practitioners to consider some of the ideas we've developed over the years.
Imagine a generative music system created by a large technology company, which is able to generate 10,000 fully orchestrated symphonies in just 1 hour. Let's say that each symphony would be lauded by experts as a beautiful work of genius had it been produced by a human composer like Beethoven; and each one sounds uniquely different to the others. If we accept the reality of an AI system (AlphaGo Zero) able to train itself from scratch to play Go, Chess and Shogi at superhuman levels [6], then we should entertain the idea that superhuman symphony writing is possible in our lifetimes. If we only concentrate on the quality of output and ease of which software can generate outputs as complex as a symphony, then the above scenario is presumably a suitable end point for generative music and would be a cause for celebration – it would certainly tick the box of huge technical achievement, as the AlphaGo project did. However, one has to wonder what the benefits of having these symphonies (and the ability to generate them so easily) are for society.
I would predict that the classical music world would find very few practical applications for a database of 10,000 high-quality symphonies, and it would likewise find little value in generating more such material. I would also predict that there would be little, if any, devaluation of symphonic music as a whole, and no devaluation of the work of gifted composers able to hand-produce symphonies. Superhuman chess playing by computers has been around since the time of Deep Blue, and has likely increased rather than decreased the popularity of the game. The chess world has responded to computer chess by being clearer about the human-centric struggle at the heart of every game of chess, and "[a]mong the chess elite, the idea of challenging a computer has fallen into the realm of farce and retort" [7]. It is clear that computer chess has made the game of chess more human. Part of the attraction of the music from composers such as Mozart and Beethoven is that these were mere mortals with superhuman creative abilities in composition. Society celebrates such creative people, often by lauding the works they produce, but also by applauding their motivations, exploring their backgrounds, expressing awe about their process, and by taking inspiration for a fresh wave of creative activity. Creativity in society serves various purposes, only one of which is to bring into being artefacts of value.
While board games have hugely driven forward AI research, chess isn't some mathematical Drosophilia for AI problem solving (as some researchers would have you believe). It is actually a game and pastime played by two people, which can be elevated to highly competitive levels. Likewise, a symphony isn't just a collection of notes to guide musicians to produce sound waves, but is created by human endeavour for human entertainment, often condensing into abstract form aspects of human life experience and expression. I would predict that – in an age of superhuman symphony generation – a huge premium would be placed on compositions borne of human blood, sweat and tears, with the generation of music via statistical manipulation of data by computer remaining a second class process.
Computational Authenticity
To hit home with the points above, I usually turn to poetry, due to the highly human-centric nature of the medium: poems are condensed humanity, written by people, for people, usually about people. The following poem provides a useful focal point to illustrate the humanity gap [8] in Computational Creativity.
by Maureen Q. Smith
The joy, the pain, the begin again. My boy.
Born of me, for me, through my tears, through my fears.
This short poem naturally invites interpretation, and we might think of the joy, pain, tears as fears as referring literally to the birth of a child, perhaps from the first-person perspective of the author, as possibly indicated by "My boy … Born of me". We might also interpret the "begin again" as referring to the start of a baby's life, but equally it might reflect a fresh start for the family.
Importantly, the poem was not actually written by Maureen Q. Smith. The author was in fact a man called Maurice Q. Smith. In this light, we might want to re-think our interpretation. The poem takes on a different flavour now, but we can still imagine the male author witnessing a childbirth, possibly with his own tears and fears, reflecting the joy and pain of a woman giving birth. However, I should reveal that Maurice Q. Smith was actually a convicted paedophile when he wrote this poem, and it was widely assumed to be about the act of grooming innocent children, which he referred to as "childbirth". The poem now affords a rather sinister reading, with "tears" and "fears" perhaps reflecting the author's concerns for his own freedom; and the phrases "Joy and pain" and "Born of me, for me" now taking on very dark tones.
Fortunately, as you may have guessed, the poem wasn't written by a paedophile, but was instead generated by a computer program using a cut-up technique. Thankfully, we can now go back and project a different interpretation onto the poem. Looking at "Joy and pain", perhaps the software was thinking about… Well, the part about "Born of me, for me" must have been written to convey… Hmmmm. We see fairly quickly that it is no longer possible to project feelings, background and experiences onto the author, and the poem has lost some of its value. If the words have been put together algorithmically with nothing resembling the human thought processes we might have expected, we may also think of the poem as having lost its authenticity and a lot, if not all, of its meaning. We could, of course, pretend that it was written by a person. In fact, it's possible to imagine an entire anthology of computer generated poems that we are instructed to read as if written by various people. But then, why wouldn't we prefer to read an anthology of poems written by actual people?
For full and final disclosure: I actually wrote the poem and found it remarkably easy to pen a piece for which a straightforward interpretation changes greatly as the nature of the author changes. I've been using this provocative poem to try to change the minds of researchers in Computational Creativity research for a few years, in particular to try and shift the focus away from an obsession with the quality of output judged as if it were produced by a person. I've argued that the nature of the generative processes [9], how software frames its creations [10], and where motivations for computational creativity come from [11] are more important for us to investigate than how to increase the quality or diversity of output. This led to a study of the notion of computational authenticity [12], which pays into the discussion below.
As with pretty much all things generative, the advent of deep learning has led to a step change in the quality of the output of poetry generators, which have a long history dating (at least) as far back as an anthology entitled: "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed" [13]. On the whole, the scientists pushing forward these advances have barely thought of addressing the deficiencies with these poems, namely that they were made by an inauthentic process. It is not impossible to imagine a poem-shaped computer generated text that would have been classed as a masterpiece had it been written by a person, but is not accepted by anyone as even being a poem, because public opinion has swung against inauthentic generative processes. I have for many years advocated using the name "c-poem" for the poem-shaped texts produced by computers. Just as people know that they won't be unwrapping a beautifully bound e-book for their birthday, they should know that their ability to project human beliefs, emotions and experiences onto the author of a c-poem will be very limited.
Responses to the Rise of Creative AI
Returning to the observation that the quality of the artistic output of AI systems has much increased in recent years, we can consider some appropriate responses to this situation.
One response is to follow the lead from the Creative AI community, and disavow the idea that software should be developed to be fully creative, concentrating instead on using AI techniques to aid human creativity. This certainly simplifies the situation, with AI systems becoming just the latest tools for creative people. It is also a public-friendly response, as journalists, broadcasters and documentary makers (along with the occasional politician, member of the clergy, philosopher or royal) often publish missives about how AI software is going to take everyone's job, strangle our cats and devalue our life. On the whole, I believe it would be very sad if this response dominates the discourse and drives the field, as it would certainly curtail the dream of Artificial General Intelligence, which brought many of us into AI, and it will limit the ways in which people interact with software, which has the potential to be much more than a mere muse or tool. Software systems we have developed in Computational Creativity projects can be seen as creative collaborators; motivating yet critical partners; and sometimes independent creative entities. We should not throw away the idea that software can itself be creative, as the world always needs more creativity, and truly creative AI systems could radically drive humanity forward.
A second response is to accept the point above that the processes and personality behind creative practice are indeed important in the cultural appreciation of output from generative AI systems. In this context, given that software won't be particularly human-like anytime soon, we could say that it's impossible to take an AI system seriously as an authentic creative voice. An extreme version of this argument is that machines will never be valuable in the arts because they are not human. I argue below that this is shortsighted and missing an opportunity to understand technology in-situ. A closely related opinion is that people should or could dislike computer generated material precisely because it has been made by computer. This point of view has certainly been simmering under the surface of many conversations I've had, leading people to talk of computers lacking a soul or a spark, and often employing other such obfuscating rhetoric. Perhaps surprisingly, I've argued on a number of occasions that such a view is not extreme, and is indeed perfectly natural: such a view would, in my opinion, be a suitable personal response to the childbirth poem above, if indeed it had been computer generated.
Well intentioned people would never dream of saying that they dislike something because it was produced by a particular minority (or majority) group of people. Hence it feels to those people that they are being prejudicial to say that a painting, poem or composition is inferior purely because it was computer generated. Moreover, the view that works such as paintings and novels should be evaluated in their own terms, i.e., independently from information about their author and the creative process, has been reinforced philosophically with movements such as the Death of the Author [14], and numerous artistic manifestos.
Software systems do not form a minority human group whose creative freedom has to be protected. Throughout the history of humanity, art has been celebrated as a particularly human endeavour, and the art world is utterly people-centric. Software is not human, but due to decades of anthropomorphic thinking on AI, it seems more acceptable to think of computers somehow as under-evolved or under-developed humans, perhaps like monkeys or toddlers, rather than non-humans with intelligence, albeit low. Disliking a work of art purely because of its computational origins is more akin to expressing a preference of one type of process over another, than it is to expressing preferences of one ethnicity, gender or religion over another. "I don't like this painting because it is a pointillist piece" is not the same as: "I don't like this painting because it was painted by a Brit".
So, we could say that, while the output of the current/future wave of generative AI systems is remarkable, and could – under Turing-style conditions of anonymity – be taken for human works, there is a natural limiting factor in the non-humanity of computational systems which gives us a backstop against the devaluation of human artistic endeavour. This is a reasonable response and may lead to increased celebration of human creativity, which would be no bad thing. However, I believe that this response will also (eventually) be limiting and lead to missed opportunities, as I hope to explain below.
A third response, which I greatly favour, is to start from the truism that software is not human. In many research and industry circles, it often seems that creating human-like intelligence through nueroscience-inspired approaches such as deep learning, is the only goal and the only approach. Not every AI researcher wants to build a software version of the brain, but this fact is often lost, and helps to obfuscate the fact that software has different experiences to people. The Painting Fool is software that I've developed over nearly 20 years [15], and has met minor and major celebrities and painted their portraits in half a dozen different countries, often in front of large audiences in interesting venues ranging from science museums and art galleries to a pub in East London. I have, of course, anthropomorphised this experience and The Painting Fool didn't experience it as I have portrayed. But it did have experiences, and those experiences were authentic in the sense that the software was present, did interact with people and created things independently of me which entertained and provoked people in equal measure.
We could therefore respond to the uptick in quality of output from Creative AI systems by agreeing to concentrate more on investigating plausible internal reasons for software to be creative, and developing ways in which it can impart its understanding of the world, through expressing aspects of its life experiences. Instead of challenging human creativity in terms of the quality of output, but failing due to lack of authenticity, Computational Creativity systems could be developed to explore aspects of creative independence such as intrinsic motivation, empowerment [10] and intentionality [8]. A side effect of this is that – if we get software to record and use its own experiences rather than pretending that it is a person having human experiences – we will gain a better understanding of computer processing, the impact of particular software systems and what it means for a machine to have a cultural existence in our human world. It may be that this communicative side effect actually becomes more important than having software be creative for the purpose of making things.
If software can express its experience of the world through artistic expression, surely this would add to our understanding of human culture in a digital age of tremendous, constant, technological change. While the non-human life experiences of software systems can seem other worldly, automation is very much a part of the human world, and our increasing interaction on a minute-by-minute basis with software means we should be constantly open to new ideas for understanding what it does. It's not so strange to imagine building an automated painting system to add on to another piece of software so that it can express aspects of its experience. In fact, this would be a natural generalisation of projects such as DeepDream [16], where visualisations of deep-learned neural models were originally generated to enable people to better understand how the model processed image data. It turned out that the visualisations had artistic value as computational hallucinations, and were presented in artistic contexts, with this usage eventually dominating, fuelling a huge push in generative neural network research and development.
A RoadMap from Creative AI to Computational Creativity
In a talk at a London Creative AI meetup event a while ago, I offered some advice for people in the Creative AI community who might be interested in pursuing the dream of making genuinely creative AI systems. At the time, there were already indications that Creative AI practitioners were beginning to see the limitations of mass generation of high-quality artefacts and were interested in handing over more creative responsibility to software. Some people were already testing the water using deep learning techniques in ways other than pastiche generation, for instance looking at style invention rather than just style transfer [17]. The advice I gave can be seen as a very rough roadmap, which reflects to some extent my own career arc in building creative AI systems, and provides one of many paths by which people can take their generative system into fascinating new territories.
While keeping much of the original, I will re-draw the roadmap below, from a fresh perspective of improving authenticity through expanding the recording and creative usage of life experiences that creative software might have. It is presented as a series of seven levels for Creative AI Systems to transition to via increased software engineering and cultural usage, with each level representing a different type of system that the software graduates to. Focused on generative visual art rather than poetry/music/games/etc., but intended to generalise over many domains, the roadmap offers direct advice to people who already have a generative system.
Generative Systems. So, you've designed a generative system and are having fun making pictures with it. You play around with input data and parameter settings, and realise that the output is not only high quality, but really varied. You write a little graphical user interface, which enables you to play around with the inputs/parameters, and this increases the fun and the variety. It becomes clear that the space of inputs/parameters is very You begin to suspect that the space of novel outputs is also vast. You're at level one: you have an interesting generative system which is able to make stuff.
Appreciative Systems. Generating images becomes addictive, and you gorge on the output. In your gluttony, you get a strong fear of missing out – what if I miss the parameters for a really interesting picture? You decide to systematically sample the space of outputs, but there are millions of images that can be produced. So, you encode your aesthetic preferences into a fitness function and get the software to rank/display its best results, according to the fitness function, perhaps tempered by a novelty measure to keep things fresh. You're at level two: you have an appreciative system which is able to discern quality in output.
Artistic Systems. At some stage, some humility sinks in, and you begin to think that maybe… just maybe… your particular aesthetic preferences aren't the only ones which could be used to mine images. You give the software the ability to invent its own aesthetic fitness functions and use them to filter and rank the images that it generates. You're at level three, with an artistic system which has some potential to affect the world artistically.
Persuasive Systems. Some of the output is great – beautiful new images that you perhaps wouldn't have found/made yourself. But some of the pictures are unpalatable and you can't imagine why the software likes them. However, sometimes, an awful image grows in appeal to you, and you realise that your own aesthetic sensibilities are being changed by the software. This is weird, but fun. You want to give the software the ability to influence you more easily, so you add a module which produces a little essay as a commentary on the aesthetic generation, the artefact generation and the style that the software has invented. You're at level four, with a persuasive system that can change your mind through explanations as well as high quality, surprising output.
Inventive Systems. You begin to realise that you enjoy the output partially because of what it looks like and partially because of the backstory to the generation of the output and the aesthetics being considered. You want to increase both aspects, by enabling the software to alter its own code, perhaps at process level, and by taking inspiration from outside sources like newspapers, twitter, art books, other artists, etc., so you have less control. And you add natural language generation to turn the commentary about the process/product into a little drama. You're at level five, where what your inventive system does is as important, interesting and unpredictable as its output.
Authentic Systems. You're loving the commentaries/essays/stories about how and why your software has made a particular picture/aesthetic/style/series or invented a new technique, and the software pretty much has an artistic persona. However, sometimes the persona doesn't ring true and actually verges on being insulting, given how little the software knows about the world. You realise that you're reading/viewing the output as if it were created by a person, which is a falsehood which has gotten very old and somewhat disturbing. You decide to give the software plausible and believable reasons to be creative, by implementing models of intrinsic motivation, reflection, self-improvement, self-determination, empowerment and maybe even consciousness. In particular, much of this depends on implementing techniques to record the life experiences that your software has, via: sensors detecting aspects of the environment the software operates in; improved in-situ and online HCI, wherein the software's interactions with people are recorded and the software is able to probe people with questions; and methods which take life experiences and outside knowledge and operationalise them into opinions that can be reflected in generative processing and output. You then give the software the ability to use its recorded life experiences to influence its creative direction, in much the same way that twitter and newspaper sources were previously. You're at level six, with an authentic system that is seen more as an autonomous AI individual than a pale reflection of a person.
Philosophical Systems. Ultimately, you find it thrilling to be in the presence of such an interesting creator as your software – it's completely independent of you, and it teaches you new things, regularly inspiring you and others. You realise that for the software to be taken seriously as an artist, it needs to join the debate about what creativity means (as creativity is an essentially contested concept [18]) in practice and as a societal driving force. You implement methods for philosophical reasoning based on the software's own creative endeavours, and you enable it to critique the thoughts of others. You add dialogue systems to propose, prove and disprove hypotheses about the nature of creativity, enabling your system to generally provoke discussion around the topic. You're at level seven, where it's difficult to argue that your philosophical system isn't genuinely creative.
It is fair to say that no AI system gets close yet to levels 6 and 7 yet, but projects presented in Creative AI and Computational Creativity circles have tested the water up to and including level 5. If I were giving a talk about this roadmap, there would be much handwaving towards the end, as the road gets very blurry, with few signposts. This, of course, is the frontier of Computational Creativity research and reflects directions I will personally be taking software like The Painting Fool in. I'm particularly interested in exploring the notion of the machine condition and seeing how authentic we can make the processing and products from AI systems. That notwithstanding, I hope the roadmap offers some insight and inspiration to people from all backgrounds who are working with cool generative systems and want to take the project further.
More than a decade ago, I was dismayed to read in a graphics textbook the following statement:
"Simulating artistic techniques means also simulating human thinking and reasoning, especially creative thinking. This is impossible to do using algorithms or information processing systems. [19, p. 113]"
The topic of the textbook is Non-photorealistic Computer Graphics, part of which involves getting software to simulate paint/pencil/pastel strokes on-screen. Stating that computational creative thinking is impossible was short-sighted and presumably written to placate creative industry practitioners, who use software like the Adobe Creative Suite which employ such non-photorealistic graphics techniques. In the 17 years since the above statement was published, the argument seems to have moved on from whether software can be independently creative to whether it should be allowed to. It is my sincere hope that the argument will shift soon to the question of how best truly creative AI systems can enhance and inform the human world, and how we can use autonomous software creativity to help us understand how technology works.
Creative AI practitioners have emerged as much via scientists in the machine learning community embracing art practice as via tech-savvy artists picking up and applying tools such as Tensor Flow [20]. Speaking personally, and having witnessed numerous transitions, scientists tend to hold on too long to the idea that product is more important than process or personality in creative practice [21]. This is presumably due to scientific evaluation being objective, with scientific findings expected to be evaluated entirely independently of their origins.
It would be tempting to follow the lead of companies like DeepMind who often justify working on applications to the automated playing of board games and video games [22] by stating that this research pushes forward AI technologies in general, which ultimately leads to improvements in applications to other, more worthwhile, domains like protein structure prediction [23] and healthcare. Getting software to produce better poems, paintings, games, etc., will likely lead to improvements in AI techniques overall, so concentrating on improving quality of output is in some senses a good thing. However, this would serve to deflect from what I believe is a looming crisis in Creative AI, which is when the novelty of the computer generation gimmick wears off, and people begin to realise that authenticity of process, voice and life experience are more important than the so-called "quality" of computer generated artefacts.
The activities of playing games and predicting protein structures have the luxury of objective measures for success and thus progress (beating other players and nanoscale accuracy, respectively). This is not true in the arts, where there are only subjective – and highly debated – notions of the "best" painting, poem, game or musical composition. The humanity wrapped up in artefacts produced by creative people is absolutely critical in the evaluation of those artefacts, which is not true in scientific or (to a lesser extent) competitive scenarios.
It is similarly tempting to appeal to the creative outcomes of the AlphaGo match against Lee Sedol, which have been described beautifully by Cade Metz in [24]:
"In Game Two, the Google machine made a move that no human ever would. And it was beautiful. As the world looked on, the move so perfectly demonstrated the enormously powerful and rather mysterious talents of modern artificial intelligence."
"But in Game Four, the human made a move that no machine would ever expect. And it was beautiful too. Indeed, it was just as beautiful as the move from the Google machine – no less and no more. It showed that although machines are now capable of moments of genius, humans have hardly lost the ability to generate their own transcendent moments. And it seems that in the years to come, as we humans work with these machines, our genius will only grow in tandem with our creations."
In the thought experiment above, in the corpus of 10,000 new symphonies generated by computer, there would surely be many moments of inventive genius: a phrase, passage or flourish of orchestration found in the notes of the music produced. Humankind would learn from the software, and would in turn develop better generative approaches to music production. But would we necessarily learn anything about the human condition, as we generally hope to in the arts?
I posit that only if software is developed to record its life experiences and use them in the pursuit of creative practice will we learn anything about the human condition, through increased understanding of the machine condition. Developing better AI painters means engineering software with more interesting life experiences, not software with better technical abilities. While there might be advantages, there is no imperative for these life experiences to be particularly human-like, and society might be better served if we try and understand computational lives through art generation. We hear all the time that the workings of black box AI systems deep-learned over huge datasets are not understood even by the researchers in the project. While this difficulty is usually overstated, we are facing a situation of increased scenarios where AI-enhanced software makes decisions of real import for us, coupled with decreased understanding of how individual AI systems make those decisions.
Combining the best practices and understanding gained from both Computational Creativity as a research field and Creative AI as an artistic and technological movement, may be the best approach to bringing about a future enhanced by creative software expressing its life experiences artistically for our benefit. The diversity, enthusiasm and innovative thinking coming daily from the Creative AI community, guided by the philosophy of the Computational Creativity movement is a potent combination, and I'm optimistic that in my lifetime, we will reap the benefits of cross-discipline, cross-community collaborations. Creative AI practitioners may rail against interventions from people like myself: stuffy academic disciples of the Computational Creativity discipline. But it is worth mentioning that we were once the angry young men and women of a largely ostracised and ignored arm of AI, shouting into the void at an establishment who thought that notions of creativity in AI systems were too "wooly" to be taken seriously.
Who knows what history will record about the rise of creative machines in society. My sincere hope is that it will chart how Computational Creativity thinking evolved without the benefit of sophisticated technical implementations; this was massively influenced with a surge in the technical abilities of Creative AI Systems during the period of Deep Learning dominance; but then naturally turned back to the philosophical thinking of Computational Creativity in order to properly reap the benefits of truly creative technologies in society.
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Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Creative Systems.
[10] Charnley, J., Pease, A. and Colton, S. (2012). On the Notion of Framing in Computational Creativity. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Creativity.
[11] Guckelsberger, C., Salge, C. and Colton, S. (2017). Addressing the "Why?" in Computational Creativity: A Non-Anthropocentric, Minimal Model of Intentional Creative Agency. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Computational Creativity.
[12] Colton, S., Pease, A. and Saunders, R. (2018). Issues of Authenticity in Autonomously Creative Systems. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Creativity.
[13] Chamberlain, W. and Etter, T. (1984). The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed: Computer Prose and Poetry. Warner Books.
[14] Barthes, R. (1967). The death of the author. Aspen 5-6.
[15] Colton, S. (2012) The Painting Fool: Stories from building an automated painter. In McCormack, J. and d'Inverno, M., eds., Computers and Creativity, 3–38. Springer.
[16] Mordvintsev, A., Olah, C. and Tyka, M. (2015). DeepDream – a code example for visualizing Neural Networks. Google AI Blog, July 1st 2015.
[17] Elgammal, A., Liu, B., Elhoseiny, M. and Mazzone, M. (2017). CAN: Creative Adversarial Networks, Generating "Art" by Learning About Styles and Deviating from Style Norms. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Computational Creativity.
[18] Gallie, W. (1956). Art as an essentially contested concept. The Philosophical Quarterly 6(23),97-114.
[19] Strothotte, H. and Schlechtweg, S. (2002). Non-Photorealistic Computer Graphics: Modelling, Rendering and Animation. Morgan Kaufmann.
[20] Abadi, M., Agarwal, A., Barham, P., Brevdo, E., Chen, Z., Citro, C., Corrado, G. S., Davis, A.,
Dean, J., Devin, M., Ghemawat, S., Goodfellow, I., Harp, A., Irving, G., Isard, M., Jozefowicz, R., Jia, Y., Kaiser, L., Kudlur, M., Levenberg, J., Mané, D., Schuster, M., Monga, R., Moore, S., Murray, D., Olah, F., Shlens, J., Steiner, B., Sutskever, I., Talwar, K., Tucker, P., Vanhoucke, V., Vasudevan, V., Viégas, F., Vinyals, O., Warden, P., Wattenberg, M., Wicke, M., Yu, Y. and Zheng, X. (2015). TensorFlow: Large-scale machine learning on heterogeneous systems. Software available from tensorflow.org.
[21] Jordanous, A. (2016). Four PPPPerspectives on computational creativity in theory and in practice. Connection Science special issue on Computational Creativity, 28(2), 194-216.
[22] Mnih, V., Kavukcuoglu, K., Silver, D., Rusu, A., Veness, J., Bellemare, M., Graves, A., Riedmiller, M., Fidjeland, A., Ostrovski, G., Petersen, S., Beattie, C., Sadik, A., Antonoglou, I., King, H., Kumaran, D., Wierstra, D., Legg, S. and Hassabis, D. (2015). Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning. Nature 518, 529-533.
[23] Evans, R., Jumper, J., Kirkpatrick, J., Sifre, L., Green, T., Qin, C., Zidek, A., Nelson, A., Bridgland, A., Penedones, H., Petersen, S., Simonyan, K., Crossan, S., Jones, D., Silver, D., Kavukcuoglu, K., Hassabis, D. and Senior, A. (2018). De novo structure prediction with deep-learning based scoring. Proceedings of the Thirteenth Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (Abstracts).
[24] Metz, C. (2016). In Two Moves, AlphaGo and Lee Sedol Redefined the Future. Wired, 16th March 2016 edition.
Art, Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, Technology
About Simon Colton
Simon Colton is a British computer scientist, currently working as Professor of Computational Creativity in the Game AI Research Group at Queen Mary University of London, UK and in the Sensilab at Monash University, Australia. He previously had an appointment at Falmouth University, UK and led the Computational Creativity Research Groups at Goldsmiths, University of London and at Imperial College, London in the positions of Professor and Reader, respectively. Simon is the driving force behind thepaintingfool.com, an artificial intelligence that he hopes will one day be accepted as an artist in its own right. His work, along with that of Maja Pantic and Michel Valstar, won the British Computing Society Machine Intelligence Award in 2007.	View all posts with Simon Colton →
← Is consciousness a battle between your beliefs and perceptions?
Philosophy and Psychedelics →
AI and Creativity
On 'The Artist in the Machine'
Arthur I Miller
Ai-Da: Robot Artist
Fairy Tales and Machine Learning: Retelling, Reflecting, Repeating, Recreating
Anna Ridler & Georgia Ward Dyer
Neural Zoo
Sofia Crespo
Meet AICAN, a machine that operates as an autonomous artist
Ahmed Elgammal
Art and Generative Systems
Gene Kogan
On Computational Art
Ernest Edmonds
In Praise of Form: Towards a New Post-Humanist Art
Taney Roniger
The Maths of Life and Death
Kit Yates
If machines want to make art, will humans understand it?
Rui Penha & Miguel Carvalhais
Is consciousness a battle between your beliefs and perceptions?
Hakwan Lau
AI's first pop album ushers in a new musical era
Melissa Avdeeff


text:
How Congress' massive infrastructure bill will impact Wyoming and its residents
By: Victoria Eavis, Casper Star-Tribune via Wyoming News Exchange - Updated: 1 year ago
CASPER — Congress recently passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, and experts say the measure could help remedy longstanding issues in Wyoming.
Driving on damaged roads costs each Wyoming driver an average of $295 per year, nearly 7% of the state's bridges are rated "structurally deficient," and 99 dams are considered to be "high-hazard potential," according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). Deteriorating infrastructure impedes Wyoming's ability to compete in an increasingly global marketplace, the group concludes.
The legislation has drawn criticism from the state's congressional delegation, who worry about its price tag and spending on projects that won't benefit rural residents. But experts say the infusion of infrastructure dollars could help Wyoming over the long term.
"Wyoming is at a nexus point, so I am optimistic about these investments that could go a long way toward better positioning the state to take advantage of new opportunities that build on its history, know how, and culture," said Christelle Khalaf, associate director for the Center of Business and Economic Development at the University of Wyoming.
What's in the bill? The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funnels money into a number of sectors in Wyoming. The state can expect to receive the following:
$1.8 billion to improve highways;
$335 million to improve water infrastructure;
$225 million for bridge replacement and repairs;
$100 million to provide better broadband coverage;
$72 million for airport infrastructure development;
$27 million to expand the state's electric vehicle network; and
$14 million to protect against wildfires.
While the bill defines broad categories of spending, the specifics have yet to be worked out, officials at both the Wyoming Department of Transportation and the Wyoming Business Council told the Star-Tribune.
The bill received some bipartisan support, but Wyoming's congressional delegation — Rep. Liz Cheney and Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis — voted against it.
Thirteen House Republicans and 19 Senate Republicans voted in favor of the package.
How will this affect you? The infrastructure bill's investment in roads will make it easier to move goods within Wyoming and across borders, while the investment in broadband will improve internet access, experts say.
The improvements could make it easier for businesses to branch out into the digital market, with potentially lower shipping costs, Khalaf said. That trend could attract more business to Wyoming, a key priority for the state as it attempts to diversify its economy to become less reliant on the energy industry.
"Wyomingites can expect higher connectivity, physically and digitally," she said.
The bill will be a boost for the construction industry, and it comes at a good time. The sector was down 11 percent in September compared to February 2020, the month before the pandemic.
"In the short term, Wyoming will benefit from a much-needed boost to the construction industry," Khalaf said.
Union workers are expected to benefit. Many of the jobs added through the bill will "largely be union jobs," Tammy Johnson, executive secretary of the Wyoming AFL-CIO, said in an email to union workers.
The bill could also help the state's highway system. The Wyoming Department of Transportation is expected to be a major beneficiary of the federal dollars.
Its director, Luke Reiner, said he is "encouraged" by the new Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and is "working to plan how best to use these potential funds for the people of Wyoming."
By boosting individual sectors, the state's overall economy will benefit, experts predict.
"I see the ripple effect of it all coming together and helping economic development and good jobs for Wyomingites," said Josh Dorrell, CEO of the Wyoming Business Council. "You improve transportation infrastructure, you're more appealing for manufacturers. This is a big igniter for economic development."
Broadband Reliable broadband is critical in a lightly populated state with residents spread out over great distances. That's even more the case with the onset of the pandemic as remote work, schooling and medical appointments have become more ubiquitous.
The bill includes a "minimum allocation" of $100 million to expand broadband coverage in Wyoming. That includes providing access to the roughly 48,000 Wyoming residents without broadband access, the White House said.
Meanwhile, about 25 percent of people in Wyoming will be eligible for the Affordability Connectivity Benefit, which is designed to help low-income families afford internet access. While the money is helpful, it may not bridge all gaps.
"What I'm worried about is that we're not going to be able to upgrade 25 [megabits per second] download, three [megabits per second] upload to something higher and better," said Rep. Albert Sommers, R-Pinedale, who chairs the Wyoming Broadband Task Force. "But if we want to keep Wyoming relevant in today's economy, we have to have something higher than 25-three."
The bill's infusion of infrastructure funding for Wyoming did not protect it from criticism from the state's all-Republican congressional delegation.
"There are many infrastructure priorities, like improving our roads and bridges, expanding rural broadband, and reforming the [National Environmental Policy Act] process, that would have by themselves received much broader bipartisan support," Cheney said. "Unfortunately, the Democrats' bill instead includes far-left provisions that will ultimately hurt families across our state."
The bill provides $66 billion in passenger rail to revitalize AMTRAK in the Northeast and $91 billion for public transit systems, neither of which will benefit Wyoming, a Cheney aide noted.
"I'm disappointed that Democrats have opted to use their slim majority to advance largely-partisan legislation rather than working across the aisle on solutions that both parties can broadly support," Cheney said. "Going forward, I will continue to prioritize the needs and interests of the people of Wyoming and work to advance those causes in the House."
Barrasso expressed a similar sentiment.
"This bill started from a bipartisan foundation that I passed through the Environment and Public Works Committee last Congress. It will invest in roads and bridges in Wyoming," the senator said. "There is much-needed funding for Bureau of Reclamation water reservoirs, although not at the level we need to fund aging facilities in the current drought conditions facing the West."
But Republicans were quick to note the legislation's massive cost.
"Being a very rural state, Wyoming has specific needs that most other states do not. There are programs in this bill that will be beneficial for Wyoming," Lummis said. "However, I didn't vote for it because I believe the price tag was too high and too much of the spending decisions would be made by bureaucrats in Washington instead of those on the ground in the states."
Proponents of the bill argue it will pay for itself through a number of measures without raising taxes.
However, the Congressional Budget Office found that the legislation would add about $256 billion to the projected federal deficit over the next decade.
"I've insisted that an infrastructure bill be fully paid for. This bill misses that mark," Barrasso said. "The level of new spending Democrats insisted on will add more than $250 billion to the debt burden on our children and grandchildren. Washington must learn to live within its means, like every family in Wyoming does."
Wyoming Democrats, meanwhile, lauded the bill.
"President Biden's dedication to the American people and his ability to reach across the aisle got the job done and, as a result, Wyoming will see real investments in and improvements made to our infrastructure," said Wyoming Democratic Party Chair Joe Barbuto. "For a lot of folks in our state, this historic piece of legislation is a game changer that will help to support and create jobs, innovation, and economic diversity. The build back better agenda isn't about whether a state is red or blue—it's about building opportunity and prosperity for all Americans."
Political critics of the bill also noted its expansion of electric vehicles will hamper the energy sector in oil and gas states. A Cheney aide pointed to the $15 billion in green subsidies in the bill, specifically for electric buses and electric vehicle charging stations.
"[These] will hurt Wyoming's energy industry that supports families across the state," the aide said.
Others don't see the bill's support of green technology hampering other sources of energy.
"(This bill) does include some provisions to promote electrification and other low-carbon technologies. However, it doesn't specifically exclude or sanction traditional fuel sources," Khalaf said. "For example, the bill includes a grant program for EV (electrical vehicle) charging and fueling infrastructure that includes natural gas, hydrogen, and propane fueling infrastructure. In addition, the clean school bus program includes not only EVs but also LNG (liquefied natural gas), compressed natural gas, hydrogen, propane, and biofuels."
Fuel taxes — which fund about 11 percent of Wyoming's highway program — have provided diminishing returns with the rise of more fuel-efficient vehicles. The federal government, meanwhile, remains the highway system's main benefactor.
"The infrastructure bill may not provide a lot of immediate, instant benefit to the traditional energy sector. But it does contain large levels of funding support that will assist with the sustainable transformation of the industry and support Wyoming's pursuit of netzero emission through the 'all-of-the-above' energy strategy," said Glenn Murrell, executive director of the Wyoming Energy Authority.
As Wyoming works to diversify its economy, it must contend with training workers to accommodate different industries. That process is known as upskilling. As it wound its way through Congress, the legislation underwent major cuts, one of which would have benefited the upskilling of Wyoming workers.
"The bill initially included $100 billion for workforce development, which would have partially helped displaced workers," said Khalaf, specifically noting the downturn in the coal industry. "This would have provided much needed upskilling investments in the state."
Business advocates agree.
"It's pretty clear that our natural resources and our energy sectors have been at risk, and so being able to provide other opportunities for those workers is really important," Durrell said.
President Joe Biden's signing of the bill into law won't mean Wyoming's infrastructure problems are solved. In fact, many details must still be worked out. State lawmakers will convene in mid-February for the budget session and are likely to tackle how to appropriate the money.
Congress recently passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, and experts say the measure could help remedy longstanding issues in Wyoming.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Tiger Palace is a casino in Bhairahawa, Nepal. According to their website, the Tiger Palace Resort is situated to the south of the legendary Himalayas, and accessible from India or Kathmandu. They offer luxurious accommodations and superb leisure facilities.
The Tiger Palace Resort also offers a casino experience. It is composed of three gaming zones – with a sports betting facility and even a separate VIP area above the main gaming floor.
Equipped with over 50 gaming tables featuring classics like Blackjack, Baccarat, Roulette or Poker for instance, you can easily find what is best for you. It also has 200 electronic gaming machines.
In January, the table drop of US$2,128,000 compared with US$1,009,000 in January 2018. It was the first month since it opened that it was possible to compare a year-on-year result.
Silver Heritage stated: « At Tiger Palace Resort in Bhairahawa, as previously announced, the Company has made a number of strategic changes to marketing and operations. Drop continues to improve with December and January being the 2nd and 3rd highest months respectively since the casino opened on December 28, 2018."
For high-stake players, the casino features an exclusive VIP area, elevated above the main gaming floor and accessed through a special VIP entrance. The area offers a choice of two private dining rooms, and is in effect a casino within a casino.
All in all, the board and management of the Tiger Palace tend to focus on making further improvements to support growth. That will include "new marketing initiatives and the opening of three VIP gaming rooms in February 2019 to further drive additional revenue at the property", revealed Silver Heritage in a statement.
The world's largest slot tournament is held at the Muckleshoot casino!
The schedule of the 15th season of the World Poker Tour is available!


text:
Q: Socket.io and Express on NodeJS im trying to build a simple application with express@3.0.0rc4, and socket.io@0.9.10.
Ive generate the skel of my app with express generator:
express --sessions --css stylus --ejs myapp

I edited then the package.json file to include socket.io:
{
  "name": "application-name",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "private": true,
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node app"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "express": "3.0.0rc4",
    "ejs": "*",
    "stylus": "*",
    "socket.io": "*"
  }
}

and ran npm install.
Socket.io got installed correctly.
I opened the app.js file, required socket.io, set it to listen the server, but when adding event handlers with
io.sockets.on('connection', callback.. bla bla bla);

I get
io.sockets.on('connection', function(socket) {
           ^
TypeError: Cannot call method 'on' of undefined

I get
   info  - socket.io started

when running, so socket.io is initializing, but there doesnt seems to be a io.sockets module.
Ive ran console.log(io); to explore the object and I got:
{ version: '0.9.10',
  protocol: 1,
  clientVersion: '0.9.10',
  listen: [Function],
  Manager:
   { [Function: Manager]
     defaultTransports: [ 'websocket', 'htmlfile', 'xhr-polling', 'jsonp-polling' ] },
  Transport: [Function: Transport],
  Socket: [Function: Socket],
  Static: [Function: Static],
  Store: { [Function: Store] Client: [Function] },
  MemoryStore: { [Function: Memory] Client: [Function: Client] },
  RedisStore: { [Function: Redis] Client: [Function: Client] },
  parser:
   { packets:
      { disconnect: 0,
        connect: 1,
        heartbeat: 2,
        message: 3,
        json: 4,
        event: 5,
        ack: 6,
        error: 7,
        noop: 8 },
     reasons:
      { 'transport not supported': 0,
        'client not handshaken': 1,
        unauthorized: 2 },
     advice: { reconnect: 0 },
     encodePacket: [Function],
     encodePayload: [Function],
     decodePacket: [Function],
     decodePayload: [Function] } }

So where is the sockets method? Nowhere. But look, there is a Socket function:
Socket: [Function: Socket]

So I thought maybe documentation is deprecated and sockets became Socket.
So I did console.log(io.Socket); and got
  this.id = id;
  this.namespace = nsp;
  this.manager = manager;
  this.disconnected = false;
  this.ackPackets = 0;
  this.acks = {};
  this.setFlags();
  this.readable = readable;
  this.store = this.manager.store.client(this.id);
  this.on('error', defaultError);

But that Socket.on doesnt seems to be the function im looking.
So how do I set the handlers?
At the webpage, github and resources out there all of them uses io.sockets.on().
Notice that I also tried running npm install socket.io separatly
I'll post my app.js just in case, but It doesnt seems to be a problem with my code:
var express = require('express')
  , routes = require('./routes')
  , user = require('./routes/user')
  , http = require('http')
  , path = require('path')
  , io = require('socket.io');

var app = express();

app.configure(function(){
  app.set('port', process.env.PORT || 3000);
  app.set('views', __dirname + '/views');
  app.set('view engine', 'ejs');
  app.use(express.favicon());
  app.use(express.logger('dev'));
  app.use(express.bodyParser());
  app.use(express.methodOverride());
  app.use(express.cookieParser('your secret here'));
  app.use(express.session());
  app.use(app.router);
  app.use(require('stylus').middleware(__dirname + '/public'));
  app.use(express.static(path.join(__dirname, 'public')));
});

app.configure('development', function(){
  app.use(express.errorHandler());
});

app.get('/', routes.index);
app.get('/users', user.list);

var server = http.createServer(app).listen(app.get('port'), function(){
  console.log("Express server listening on port " + app.get('port'));
});

io.listen(server);

console.log(io.Socket);

io.sockets.on('connection', function(socket) {
  socket.emit('init', { msg: 'Welcome'});
  socket.on('roll', function(data) {
    console.log(data);
  })
});

A: var app = require('express')()
  , http = require('http')
  , server = http.createServer(app)
  , io = require('socket.io').listen(server)

server.listen(3000)

io.on('connection',function(socket){
  console.log('connection..')
})

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Before I started making soaps, I made lotion bars. However, I was never fully satisfied with them. They always seemed too greasy, and not to mention a little smelly from the oils I chose to use back then.
Previous lotion bars never fulfilled my angry skin's hunger for a good conditioner that would last through my obsessive hand washings.
Now that I have a better understanding of oils, I concocted a new version of my beloved lotion bars. They smell, feel and work significantly better than previous recipes I've tried or created.
Have you tried a Beeswax Buddy? What do you think about them? Leave a Review!


text:
Despite an excellent debut album, "Naughty By Nature" was pegged as a one-hit wonder by some, after all, they'd never duplicate the inescapably catchy "O.P.P.". But when 19 Naughty III was released on February 23, 1993 with the lead single "Hip Hop Hooray, " the group proved that they could recreate that magic. Celebrating it's 30th Anniversary this year, the album has been certified platinum and "Hip Hop Hooray" has become a hip hop anthem. The single was #1 on the charts, earning the band their second Top 10 hit, with the video directed by Spike Lee, featuring appearances from Tupac Shakur, Run-DMC and more. The album also contains the hits "Written on Ya Kitten" and "It's On" and has guest appearances from Heavy D and Queen Latifah. Production was handled entirely by group member KayGee, who has one foot in the clubs and the other one on the street corner, and that's true of the group as a whole.
Label: Tommy Boy Music
19 Naughty III - 30th Anniversary - Orange
Artist: Naughty By Nature
$ 34.98 PREORDER
1. A1 19 Naughty III
2. A2 Hip Hop Hooray
3. A3 Ready for Dem
4. A4 Take It to Ya Face
5. A5 Daddy Was a Street Corner
6. B1 the Hood Comes First
7. B2 the Only Ones
8. B3 It's on
9. B4 Cruddy Clique
10. B5 Knock Em Out Da Box
11. B6 Hot Potato
12. C1 Sleepin' on Jersey
13. C2 Written on Ya Kitten
14. C3 Sleepwalkin' II Shoutouts
15. C4 Hip Hop Hooray (Pete Rock Remix)
16. D1 Hip Hop Hooray (Extended Mix)
17. D2 Written on Ya Kitten (Q-Funk Mix)
18. D3 Written on Ya Kitten (Shandi's Smooth Mix)
19. D4 It's on (Beatnuts Remix)
20. D5 It's on (Sunship Edit)


An Exclusive evening in the heart of Union Square.
Looking forward to this super Fun evening packed with energy !!
Breathtaking Views of the City, a MUST Experience!!
Join us between the STARS & CABLE CARS.
It's easy to leave your heart in SF at this fabulous venue!!


New Pattern is here! Spring Patchwork Dress and Top – Sewing Pattern for 18 inch dolls.
Hi! New pattern is here! Spring Patchwork Dress and Top. Modern and classic style for your doll. This pattern includes, Dress, Maxi Boho Style and Top Patchwork. It fits 18 inch dolls and suitable for cotton fabrics.
This dress can be made using 3 fat quarters of different prints of cotton fabric or you can use scraps of your favorite fabrics.
It can be embellished with lace, ribbon, ric rac, tiny buttons, trims, many options… It's available now on SuzyMStudio site, Craftsy and Etsy.
Hope your dolls like it! Any question, please contact me. Happy sewing! Suzy.
Spring Patchwork Dress and Top for 18 inch dolls.


text:
Лу́пче-Са́вино — военный посёлок, расположенный в 7 км к северо-западу от города Кандалакша Мурманской области, недалеко от федеральной трассы «Кола». Состоит из двух гарнизонов.

История
В 1941—1944 годах через него прошли десятки тысяч призванных в Красную Армию жителей Мурманской области. Сейчас в Лупче-Савино около 70 работников местной военной части, из них 8 официально военные. В 2012 году закончили уничтожать боезапасы ещё с ВОВ. Это происходило на полигоне, который находится в 4 км от посёлка (в 11 км от Кандалакши).

Географические сведения

Посёлок является частью города Кандалакша, однако, въезд на его территорию осуществляется строго по пропускам. В наши дни на территории Лупче-Савино расположены военная комендатура, избирательный участок, офицерское кафе, столовая, магазин, библиотека, спортивные сооружения, а также необходимые объекты инфраструктуры.

Примечания

Военные гарнизоны
Населённые пункты, вошедшие в состав Кандалакши

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


The dependency on the internet has increased to such a great extent that you hardly find any document coming to your office in hard copy, almost all the documents come in soft copy. It provides ease in the transportation of documents. It is very often found that there are many mischievous people who are active online to commit fraud and make changes in the online documents to gain benefits from them. In order to secure your documents from being used to dupe you from money or from any other valuable assets you must convert epub to pdf format.
Why to convert the format of the document?
The conversion of the document from epub to pdf free ensures that your documents are safe and no changes could be made in the document as the pdf format allows the reader to read the document only facility. The changes could be made by the creator of the document only. No one else can make any changes in the document whereas if the document is available in the electronic publication format then change can be made very easily in the document.
How to convert the documents?
Upload the file: The very first step in the conversion of the file is to get the file available in your system. You have to select the file which you want to convert and then upload the file on the page which provides the online conversion facilities.
Selecting the desired format: You have to select the desired format in which you want your document to be converted. You can select the pdf format for the conversion of the document.
Download the file: The conversion completes in few seconds and then you can download the file immediately.
You all know that all the books available on the internet are available in the epub format. This format provides you ease of reading the book on the internet but in case if you want to print the entire book or part of the book then you find that this format does not support printing. Hence, in order to print the book you have to convert the electronic book into pdf format.
In order to convert the format of the book you need to download the Epub converter which can convert a number of books into pdf format. Once you have downloaded the converter, then you have to upload the epub files into the program and then choose pdf format as output format.


text:
Home Tag: Illinois
Topic: Illinois
Northern Illinois' Diversity Officer Earns More than Governors
August 8, 2015 , Spencer Irvine
The College Fix reported: The recently tapped chief diversity officer at Northern Illinois University will make $205,000 a year – a $185,000 salary and $20,000 in allowances and expenses – collecting more than 99 percent…
Illinois to be Censured for Ousting Anti-Israel Professor Steven Salaita
May 8, 2015 , Spencer Irvine
The University of Illinois will be censured for firing Steven Salaita, who had left his previous job at Virginia Tech to work at Illinois. But, his comments about Gaza and Israel (like the one below)…
Delaying Common Core the Chicago Way
April 21, 2015 , Malcolm A. Kline
Opposition to Common Core continues to spread well across party lines, no matter how much the educational establishment tires to minimize the blowback. "Illinois state officials have threatened to withhold funding from school districts that…
Colleges Can't Hide Info Behind Student Privacy Laws, Illinois Says
April 2, 2015 , Spencer Irvine
The state of Illinois Attorney General says that their state universities cannot keep hiding behind student privacy laws to keep information from being released. Good.
Israel Divestment Student Vote Passed in Close Vote
Even the university's chapter of the Red Cross voted in favor of divesting from Israel, but the national organization said it is politically neutral and that the student chapter does not represent their mission or…
Charlie Hebdo Speaker allowed at University of Chicago, after Threats and Protests
March 2, 2015 , Spencer Irvine
Kudos to the University of Chicago to not cave to protests and threats against holding the event, where a cartoonist for the French satirical magazine spoke to the college's French club.
Fracking College Degree to be Offered at Illinois Community College
February 1, 2015 , Spencer Irvine
Talk about an actual practical college degree, for starters.
Salaita goes after Illinois Donors in post-firing controversy
Steven Salaita, who did not get tenure at the University of Illinois for anti-Semitic remarks, is now suing the university's donors for encouraging the university not to hire him.


text:
info@allabouttennis.co.uk
Tennis Court Cleaning
Netball Court Cleaning
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James Bond: Octopussy
Octopussy was the 13th in the ongoing series by Eon Productions about the British secret agent, 007. As suave British actor Roger Moore's sixth outing as superspy, James Bond, the film was inspired by a short story written by Fleming in 1966.
The screenplay was adapted for modern audiences. Moore had been playing the MI6 agent since 1973, when he first appeared as Bond in The Man with the Golden Gun. He took over the role from his predecessor, Sean Connery, who left the franchise in 1971.
Action scenes
The series of 007 films began in 1962 with Dr No, continuing for more than five decades until the most recent film to date, Spectre, in 2015. One thing they have in common is their all-action fight scenes, with Bond disposing of the villains in many innovative ways.
Over the years, 007 has kicked, punched and shot the bad guys, set them on fire, blown them up, thrown them off high buildings, blown them out of airplanes, fed them to sharks and thought up many other ways of dispatching his foes.
Perhaps one of the oddest fight scenes occurs in Octopussy, when our hero and his ally are travelling in a rickshaw using a tennis racket to fight off the bad guys!
If this seems an unusual weapon, and perhaps a less effective one than a gun or bomb, but the explanation is in the nature of the film. Although all of the Bond movies had a smattering of humour, Moore tended to play the role with rather more comedic elements than his predecessor, Connery.
Tennis star
Octopussy was famous for having a professional tennis player, Vijay Amritraj, as one of its stars. Amritraj was once number 16 in the world tennis rankings and won 16 singles and 13 doubles titles during his career. He was still playing regularly when he met James Bond producer Albert "Cubby" Broccoli in 1982 at Wimbledon.
Broccoli approached Amritraj and asked if he would be interested in doing a screen test for the role of Vijay, Bond's MI6 ally in India, in Octopussy. Amritraj said he didn't think he'd get the role, but thought it would be fun to do a screen test for a James Bond film, as well as playing at Wimbledon, so he agreed.
He was thrilled to be offered the role, although he had to break off during filming to play in the Davis Cup tennis championship in the Soviet Union! He became good friends with Moore during filming and the two of them would swap stories about the movie world and the tennis circuit.
Hence the script contained several tennis jokes, including the famous chase scene when Vijay rescues Bond from a gang of bloodthirsty assailants by whisking him off in a Tuk Tuk taxi through an Indian outdoor market. In one memorable scene, one of the villains is knocked out when a tennis racket is smashed over his head.
Vijay hits the racket on his skull with such force that all of the strings snap and the villain's head pops up through the metal frame, bringing a whole new meaning to the tennis term, "smash" shot.
Rickshaw wheelie
In an interview, Amritraj said the close bond and understanding that grew between him and Moore was what got him through the rickshaw scene. It was no ordinary Tuk Tuk, but rather a customised alternative that had been specially made, with plenty of horsepower.
Amritraj practiced on it for three days before filming, as he did his own stunts and had to do a wheelie in the vehicle, with Moore as a passenger. He admitted it was "a lot of pressure" but Moore made sure he felt comfortable.
As the chase continued and Amritraj hit the villain with a tennis racket, he said it got a big laugh when Octopussy premiered at Leicester Square, just before Wimbledon 1983. He felt that a lot of people in the tennis fraternity were in awe that he had won his first acting role in a James Bond film. He and Moore remained close friends after filming.
Amritraj enjoyed a career in acting after he retired from the professional tennis circuit, winning a role as a starship captain in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and appearing in two American sitcoms, The Last Precinct and What a Country.
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CAT has underperformed the market consistently for the last 18 months, suffering from: diversity, exposure to China, exposure to mining, exposure to Europe, etc. All the things that the market does not like.
Among the large cap industrial names it is now one of the cheapest, despite earnings that reflect normalized returns on capital and despite meaningful leverage to an economic recovery. As shown in our accompanying piece on complexity, the market is punishing companies that are focused outside the US and with diverse portfolios – CAT is a clear victim of this behavior.
We are not that bullish about mining – we expect a relatively stagnant market for a while, followed by a slow recovery. But we are more positive about everything else as we see spending recovering around the world. It will likely not get back to the levels seen pre 2008, but it does not need to for CAT to improve.
The new CAT is much better than the old CAT, in that the major decline in revenue we saw in 2009 would have resulted in huge losses had it happened 10 years earlier. The company has improved its operations such that return on capital and earnings volatility has been reduced. The company is close to normal returns today, but with ample operating leverage – the recent dividend increase suggests confidence in cash flows.
The risk is that we bounce along the bottom for a couple of additional quarters and perhaps see another earnings miss or further negative revisions, but the absolute and relative downside to the stock is, we believe, limited. The level of skepticism in the stock is the highest it has been since September of 2011.
Our valuation framework suggests that there is as much as 35% upside in the stock to reach what we would calculate to be "normal relative value". Equally important, CAT today stands at its greatest ever discount to the Capital Goods sector – see chart, and would need to rise 23% to achieve a more normal relationship.
CAT has been one of the most significant underperformers in the industrials space over the last 18 months – Exhibit 2, and now trades well below what we would consider to be "normal value" – Exhibit 3.
This is a company that was being lauded only a few years ago for its improved production process. Part of that thesis was less volatile earnings (arguably shown in the 2009 numbers) and more operating leverage/greater capital productivity. If you believe that story, you would argue for improving returns on capital through a cycle. As shown in Exhibit 4, we do not have enough data to support that this is happening yet, but the last cyclical low was much higher than the prior cyclical lows. Our "normal value" methodology is based on a flat ROC trend at the historic average of the last 30 years – 10%. This generates a current normal relative value of $123 per share, given the current market multiple. If you could make a case for improving returns you could generate a higher price, but you do not need to stretch that far today.
Equally compelling is the discount that CAT shows to its peers. If we look at valuation relative to our Capital Goods index we show CAT at its widest discount to the group average, as we showed in Exhibit 1. It is not the cheapest Capital Goods stock based on our valuation framework, but it is an outlier – Exhibit 5.
high return on capital volatility significantly since 2009. CAT did not screen into either the low volatility or high volatility sample set in this analysis, but it is one of the more complex stocks, based on our definition.
More diversity should reduce earnings volatility, and given the production process changes at CAT we see evidence that CAT is becoming less volatile. The factors all point to our increased level of interest.
Other companies that fall into a similar bucket today would be DuPont, to a lesser extend Dow Chemical in the Chemical sector, as well as ITW, MMM and GE.


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Home Crypto Aspire Global Gives Karamba Games a Major Facelift
Aspire Global Gives Karamba Games a Major Facelift
Karamba.com is one of the most popular brands under Aspire Global which is an Internet gaming solution company for white labels and operators. It was given a fresh makeover recently to make it look and feel more "premium" and fun.
Don Mabona
online casino Karamba
Now, online casino Karamba features better navigation and display, and a slew of new promotions that include different kinds of daily bonuses. Customer support service is also given a boost with live chat and other features. It goes without saying that the casino has become a favorite among South Africans.
One of the major ways the online casino industry has evolved over the past few years is in the way how brands understand their customers. This is also where Karamba is shining today as it's able to provide the right kind of games that resonate with the players.
On Karamba, you can find a wide range of titles from top software companies like Evolution Live Casino, Microgaming, and NetEnt. You also have access to plenty of live casino classics, slots, and scratch card games.
The following are some of the most exciting features of Karamba that you need to know:
Backed by NeoGames: Karamba is powered by NeoGames, although it supports many other games from other developers like Microgaming and Cryptologic. You get a demo of the platform, access the tools and services in 10 languages including English, Japanese, Spanish, etc.
Game Selection: The majority of online casinos are filled with slots. However, offers a decent variety in terms of scratch card games, progressive jackpot games, roulette and blackjack games, etc.
Mobile Support: Karamba is available as a mobile app for both Android and Apple devices. Even if you don't want to install the apps, you can directly access the casino on your mobile through the website.
Excellent Customer Support: The customer support service has improved a lot now. The support team is available from 6 AM to 11 PM, 7 days a week. You also have multiple ways to reach out including email, phone, and live chat.
Here's What VP (Product & Technology), Aspire Global Says
VP Galit Shani-Michel said that he was happy that after many months of work, the company launched a revamped version of Karamba.com and the aim is to provide high-quality HTML-based user experience while maintaining the fun-filled and youthful values that the brand is all about. He said that the process required a lot of planning and development but the feedback has been great so far.
Michel's comments were received with love and admiration by South African fans and it's likely that the platform users will grow at a faster pace now.
An Insight into Aspire Global
Aspire Global is a well-known iGaming service provider to operators and white labels. It was set up in 2005 and today, it offers a range of services for sportsbook and online gambling industry. Other services include VIP management, payments and risk control, etc.
Aspire Global holds licenses in various regulated markets viz. Malta, Italy, UK, and Denmark.
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4/05/2010 · I don't know how to use Windows Movie Maker to cut video footage, and I know WMM just supports some special formats, so I think you can try my way, I am using RZ Video Converter which can supports all popular video formats, and it can cut the video which you just hate directly by setting start time and end time.... Import MP4 video to Windows Movie Maker: When the conversion complete, open Windows Movie Maker and click "Import" or "Import Video" on the left to import your video to the movie collection and drag and drop to the timeline for editing.
I'm not an expert on Movie Maker but most basic editing software is designed more for cuts, not so much for "forensics" type work like you're describing. Maybe someone else can offer better suggestions.
4/05/2010 · I don't know how to use Windows Movie Maker to cut video footage, and I know WMM just supports some special formats, so I think you can try my way, I am using RZ Video Converter which can supports all popular video formats, and it can cut the video which you just hate directly by setting start time and end time.


Wendy Lee Oct. 4, 2017 Updated: Oct. 4, 2017 6:01 p.m.
Google already has the ability to know your route from home to work, what you search for online and what's in your email.
Now, the Mountain View tech company wants you to buy its hardware products that will tie all of those software features together.
On Wednesday, Google announced a family of new or updated electronic devices, including a music speaker, a convertible laptop, smartphones, a virtual reality headset, a camera for candid shots and a smaller Internet-connected speaker that can all be linked to its digital assistant and apps.
The announcement accelerated the company's move into hardware, which began last year when it started selling Pixel smartphones — the first phones that Google had designed from start to finish.
The Pixel 2 phones, which use a single-lens camera to create portrait photos, start at $649 for the 5-inch version and $849 for the 6-inch one. The phones will become available in several weeks at Best Buy and Verizon stores as well as at Google's online store.
Rishi Chandra, a Google vice president, said the company sees hardware becoming an important line of its business, in which Google products differ from those of competitors because of their artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, rival Apple — known for its hardware — wants to grow its services business.
Chandra said Google is not just trying to gather more data for advertising, and people can always opt out of sharing information. The company is investing heavily in hardware and expects it to be an important growth area, he said. He declined to say what percentage of Google's revenue comes from hardware.
Still, some analysts said that they believe Google's goal is less about making money off of the hardware and more about retaining all of the users of its popular apps. Several of Google's services, including Gmail and Google Maps, have more than 1 billion users each.
"Clearly, hardware is going to help the subscribers and users stick with their ecosystem as opposed to abandoning (Google) and going to Samsung and Apple," said Wayne Lam, a principal analyst with market research firm IHS Markit.
Last month, Google announced plans to spend $1.1 billion to acquire roughly 2,000 employees from Taiwanese tech firm HTC. The move will help the company build its own devices, after selling its Motorola Mobility business several years ago.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai envisions a future in which artificial intelligence plays a bigger role in everyday lives because the technology is more contextual, conversational, adaptable and used across multiple devices.
"We think we're in a unique moment in time where we can bring AI, software and hardware (together) to bring a different perspective to solving problems for users," Pichai said at a press event held at the SFJazz Center.
The Pixel 2 smartphones will work with Google's new Pixelbook laptop that starts at $999 and becomes available on Oct. 31. The Pixelbook, which weighs 2.4 pounds, can fold into a tablet or have its screen propped up for viewing video. The laptop works with a $99 Pixelbook Pen that allows users to circle words or images that they want to learn more about. Google's digital assistant will pull up that information on their screen. The Pixelbook Pen can also be used for writing or drawing on the tablet.
Google also unveiled Pixel Buds, $159 smart earbuds connected to each other with a wire, that work with Android phones. Pixel Buds will work with iPhones, but those users will not be able to get access to Google's digital assistant through the earbuds.
The company rolled out two new speakers for the home, each voice-activated and tied into Google's larger universe of cloud-based search and information services.
The $49 Google Home Mini is a smaller version of original smart speaker Google Home, but designed as less obtrusive and more decorative.
The $399 Max is pitched as a music and entertainment device, like old-style bookshelf speakers but with content streaming from the cloud. This speaker is able to tailor the sound to the shape of a room, which will put it in direct competition with Apple's upcoming Siri-activated HomePod speaker.
Customers can broadcast voice messages like "Dinner is ready!" or "It's time to wake up!" over more than one Google Home speaker using Google's digital assistant through apps or on a Pixel phone. The company said it is working on developing more features for kids such as storytelling.
Google also previewed Google Clips, a small, square camera designed to automatically take and sort candid 8-second video clips. Clips includes artificial intelligence technology so that it takes short, candid video clips of people it recognizes and highlights moments to download to a phone.
Google officials said Clips does not store the images or send them to the cloud, but customers can chose to share favorite shots captured, such as a baby's first steps.
The camera will cost $249 and will work with Pixel phones, Samsung Galaxy 7 and 8 phones and Apple's iPhone 6 or newer phones. Google says the candid camera will be available "soon" but has given no specific release date.
Some analysts also cautioned that consumers should be aware that what they opt to share could be used in the future for advertising. Google makes its money through ads that are targeted toward its users and by providing anonymous information on its users to businesses.
Chandra said Google wants to provide a great user experience and is not focused on making money off its digital assistant.


The Eye Center at MedStar Washington Hospital Center has a long history of serving the eye care needs of all residents of the Washington, DC, area. Founded in 1897 as part of the Episcopal Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, the Eye Center moved to Irving Street when Episcopal merged with two other hospitals – Garfield Memorial and Central Dispensary and Emergency – to create the state-of-the-art Washington Hospital Center.
The Eye Center boasts the first residency program of any kind in the metropolitan Washington area and is a comprehensive eye care facility, divided into 14 clinical areas: glaucoma, retina, ocular motility, contact lenses, low vision, cornea, oculoplastics, orbital disease, uveitis, neuro-ophthalmology, diagnostic testing, minor surgery and lasers, and, general ophthalmology, which includes cataract evaluation.
Most ophthalmic surgery is performed in 2 dedicated operating room suites, and care is provided by a range of ophthalmic specialists, including faculty ophthalmologists, ophthalmologists-in-training, and technicians. Our goal is to provide the very best eye care possible to all members of the area, regardless of financial status.
MedStar Eye Institute prides itself on patient care and medical expertise. With convenient locations in Silver Spring and Bowie, Maryland, our doctors have faithfully served patients of the greater D.C. area for over 25 years, successfully treating a wide variety of ophthalmological diseases and disorders.
Each of our offices has a fully-equipped Optical Boutique, staffed by a trained optician, where you can view and purchase the latest styles of prescription glasses and sunglasses at competitive prices.


Lipocontrast is a new body contorting treatment that guarantees rapid results by heating, cooling and heating the fat cells, reducing body fat without damage or invasive methods. Lipocontrast breaks down up to 33% of the treated fat tissue, gradually eliminating and breaking down the fat cells through metabolic system.
The results will not disappoint! As treated fat areas will carry on refining within next 20 days after the treatment, though the process of gradual fat breakdown.
Although, for ultimate result we recommend 1-3 treatments conducted on a single treated area – depending on the thickness of the adipose tissue. If you decide to proceed with 2/3 treatments we suggest waiting at least 3 weeks before your next appointment to let you skin rest and fat breakdown finish naturally.


Edge 420s: i7 Quad core?
Does anyone know if the new Edge 420s (or 420) laptops also feature an i7 Quad core (i7 2xxx QM) cpu as an option? Or are the new sandy bridge quads destined for a different lenovo product line (i.e. W or T series)? The quad could really make this an overall rock solid business system for me.
Re: Edge 420s: i7 Quad core?
If you want a quad core you need to buy a W series. Sandy Bridge might be available in the T series but don't know when.


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Archives of Proteomics and Bioinformatics
Haitham Amal
The Hebrew University
Upon graduating, he began his academic journey at the young age of 17.5 years old, with a first degree in Pharmacy, from the Hebrew University. From there he moved to Tel Aviv University for his master's degree in the Faculty of Medicine, where he investigated the impact of cannabis on memory and cognition. Upon graduating magna cum laude, he moved to Haifa to the Technion Institute, Department of Chemical Engineering, for his doctorate, during which he researched the diagnosis of cancer through exhaled breath. With several offers for postdoctoral fellowships, Dr. Amal decided that the next stage of his academic journey would be at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston (MIT). It was there that he started his journey working on the autism spectrum disorder and Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Amal was a Senior Postdoctoral Associate at the Biological Engineering Department at MIT and affiliate in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Dr. Amal's research has been widely published, with more than 15 papers on the cancer, autism, Alzheimer's disease, and other brain disorders; he has been the recipient of many awards. Dr. Amal is a member of many local and international scientific committees and societies.
At MIT, the first paper of his postdoctoral research was published in the Journal of Molecular Psychiatry – the leading journal in Psychiatry. It represented the first literature to link nitric oxide with autism spectrum disorder, a key step towards identifying a drug target for the disorder. He has also worked on Alzheimer's disease, with his research being published in Translational Psychiatry. Dr. Amal was the recipient of many postdoctoral fellowships including the MIT Technion Postdoctoral Fellowship for the Brightest Students.
Currently, Haitham is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Drug Research, Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University. He leads a group of scientists that their ultimate goal is to discover therapeutics and biomarkers for autism spectrum disorder, brain disorders, and other diseases. Recently, Dr. Haitham Amal received the prestigious Golda Meir Fellowship Lectureship Award, 2020. The Amal Group has multinational collaborations including MIT, UCSD (UC San Diego), and Imperial College London.
Currently, Haitham is leading different projects at MIT in collaboration with the McGovern Institute, Broad Institute and the Mechanical Engineering Department. He is using different OMICS techniques to understand the mechanism of several neurological diseases (Autism, Alzheimer and Parkinson). Furthermore, he is trying to reveal the pathological signaling pathways and trafficking in the Neuron. Haitham is also involved in the DARPA project, "Human Body On A Chip" which is lead by several groups. This big project is trying to integrate TEN different organs on one chip; The state-of-the-art of this project is that it, for the first time ever, will deliver a novel way for the research/industrial community to have a human physiome on a chip that can be translated to biopharmaceutical research.
Review Process Single-blind peer review
DOI 10.33696/Proteomics


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