Sunday, December 30, 2007

Car Albums in 1978’s

The band's hits dominated the charts for over nine years; their most victorious albums were 1978's The Cars, which featured hit "Just What I Needed," and 1984's Heartbeat City, which included four Top 20 singles: "Magic," "Drive," "Hello Again," and "You Might Think," which also won the MTV Video of the Year Award . "Drive" gained fastidious notability when it was used in a video of the Ethiopian food shortage prepared by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and introduced by David Bowie at the 1985 Live Aid concert at Wembley Stadium.

After the consequential period of superstardom and another hit single, the Cars released their last album Door to Door in 1987, but it failed to approach the success of their previous albums. The Cars announced the group's disintegrate in February 1988. In the late 1990s, rumors circulated of a Cars reunion, but Orr's death of pancreatic cancer on October 3, 2000 position an end to them.

Starting in late 2004, The Cars punch song "Just What I Needed" was played in Circuit City television ads.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

CARS

The Cars were an American new wave band, one of the most admired to emerge out of the early punk scene in the late 1970s. They hailed from Boston, Massachusetts and were signed to Elektra report in 1977.

The band's members were Ric Ocasek (born Richard Otcasek), the band's principal songwriter, rhythm guitarist, and part-time lead singer; Benjamin Orr (born Benjamin Orzechowski), bassist and recreational lead singer; Elliot Easton, lead guitar and backing vocals; David Robinson, drums and backing vocals; and Greg Hawkes, keyboards, saxophone, guitar, and backing vocals. The nucleus of the assemblage was composed of guitarists Ocasek and Orr.

The Cars productively bridged the gap between the guitar-oriented rock of the 1970s and the synth-oriented pop of the early 1980s. While most of the singles included an Elliot Easton guitar solo, The Cars' sound was distinct much more by Greg Hawkes' synthesizers and the huge harmonies of Easton, Robinson, and Hawkes behind Orr's and Ocasek's lead vocals.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Collective and non-human intelligence

Some thinkers have explored the idea of combined intelligence, arising from the coordination of many people.

A battleship, for instance, cannot be operated by a single person's knowledge, actions and intelligence, it takes a corresponding and interacting crew.

Similarly, the interesting behaviors of a bee colony are not exhibited in the intelligence and actions of any lone bee, but rather manifested in the behavior of the hive.

These ideas are explored as a foundation for human thought, with applications for artificial intelligence (AI), by MIT AI pioneers Norbert Wiener and Marvin Minsky. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged from Computer science as a specialty which seeks to make computers do something in increasingly intelligent ways, and provides insights into human thought processes.

When considering animal intelligence, a more common definition of intelligence might be applied: the "ability to adapt effectively to the environment, either by making a change in oneself or by changing the environment or finding a new one" (Encyclopædia Britannica).

Many people have also speculated about the opportunity of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Intelligence, IQ, and g

Intelligence, IQ, and g are very different. Intelligence is the term used in ordinary discourse to refer to cognitive ability.

However, it is usually regarded as too imprecise to be useful for a scientific treatment of the subject. The intelligence quotient (IQ) is an index calculated from the scores on analysis items judged by experts to encompass the abilities coverd by the term intelligence.

IQ measures a multidimensional magnitude: it is an amalgam of dissimilar kinds of abilities, the proportions of which may differ between IQ tests.

The dimensionality of IQ scores can be premeditated by factor analysis, which reveals a single dominant factor underlying the scores on all IQ tests.

This factor, which is a hypothetical construct, is called g. Variation in g corresponds very much to the intuitive notion of intelligence, and thus g is sometimes called general cognitive ability or general intelligence.