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The Playing-Our-Song Edition Sunday, February 4, 2018

How Sofi Tukker Got Tapped For Apple's iPhone X Campaign & Landed 'Best Friend' On The Hot 100, by Tatiana Cirisano, Billboard

When Tucker Halpern tuned in to Apple's September keynote event, he wasn't expecting to hear his own voice on the other end. Though Apple's music director had told Halpern and collaborator Sophie Hawley-Weld -- who together make up eclectic dance-pop duo Sofi Tukker -- that the company was a fan of their funky new single "Best Friend," the track's appearance during the keynote iPhone X reveal left the duo stunned.

"We were in Ibiza shooting the video, and I had the keynote on in the background," Halpern tells Billboard from his cell, which, he is pleased to note, is in fact an iPhone X. "They started playing our song, and I was like, 'SOPHIE!'"

Apple Begins Collecting Apple Watch Data For Heart Study, by Mikey Campbell, AppleInsider

The study relies on Apple Watch's specialized heart rate sensor and a dedicated app to collect data that can be used to identify irregular heart rhythms. If a study participant displays abnormal heart activity, they receive a notification on their Apple Watch and iPhone, a free consultation with a study doctor and an electrocardiogram peripheral for additional monitoring.

Apple's China Data Center To Open In 2020, by Xinhua

Starting Feb. 28, iCloud services on the Chinese mainland will be operated by a local partner, Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry Co,. Ltd.

Before the data center begins operations, the Chinese company will rent servers from China's three major telecom operators to provide iCloud services.

Stuff

Hands On: Keymand 1.1 Brings Touch-screen Options To Your Mac From A Connected iPad, by Mike Wuerthele and William Gallagher, AppleInsider

The Keymand iPad app connects to a Mac, and acts like a beefy, user-configurable MacBook Pro Touch Bar.

Develop

If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours A Week?, by Laura Empson, Harvard Business Review

Your insecurities may have helped to get you where you are today, but are they still working for you? Is it time to acknowledge that you have “made it” and to start enjoying the experience a little bit more? And if your boss is an insecure overachiever, recognize how they are projecting their insecurity onto you — how they make you feel insecure for not being able to keep up with them.

Work exceptionally long hours when you need to or want to, but do so consciously, for specified time periods, and to achieve specific goals. Don’t let it become a habit because you have forgotten how to work or live any other way.

Notes

The AI Superstars At Google, Facebook, Apple—they All Studied Under This Guy, by Katrina Onstad, Tornoto Life

For more than 30 years, Geoffrey Hinton hovered at the edges of artificial intelligence research, an outsider clinging to a simple proposition: that computers could think like humans do—using intuition rather than rules. The idea had taken root in Hinton as a teenager when a friend described how a hologram works: innumerable beams of light bouncing off an object are recorded, and then those many representations are scattered over a huge database. Hinton, who comes from a somewhat eccentric, generations-deep family of overachieving scientists, immediately understood that the human brain worked like that, too—information in our brains is spread across a vast network of cells, linked by an endless map of neurons, firing and connecting and transmitting along a billion paths. He wondered: could a computer behave the same way?

The answer, according to the academic mainstream, was a deafening no. Computers learned best by rules and logic, they said. And besides, Hinton’s notion, called neural networks—which later became the groundwork for “deep learning” or “machine learning”—had already been disproven. In the late ’50s, a Cornell scientist named Frank Rosenblatt had proposed the world’s first neural network machine. It was called the Perceptron, and it had a simple objective—to recognize images. The goal was to show it a picture of an apple, and it would, at least in theory, spit out “apple.” The Perceptron ran on an IBM mainframe, and it was ugly. A riot of criss-crossing silver wires, it looked like someone had glued the guts of a furnace filter to a fridge door. Still, the device sparked some serious sci-fi hyperbole. In 1958, the New York Times published a prediction that it would be the first device to think like the human brain. “[The Perceptron] will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.”

Bottom of the Page

What should I put into my when-I-am-sad Apple Music playlist? Should they be songs to cheer me up, or should they be songs to affirm my sadness?

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Thanks for reading.