The humiliated began to sing

Learning lyrics: to sing or not to sing?

According to common practice and oral tradition, learning verbal materials through song should facilitate word recall. In the present study, we provide evidence against this belief. In Experiment 1, 36 university students, half of them musicians, learned an unfamiliar song in three conditions. In the sung-sung condition, the song to be learned was sung, and the response was sung too. In the sun...

How Safe Routes to School Began

41 DID YOU WALK OR RIDE A bicycle to school? Chances are that you did. Thirty years ago, the sight of children walking or bicycling to school was common—66 percent of all children did so. Now, however, 87 percent of all trips to and from school are made by car or bus.1 Safe Routes to School (SR2S) provides some solutions to reverse this generational shift. It is a growing movement that integrat...

To Sing like a Mockingbird

Musical parody, i.e. the act of changing the lyrics of an existing and very well-known song, is a commonly used technique for creating catchy advertising tunes and for mocking people or events. Here we describe a system for automatically producing a musical parody, starting from a corpus of songs. The system can automatically identify characterizing words and concepts related to a novel text, w...

The fossil tabanids (Diptera Tabanidae): when they began to appreciate warm blood and when they began transmit diseases?

A discussion of the known fossil tabanids (Diptera Tabanidae) is presented based on fossil evidence. This includes the origin of the hemathophagy in the Brachycera, more specifically for tabanids. Several tabanid species in the extant fauna are vectors for disease-producing organisms that affect humans and animals. Bacteria, viruses, rickettsiae, protozoa, and filarial worms can be transmitted ...

Satcom-on-the-move A Terminal Engineered to Sing