OFFICIAL: Pop music too loud and all sounds the same

LONDON (Reuters) – Comforting news for anyone over the age of 35, scientists have worked out that modern pop music really is louder and does all sound the same.

Researchers in Spain used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which breaks down audio and lyrical content into data that can be crunched, to study pop songs from 1955 to 2010.

A team led by artificial intelligence specialist Joan Serra [...]

Alarming: Twitter Complies with 75% of Gov’t Requests for User Data

On July 2, social media service Twitter released its first ever “Transparency Report,” revealing the alarming number of requests it has received from the government of the United States to delete tweets and disclose information about its users.

The report covers activity from January 1, 2012 to the end of June, and although brief, it contains irrefutable evidence of the government’s sustained effort to monitor the online activity of citizens of [...]

Wisconsin: Website Reveals Recallers Owe $17 Million in Back Taxes

Madison, Wisc…] After refining the dataset created by Verify the Recall, a Wisconsin man began running it against other public records and discovered 571 tax delinquents signed Recall petitions.

His findings? The total in back taxes owed by petitioners is more than $17 million. The list of individuals can be found through the website, www.putwisconsinfirst.com The creator of the site told the MacIver News Service, his databases should be considered to be [...]

Global Economic ‘Mojo’ Still Lacking

As of Q3 2011, the citizens of less than 20% of the countries involved in Nielsen’s Global Consumer Confidence, Concerns, and Spending Intentions Survey were on average confident in their future economic confidence. Not surprisingly, Nic Colas of ConvergEx points out, six were in Asia, the least confident were in Eastern and Peripheral European nations, and furthermore overall global consumer confidence remains 9.3% below 2H 2006 (and 6.4% below Q4 2010) readings [...]

US Treasuries Record Sell Off Breaking the Debt Trendline?

Just as Chris’ chart of debt in his recent presentation in Spain demonstrates that debt has broken the near perfect correlation with exponential growth (around minute 7 of this: http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/unfixable/65829), today’s news article is:

Foreigners Sell Second Largest Amount Of US Bonds Ever In Past Week, Record $93 Billion In US Paper Sold In Past 2 Months

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/foreigners-sell-second-largest-amount-us-bonds-ever-past-week-record-93bn-us-paper-sale-past-2-

Check out the Treasury charts.  Yikes!

If this trend continues (due to European liquidity issues), wouldn’t the [...]

The “Book-Cooking” Index Soars To All Time Highs

by ZH

Everyone has heard of the Big Mac Index, the Misery Index, even the Shoe Thrower Index. But the Book Cooking Index? This latest addition to the compendium of oddly named yet extremely fascinating “indices” is based around the statistical irregularity known as Benford’s law, according to which within sets of numbers that span orders of magnitude, the distribution of first [...]

New Inflation Tracking

The Billion Prices Project @ MIT

The Billion Prices Project is an academic initiative that collects prices from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct economic research. We currently monitor daily price fluctuations of ~5 million items sold by ~300 online retailers in more than 70 countries.

This webpage showcases examples of average inflation indexes that we created to illustrate the [...]

MIT “Billion Price Project” Confirms US Prices Surging Which Compiles Real Time Price Data About A Universe of Products.

From the methodology section: “our data are collected every day from online retailers using a software that scans the underlying code in public webpages and stores the relevant price information in a database. The resulting dataset contains daily prices on the full array of products sold by these retailers. Our data include information on product descriptions, package sizes, brands, special characteristics (e.g. “organic”), [...]