Sen. Paul introduces air travelers’ ‘bill of rights’
Sen. Paul introduces air travelers’ ‘bill of rights’
WASHINGTON — A senator who was stopped from boarding a flight after refusing a security pat-down has introduced a pair of bills taking aim at the TSA: one would establish a so-called air travelers’ bill of rights, and the other would replace government-paid screeners with private workers.
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul’s “bill of rights” act also would require the Transportation Security Administration to forward the bulk of the loose change left by harried travelers at checkpoints — $376,480.39 in the 2010 fiscal year — to the U.S. Treasury for deficit reduction.
Some of the money would go to provide up to $5,000 “Passenger Privacy Protection Awards” to workers for the “most innovative idea to improve the privacy of passengers.”
Paul’s bills are among dozens dealing with air travel that have been introduced by frequent-flying members of Congress, who are often lightning rods for complaints and eyewitnesses to airport problems while traveling between their home states and Washington.
Darwinian software
‘evolves’ music
LOS ANGELES — Composers, look to your laurels: A mere computer program can transform a racket of clangs, hums and beeps into a pleasing melody, and all humans have to do is offer feedback with the click of a mouse.
The program, by a British bioinformatics expert whose day job involves tackling biomedical problems, employs the same principles of natural selection that guide the evolution of living beings over many generations. The software — dubbed DarwinTunes, of course — creates 8-second collections of notes and puts them through the evolutionary wringer.
All the tunes have certain fixed traits: the same four-beats-per-measure tempo and tones from the Western 12-tone musical scale.
But other traits vary. Any note or instrument can be played at any given point at any volume and with any special effect. The result is a huge number of possible sound experiences, from the intolerable to the sublime.
Robert MacCallum of Imperial College London and his colleagues asked 120 undergraduates to listen to continuous loops of the computer-generated tunes and rate them on a 5-point scale that ranged from “I can’t stand it” to “I love it.” The tunes were also posted on the Web (at darwintunes.org/evolve-music), where anonymous critics added their feedback.
Each time tunes were rated, the half that came out on top were selected to contribute to the next generation of music. Each successful melody would mate with another successful melody, spawning similar-but-not-identical daughters before expiring from the collection.
Tunes that didn’t make the cut were relegated to the evolutionary trash heap without leaving behind any musical legacy.
Gilani booted as
Pakistan’s prime minister
ISLAMABAD — The Pakistani Supreme Court ousted Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Tuesday, leaving an important U.S. ally without a chief executive and setting up a showdown between the country’s president and judiciary that could lead to political chaos.
The high court’s ruling, triggered by Gilani’s contempt conviction in April for failing to revive an old corruption case against Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, potentially sets up a constitutional clash between the judiciary and parliament, which is controlled by Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party and a fragile coalition of allied parties.
For now, Zardari’s party appeared to accept Gilani, along with his Cabinet, are no longer in government.
By wire sources