Lil' Kim is convicted of perjury. She had said in court her manager was not in the vicinity of Hot 97, but surveillance cameras showed her and him on the sidewalk as he shot at rapper Camron's crew.
Hundreds of thousands of people have had their personal information stolen recently — identity theft, as it's known.
It was not hackers, though that's another issue, in this case the files were knowingly sold by a company called ChoicePoint who have more data on more people than any other. I seem to remember AOL being a source for some of their data — heads up, AOL users. This from the Times:
Data brokers can buy a wealth of private consumer information — including magazine subscriptions, recent purchases, travel records and the four crucial ingredients for identity theft: name, address, date of birth and Social Security number — from credit reporting agencies, publishers, retailers and other companies.
Alarming news from ChoicePoint, a company that compiles data on millions of citizens. It was only one of more than 140,000 such letters ChoicePoint has mailed in recent weeks, informing people like Mr. Lambert that computer files containing their names, addresses and Social Security numbers, among other critical personal data, had been inadvertently sold to "several individuals, posing as legitimate business customers.
Well, the sale wasn't inadvertent — they made money on it, one presumes, hence the word sale — but they failed to check on the buyer. Which is bound to happen eventually in that business. Ooops. Guess those folks will all need new identities now.
At Yale's suggestion we met at Luaka Bop with a man who is pitching a software that analyzes songs and more or less tells if a song will be a hit or not (www.polyphonichmi.com). Neither of us can afford their services, but it's fascinating. It's less insidious than it sounds, partly because it doesn't tell you what to do, it just tells you your score.
It also is cross-genre, so it tends to lump songs into "related" clusters (though they don't always know what is related about them)... so you find Nora Jones, Leigh Ann Rimes and a Nine Inch Nails ballad in the same cluster — related somehow — as the analyzed factors are similar for those particular songs.
The "structure" of the songs are related, or the melody, or the mix... one doesn't know exactly and it’s not always audibly apparent, so we are told.
Couldn't think offhand of a creative use for this thing, a non-business use, but maybe with some pondering...
Yale wonders if it could seep into other parts of our lives. I think it would be pretty hard to translate it over to food and clothes, as they haven't been digitized (yet) ...and the other information about them would require extensive polling. And polling is a different animal.
Komar & Melamid of the World's Most Wanted Painting fame should know about this. Following poll results can lead to ridiculous solutions. There's a huge difference between polling people as to what they like and their actual buying habits. NO relation whatsoever sometimes. Of course people often don't know what they like until they see or hear it, and even then they don't know what it is they like about it. Polling is about polling, to some extent, and also about the limits of verbalizing and articulation. Where it stops and the realms of the unreal begin.
