MOBO Awards - Best Jazz Act nominations

Empirical winning Best Jazz Act at the 2010 MOBO Awards
Photo Credit: William Ellis. All Rights Reserved 

The 2011 MOBO awards nominations were announced last night. The nominees for best jazz act are:

DENYS BAPTISTE
GWILYM SIMCOCK
KAIROS 4TET
MATTHEW HALSALL
USONIC

The Awards Ceremony is at the SECC in Glasgow on October 5th

Kairos 4tet are playing as part of the Edition Records showcase at the Kings Place Festival on Sept 10th. Gwilym Simcock's trio will open the new The Base season at Kings Place on Sept 17th
Full list of nominees at Mobo.com

Paid In Full

"But you shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth." -- Deuteronomy 8:18

"And my God will supply all [my] needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus." -- Philippians 4:19

Last night as I was sitting on my bed paying this month's bills, and listening to worship music, I received a text from a friend asking what I was doing. I replied, "Paying bills and worshiping God." The reply came back, "those two things don't seem to go together."

And therein came the challenge. Paying bills should be an act of worship because my God has supplied all of my needs according to HIS riches in glory. There is no lack in the kingdom. When I pay the electric bill I can thank God that I have electricity because 1/4 of the world's population does not. And when I pay the water bill, I can thank God that I have water -- cold and hot -- on demand -- 24/7. Such luxuries to those without.

So, yes, paying bills is [or should be] an act of worship and from this point on I will be more deliberate in turning this task into worship. So grab those bills and get your praise on!

Children with autism demonstrate superior change detection skills

Developmental disorders are usually thought about in terms of their impairments. But a welcome trend in recent years is to document their advantages too. I'm not talking about dramatic savant skills like calendar calculating, but rather advantageous manifestations of basic cognitive differences. For example, investigators have shown that children with Tourette's syndrome - a condition involving involuntary tics - have superior cognitive control and timing, compared with children without Tourette's. Now Sue Fletcher-Watson and her team have added to this literature with a new study showing that children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are quicker than neurotypical children and adults at detecting subtle changes to a visual scene.

The task required that children with ASD and neurotypical children (aged 11 to 16; most were male), and non-ASD adults, look at pictures of non-social scenes (e.g. a furnished room) on a computer. Each scene appeared for just under half a second, the screen would go blank, then the scene would reappear with one subtle change. The changes could be located centrally in the scene or in the periphery, and they could be a change in colour of an object, a change in an object's presence or absence, or location. The participants' task was to spot the change as quickly as possible and say what it was.

The headline result is that the 11 children with ASD were often significantly faster at detecting scene changes than the 29 neurotypical kids and the 20 adults. Specifically, they were faster than the neurotypical children at spotting central location changes and peripheral colour and location changes. They beat the adults at colour changes in the periphery. The difference in speed was often dramatic - for example, for a colour change in the periphery, the average response time of the ASD group was just over 5 seconds. For the typically developing children, it was just over 8 seconds, and for the non-ASD adults it was just over 7 seconds.

The researchers said theirs was the first study to show "somewhat enhanced" performance in change detection among children with ASD, "providing further welcome evidence of strengths in this population". The cautious tone is due to a major caveat in the results. As well as being quicker at change detection, the ASD children were also less accurate - being more likely to describe a change that hadn't actually happened. This points to a simple speed-accuracy trade-off as explaining the group differences in performance. But the researchers don't think this is the case. Supporting their claim, they demonstrated that the ASD kids were faster whether all responses were analysed or only accurate responses were analysed. However, they conceded that more research was needed to clarify this issue.

Intriguingly, studies with adults with ASD have actually found that they are relatively impaired at detecting changes in complex scenes, compared with neurotypical participants. Fletcher-Watson and her colleagues wonder if this is because they've learned through education and therapeutic interventions to focus more on social information in scenes at the expense of their instinct for focusing on local details. "Since the attentional system can only give enhanced processing to about five items in a scene at once, a focus on social information would have the effect of removing attention from other, non-social features," the researchers said.
_________________________________

Fletcher-Watson, S., Leekam, S., Connolly, B., Collis, J., Findlay, J., McConachie, H., and Rodgers, J. (2011). Attenuation of change blindness in children with autism spectrum disorders. British Journal of Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-835X.2011.02054.x

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Ellington Park in Ramsgate - this Saturday Sep 3rd

Yet another story of music of high quality associated with the Kent/Sussex coast. I've stopped being surprised:  after Schumann in Folkestone, then Debussy in Eastbourne,  Kurt Weill in Margate - and now this:

As a culmination of a day's jazz starting at 2pm,  some of the top players will take the stage for a free admission gig in Ellington Park (sic) in Ramsgate at 7 30pm, as part of the Ramsgate Wantsum Festival, and play one set until 9pm.

Paul Booth writes: "It's a new project which Giorgio Serci and I have got going. It's really a collective.
The idea behind the group is to have an outlet for creativity in London for contemporary jazz and world music in a large ensemble. We don't want to really sound like any conventional big band, therefore, all the arrangements and compositions are done "in-house", trying to edge away from big band swing. I'm also asking people to bring any instruments they play on top of their primary instrument, so we should have a wide range of colours to work with. "

The personnel for this Saturday is of high quality:

Trumpets: Kevin Robinson, Paul Jayasinha, Steve Fishwick, Duncan Mackay
Trombones: Mark Knightingale, Fayyaz Virji, Martin Gladdish, Richard Henry
Saxes: Steve Main, Jason Yarde, Paul Booth, Ian East, Richard Beesley
Rhythm Section: Giorgio Serci guitar, Alex Wilson piano, Michael Janisch bass, Andrew Bain drums, Adriano Adewale percussion

From the Visit Thanet website

What exactly are candidate selection measures measuring?

This post originally appeared on our offspring title, the BPS Occupational Digest, written by Dr Alex Fradera. It's like the main Research Digest but focuses on psychology in the work place.

While we know that modern selection procedures such as ability tests and structured interviews are successful in predicting job performance, it's much less clear how they pull off those predictions. The occupational psychology process – and thus our belief system of how things work - is essentially a) identify what the job needs b) distil this to measurable dimensions c) assess performance on your dimensions. But a recent review article by Martin Kleinman and colleagues suggests that in some cases, we may largely be assessing something else: the “ability to identify criteria”.

The review unpacks a field of research that recognises that people aren't passive when being assessed. Candidates try to squirrel out what they are being asked to do, or even who they are being asked to be, and funnel their energies towards that. When the situation is ambiguous, a so-called “weak” situation, those better at squirrelling – those with high “ability to identify criteria” (ATIC) - will put on the right performance, and those that are worse will put on Peer Gynt for the panto crowd.

Some people are better at guessing what an assessment is measuring than others, so in itself ATIC is a real phenomenon. And the research shows that higher ATIC scores are associated with higher overall assessment performance, and better scores specifically on the dimensions they correctly guess. ATIC clearly has a 'figuring-out' element, so we might suspect its effects are an artefact of it being strongly associated with cognitive ability, itself associated with better performance in many types of assessment. But if anything the evidence works the other way. ATIC has an effect over and above cognitive ability, and it seems possible that cognitive ability buffs assessment scores mainly due to its contribution to the ATIC effect.

In a recent study, ATIC, assessment performance, and candidate job performance were examined within a single selection scenario. Remarkably it found that job performance correlated better with ATIC than it did with the assessment scores themselves. In fact, the relationship between assessment scores and job performance became insignificant after controlling for ATIC. This offers the provocative possibility that the main reason assessments are useful is as a window into ATIC, which the authors consider “the cognitive component of social competence in selection situations”. After all, many modern jobs, particularly managerial ones, depend upon figuring out what a social situation demands of you.

So what to make of this, especially if you are an assessment practitioner? We must be realistic about what we are really assessing, which in no small part is 'figuring out the rules of the game'. If you're unhappy about that, there's a simple way to wipe out the ATIC effect: making the assessed dimensions transparent, turning the weak situation into a strong, unambiguous one. Losing the contamination of ATIC leads to more accurate measures of the individual dimensions you decided were important. But overall your prediction of job performance measures will be weaker, because you've lost the ATIC factor which does genuinely seem to matter. And while no-one is suggesting that it is all that matters in the job, it may be the aspect of work that assessments are best positioned to pick up.

--
Kleinmann, M., Ingold, P., Lievens, F., Jansen, A., Melchers, K., and Konig, C. (2011). A different look at why selection procedures work: The role of candidates' ability to identify criteria. Organizational Psychology Review, 1 (2), 128-146 DOI: 10.1177/2041386610387000

Henry Lowther on Jazz Line-Up; and in our Prize Draw

Trumpeter Henry Lowther is featured in this Sunday's Jazz Line-Up (September 4th.) It's a session recorded last month at Maida Vale of two bands, Still Waters and the Great Wee Band, plus Julian Joseph interviewing Henry about his distinguished career. More details from the Jazz Line Up website.

I attended the recording, and am waiting to hear the Great Wee Band's slow "Nica's Dream." Was it really the perfect take I remember?

That track is on the Great Wee Band's first CD, The Sound of Music (Trio Records). Peter Vacher singled it out for special prise on the 2010 Jazz Library Albums of the Year show . And I'm hearing that supplies of the CD are starting to dwindle.

The band has recorded a second CD, entitled Light Blue, release forthcoming. This week's LondonJazz prize draw is for a fan with patience. Put your name in the hat to be among the first to get the new album when released.

Henry Lowther artist page at Trio Records

Review: Prom 59. John Wilson Orchestra: Hooray for Hollywood

John Wilson Orchestra - Hooray for Hollywood

(Prom 59, Royal Abert Hall. August 29th 2011. Review by Sebastian Scotney)

The John Wilson Orchestra has been in existence for seventeen years. It has done its "annees de galere" and both its reputation and its brand these days are, deservedly, flying high.

It brings something different to Britain's musical life and to Radio 3's Proms. One official BBC website calls the orchestra's MGM musicals Prom from 2009 unequivocally "the highlight of the 2009 BBC Proms season."(*)

The orchestra's 2011 Prom had sold out within just four hours of going on sale. The orchestra will be on a ten-date national tour from 28th November, bringing a much-needed feelgood factor to several cities in Great Britain

This year's programme, assembled by the energetic Tyneside-born conductor who is - still, just - in his late thirties, was entitled "Hooray for Hollywood." It was billed as a sequel to the 2009 venture, and again focused mainly on film musicals from the golden years of the studio system. Wilson presents either new transcriptions - painstakingly, brilliantly realised by himself and a team of three collaborators - or original scores. There were clever linking threads through the programme around the stars featured in the films - Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers and their films from the RKO Studio, passing via Ziegfeld and Busby Berkeley to, Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, Julie Andrews... .

For the listener, the key to the John Wilson Orchestra experience is to revel in the sound of these lushly orchestrated film scores. Without images from the films, the experience is all about the music, and the claim that the orchestra delivers the sound experience "in technicolour" is not misplaced, indeed it sums up the contribution of this handpicked orchestra, which last night consisted of around a hundred players.

The commitment of the players is impressive. String principals such as violist Andriy Vitovych , the Belcea Quartet's Laura Samuel and leader Andrew Haveron bring a special energy to the string timbre. There are also some fine contributions from the jazz world, Matt Skelton bringing an unequalled crispness, life and precision to the drums, Jeremy Brown's generous-toned jazz bass is omnipresent.

After the success, parrticualrly of the 2009 Prom, last night had a mood of inspired risk-taking in the programme, willing the audience to be taken into less familiar repertoire. The first half closer was a case in point. Conrad Salinger's massive symphonic arrangement ofthe Harry Warren tune This Heart of Mine from Ziegfield Follies of 1946 was worth showcasing, but the claim in David Benedict's programme note that it is "a textbook case of how to keep building through 13 choruses" probably overstates the case for the piece.

I sensed that the audience only really started to lift the performers and for the whole evening to get going proplerly during the second half. For me, the turning point was Charles Castronovo taking to the High C's in the Serenade from The Student Prince. Others may - of course - have different reactions, it may feel very different in the TV transmission, but that sense one knows of an audience fully engaged seemed to take a long time to materialize.

Why? I'm not sure. Perhaps, compared to the likes of Kim Criswell and Curtis Stigers from the 2009 show, some of the vocalists this year had a one or two lumens of starriness, or joules of stage energy less than their predecessors. Perhaps the formula of singers doing one number and walking off creates discontinuity. Maybe it would have had a fresher feel if they'd stuck around. That would have prevented Annalene Beechey from making (I think) six changes of costume, but there would also have been gains. Or maybe an audience that books out this kind of show within hours of booking opening consists of careful rather than flamboyant types. Or maybe we're all just that little bit British and keep our feelings to ourselves.

These are minor quibbles. There were many moments to treasure in the first half: Clare Teal lingering over the long phrases of Harry Warren's "You'll never know," or the orchestra shimmying through the Astaire/Rodgers dance sequences.

And, at its best, such as the second half closing sequence, culminating in encores of "Hooray for Hollywood" and "There's no business like show business," the line from the latter song "The audience that lifts you when you're down" did ring completely true.  The energy from the stage was properly reciprocated from the hall, and this Prom did, eventually, turn into the memorable evening it could or should have been all along. It will be on BBC2 on the evening of Saturday September 3rd.


(*) LINK John Wilson Orchestra Nov-Dec Tour Dates

Nobody's Online Nobody's Online

Sing it~ "Nobody's Online Nobody's Online"



Which is most probably true. Unless there's someone who's not celebrating Raya holidays that's reading this blog.



Here's to those of you.









Moi enjoying my 1.5 litres of Sangria in France, alone.



Let the celebration begins!

Was Prayer To Blame?

"So Moses went out of the town, and stretching out his hands made prayer to God: and the thunders and the storm came to an end; and the fall of rain was stopped." -- Exodus 9:33

I sat astounded at the news reports. Some read as if the watching world is disappointed that Hurricane Irene did not cause more damage or claim more lives. Some blame the media for dire predictions that did not come to pass (see excerpt below). Did we not pray and did God not hear and answer our prayers? Let's not blame the media or the politicians for what has been spared. Let's blame prayer!

"The media spooked Americans with dire predictions of historic destruction that the storm didn't quite deliver. Public service or unnecessary fear-mongering? Hurricane Irene — which was downgraded Sunday to Tropical Storm Irene — dumped water all along the East Coast this weekend, flooding towns, washing out roads, and blowing down trees from North Carolina's Outer Banks to Vermont's border with Canada. It was bad — at least 22 people died — but it was hardly the "end-times scenario" warned of on cable TV and by local and national politicians. In fact, "there seems to be a growing consensus that the storm was overblown by the media, says Charlie Spiering in The Washington Examiner."

Animal-sensitive cells discovered in the human brain

A part of the human brain that's involved in emotion gets particularly excited at the sight of animals, a new study has shown. The brain structure in question is the amygdala: that almond-shaped, sub-cortical bundle of nuclei that used to be considered the brain's fear centre, but which is now known to be involved in many aspects of emotional learning.

Florian Mormann and his colleagues didn't use a brain scanner for their main study. Instead they inserted electrodes directly into the brains of 41 patients with epilepsy, who were undergoing neurosurgery as part of their treatment. This allowed the researchers to present the patients with different pictures and to record the resulting activity of nearly 1,500 individual brain cells, located in the amygdala, hippocampus, and entorhinal cortex (all regions are found in the medial temporal lobe; the latter two are involved in memory).

The dramatic result was that cells in the right-sided amygdala, but not the other regions, were far more likely to respond to pictures of animals, and to be aroused more powerfully by them, as compared with pictures of people (mostly celebrities), landmarks and objects (e.g. food and tools). By contrast, hippocampus cells responded similarly to the different picture categories, whilst the entorhinal cortex cells showed a reduced likelihood of response to pictures of people.

Cells in the right-sided amygdala weren't only more likely to respond to the sight of animals than other pictures, and to do so more powerfully, they also did so extra fast, with a mean latency of 324ms. This wasn't true for the other brain regions. Although this suggests the sight of animals is processed with extra efficiency by the amygdala, the latency is not so short as to suggest bypassing of the cortex (the crumpled, outer layer of the brain associated with conscious processing).

Because the amygdala is involved in fear learning, among other functions, it's tempting to interpret these findings alongside fossil evidence showing that early hominids were preyed on by carnivores, and alongside findings relating to "prepared learning" - this is our innate or early predisposition to have our attention grabbed by threats, such as snakes, faced by our ancestors rather than by contemporary threats like guns. Other research shows that animals are more likely to be detected, than vehicles or even buildings, in change blindness tasks, in which an object or animal appears in a scene that remains otherwise unchanged. However, Mormann's team noted that there was no relation between the likelihood or speed of response of amygdala cells and the nature of the animal pictures as either threatening or harmless.

The researchers said the differential response to animals by amygdala cells is "truly categorical" and "argues in favour of a domain-specific mechanism for processing this biologically important class of stimuli.

"A plausible evolutionary explanation," they continued, "is that the phylogenetic importance of animals, which could represent either predators or prey, has resulted in neural adaptations for the dedicated processing of these biologically salient stimuli."
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F. Mormann, J. Dubois and 10 others (2011). A category-specific response to animals in the right human amygdala. Nature Neuroscience, In Press.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Real Alcazar de Sevilla - Seville Royal Palace

Short Note: Selamat Hari Raya to all my muslim friends around the world. Enjoy your holidays and celebrations. I'm still sick at this point, it's been more than a week and it isn't fun :(.



Sorry if I haven't had the health or mood to blog as much lately, while I'm recovering, let me show you a wonderful palace I visited in Seville that was adorned with the most magnificient garden. It would be a perfect fit for the Raya since Mudéjar architecture was influenced by muslims of those times (of Al-Alandus).





or called the "Royal Alcazars of Seville".



You guessed it, it's the royal palace in Seville which architecture style was heavily Arabic influence - also referred to as the mudéjar architecture.





















Unlike most palaces, the Real Alcazar has a rather humbling entrance as compared to its more superior interior.



























The grander part.

















the secret passage for the king to escape during an invasion







where the passage leads to











Some of the most intricate designs had been dedicated to its ceiling and wall. One could stare at how extravagant each ceiling or room, the amount of time and effort spent on carving them out. Each space a different design.





wall, pillars, right up to the ceilings were covered in detailed carvings





































drinking station?







ballroom





Here's a floorplan of the palace:









What struck me the most about the Alcazar was the magnificence of a courtyard and an even more impressive garden at the back. History aside, the place was a wonderful tourist or local spot for a day walk, either in its maze garden, the orange trees garden, or the luscious green garden filled with wandering peacocks and fountains.



































the maze













tall trees lined in the maze













a secret garden?







ducks in pond







I find this duck a bit eerie, looking at me like that. :S







smiley orange!





This put a smile on a face. If only all fruits come with a smiley face, the world would have been a better place.





beautiful orange in the orange trees garden











Spotted a dungeon looking area with water-filled tunnel. Looked it up online and found that it was called the Baths of Lady María de Padilla, who was supposed to be the mistress of the Peter the Cruel. The other story was that she was known for her purity for defending against the advances of the king, hence the bath.









What's CREEPY about this place, after looking at the photo lately, while resizing it, I realised I had a similar dream about a place exactly like this, a dungeon filled with water and I was swimming under water towards a very deep space within, which was supposed to open up to a darker cave that held treasures and other mysteries I was trying to unfold.



And I totally forgot about this place and this photo until I wanted to blog about it. And the dream happened like a couple of months back. But now that I'm looking at this, it bears an uncanny resemblence to that dream of mine, only that the water dungeon was much bigger, and darker, and deeper.



:S















found myself in some tower bridge that splitted across two gardens. I wondered what it was for. Perhaps for princesses and the king to overlook the garden without getting out of the palace?





There were a lot of artists in the greender side of the garden painting and sketching.









Made the place filled with artistic vibe.





cut and paste?











Why don't I see artistic people in our park? :(

It's such a great feeing.





Oh, and I stalked a peacock. :D















So pwweetty~



I waited half an hour for them to fan out their tails but they didn't. :(