tv Click BBC News April 6, 2017 3:30am-4:01am BST
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over her handling of the rohingya muslims crisis. the de facto leader of myanmar has denied international accusations that she's been standing by as rohingya muslims are ethnically cleansed by the army in rakhine state. president trump has called the deadly gas attack in syria on tuesday an affront to humanity and said it changed his view on bashar al—assad. previously, the us administration said trying to topple mr assad would not be a priority. a series of devastating floods in north—west peru have left 100 people dead and tens of thousands homeless. entire roads and bridges have been swept away, and 800 towns and cities have declared a state of emergency. peru's air force has been deployed planes to airlift thousands of people. now it's time for click. this week: adventures in sound with posh cams, invisible speakers and cloning brian's brain.
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of speakers, they are working speakers — these are working speakers? they're working speakers, yeah. oh, my gosh. and it is sound that this man is best known for. big sound. the former member of the band, roxy music, has added his unique production sound to the biggest acts in the world — groups like u2, and coldplay and some chap called david. he is a self—proclaimed non—musician who uses technology to make his art. there it is. so this essentially never repeat in billions of years. it is constantly generating new images. i mean, sometimes it does things that are so baffling fantastic you think, "gosh, i never would have thought of that." and it is his love of random, so—called generative art, that has brought us here. eno, whose sonar music is very
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atmospheric and ethereal, is regarded as ‘the godfather‘ of ambient music and his new work, reflection, is also rather unpredictable. it is a generative music app which follows rules defined and refined by eno but which plays differently every time you listen. so 14% of these notes, a random 14%, are going to be pitched down by three semitones. the second is 41% of them are going to go an octave down — i2 semi—tones. can i just say... ..scientist. i would go further, quantum scientist. all about probabilities here. yeah, it is probabilities. brian eno has spent weeks, even months, tweaking these rules and probabilities which, they're all when combined,
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cause these sounds to randomly echo, bounce, transpose or not play at all. so these are all different types of scripters. and then there's a whole lot of other stuff. buried maths. i like my chains. who doesn't! actually, these rules can be applied to any type of music. in something more pacey than ambience, their effects become immediately obvious. we will make that a tedious loop. music beat loop a lot of music is based just on things like that and it goes on for ever. now i'll try putting in some scripters. first thing i'm going to put in is a way of reducing the number of beats. beat changes so it's only playing 80% of the beats. now, let's have it hit some other drums, occasionally. already it's a pretty crappy drummer, i have to say.
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well, no, i have to say, actually, this is way more interesting, with the greatest of respect, than the original drumbeat, isn't it? it makes it sound human. now we'll put in some rolls. traditional music, you have a piece which you lock down but you're not locking that down. you're locking down a kind of process. it's almost like you're taking this, part of it, and you're locking that down. this is how i want the piece to be but i don't mind so much if it changes every time. that's a good way of explaining it. i'm trying to make a version of me in the software, my taste, if you like. i'm always interested in what is at the edge of my taste envelope, if you like, and randomness is a way of finding out. mixing things up is something that brian is well known for.
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he developed the now legendary oblique strategies cards, a box of creator suggestions which, by imposing a seemingly limiting rule to your problem, encourage lateral thinking. discover the recipes you are using and abandon them. that's not what a computer would do. i'm working alone a lot of the time. if you are working with other people, you get a lot of information and derailment from the fact there are other people there. if you are working alone you can very easily get into a rut. work at a different speed. yeah, that's a useful one. that can mean a lot of different things. that can mean change the speed here but also it can mean do things at a different speed. work very, very quickly or work very, very slowly. take a minute to get to that guitar. pick it up, put it on. plug it in. have you ever thought about whether you can copyright
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the music that comes out of...? that's an interesting question. if you sell the app to somebody, do they own the music that comes out of it? because they have constructed it, in a way. all the bits are mine but the final construction is that theirs so. what did you conclude? i don't think it's very easy to make a case for saying it's my music because it sort of is in a modern sense of what composing means. we spent about an hour with eno and in the next few days you can see more inside brian's brain online. look out for the link on twitter. welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that serial entrepreneur elon musk started yet another company. a company which aims to implant ai technology onto the human brain. does this guy never watch sci—fi films? this sort of thing rarely ends well in them.
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and from one tech billionaire to another — amazon head honcho jeff bezos showed off the interior space tourists will see in his blue origin spacecraft. it was also announced this week that bezos is now the second richest man in the world, with a net worth of $75 billion. he's still $10 billion behind bill gates, though. and how about turning any surface into a control interface, without the need for a screen? weller plans to control a host of devices like speakers, lights and thermostats, by users waving their hands around in front of a sensor. meaning you can ditch all of those remote controls, if you haven't lost them all already. next month, in france, a host of teams will race vehicles built from less than 100 atoms in a nano—car race. while these nano—scale vehicles may someday drive around the human body performing medical procedures, for now, teams will race them at speeds of up to five
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nano—metres per hour — that means it would take these micro—machines 37 million years to travel a single mile. not exactly formula one. this week, samsung launched its latest mobile phones. just a few minutes to go until the launch starts and there is an incredible level of secrecy here, but i guess there's a lot at stake for samsung after the note 7 debacle. we're just waiting to see what the s8 has in store for us. soon the hype turned to cold hard facts, out of this samsung unboxed event, a phone... well, two phones were born. so here we have it — the s8 and the s8 plus. my first thought? not even the plus seems to be that large — that's because the screens on both
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of them curve over the edges. there's been a lot of hype about this. personally, i'm not really sure it feels like that big a deal, but it does mean you get a screen which is bigger on a smaller sized device. a few of the features that we've been told about today — there's a fingerprint scanner, as well as iris and facial recognition, meaning you should not need a password but should still be able to achieve all the security that you want. there's also what they're calling the invisible "home" button. it's part of the screen there. as you press it, you can feel some sensation if you're missing the original kind of home button. one thing we have heard a lot of talk about is the launch of bixby. when fully functioning, the virtual assistant aims to make interacting with your phone easier. interacting with 10 samsung apps, controlling other samsung devices — yes, there is a theme here — and using artificial intelligence to learn your habits and suggest
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what you might be looking for next. naturally, i want to test this new personal assistant but there is one substantial problem — bixby is currently only available in korean. it is not until may that it is going to be released in american english, and then after that some other languages are going to follow. it may well be great but i can't tell you about it. in the meantime, the image recognition function is in action. you photograph an item and it aims to find it for you online, with varying success. so we'll put the hairbrush in shot. so it thinks my hairbrush is a fork. i've been asking around to see what others think of it. first impression of the screen — very impressive with the infinity display. 18.5x 9, that's going to be a huge trend in phones this year. that's a big screen in a very small phone. 5.8 inches and i can
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fit my hands around it. obviously the core experience of using the phone hasn't changed a lot from the galaxy s7. we haven't got the dual camera we are seeing elsewhere. it only works with the standard samsung apps. so google play music. i don't think everybody always wants to speak to standard apps, they want to speak to all their apps. i feel that samsung, for the amount of time they made us wait for this, perhaps under—delivered on standout features we haven't seen elsewhere. the phone will be released this month with a sim—free price tag from $650. the company believe they will see explosive sales, but let's hope not exploding phones! now to cyborgs. and when hollywood imagines them, they look way too futuristic to be anywhere close to becoming a reality. they did not save your
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life, they stole it. but are they? dan simons has a very special appointment with professor someya at the university of tokyo injapan. i have come to see a professor who is apparently going to turn me into some sort of cyborg so it's very unusual. it is one of the first times a camera crew has been allowed in to see the process happen and it will all take place through this door, here. this research team have come up with the world's thinnest organic circuits, lighter than a feather, they could be worn like a second skin.
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either monitoring the body or as an e—skin display. we can introduce the electronic functions directly on the surface of the skin without causing any discomfort. so this is human and machine coming together? the display they are putting onto me has taken three days to manufacture, so the research team are being very careful. it's thickness is just two to three microns. the magic is controlled by polymer semiconductors and transparent electrodes, with organic semiconductors and diodes firing up the display. and they're surprisingly resilient. they can scrunch them and, on rubber, even stretch them. the circuits still work and that's something i have come to put to the test. professor someya has used this e—skin to measure heart rate and oxygen levels in the blood.
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could we use this out and about? is it robust enough to go running with, for example? yeah. so, first, please move your hands. something like that. and... it doesn't cause any mechanicalfailure. it's flexible. yeah, that's truly flexible. would you expect us to change this every two or three days? yes, that's another possibility. so if we can manufacture everything very cheap, so after you go to the shower and then delaminate your skin, and then put the fresh one. i expected that to break by now.
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and it's still very much alive. this is just a single digit display today, but what could this be the future? so, the second step will be much multiple digits and then going to the high—definition display. so we could have maybe 1,000 pixels? yes, 1,000 pixels, that's technologically possible. so on our hand, so we could, what, talk to people? yes. on our hand? this could be a picture of my mum, for example? i could say, "hi, mum", and my mum would appear on my hand? yes, that would be possible in the future, maybe four or five years. but lifetime will be the biggest issues. this is the start of the rise of the cyborgs. that was dan, wearing some pretty advanced technology on his person. i've got my own piece of advanced technology here.
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these are the sennheiser he1 headphones and would you like to take a guess at what's special about them? well, for a start, they cost £54,000! right, fire up one direction. no one direction? 0k. so, i'm not a real audio expert. i used to work on the radio so i do know about sound. but i'm also 43, so i think i'm slightly deaf. but these certainly sound very expensive. very, very nice. what's interesting is they're not noise cancelling and they're not sound isolating, which means i can actually hear other stuff in the rroom.
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and i'm not sure whether i would expect that or whether i would expect to be shut off from the room when i put these on so you can just hear the music. wow. for people who are in love, or shall we say obsessed, with sound quality, it seems that nothing is off—limits. but when those people are injapan, off—limits hits a whole new level. see, we're used to seeing unusual things in japan, so we were not surprised at all to hear about a group of people who would think nothing of spending a whole lot more than the price of these in search of audio perfection. it seems some people don't care what their place looks like, as long as it sounds amazing. it seems some people don't care what their place looks like, as long as it sounds amazing. but if you're into your high end audio, but you also want something a bit more inconspicuous, then we've come here to london's smart apartment to see a few options. for starters, these speakers are made by linn. they'll cost £12,500 for the pair.
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the deal is, they come with a choice of fabrics. you can choose whichever one blends into your decor best. the fabric apparently has been specially developed so it doesn't dull the sound. but metre tall speakers are always going to be quite attention grabbing. what if you want your speakers to be heard, but not seen at all? so, can you spot the speakers in this room? well... ..they‘re actually up there. there are lots of little speakers in the ceiling next to the light fittings. now, they were installed before plastering, so that they can sit flush with the ceiling. this is what they actually look like and because there's quite a few of them they don't need to be that loud to fill the room with sound.
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and if that's still too conspicuous for you, then this room has invisible speakers, in that they are... ..in the walls. you can feel them by the vibration here and here. you can't see them at all of course. these ones have been wallpapered directly over. if you're plastering the wall you can get away with two millimetres of plaster only, apparently. and if you're worried about your speakers going wrong, the manufacturers have told us that within 15 years they will come and not only repair the speakers but also make good your decorations. and that's it from the smart apartment. follow us on twitter, if you'd be so kind, with plenty of this kind of stuff throughout the week and there's more coming from brian eno soon. we'll tweet you when that's ready. thanks for watching and see you soon. hello there.
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the weather story is pretty quiet for the next few days. a lot of dry weather, variable cloud, some sunshine, and generally light winds as well. it is all because of high pressure. now, during the course of the night, most places will be dry, maybe a little bit of light rain across the north—west of scotland. more of a breeze here. but where you have the cloud, relatively mild, 7—9 degrees. where the skies clear, cool, perhaps with a touch of frost in some rural places. so a quiet looking start to thursday. most of us will be seeing light winds, but across the north, high pressure, in towards northern and western scotland, more of a strong, north—westerly breeze. that will fit in quite a lot of cloud to the northern isles. west scotland, some drizzle, with the east of scotland potentially seeing some shelter, so a few of you could be seeing some breaks and some sunshine. variable cloud, maybe a bit of sunshine for northern england. i think much of wales and england, variable cloud and some sunny spells. i think probably the best of the sunshine in south wales,
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in towards the south—west of england, where we could make 15 or 16 degrees. on friday, a similar story. light winds for most, variable cloud, also some sunshine. the high pressure is with us for thursday and friday, but it moves position as we head towards the weekend. this is pretty crucial, because we then start to pull a southerly wind off the near continent. it is drier air, and eventually it will be warmer air, particularly as we head on into sunday. notice the blue colours behind me, though. this is an approaching weather front, a cooler mass of air, which will arrive across the far north—west of the country as the weekend wears on. so i think, for saturday, probably a greater chance of seeing more sunshine around. temperatures up just that little bit. 15, 16, maybe 17 celsius. more cloud, though, across the north—west of the country. it is looking pretty good for the grand national, as well. aintree, on saturday, a lot of dry weather, temperatures around the mid—teens celsius. now, on sunday, that weather front approaches
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northern ireland, western scotland. strengthening winds, and feeling quite cool, outbreaks of rain. but for england and wales it is looking much sunnier, because we are pulling down to warmerand drierairoff the near continent. it is going to be really warm, with temperatures in the low 20s celsius. we could make 23 degrees across the south—east. so the main message for the next few days — because of high pressure, it is going to be largely dry, with light winds. there will be some sunshine around. it is going to get warmer this weekend, especially on sunday. but, like i mentioned, that weather front with the colder air behind it spreads its way southwards during monday. so a cloudy, cool day generally. temperatures in the north struggling to get much above eight or nine degrees. still fairly mild in the south—east. a very warm welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to our viewers in north america and around the globe. my name's mike embley. our top stories: as the persecution of rohingya muslims intensifies, we ask the leader of myanmar, aung san syu kyi, if she's failing to stop ethnic cleansing.
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i don't think there's ethnic cleansing going on. i think ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening. the us signals a new stance on syria after the chemical weapons attack that left 70 dead. i will tell you, it has already happened, that my attitude towards syria and bashar al—assad has changed very much. a reshuffle at the white house, as chief strategist steve bannon loses a key post. but why?
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