Wolcum Yole

Working, working...

I might have mentioned that I am one of the Programme Committee (PC) chairs of the Fundamentals of Software Engineering (FASE) conference taking place in Grenoble early April next year. This involves a number of different activities, from advertising the conference in order to draw as many good submissions as possible, to distributing the papers that have been submitted among the 30 members of the PC for reviewing, then making sure the reviews are in, and this week, guiding the process towards a collective decision on what is going to be accepted for presentation at the conference and publication in the proceedings. For this we have been set a quotum of between 20% and 25%, meaning that more than three quarters will be rejected for this conference. Publication is a big deal so this is A Serious Responsibility, and since the discussions are all conducted via electronic media - in contrast to a physical PC meeting which used to be the rule up to 15 years ago - it takes a lot of coordination. Busy, busy, busy. In addition there is the workshop paper that we agreed to write during the Banff experience last week (how long ago it seems already!) and on which I pledged to invest time. What am I doing wasting my time to write blogs?

York Minster, sold out for The Sixteen

Well, as my faithful readers know, during my stay in York I have not yet failed to make time for things other than work. As I mentioned in my last post, I had reserved a ticket for a choral performance of the Ceremony of Carols by Britten - I had the title wrong then, got mixed up a bit between Britten and Dickens - combined with other stuff since the Ceremony will only last 20 minutes or so. It was, in fact, Poulenc, Britten and a smattering of medieval Christmas carols, peformed by a British chamber choir of sixteen singers, called The Sixteen. (Just imagine the intense and excruciating discussions that went into that name.)

What a treat! What an absolutely fabulous experience! The Minster itself is one of the extravagant wonders of gothic architecture of course, and to hear those intricate harmonies performed so flawlessly in that acoustic heaven is truly transcendental. Close your eyes and you bask in sound. It is a marvel how well these contemporary composers managed to arrange music that can be heard and understood when performed in a space this large. In contrast, the medieval carols were just a breathing space, simplistic and noisy.

I liked Poulenc maybe even more than Britten. We did sing the Ceremony of Carols with the Twents Kleinkoor; but I had forgotten the harp and I'm sure that with the exception of one of the Carols we had an arrangement that had room for male voices. I now realise it is originally set for female voices only. Call me a male chauvinist: I tend to prefer male-only choirs over female-only (go see Pitch Perfect though, one of my favourite movies!) - still, I was almost in tears and certainly had goosebumps.

Yes, the record has been set straight! This is what singing should be!

Postscriptum

After all this solemnity, here is my Challenge of the Day: parse and explain the picture on the right.

OK, you had a head start, after having read the above and maybe looking for a while at the center of the picture before. But would you be able to make heads or tails of this if someone asked you at some other occasion? There used to be a TV show (don't recall the name) where they showed pictures and asked the contestants what they thought they saw. More interestingly (at least to me): when will computer algorithms have progressed to the point where they can do this sort of thing as well as humand? Forty years ago the litmus test of artificial intelligence was playing chess as well as a human; now that has been achieved, we have to set our sights higher, and image recognition is harder than you might realise.