Music plays a huge part in shaping peoples' psychology and behavioral patterns. This paper investigates the connection between national anthems and different global indices with computational music analysis and statistical correlation analysis. We analyze national anthem musical data to determine whether certain musical characteristics are associated with peace, happiness, suicide rate, crime rate, etc. To achieve this, we collect national anthems from 169 countries and use computational music analysis techniques to extract pitch, tempo, beat, and other pertinent audio features. We then compare these musical characteristics with data on different global indices to ascertain whether a significant correlation exists. Our findings indicate that there may be a correlation between the musical characteristics of national anthems and the indices we investigated. The implications of our findings for music psychology and policymakers interested in promoting social well-being are discussed. This paper emphasizes the potential of musical data analysis in social research and offers a novel perspective on the relationship between music and social indices. The source code and data are made open-access for reproducibility and future research endeavors. It can be accessed at http://bit.ly/na_code.

After a four-year hiatus, Black Mirror is back. Season six is now on Netflix, along with the whole back catalog--including one Christmas special and an interactive movie. The show, created by Charlie Brooker and producer Annabel Jones, is a modern take on classic anthology series like The Twilight Zone. Through Brooker's dark, playful, and sometimes uplifting lens, the show examines the unintended ways technology impacts our lives. Because it's an anthology series--in which each installment has new subject matter and a slightly different tone--each episode has its fans.

Dear Abby: I am a man in my late 40s who has been looking for love all my life. One factor that has made it difficult is my height. What makes finding someone nearly impossible is that the online dating site profiles always ask for my height. Unfortunately, being extremely short in stature isn't a characteristic women are looking for, so even though I can spend upward of an hour filling out all that profile information, the system invariably returns a no-match for me. Do you think I should lie about my height, and when I meet the person, hopefully she can give me a chance?

On August 15, India's Independence Day, it's customary to sing Jana Gana Mana: the Indian national anthem, originally composed by the poet Rabindranath Tagore and adopted as the anthem after India gained full independence. This year, together with Prasar Bharati and Virtual Bharat, we offered Indians a new take on the familiar with Sounds of India, an AI-powered web app. Using the app, you sing Jana Gana Mana into your phone, karaoke-style, and it transforms your voice into one of three traditional Indian instruments. The day culminated in a rendition of the national anthem, combining many of the voices that Indians submitted through the app. The Sounds of India experiment was made possible by machine learning models built with Google's TensorFlow platform to convert sounds into musical instruments (in this case, the Bansuri, the Shehnai, and the Sarangi).

Getty Images is embracing artificial intelligence, starting with a way to help publishers pick photos. Today, the photo agency debuted a tool that uses AI to analyze a story and suggest photos that might go along with it depending on the text and content. The tool, called Panels, uses natural language processing--a term for how computers can learn to "read" human words, phrases and sentences--to then match a story based on keywords, images, captions and other criteria. Publishers also will then have access to custom filters and a self-improving algorithm to move around keywords or select images through a more human-driven process. Here's how it works: When someone enters in the URL for a story or copies and pastes in the text, Panels will analyze the words before suggesting people, places and things that appear in the story after weighing different options based on frequency and relevance.

In a week where North Korea insisted that America had declared war and Puerto Rico suffered one of the worst natural disasters in its history, headlines were nonetheless dominated by a war of words between Donald Trump and the National Football League. Speaking in Alabama, the President declared that he would like to see NFL owners whose players knelt during the national anthem to "get that son of a b*tch off the field right now. Trump's comments insisting that players be compelled to stand during the national anthem put a spotlight a handful of NFL players who continued the protest initiated last year by former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. In response to Trump's comments, every NFL team – and nearly every owner – offered some version of protest in Week 3. The controversy around the NFL protests and Trump's comments raised many questions about the nature of peaceful protest, what the national anthem represents and, what rights are protected by the First Amendment. These are thorny, complicated questions, and researchers at Unanimous AI sought to untangle them by forming a swarm of thirty American voters inside our Swarm AI platform.

It has been 73 years since the Supreme Court ruled that students in public schools couldn't be forced to pledge allegiance to the American flag or engage in other patriotic demonstrations. But some educators obviously haven't gotten the message. In recent days, a principal in Florida told students they would be ejected from sports events if they didn't stand during the national anthem. A student in Northern California said her class-participation grade was lowered because she refused to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance, her chosen form of protest over the mistreatment of her Native American ancestors. A high school football player in Massachusetts said he was told he would be suspended if he emulated San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and knelt during the national anthem.