Greatest hits album

A greatest hits album, sometimes called a "best of" album or a catalog album, is a compilation of songs by a particular artist or band. Most often the track list contains previously released recordings with a high degree of notability. However, to increase the appeal, especially to people who already own the original release, it is common to include remixes and/or alternate takes of popular songs; even new material (previously unreleased). At times a greatest hits compilation is the original release for songs that have themselves been released as a single and charted successfully.

Notable compilations

Madonna's The Immaculate Collection is the best selling greatest hits compilation by a solo artist; all of the songs on it are presented in different versions than the original hit versions. The Eagles' Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) is the best selling greatest hits compilation by a group and also one of the ten best selling albums in history. Greatest hits albums are typically produced after an artist has had enough successful songs to fill out an album release. Some artists, such as Mariah Carey, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Britney Spears, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Kenny Rogers, Aerosmith, Kiss, U2, Dolly Parton, Journey, Los Tigres del Norte, Queen, Kylie Minogue and Billy Joel, have released multiple greatest hits albums through their long careers. Some greatest hits albums are released only at the end of the artist or group's career. For example, My Chemical Romance released a greatest hits album after they disbanded. Other artists, like Eminem have released hits albums in the center of their success. He released Curtain Call: The Hits in 2005 and then Shady XV as a compilation album in 2014.

Random walker algorithm

The random walker algorithm is an algorithm for image segmentation. In the first description of the algorithm, a user interactively labels a small number of pixels with known labels (called seeds), e.g., "object" and "background". The unlabeled pixels are each imagined to release a random walker, and the probability is computed that each pixel's random walker first arrives at a seed bearing each label, i.e., if a user places K seeds, each with a different label, then it is necessary to compute, for each pixel, the probability that a random walker leaving the pixel will first arrive at each seed. This computation may be determined analytically by solving a system of linear equations. After computing these probabilities for each pixel, the pixel is assigned to the label for which it is most likely to send a random walker. The image is modeled as a graph, in which each pixel corresponds to a node which is connected to neighboring pixels by edges, and the edges are weighted to reflect the similarity between the pixels. Therefore, the random walk occurs on the weighted graph (see Doyle and Snell for an introduction to random walks on graphs).

Time Walker

Time Walker (a.k.a. Being from Another Planet) is a 1982 B-movie. It was directed by Tom Kennedy. This movie (under the title Being from Another Planet) was featured in Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode 405, which first aired on July 4, 1992.

Plot

While California University of the Sciences professor Douglas McCadden (Ben Murphy) explores the tomb of the ancient Egyptian king Tutankhamun, an earthquake causes a wall in the tomb to collapse, revealing a hidden chamber. Inside, McCadden finds a mummy in a sarcophagus. Unbeknownst to McCadden, the "mummy" is not the body of a dead Egyptian, but an extraterrestrial alien in suspended animation, being wrapped up and buried alive thousands of years before and covered with a dormant, green fungus.

The body is brought back to California and McCadden has it examined by Dr. Ken Melrose (Austin Stoker) and X-rayed by student Peter Sharpe (Kevin Brophy) before a big press conference about the discovery. While reviewing the X-rays, Sharpe notices there are five crystals around the "mummy's" head. Sharpe steals the crystals and makes new X-rays to cover up his theft. He sells four of the crystals to students who are unaware of their origin. The second set of X-rays overdose the body with radiation. This causes the fungus to re-activate and the alien to awaken from suspended animation.