Category: ideas

A former president of Harvard writes in a new book about the dangers to academia by the profit imperative. Increasingly schools are chasing money at the the expense of… standards? Integrity? “How colleges and universities relate to the marketplace and the world beyond their walls is not merely an academic issue. These institutions are an engine of prosperity, training specialists and the workforce, advancing scientific discoveries and moving people up the ladder of socioeconomic advancement. It is increasingly difficult, though, to meet higher education’s insatiable financial demands through conventional means. The hunt for profits is not a new story.”

“The big brother of ultrasound, infrasound means frequencies too low to be heard by the human ear. Infrasound occurs naturally – from waves pounding shores, storms, earthquakes, meteors hitting the atmosphere. Longer pipes in church organs also create infrasound, which many believe gives the music a particular atmospheric power. Humans have a hearing range of roughly 20 to 20,000 Hz (the lowest note on a piano is around 33Hz). Sounds that fall below that threshold are not audible – but they are felt.” And musicians are learning to play with it.

As much as we may want to believe that people are truly creative beings who appreciate the unconventional and revel in the revolutionary, the facts of modern life say otherwise, according to Lisa Rochon. “We’ve settled deeply into our La-Z-Boys and clicked on a lifetime of architectural reruns. It’s Tim Hortons, it’s Starbucks, it’s the Gap, it’s Home Depot, it’s tract housing and towers for as far as the land rolls on… To suggest that people are desperate for an alternative is to romanticize the reality.” Whose fault is it? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but, um, Americans, actually, with our “development of ecologically sensitive land to exploit for the android architecture of the suburbs and big-box retailers which destroy the Mom and Pop stores of the downtown.”

Scientists have been working for decades on trying to build artificial intelligence. But how much progress has actually been made, when “notions as ‘water is wet’ and ‘fire is hot’ have proved elusive quarry for AI researchers? Unfortunately, the strategies most popular among AI researchers in the 1980s have come to a dead end. So-called ‘expert systems,’ which emulated human expertise within tightly defined subject areas like law and medicine, could match users’ queries to relevant diagnoses, papers and abstracts, yet they could not learn concepts that most children know by the time they are 3 years old.”

Is it any surprise that Americans have such a narrow sense of other cultures? “About 3% of the fiction and poetry published in the United States in 1999 was translated (approximately 330 out of the total 11,570 fiction and poetry titles published). America compares unfavourably to almost every other country and most unfavourably to western Europe, the region closest to an ideological sibling. There, Germany translates the most works – about six times as many as the US each year. Spain is close behind, while the French publishing industry exceeds the US by four times. Without translations, Americans, who are notoriously monolingual, have access only to the perspectives of those who write and speak in English; thus the ideas of millions are lost to them.”

Not everyone pays for an artist’s work. That’s a good thing – it allows entry to the work and opens possibilities for the artist. “An ecosystem with many ways for unintended free-release is a requirement. Therefore, an ecosystem which looks to a mixture of the traditional amateur, performance, patronage, and commission forms of payment is a requirement. Depending upon rigid enforcement of performance payments will disrupt the balance. Listening to representatives from the recording and movie industries, you would think that selling fixed artifacts is the only way that artists can get paid. That has never been the case, and should not be in the future or else society and art itself will suffer.”

A Universisty of Chicago economist contends that “techniques commonly used by economists, such as statistical analysis, can be employed to understand even a seemingly subjective world such as art. By studying the careers of more than 100 modern artists, David Galenson proved certain artists did their best work early in their careers – with ‘best’ determined by which works fetch highest prices at auction and are displayed by museums – while other artists did their best work later in their careers. Those who peaked early, Galenson claimed, were conceptual artists, driven by a singular vision. The late bloomers, by contrast, were experimental innovators who used a long period of trial and error to eventually create their masterpieces. What irked art historians was the prospect of dividing artists into neat categories, of treating their output like a commodity.”

“Musicians of all stripes are starting to recognize that the galloping consolidation of American media – especially in radio, where most Americans were first introduced to their favorite songs – has reduced the ability of recording artists to take the risks that reshape our consciousness, to explore new ideas and new sounds and, ultimately, to be heard.” And musicians are alarmed by proposeals for even more deregulation They’ve sent a letter to the FCC to protest. The “letter from some of the best-known musicians in the U.S. is the latest sign of the broad opposition that rule changes being considered by the FCC – which would allow one company to own newspapers, television and radio in the same town, and which would allow more consolidation of media ownership on the local and national levels.”