“While online video streaming in the U.S. has shown that the Internet can be effectively monetized by film and television, the fear of piracy in Russia has limited the spread of such services here. Only now, a few companies are taking the plunge and offering online streaming services, and The Moscow Times spoke to three of them to get a sense of the online video market in Russia today.”
Tag: 01.28.14
English Speakers Are Bad at Identifying and Describing Smells
“But is this a problem with our noses, or with English?” Or simply a matter of practice, compared with hunter-gatherers?
Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam Help Save Detroit’s Art
“Foundations seeking to protect Detroit’s public pensions and its art museum in the city’s bankruptcy process raised their pledge total to $370 million on Tuesday with the addition of a $40 million commitment from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.”
When Social Scientists Study String Quartets
“Scientists have come up with a way to reveal the pecking order within a string quartet. A team from the Royal Academy of Music and the University of Birmingham found that analysing how individual musicians vary their timing to follow the rest of the group can indicate a hierarchy.”
Alain de Botton’s Idea To Fix The News
De Botton thinks news should be more like novels, but what does he think news is? “The determined pursuit of the anomalous,” he writes at one point, before deciding that he wants to leave the definition “deliberately vague”.
Spotify King – This Songwriter Records 20 Songs A Day
Over the past six years he has composed and digitally released over 14,000 songs. In a single day, he says, he records between five and 100 tracks, though he averages 20.
Ticket Pricing Error Hurt Met Opera, Led To Drop In Sales
“Last February, Met officials announced a reversal of the price increase, acknowledging that their foray into dynamic pricing had had unintended consequences. The financial disclosure, filed as part of the requirements of a $100 million bond offering in 2013, shows average attendance fell to 79% of the opera house’s capacity—even lower than officials projected last February.”
Who Knew? Poets Are Hot (So Say Advertisers)
Poets are being used to sell things. Poets are celebrity endorsers whose endorsements seem to mean something.
What Shakespeare Knew About Science
Scholars are examining Shakespeare’s interest in the scientific discoveries of his time – what he knew, when he knew it, and how that knowledge might be reflected in his work.
Do We Really Need Commas?
You “could take [the commas out of] a great deal of modern American texts and you would probably suffer so little loss of clarity that there could even be a case made for not using commas at all.”