“White-collar service industries are currently witnessing a huge increase in automation. Artificial intelligence, analytics and voice-recognition technologies are taking over more and more tasks employees used to do. Retailing is another example: we’re moving from physical to virtual retailing. Even lawyers, accountants or radiologists are afraid of the prospect of losing their job to a machine or algorithm.”
Tag: 02.24.15
Russian Opera Director Faces Criminal Charge For Offending Religious Believers
“Thirty-year-old director Timofei Kulyabin told AFP he has been charged over his production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at Novosibirsk’s State Opera and Ballet Theatre in Siberia, which premiered in December. ‘It’s absurd and I don’t want to take part in something absurd, to be honest,’ he said.”
How Did This ‘Jeopardy’ Winner Become A Cultural Critic And An ‘Ombudsman’ To Nerds?
After his win streak, Arthur Chu called publicists and PR firms “and said straight up, ‘Hey, do you work with viral celebrities?’ Then I’d ask, ‘If you were me, how would you hang on to the fame, how would you monetize it?'”
“The Brother From Another Planet”: J. Hoberman on Godard
“Taken with cinema, but not taken in by it, … [Godard] is also the brother from another planet, at once straightforward and cryptic, an epistemologist of cinema, wondering why the film frame became a square and why lenses are round. … What to make of the Godardian mind? You might say that, as prolific as he is, Godard suffers from the attention-deficit disorder of genius.”
Who Should Decide How Students Learn About America’s Past?
“This school year, the fury is over the new U.S. History Advanced Placement course – in particular, whether its perspective is overly cynical about the country’s past. The controversy raises significant questions about the role of revisionism in education: How should students learn about oppression and exploitation alongside the great achievements of their country? And who decides which events become part of the national narrative as more information comes to light?”
Richard Linklater Considering Sequel To “Boyhood”
“I wake up in the morning thinking, ‘The twenties are pretty formative, you know?’ That’s where you really become who you’re going to be. It’s one thing to grow up and go to college, but it’s another thing to … So, I will admit my mind has drifted towards [this sequel idea].”
How Ballet Dancers Learn Their Steps: Music, Muscle Memory And Mystery
Jenifer Ringer, late of New York City Ballet, explains the process and the factors that affect it.
Hard Feelings: Science’s Struggle To Define Emotions
“The debate over the nature of emotion has been reinvigorated in recent years. While it would be easy to paint the argument as two-sided – pro-universality versus anti-universality, or Ekman’s cronies versus his critics – I found that everyone I spoke to for this article thinks about emotion a little differently.”
Ancient Frescoes In Roman Catacombs May Undermine Church Teaching About Women Priests – Or May Not
The wall paintings in the Catacombs of Santa Priscilla “have sparked controversy over the role of women in the Church, and helped scholars re-evaluate the importance of the Virgin Mary in early Christian history.” Some claim that one fresco even provides evidence that female priests served the Eucharist, though others are skeptical.
“Amadeus” The Movie At 30 – And Everything It Got Wrong About Mozart And Salieri
BBC Radio 3 presenter Clemency Burton-Hill reviews the liberties writer Peter Shaffer and director Milos Forman took with the historical record (and the device they used to get away with it) – and nevertheless finds that Amadeus is “arguably the finest movie ever made about the process of artistic creation and the unbridgeable gap between human genius and mediocrity.” (text-only)