“Campus speaker invitations and disinvitations reflect a curious paradox. On one hand, there’s clearly a market for speakers for bestselling authors like Murray and Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart writer and prolific campus provocateur. On the other hand, Murray was met with disinvitation attempts in 2014 and 2016 before he was shouted down last week at Middlebury, reflecting student awareness that the work for which Murray is best known—1994’s The Bell Curve, which was excerpted in the New Republic alongside criticism of it—has been largely discredited among social scientists.”
Tag: 03.04.17
Why So Many Words Die
Of the Oxford English Dictionary’s 231,000 entries, at least a fifth are obsolete. They range from “aa”, a stream or waterway (try that in Scrabble), to “zymome”, “that constituent of gluten which is insoluble in alcohol”. That is surely an undercounting.
Finding: Dancers Can Deliver Effective Healthcare
“Dance to Health is capable of generating better outcomes and being associated with lower overall costs of managing falls compared to the primary prevention programme or no intervention,” the report finds. It describes the classes as faithful to their healthcare objectives and an “enjoyable challenge” for the dancers.
It’s Really Important To Define What We Mean By Artificial Intelligence
I’ve previously argued that the word “algorithm” has become a cultural fetish, the secular, technical equivalent of invoking God. To use the term indiscriminately exalts ordinary—and flawed—software services as false idols. AI is no different. As the bot author Allison Parrish puts it, “whenever someone says ‘AI’ what they’re really talking about is ‘a computer program someone wrote.’”
Researcher: Success In School Doesn’t Relate To Enthusiasm For It
“My research has found that there is in fact no relationship between how well students do academically and what their attitude toward schooling actually is. A student doesn’t need to be passionate about school to be academically successful.”
Amazon Is Moving A Brick And Mortar Bookstore To Town, But An Indie Thinks It Can Thrive Anyway
Blue Bunny, a children’s bookstore about a mile up the road from Amazon’s big new Boston-area bookstore, isn’t worried. The owner: “At first my heart sort of sunk a bit, but I realized quickly the response from our friends was what you have in your independent bookstore is very, very different than what Amazon is providing, and I think that we’re going to be OK.”
The Ballerina From Ballerat
Brooke Lockett was 15 when the Australian Ballet in Melbourne called her up. “It was really intense. And some of my teachers back home were skeptical. Thing is, you only get one shot at being a great ballet dancer and it needs a young body. … That window is incredibly small.”
A Writer Turns To Toni Morrison To Get Past The Fear Of A White Audience
“I’ve known for a long time that as a black person, some white people expect a performance from me, something that might confirm what they think they know about my identity. … What surprised me was that these questions took up so much imaginative space, and did it so quickly, and were in fact so large and puzzling that they stopped me from writing anything.”
Opera Montreal Is Going All-Out For Pink Floyd
Will this bring in new audiences? “Opera hasn’t been a profitable business for a long time, but Pierre Dufour is betting $3.2-million that he can make money from an opera version of the most ambitious and successful of narrative rock albums: Pink Floyd’s The Wall.”
Making A Horror Comedy Out Of The Racial Tensions In The U.S.
It wasn’t exactly simple, says “Get Out” writer/director Jordan Peele. Known as a comedian, he saw his dream of being a director slipping away – but then he realized comedy and horror were close: “The reason they work, why they get primal, audible reactions from us is because they allow us to purge our own fears and discomforts in a safe environment.”