For the past few years, scientists have been telling us that there’s not really any such thing as multitasking – that the best the human nervous system can manage is very fast task-switching, and that we get better results by concentrating on one thing at a time. Turns out there are a few exceptions – and researchers have been putting some of those individuals in a brain scanner.
Tag: 05.27.15
Black Directors And Filmmakers Flip The Script With Public Twitter Discussion
“Academy Award nominee director Ava DuVernay, founder of the African American Film Releasing Movement (AFFRM), organized a massive ‘Rebel-a-Thon.’ The online event included the voices of 43+ black filmmakers—some well known, like Debbie Allen and Malcolm D. Lee.”
Dean Sends ‘USC7’ MFA Group Another Letter
“As the USC students and the administration go back and forth over what promises were and were not kept, a larger debate now rages about the future of art in education.”
Margaret Atwood Is First Author To Write For A Library That Won’t Be Read For 100 Years
“The Toronto-based Man Booker Prize winner is the first author to hand over an unpublished piece to the Future Library in Oslo. The international project will see one writer contribute a new, unread text to the collection every year for the next 100 years. The pieces will be kept locked up until 2114, when 1,000 trees planted for the project in a forest just outside Oslo will be cut down to provide paper for their publication.”
Musical Theatre For The Deaf
Musicals may seem like a counterintuitive choice for a deaf theater company, but they aren’t uncommon for Deaf West, one of the few theater groups in the country led by a deaf artistic director, in its case DJ Kurs.
Artist-Friendly Portland Rents Are Pricing Out Artists
“Portland has long been an incubator for artists looking for a vibrant and supportive community—minus the high cost of living in larger cities like Seattle and San Francisco. But a perfect storm of decreased development during the recession, and increased in-migration in the years following, has transformed Portland into a place where artists like Abernathy are being priced out as rents continue to rise.”
Did Bluesman Robert Johnson Really Sell His Soul To The Devil?
“Blues musician Robert Johnson is that grand rarity in the music world—a recording artist from the 1930s who can sell millions of records in the modern day. He left his stamp on the work of almost every later blues musician… But the rumors of Johnson’s dealings with the Devil are even more famous than his recordings. I’ve found that people who know nothing else about the blues, have often heard that story.”
How Machine “Deep Learning” Will Change The Things Around Us
“Deep learning is particularly interesting because it has transformed so many different areas of research. In the past researchers used very separate techniques for speech recognition, image recognition, translation, and robotics. But now one this one set of techniques—though a rather broad set—can serve all these fields.”
Who Knew? Musicians Union Sues Hollywood Studios For Reusing Music In Movies
“For instance, 1 minute and 10 seconds of music from Titanic was allegedly used in This Means War; 47 seconds of music from Die Hard and 30 seconds of music from The Bourne Identity was allegedly used in episodes of The Office; 18 seconds of music from Jaws was allegedly used in Little Fockers; 33 seconds of music from Cast Away was used in Bridesmaids; 35 seconds of music from Battle for the Planet of the Apes was used in Argo … and so forth.”
Is This 25-Year-Old Composer The Great Hope Of American Opera?
There are more established young composers who write operas, but if contemporary opera has a rising wunderkind, then Aucoin has to be it — although his promise as a composer, conductor, pianist, poet and critic extends well beyond opera or any other single form. The conductor Johannes Debus says that the range of Aucoin’s talents exemplifies “Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner’s term for everything at once.”