Despite the current limitations, fashion seems ripe for an AI invasion; it’s an arena that has great data sets on customers’ interests, and there is a lot of money at stake. Amazon, for one, is already working on AI systems to provide a leg up in spotting fashion trends, and it has also done some work with GANs (see “Amazon Has Developed an AI Fashion Designer”). Alibaba, meanwhile, just debuted FashionAI, a technology that can recommend items to shoppers on the basis of what they brought into the dressing room.
Tag: 11.16.17
The Strange Case Of The Arab Whodunnit: Noir Fiction Sees A Revival In The Mideast
“Away from caliphate building and sectarianism, a neo-noir revolution has been creeping across the Middle East, allowing artists and writers to act as ombudsmen in the current political climate. Jonathan [Guyer] meets the writers who are latching onto the adventure, despair and paranoia prevalent in genre fiction to tell stories that transcend the present.” (audio)
This Is The Only Book Ever Banned By The US Supreme Court (And It’s Still Banned Today)
Here’s the story of The Housewife’s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, the 1960 “sexual autobiography” of “Rey Anthony”, also known as Lillian Maxine Serett.
Pentagon Takes Away Gitmo Prisoners’ Rights To Their Own Art
“The military has decided that art made by wartime captives [at Guantanamo Bay] is U.S. government property and has stopped releases of security-screened prisoner art to the public. One attorney says the U.S. military intends to burn cellblock art. The new source of tension in the 41-captive prison is stirring a fundamental question: Who owns art? The state or the artist?”
Why Spoken English Is So Different From Written English
“Modern languages with a long literary tradition show a stark split between their written and spoken styles across many contexts. In current English, writing uses more varied vocabulary than conversational speech, and it uses rarer and longer words much more often. Certain structures (such as passive sentences, prepositional phrases, and relative clauses) appear more often in written than spoken language. Writers generally elaborate their ideas more explicitly through syntax whereas speakers leave more material implicit. And written language stacks clauses inside each other to a greater depth than spoken language. This is one of the most striking differences between speech and text; sentences like the opening line of the Declaration of Independence simply do not occur in conversation.”
Newly-Discovered Raymond Chandler Story Attacks US Health Care
“Found in Chandler’s archives at the Bodleian Library in Oxford …, the story, “It’s All Right – He Only Died,” opens as a ‘filthy figure on a stretcher’ arrives at a hospital.”
Hiking With John Adams In The Mountains Where His New Opera Is Set
“From time to time when driving in the High Sierra I’ll see amateur gold miners, panning in a river that 150 years ago gave up the best of its treasure to the first prospectors,” says the composer, “and I’ll be tempted to wonder if the image of these latter-day panners, hoping only for a tiny nugget, isn’t an illustration of my own predicament as a composer.”
The University Of Vermont Is Slashing Music And Dance Classes
Not only that, but the classes slashed were taught by part-time faculty – and the chair of the music department resigned in disgust. “A former part-time faculty member himself, Toner said he feels especially bad for the adjunct music faculty who arranged their schedules to accommodate spring classes. As musicians trying to make a living in the small state of Vermont, Toner said many count on their salary of $1,900 per class credit to augment their incomes.”
UK Lottery Sales Are Way Down. Arts Funding Is Suffering. Scottish Officials Say Other Arts Funding Is Needed
With National Lottery income making up nearly 40% of Creative Scotland’s and sportscotland’s total income, these reductions are of critical concern and put both jobs and provision at risk. Figures released by National Lottery operator Camelot in June 2017 showed arts funding was down £55m, with expectations that the “disappointing” sales would continue this year. Creative Scotland told AP its lottery income fell by £5.3m in 2016/17, to £29.1m.
Love The Art, Hate The Artist?
“I expect art to be troubling because I expect people to be troubling. I am prepared to like and dislike something in every work. I can also appreciate the aesthetic genius of a moral monster without feeling that I am becoming inured to monstrosity. Just as I can read Heidegger without becoming a Nazi, I can look at one of Adolf Hitler’s juvenile watercolour paintings and appreciate a bit of pink in the sky there, and understand it as a painting of its era and one by a tyrant at the same time. And if I do this and am judged immoral for it, is it because it is bad for just me or bad for society at large?”