“While Yahoo! Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren’t true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It’s every middle-school teacher’s worst nightmare about the Web.”
Tag: 12.07.07
Two NY Museums Fight For Picassos
The Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation asked a court Friday to declare them the rightful owners of two Picasso paintings that a Jewish scholar claims were the rightful property of a relative persecuted in Nazi Germany.
OSHA Investigating Ballet Accident
Last weekend, a 17-year-old dancer with the Atlanta Ballet took a tumble off the stage while wearing a bulky panda costume and fell 12 feet into an empty orchestra pit during a performance of The Nutcracker. “She remains in critical but stable condition… after spinal surgery,” and now, the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration is investigating the incident to determine whether the company was at fault.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, 79
“Endlessly prolific, whether in fashion or out of it, he composed 362 works, including the world’s longest opera, Licht, a sequence of seven pieces – one for every day of the week. The whole piece lasts 29 hours.”
Late Night TV Audiences Plummet During Strike
Hardest hit: latenight leader “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” The show’s audience is down “a stunning 40% decline among adults 18-49 vs. the same frame a year ago.”
Email? That’s So 90s!
new poll shows that younger people are giving up on email and using SMS and instant messaging instead. “Korean young adults put it so well. Email is simply outdated and not used between friends and colleagues. The only people you would use mobile email with are the older generation at work. Email? It’s so 90s.”
Aussie PAC Chief Quits
“The chief executive of [Australia’s] Queensland Performing Arts Centre has stepped down after the state Government made major changes to the board of trustees… QPAC has been under increasing pressure from the state Government and Arts Minister Rod Welford to operate with smaller subsidies…”
The Fulbright Worldview: Arts As Essential As Math
Philanthropist Harriet Fulbright, the woman behind America’s Fulbright scholarships, believes that “the established educational measures of numeracy and literacy are too limited and that there are other intelligences that we may associate with creativity: visual, kinesthetic, musical and social.”