One feature that differentiates the Motion Picture Country Home, as residents call it, from your run-of-the-mill retirement community: it has a TV channel. Founded about a dozen years ago, Channel 22 is a closed-circuit station run by and for MPTF residents, with assistance from a dedicated staff and hundreds of volunteers, including film-school students and current members of the industry. Its programming, which runs 24-7, is composed of older movies and TV shows and 12 hours of original content a day, including interviews with the residents about their experiences in entertainment—like a popular series called Behind the Silver Screen, in which folks will recall their work on a specific film or show before it airs on the channel
Tag: September 2018
Computers That Create Sonnets? So Perfect, And Yet…
The latest is a computer program that generates sonnets. Sonnets! Fancy! Computer scientists at IBM and the universities of Melbourne and Toronto have built a system that creates poems so metrically accomplished that the majority of readers in a study failed to distinguish them from the efforts of humans.
How Digital Image Manipulation Has Invaded The Culture
“For my generation, editing your own image has become as routine as using social media. We grew up with airbrushing and Photoshop and saw the exposés of flawless magazine cover stars who weren’t flawless at all. Instead of rejecting the falsehoods we’ve made it part of our daily lives, crafting idealised digital versions of ourselves that feel like an essential corollary to real life. Technology has set a new standard for beauty that quite literally doesn’t exist in real life. Rather than reject that, we’ve embraced it.”
Feeling Oppressed By Information Overload? There Are Historical Parallels
In the coming years, it may be that conversational, artificially intelligent assistants will become part of the answer, deciding whether or not to alert us to messages, helping us retrieve information and recommending items of interest. But figuring out book reviews, indexes and the rest took several centuries, so we shouldn’t expect an immediate solution. In the meantime we must endure information overload: the feeling that arises in the space of time between a sudden increase in the flow of information and the development of the tools to enable us to cope with it.