~ Malchkeon
Mystery behind toys appearing on 134-year-old toddler's grave solved
Czech Robots and Toothless Dragons 🐉 Iron curtain fest
Philosophy helped me to leave my marriage quit my job
Edward Pollitt, via ACS
Information Age
Henry Wollman Bloch, Art Philanthropist And Co-Founder Of H&R Block, Dead At 96
The primary beneficiary of Bloch’s largesse has been Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: he spent three years as its board chairman, he and his wife are the name donors on the museum’s 2007 expansion and its 2015-17 renovation, and at the same time the couple gave a collection of 29 major Impressionist paintings to NAMA. – ARTnews
For the everyman, he was the real tax man
“Bot visibility” has
emerged as a significant factor, with 90% of Australia’s top 250 websites
unable to differentiate a customer from a bot on login pages.
The Big Read
Why American CEOs are worried about capitalism
What Will Art, And The Art World, Look Like In 2039?
“Devon Van Houten Maldonado asks artists and curators to imagine the changes and trends that will influence the art world in the next two decades.” – BBC
How The Roxane Gay-Christina Hoff Sommers #Feminist Debate Tour In Australia Turned Into An Ugly Mess
If it had happened in a radio or television studio, it might have gone well. But having an audience turns out to have been a bad idea. (And some ill-advised moves by either Gay or her management didn’t help.) – New York Magazine
Debra S. Austin (Denver), Windmills of Your Mind: Understanding the Neurobiology of Emotion, 54 Wake Forest L. Rev. ___ (2019):
Intelligence has been parsed into categories including general intelligence (IQ), which is cognitive capacity, and emotional intelligence (EQ), describing social competency. Perhaps the most important new form of intelligence that lawyers can cultivate is neuro-intelligence (NQ), which is an understanding of the most important tool a lawyer must deploy — the brain. NQ can help us understand how emotions that arise in the brain are often experienced in the windmills of the mind as “words that jangle in your head”. Boomers will enjoy the Noel Harrison version of Windmills of your Mind, which won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Original Song, while Millennials should check out the Sting version from the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crowne Affair.
How The Roxane Gay-Christina Hoff Sommers #Feminist Debate Tour In Australia Turned Into An Ugly Mess
If it had happened in a radio or television studio, it might have gone well. But having an audience turns out to have been a bad idea. (And some ill-advised moves by either Gay or her management didn’t help.) – New York Magazine
Generosity? Noblesse Oblige? Or Reputation-Laundering? The Century-Old Bargain Behind Big-Ticket Philanthropy
The debate has arisen a lot over the past few years: BP, the Koch brothers,the Sacklers, that board member at the Whitney, Notre-Dame. Bob Garfield talks about the issue with Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: the Elite Charade of Changing the World. (audio) – NPR’s On the Media
In China, Two Historical Soap Operas Go Viral, And The Communist Party Promptly Cancels Them
The Story of Yanxi Palace and Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace smashed viewing records for the streaming services that showed them. Then the journal Theory Weekly (a title only a Communist bureaucrat could love) published an article condemning the series as “incompatible with the core values of socialism” and “[a] negative influence on society.” State media condemnation went on from there, and the series disappeared. Why? – The New Yorker
The genre of books about growing old is nearly as old as old age itself. They fall into three categories: the scientific, the personal, and the political
How Recommendation Algorithms Run the World - Wired – “…What should you watch? What should you read? What’s news? What’s trending? Wherever you go online, companies have come up with very particular, imperfect ways of answering these questions. Everywhere you look, recommendation engines offer striking examples of how values and judgments become embedded in algorithms and how algorithms can be gamed by strategic actors… Another common method for generating recommendations is to extrapolate from patterns in how people consume things. People who watched this then watched that; shoppers who purchased this item also added that one to their shopping cart. Amazon uses this method a lot, and I admit, it’s often quite useful. Buy an electric toothbrush? How nice that the correct replacement head appears in your recommendations. Congratulations on your new vacuum cleaner: Here are some bags that fit your machine…”
Reuters -April 15,
2019
The United
States will push its allies at a meeting in Prague next month to adopt shared
security and policy measures that will make it more difficult for China's
Huawei to dominate 5G telecommunications networks, according to people familiar
with the matter and documents seen by Reuters. The event and broader U.S.
campaign to limit the role of Chinese telecommunications firms in the build out
of 5G networks comes as Western governments grapple with the national security
implications of moving to 5G, which promises to be at least 100 times faster
than the current 4G networks. The issue is crucial because of 5G's leading role
in internet-connected products ranging from self-driving cars and smart cities
to augmented reality and artificial intelligence. If the underlying technology
for 5G connectivity is vulnerable then it could allow hackers to exploit such
products to spy or disrupt them. The United States has been meeting with allies
in recent months to warn them Washington believes Huawei's equipment could be
used by the Chinese state to spy. Huawei Technologies Co Ltd has repeatedly
denied the allegations.
As Social Media Ages, Some Who Documented Their Own Lives Turn Away, For Their Kids
Don’t do it for the children! In other words, some parents, even in tech-obsessed San Francisco, refuse to put their kids online. “They cite reasons ranging from preserving children’s safety to giving their children agency over their own online presences.” – San Francisco Chronicle
The wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity,” wrote Horkheimer and Adorno. Is enlightenment necessarily accompanied by darker forces?
The Band That Sang End Credits To This Week’s ‘Game Of Thrones’ Turned Down The Same Opportunity In Season Two
Florence and the Machine sang a haunting song over the end credits of the second episode of the final season of Game of Thrones, and they’re one of a very few groups who have gotten that opportunity. The band’s singer and leader wasn’t a fan when the showrunners first asked the band to sing, eons ago in Season 2, but now she is – and that helped win the band over. – The New York Times
Resources for Living a More Ethical Life Online
Ethical.net has compiled a list of resourcesfor “discovering ethical alternatives to stuff”. Their list includes web browsers like Tor and Firefox (check out the first site in the “top sites” listing in the graphic), search engines like DuckDuckGo, email services like Fastmail, a bunch of carbon-neutral web hosting options, and all kinds of other services and apps that tend to be open source, privacy friendly, not supported by advertising, and decentralized.