Artificial intelligence predicts which movies will succeed—and fail—simply from plot summaries Science. I suppose it’s only a short time before this technology is weaponized for political narratives.
Journalism jobs: 2,000 American newspapers close in 15 years.
So far as I know, the Wall Street Journal continues to flourish. It also continues to abide by rules set by the late Warren Phillips, whom I had the privilege of knowing.
Whatever the position and title, his primary focus was always journalism. Warren regarded publishing a great newspaper as a sacred trust whose ultimate mission was public service. This was well before today’s era of “fake news” and the ubiquitous blending of news and opinion. To Warren, news and opinion were separate “courses,” like meat and dessert, and news journalists should have no agenda beyond serving their readers and the broader public with honest and reliable information.
A Primer for Forgetting Sometime in the twenties in Berlin, a certain Dr. Kurt Lewin noticed that the waiters were very good at remembering the particulars of his restaurant bill—until the bill was paid. Soon settled, soon forgotten. Lewin wondered if he hadn’t stumbled upon a fact of mental life, that the finished task drops into oblivion more easily than the unfinished.
There is a paradox at work here. We remember what we left unfinished, but should we get around to finishing it, we will forget it.
One 8-Second Sample Yields 800 Radically Different Songs
Last year, music software company Ableton gave music producers a challenge: take an 8-second sample of audio and make a track out of it in just 12 hours. They received almost 800 submissions, which you can listen to here. At the company’s conference, three producers working under the same conditions debuted their tracks onstage and talked about their creative process; here’s a highlight reel:
Included in a blog post about the challenge are several playlists that show the common approaches to sampling, including the use of acoustic instruments, using the sample as texture, and of course using the sample as percussion.
While listening back to this huge volume of material we noticed something interesting; above and beyond each track’s individual sound and overall character, we were able to make out a few trends and tendencies in the ways that people were working with the source material. And so we’ve assembled a few playlists with prime examples of some of the main approaches we were hearing.
Here’s A Place Where Prescribing The Arts As Medical Treatment Seems To Be Working
Four cities in Denmark are running pilot versions of a program called Kulturvitaminer (culture vitamins), partly funded by the national health ministry, that gets people on long-term sickness/disability leave or unemployment involved in cultural activities — as both viewers and participants. – The Guardian
101 Things Changing How We Work
From the BBC, a list of the 101 people, ideas, and things changing how we work today. I pulled out a few of things I thought were interesting.
5G — So the whole 5G thing seems like a marketing gimmick to me, but I used its inclusion on this list to finally read about why anyone should care. From this PC Magazine article:
5G brings three new aspects to the table: greater speed (to move more data), lower latency (to be more responsive), and the ability to connect a lot more devices at once (for sensors and smart devices).
Ok, I get it now. Sounds good.
Adaptability quotient (AQ) — One of the most valuable things I’ve learned in my adult life is that people have all sorts of different abilities that contribute to how “smart” they are, and most of those things have little to do with how well they did in school or what their IQ is.
The good news is that scientists agree AQ is not fixed — it can be developed. Theory U by Otto Scharmer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests three elements can help provide a framework: keeping an open mind, so you see the world with fresh eyes and remain open to possibilities; keeping an open heart, so you can try to see any situation through another person’s eyes; and keeping an open will, letting go of identity and ego to sit with the discomfort of the unknown.
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