Author: Douglas McLennan

Tate Museums Pledge To Cut Resource Use, Cut Carbon

Tate—a network of four museums including Tate Modern, which ranked as Britain’s top tourist attraction, with 5.9 million visitors in 2018—announced it would cut its carbon footprint by at least 10 percent by 2023. “Large public buildings, attracting millions of visitors from the U.K. and overseas, require energy,” reads a declaration issued in July, which saw the highest-ever temperature recorded in the U.K. and record-setting heat across Europe. “We see caring for and sharing a national art collection as a public good, but it also consumes resources. . . . That’s why we pledge to make our long-term commitment ambitious in scope. We will interrogate our systems, our values, and our programs, and look for ways to become more adaptive and responsible.” – ARTnews

Coachella And Stagecoach Festivals Trying To Reschedule To October

Postponing the massive festival series until October is a huge endeavor involving hundreds of artists and their representatives, as well as hundreds of contractors and vendors and tens of thousands of employees. Artists are frequenting touring during the fall months and while organizers aren’t likely to get all the performers to agree to move, sources say that if enough of the big headline acts then the festival can be moved. – Billboard

As Festivals Cancel, A Looming Insurance Crisis

The aphorism is that if America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold; if Ultra and SXSW cause a domino effect, and music festivals in the UK and Europe are shut down, the economic impact could be enormous. Worse still, most festivals will not have the correct insurance to cover their expenditure and projected losses if the government or local councils order them to cancel. – The Guardian

Max von Sydow, 90

Widely hailed as one of the finest actors of his generation, Mr. von Sydow became an elder pop culture star in his later years, appearing in a “Star Wars” movie in 2015 as well as in the sixth season of the HBO fantasy-adventure series “Game of Thrones.”He even lent his deep, rich voice to “The Simpsons.” – The New York Times

Traditional University Degrees No Longer Cut It. Lifelong Learning Needs A Rethink

Recent advances in computational methods and data science push us into rethinking science and engineering. Computers increasingly become principal actors in leveraging data to formulate questions, which requires radically new ways of reasoning. Therefore, a new discipline blending computer science, programming, statistics and machine learning should be added to the traditional foundational topics of mathematics and physics. These three pillars would allow you to keep learning complex technical subjects all your life because numeracy is the foundation upon which everything else is eventually built. – Aeon

How Those Flocks Of Starlings Know Where To Fly

In the mid 1960s, researchers found that murmurating birds, particularly starlings, interact—not always, but often—with six or seven of their closest neighbors, who interact with six or seven of their closest neighbors. In recent years, studies posit that a network with seven neighbors optimizes the trade-off between “group cohesion and individual effort.” One theory among researchers, in the context of predation, is that starlings are “managing uncertainty while maintaining consensus.” – Nautilus

How Academe’s Adjunct Addiction Changed Education

“The halls of academe are known to be hospitable to people with radical views on power relationships between capital and labor, but colleges themselves are often merciless actors in the labor market. Many adjuncts earn only a few thousand dollars per course, with no health insurance or retirement benefits. Twenty-five percent of part-time faculty receive some form of public assistance. Some adjunct postings don’t require doctorates.” – The New York Times