People in the field who were close to him, recalling him after his death, said that the warmth was innate and not for show. “You think of architects who seem to lead with their ego, and he was never like that,” said David Childs, a consulting design partner with SOM, a firm that often competed with Pei’s. “He was very generous to me when I was a 28-year-old kid.” – The New York Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Experts Problem: Why Generalists Out-perform Experts
It turns out that experts have bad track records at predicting what will happen. Generalists, on the other hand, who read widely and are constantly adapting to the observations they make, are considerably more savvy. – The Atlantic
How To make The SATs More Fair? Adversity Algorithms?
The standardized tests, it turns out, aren’t so standardized when you account for the disparities of students taking them. Where you grew up matters. How good was your school matters. So new algorithms attempt to measure these factors and level the field. – The Atlantic
Could New “Indie” Social Media Sites Solve What’s Bad About Social Media?
Could the IndieWeb movement—or a streamlined, user-friendly version of it to come—succeed in redeeming the promise of social media? If we itemize the woes currently afflicting the major platforms, there’s a strong case to be made that the IndieWeb avoids them. – The New Yorker
We’ve Long Imagined Artificial Beings. It Was A Useful Exercise. But Now We’re Close To Seeing It Become Real, Will We Be Disappointed?
Ian McEwan: “The ancient dream of a plausible artificial human might be scientifically useless but culturally irresistible. At the very least, the quest so far has taught us just how complex we (and all creatures) are in our simplest actions and modes of being. There’s a semi-religious quality to the hope of creating a being less cognitively flawed than we are.” – Edge
The Non-Performing Musicians’ Agent: Is It Fraud, Incompetence Or Unrealistic Hopes?
“The combination of necessary professional arrogance, high hopes, and even bigger disappointment has allowed conspiracy theories to gain currency among the musicians who feel cheated by Evangelista.” – Van
What Does It Mean That Jeff Koons’ Bunny Just Sold For $91 Million? Anything?
Sebastian Smee: “What the sale of Koons’s “Rabbit” — an auction record for a living artist — is telling us with special force is that the question of valuation is not just about rationality or irrationality. It is, on a deeper level, redundant. It’s redundant because we are in a realm divorced from reality. Intentionally so.” – Washington Post
What Public TV And Radio Learned About Members And How They Support Public Media
“The age of 58 — and whether a member is older or younger — is the generational divide between donors who want more on-demand programs and those who are less likely to know that those programs are even available. It also correlates to how much members are willing to pay and what would inspire them to pay more.” – Current
What Happens When Site-Specific Art Can’t Be Site-Specific Any More?
“This purist notion of artwork inviolably tied to its context, once a subversive strike against tradition and the marketplace, seems almost quaint now, as artists, dealers, museums and patrons interpret “site-specificity” in ever more elastic ways. The phrase itself has been co-opted as marketing speak in recent years: “site-specific” might even steal the crown from “curated,” the reigning art-world term applied to everything from playlists to pop-up shops.” – New York Times Magazine
Belgium’s Royal Museum Says It Wants To Confront The Country’s Colonial Africa Past. There’s Just One Problem…
“I went there a month later, and spent two days trying to access its famed music archives, and mostly just looking around. And at the risk of spoiling any big, revelatory climax, I’ll just tell you: there’s basically nothing in the museum that honestly confronts what went on in Central Africa.” – The Outline