Today, many of the Staines’ radical ideas — student-led teaching, community outreach, globally relevant ideologies and an emphasis on physical and mental health — are commonplace. And many of Staines’s students, whether they have continued in dance or not, have gone on to preach and evolve her doctrine. – The Globe & Mail
Author: Douglas McLennan
Scientists Make Progress On Decoding Speech Inside The Brain
Although still a long way from restoring natural speech, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have generated intelligible sentences from the thoughts of people without speech difficulties. – Scientific American
Academics Worldwide Worry About New Online Censorship Law In Singapore
Earlier this month, the country’s government introduced a draft of the Protection From Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act. It would authorize any minister in Singapore to order “corrections” to online content hosted anywhere in the world if the minister deemed that a statement is “false or misleading” in whole or in part, when that statement is made available online to one or more users in Singapore and it is deemed to be in the public interest to issue such a correction. – Inside Higher Ed
Study Shows That People Cannot Identify “Fake” Voices Created With Technology
The tech is now so good, it can impersonate voices you know. “The main takeaway is that human brains may not be able to distinguish a speaker’s voice from its morphed version, which means that people would be susceptible to voice impersonation attacks at a fundamental biological level.” – The Daily Beast
Be The Better You! Audio Books Are Assaulting Our Leisure Time
They’re the fastest-growing segment of the books industry, a real success for an industry that has struggled to reinvent. Learn while you’re doing something else. That’s what successful people do, right? Maximize their efficiency? But listening isn’t reading, and attention spans being what they are… – The Baffler
The Culture Of Competitive Masculinity At The Iowa Writers’ Workshop
This “masculinist logic” infected the classroom. Criticism had always been central to the Workshop experience, and it was harsh by design. Engle believed “that young writers overestimated their creative powers, a flaw that only astringent criticism could overcome.” Cisneros put it more simply: “There was no love.” The poet Robert Bly described how “the aggression went against each other,” as students tore apart works in progress. Praise was uneven, and favoritism was everywhere. – The New Republic
When What We Think Will Make Things Better Makes Them Catastrophically Worse
“Our very attempts to stave off disaster by introducing safety systems ultimately increases the overall complexity of the systems, ensuring that some unpredictable outcome will rear its ugly head no matter what. Complicated human-machine systems might surprise us with outcomes more favorable than we have any reason to expect. They also might shock us with catastrophe.” – The Atlantic
Redefining “Common” Language Is A Fraught Exercise
Looking at Amherst College’s new Common Language Guide: What the glossary contains is not “common” language by any normal reckoning. Its very first entry defines “accomplice” as “a term coined by Indigenous Action Network to critique the ways in which ‘ally’ as an identity term has been deployed absent of action, accountability or risk-taking.” Such definitions signal that we have departed the real world for an alternative progressive universe filled with specialized terminology and in-house references. – Commonweal
An Academic Paper That Identifies And Explains Bullshitters
“Unlike many previous studies, we are able to investigate differences between bullshitters and non-bullshitters conditional upon a range of potential confounding characteristics (including a high-quality measure of educational achievement) providing stronger evidence that bullshitting really is independently related to these important psychological traits.” IZA Institute of Labor Economics
See Inside Some Of America’s Grandest Old Movie Theatres
The photographers used Cinema Treasures, a database of American movie theaters past and present, to track down some of the country’s most spectacular movie palaces. At first they focused only on abandoned theaters, but after discovering some tastefully repurposed palaces, such as Brooklyn’s cavernous Paramount Theater—now used as a gymnasium by Long Island University—they expanded the scope of their project. – Wired