Author: Douglas McLennan

Why YouTube Stars Are Burning Out At A Fearsome Rate

Matt Lees began to feel a knock-on effect on his health. “Human brains really aren’t designed to be interacting with hundreds of people every day,” he says. “When you’ve got thousands of people giving you direct feedback on your work, you really get the sense that something in your mind just snaps. We just aren’t built to handle empathy and sympathy on that scale.”

The Women Who Are Busting Into The Samba Circle

With astonishing speed, female musicians in Brazil have in the past couple of years begun breaking into the male realm of samba circles, taking a seat at the table both literally and figuratively. Just a few years ago, the musicians playing in a samba circle jam session used to be almost all male. In 2018, though, a clutch of all-female samba groups have set out to change that, and in doing so, they have generated what could be a sea change for this beloved Brazilian musical genre.

Have Researchers Taught AI How To Recognize And Understand Language?

The most widely tested model, so far, is called Embeddings from Language Models, or ELMo. When it was released by the Allen Institute this spring, ELMo swiftly toppled previous bests on a variety of challenging tasks—like reading comprehension, where an AI answers SAT-style questions about a passage, and sentiment analysis. In a field where progress tends to be incremental, adding ELMo improved results by as much as 25 percent.

Your Reading Comprehension: Print Versus Screen Versus Audio

If you’re reading, it’s pretty easy to go back and find the point at which you zoned out. It’s not so easy if you’re listening to a recording. Especially if you’re grappling with a complicated text, the ability to quickly backtrack and re-examine the material may aid learning, and this is likely easier to do while reading than while listening.

Will Blockchain Really Make A Difference In The Art World?

The first model is art registries, which is where the technology offers incontestable benefits. All the information about a work of art is entered on the chain, so ownership of the work can be tracked and its characteristics recorded in a form that cannot be modified. This is potentially good for verification of authenticity, provenance and trust. It may have particular benefit for living artists, allowing them to track sales and eventually claim resale rights.

Bill Rauch Talks Inclusive Theatre

“We’re telling the best stories that we can possibly tell — the most dynamic, the best writing — period. The fact is: Voices that have been too often marginalized in our theater have some of the most exciting stories to tell. So if we’re going to tell the best stories, we darn well better have a mix of storytellers and stories that reflect gender diversity and many, many other expressions of identity.”