After five years of dredging, which saw 320 million cubic metres of sand and 25 million tonnes of rock hauled into place, the final stone in the breakwater was laid in January 2008 – on the eve of the global financial crisis. The vision collapsed just as quickly as the computer renderings had been conjured. Dubai World, the government investment arm in charge of the project, was revealed to have debts of $60bn.
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Reclusive Artist (I’m Sorry, We Don’t Have Tolerance For That These Days)
Once upon a time, not turning up for an awards ceremony held a kind of clout: “When a writer doesn’t show his face,” as DeLillo wrote in his 1991 novel, “Mao II,” about a reclusive novelist who becomes a prisoner of a terrorist organization, “he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.” Now it feels a little rude, like not showing up to a dinner party held in your honor.
Are Museums Pandering To The Selfie Generation And Losing Their Meaning?
“Not only are [visitors] taking pictures of art, they are taking pictures of themselves within these spaces. So in the pre-digital photography era, the message was ‘This is what I am seeing. I have seen.’ And today the message is: ‘I was there. I came, I saw, and I selfied.’ ”
There’s Nothing Smart About “Smart” Cities So Stop Saying It
The cities of the future won’t be “smart,” or well-engineered, cleverly designed, just, clean, fair, green, sustainable, safe, healthy, affordable, or resilient. They won’t have any particularly higher ethical values of liberty, equality, or fraternity, either. The future smart city will be the internet, the mobile cloud, and a lot of weird paste-on gadgetry, deployed by City Hall, mostly for the sake of making towns more attractive to capital.
How We Tell Stories To Make Ourselves Feel Better About Things That Aren’t True
‘Confabulation’ comes from the Latin fabula (‘story’) which can be either a historical account or a fairytale. When we confabulate, we tell a story that is fictional, while believing that it is a true story. As we are not aware that our story is fictional, this is very different from a lie: we have no intention to deceive. So in confabulation there is a mismatch between what we aim to do (tell a true story) and what we end up doing (tell a fictional story).
In Philadelphia, A Superbowl Win Gets Sports And Arts Talking
“Arts and sports suddenly had something to say to each other. Arts groups surely capitalized on the moment, holding Eagles-themed promotions to sell tickets to their performances and using the chance to shed their sometimes-elitist aura. But the arts in a way were just expressing the larger civic sentiment as they often do, whether with an orchestra concert at the Mann after 9/11 to calm a shaken city or a choir and ensemble assembling in a Rittenhouse Square church to memorialize victims killed in 2016 at the Pulse nightclub.”
What Makes Humans Special? Our Ability To Automate Things
“As a species, we have built cities and crafted stories, developed cultures and formulated laws, probed the recesses of science, and are attempting to explore the stars. This is not because our brain itself is uniquely superior – its evolutionary and functional similarity to other intelligent species is striking – but because our unique trait is to supplement our bodies and brains with layer upon layer of external assistance. This provides us with a depth, breadth and permanence of mental and physical capability that no other animal approaches. Humans are unique because we are complex, and we are complex because we are the beast that automates.”
SoundCloud’s Fake Music Problem
Though 49 of the site’s top 50 tracks are songs from official artist accounts, the site is plagued with secondary accounts posting primary content, all of it loaded with track info designed to game the system’s search algorithms in their favor. If other platforms have problems with “fake news,” SoundCloud has problems with fake music, and in both cases the issue is more feature than bug.
Trump Budget Proposes To Begin Shutting Down The National Endowment For The Arts
According to the new budget proposal, the NEA’s budget would be cut down to $29 million, and the NEH’s budget would be reduced to $42 million. Both organizations are currently budgeted at around $150 million; they account for well under 1 percent of the government’s budget. “The Budget proposes to begin shutting down NEA in 2019, given the notable funding support provided by private and other public sources and because the Administration does not consider NEA activities to be core Federal responsibilities,” the budget proposal reads.
Why Aren’t We Using What We Know About How Kids’ Brains Work To Teach Them To Read?
The way kids are taught to read in school is disconnected from the latest research, namely how language and speech actually develop in a child’s brain.