“Dutoit, the orchestra’s principal conductor and artistic director, had been due to step down in October 2019. Following an emergency board meeting, however, his departure has been brought forward and he will leave immediately. In December, three opera singers and a musician accused Dutoit of forcing himself upon them – which he denied.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Just How Many Dimensions Do We Exist In?
“Unlike mathematicians, who are at liberty to play in the field of ideas, physics is bound to nature, and at least in principle, is allied with material things. Yet all this raises a liberating possibility, for if mathematics allows for more than three dimensions, and we think mathematics is useful for describing the world, how do we know that physical space is limited to three? Although Galileo, Newton and Kant had taken length, breadth and height to be axiomatic, might there not be more dimensions to our world?”
Mindfulness – A Corporate Con?
When the nature of work changes, companies reward new ways of feeling about it. The rise of white-collar work in the 1950s birthed the risk-averse organization man, whose highest values were loyalty and orderly conduct. The deregulation of the 1980s made virtues of aggression and ruthless competition. The new economy is characterized by instability and disruption; its ideal worker is calm in the midst of it all, productive and focused. The mindfulness training his company offers isn’t so much a perk as it is the means of turning him into a new type of person.
Study: Skill At Playing A Musical Instrument Is A Romantic Turn-on
So was musical skill sexy? The results suggest the answer is, in general, yes. “Mate value ratings were generally increased by music performance quality by raters of both sexes,” reports the research team led by psychologist Guy Madison of Umea University.
Study: The Value Of Work By Artists Who Are Depressed Goes Down
By looking at sale and auction price between 1972 to 2014, the authors of the study found that paintings created in the year following the death of a friend or relative saw a decrease in value of about 35% compared to the rest of the artist’s catalog.
At 86, Looking Back At A Lifelong Career As A Struggling Artist
Over the years there were some exhibitions and acquisitions, notably a 140-work retrospective in 1997 of both his commercial and fine art in Basel, Switzerland, where Mr. Bertschmann was born and raised. But these accomplishments never amounted to a self-sustaining fine art career. As he reached his 80s, humility and obscurity started getting old, and costly. Now the Bertschmanns find themselves in a tenuous financial position.
What Foucault Knew: Sharing In Public Makes Us Self-Monitor And Conform
According to Foucault, the dynamics of the Panopticon bore an uncanny resemblance to how people self-monitor in society at large. In the presence of ever-watchful witnesses, he said, physical coercion is no longer necessary. People police themselves. They do not know what the observers are registering at any given moment, what they are looking for, exactly, or what the punishments are for disobedience. But the imagination keeps them pliant. In these circumstances, Foucault claimed, the architecture of surveillances become perniciously subtle and seamless, so ‘light’ as to be scarcely noticeable.
Apple Investors Say Company Needs To Do Something To Fight Smartphone Addiction In Kids
“There is a developing consensus around the world including Silicon Valley that the potential long-term consequences of new technologies need to be factored in at the outset, and no company can outsource that responsibility,” said the investors, who collectively control $2bn of Apple stock.
The New Tax Bill Really Screws Artists (And It Might Have Been So Much Worse)
“It’s worth nothing just how viscerally vicious the Republicans wanted to be towards artists and the creative professions as the Congressional legislative process, such as it was, began. Earlier drafts of the tax bill attempted to discard the “qualified performing artist” deduction for low-income entertainment industry workers. There was an amendment aiming to eliminate low-income housing credit exemptions that are to lure artists into new cities through affordable housing. There was an attempt to treat tuition wavers as taxable income, something that would have disproportionately affected artists who enroll in MFA programs. While none of these items made it in the final version of the tax bill, it demonstrates frothing Republican hostility to anyone in any creative profession anywhere in America.”
Scanner And New Software Looks Inside An Ancient Charred Bible That Is Too Fragile To Open
Dr. Brent Seales has spent 14 years developing a technique for reading ancient scrolls that are too fragile to unwrap. Fine-detail CT scanners can visualize the ink of letters inside such scrolls, but the alphabet soup is unreadable unless each letter can be assigned to its correct position on a surface. Dr. Seales has developed software that can model the surface of a contorted piece of papyrus or parchment from X-ray data and then derive a legible text by assigning letters to their proper surface.