“It’s far and away the most ‘knowledgeable’ natural language generation program to date, and it has a range of potential uses in professions ranging from teaching to journalism to customer service. GPT-3 confirms what computer scientists have known for decades: Size matters.” – The Conversation
Blog
Arts Fundraising Needs To Be Fully Professionalized As A Field
“As many as 44% of fundraisers fell in the profession by accident, with only 5% gravitating to fundraising as an intentional career choice. … We wouldn’t, for example, find a surgeon, accountant or lawyer who said they had got into their role by accident. All those roles would require a set period of study, with key milestones for passing training and competency-based testing. Yet in careers such as fundraising, there is no such pathway.” – Arts Professional
American Museum Of Natural History Fires Curator For Sexual Harassment
Mark E. Siddall, an invertebrate zoologist whose expertise is in leeches, “was fired this month … after the museum found that he had sexually harassed and bullied a graduate student who was doing research under his supervision.” – The New York Times
Harold Evans, 92, Investigative Journalist, Magazine Founder, Author, Publisher
Over a seven-decade career, Evans exposed major political and business scandals (above all, Kim Philby’s hidden career as a Soviet spy and the abandonment of children deformed by thalidomide by the drug’s manufacturers), edited The Sunday Times and The Times of London (which he left after a battle with Rupert Murdoch), wrote several books, founded Condé Nast Traveler magazine, and served as president of Random House; he became a Reuters editor-at-large at age 83. In a 2002 British Journalism Review poll, he was voted “the greatest newspaper editor of all time.” – Reuters
Juliette Gréco, Legend Of Chanson Française, Dead At 93
“An acclaimed French chanteuse whose sensual stage mystique and doleful voice bewitched audiences for more than six decades and made her an international recording and concert star, … [Gréco] was one of the last links to Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialist intellectuals who made her their raven-haired, black-clad muse in the post-World War II bohemia of Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood.” – The Washington Post
Using Video Games To Explore India’s Politics And History
“Through fantastical environments where buildings and oversized monuments are made of rubber sandals and toothpaste tubes, Studio Oleomingus … crafts interactive stories that cast a playful light on India’s complicated past and present.” – The Guardian
What Virtual Theatre Is Lacking
“When I tune into a play or a devised theater piece, I’m not looking to be dazzled by computer graphics. Clever Zoom backdrops don’t seize my imagination. I want what I always want from the stage: a confrontation with what it means to be human.” – Los Angeles Times
Why Does Netflix Keep Canceling Series After Two Seasons?
Data from media analytics firm Ampere Analysis suggests that on average, a Netflix Original gets just two seasons before being canceled. – Wired
JK Rowling’s Controversial New Book Tops Sales List
Sales figures from Nielsen BookScan reveal that Troubled Blood has hit the No 1 spot in the UK’s book charts, selling 64,633 copies in the five days to 19 September. According to the Bookseller, this is “by far” the biggest single-week sale for any Galbraith title, almost double the first-week sales of the novel’s predecessor, Lethal White. – The Guardian
Metropolitan Opera Decides To Cancel Entire 20/21 Season
The decision is likely to send ripples of concern through New York and the rest of the country, as Broadway theaters, symphony halls, rock venues, comedy clubs, dance spaces and other live arts institutions grapple with the question of when it will be safe again to perform indoors. Far from being a gilded outlier, the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, may well prove to be a bellwether. – The New York Times