Category: issues

“Evidence has shown the potential benefits of approaches like social prescribing, which addresses people’s physical and mental well-being and has been shown to both improve patients’ quality of life and reduce pressure on other NHS services.”

The poll of 600 drama, music and dance students found that more than half (51%) had experienced inappropriate behaviour, sexual harassment or bullying. Nearly two thirds (73%) of those who experienced some sort of incident identified as female.

67% of cultural sector organisations agreed that ACE should “represent the role and value of the sector to central Government”, when asked about what the body’s purpose should be beyond funding. In contrast, only 29% said that the arts council should “evaluate the quality of what the individuals and organisations it funds deliver”.

Turns out Alexa, Siri, Google’s Assistant and other AI voice responsive systems really understand West Coast English. Everything else? Wellllllll … let’s say that even if you’re a native English speaker, but you’re from the South or Midwest? They’ll understand you less often. Worse: “People with nonnative accents, however, faced the biggest setbacks. In one study that compared what Alexa thought it heard versus what the test group actually said, the system showed that speech from that group showed about 30 percent more inaccuracies.”

Wow: “Photojournalists described behavior from editors and colleagues that ranged from assault to unwanted advances to comments on their appearance or bodies when they were trying to work. And now, as the #MeToo moment has prompted change across a range of industries—from Hollywood to broadcasting to the arts—photojournalists are calling for their own moment of reckoning.”

Reddit’s AskHistorians subreddit – one of the largest history forums on the internet – doesn’t bother debating Holocaust deniers. Instead, it bans them, and one moderator says Facebook should, too, because “deniers need a public forum to spread their lies and to sow doubt among readers not well-informed about history. By convincing people that they might have a point or two, they open the door for further radicalization in pursuit of their ultimate goal.”

The site’s board of governors locked out the union, IATSE Local 158, and then asked the stagehands and technical workers not to picket until after the Canadian National Exhibition. The union responded, “That’s not going to happen. … We are not going to surrender our rights under the law and jeopardize the safety of Torontonians and other visitors to Exhibition Place as a favour to Tory’s friends. Nor will we put visitors at risk.”

“The poll of 600 drama, music and dance students found that more than half (51%) had experienced inappropriate behaviour, sexual harassment or bullying. Nearly two thirds (73%) of those who experienced some sort of incident identified as female. … When asked if they had reported their concerns, 57% who had experienced inappropriate behaviour did not report it. Just 13% did.”

Using as examples the recent reunion – enthusiastically captured and craftily edited by CNN – of a Salvadoran refugee woman with the six-year-old daughter ICE separated from her as well as the cute-turned-creepy-turned-cruel viral tale known as #PlaneBae, Megan Garber considers “how easily the desire for a happy ending can insinuate itself on the facts of the matter. The possibility at play … is that the full story, and its attendant horrors, will get washed away in the easy rituals of false closure. It is that people will forget, because the logic of the happy ending has given them permission to be preoccupied.”

The vote on Wednesday was 297-114. It was a boost to arts advocates, who argued that such funding was just a tiny fraction of the federal budget yet offered any array of benefits to local communities. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) proposed the funding cut via an amendment to a larger government funding bill, arguing that the purpose was to make a “small dent” in federal spending