Category: issues

“Called Astana, it is the world’s latest example of a rare but persistent type, the capital from zero. It is in a line that includes St Petersburg, Washington DC, Canberra, Ankara and Brasilia and like them it provokes a question: can a city, in all its teeming complexity, really be planned?”

“The Edinburgh International Festival is braced for a possible reduction in the size of its programme next year as it faces cuts of 10% or 15% in Government funding.”

“Since its rebirth after a $4.8 million renovation, the Dumas Center has been losing money. And the two arts organizations that were its main tenants, the opera and the music lab, have left, replaced by two non-arts-related groups: Accunet Information Group and the Virginia CARES program.”

“The research, published in The Journal of Educational Psychology, found that students tend to study on computers as they would with traditional texts: They mindlessly over-copy long passages verbatim, take incomplete or linear notes, build lengthy outlines that make it difficult to connect related information, and rely on memory drills like re-reading text or recopying notes.”

“As I see it, the agreement makes two huge carve-outs to neutrality and regulation of the internet: mobile and anything new. So ol, grandpa internet may chug along giving us YouTube videos of flaming cats, but you want to get that while you’re out of your house? Well, that’s the nonnet.”

“Parochial San Franciscans identify such traits as unique to this place, but they define today’s island between the Hudson and East rivers equally well. The difference in New York is the sense of adventure – a willingness to explore innovations at a large scale, rather than recoil from anything ambitious or new.”

“But it’s not just the nice — and free — accommodation: None of these museum heads pay income tax on the value of this housing, which combined would rent for about $400,000 a year.”

“But some proponents of net neutrality say that by excluding wireless and other online services, Google and Verizon are creating a loophole that could allow carriers to circumvent regulation meant to ensure openness.”

“Whenever it comes up plagiarism is a hot button topic and essays about it tend to be philosophically and morally inflated. But there are really only two points to make. (1) Plagiarism is a learned sin. (2) Plagiarism is not a philosophical issue.”

“It is an ingenious telling of just how German emerged from the primordial Germanic soup, and how many other ways it could have been if, say, Luther had been born 100 miles farther north.”