“In a fascinating new paper published this summer, five economists, Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, call into question higher education’s role in promoting upward mobility. The centerpiece of the paper is “mobility report cards” for each college in America. The researchers considered 30 million students between 1999 and 2014 and compared their parents’ incomes to their own post-college earnings, by school. With this data, they could see exactly which colleges helped the most students rise from the bottom of the earnings ladder to the top.”
Archives for August 2017
Lessons For The US? – How New Delhi Dealt With Its Colonial Monuments
“Britain withdrew from the subcontinent seventy years ago this month, creating, amid the bloodshed of Partition, the independent states of India and Pakistan. (They came into being at the famous stroke of midnight, the moment when Britain withdrew its sovereignty.) The imperial statues in New Delhi presented a dilemma; compared with the challenges of poverty, industrialization, and the desire to consolidate a constitutional democracy, they were a minor irritant, but a highly visible one.”
Art In Support Of Homeless: 9000 to Sleep In A Park In Edinburgh
“It is hoped 9,000 people will take part in the sleepout, which will see Liam Gallagher, Deacon Blue, Amy Macdonald and Frightened Rabbit play unplugged. No tickets will be sold, with members of the public and businesses joining the event by reaching fundraising targets and accepting the sleep-out challenge.”
It’s Two Years Before The Final Season Of “Game Of Thrones.” So An Engineer Enlisted Artificial Intelligence To Get There First
Software engineer Zack Thoutt has trained a recurrent neural network (RNN) to predict the events of The Winds of Winter. This machine-learning algorithm is modeled after the human brain—it can quickly analyze text and remember thousands of plot points.
Artist To Swarm Philly’s Ben Franklin Parkway With Lantern-Covered Pedicabs
In a new project titled Fireflies, Cai Guo-Qiang, the artist known for (literal) fireworks such as Fallen Blossoms on the front steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will send a fleet of pedicabs swathed in colorful lamps to perform synchronized maneuvers on the city’s grand avenue and then pick up passengers for an evening ride.
The Onion And Satire In The Age Of Fake News
“If someone doesn’t recognise the joke we’re making, then that’s a whole lot of labour lost. We aim never to trick people but rather to train them to see the world as we see it. In a world infested by ‘fake news’, the intention [and subsequent execution] is everything.”
Drama Critic Gets Bad Review, Takes It Personally, Discovers That It Hurts
In which Time Out London‘s theatre editor books a room in Edinburgh via Airbnb, has a minor disagreement with his host, and finds himself on the receiving end of a 500-word “screed”. “As I proceeded to moan about it on Twitter, I heard the faint sound of a very distant penny dropping …”
No, Asking The Community Who Doesn’t Attend Your Theatre What You Should Do Isn’t The End Of Expertise
Of course dig deeper behind the headline and the York initiative is not quite the latest nail in the coffin for expertise that it might first appear. Rather it’s a smart move to broaden audiences and repertoire and involve the local community from a theatre that has already pioneered involving young people in every aspect of theatre production from programming through to producing and marketing with the annual excellent Takeover Festival.
Bringing Western Opera (Back) To India
Patricia Rozario, a Mumbai-born soprano who made her name singing the music of the late John Tavener and now teaches at London’s Royal College of Music, has been making regular visits to her home country to give young singers advanced training in opera technique – and then creating opportunities for them to perform. Last month, Rozario and her colleagues produced the first opera seen at Mumbai’s old Royal Opera House in some eight decades.
How Tiny Eau Claire Wisconsin Became The Mid-West’s Hot New Town
The tipping point came in 2012: Arts advocates, the city, the state, and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (UWEC) joined forces on the $85 million Confluence Arts Center. Previous big projects proposed for downtown had failed to gain approval, but Confluence’s critical mass of partners overcame some mild opposition. When it’s completed next year, across from Phoenix Park, it’ll have two theaters, apartments, retail space, and a pedestrian plaza, along with artist and technical training facilities.
Why ‘Gone With The Wind’ May Be The One Confederate Memorial Worth Saving
Alyssa Rosenberg: “Both types of period pieces are valuable historical artifacts, not of the events and people they portray, but of previous generations of Americans’ efforts to figure out how they feel about the Civil War. … [What’s more, the film] casts a more gimlet eye on the Confederacy than it often gets credit for.”
So Curiosity Is A Genetic Trait?
“There are many studies that have shown that there is a strong genetic component to curiosity,” he notes. “It is also the case that some people are more curious than others, in the same way that some people have talent for music and others don’t or some people are smarter than others … But all people are curious, with the possible exception of people who are very deeply depressed or have certain kinds of brain damage.” Humans exhibit two basic types of curiosity that show up in different parts of the brain during functional MRI scans.
‘The Man Who Was Eaten Alive,’ Wildlife Filmmaker Alan Root, Dead At 80
“[He] splashed through crocodile-infested rivers, piloted hot-air balloons over stampeding wildebeests and lost a ‘Coke bottle’-size chunk of his calf to an angry hippopotamus, all while producing nearly two dozen acclaimed nature documentaries.”
How A Bell Labs Scientist Gave Us A Framework For Defining Information
“The information value of a message depends in part on the range of alternatives that were killed off in its choosing. Symbols chosen from a larger vocabulary of options carry more information than symbols chosen from a smaller vocabulary, because the choice eliminates a greater number of alternatives. This means that the amount of information transmitted is essentially a function of three things: the size of the set of possible symbols, the number of symbols sent per second, and the length of the message. The search for order, for structure and form in the wending catacombs of global communications had begun in earnest.”
Why We Keep Coming Back To ‘Waiting For Godot’
“Samuel French, Inc., which licenses it, reports that Godot will be professionally produced at least ten times around the world in the next three months, nearly 65 years after it first premiered.” Shannon Reed considers the reasons why – including this one: “we return to Godot at least partly to be able to walk out of Godot.”
One Public TV Station Cut Back On Pledge-Drive Time – And Saw Revenue Rise
“In what began as a one-year experiment last summer, the New York pubcaster [WNET] carved out regular time slots for fundraising programs on its flagship channel, ending the campaign-style drives that go on for weeks. With pledge confined to a limited number of slots – including Thursday primetime and weekends – the station also changed how it communicated with viewers and members about fundraising.”
This Guy Played His Sax While Undergoing Brain Surgery
Granted, this isn’t truly a first – an opera singer and a violinist have done the same thing – but it’s for a very good reason.
Violinist Dmitri Kogan Dead At 38
“The descendant of a celebrated musical dynasty” – two of his grandparents were Leonid Kogan and Elizabeth Gilels, Emil’s sister – “he was known for curating and supporting innovative music projects in his native country and abroad.”
Crystal Bridges Museum To Open Satellite Venue
The facility, in a former Kraft Foods factory about a mile and a half from the main museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, “will be known as the Momentary and will showcase visual and performing arts. It also will house an art[ist]-in-residency program.”
Canada’s Globe And Mail Kills Its Weekday Arts Section
The country’s national English-language daily “will be consolidating its ‘Life and Arts’ and ‘News’ sections, beginning in December. The reshuffling means that arts reviews will be relegated to the generic ‘News’ section, and that dedicated space for other arts coverage would be found exclusively in the paper’s weekend edition.”
How Houston’s Dance Community Is Holding Up Under Harvey
While the basement and parking garage of the Wortham Theater Center (home venue of Houston Ballet) are flooded, “so far, it seems that the small and mid-size companies came through the storm with minor damage.”
Turning Trucks Into Art And Rolling Them Across Spain
“Jaime Colsa owns a transport company that delivers ordinary consumer goods – computers, food, drinks. The contents of his trucks aren’t eye-catching, but his vehicles certainly are, adorned with paintings showing cartoonlike faces, dogs, brightly colored geometric patterns, spirals and landscapes.”
Truck Drivers Are Addicted To NPR, Even When They Disagree With It
As one trucker told reporter Alan Yu, “Every single driver I’ve ever talked to listens to NPR.” Why? Some of it is that the substance can keep people engaged for mile after mile. But this is also another case where geography is destiny.
New York City To Get European-Style Nightlife Czar
“‘Night mayors,’ as they are commonly known, are popular in Europe, where these figures are chiefly concerned with how people can have a good time after dark in their cities. London, Berlin, Paris and Zurich all have them – and now the initiative is making its way to New York, where night life is in great need of attention.”
She Directs Some Of The Most Searing Theatre Around Today
Yaël Farber: “Directing is basically asking a bunch of people to run full speed at a wall with you, and to believe that you’ll all pass through. And sometimes you won’t. But you have to feel it’s still worth the injury.”