Why We Laugh? "One theory of why people laugh — the superiority theory — says that people laugh to assert that they are on a level equal to or higher than those around them. Research has shown that bosses tend to crack more jokes than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around women, while laughing louder when in a group of men." The Economist 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:39 pm
Patently Absurd America's patent system is broken, impeding the orderly processing of ideas. "Lawyers, companies, inventors and politicians all agree that the nation's patent system is in desperate need of reform. They cite concerns about proliferating litigation, questionable licenses and a potential decline in American competitiveness. The question is how to reform: For all the complaints, little consensus has emerged on how to fix the system." C/Net.com 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:17 pm
Brain Calisthenics How to keep sharp mentally? You have to exercise. "Among people who work with older adults, the concept of "cognitive fitness" has become a buzzword to describe activities that stimulate underutilized areas of the brain and improve memory. Proponents of brain-fitness exercises say such mental conditioning can help prevent or delay memory loss and the onset of other age-related cognitive disorders." Wired 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:11 pm
Click here for more Ideas stories...
Carmel - Too Many Galleries? Carmel California has built a tourist trade on its galleries. "But now galleries outnumber artists, and Carmel faces a clash between creativity and commerce that may be painfully familiar to residents in other scenic tourist spots across America. Today, galleries selling everything from Impressionist landscapes to cartoon dog portraits make up one of every three businesses along Carmel's stone walkways. In all, 105 stores sell art in this town of a little more than 4,000 residents. For a while, the city was approving a new gallery every week." Los Angeles Times 08/05/05
Posted: 08/05/2005 6:43 am
Will New Tall Buildings Wreck London? "Nine enormous and hugely unsophisticated skyscrapers are being mooted by the world's architectural mega-corps. The London model dictates that, where a skyscraper is built, open space must be left around it, creating dim plazas. Consequently, tall buildings, while they do increase office space, fail to increase the density of the city, instead merely prodding the skyline with primitive architectural fingers, the sole aim of which is to create a recognisable logo. This leaves blank, unnecessary plazas, inevitably filled with the usual coffee shops and chain stores, the city becoming in effect suburbanised." Financial Times 08/03/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:33 pm
Quantifying The Art Market's Rise What's the art market doing? Well, it's going up. Here're the stats: Prices generally rose 4.1 percent in the first six months. The number of records set rose to 4,614 from 3,920 in 2004's first half. The general increase in art prices generated a sharp rise in the number of auction records. Bloomberg 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:06 pm
Click here for more Visual Arts stories...
Ideas
Why We Laugh? "One theory of why people laugh — the superiority theory — says that people laugh to assert that they are on a level equal to or higher than those around them. Research has shown that bosses tend to crack more jokes than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around women, while laughing louder when in a group of men." The Economist 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:39 pm
Patently Absurd America's patent system is broken, impeding the orderly processing of ideas. "Lawyers, companies, inventors and politicians all agree that the nation's patent system is in desperate need of reform. They cite concerns about proliferating litigation, questionable licenses and a potential decline in American competitiveness. The question is how to reform: For all the complaints, little consensus has emerged on how to fix the system." C/Net.com 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:17 pm
Brain Calisthenics How to keep sharp mentally? You have to exercise. "Among people who work with older adults, the concept of "cognitive fitness" has become a buzzword to describe activities that stimulate underutilized areas of the brain and improve memory. Proponents of brain-fitness exercises say such mental conditioning can help prevent or delay memory loss and the onset of other age-related cognitive disorders." Wired 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:11 pm
Click here for more Ideas stories...
Carmel - Too Many Galleries? Carmel California has built a tourist trade on its galleries. "But now galleries outnumber artists, and Carmel faces a clash between creativity and commerce that may be painfully familiar to residents in other scenic tourist spots across America. Today, galleries selling everything from Impressionist landscapes to cartoon dog portraits make up one of every three businesses along Carmel's stone walkways. In all, 105 stores sell art in this town of a little more than 4,000 residents. For a while, the city was approving a new gallery every week." Los Angeles Times 08/05/05
Posted: 08/05/2005 6:43 am
Will New Tall Buildings Wreck London? "Nine enormous and hugely unsophisticated skyscrapers are being mooted by the world's architectural mega-corps. The London model dictates that, where a skyscraper is built, open space must be left around it, creating dim plazas. Consequently, tall buildings, while they do increase office space, fail to increase the density of the city, instead merely prodding the skyline with primitive architectural fingers, the sole aim of which is to create a recognisable logo. This leaves blank, unnecessary plazas, inevitably filled with the usual coffee shops and chain stores, the city becoming in effect suburbanised." Financial Times 08/03/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:33 pm
Quantifying The Art Market's Rise What's the art market doing? Well, it's going up. Here're the stats: Prices generally rose 4.1 percent in the first six months. The number of records set rose to 4,614 from 3,920 in 2004's first half. The general increase in art prices generated a sharp rise in the number of auction records. Bloomberg 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:06 pm
Click here for more Visual Arts stories...
Domingo: Retirement Is Near At the age of 64, tenor Placido Domingo says he's close to retiring from singing. "The day is close that I quit singing. I really don't know how to do it - a tour or a concert or if I just say, that's it, that's the last night."
BBC 08/05/05
Posted: 08/05/2005 6:38 am
Judge Ye Not So Ye Can Hear Frank Oteri ponders the limitations of judgment on really hearing music: "I have long thought that the only way to be a receptive listener to music in a world where the Schoenberg/Cage emancipation of dissonance was a fait accompli is to engage in an emancipation of judgment. Such a stance not only liberates dissonance by also re-embraces consonance, any kind of timbre, rhythm or lack thereof, duration, you name it... Once we set up paradigms of good and bad, worthwhile and worthless, cool and uncool, we doom ourselves at best to being tomorrow's Horatio Parker and, at worst, to being a mirror image of the very thing we claim not to let into our aesthetic purview." NewMusicBox 08/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 6:20 pm
Why The iPod Fails At Classical Music "Classical music fits badly into the Walkman world, and even worse into the iPod world. For one thing, the technology doesn't suit it very well. Try listening to an opera on an iPod, and you'll discover the software puts a gap between tracks, which is pretty annoying if you're trying to enjoy the dramatic flow of an opera scene. And just try searching for your favourite Beethoven trio on iTunes, which is designed to search for "song" and "artist", and copes badly with keys and opus numbers. But the very conception of music embodied in the iPod is bound to seem odd to a classical music lover." The Telegraph (UK) 08/05/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 6:04 pm
Going Cheap - A Chance To Conduct A Big Orchestra The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has put itself up fo sale on eBay. The winning bidder will have the opportunity to conduct the orchestra. "It will be interesting to see whether it will be bought by some terribly serious budding conductor who sees this as their break, or someone completely inexperienced who wants to be charitable towards us." The Guardian (UK) 08/05/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:55 pm
Is Vinyl A Thing Of The Past For DJ's? "When laptop DJing first came on the scene a few years back, there was a small handful of software programs for DJs to choose from, and none of them offered the same range of song manipulation options available with turntables or even CD DJ players. DJs could cross-fade (or blend) digital tracks, but the crucial function of shifting the pitch (or speed) of a song to match beats was unreliable. There was also the question of credibility. Vinyl was for purists. Digital was seen as cheating. But in the last year, technology has finally caught up with DJs' expectations — and given them a way to keep it real." Los Angeles Times 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:15 pm
Click here for more Music stories...
Poll: The Song That Changed The World "Bob Dylan's song "Like a Rolling Stone" topped a poll Friday to find the 100 songs, movies, TV shows and books that "changed the world" in the opinion of musicians, actors and industry experts." Yahoo! (Reuters) 08/05/05
Posted: 08/05/2005 7:03 am
Hollywood Wins In CAFTA Copyright Accord The Central American Free Trade Agreement included a big win for American lobbyists for tougher copyright laws. "You wouldn't know it from a political debate veering between labor standards in Nicaragua and the evils of protectionism, but one major section of CAFTA will export some of the more controversial sections of U.S. copyright law. Once it takes effect, CAFTA will require Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to mirror the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's broad prohibition on bypassing copy-protection technology." MediaChannel.org 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 6:28 pm
A Congressional Agreement On NEA Funding "While the Senate's version of the bill, passed in June, increased the NEA's budget by $5 million, bringing it to $126.3 million from $121.3 million, the House's version was twice as generous, with an increase of $10 million setting the endowment's funding at $131.3 million. In the end, the Senate-House conference committee agreed to raise the NEA budget by what the Senate had recommended, but not without applying additional cuts." Backstage 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:35 pm
Click here for more Arts Issues stories...
Anne Sofie von Otter At 50 The soprano is aware of her voice changing: "A little bit. I'm not 20 any more. I can hear it. But I don't think it's a bad thing. It's a little broader than it used to be, has more volume in the lower and middle registers. The vibrato changes too. Everything is a bit bigger, a bit slower, but not in an embarrassing way. I'm enjoying using my voice in a different way. I'm using more of it and I am enjoying that. Ten or 15 years ago, using the mass of the voice didn't interest me. Then I was looking for a thinner, more instrumental sound. I did a lot of baroque music and Mozart. I'm still doing baroque and Mozart but not as much, and therefore I can use my voice in a different way. The Guardian (UK) 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:45 pm
Click here for morlass=redmenu href="http://www.artsjournal.com/music/">Music
Domingo: Retirement Is Near At the age of 64, tenor Placido Domingo says he's close to retiring from singing. "The day is close that I quit singing. I really don't know how to do it - a tour or a concert or if I just say, that's it, that's the last night."
BBC 08/05/05
Posted: 08/05/2005 6:38 am
Judge Ye Not So Ye Can Hear Frank Oteri ponders the limitations of judgment on really hearing music: "I have long thought that the only way to be a receptive listener to music in a world where the Schoenberg/Cage emancipation of dissonance was a fait accompli is to engage in an emancipation of judgment. Such a stance not only liberates dissonance by also re-embraces consonance, any kind of timbre, rhythm or lack thereof, duration, you name it... Once we set up paradigms of good and bad, worthwhile and worthless, cool and uncool, we doom ourselves at best to being tomorrow's Horatio Parker and, at worst, to being a mirror image of the very thing we claim not to let into our aesthetic purview." NewMusicBox 08/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 6:20 pm
Why The iPod Fails At Classical Music "Classical music fits badly into the Walkman world, and even worse into the iPod world. For one thing, the technology doesn't suit it very well. Try listening to an opera on an iPod, and you'll discover the software puts a gap between tracks, which is pretty annoying if you're trying to enjoy the dramatic flow of an opera scene. And just try searching for your favourite Beethoven trio on iTunes, which is designed to search for "song" and "artist", and copes badly with keys and opus numbers. But the very conception of music embodied in the iPod is bound to seem odd to a classical music lover." The Telegraph (UK) 08/05/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 6:04 pm
Going Cheap - A Chance To Conduct A Big Orchestra The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has put itself up fo sale on eBay. The winning bidder will have the opportunity to conduct the orchestra. "It will be interesting to see whether it will be bought by some terribly serious budding conductor who sees this as their break, or someone completely inexperienced who wants to be charitable towards us." The Guardian (UK) 08/05/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:55 pm
Is Vinyl A Thing Of The Past For DJ's? "When laptop DJing first came on the scene a few years back, there was a small handful of software programs for DJs to choose from, and none of them offered the same range of song manipulation options available with turntables or even CD DJ players. DJs could cross-fade (or blend) digital tracks, but the crucial function of shifting the pitch (or speed) of a song to match beats was unreliable. There was also the question of credibility. Vinyl was for purists. Digital was seen as cheating. But in the last year, technology has finally caught up with DJs' expectations — and given them a way to keep it real." Los Angeles Times 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:15 pm
Click here for more Music stories...
Poll: The Song That Changed The World "Bob Dylan's song "Like a Rolling Stone" topped a poll Friday to find the 100 songs, movies, TV shows and books that "changed the world" in the opinion of musicians, actors and industry experts." Yahoo! (Reuters) 08/05/05
Posted: 08/05/2005 7:03 am
Hollywood Wins In CAFTA Copyright Accord The Central American Free Trade Agreement included a big win for American lobbyists for tougher copyright laws. "You wouldn't know it from a political debate veering between labor standards in Nicaragua and the evils of protectionism, but one major section of CAFTA will export some of the more controversial sections of U.S. copyright law. Once it takes effect, CAFTA will require Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to mirror the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's broad prohibition on bypassing copy-protection technology." MediaChannel.org 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 6:28 pm
A Congressional Agreement On NEA Funding "While the Senate's version of the bill, passed in June, increased the NEA's budget by $5 million, bringing it to $126.3 million from $121.3 million, the House's version was twice as generous, with an increase of $10 million setting the endowment's funding at $131.3 million. In the end, the Senate-House conference committee agreed to raise the NEA budget by what the Senate had recommended, but not without applying additional cuts." Backstage 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:35 pm
Click here for more Arts Issues stories...
Anne Sofie von Otter At 50 The soprano is aware of her voice changing: "A little bit. I'm not 20 any more. I can hear it. But I don't think it's a bad thing. It's a little broader than it used to be, has more volume in the lower and middle registers. The vibrato changes too. Everything is a bit bigger, a bit slower, but not in an embarrassing way. I'm enjoying using my voice in a different way. I'm using more of it and I am enjoying that. Ten or 15 years ago, using the mass of the voice didn't interest me. Then I was looking for a thinner, more instrumental sound. I did a lot of baroque music and Mozart. I'm still doing baroque and Mozart but not as much, and therefore I can use my voice in a different way. The Guardian (UK) 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:45 pm
Click here for more People stories...
Long Wharf Managing Director Quits Michael Stotts is leaving as managing director of New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre because of conflicts with the theatre's board. Stotts declined to detail the conflicts other than to say there were "clashes between me and some board members. There is a culture of governance that made it very difficult for a managing director to do what that person was hired to do. I've been increasingly frustrated with these differences in the last few months and so it was time for us to part ways." Hartford Courant 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 7:32 pm
"Unendurable" London Mask To Close Behind the Iron Mask, a three-actor chamber musical based loosely on The Man in the Iron Mask opened this week in London's West End to terrible reviews, and announced it will close. How bad were the press notices? "It's so bad that it is merely unendurable," wrote Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph. "There's no insane flourish to its mediocrity, no sublimity to its awfulness. It is just relentlessly, agonisingly third-rate." The cast, he said, "perform as if they have been on a prolonged Mogadon bender". The Guardian (UK) 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:49 pm
Click here for more Theatre stories...
Quills Lit Award Announces Finalists "Authors ranging from Bob Dylan to Stephen King and J.K. Rowling on Thursday made the Quills short-list -- a new American literary award pitched as a populist event with a touch of Hollywood glitz. Readers will vote for the winners in 19 categories that include graphic novels and romance, as well as the more traditional fiction and biography categories from established prizes such as the Pulitzer and the National Book Award." Yahoo! (Reuters) 08/05/05
Posted: 08/05/2005 7:05 am
Brits Hot On Sci-Fi "Science fiction is booming and the British writers are leading the pack. For the first time in its 63-year history, all the writers nominated for the prestigious Hugo award for the best novel are British. The Hugos, named after science-fiction publishing legend Hugo Gernsback, are the genre writing equivalent of the Oscars." BBC 08/05/05
Posted: 08/05/2005 6:40 am
Click here for more Publishing stories...
EU Considers New Anti-Piracy Law The European Union is considering anti-piracy legislation that would be stricter than that in the US. "A directive being pushed by the European Commission would, among other things, criminalize "attempting, aiding or abetting and inciting" acts of copyright infringement. The EU parliament will take up the proposal later this year." Wired 08/05/05
Posted: 08/05/2005 6:58 am
Video Games - Mainstream Mass "Gaming has gone from a minority activity a few years ago to mass entertainment. Video games increasingly resemble films, with photorealistic images, complex plotlines and even famous actors. The next generation of games consoles—which will be launched over the next few months by Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo—will intensify the debate over gaming and its impact on society, as the industry tries to reach out to new customers and its opponents become ever more vocal." The Economist 08/04/05
Posted: 08/04/2005 5:20 pm
Click here for more Media stories...
