Future of Museums

a key turning point there occurred in 2019, amid growing public pressure.

a rising awareness in Germany of its own colonial crimes — including the killing of tens of thousands of Nama and Herero people in what is now Namibia. The atrocity, carried out between 1904 and 1908, is widely seen as the first genocide of the 20th century.

Until then, the main vehicle for discussing the return of the Benin Bronzes had been the Benin Dialogue Group, a network founded in 2010 that brought together Nigerian representatives and figures from European museums with bronzes in their collections. The group, however, favored loans over transfers of ownership.

The agreement stipulated that all objects that had been obtained “unethically” would be liable for return and directed institutions to facilitate claims by producing publicly available inventories.

obstacles remained on the Nigerian side. Although the country had requested the return of the bronzes since the 1970s, there was conflict over who would take ownership of the artifacts. Both the Nigerian government and the oba of Benin, whose family ruled the historical Kingdom of Benin from which they were looted, claimed that they owned the items. Godwin Obaseki, the governor of Edo State, where Benin City is, said he acted as a facilitator to resolve the dispute.

Ultimately, he said, the oba’s family, Nigeria’s museum commission and the government of Edo State agreed to join a trust together, with independent directors that oversee the construction and operation of the new museum.

the agreement allows for 168 pieces chosen by Nigeria’s museum commission to remain in Germany “so that Benin’s art can be shown to the world.” The approximately 350 other bronzes that were part of the Berlin museum collections will be transported to Nigeria once the pavilion is completed.

Edo Museum of West African Art

It remains unclear who will pay for the shipment and insurance of the remaining items in Germany, and he noted that the bronzes’ storage and upkeep will come at a considerable cost, including electrical bills for climate control.

After a volunteer review committee voted to return all but a few of the titles, two disgruntled members of the committee filed a police report in May accusing district employees of providing “pornography” to children, triggering a monthslong criminal investigation by Hood County Constable Chad Jordan, which remained open as of August.

The ACLU of Texas made similar legal arguments in another civil rights complaint filed last month against the Keller Independent School District in North Texas in response to a policy banning any books that mention “gender fluidity.” The Education Department has yet to decide whether to open an investigation in Keller,

the nonprofit PEN America, which has tracked thousands of school book bans since last year,

If the Education Department finds Carroll students’ rights have been violated, experts said, the federal agency could require the district to implement the same types of diversity and inclusion training programs that conservative activists have fought to block in Southlake.

On Social.coop, we don’t just post and comment about what’s on our minds; we also decide on our moderation practices and enact them through committees. The Community Working Group handles conflict resolution through accountability processes. Its members are paid with funds from our sliding-scale member dues. The Tech Working Group maintains our servers, while the Finance Working Group keeps an eye on our budget. Any member can propose new activities and policies, and we can all vote on them according to the bylaws. We adjust Mastodon’s moderation settings as we see fit.

a number of servers organized to collectively ban those that harbored white supremacists, like Gab, from the rest of the fediverse — even if it remained active on the network, most people using Mastodon would never see Gab users’ posts.

Salman said he could imagine a future where companies, even the ones who generate the AI models, could certify that uploaded images are immunized against AI models. Of course, that isn’t much good news for the millions of images already uploaded to the open source library like LAION, but it could potentially make a difference for any image uploaded in the future.

there are some AI systems that can detect deepfake videos, and there are ways to train people to detect the small inconsistencies that show a video is being faked. The question is: will there come a time when neither human nor machine can discern if a photo or video has been manipulated?

Back in September, OpenAI announced users could once again upload human faces to their system, but claimed they had built in ways to stop users from showing faces in violent or sexual contexts. It also asked users not to upload images of people without their consent

Noah asked Murati if there was a way to make sure AI programs don’t lead us to a world “where nothing is real, and everything that’s real, isn’t?”

Rural four-day students generally learned as much as rural five-day day students. Statistically, both groups’ test scores rose by about the same amount every year.

small town and suburban students who switched to four-day weeks were far worse off than other students in the state

One possible explanation, Morton says, is sports. Many rural athletes and young student fans leave school early on Fridays or skip school altogether because of the great distances to travel to away games. In effect, many five-day students are only getting four-days of instruction in rural America.

The four-day work week is an attractive work perk in rural America that may lure better teachers.

By this theory, four-day schools may make it easier to hire better teachers, who could accomplish in four days what a less skilled teacher accomplishes in five days.

five-day weeks have their own drawbacks in rural America: hidden absences, skipped lessons and lower quality teachers.

Hispanic students, who accounted for one out of every six rural students in this study, suffered much more from four-day weeks than white students did. (Native American students, who made up one of every 10 rural students, did relatively better with the four-day week.)

biggest surprise to me in this review of the research is how tiny the cost savings are: 1 to 2 percent.  It does save some money not to run the heat or buses one day a week, but the largest expenses, teacher salaries, stay the same.

A new Pew Research Center survey finds that about one-in-five workers (22%) say they are very or somewhat likely to look for a new job in the next six months

those who describe their personal financial situation as only fair or poor are about twice as likely as those who say their finances are excellent or good to say they’d consider making a job change (29% vs. 15%).

About half of job switchers also change their industry or occupation in a typical month, but this share has not changed since 2019. Women who leave a job are more likely than men who leave a job to take a break from the labor force, and men with children at home are least likely to do the same.

One floor above the African exhibit, which opened in 1999, the bones of Robert Kennicott, the famed Smithsonian explorer who once lived in the Castle, are on view.