Group items tagged

OSLO — “Skam,” a racy, emotionally intense, true-to-life Norwegian web and television series, follows a group of Oslo teenagers as they navigate sex, school, drinking, depression, rape, religion, coming out and the pains of status anxiety, in real life and online.

Each season of “Skam” centers on one character. Season 3, which wraps up next week, has focused on Isak (Tarjei Sandvik Moe), who is coming to terms with being gay and has fallen for an older boy, Even (Henrik Holm).

“‘Skam’ is combining reality and fiction and the line between them isn’t so clear,” said Mari Magnus, 27, the web producer for the show, who writes the text messages and masterminds the Instagram accounts.

On the surface, the dispute is about grout and tiles, but it is also a collision of values and taste. Ms. Breen said she suspected that one of the founders of RFR was just not a fan of “Le Tricorne” — a person who heard him discussing the work said he dismissed it as “a schmatte,” Yiddish for rag — and was using the damaged-wall argument as a pretense to ditch it for good.

His own tastes run to contemporary artists, like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, and he has told people that he wants to showcase highlights of his vast trove in the space now occupied by “Le Tricorne.”Neither Mr. Rosen nor anyone contacted at RFR returned calls for comment.

“Le Tricorne” is not regarded as one of Picasso’s masterpieces, partly because it strays from the avant-garde path he had started traveling a decade earlier with Cubism. Its sheer size reduces its market value, as does its origins as a stage prop. In 2008, when the conservancy wanted an estimated value for insurance purposes, Christie’s appraised the work at $1.6 million.

Hubble spies colorful change of seasons on Saturn

arth isn't the only planet that experiences a changing of the seasons. The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the colorful transition from summer to fall in Saturn's northern hemisphere -- a change years in the making.

Changes can be seen in Saturn's northern hemisphere as it transitions from summer to fall. The Hubble Space Telescope captured these images in 2018, 2019 and 2020 (left to right).

In another part of the study, the researchers determined that defining vaccination in terms of contamination—“the seasonal flu vaccine involves injecting people with the seasonal flu virus”—increased prejudice in subjects concerned about disease, whereas defining it in terms of protection—“the seasonal flu vaccine protects people from the seasonal flu virus”—had no such effect. Initiatives that minimize disease, the researchers concluded, might also end up minimizing discrimination.

It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump enlisted such language to serve his nativist agenda. Although COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has killed more than twenty thousand people and affected countries around the world, Trump’s fixation on its origins in Wuhan, China, has encouraged a rash of anti-Asian bigotry in the United States.

This month, Trump has taken to referring to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus,” presenting the label as a corrective to Beijing officials’ claims that the American military was the source of the outbreak.

That’s what researchers in a classic study from 1998 found when they put female and male undergraduates in dressing rooms with a mirror and either swimsuits or sweaters in a range of sizes. The students were instructed to try on the assigned clothing and wear it for a while before filling out a sham evaluation of the apparel.

To confirm that they were detecting a detrimental effect of wearing a bathing suit, and not anxieties about math, researchers ran a second study. This time, instead of math questions, they used a test of the capacity for focused attention and again found that women wearing swimsuits scored lower than women wearing sweaters

In short, when young women are prompted to reflect on their physical appearance, they seem to lose intellectual focus.

Kazuyoshi Miura just can't give up playing football

53-year-old

36th season as a professional.

Present bias shows up not just in experiments, of course, but in the real world. Especially in the United States, people egregiously undersave for retirement—even when they make enough money to not spend their whole paycheck on expenses, and even when they work for a company that will kick in additional funds to retirement plans when they contribute.

hen people hear the word bias, many if not most will think of either racial prejudice or news organizations that slant their coverage to favor one political position over another. Present bias, by contrast, is an example of cognitive bias—the collection of faulty ways of thinking that is apparently hardwired into the human brain. The collection is large. Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” contains 185 entries, from actor-observer bias (“the tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation … and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite”) to the Zeigarnik effect (“uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones”)

If I had to single out a particular bias as the most pervasive and damaging, it would probably be confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation, and to discount or ignore any piece of evidence that seems to support an alternate view

a steady push toward viewing on phones and tablets is shrinking the spirit of films. In the past, he said — citing “A Man for All Seasons,” “8 ½,” and “The Searchers” — there was a grandeur to films that delivered long-form storytelling on very large screens.

the prospect that a film will embed itself into the cultural and historical consciousness of the American public in the way of “Gone With the Wind” or the “Godfather” series seems greatly diminished in an era when content is consumed in thinner slices, and the films that play broadly often lack depth.

After six weeks in theaters “The Master,” a 70-millimeter character study much praised by critics, has been seen by about 1.9 million viewers. That is significantly smaller than the audience for a single hit episode of a cable show like “Mad Men” or “The Walking Dead.”

Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

You had all week to finalize a proposal, but waited to do it until 4:30pm on the Friday.

He found that even a series of simple tasks increased in complexity to fill up the time allotted to it. As the length of time allocated to a task became shorter, the task became simpler and easier to solve.

hovering above all that is a more subtle — and quietly clever — narrative arc, involving the gap between parents and children and how each generation has a different awareness of what it means to be black in 2014.

I want it to succeed because the show arrives when black characters on mainstream broadcast networks who directly deal with issues like race are incredibly rare.

so far, his approach seems to be a hit. The premiere resonated with critics and attracted a robust 11 million viewers, besides generating a lot of positive reactions and discussions on social media. In a vote of confidence, ABC has given the show a full-season order.

This holiday season will be a lonely one for many people as social distancing due to COVID-19 continues, and it is important to understand how isolation affects our health.

This holiday season will be a lonely one for many people as social distancing due to COVID-19 continues, and it is important to understand how isolation affects our health.

based on variations in the volume of different brain regions as well as based on how those regions communicate with one another across brain networks.

There is no conventional “narrative” to Fortnite Battle Royale – Epic doesn’t provide an origin story for its endless 100-player wars, it doesn’t give us long cinematic scenes with characters explaining the world, the factions and the plot. Instead, Fortnite is split into a series of three-month-long seasons, each with a climactic event that suggests some kind of interdimensional struggle taking place over the future of the game’s isolated island locale.

Ostensibly, there’s no need for a narrative – Epic could, in theory, retain player interest simply by making sure there is a steady supply of new dance moves, costumes and scenic features to enjoy. Instead, the studio has built a vast functional universe in which an alien known as The Visitor is attempting to mend the space-time fissure around the island, and communicated this through systems of signs, signals and miracles – sort of like the Medieval Christian church

Indeed, it’s interesting how Fortnite has co-opted a lot of religious symbolism into the game’s suggestive narrative, from comets trailing across the sky, to the decidedly apocalyptic imagery of fire, brimstone and global destruction.

As many as one million seabirds died at sea in less than 12 months in one of the largest mass die-offs in recorded history -- and researchers say warm ocean waters are to blame.

The birds, a fish-eating species called the common murre, were severely emaciated and appeared to have died of starvation between the summer of 2015 and the spring of 2016, washing up along North America's west coast, from California to Alaska.

The heat wave created the Blob -- a 1,000-mile (1,600 km) stretch of ocean that was warmed by 3 to 6 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 10.8 Fahrenheit). A high-pressure ridge calmed the ocean waters -- meaning heat stays in the water, without storms to help cool it down.

If you've heard of the term "MSG," you might have also heard of its common -- but inaccurate -- connotations.For years, monosodium glutamate, a food additive known as MSG, has been branded as an unhealthy processed ingredient mainly found in Chinese food, despite a lack of supporting scientific evidence.

Now, activists have launched a campaign called "Redefine CRS." Headed by Japanese food and seasoning company Ajinomoto, the online campaign urges Merriam-Webster to change its entry to reflect the scientific consensus on MSG -- and the impact of misinformation on the American public's perception of Asian cuisine.

First off: what is MSG?Chances are, you've eaten it. It's a common amino acid naturally found in foods like tomatoes and cheese, which people then figured out how to extract and ferment -- a process similar to how we make yogurt and wine. This fermented MSG is now used to flavor lots of different foods like stews or chicken stock. It's so widely used because it taps into our fifth basic taste: umami (pronounced oo-maa-mee). Umami is less well known than the other tastes like saltiness or sweetness, but it's everywhere -- it's the complex, savory taste you find in mushrooms or Parmesan cheese.

I work as a psychotherapist and my specialism is ultra-high net worth individuals.

I got into working with billionaires by accident. I had one wealthy client, who passed my name around to their acquaintances. They are called the 1% for a reason: there are not that many of them and so the circle is tight.

Over the years, I have developed a great deal of empathy for those who have far too much. The television programme Succession, now in its third season, does such a good job of exploring the kinds of toxic excess my clients struggle with that when my wife is watching it I have to leave the room; it just feels like work.

According to “fourth turning” proponents, American history goes through recurring cycles. Each one, which lasts about 80 to 100 years, consists of four generation-long seasons, or “turnings.” The winter season is a time of upheaval and reconstruction — a fourth turning.

The theory first appeared in “The Fourth Turning,” a work of pop political science that has had a cult following more or less since it was published in 1997. In the last few years of political turmoil, the book and its ideas have bubbled into the mainstream.

According to “The Fourth Turning,” previous crisis periods include the American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II. America entered its latest fourth turning in the mid-2000s. It will culminate in a crisis sometime in the 2020s — i.e., now.