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in title, tags, annotations or urlReview: Tegan and Sara's Album 'Love You to Death' Tinkers With Synth-Pop for Precise and Bittersweet Emotions - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Listening closely to Tegan and Sara, the twin musicians enjoying unprecedented popularity two decades into their career due to 2013’s irresistible Heartthrob, can offer the kind of satisfaction that comes from solving a logic puzzle. Listening less closely can offer the same satisfaction great pop music always does. They bring a scientist’s rigor and an editor’s clarity to the stereotypically mushy topic of love, as well as, lately, to the synth-pop template they’ve helped repopularize on radio. Their trick is conveying lots of information—melodic, rhythmic, and lyrical—while maintaining simplicity and elegance.
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The first track, “That Girl,” sets the album’s bittersweet tone in a very cool way. It’s about considering who you’ve become and not liking what you find—an extremely Tegan and Sara concept in that it’s less a demonstration of emotions that it’s a demonstration of thinking about emotions.
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The vocals are moving enough to have worked nearly acapella.
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Sexual Freelancing in the Gig Economy - The New York Times - 0 views
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We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. Few people today refer to women as “damaged goods” or wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get the milk for free,” but we have “friends with benefits” and “invest in relationships.” An ex may be “on” or “off the market.” Online dating makes “shopping around” explicit. Blog after blog strategizes about how to maximize your “return on investment” on OkCupid.
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he ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.
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If you want to understand why “Netflix and chill” has replaced dinner and a movie, you need to look at how people work.
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Microsoft Created a Twitter Bot to Learn From Users. It Quickly Became a Racist Jerk. - The New York Times - 0 views
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Microsoft, in an emailed statement, described the machine-learning project as a social and cultural experiment.
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Microsoft said the artificial intelligence project had been designed to “engage and entertain people” through “casual and playful conversation,” and that it was built through mining public data. It was targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States and was developed by a staff that included improvisational comedians.
Do Political Experts Know What They're Talking About? | Wired Science | Wired.com - 1 views
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I often joke that every cable news show should be forced to display a disclaimer, streaming in a loop at the bottom of the screen. The disclaimer would read: “These talking heads have been scientifically proven to not know what they are talking about. Their blather is for entertainment purposes only.” The viewer would then be referred to Tetlock’s most famous research project, which began in 1984.
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He picked a few hundred political experts – people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends” – and began asking them to make predictions about future events. He had a long list of pertinent questions. Would George Bush be re-elected? Would there be a peaceful end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the pundits were asked to rate the probability of several possible outcomes. Tetlock then interrogated the pundits about their thought process, so that he could better understand how they made up their minds.
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Most of Tetlock’s questions had three possible answers; the pundits, on average, selected the right answer less than 33 percent of the time. In other words, a dart-throwing chimp would have beaten the vast majority of professionals. These results are summarized in his excellent Expert Political Judgment.
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In our culture, we have all accepted the notion... - more than 95 theses - 1 views
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In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb is the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.
Deluded Individualism - NYTimes.com - 2 views
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We tend to see ourselves as self-determining, self-conscious agents in all that we decide and do, and we cling to that image. But why? Why do we resist the truth? Why do we wish — strain, strive, against the grain of reality — to be autonomous individuals, and see ourselves as such?
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why do we presume individual agency in the first place? Why do we insist on it stubbornly, irrationally, often recklessly?
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though Republicans call for deep cuts to the safety net, their districts rely more on government support than their Democratic counterparts.
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What Is College For? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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74 percent of graduates from four-year colleges say that their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.”
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When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education
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This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases. But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.
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Wonder Woman Shouldn't Be a Sidekick - Noah Berlatsky - The Atlantic - 0 views
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for example, the main story is about Superman needing to accept and embrace his awesomeness; Wonder Woman is mostly there to advise and comfort and tell him his values are great before giving him the kiss that awakens him to his destiny
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especially frustrating because, initially, the whole point of Wonder Woman was that the world needed her and not Superman.
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was a psychologist and a committed feminist, and he conceived Wonder Woman as a superior replacement for the Man of Steel. In a 1944 article for The American Scholar, he noted that, "Superman and his innumerable followers satisfy the universal human longing to be stronger than all opposing obstacles." He added that "the wish to be super-strong is a healthy wish, a vital, compelling, power-producing desire."
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The English language is literally spiralling exponentially out of the control of pedants - Culture & Entertainment News | The Irish Times - Sat, Aug 31, 2013 - 0 views
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Even the most fanatical pedant must admit that usage is the ultimate arbiter of linguistic propriety. That is to say, a word means a certain thing because significant numbers of people take it to mean a certain thing. An informal process has evolved to monitor any shift in definition. At one end of the spectrum we meet words that will, from time to time, be “mistakenly” used in a way that does not conform to the dictionary definition. A chap might write “limpid” when he means “flaccid”. This still counts as an error. At the other end, we encounter words that, after decades of squabbling, have had their meaning formally transformed. Classical scholars will tell you that, derived from a term used by the Roman military, “decimate” used to mean the killing of one in 10 of any accused group. Now, we take it to mean the same as “annihilate” (which itself used to mean “make null and void”). The really interesting, contentious words can be found in the middle section of the spectrum.
Untier Of Knots « The Dish - 0 views
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Benedict XVI and John Paul II focused on restoring dogmatic certainty as the counterpart to papal authority. Francis is arguing that both, if taken too far, can be sirens leading us away from God, not ensuring our orthodoxy but sealing us off in calcified positions and rituals that can come to mean nothing outside themselves
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In this quest to seek and find God in all things there is still an area of uncertainty. There must be. If a person says that he met God with total certainty and is not touched by a margin of uncertainty, then this is not good. For me, this is an important key. If one has the answers to all the questions – that is the proof that God is not with him. It means that he is a false prophet using religion for himself. The great leaders of the people of God, like Moses, have always left room for doubt. You must leave room for the Lord, not for our certainties; we must be humble.
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If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God.
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Integrating Design Theory & the Scientific Process - Blog - Mills-Scofield LLC - Innovanomics, strategic alignment for innovation - 0 views
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I am sitting across the table from my thesis advisor. We stare at one another in silence, our faces reflecting equal levels of frustration. After a 15-minute debate on the differences between a parameter and a constraint, it has become apparent my advisor is an engineer, and I am not. My advisor and I meet weekly to discuss my research. Each week we inevitably hit a wall; expressing the same words, but interpreting them in entirely different ways. With a background in biology and design, my definition of details often do not align with an engineer’s. However, we both know the objectives of my thesis, and both want to work towards that goal (and diploma) So why are we having such a difficult time communicating?
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ealization that our different disciplines do not speak the same language.
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There was never room for another subject like art, no space for speaking two languages fluently. My educational system created silos between the different disciplines. Once I chose one path, essentially my language, other subjects became foreign.
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The funniest TED Talks | Playlist | TED.com - 0 views
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We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity
The Last Cosby Defenders Throw In The Towel - 0 views
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people treat sexual abuse differently than other crimes. Because the crime reveals icky things about our society and our continuing problem of gendered violence, a lot of people simply refuse to see it for what it is, either going into deep denial or holding accusations of rape to a much higher standard of evidence than they would any other crime.
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The Cosby situation is a classic example of this. Public Policy Polling found, back in January, that despite the testimony of dozens of women, 41 percent of Americans remained unsure about Cosby’s guilt. Another 20 percent outright preferred to believe all those women were lying rather than admit that he probably did it. A minority of Americans—39 percent—were able to look at all these testimonials and accept the likely truth that he did it.
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there’s a felony conviction in only 5 percent of rape cases. That is well beyond “innocent until proven guilty” and shows that eyewitness testimony is simply disregarded in rape cases to an extent that isn’t true in all other crimes. Fixing this situation requires everyone—not just cops and judges, but ordinary Americans who might sit a jury one day—to rethink our attitudes towards rape accusations.
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Addicts, Mythmakers and Philosophers | Issue 90 | Philosophy Now - 0 views
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Alan Brody explains Plato’s/Socrates’ understanding of habitually bad behavior.
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the condition is capable of creating urges and motivations which bring about highly significant losses to a person’s well-being in spite of the person’s standing preference not to live like that.
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It’s common to change one’s mind when faced with temptation. Sometimes the choice to go ahead with the temptation is the result of a cost-benefit evaluation – in other words, it seems worthwhile to do it. At other times a person might gratify their desire or urge without entertaining any qualms or even thoughts about it. So although an addict’s habitual behavior might be atypical, rather than seeing it as a result of a compulsion they’re not strong enough to fight against, why not see their addictive behavior as something done in a willing manner, because the person feels like doing it, and/or they regard it as worth doing?
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