the votes — in Hollywood as in Washington, D.C. — are a result of a highly contingent, political process, handed down not from movie gods but from the very people who stand to benefit from it
............ Oscar campaigns are often run by professional strategists, essentially a specialized breed of publicist. Their job begins as early as a year before the awards, sometimes before a film is even shot. They advise on which festival a film should premiere at, shape a campaign platform and hope that the film gains enough momentum to propel it into awards season. Sometimes several strategists work on a single film, and the war room of an Oscars campaign can grow to be as many as 10 or 20 people. All the stops along the campaign trail — screenings, events, other award shows — are an opportunity to workshop talking points and gauge the competition. And unlike the Golden Globes, which are voted on by 199 entertainment journalists, the Oscars electorate is a voting body of about 10,000 industry peers ........... The Oscars race is split into Phases 1 and 2: before and after the nominations, which is akin to the divide between the presidential primaries and the general election. ........ “Top Gun: Maverick” saved the movie business with its nearly $1.5 billion at the box office. ............. “They try to change someone else’s narrative by adding dirt to the layer,” Angellotti told me, citing the old rumor that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck didn’t really write “Good Will Hunting.” ......... The film still won, but many believe another best-picture campaign planted the story. ........ how opportunistic it was for the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” cast to visit the site of the Monterey Park shooting on the eve of the nomination announcements ........... “We prefer to be invisible,” a strategist working on several films this year told me. And yet here they were, seemingly sparring out in the open. .......... Oscars campaigning has been around as long as there have been Oscars, but the modern playbook was invented by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Weinstein popularized the practice of sending out VHS screeners, demanded that actors clear their schedules for awards season and relentlessly lobbied academy members. Studios generally held their noses at aggressive campaigning, but Weinstein, unable to compete with their budgets, wasn’t above a shameless publicity stunt. .......... For “My Left Foot,” one of his first Oscar campaigns, he got Daniel Day-Lewis to go to Capitol Hill to speak with lawmakers about the Americans With Disabilities Act. For “Il Postino,” a 1994 Italian-language film about a mailman who befriends the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, he persuaded more than a dozen celebrities, including Julia Roberts, Samuel L. Jackson and Madonna — none of whom appeared in the film — to record poetry readings for the film’s soundtrack........ Weinstein was widely rumored to wage whisper campaigns against his competitors. The last time Spielberg won a best-director Oscar was in 1999 for “Saving Private Ryan,” which lost an epic behind-the-scenes battle for best picture to Miramax’s “Shakespeare in Love.” ............. Whereas a major studio might spend anywhere from $5 million to $25 million on an Oscars campaign, Netflix was estimated to deploy upward of $40 million on “Roma” in 2019, more than double the film’s production budget. ........ A nomination means that an actor’s or director’s fee goes up considerably. .......... “It’s gotten to a place where every single filmmaker thinks their movie is an award contender.” ........... Much of the criticism leveled at the Riseborough campaign has been about how strategic it seemed despite being described as organic. ......... She posted about Riseborough almost every day during the week of nominations voting. “Hello actors branch of the academy!” Fisher wrote on Instagram, addressing the voters directly. ......... A best-actress campaign can run to $5 million. ....... “Hand-to-hand combat,” as this style of campaigning is known.......... The thing with actors is they tend to like a certain kind of performance — big, physical and full of interesting “choices,” all of which Riseborough’s is. (Kate Winslet called it the greatest performance by a female actor she had ever seen.) ............ Have you seen what happens when actors come together for a cause? It can be clueless, but it is usually well intentioned. .......... The academy’s regulations are a bit like the Talmud: maddeningly specific in certain places ............ At the end of the day, the campaign game is about finding the most compelling narrative, one that inspires people to root for you. ......... “This town doesn’t move without actors,” one veteran strategist told me. “If they came down on this campaign, well, that’s an indictment of Charlize Theron, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton. But the truth is, if I did it, I would be in academy jail.” ............ It is worth remembering that the Academy Awards were created as a marketing device to entice people to see movies and, like football, used to air on Monday nights to boost ratings. “This is not the Nobel Peace Prize,” Lundberg told me. That doesn’t necessarily stop some Oscar winners from acting as if it is. ......... (Theatrical attendance has shrunk by half in the last four years.) .How to Set Boundaries With a Difficult Family Member It’s tricky but doable, says Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist and best-selling author. Here are her strategies for getting started........ “Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself” and a popular Instagram therapist whose 1.7 million followers devour her pithy nuggets. (A recent example: “The silent treatment isn’t teaching them a lesson; it’s showing you can’t handle conflict.”) ......... she offers practical strategies for dealing with toxic family dynamics — and ways to successfully disconnect from a person when you decide to do so. ........ as an adult you get to choose who you want to be in relationships with and how,” Ms. Tawwab said. “Even with family.” ......... To begin, identify the issues that are affecting your dynamic with this family member, she said. Then decide what type of relationship you can realistically have, and want to have, with that person, taking those dynamics into account. ....... “success” may mean that you accept the way your in-laws are and stop trying to change the family culture ........... you cannot change your family members ........... “When the solution to the problem is ‘they need to change,’ the problem will never go away,” she writes. “You can only control your side of the street.” ......... If this person did not change a single thing, what — if anything — could I do to make the relationship different? Write it all down in a list, she said: “These are the issues in this relationship. These are the parts of those issues that I can change, and these are the parts that are not my stuff.” ........... coping strategies within her control, like letting his calls go to voice mail so she can return them if and when she is ready, and letting him know that certain topics, like rants about siblings or parents, are off-limits. ............. Changing a dysfunctional relationship will invariably require you to say hard things to a family member. But that is a skill that anyone can develop .......... being assertive about your needs and your boundaries is not rude ........ It’s OK to say something like “I don’t want you yelling at me anymore” ........ “We have tricked ourselves into thinking that we’re supposed to always feel comfortable, so even as we’re saying hard things our goal is to say it without the other person feeling upset or mad or wanting a further explanation,” she said. “And that’s not realistic.” ......... In dysfunctional families, change is almost always seen as a rejection ........ “boundaries in unhealthy families are a threat to the system of dysfunction.” ........... Your call for change might be met with disapproval (“You’re wrong for changing; everything was going well until you intervened”), shame (“You’re a terrible person”), or resentment (“I’m upset because you want something different”), she writes. You could also encounter general pushback, which might involve your family member continuing to behave as though you said nothing or pressuring you to change your mind. ........... the strategic power of distance and its importance in preserving certain bonds while still establishing a healthier dynamic. ........... Distancing might mean putting time and space between you and your relative ......... Distancing could also mean engaging less with the person on an emotional level ......... If you want to maintain a relationship with a difficult family member because it ultimately feels worth it to you, acceptance — and strategic distancing — can give you some peace .
. What These 13 Jewish Americans Are Proud of and Afraid Of Others, though, felt that America was more accepting of Jews than ever and that their ancestors would be amazed. “I think they would be completely shocked by how successful we are,” said Joel, a 59-year-old in the group. ......... Things used to be easier even 10 years ago. It feels like we’re at the fall of the Roman Empire. ............. Wherever I work, I’m almost always working in a Christian environment. And every year, the same people come up to me and ask me to explain the Seder and explain Hanukkah. I feel like I’m the only voice of the Jews. I’m really tired of it. .......... But we also do the menorah. And to me, that’s tradition. And this is the first year my great-grandchildren wanted to know all about it, about the lighting of the menorah. And we went through the whole thing, and they really enjoyed it. And that made me just so happy. In fact, it made me cry at the time. .
Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT Optimism because intelligence is the means by which we solve problems. Concern because we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge. ........... Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought. ............ These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty........... the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations. .......... For instance, a young child acquiring a language is developing — unconsciously, automatically and speedily from minuscule data — a grammar, a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and parameters. This grammar can be understood as an expression of the innate, genetically installed “operating system” that endows humans with the capacity to generate complex sentences and long trains of thought. .......... the grammar that the child builds instinctively and with minimal exposure to information ........... Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence. ............ “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking. ...........
machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round
........... The correct explanations of language are complicated and cannot be learned just by marinating in big data. ......... True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things. ........... In the absence of a capacity to reason from moral principles, ChatGPT was crudely restricted by its programmers from contributing anything novel to controversial — that is, important — discussions. It sacrificed creativity for a kind of amorality. .If We Want More Babies, Our ‘Profoundly Anti-Family’ System Needs an Overhaul more generous family leave, more affordable child care, student loan forgiveness, child tax credit, a mortgage rebate and earlier retirement ....... Among the ideas offered, the most popular was more affordable child care, and what surprised me about the responses was that they weren’t just from Americans. I have endlessly covered the outrageous expense of and lack of government support for child care in the United States, but parents from Canada, Germany, Britain and the United Arab Emirates all reported that child care costs were prohibitive for them, too......... Our household earns a good wage — we’re on about $150,000 a year — and yet I cannot really afford to send two children to day care. ........ She described the lack of affordable child care as “one of the greatest failures of policymaking in modern history.” ........... A dad in Seattle who is a teacher and has one child described our entire economic system as “profoundly anti-family.” A mom of four in South Carolina said the modern expectations of parenting make her life harder: “For example: keeping your eye on every kid at all moments (or else you’re an irresponsible parent and child protection services may be called on you), signing up for sports where the schedule is different for every single age.” .
“We seek a strategic competition with China, we do not seek conflict.” ......... the administration still does not support independence for Taiwan. ........ “He’s trying to foster the country’s high-tech firms both for economic growth and to handle decoupling at a time when China is facing severe economic headwinds. Beating the nationalist drum is a politically savvy way to achieve these goals.” ........ “It clearly indicates that they understand that China’s relations with the Western world will be very difficult in the coming years.” .
India soaks in all colors rainbow on Holi . Three years after the Covid-19 pandemic, the country went all out in celebration, not caring about the virus anymore. .
It’s Ursula von der Leyen’s Europe—for Now Europe’s president has won high marks from everyone—except the allies she might need for a second term. ...... In the four years since she became European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen has mostly been praised by Brussels insiders and top officials around the world. Many say her record—which has put the EU significantly closer to becoming a coherent United States of Europe—already qualifies her as the best Commission president since the celebrated French politician Jacques Delors three decades ago. A 99-year-old Henry Kissinger recently acknowledged that she is Europe’s undisputed leader, and thus provides the EU with the single telephone number that he as U.S. Secretary of State is famously (though perhaps erroneously) quoted as saying that the bloc lacked. ........ VDL, as she is widely referred to in Brussels .
The opposition has stated that it plans to return Turkey to a parliamentary system, undoing a switch to a presidential system that Mr. Erdogan used in 2018 to drastically expand his control of the state. .
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon. .......... Certainly, nobody inside OpenAI was prepared for a viral mega-hit. The firm has been scrambling to catch up—and capitalize on its success—ever since. ........... four people who helped build what has become one of the most popular internet apps ever. .......... OpenAI is still bemused by the success of its research preview ......... a technique called adversarial training to stop ChatGPT from letting users trick it into behaving badly (known as jailbreaking). ......... Successful attacks are added to ChatGPT’s training data in the hope that it learns to ignore them. ........... OpenAI has also signed a multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft and announced an alliance with Bain, a global management consulting firm, which plans to use OpenAI’s generative AI models in marketing campaigns for its clients, including Coca-Cola. Outside OpenAI, the buzz about ChatGPT has set off yet another gold rush around large language models, with companies and investors worldwide getting into the action. ........... I was checking Twitter a lot in the days after release, and there was this crazy period where the feed was filling up with ChatGPT screenshots. I expected it to be intuitive for people, and I expected it to gain a following, but I didn’t expect it to reach this level of mainstream popularity............ I would love to understand better what’s driving all of this—what’s driving the virality. Like, honestly, we don’t understand. We don’t know......... As it turned out, the conversational data had a big positive impact on ChatGPT. .......... users can get to what they want by going back and forth. ......... a technique called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). This is ChatGPT’s secret sauce. The basic idea is to take a large language model with a tendency to spit out anything it wants—in this case, GPT-3.5—and tune it by teaching it what kinds of responses human users actually prefer. ............. you want it to be—you know—nontoxic ........... if the user’s query isn’t clear, it should ask follow-up questions. It should also clarify that it’s an AI system. It should not assume an identity that it doesn’t have, it shouldn’t claim to have abilities that it doesn’t possess, and when a user asks it to do tasks that it’s not supposed to do, it has to write a refusal message. ........ everybody at OpenAI sat down and tried to break the model. And we had external groups doing the same kind of thing. We also had an early-access program with trusted users, who gave feedback............ Our biggest concern was around factuality, because the model likes to fabricate things. But InstructGPT and other large language models are already out there, so we thought that as long as ChatGPT is better than those in terms of factuality and other issues of safety, it should be good to go. ............. tens of millions of users who may be looking to test its limits and find its flaws. .......... what ChatGPT can produce—from songs about God’s love for rapist priests to malware code that steals credit card numbers— ............. we think we can make a lot of the jailbreaking a lot more difficult. .......... In January, Microsoft revealed Bing Chat, a search chatbot that many assume to be a version of OpenAI’s officially unannounced GPT-4. ....... I think we just have to be very up-front, and manage expectations, and make it clear this is not a finished product. .
'Thrilled To Join This Community': Hudson Valley's Hillary Clinton Reveals New Teaching Gig . she will serve as a professor of practice at the university's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and a presidential fellow at Columbia World Projects. In these roles, she hopes to help the world's next generation of leaders face upcoming obstacles, Clinton said. ........... Thrilled to join this community," Clinton tweeted on Thursday, Jan. 5. ........ She will also lead an effort to gather policy leaders from around the globe to develop "innovative policy solutions," Columbia officials said. .
SHOCKING STUDY FINDS 99 PERCENT OF THE WORLD POPULATION IS BREATHING HARMFUL AIR "ALMOST NO ONE IS SAFE FROM AIR POLLUTION." only 0.001 percent of the global population live in areas with levels of PM 2.5 below the safe threshold recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), which accounts for less than 0.18 percent of available land on the planet. ....... PM 2.5 is a fine air particulate that's no more than 2.5 microns in width — over thirty times smaller than a grain of sand — allowing it to easily invade our lungs and bloodstream. Lung cancer is an obvious fear, but PM 2.5's potential to cause and exacerbate heart disease should not be overlooked, either. ........ exposure to PM 2.5 as brief as a few hours can be enough to trigger "cardiovascular disease-related heart attacks and death." Long-term exposure can lead to an "increased risk of cardiovascular mortality and decreases in life expectancy." ..........
99 percent of the global population is exposed to high PM 2.5 levels
....... while daily levels have dropped in North America and Europe over the past two decades, it continues to climb in other regions, including Southern Asia, Latin America, and Australia. ........ the global average level of PM 2.5 was extremely high between 2000 and 2019 at 32.8 micrograms per cubic meter, over six times the recommended threshold. ........air pollution was responsible for nine million premature deaths in 2015.
.10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023 Every year, we pick the 10 technologies that matter the most right now. You’ll recognize some; others might surprise you. .
2022’s seismic shift in US tech policy will change how we innovate Three bills investing hundreds of billions into technological development could change the way we think about government’s role in growing prosperity. ......... The dollar amounts are jaw-dropping. The bills include $550 billion in new spending over the next five years in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, $280 billion in the CHIPS and Science Act (which prompted Intel to go ahead on the Ohio construction), and another roughly $390 billion for clean energy in the Inflation Reduction Act. Among the investments is the most aggressive federal funding for science and technology in decades. But the greatest long-term impact of the legislative flurry could come from its bold embrace of something that has long been a political third rail in the US: industrial policy....... Think of US support for semiconductor manufacturing in the 1980s or the creation during the Cold War of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which led to the internet and GPS. ......... for the most part, it has seemed foreign to US political thinking: it was something China does, something Japan, South Korea, and France used to do (remember the Concorde?). ......... experts have begun identifying a handful of superstar cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston, that are booming while the rest of the country suffers. ........ After decades of declining federal investment in R&D, which dropped from 1.2% of GDP in the late 1970s to below 0.8% in recent years, the CHIPS and Science Act alone authorizes some $174 billion for research at places like the National Science Foundation. .......... After decades, he says, it’s time the US government got back in the game of “understanding the importance of merging innovation strategy with industrial policy.” ............ industrial policy ...... Instead of being embarrassed by the topic, he says, politicians are now touting it as a strategy. ........... For every Solyndra (a solar company that received a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee before flaming out, and the favorite example of a disastrous losing pick), there is a Tesla—funded around the same time by a federal loan. But the criticism does have some truth to it; industrial policy requires, well, policies. It requires choices. ......... today’s advanced manufacturing is highly automated, and facilities tend to employ relatively few workers. .......... opportunities to increase the capabilities of people working in long-term care, an area that is exploding as the population ages, by giving them digital tools. ......... The tech industry gave us Zoom to survive the pandemic, and Amazon went on a hiring spree, but none of this led to a widespread economic expansion. We’re still waiting for the long-anticipated economy-wide productivity boom from AI. ........... “Two hundred cities in the US are all trying to look like Silicon Valley,” Breznitz says, adding, “I don’t know why. Maybe they’ve never been to Silicon Valley?” ........... today’s technologies, especially artificial intelligence, robotics, genomic medicine, and advanced computation, provide vast opportunities to improve our lives, especially in areas like education, health care, and other services. .
The original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video Runway’s new model, called Gen-1, can change the visual style of existing videos and movies. ....... can transform existing videos into new ones by applying any style specified by a text prompt or reference image. ........ Gen-1, can turn clips of people on a street into claymation puppets, or books stacked on a table into a cityscape at night. Runway hopes that Gen-1 will do for video what Stable Diffusion did for images. ...........
“I truly believe that 2023 is going to be the year of video.”
.......... “We’re really close to having full feature films being generated,” he says. “We’re close to a place where most of the content you’ll see online will be generated.” .https://makeavideo.studio/
Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust. .
