Artists don’t just make art: They venture far and wide. And few of these forays have been more fruitful than when they take them to the stage. The history of painters and sculptors designing sets and costumes for opera and dance is exceptionally rich. Impresario extraordinaire Sergei Diaghilev set the tone at the turn of...
West Side Story is certainly one of the most beloved American musicals. The catchy and propulsive songs, the energetic dances, the moving story which is at turns humorous, romantic and painful, all contribute to its massive success as a crowd pleaser. Even though most showgoers know that the story ends with tragic notes, many continue...
Liking certain things or styles is an important aspect of peoples’ identities and social lives. Tastes can influence the ways humans act and judge. How to best describe musical taste reliably is – due to the ever-changing diversification and transformation of music – difficult and open to debate. Using an approach which also considered sub-genres,...
Researchers from University of St. Gallen and Columbia Business School published a new Journal of Marketing article that examines how the perceived meaning of manual labor can help predict the adoption of autonomous products. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Meaning of Manual Labor Impedes Consumer Adoption of Autonomous Products” and is authored by Emanuel de Bellis, Gita Venkataramani...
A new book titled, Adult Mortality in India: Trends, Socioeconomic Disparities, and Consequences, provides an in-depth analysis of adult mortality patterns in the country and addresses crucial issues related to public health and policy. Authored by Moradhvaj Dhakad, a researcher in the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program, and IIASA alumna Nandita Saikia (currently a...
When one thinks of movie reviews, one might see them as harbingers of success or failure at the box office. Some researchers have previously found that both positive and negative reviews correlate to box office revenues, and the effect of negative reviews diminishes over time. However, researchers at the University of California, Davis, suggest that...
Researchers have trained a robotic ‘chef’ to watch and learn from cooking videos, and recreate the dish itself. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed their robotic chef with a ‘cookbook’ of eight simple salad recipes. After watching a video of a human demonstrating one of the recipes, the robot was able to identify...
Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘Godfather of AI,’ recently predicted that so-called general artificial intelligence could emerge within 20 years. This term refers to a hypothetical future AI that can perform any cognitive task that a human can. This statement begs the question: how long will it take before we see the emergence of general artistic intelligence? And what should...
Corporate tax breaks for innovation lead to two kinds of economic growth: in capital investment and highly compensated jobs, according to a new study from a researcher at The University of Texas at Austin. Because innovation is key to growth in high-tech economies, one strategy has been to give companies a tax break for it....
Workplace ostracism refers to an employee’s perception of being excluded, ignored, or rejected in the workplace. A study published in PLOS ONE by Jun Qiu at School of Nanchang, Institute of Technology, Nanchang, Jiangxi, China and colleagues suggests that romantic relationships between coworkers are associated with perceived ostracism and knowledge sabotage by other colleagues. Workplace romance can...
