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Tag: rap concert
Diggin' Through the Crates: The Roots "Thought @ Work"
Song: "Thought @ Work"
Artist: The Roots
Album: Phrenology
Lyric: "I'm like Aquaman and Brown Hornet/I'm like Imhotep but don't flaunt it."
Character Reference/Meaning:
This time on "Diggin' Through the Crates, we focus our time on parallel subjects: The Roots out of Philadelphia, Aquaman, Brown Hornet, and Imhotep. Chances are, if you have watched Jimmy Fallon do his Late Night or Tonight Show thing in the past few years, then you know The Roots as the band that does all the homemade covers of pop songs (the Sesame Street theme is my favorite). However, to those of us rooted in Hip-Hop, The Legendary Roots Crew are the best damn group to ever rock a crowd. While Wu Tang Clan got all the hype for knockin' heads in Staten Island, The Roots were noddin' heads all over the country with their genre-neutral melodies and conscience rhymes. Perhaps being that good was a gift and a curse, with millions of fans across the world yet still not leading to the commercial success that other groups in their class had (Wu Tang Clan, A Tribe Called Quest, N.W.A., etc). The Roots are always the underdog, and with the release of their most recent record, And When You Shoot Your Cousin, the world doubted they could still put music out like they used to. The Roots are a sleeping giant, and they finally have the recognition they deserve by being on the best late show on television and whether it's soft melodies like "What They Do" or venomous cyphers like this one here, The Roots always put heart into their music.
"Thought @ Work" is five minutes of hard-hitting rhymes by head lyricist Black Thought, who covers everything from modern superheroes to ancient Gods in just one line. This started off as a way for us to give a nod to the recent photo that dropped of Jason Momoa as Aquaman, but no other reference embodied the spirit of the underdog quite like this gem. Until "Unite the Seven" became a household phrase (well, maybe just our household), Aquaman has been steadily been attempting to gain the reputation of being a comic book character people could get behind. His days of riding seahorses are over; Arthur Curry is a powerful force in the comic book world, possessing skills that no other on the Justice League has. He is a king of his own domain, a domain in which the other Justice Leaguers have no power in. Most importantly is his connection to ocean dwellers – his telepathy can direct the oceans' inhabitants the way no other being could otherwise. I'm not saying that Philadelphia is the same as Atlantis, but both Aquaman and Black Thought have a special connection to and draw power from the land they rule.
Meanwhile, the Brown Hornet was a reference to a character from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, first airing in 1979. Created by Bill Cosby, Brown Hornet was the first mainstream animated black superhero to air on television. He was given segments within the show instead of his own series, believed to be due to Cosby wanting to avoid the backlash from putting out a black superhero cartoon based on morality – which was unheard of at the time. BH was a parody of the Green Hornet, and sort of a bumbling hero similar to Inspector Gadget, one that resolved issues with the help of his sidekicks, here named Tweetle Beele and Stinger. Black Thought, like the Brown Hornet, is a mighty force for good, but may have fallen to the wayside by not indulging in what mainstream media has dictated should be the content of Hip Hop these days. Even at the risk of falling off in popularity, Black Thought and the Legendary Roots Crew stand for justice and behind their people.
Contributing to this piece was Lewis Brown, the new Brown Hornet. You can find him here!
Posted on February 27, 2015 February 22, 2015 Author Hush ComicsCategories Diggin Through the Crates, MusicTags #Aquaman, arthur curry, bill cosby, black thought, diggin through the crates, hip hop, hip-hop, imhotep, Lewis Brown, okayplayer, rap concert, rap music, the brown hornet, The RootsLeave a comment on Diggin' Through the Crates: The Roots "Thought @ Work"
Diggin' Through the Crates: Childish Gambino "Run This Town (Bambi Remix)"
Song: "Run This Town (Bambi Remix)"
Artist: Childish Gambino
Album: (No album single)
Lyric: "Yea, the flow so absurd/It's C.G. boy, king of the black nerds/I gotta get my Urkel on/ I won't stop until i see an afro at Comic-Con/And not just Samurai."
Childish Gambino is back with "DTC" to prove once again that nerds cannot fit into a one size fits all mask and cape. In this week's song, "Run This Town (Bambi Remix)" he is out to spread a message to everybody out there that has ever experienced any sort of bullying simply for being who they are. If you have ever been teased or made fun of because you don't fit into the stereotypes of your race or culture, or like to express yourself differently, this song is for you. Gambino talks about his experiences with such matters, just because he likes to wear pink clothing, yellow hats, and rainbow colored items people use to call him hurtful things and basically tried to destroy him just because of his style. He talks a lot about how this happens to black kids, while at the same time addressing various stereotypes. If you are a young black man who prefers a power ring to a dime bag, or likes to hit the skate park after school while listening to Coldplay and recite every syllable and letter, then you are made to believe that you should be ashamed of who you are.
Gambino said no to all of this, and tells us that we have dealt with haters like this for too long. It is well known that Childish Gambino is a huge nerd. With his #donald4spiderman campaign, various comic book references in music, TV, and comedy, and overall praise of nerd culture, Gambino is at the top of my list to wear that nerd crown. Even back in 2012 Gambino made a cameo appearance in an Image Comics series called The Li'l Depressed Boy. In issue #10, Gambino can be seen performing a concert, which inspires the main characters to get out and experience the world. The series is said to mirror Childish Gambino's first studio album Camp. Although it is exciting to see Gambino represented in a comic book, the chosen lyric for this "DTC" reminds us that African-Americans are still vastly underrepresented in the nerd community, both in character and fandom. It may not be a surprise to most, but there are not very many black superheroes in the mainstream. Sure, we have had some: John Stewart, Storm, Black Panther, Bishop, Static Shock, Luke Cage, Falcon, and Blade. But beyond that, there aren't an abundant amount of characters compared to white heroes – who always seem to be at the top of the comic book totem poll.
The same can be said for people who attend comic conventions around the world. Thing is, black people want to be represented at comic conventions beyond cosplay. And a majority of the time, at a majority of the conventions, that representation is not present. As the years have gone on and progressed, I believe this image and concept of the "black nerd" has been skewed and misunderstood. When people think of black nerd, they automatically think of Urkel. However, that is rarely the case nowadays. Black nerds are as diverse in their interests and styles as Iron Man is with his suits or armor. Urkel can no longer be the poster boy for black nerds. In fact I'm not so sure there even can be a go to black nerd for today, but if there had to be one, Gambino is a front runner. Currently Gambino is on the "Deep Web Tour" promoting and performing his latest album, because the internet. I know one thing, this black nerd is going to be in that crowd when he comes to Denver, CO. on April 29th. If there is one thing to take away from this article, I would say this, be who you are and love yourself because of that. It doesn't matter if you are white, black, brown, purple, orange, green or whatever, in the end we all want to be represented and we all want to be able to embrace what we love and be embraced by those around us. Because for every person who is willing to put you down for being you, I'm sure there has to be two people who that you are pretty cool for not giving a crap what the others think. And if not, then scratch all three in the face and make it known that they just got beat up by a nerd. So stay nerdy, stay proud, and be open to new experiences, because you never know if that person sitting next to you on the bus stop is also on their way to the comic book shop.
Posted on April 25, 2014 May 12, 2014 Author Evan LoweCategories Diggin Through the Crates, MusicTags afro samurai, because the internet, black james franco, black nerds, blerds, camp gambino, childish gambino, comic con, concert, deep web tour, denver, donald glover, hip hop, hip-hop, james franco is the white donald glover, lil depressed boy, nbc community, rap concert, rap music, troy and abed, urkelLeave a comment on Diggin' Through the Crates: Childish Gambino "Run This Town (Bambi Remix)"


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May 21, 2018 April 1, 2020 spiritualgrowthadventure
Perfect Spirituality: Perfect Masters
A little known idea in the spiritual world is that Creation was first started by the first Avatar, Ganesha (the one in pictures and shown as statues with an elephant's head). The Avatar then chose five souls that had come down with him, and gave each a quality, a spirit of God.
So the first five Perfect Masters were created. One Perfect Master had the quality of Bliss, another Perfect Master had the quality of Wisdom, then there was Power, Knowledge and Truth.
Each Perfect Master was 20% of God, so the five together were 100%. The Perfect Masters' consciousness was on the lowest three Divine Journeys; the first Divine Journey, the second Divine Journey and the third Divine Journey. There were many millions of Divine Journeys which held qualities of God, each with light and love more intense than the ones below, all the way Up to the Father. The lower three Divine Journeys though were just above what was called the Om point, the gateway to Creation in the below, so Divine Energy and souls could flow down into Creation..
Creation was created to consist of seven Planes of Consciousness. The bright white light of the sixth plane, filled with mental light, was energetically across a gigantic abyss from the first Divine Journey. The next plane, also a mental light plane, was the fifth plane. Then came the next lower plane, the fourth, which is a plane of power, of God's power, which can be a tricky plane to move up through, because if there is misuse of power, the soul goes back down. The next plane was the third plane of consciousness, where souls turn their gaze inwards, towards the inner, rather than focus on the outer, material world.
The lower planes were the second and first plane of consciousness, where the focus is naturally mostly on the outer world. The lowest plane, the zeroth plane was massive, and souls start of at the bottom of this plane on their spiritual journey back to God. The zeroth plane incorporated the mineral, plant, animal kingdoms and the beginnings of humanity.
The Perfect Masters had a physical body, yet their consciousness moved around on the first three Divine Journeys, so they had access to infinitely big amounts of energy, which they could focus on Creation.
Being Divine, Perfect Masters have Universal Consciousness. Aware of Reality, they know that Creation is an illusion. They operate in Creation, as they have a role to look after all the souls in Creation, and move them on through experiences on the Planes of Consciousness. When a soul has had enough experience and has balanced their karma enough, a Perfect Master will God-realize the soul, taking their consciousness up to one of the Divine Journeys, so they too experience themselves as their true nature, which is God. Having Universal Consciousness, the Perfect Masters are at the centre of Creation, they are the Pivot. They are at the centre of each soul. Everything they do affects all of Creation, as they help to balance karma and develop Creation spiritually.
The Perfect Masters look after and work on Creation while the Avatar is back in the Divine Journeys. Every four hundred to seven hundred years, the Avatar returns with souls in tow, in a major or minor incarnation. They do their Universal work, give instructions concerning what needs to be done to move Creation in the right direction and drop their physical body, and go back up the Divine Journeys again. The Perfect Masters do their best to implement the changes.
When an issue came up the Perfect Masters would take a vote on what to do. Sometimes an energetic vote would be unanimous, 100%, so full energy could be focused on an issue. If the vote was 4 to 1, or 3 to 2, then less energy would be focused on an issue, which might not have been enough, so the Avatar would have to fix that the next time around. Perhaps that is changing now, so the five Perfect Masters work together better.
When souls first come into Creation, they have a leaning to one of the Perfect Masters, Bliss, Wisdom, Power, Knowledge and Truth. They usually keep this affiliation. (Which means you will have a leaning to a particular Perfect Master).
When a Perfect Master drops their body and dies, the energy, quality or spirit of that Perfect Master lifts from them to seek out the next possible likely candidate. Then it descends on the new candidate and they become the next Perfect Master of that quality.
This Earth is currently the planet where all the frequencies of energy are found, and where all the planes and Divine Journeys can be accessed. This is the planet where the Avatar incarnates and where the five Perfect Masters live. What changes the Avatar and Perfect Masters make here on Earth radiates out into the rest of Creation.
Currently, humanity is an important focus for spirituality, so three Perfect Masters work with humanity, and two Perfect Masters focus on the Devic realm. All Perfect Masters work with the Archangels (who are on the sixth plane) and angels (who are on the fifth plane).
Perfect Masters may or may not work with groups of people, or make themselves known to the public as they are basically a bit busy looking after the whole of Creation, which is quite an all consuming job. It's worth remembering that they are connected to all souls anyway, yours and mine, because they are in the centre of our souls, so in a sense they are working with us anyway.
Footnote: Before Meher Baba became Avatar, the Perfect Masters, who at that time lived not far away from him in India (which helped to protect him when he was younger) were Babajan, Sai Baba of Shirdi, Upasni Maharaj, Tajuddin Baba, and Narayan Maharaj. There is information about them and photographs, on the internet.
If you enjoyed this article or found it useful you might want more spiritual information and meditations. Take a look at the page https://spiritualgrowthadventure.com/spiritual-books-spiritualgrowthadventure/ which will tell you more about the books "Your Spiritual Awakening And the New Dawn for Humanity", "Meditation: Opening Doorways On A New Reality", and "Neutralising Negativity" on Kindle and Amazon. Love and light, Jonathan Barber
Posted in Avatar, meditation, Perfect Masters, soul, spiritualityTagged Creation, Divine Journeys, planes of consciousness, Universal Consciousness1 Comment
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I'd do it again, zip-lining. It seems to be the newest craze. Take a long steel line, secure it between two points high over a canyon through which rapids rage. Hook up a connector on the wire and attach one human in harness and helmet securely to it. Then let her rip and gravity takes you fo r a ride. We did it six times, six levels of fear, south of Vail at Four Eagles Ranch. The first one, more a trainer, took my breath away as I tried to get the hang of controlling whether I go backwards or frontwards legs kicking the air. Sometimes the start meant running down hill, your toes hardly touching the ground, very similar to when I paraglided, and other times it was a jump off a wooden platform. The final run was 1000 meters not across a canyon but down it at breakneck speed, a rock in hand to try to hit a rusty barrel 30 feet below as I passed over, missed, and coming in with a stop chord to slow me down. Did I see the mule deer or the wrecked van? No. But I must say it was a blast, safe, and now I'm ready to seek out more. I'm told South America has the longest one.
We spent Fourth of July in Keystone, Col. watching Serena, Venus, Nadal, Federer on television, riding ski lifts up 11600 feet (and hiking up more height) and trying to deal with altitude adaptation; riding dude horses up a trail, and most excitingly, a white water raft trip down Clear Creek, which was a rough tumble through incessant waves, over rocks, and in a questionable yellow raft built for six. Wearing wet suits and wet shoes, we secured ourselves by sliding one foot in a covered slot and the other under the roll seat in front. For the six mile ride there was hardly a lull in "thrill" and paddling became the way Kelly, our sailor, kept us occupied, "two front," "one front," "now back" so that we would turn the raft wherever it needed to go to get over obstacles. We frequently had to duck under giant freeway overpasses built low and taking the mystery out of the scenery. But I could do this all day. The water was 45 degrees but a refreshing stomp when getting out of the yellow dinghy at the end.
At the huge tourist complex on Keystone ranch, which goes for miles and miles, loaded with condos and rooms filled in winter and spring with skiers since ski-lifts abound practically from room doors, blocks of lodges have names like River Run, Argentina, Arapahoe, Hidden River and they stretch out for miles along a feisty river called the Snake, although it's no kin to Jackson Hole's Snake River. I guess every mountain state has a snake to pour off melting snow. On the Fourth, decorations in red white and blue were given out to little children who had bicycles and plastic vehicles of various kiddie types, and then there was a parade. Wear your red star sunglasses, please, and the American flag wrist bands. We also went to the Activity Center and played putt-putt golf, kid's bungie jumping, paddle boats, kayaks and stopped by the Colorado Chocolate Factory where a single dip of ice cream in a cup was just about four dollars. Daily I took Pilates classes and worked out on a Gyrotonic machine which rocked my muscles.
My family loved it here. I kept getting flashbacks visions of Annapurna and Everest, which are hard to forget. Next I'm off to Jackson Hole to renew my spirit, since there is where the mountain b ug got into me, and to see old friends who helped me stay in shape mentally and physically when I lived there two years (2002-04) within view of the Grand Tetons and their side-kicks like Old Glory, my first major climb. I will also reunite with Jim and Sue who kept me kicking through the East Asia trip, which still swirls in my mind as I try to figure out what it meant to my soul. As in all travel, there is so much I'd like to replay.
Photos: Hanging on the Vail Zipline; going western; we are high; snow in shorts before the 10 peaks.
And The Beat Goes On. . .


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The following collage studies and the accompanying short text approach the notion of crisis through a reading of what the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri has called the "project of a crisis." For Tafuri, crisis was etymologically linked with the political category of decision (de-cision, to de-cide, to de-fine), which shares the prefix de- from the Latin for "off" meaning "to cut off" or to separate and isolate. These ideas are given political and methodological significance in Tafuri's work as he constructed a project from the fragments of the historical avant-garde and theorized the relationship between architectural and political ideology, between critical thought and agency. Cutting, separating, isolating, joining together of material, are operations in the construction of a collage or montage. The collages in "Notes on the Crisis of Historical Consciousness and Formal Knowledge" take Tafuri's statement on the project of a crisis as a point of departure. They operate on the historical and formal knowledge of architecture, combining and recombining elements and forms. They examine conventions of authorship, predictability, composition, and the relationship between thought and image, reflective and projective operations. History, knowledge and thought are put into crisis toward a possible remontage.
Today there is a crisis of knowledge. In Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity the political philosopher Gerald Raunig has noted the conjunction (the montage) of contradictory keywords that describe this situation: "Knowledge economy, knowledge age, knowledge-based economy, knowledge management, cognitive capitalism – these terms for the current social situation speak volumes. Knowledge becomes commodity, which is manufactured, fabricated and traded like material commodities."2 Knowledge is commodified and instrumentalized through procedures, protocols, and technologies for the purpose of profit and power. If knowledge is understood as historically and collectively produced, shared thinking toward shaping the world, it is paradoxical that today knowledge is intensely market oriented toward an ethos of individual entrepreneurial, managerial, and consumerist mentality. Knowledge is no longer critically acquired but passively consumed. Deep thought and critical intelligence has been abandoned for instrumentalized reason and immediate gratification.
In architecture this has led to historical and project amnesia. We need to affirm historical consciousness, a critical intelligence toward the history of architecture where history is a foundation for critical judgement and projective potential. We need to reactivate our capacity to perform judgements about present work against what has gone before. We need to understand the projective potential of the history of architecture as an accumulation of formal knowledge: critical principles, creative approaches, analytical strategies, spatial forms and concepts to be rethought, reframed and transformed for project thinking.
These collage studies examine historical consciousness and formal knowledge. The collages operate on the historical and formal knowledge of architecture. They examine formal and conceptual possibilities between projects, forms, and spaces producing a dialogue across architecture's history. The collages are developed through repetition, where project fragments are repeated at different scales in different arrangements, combinations, and recombinations. Compositional principles are examined and an analogical procedure of substitution and replacement is put forward in relation to project association and syntax. Analysis and project coincide. History and project are put into crisis toward their remontage.
City-Screen: A Collective Subjectivity, 2013. Mixed media collage with chalk and graphite on cartridge paper, 16.5in. x 11.7in.
Death and the Labyrinth, 2013. Mixed media collage with chalk and graphite on cartridge paper, 16.5in. x 11.7in.
School-Cemetery, 2013. Mixed media collage with chalk and graphite on cartridge paper, 16.5in. x 11.7in.
Cemetery-City, 2013. Mixed media collage with ink and graphite on layout paper, 11.7in x 8.3in.
Mausoleum-Maze, 2013. Mixed media collage with ink and graphite on layout paper, 11.7in x 8.3in.
Coliseum and City Hall with Figure, 2013. Mixed media collage, ink and graphite on layout paper, 11.7in x 8.3in.
City Gate, 2013. Mixed media collage with ink and graphite on layout paper, 11.7in x 8.3in.
Sacro-Silo, 2013. Mixed media collage with ink and graphite on layout paper, 11.7in x 8.3in.
Alberti & Rational Architecture, 2013. Mixed media collage, chalk and graphite on cartridge paper, 16.5in. x 11.7in.


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Media Releases	| 9th Oct, 2018
AGL forced to face facts: full environmental assessment for Crib Point gas proposal
Environment Victoria and the Victorian National Parks Association have welcomed today's decision by Planning Minister Richard Wynne to require a full Environment Effects Statement (EES) for AGL's controversial proposed gas import terminal at Westernport.
Concerns over the proposal have been raised time and again by the local community, scientists, and environmentalists, and the decision on the EES comes as Reachtel polling released by Environment Victoria shows there is little community support for the project.
"Together with the community, we are pleased that there will now be a proper assessment of the impacts of AGL's damaging and polluting project," said Environment Victoria Campaigns Manager Dr Nicholas Aberle.
"It is critical now that all work on site and along the route of the pipeline ceases immediately. We share the alarm of local residents that significant on-site works appear to be underway.
"Our research shows that only two percent of residents in the state seat of Bass support importing gas from interstate or overseas. A domestic gas reservation policy and greater use of renewable energy and energy efficiency are seen as much better solutions.
"There is deep community concern about the impact of the project on the local area. Over 80 percent of locals saying they are worried about the gas terminal's impact on threatened species and migratory birds. 72 percent of voters are concerned about the impact on Victoria's greenhouse pollution.
"While we're pleased there will be a thorough environmental assessment, like many residents we believe the project is unnecessary and polluting and should not go ahead.
"It is ridiculous to think that as AGL is pushing this import project, Australia is about to become the world's largest exporter of LNG. We shouldn't even entertain the idea of a new industry importing gas.
"Ahead of the Federal election, sanity must prevail. Australia must limit gas exports to provide enough for local consumers, as well as support households and business to use less gas and shift to renewable energy.
Victorian National Parks Association nature campaigner Shannon Hurley said "The Planning Minister's decision for an EES is crucial to protect Westernport's significant internationally listed Ramsar wetland, fisheries and valuable habitats, some of which are only found in Westernport Bay – and they are too important to get this one wrong."
Learn more about the campaign here
For interview and further comment
Dr Nicholas Aberle, Environment Victoria Campaigns Manager
Office: (03) 9341 8112 Mobile: 0402 512 121
n.aberle@environmentvictoria.org.au
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Abstract: The rise of the ambient brings new directions in environmental criticism. Not only the city but also its media demand assessment, and not only in the usual manner of environmental impact assessment (not our concern here) but also for the outlooks they shape. In the humanities, environmental criticism generally has origins in literary studies. In architecture and urbanism, it takes root in cultural landscape history. In the information discipline, however, it hardly exists. The more that the information sphere pervades the world, and indeed sometimes monitors and operates the world, the more this oversight must change. The discipline of interaction design already surpasses architecture and urbanism at methods of more immediate contextual inquiry, however, at least into the physical and organizational formats of tasks. It has also begun to understand how with ambient media, people do not necessarily recognize themselves as 'users.' Now it also begins a critique of physical embeddedness with respect to environmental sensibilities outside the efficiency of the information task. How does inhabitable information advance or obstruct larger changes in worldview, and how do the particular concerns of interaction design imply responsibility or neglect of that question?
The rise of the ambient brings new directions in environmental criticism. Here 'the ambient' means a continuum of contexts where information has been embedded locally, to facilitate being brought in and out of focal attention. How may design for that state contribute to necessary shifts of worldview? Do new relations of embodiment, touch, tagging, and display change environmental awareness, no so much of global problems as of simply being in and part of the world?
This word 'environmental' has been badly abused; it seems to mean everything to some people and nothing in particular to others. So long as whatever this word meant was considered large and far away, absent of technology and beyond human agency, it was difficult to imagine much less act upon. So long as information technologies have been considered placeless and nonmaterial, they have hardly been part of such imagination.
Information has always had environmental effects, nevertheless. Abstract systems of access and distribution have physical, even geographic manifestations, and sometimes direct mappings. One most dramatic example of these might be America's Jeffersonian grid, a system of survey that encouraged commodification of land. More recent information technologies not only map environments but also interpret them. Data visualization techniques have advanced public environmental education. Then too, information infrastructures themselves have ecological footprints. Any of these relations of the digital and physical might suggest background for any of these essays in this collection. But here, let us narrow the scope to a question of coupling embodied information to shifts in environmental criticism.
For as humanity now changes not only its means, but also its ends, economic valuation shifts dramatically, and in the process creates a greater role for design. As the upkeep of non-fiscal capital (e.g., natural, human, or cultural) becomes a more viable enterprise, design emphasis shifts from extent of material production toward more intensive, systemically integrated patterns of living. As in a traditional culture where waste was less of a possibility, the new environmental economy produces a sense of simple elegance that is everywhere. Here the wish for distraction declines, and the sense of participation increases. It is a simple truth of urbanism that people take care of things and places that they value aesthetically.
1) Consider a turn in environmental history, which admits not only of urbanism but also of ambient media.
2) Ask whether an information environmentalism is desirable, even possible, or whether it is mainly censorship.
3) In the context-sensitive practices of the expanding discipline of interaction design, what might already be environmental, in some larger sense, at least implicitly so?
4) Under what themes does the discipline develop a critique of these values, attitudes, and practices? How might this follow from developments in literature and the arts?
First, a turn in the field of environmental history generally concerns itself more with artifice, and specifically investigates the relation of built environments and cultural values. Although such interest was once perhaps countercultural it now enters mainstream debate.
Environmental history asks how human affairs transform the living world. This has of course become the central question of our time. So that others might ask better how else humanity might live, environmental history first describes the effects of particular ways in which particular peoples have already lived. While lands may indeed shape cultural dispositions, environmental history reverses these relations to look at how cultures and destinies have shaped the land. Like much else in early environmental work, it has simply tried to document impact.
Such studies of setting and circumstance may seem normal to any discipline with ethnographic roots. Interaction design has been one of these from the start. Yet even quite recently all this emphasis on place would have been considered unusual, nostalgic, and perhaps misguided, in just about any field. Circumstance was something to transcend. Modernity was the general belief that humanity could impose abstractions on the world until those became the world, at least in human experience, and especially through the use of technology.
To admit of circumstantial impacts was not what most historians did anyway. As Donald Worster declared: 'In the old days, the discipline of history had an altogether easier task. Everyone knew that the only important subject was politics and the only important terrain was the nation-state' (Worster, 1988: 289).
Environmental history thus belongs to a more fundamental turn toward the study of everyday life. This breakthrough has generally been credited to the Annales school of economic historians (e.g., Bloch, Lefebvre, and Braudel in France). Much of this took a voice that was countercultural, in which material circumstance was mainly evidence of political marginalization. Environmentalism inherited that voice.
Considering the first decades of 'doing environmental history,' Worster emphasized how in the origins of this field, artifacts had been excluded.
This is where the field necessarily began.
Thus another early step toward an environmental history of ambient information was to admit of any positive role for design. Without this, the countercultural origins of environmentalism too often reduce into naïve wholesale oppositions of nature (good) and artifice (bad). There are people who believe that any human intervention detracts from a place – even, say, the Golden Gate Bridge.
More general histories of the city did not lack awareness of environment. Many a mythology began from the founders hallowing a chosen spot. Geography was destiny. City air, for all its stench, was said to make men free. Yet it was the stench that demanded a new breed of historians. Environmental history of the city was history of plague and pollution. Industrial urbanism seemed not only separate from the world, but completely in opposition to it.
Now, much of this has been changing. For one indicator of this change, note 'Green Manhattan' (Owen, 2004). Hardly an ideal place, and more like the early environmentalists' very idea of what to avoid, Manhattan turns out to be more green than most of America when its huge carbon consumption is normalized per capita. Relative to their exurban counterparts, New Yorkers have less stuff, perhaps more fun, and lower ecological footprints, all without risk of cholera. And not to get ahead of the story, but many of the benefits of mobile and embedded media incidentally first appear in places of highest social density.
It is instead the exurban domains where environmental knowing seems most absent. Somewhere in suburbia somebody has never even gone for a walk. Also it is in the rural domains where the worst perversions of the biosphere are perpetrated by agribusiness. To early environmentalists, the extent to which exurban artifice would disable common sense was not yet conceivable.
Thus the next step in environmental history was to treat the relationship of planetary crisis to settlement patterns, as if not all urban artifice were bad, and some ways of living healthier than others. Do poorly built environments undermine the very ability to think environmentally? It is ever more useful to ask how artifice can dramatize human agency and belonging in the world, not just provide conquest, distraction, or escape.
Urban environmental history, once considered an oxymoron, asks how settlement patterns present and reflect choices about worldview. Although often beginning from the ecological impact of economic production, it can proceed to questions of consciousness concerning just what about a production or its side effects is considered necessary. It asks what has been valued as commons. Whatever its foundations in pristine nature, it also studies questions of liveability.
This has enhanced a tendency within media, which have often been self-referential. Given the inherent quality of digital media to include both information about itself and links to other media productions, media studies increasingly investigate information as a world in itself. For some young people steeped in electronics, history goes back only so far as electronic recordings.
Histories of information, which became abundant during the web boom, have thus emphasized long term change in literacy, and not the environment. Yet literacy itself can be situated. Once it was solely in monasteries. Commercial television was first rolled out in taverns, to take another example (McCarthy, 2001: 5-7). Where you read a book affects how you read that book. The locations in media which actually get used deserve more study. This provides one way toward environmental criticism.
Second, a question of information pollution has long existed but now accelerates. Media facades especially stir public debates, not only legal but also philosophical. A sense of unprecedented distraction keeps growing.
To send your first-grader on a school field trip, you might have to fill out twenty lines on a form, over breakfast that morning. At work your inbox is stuffed, not only with spam (which can be filtered), but also with reply-to-all-recipients email from your colleagues (which cannot). Over lunch, there's no fashion crime in wearing a hands-free phone on one ear. To get the attention of a colleague who is playing his iPod loudly enough that you hear it too, you might have to raise your voice. After work you might have trouble finding a bar without television. You could carry a 'TV-B-Gone' universal remote, which scans through the IR spectrum in which most TV on-off signals lie, but you might be nervous about where you can get away with using it, and of course that would be yet one more gizmo to manage.
Twenty years have passed since Richard Saul Wurman coined the term 'information anxiety.' What does it take, he asked, to put the verb 'inform' back into the noun 'information?' (Wurman, 1989: 38). Context, for one thing. Few people claim that the ubiquity of wisdom has been rising so rapidly as ubiquity of data. Since those twenty years are the very ones in which information technology exploded into everyday lives, this expression may be worth reexamining. How has concern for 'information anxiety' canceled or reinforced other more basic environmental sensibilities? The more that its designs are embedded, the less the field of interaction design may ignore these issues.
Information anxiety feels like an inability to keep up, an urge to research your every move, or a duty to provide useless data. It comes at you over call lists, customer notices, and ubiquitous advertising. But not all information anxiety is junk. It is also your own inability to restrain your grazing on news, digging into the practices of your trade, or researching exhaustive minutiae of some hobby like knitting, that you supposedly do to relax.
'Ambient information anxiety' demands a new concern in the human sciences. Educators, ethnographers, sociologists, and psychologists now debate the intellectual and emotional impacts of a fulltime, ubiquitous, multitasked feed. Architects and urbanists need to find their take on these issues as well. How does design of the physical environment mitigate (or worsen) information anxiety? When is it pollution?
In Technics and Civilization, Mumford observed that 'the first mark of paleotechnic industry was the pollution of the air' (Mumford, 1936: 167). The neotechnic phase, which anticipated what would later come to be called cybernetics, shifted 'from destruction to conservation' (255). For example, in nineteenth century Pittsburgh, smoke and fire were discussed aplenty, but to construct them as pollution was to think of them as a correctable nuisance; and this only happened much later. In a familiar cycle within technological determinism, pollution is a social construct.
Today a mother at the supermarket takes great care to scrutinize the ingredients on the labels of the foods she is buying for her family. Yet on returning home she may flip on the television without any similar vigilance. Obsessed with material pollution, she is oblivious to information pollution.
Nonmaterial pollution does exist. Most towns have regulations against nighttime noise, for example. At a loud party in the wee hours, it would be no surprise for the police to show up. Yet if there are no similar policies against light pollution, you might be able to light your driveway as brightly as technologically possible without concern that your neighbors would call the police.
Desktop data glut has been described as information pollution, that makes foragers likely to 'hunt elsewhere' (Nielsen, 2003). Shenk was the first to call it smog: 'Data smog gets in the way; it crowds out quiet moments, and obstructs much-needed contemplation. It spoils conversation, literature, and even entertainment. It thwarts skepticism, rendering us less sophisticated as consumers and citizens. It stresses us out' (Shenk, 1997: 31).
Yet to discuss information pollution is likely to contribute more of it. Also, it is subjective: information pollution fouls one person's thought, not everyone's waters. Above all, because one person's signal is another person's noise, it is much more difficult to agree on what is a common, noxious nuisance. The ethical questions raised differ from both those of free speech and those of clean air. Many of these concern whether information glut declares itself, and allows people to opt out (Greenfield 2004). The ethical questions can seem more culturally biased, as in what makes a society with many implicit forms of common sense much more pleasant than a nanny state with many explicit rules preventions. So how can it be shown that glut fouls conviviality, which per Ivan Illich (1973) is all that which occurs socially without need for overt information? Such questions tie into ethics, politics, rhetoric, and other such fundamental categories in philosophy. It is a lot easier just to keep building, buying, and consuming more information feeds.
Third, then, this essay asks where current practices and common wisdom in the young field of interaction design show environmental awareness of any kind. Where might designed embodiment in ambient information actually increase awareness of the many issues raised? Such general questions seem warranted in a field where the pursuit of calming is a given (Weiser and Brown, 1997). It is the goal of this essay to provide intellectual background and future questions to that sensibility, and not to survey current practices in detail. How do context-sensitive design practices, which already emphasize symbolic environments, now make the step toward ambient environments?
Interaction design has to be intrinsically environmental at some level because it expands the symbolic context of actions. Since its inception, the field has looked at data input and output in relationship to interface form and structure. It has looked at tasks in relationship to workflows and organizations. It has looked at architectures of access. More recently it has looked at socially networked frames of reference, especially amid habitual and even institutional contexts. And now, as in the focus of this volume, it is looking at physical embodiment in urban space.
Something about urban computing shifts the disciplinary emphasis from equipment to perceptions. It replaces a bias toward adding ever more tools and technological features with a quest toward a sensibility inflected toward maintaining some cultural commons. It differs from larger and necessary agendas in 'eco-tech,' that is, embedded information systems for improved resource economy, especially in building technology. It emphasizes proximity of particular people and annotation of particular places. It admits that knowledge of how to inhabit a city may be lost in the rush to personal entertainment. Indeed, distraction may be the state on which it must operate. The ethical issues at hand are those of distraction.
As the literature of urbanism has long emphasized, individuality in places that are of interest to particular inhabitants produces a cumulative urban experience, such as the experience of districts. The personalization of mobile media feeds does not produce this cumulative experience. This has often been understood though psychogeography. Physical experience introduces aspects of orientation, memory, and territory, largely because the body imposes a schema on space. While these do increase the sense of being in the world, the question arises whether they reinforce or interfere with existing senses of embodiment and environment. On the other hand, new techniques of embedding, touch, and diversified display formats introduce a new domain of using the world itself as an access structure. In contrast to more innate relationships of body and memory, this new domain invites a more exploratory and less territorial approach to spatial mental mapping. That is because the world is now so much more overlaid and annotated with cultural productions of different spatial ordering. This much-championed hybrid introduces challenges of 'findability' (Morville, 2004) to which disciplinary approaches are quite different from the conventional literature on cognitive mapping. Thus new relations of embodiment, tangible interface, and ambient information increase the environmental implications of interaction design in two complementary ways.
On the one hand, the discipline could increase its concern for shifts in focal attention. Early interaction design carefully studied focus amid tasks. Pervasive computing began from the introduction of peripheral attention (Weiser and Brown, 1997). The ambient is a continuum of possibilities for focal shift. Information theorists contend that complexity and emergence become central to any study of awareness amid ambient, noisy, glutted communications. 'When information is understood as a process rather than a product, the line separating it from noise is difficult to determine,' Taylor explained. 'The interplay of noise, which is informative, and information, which is noisy, creates the conditions for emerging complexity, which is the pulse of life' (Taylor, 2001: 123).
On the other hand, the need to tune and personalize one's range of focal possibilities becomes a central strategy of information anxiety management. This challenge was evident to Wurman twenty years ago, but it has accelerated, and in doing so it has implicated more contexts. The discipline might now read 'almost unconsciously' as 'embodied, haptically-oriented, socially cued.' One key to the ambient is the increasing belief that much mental activity does not rise to the level of conscious deliberation.
Thus the overall social and practical contexts of action have become much more central to interaction design, and often surpass matters of mechanical or workflow-oriented usability as the key success factor. This makes the field more design-oriented. What one chooses to take on as subject matter matters as much as how efficiently that is engineered. For subject matter beyond the graphical user interface, the discipline works on product-service systems, neighborhood technologies, material and energy flow representation, and more. Because waste is almost intrinsically ugly, exposing and correcting it is a cultural, and not merely moral or economic act. Environmental description, advocacy, and education allow more people to understand and shape such policy. Criticism suggests that these are cultural acts. Hopefully this issue provides a review of many such projects. To see the change, one need only consult a CHI proceedings of ten years ago, when it was widely thought that only the virtual would count.
Fourth, the invitation here is to develop terms and criteria by which to give more discernment and design authority to these implicitly environmental computing practices. And the philosophical question is whether those design experiences cultivate (for a highly networked generation, many of whom seldom played outdoors as children) a sense of connection to the physical world.
The first step is to demonstrate that locality is more than location. Proximate networks and not just GPS coordinates become the basis for locative media work. Locality and participation seem key to many an emerging green economics. How does interaction design become valuable to this?
Orientation to the physical everyday came first to history and letters. In the humanities, environmental criticism generally has origins in literary studies. Most university courses on environmental criticism concern literature first, and perhaps the high visual arts. Even without 'media,' a traditional culture created its environment mythologically; modern environmentalism might trace its origins to Virgil. Literature can blur distinctions among mythology, politics, environment, and perception. Was Mark Twain, educated as he was by the river, an early environmentalist?
However, in recent decades, literary studies have often divided over environmental criticism. To the relativistic language games of postmodernity, any insistence on worldly referents seems naïve, and any insistence on a master narrative (e.g., planetary change) demands opposition. Even spatial disciplines such as architecture long followed this literary lead. A better lead, however, appeared in cultural landscape studies. These ask how a society's values may be known as much from its settlement patterns as its literature or objects of art. Much of this has been directed to the macro scale, and sprawl, especially in America. But where it crosses with social history of technology, a useful genre of environmental criticism emerges. For example, this is evident in the parallels commonly drawn between pervasive computing and early electrification. It is the ethnographic perspective of some of this work that makes it relevant to interaction design. For example McCarthy's 2001 study of ambient television looks at the influence of information pollution (our term, not hers) on gender roles and the spaces of conviviality and travel. As more kinds of ambient information technology become similarly normative, and no longer principally a technical challenge, surely they invite such similar critique.
This is mainly a matter of building a culture. That perhaps begins with awareness of context. Only with a conversation that is accumulated and perpetuated does the larger body of work acquire enough coherence to warrant criticism. The word 'criticism' implies familiarity with the issues, and how to reconsider what you have been thinking anyway. For instance the original Macintosh was described as the first human-computer interface that was good enough to criticize. With design for embodied, tangible, and diversely displayed information, is pervasive computing at last good enough to criticize?
One of the must fundamental sets of categories for critique has been introduced by Borgman (1999) as information 'about,' 'for,' or 'as' the world. Information 'about' the world characterizes much pre-modernity. Even biologists concentrated on descriptions. Information 'for' the world implies also some generative understanding, and is the main work of design. Modernists are notoriously spotty at seeing how things are because they are so busy imagining how else things might become. That begins an environmental disconnection. Then there is information 'as' the world, 'a deluge that threatens to erode, suspend, and dissolve its predecessors' (Borgman, 1999: 2). Herein lies the main environmental disconnection. Media-saturated people somehow become reality-challenged. Realism involves making sense of information types, especially in relationship to unmediated objects, structures, and surroundings, especially those that cannot be turned off, put away, or ignored.
Here let us limit the scope to information in environments, neither just describing them elsewhere like stories and maps, nor becoming them virtually like games and cinema, but, ubiquitous and embedded from within, engaged at annotating, operating, identifying, linking, recording, embellishing, polluting, populating, and filling the peripheries of what the best philosophers agree upon as reality.
Under philosophical shifts required by planetary change, environmental critics no longer oppose environment and culture, nor conflate environment with nature. Instead the critical challenge has becomes to recognize the origins of crisis, and prospects for change, in cultural attitudes toward any and all concepts of environment in which humanity plays a part. This includes built environment, managed biosphere, information sphere, and ambient cultural experience. How each of these disposes people to understand their place in the world now demands exposition. Bio-centric forms of environmentalism may always lead the way; yet to make such abstraction accessible to more imaginations, culturally-centric forms must also play a role.
Information and environmental histories have not yet interwoven enough. Now, as information media become ubiquitous and interfaces become physically tangible and socially transparent, this separation may change. 'Environmental history of information' may no longer yield a null search on Google, as it did at this writing.
Malcolm McCullough is associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan. He has also served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon and Harvard. He has written two widely-read books on architecture and interaction design – Digital Ground (2004) and Abstracting Craft (1996) – and has engaged in speaking and editorial review across a wide range of disciplines, from urbanism through applied arts to interaction design.
Borgman, Albert. Holding on to Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Buell, Lawrence. From Apocalypse to Way of Life : Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Greenfield, Adam. 'All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings.' Boxes and Arrows. www.boxesandarrows.com. 2004.
Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1973).
McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
Miller, Henry. The Air Conditioned Nightmare (San Francisco: New Directions, 1970).
Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability (Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2005).
Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).
Nielsen, Jacob. 'Information Pollution.' Alertbox. www.useit.com. 11 August 2003, <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030811.html>.
Owen, David. 'Green Manhattan– Why New York is the greenest city in the U.S.' The New Yorker. 18 October 2004.
Shenk, David. Data Smog – Surviving the Information Glut (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1997).
Taylor, Mark. C. The Moment of Complexity – Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Weiser, Mark, and John Seely Brown. 'The Coming Age of Calm Technology.' 1996. 15.08.2011. <http://nano.xerox.com/hypertext/weiser/acmfuture2endnote.htm>.
Worster, D. 'Appendix: Doing Environmental History' The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Wurman, Richard Saul. Information Anxiety (New York: Doubleday, 1989).


How do you let an ex know your there for them no matter what without them getting the wrong idea that you want them back?
In regard to your question; Tell you ex what you've just said on here!
At the end of the day, it is then their choice as to whether or not they share any problems with you.
Just be honest with them. If the break up is fresh, they may not take it very well just yet. However, you could always just let them know that you will be there for them whenever they need a friend.


Actor and unorthodox artist Shia LaBeouf caught people's attention last week after launching his new art installation, HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US. Over the weekend the exhibit was visited by a white supremacist who attempted to derail the proceedings by shouting racist phrases amid a crowd of protesters. Luckily — or unluckily for this individual — LaBeouf was on-site and was not pleased.
The 30-year-old actor then immediately appeared onscreen and began shouting his exhibit's slogan into the face of the white supremacist, sparking a brief showdown between the two men as they chanted opposing mantras. The exchange ended nonviolently when a security guard showed up to boot the racist interloper.
The rest of the protestors in the background appeared content to let LaBeouf take charge in defending his installation, but kept up the chant with him as he drove the white supremacist away. It made for a strange but fitting testament to the intention of LaBeouf's message.
It's unclear what the individual was attempting to accomplish — besides generally being a troll — but people on Twitter has seen to it that his efforts largely backfired, with an outpouring of support for LaBeouf and his actions.
This early example might serve as a lesson to anyone with similar designs of interfering with the webcam. LaBeouf is passionate and he's not afraid to get in the ring to defend his work. And it looks like he's earned some new fans in the process.
Find out more about HE WILL NOT DIVIDE US here.


text:
Netflix—Are You Still Watching?
Dec 26, 2019 by Arnaav Anand in Arts & Culture
In a world heavily supplemented by an influx of technology with various applications, the television industry is one of the many key players in the entertainment collective. The current leading entity in this bid, with 158 million subscribers worldwide, is Netflix. An American media-services provider that offers a wide range of television programmes and movies, Netflix's content is specifically curated to the interests of each viewer. This model of viewing content has risen to become the norm and has replaced old-fashioned mediums such as cable TV, and up to a certain extent, the big screen. As of April 2019, Netflix has an 87 per cent market share in the USA and nearly 30 per cent globally in the streaming services market.
Netflix was founded in 1997 by its current CEO, Reed Hastings. Netflix began as a web service that allowed people to rent DVDs online and have them delivered, or returned, by mail. It adopted the approach of enabling people to stream content online in 2007. Consumers were able to watch what they wanted, whenever, or however, they wanted, without being limited to a specified time frame. In the late '90s, Netflix rapidly grew as a competitor to many leading companies at the time. By the early 2000s, Netflix was in prime position to be acquired by Blockbuster. However, the proposed deal wasn't mutually agreed upon by both parties. Netflix soon began putting Blockbuster out of business and eventually, the latter declared bankruptcy in 2010. Soon after, Netflix started growing on its own as a streaming business by releasing its original television series and movies, and by striking exclusive deals with studios and show-runners. As a result, the stock value skyrocketed in 2013 and has only proliferated since.
A Blockbuster outlet closing down as a result of Netflix making their service obsolete. [Image Credits: Entrepreneur]
Cable companies are by far the most affected entities by the advent of Netflix. In 2013, Netflix began competing with TV networks and cable directly for original content. While most networks only approved shows based on pilots hitting specific metrics, Netflix offered series producers and show-runners contracts upfront to create an entire season or two. Additionally, show-runners were given creative leeway to develop their programs without notes or approval from Netflix. As a result, many of the most critically acclaimed and popular new series now release on Netflix instead of the established networks.
Netflix also started uploading entire seasons of established TV series at once, resulting in the advent of binge-watching, in contrast to broadcast and cable TV's once-a-week programming model. Many TV networks, such as NBC and BBC, are now experimenting with this model, even if it means sacrificing advertising revenue. Netflix's production methods have forced TV networks to be more aggressive in recruiting and retaining talent by paying more generously and offering more creative freedom. Netflix's most salient feature is its on-demand library of media, along with the option to download the same. If this trend continues, cable services such as Tata Sky are vulnerable to becoming obsolete in the coming years.
Comparison between Netflix and major cable companies in the US. [Image Credits: Statista]
An inevitable consequence of global streaming services is its impact on the Hollywood sector. Netflix is creating greater original and award-winning content and offering it to the customers for affordable subscriptions. By doing so, it is constantly feared by Hollywood studios and film distributors, due to their entire business model being disrupted. In the first six months of 2018, Netflix had released as many movies as the six major studios of Hollywood combined. It is also planning to spend around $8 billion on creating original content, television series, and movies that would give competition to the other studios. It is increasingly producing movies that are released to the customers on the same day as they hit the movie theatres. For the active user, an average subscription to Netflix is a cheaper alternative to purchasing a movie ticket. Netflix reflects people's tendency to prefer quality content and value for money over 4D and IMAX. Movies such as The Irishman and 6 Underground are a testimony to Hollywood producers capriciously shifting their business model to generate a larger revenue by directly broadcasting movies on Netflix instead of the theatres.
[Image Credits: Statista]
Despite Netflix's boundless success with its extensive variety of regional and international programmes, it does have several limitations. To start with, all the new content isn't readily available for streaming on Netflix. This is owing to the long and onerous process at the corporate level to put pen to paper on lucrative deals and contracts. Secondly, Netflix's library is quite outdated. Viewers often have to wait for a long time before its library is updated and new content is added.
Another significant drawback is the lack of a quality adjustment feature, which leads to a large data cap that eats away a sizeable chunk of bandwidth. Moreover, Netflix has an odd way of eliminating some TV shows and movies. Periodically as the library is revised, old media is discarded without warning, which is frustrating for consumers who must rely on third-party sources to be informed. Lastly, Netflix does not have a live-streaming feature. This is one of the primary issues when it comes to the entertainment sector, and is overcome by competing services such as Amazon Prime and Hotstar, which offer live broadcasting of sports events.
Netflix also sports an easily overlooked Achilles heel—its outstanding debt problem. As of November 2019, Netflix is at a debt valued at about $12 billion, which is not quenched by its relatively minor cash revenue. By the end of 2019, Netflix is expected to generate a cash loss of $3.5 billion. The driver of its cash problem is hefty content costs. The concern of the hour is that if the consumer market stops growing, it won't be able to meet its debt obligations, and this will quickly throw the company into bankruptcy.
India has shown a penchant for Amazon and the multitude of services that are offered along with Prime Video. To combat this, Netflix executives are working on a new long-term plan in India to offer cheaper subscription rates. As of now, Indian users are privy to a mobile-only subscription plan at a considerably lower price, thus benefiting the company in the short run. Despite having poured money into original Indian titles such as Sacred Games, Chopsticks, and Lust Stories, as well as a multitude of beloved Bollywood titles in their library, Netflix has a relatively low footprint in the Indian market.
Due to the country's capriciously unsaturated market and the broad range of ethnic communities, it is an increasingly unassailable challenge to cater to everybody's interests. A pivotal player in the Indian market that shuts the doors for any further expansion by Netflix is Hotstar, which offers incredibly cheap live-streams of cricket and football matches. Netflix most recently has an estimated four to six million monthly active users in India, in comparison to Hotstar's 300 million users.
Sacred Games, which enjoyed nation-wide success, was widely advertised in India by Netflix. [Image Credits: BBC]
Another important aspect to consider in today's scenario is data mining and artificial intelligence. Netflix utilises a highly efficient algorithm that controls the content being suggested on the platform based on user interactions with the various titles. Their selection is based on the existence of over 75,000 'micro-genres' that are latent to the user, which allows for ludicrously specific recommendations.
By cross-referencing basic geographical information and the data produced by the 70 million-odd Netflix subscribers, Netflix can produce comprehensive charts detailing exactly what people watch. Given the vast wealth of statistics about viewing habits Netflix has at its fingertips, the company abstains from micro-managing shows because they have more than a fair idea of what will flourish. Perhaps the best example of this is House Of Cards, Netflix's first original series, which was predestined to succeed even before its production as the company possessed user data that indicated users would enjoy it.
Just a few years ago, most television programming could only be consumed on television. This has changed largely due to Netflix, whose success has been deemed an existential threat for the entrenched TV industry. Many consumers have already cut the cord from existing cable, as the cost of a Netflix subscription is a small fraction of that of most cable packages. Numerous companies are working to overtake Netflix, and the firm faces competition from other digital operators like Amazon and Google. All of this merely points to the fact that Netflix has broken the mould for how television is made, watched, rated, and ultimately exhibits the extent of its influence on all future content.
Featured Image Credits: Unseen Opportunity
Tagged with: business, data, Netflix, service, streaming, Technology
About the author Arnaav Anand


text:
Education to make informed decisions
Author Topic: Education to make informed decisions (Read 1989 times)
kelee877
Bugged out already
Location: Northern Ontairo
Currently there is not a lot of news on the Ebola front, except for it is still out there...
As a person who likes to read between the lines, the lines and underneath the lines I find Ebola difficult to follow. Not that I am uneducated and cannot understand the sequences of events or timelines, but the lack of clarity from those who have been set in charge.
Educated decision making is based on facts received and processed by ourselves, if the true facts are not there or they are grey matter into a blur, then we cannot make for ourselves educated and informed decisions.
Questions remain in our minds as to how much,what to and how long
I have spent some time this morning rehashing the older news, the level of urgency and just what has changed over the past few months
as in any possible pandemic situation I find the CDC and WHO to be the front run liars..and have no idea between the difference of a hole in ground and their ass@@@@....
Freedom means just as I have stated above, for any person to make informed decisions based on information received by another relevant party...
and we can history has a way of repeating itself, I find myself today in the same frame of mind as I did in the late 2005 H5N1 scare...but I have to admit that at least Bush had a set of brass ones to hide tamiflu on a huge ship and send it out to sea in a hidden location just n case there was a pandemic and released the info so we had an idea of what might occur, also during that time we were forever on the watch for a gene mutation, we were still given facts...they even went as far to say IT could happen and for anyone that could stock up on powdered milk and tuna, althou at the time this seemed hillarious and useless, it was at least something
Today I find the CDC and WHO to be negligent in with their power to inform the public of the truth, so that WE as human can make for ourselves informed decisions, we still at the presupus of what could possibily be the most deadliest pandemic the world has ever seen and they(the CDC and WHO) black out news) all under the guise of not creating panic...
So far what I have gathered is the CDC has changed its procedures for hospitals that will deal with Ebola victims, they have order millions of dollars worth of PPE equipment, that will divided in to 50 bundles and will be sent to hospitals that are in need...and that any hospital staff that will be dealing with Ebola patients must show,during practice that they know how to properly done and take off PPE equipment.
In conclusion of this torrid rant of some sorts, I myself would like them to drop the game and come clean with the proper information to help us to make our God given right of informed and educated decisions...
Rant off for now, feel free to share this with anyone that has an ear to listen...
http://prepareforfuture2.forumotion.com/
In loving memory of my son Chris April 12 1985-June 19 2007
Re: Education to make informed decisions
As I posted this, I am watching cbc TV news and along the bottom scrolls Serra Leone sees spike in Ebola numbers
So I have searched through there site and there is no news write up on this and nothing around at all..I would like to have more information and yet again we are being held in the dark
I have found an older news write up from Nov 2 2014 that says they have jumped nine times higher...I will keep searching, I am just surprised if this is from Nov 2, that they are still scrolling it along the bottom
« Last Edit: November 10, 2014, 09:52:54 AM by kelee877 »
fleetway
And yesterday's news said it is almost eradicated in Liberia. Go Figger!
Finally found some news
]Ebola cases in Sierra Leone show sharp rise
Official figures show 111 new cases on Sunday, the highest daily rate since August, as UN warns numbers may be much higher
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/10/ebola-cases-sierra-leone-sharp-rise
]Liberia village becomes a new Ebola epicenter
A schoolteacher brought his sick daughter from Liberia's capital to this small town of 300 people. Soon he was dead along with his entire family, and they are now buried in the forest nearby along with an increasing number of residents.The community of Jene-Wonde in Grand Cape Mount County near the border with Sierra Leone has become a new epicenter for the deadly Ebola outbreak in Liberia, which is also hitting Sierra Leone and Guinea.Momo Sheriff, who lost his son to Ebola, said there is no health care in the community and leaders have no way to manage it.
The tiny town already has lost 10 percent of its population to Ebola since late September. Amid all the deaths, markets and farms nearby have been abandoned."If the government does not take action, everybody will die in this town," he said. "We are burying two dead bodies today. We don't know who it will be tomorrow.
Every day we have to cry," he told an Associated Press journalist.Liberia has suffered the greatest death toll in the Ebola epidemic, with 2,766 deaths blamed on the virus that had never been seen in West Africa before this year's crisis. After months of aggressive efforts to isolate the sick and safely bury the dead, the World Health Organization says Ebola appears to be declining in Liberia "although new case numbers remain high in parts of the country."The number of reported cases appears to be even dropping in Liberia's capital, Monrovia.
But that is little solace for the people of Jene-Wonde.Juma Mansaray lost her mother and grandmother on the same day here. She said the community has been ostracized from neighboring ones.
Everywhere we go the people will drive us away," she said. "We are like outcasts; we can't even go to the local market to buy pepper or food because people think we are cursed
We don't know what to do. Most of our relatives in other areas don't want to see us ... we are stuck here."
]http://www.aol.com/article/2014/11/10/liberia-village-becomes-a-new-ebola-epicenter/20991132/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D560688
HHS Issues Special HIPAA Bulletin On Ebola Privacy
Law360, New York (November 10, 2014, 6:24 PM ET) -- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Monday issued a bulletin reminding health care centers and others about what information can and cannot be disclosed about Ebola patients or others in an emergency health situation.[/font][/color][/font][/size][/color]According to HHS' Office for Civil Rights, it has received a number of inquiries on how the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act applies to information about Ebola patients, an issue that could lead to legal risks for providers and business associates. Monday's special guidance recognized that patient data...
[/color]http://www.law360.com/articles/594963/hhs-issues-special-hipaa-bulletin-on-ebola-privacy[/font][/color]
JustABear
Quote from: kelee877 on November 10, 2014, 08:07:29 PM
Not sure what you are trying to say with this. The link has no information.
THERE ARE NO PROBLEMS... ONLY OPPORTUNITIES FOR SOLUTIONS
In my eyes it is saying that hospitals can no longer release information should they receive a patient with Ebola...it will now all be hush whether they test positive or negative...you will never know if and when you have to go through a set of emergency doors,if someone has sat in the very chair you are going to sit in could have Ebola..well not really but, they will not have to say if they have someone in that hospital that is infected
There is nothing in that to state that hospitals cannot make the public aware of a patient with Ebola. What it IS warning about is the legal and ethical requirement to maintain patient confidentiality by not sharing anything that can identify the patient or actual details of treatment or progress. It is illegal in Ontario to even access a patient's information unless you are actively involved with that patients care.
I understand both sides of this discussion. But I have to say I sympathize with Kelee's take on the situation. Although I have been away for a few days hunting my favorite meat (yes cute little bambi) trying to get current stats is almost impossible. A couple of weeks ago they were stating infections at almost 14,000 and deaths at close to 5000. This was revised downward later due to "new reporting methods" ... then nothing. Did it just go away? perhaps it is like a Malaysian airliner; out of site out of mind? This followed the appointment of a US Ebola (read media) czar. Now there was intense pressure on the mainstream media only to report positive cases in North America not just suspected or cases under surveillance. Well from what I can find out there were 146 people being monitored in the City of New York just over a week ago, this week it is almost 400! This is just one city all be it a very large one.
I believe they the general public should be treated with respect but most of all honesty. Give the data and let us interpret the data for ourselves. The lack of current data speaks volumes. If they are not telling us the numbers they are already not telling the truth.


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Home » Events » Traveling Through Album Leaves: The Multi-Voiced Haiga of Hanabusa Itchô, c. 1690
Traveling Through Album Leaves: The Multi-Voiced Haiga of Hanabusa Itchô, c. 1690
Miriam Wattles - Associate Professor in History of Art and Architecture, UCSB
Monday, February 18, 2013 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Room 203, Henry R. Luce Hall See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 6511
A new brand of lyricism, very much colored by satire, defines the paintings of Hanabusa Itchô (1652-1724). This explicates Itchô's relatively unknown painting album, now entitled Fûzoku gajô (or, "album of genre subjects"), delineating how its thirty-six leaves combine strands of poetry, song, and painting to culminate in a complex opus. Trained under one of the top Kanô painters during a moment when the school was actively reworking their synthesis of continental and native styles, Itchô's mode broke new ground. His own amalgamation of Chinese/ Japanese and ancient / modern exemplified the aesthetic philosophy of the haikai poetry circles of Matsuo Bashô, fine-tuned through his experience as entertainer in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters. In this album, Itchô gives a virtuoso multi-voiced performance composed of many moments of "awakening to the high, while returning to the low," as Bashô's epithet would have it. Itchô varied his artistic personas along with his artistic signatures, creating in effect a one-man visual haikai sequence. Accordingly, the viewer's inner eye experiences a multi-pathed journey through the imagination. Miriam Wattles, Ph.D. (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, 2004), is Associate Professor of Japanese Visual Culture at UC Santa Barbara. She has published articles on Edo-period books, art, and historiography. Her present research is on the materiality and migration of books on toba-e, giga, and manga, 1720-1928. Her book, The Life and Afterlives of Hanabusa Itchô, will be coming out Spring, 2013.
CEAS Colloquium Series
Diverse or Disciplinary: DH in Mainland China Today
Reading Edo: Data-driven Approaches for Japan Studies
Tuesday, Feb. 8th 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Pak Sheung Cheun's Artwork "Nightmare Wallpaper" and Hong Kong's Despair
Thursday, Feb. 10th 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM
Edward H. Hume Memorial Lecture
Wednesday, Feb. 23rd 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM
Japan Colloquium TBD
Social Mobility across the Pacific: The Case of Japanese in the United States
Friday, Feb. 25th 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Copyright © 2018 Council on East Asian Studies at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale · All rights reserved
CEAS · Room 320, Henry R. Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue · New Haven, CT 06511
phone: 203-432-3426 · fax: 203-432-3430 · eastasian.studies@yale.edu (link sends e-mail)


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Fri, 17 Jan, 2020 - 16:24
'He was only starting his life, that's the worst part'; Locals react to Bandon Road killing
Gardai speak to residents as members of the Garda forensic team take pictures of the area outside the house on the Bandon Road, Cork, where a student died after a row broke out on Thursday night. Picture Dan Linehan
Sarah O'Dwyer
LOCALS and business people in the Bandon Road area of the city have been reacting to the shocking murder of CIT student Cameron Blair.
One man, who was on the way to collect his pension in the post office next to the crime scene, told The Echo the incident had given him a fright, while another man out walking his dog said: "He was only just back in college. It's shocking. It's desperate."
Cameron Blair
Others described the incident as both scary and heartbreaking.
A woman, who was working in a local business, said: "It's his family and the people that saw it happen, and the damage that does. We have loads of young lads and girls coming in here all the time, all the students, happy people. No one expects that to happen.
"It's really sad. It's absolutely devastating. I have children myself, and if I thought something like that could happen - you'd never get over it.
"He was only starting his life, that's the worst part. He was out having his night. He wasn't interfering with anyone. He was in his own place.
Garda members involved in a massive search of the undergrowth on the cliff face above O'Donovan Rossa, Road, Cork in connection with the death of CIT student Cameron Blair who was stabbed at the Bandon Road, Cork.
"You're never safe, no matter what. No matter how you think you're safe," she added.
Barry Broderick, owner of Broderick's pharmacy on Barrack Street, described the incident as "senseless", but said the area had changed in recent years.
"We have lots of broken glass, broken windows, vomit. It always happened a bit but it is worse, but I don't think it is a Barrack Street or a Bandon Road thing, I think it is a societal thing," he said.
He criticised a lack of garda presence on the street despite the number of high-profile incidents in recent months.
Meanwhile, another man who lives in Togher but was out walking, said incidents like this are happening too frequently.
He described it as "gruesome" but said it was the latest in a series of "heartbreaking" incidents in recent times.
Members of the Cork Fire Service and the Gardai takig part in a massive search of the undergrowth on the cliff face above O'Donovan Rossa, Road, Cork in connection with the death of CIT student Cameron Blair who was stabbed at the Bandon Road, Cork. Picture Dan Linehan
"It's happening too often. A couple of families have been destroyed. It's heartbreaking. I've had videos sent on to me from what was happening inside in the house," he told The Echo.
"It's a lovely area, there's a lot of old people here but all the houses are being sold now for students.
"It's a recipe for disaster. It's a prime area for landlords, they can charge what they want with the college around the corner," he added.
more Cork crime articles
Man jailed for threatening to kill elderly relative
Gardaí remind people to lock their cars as two people arrested in connection with thefts in Cork town
Watch: Stolen dog reunited with Cork family after being found in UK


A number of American films released in the mid/late 1990s drew on, or have been discussed in the context of, gnosticism—a loose, imprecise umbrella term usually applied to a number of heterodox early Christian literary traditions. The Matrix is the most famous of this group of films, which also includes such films as Pleasantville, Dark City, The Truman Show, and Thirteenth Floor. This curious trend would not have been possible had it not been for the emergence of gnosticism in mainstream culture generally; as well, gnosticism's emphasis on the spectacular, constructed and ultimately illusory nature of apparent reality became especially relevant and compelling in the context of the digital revolution taking place at that time.
However, the gnosticism that was reborn in late 20th century North American culture differed significantly from the traditions of Late Antiquity on which it drew: in its modern rediscovery or reinvention, "gnosticism" came to mean something that was in many ways more hopeful, more life-affirming, and ultimately more humanistic in its rebirth than in its original form—indeed, something akin to ancient Hermetic thought. In this presentation, I will discuss the wave of "gnosticized" movies of this period, putting them in dialogue with the modern rediscovery of gnosticism and using them as a way of capturing the changes that gnosticism underwent as it emerged into the modern world from its centuries of hibernation. As I will argue, these films—and the ways in which they have been received—present us with a clear view of how this reinvented gnosticism, this revived and adapted ancient heresy, works in a modern context and in dialogue with modern needs.
Kaler, Michael (2018) "Neo-gnosticism at the movies," Journal of Religion & Film: Vol. 22 : Iss. 3 , Article 11.


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South Carolina Is the 10th State to Impose Medicaid Work Requirements
December 13, 2019 by Read Sector
A coalition of groups opposed to work requirements criticized South Carolina on Thursday for becoming "the first state in the nation to exclusively impose the harmful policy of work requirements on low-income parents with children."
The coalition, which includes the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Children's Defense Fund, the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families and the March of Dimes, said in a statement that the requirement "adds red tape burdens that will fall squarely on parents' shoulders."
"Children rely on healthy parents and caregivers to help them meet their health and developmental needs," the statement went on, "and this waiver will make it harder for parents to be there for their children."
A federal judge struck down work requirements in three of the nine other states that introduced them — Arkansas, Kentucky and New Hampshire. Only Arkansas had already put them into effect. All three states have appealed, although Kentucky's new Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, who was sworn in this week, has said he will rescind the work rules.
Many of the six other states — Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Utah and Wisconsin — have voluntarily put their work requirements on hold; Indiana and Michigan have also been sued over them.
The Arkansas work rule led to more than 18,000 people there losing coverage before Judge James E. Boasberg of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, blocked it in March. Even many who did work had not kept up with or even learned about the reporting requirements. There, as in Kentucky and New Hampshire, Judge Boasberg ruled that federal health officials had failed to adequately consider the impact of the rules on people with Medicaid coverage.
The rules require "able-bodied" adults to report to the state every month that they have worked, searched or trained for a job, taken classes or volunteered in order to keep receiving Medicaid health coverage, which is largely free. Ms. Verma has said such activities can improve people's health and help them "rise out of poverty and government dependence."
Keir Starmer and Rebecca Long-Bailey are favourites to be next Labour leader
Doctor Who star Lenny Henry claims BBC bosses would rather cast a DOG than a black Time Lord
Disneyland visitors are stranded on a SINKING pirate boat for an HOUR before being rescued


text:
Q: Como passar estruturas para funções de classes de gabaritos Eu simplesmente não entendo porque esta errado.
Este código funciona.

template
class test{
public:
    struct st1{
        T a, b, c;
    };
    struct st2{
        T d, e, f;
    };

    T foo1(st1 *st);
    st1 *foo2();
};

template
typename test::st1 *foo2()
{
    return 0;
}

template
T test::foo1(typename st1 *st)
{
    return 0;
}

Mas este não funciona.

template
class test{
public:
    struct st1{
        T a, b, c;
    };
    struct st2{
        T d, e, f;
    };

    T foo1(st1 *st);
    st1 *foo2();
    st1 *foo3(st2 *st);
};

template
T test::foo1(typename st1 *st)
{
    return 0;
}

template
typename test::st1 *foo2()
{
    return 0;
}

template
typename test::st1 *foo3(typename st1 *st)
{
    return 0;
}

A: A sintaxe do seu segundo código está completamente errada.
template <typename T>
class test{
public:
    struct st1{
        T a, b, c;
    };
    struct st2{
        T d, e, f;
    };

    T foo1(st1 *st);
    st1 *foo2();
    st1 *foo3(st2 *st);
};

template <typename T>T test<T>::foo1(st1 *st)
{
    return 0;
}

template <typename T> typename test<T>::st1* test<T>::foo2()
{
    return 0;
}

template <typename T> typename test<T>::st1* test<T>::foo3(st2 *st)
{
    return 0;
}

Esta é a sintaxe correta, mas gostaria de saber o que exatamente você espera conseguir com esta classe. Você está estudando templates?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


But as the sun sets on summer evenings, curtains rise on a busy schedule of mostly volunteer theater productions – most of the actors and crews don't get paid, but the word amateur understates the quality of their work – that give theater company members a vital creative outlet and grant audiences the chance to see classic drama and comedy for the price of a bottle of sunscreen.
Across the state, dozens of theater companies (many of which are listed geographically here www.jnctg.com/) put on hundreds of shows featuring the tireless work of thousands of actors, directors, musicians, set-builders, costume designers and car-parkers. Some perform in theaters that can hold more than 500 people, and often fill every seat. Others leave it all on the stage for audiences of fewer than 100.
Some perform in extravagantly renovated historic buildings that saw their first heyday in the early 1900s, when vaudeville acts came into the state on trains, unloaded their gear into theaters near the railroad tracks and performed for a few days before moving down the line. Some companies perform in school auditoriums or outdoor amphitheaters. One uses a former post office. Except for the rare company that is able to hire one or two professionals, most actors are local residents, performing for their neighbors, co-workers and relatives who get a seat on the front row to applaud the results of all those weeks of rehearsals.
"I ask myself all the time why people continue to do it," said Alice Sherwood, artistic director for the Opera House Theatre Company, which staged a rousing "Spamalot" at downtown Wilmington's Thalian Hall in June and will perform "1776" at the historic theater building for the next two weekends. "Almost everyone who performs with us has a full-time job, so they work all day, come to rehearsals at night and on weekends, and then do multiple shows on the weekends. It's a lot to ask of people, and yet, they continue to give it. It's amazing.
Like others across the state, Opera House Theatre Company relies on individual and corporate donations to help with the cost of sets, costumes and other expenses so that ticket prices can remain affordable. Donors often are named in the playbill.
Whether they give $50 or $500,000 or pay nothing more than their face value of a ticket, audience members contribute something to every performance, said Sherwood, whose mother and stepfather launched the company in 1985, and who grew up working backstage.
"The energy from the audience affects the show immediately," she said. "So every show is different.
After a day at the beach, consider an afternoon or evening at Thalian Hall in Wilmington, where the Opera House Theatre Company will perform "1776," the musical that tells the story of America's first steps as a nation, July 22-24. Sunday shows are matinees. Tickets can be purchased at the box office in the lobby of Thalian Hall, by phone at 910-632-2285 or online at www.operahousetheatrecompany.net/. Tickets are $24-32, with discounts for students, senior citizens and groups of 10 or more booking in advance.
Carteret Community Theater in Morehead City will perform "Hands on a Hard Body," about a contest to win a truck by being the last one standing with a hand on its skin, July 21-24. Sunday shows are matinees. Tickets are $15 to $22 and can be purchased online at www.carteretcommunitythreatre.com, or call 252-497-8919. New Bern Civic Theater will perform Shakespeare's comedic quartet of short pieces on marriage, love and physical attraction, "Midsummer Night's Dream," Aug. 5-7. Tickets are $10 to $20, with discounts for students and active-duty military. Next up at the theater is "Death Trap," opening Sept. 16. Tickets are available online at www.newberncivictheatre.org or through the box office at 252-634-9057.
Sanford is home to the 330-seat Temple Theatre, www.templeshows.com, opened in 1925 to host traveling vaudeville shows. When vaudeville went out of fashion, the theater added a movie screen, but it all went dark when Temple closed in the late 1960s, allowing the building to fall into disrepair. A community group raised money for restoration and a reopening in the 1980s, and Temple now hosts professional performances year-round, and youth conservatories in the summer. "The core of what we do is musical theater," said Chris deLambert, Temple's director of business development. Last year, nearly 300 children and youth participated in programs and shows. "I think that for the kids that are engaged in the arts, that filters into other parts of their lives: the positive energy and the positive reinforcement they get back from being a part of something so creative and so big," deLambert said. "It's almost magnetism. They're drawn to perform. They want to sing and dance. They want the spotlight on them. And the audiences, especially with the kids programs, more than anything else, there is a sort of civic pride and optimism about what we're able to do." This summer, Temple is hosting four youth conservatories. They will perform Shakespeare's "As You Like It" Aug. 4-7, and "Seussical Jr." Aug. 12-14. Tickets are $7-$13.
Kernersville Little Theatre (kltheatre.com) has finished its run of "Leap of Faith," a fast-moving musical about a fake faith healer whose real calling seems to be swindling the believers of every town where he and his entourage park their bus. The nonprofit theater company, which recently outgrew its original performance space in Kernersville's most notable historic home, Körner's Folly, features cast members from age 8 to 80 in four shows a year. Beverly Fry, vice president of administration, has volunteered with the group for about 30 years and says some of the actors have served for decades as well, and some have roped in their children and grandchildren. The company includes a live orchestra whose members perform while perched on a ledge at the back of the stage. The hours and hours of practice and set construction all pay off on opening night, Fry said, "When you see what a great production we put on. It's mesmerizing," she said. The company will kick off its 40th season with "Route 66," with performances Sept. 16-18 and Sept. 18-24. Sunday shows are matinees. Tickets are $13 to $15 and are available online and at the door of the James Fitzpatrick Auditorium of Kernersville Elementary School, where performances are held.
It's been a busy summer as always at Flat Rock Playhouse, which traces its roots to a group of traveling performers who landed in the region, near Asheville, in 1940. Designated by the legislature as the official state theater in 1961, Flat Rock now operates nine months a year and still features college students who live on the property and apprentice in the theater. The troupe recently finished "The Music Man," and opens "9 to 5," based on the 1978 movie launched by the Dolly Parton song of the same name, July 28. The show runs through Aug. 20. Tickets are $15 to $40 and are available at www.flatrockplayhouse.org.
Established in 1987 as an outlet for the creative arts in Catawba County, The Green Room in Newton moved several years ago from a local auditorium to a renovated post office. The theater offers more than two dozen performances and programs each year and encourages diversity in casting and attendance. The theater will offer Shakespeare's comedy of mistaken identities "Twelfth Night" Aug. 7-8 and 14-15. "West Side Story" will run Sept. 9-11, Sept. 16-18 and Sept. 23-25. Tickets are $8 to $16 and are available through the box office at 828-464-6128. More information is at thegreenroomtheatre.org/.
Getting up close and personal along with affordability are what make small zoos and farms in North Carolina worth a visit.