Joseph Schumpeter is famous among historians for his “creative destruction” theory of modern capitalism. How about a “destructive creation” theory of art? Via kottke, an artist pretending to be a Parisian hipster named “Stan”–who only watches modern films and TV series on old-school VHS tapes–created a number of fictional VHS covers of his favorite films and shows. (You can read more about this fun prank (in French) here: http://golem13.fr/hipster-vhs-paris.)
On this day (April 9) in 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee formally surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant after the remnants of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia were decisively defeated at the Battle of Appomattox Court House by Union forces. (Above is a screenshot of the front page of the Albany Journal, dated 10 April 1865. More information about this fateful battle is available here and here.)
This simple model might be wrong, but is it useful? This is one of the quirky questions the hyper-productive blogger and cultural economist Tyler Cowen posed to Peter Thiel recently. Here is Thiel’s reply (the aside in brackets was added by us):
THIEL: It’s probably the case that D4 is marginally better at this point, because it looks like there are certain defenses to E4 that are very hard to break, like the Berlin defense. But I still always play E4. It’s what I’ve gotten used to.
COWEN: Because it’s the attacking move, right?
THIEL: It’s the attacking move, and if you’re short of world champion level [i.e. if you have nothing to lose!], I always enjoy increasing the risk involved and volatility in the game.
First move … D4 or E4?
The test for copyright infringement is “substantial similarity” … According to this report by Philip Guo, Juho Kim, and Rob Rubin, who studied student engagement with online courses offered by the edX consortium (edX’s Wikipedia here). Guo, Kim, and Rubin took all 862 educational videos from four edX courses offered in the fall of 2012 and classified each video according to its type (e.g., traditional lecture, problem-solving tutorial) and its production style (e.g., PowerPoint slides, Khan-style tablet drawing, talking head). They also mined the edX server logs to obtain over 6.9 million video watching sessions from almost 128,000 students. After all was said and done, they conclude: “Shorter videos are much more engaging. Engagement drops sharply after 6 minutes. Recommendation: Invest heavily in pre-production lesson planning to segment videos into chunks shorter than 6 minutes. This is the most significant recommendation!” That’s what we thought … Continue reading
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