Monthly Archives: June 2021

Michael Jackson's casket is brought out during public memorial service held at Staples Center on ... [+] July 7, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. Jackson, 50, the iconic pop star, died at UCLA Medical Center after going into cardiac arrest at his rented home on June 25 in Los Angeles, California. AFP PHOTO/ Kevork Djansezian / POOL (Photo credit should read KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/AFP via Getty Images)

If you are a young public figure, and will die an unnatural death, then I have good news for you! You will most likely be remembered for a long time after you die. Conversely, if you are older, are not a public figure, and will die of a natural cause, then the odds that you will be forgotten over time are strong.

Remembering those who have passed on from this life has been an important theme throughout human history. Our ancestors used to remember those who died by sharing their memories with the next generation in the form of stories and ballads. They would sit around a fire and exchange memories and hope they would be passed through generations after them. Later when the printing press was invented, humans began to store, collect and spread information on a massive scale. The printing press made it easier to collect and preserve memories of the deceased because it is easier to store written pieces of information. Today, the developments in communication technologies such as the internet have changed how we create, store and retain memories. The internet also allows us to analyze memory through large-scale data in a quantitative framework.

Being remembered after death has been such an important concern throughout history that civilizations such as the Romans considered damnatio memoriae, or being erased from the publics memory, as one of the severest punishments imaginable. At some point, many of us might have wondered how we will be remembered after passing on from this life too.

The h-index, the number of research papers with the same number of citations is one of the common ways to evaluate academic performance. It is a very important number in academia. The mean and median Hindex for all peer reviewed papers at the time of promotion to Professor in the JHU School of Medicineis 25 and 23 respectively. In computer science and math, scientists do not cite each other as often as in biomedicine and there are very few young computer scientists with the H-index of 100. So it is natural to follow them on Google Scholar and learn about their research. One of the scholars I follow is Jure Leskovec (h-index = 117) the co-author of the famous node2vec and an authority on graph neural networks (GNNs).

So imagine my surprise, when I saw the paper by Robert West, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts titled Post-mortem memory of public figures in news and social media in my Scholar feed. I dont know any of the authors personally but based on their work, they are extremely credible, and productive. In this paper the authors identified trends and analyzed how people are remembered in news and social media one year before and after death. It technically answers a question how long will your name last in peoples memory after you die. We know what you needed to do in ancient Greece to make it last (hello, Achilles!) but what about today? So, if you ever wondered how you can stay famous after you die, then this paper is for you!

Robert is an assistant professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne where he also leads the data science lab. Jure is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University. He is also an investigator at nonprofit research organization Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Meanwhile, Christopher is professor and chair of the linguistics department at Stanford University.

Despite their varying backgrounds, the trio have a few things in common: they are experts in the field of artificial intelligence and data analytics.

In this short but fascinating paper, the three scientists tracked mentions of 2,362 public figures in English-language online news and social media (Twitter) one year before and after death. The tracked people died between 2009 and 2014. They then looked at the spike and decay of attention after death and modeled the two as the interplay of communicative memory, which is sustained by the oral transmission of information and cultural memory, which is sustained by the physical recording of information.

In order to track mentions, they combined the Freebase knowledge base with online news and social media compiled through Spinn3r, an online media aggregation service that tracks mentions from a complete set of all 6,608 English-language web domains indexed by Google News as well as media posts from Twitter. For each of the 2,362 people, the scientists tracked the frequency with which they were remembered in the two medias on a daily basis during the year before and the year after death. This allowed them to quantify the spikes and decay of attention that follow the death of public figures.

The analysis of mention frequencies revealed that for most public figures, a sharp increase of media attention followed immediately after death, whereby mention frequency increased by 9,400% in the news and by 28,000% on Twitter in the median. The average mention frequency then declined around one month after death and eventually decayed slowly to the pre-mortem level. These two stages are consistent with the two components of collective memory: communicative memory, which dominates early on and decays quickly, and cultural memory, which dominates starting around two weeks after death and decays slowly.

Based on the study, the researchers concluded that artists remain more present in the collective memory because they tend to leave a legacy that can long survive them, whereas leaders, athletes, etc who are noteworthy for the actions they take during their lifetime, are of decreased interest once they cannot replicate their actions anymore. This is most pronounced for leaders. Artists also stand out with respect to cultural memory, while no notability type stands out with respect to communicative memory. Ceteris paribus, an unnatural death, also increased the rank with respect to the short-term mention. The effect of age at death also was significant. For instance, on Twitter, the post-mortem boost was monotonically and negatively associated with age at death. Likewise, the increased short-term boost associated with unnatural deaths was more pronounced in the news than on Twitter.

Separately, the study also revealed that Twitter users pay less attention when an old public figure or leader died. Deaths of these poor souls were boosted more by the news both in the short and long-term. Additionally, the researchers noted that future studies may also add language, tone and attitude towards public figures one year before and after death to see if the study would come to a different conclusion.

To conclude, the researchers found that the largest post-mortem boost in English-language media attention can be described as an anglophone of any gender who was already well-known before death and died a young and unnatural death. So, try and get famous before you die if you want to be remembered for a long time!

And if you are interested in ways to avoid dying prematurely and gaining some time to become famous, consider finding more ways to live longer and attending the 8th Aging Research and Drug Discovery conference organized by University of Copenhagen and Columbia University. I am sure that one way to become famous in late life is to set a longevity record, currently held by Jeanne Calment (122.5).

aging process, young woman become old

Continue reading here:
How To Stay Famous After You Die. AI Scientists Have An Answer - Forbes

Covid-19 has reshaped the way actors express themselves and the way audiences experience and receive live performances.

What was thought to go away in a couple weeks, in the months of March and April 2020, an unheard of virus completely disrupted every rehearsal room and live show, which in turn grounded every performer and entertainment company to an unexpected halt.

After the blow of it all, creatives slowly found themselves gravitating towards technology to connect with their audiences, which unexpectedly came through for them in unique, and quite positive and enriching ways.

Whether it was to simply keep human contact alive, read plays together, brainstorm ideas (and once those ideas were sourced and deliberated on, they were executed and presented on the very same platform) for their audiences, family and friends, albeit predominantly from home due to restrictions and national lockdowns globally.

Over a year later, we now see theatres, creatives and performers slowly planning an in-person return this summer and autumn, with social distancing measures in place.

Last week, I was invited to see a first rehearsed reading on stage at Londons Almeida Theatre in Islington, and it was the most exhilarating experience, to say the least. To be in the room again and to take it all in as well as observe others take it all in, was certainly like a recalibrated, cleansed palate experiencing taste for the first time again.

An even more crucial point in the evening was the post-show discussion with the panel of artists and the socially-distanced audience questioning and discussing our humanity, and what the play meant to everyone individually. There were moments and minutes when the entire room just sat in silence taking in what was said. You could sense the unease of certain topics and subject matters, the shuffling of discomfort, as well as some feeling the relief and ease to express how they were digesting what they just had witnessed on stage.

When talking to audiences who have seen shows online this past year, some of the feedback of the digital experience included comments like, "It somehow lacked the eeriness of being in the physical presence of the art for me!".

Others shared, "I felt disconnected at moments because ultimately the screen reminded me it was a virtual experience and I wasn't in the room with the others to feel the tangible things you feel when you're in the room. But I must say in the stage productions that were filmed specifically for online viewers, the camera made me feel welcomed and in the room".

What we now know is that the uncertainty of the past year has changed the way creatives, performers and performance companies approach their craft. What is even more striking is the change in the way we all have had to relate to our audiences.

Take my very first performance of this year in January,Borders and Crossings, written by Nigerian playwright Inua Ellams and directed by Bijan Sheibani for Under The Radar Festival. Produced by the Public Theater New York and the UKs Fuel Theatre, it was technically brought to you through my laptop, the hand delivered ring light, studio and mic setup, in my shared sitting space within my small London flat in the midst of a harsh winter. We were given the freedom to choose our wardrobe and do our own hair and makeup, which was a fun experience in itself, given I got to dress my own character, for once.

My fellow actor, Sope Dirisu, in the Borders and Crossings performance was also in his flat on the other side of London; and yet the audiences around the globe experienced our unique rapport and story-telling, making them feel like they were right there, in the same room with us, sat right next to each other escaping from Eritrea by foot and then managing to get on a lorry through the Sudan desert to Libya, followed by another journey on a boat to Lampedusa, Italy.

If you saw the performance, you would have seen that our characters made new friends on their journey for a better life, friends from Cote dIvoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Syria. They also sadly lost some friends to the sea or as they called it, the blue desert.

Every night, after every performance, we held a live Q&A with audiences that hailed to be tuning in from New York, Medellin, London, Dublin, Glasgow, Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, Asmara, Lagos, Beirut, Dubai, Hanoi, Istanbul, Berlin, Madrid, among many more cities worldwide with such emotionally filled reactions, responses and feedback.

Who would have thought a performer can reach an audience from their home, in fact every continent? Is this what a digital platform can provide for the experience of the performance arts? No one had to book a flight and come to the US to watch our show, they only needed access to the internet with a free Zoom account to connect to the live-stream. How did that feel for the audience member, in place of an in-person attendance?

The overall sentiment appeared to be one of gratitude. Audience members were grateful for access but agreed it did not replace the visceral experience of a live performance.

What about the actor? The creative? The performer? What does it feel like not having their audience there with them in-person? Experiencing and feeling their energy, tics, and reactions?

After speaking with many fellow performers, writers, directors, and producers around the world, it appears that they agree the physical presence of a live show cannot be replaced. Yet it still has somehow provided a sharing of stories as well as a way of continued living with purpose, and making ends meet.

Many artists shared the curiosity of simply wanting to know to what extent new ways of performing will remain - for both performers and audiences - after the pandemic.

What enhanced it even more was artists continuously inspiring and supporting each other.

One wonderful artist I met (just after the second national lockdown was easing up again) was international award-winning, South African rising star Kgole Giggs. His poetic pieces of art really showed me the essence of the adversities we face right now around the world.

The world slowing down has allowed me to reflect more on where I come from in order to understand more where I would love to see myself and work this coming decade, he said.

Our serendipitous meeting happened thanks to Signature African Art gallery, which was exhibiting his work at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair and we are now in the works of putting an original collaboration together towards the end of the year.

One thing artistic directors and producers shared with me is that now a lot of time is saved not having to fly artists in, which additionally meant there were less scheduling conflicts. Many producers I spoke to really like the idea of now being able to extend access to everyone that may not be able to attend a show in-person and can then watch it online and also pay less for a ticket.

Technology is certainly here to stay and evolve. As a result of the global restrictions over the past year, there has been a push to think outside the box and try new things. However, does this new channel have longevity in the years to come?

These new forms of live shows and performances the pandemic has given birth to has allowed audiences to continue to engage with performers; however the majority agree if you can be in the room, go! The adrenaline, anticipation, affection, the community and engagement we all receive from being together in-flesh appears to be irreplaceable.

Either way, what is a performer without its audience? And is not the audience non-existent without the performer?

Hope is perhaps the ultimate resource of what keeps us all going during these strange times.

I leave you with Joy Williams beautiful words expressing the worlds never ending hunger for the performing arts:

Hungry, I come to you

For I know You satisfy

I am empty but I know

Your love does not run dry

So I wait for You

So I wait for You

I'm falling on my knees

Offering all of me

You're all this heart

Is living for

Broken, I run to You

For Your arms are open wide

I am weary but I know

Your touch restores my life.

Source: TRT World

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How the performing arts discovered a new channel during the pandemic - TRT World

With Greenpeaces 50th anniversary on the horizon, I was asked to host a series of virtual mailbag calls connecting activists across generations and regions. The outpouring of interest and questions from those at Greenpeace today was moving.

While I could not address all the great questions and comments in one article or one call, here is the first batch. These are my thoughts and ideas. Someone else might have different ideas. I make no claim to arriving at complete and definitive answers to these questions.

I was fortunate as a young child to live in natural settings, with rivers, forests, hills, and ocean to explore. However, as a child, I didnt know how vulnerable all this was. Later, I witnessed pristine natural settings obliterated for shopping malls, highways, and parking lots. Rachel Carsons Silent Spring taught me more about the crisis, and in 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught on fire from pollution, I realized the urgency of the crisis. From Gregory Bateson, Arne Naess, the Taoist writers, and my Indigenous friends, I began to learn a deeper respect for how to think and live the way nature works. I recently wrote about this for Greenpeace.

Sort of. In the 1970s, we set out to create a global ecology movement, which did not exist at the time, and we expected that the movement would expand around the world. In the beginning, I think most of us were more interested in a global movement than in a global organization. We wanted people to rise up everywhere and defend biodiversity and vulnerable ecosystems. Friends of the Earth and other organizations arose at the same time. As Greenpeace offices sprang up all over the world, to maintain clear communications about our work, we had to create a global structure, and thus we created Greenpeace International in Amsterdam in 1979. The movement is strong enough now, that it will continue with or without any single organization. Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion are examples of how the movement evolves. This is more or less what I hoped would happen.

There are many fond memories, and most are linked to the camaraderie of working with people to achieve something larger, more important than ourselves: Sailing on the fish boat in 1975, at night under the stars as if adrift in the universe, playing music, learning maritime skills, the day we found the whalers, the shared euphoria, the shared heartbreak at witnessing the slaughter, the shared satisfaction when our pictures and story circled the globe, and the feeling that we had achieved something significant.

I felt most at risk the first time we actually maneuvered our Zodiacs between the whales and the whalers in 1975. During the previous two years of organizing this campaign, and two months at sea looking for the whaling fleets, I had not thought about the consequences of what we planned. However, once I stood in the bow of the Zodiac, with the whales in front of us and a harpoon boat behind, it occurred to me that if we were hit by one of these 200-pound exploding harpoons, we would be instantly killed. I suddenly felt a chilling tremor of fear, but with no alternative but to stay in place. That remains the most frightening moment of my Greenpeace experience.

I would advise my younger self to pay more attention to the relationships, internal and external, to be more aware of others motivations and intentions. I believe I was sometimes naive and perhaps too tolerant of big egos. I would also advise more modesty in the face of the challenge we set for ourselves. Confidence is helpful, but overconfidence is not. I was unaware of how easily our stated values and visions for an ecological society could be misunderstood and even subverted. I would also advise more boldness and less compromise in certain cases. We often made compromises to appease other factions in society and in the environmental movement. Sometimes those compromises might have been helpful, but in some cases, we may have allowed our message to be blunted.

The 1970s whale campaign was probably the most successful because it achieved two significant goals: It led to the 1982 whaling moratorium and many populations of whales began to recover. We also had the intention that this campaign would help launch an ecology movement, which it did.

One of my favorite campaign actions, however, was our test blockade of a supertanker. In 1981, as we were working in our Vancouver office, Rod Marining read in the newspaper that in three days, an oil tanker was going to enter the Salish Sea between Seattle and Vancouver, loaded with water, as a test to demonstrate how easily an oil tanker could maneuver in these inside waters, promoting an oil port. We were discussing what we might do when our office manager Julie McMaster said casually, You should do a test blockade.

This made us laugh, and we thought: This is perfect! We promptly announced to the media that we were going to do a test blockade of the oil tanker test run. We knew we were onto something when the reporters laughed. We phoned our friend Dennis Feroce, who agreed to pilot his boat, The Meander, to take us to the entrance of Juan de Fuca Strait, where the tanker would have to enter. Three days later, we sat ready in the water with our Zodiacs and a small flotilla of sailboats, as television camera crews flew overhead in helicopters. We stopped the tanker dead in the water, film and photographs went all over the US and Canada, and we got arrested by the US coast guard and taken to jail in Everett, north of Seattle. The media followed us, as we told the police that it was just a test. We made jokes about testing the handcuffs, testing the jail, and the police also laughed. Everyone was on our side. When an officer brought us our meal (fast food burgers), she dropped the bag on the table in the cell and said test this. The entire campaign was hilarious, and the oil port never got built. This is one of my favorite campaigns because we pulled it off in three days, everyone had fun, and the idea came not from a seasoned activist or a campaign committee, but from our unassuming office manager, Julie.

To shift the needle in social action, one has to be creative and do something that is not expected. When environmental groups do what everyone expects them to do, nothing changes. For example, regarding global warming, I would suggest dont do the predictable thing and go to the next climate conference. Flip the script. Boycott the climate conference. Explain why: Because the next conference in Glasgow in October will be the 34th international climate conference since the first one in 1979, and these conferences have achieved nothing significant.

Thirty-four climate conferences in 42 years, and during that time human carbon emissions have doubled. Atmospheric CO2 levels have gone from 337 parts per million (ppm) to 420 ppm; the oceans are choked with acidification, the coral beds are dying, forests are burning, and the worlds politicians are burning jet fuel to twiddle their thumbs at these climate meetings. I would suggest: Stop validating this nonsense. Boycott. Organize the ecology groups to boycott together, and state the reasons. Hold your own separate meetings regionally and on the internet. Denounce the phoney and hollow promises by governments. Go instead to every major seaside city on Earth and paint the future waterline on buildings to depict sea rise after the Antarctic and Greenland ice melts. Give people a new picture, not the failing routine.

The great social movements of history that have actually changed things have been able to find a way to do the unexpected, to blow up the prevailing paradigm, to make people think in new ways.

The pandemic is linked to human overshoot, our occupation of wild habitats, our destruction of biodiversity, our growth and consumption beyond the capacity and limits of the global ecosystems. So, yes, the conditions for the swift transmission of this pandemic are created by human activity. However, nature does not really fight back. Evolution does not appear to have goals or preferences, and does not hold grudges. Nevertheless, pandemics will likely continue to be one consequence of neglecting our ecological crisis.

I dont assume that Greenpeace can or should do everything that needs to be done. I know from experience that people project onto Greenpeace the responsibility for every environmental urgency, an impossible expectation for a single organization. Thus, I think of this question more as What do I wish the environmental movement would do that it isnt doing?

I wish the ecology/environmental movement was more realistic about our real, fundamental crisis: Ecological overshoot and the conditions that create it, namely: unfettered growth. Overshoot is natural. Most successful species overshoot their habitats, a pack of wolves will overshoot the capacity of a watershed, algae will overshoot the capacity of a lake, and we can see in our own gardens how everything grows into its neighbours, tangling and pushing the limits of space and resources. Natural evolution teaches all species how to grow, reproduce, and consume, but evolution does not teach species when to stop, when to restrain itself.

I wish the ecology movement would more directly address the fact that humanity has overshot Earths capacity. Calculated estimates range from about 50% overshoot (Footprint Network) to 100% or more. The significant point is that all pathways out of overshoot for any species anywhere, no exceptions involve contraction: The wolves die back until their game recovers; the algae die back to the limit of available nutrients; plants push back on each other until they reach a new dynamic homeostasis. We make a mistake if we behave as if humanity does not have to also get smaller in numbers and consumption, the two issues we tend to avoid. Government, industry, and even some environmental groups focus on new technologies and a presumed green growth, avoiding the inevitable contraction of human economic activity, numbers, and consumption.

Addressing the frivolous, wasteful consumption of the rich is a good place to start, but not the full story. To actually reverse overshoot, we also need to address the global economic system of capitalism, which requires unrealistic, endless growth; we need to address equitable ways to reverse human population growth (womens rights and accessible contraception); and we need to be realistic about what is required to clean up our technologies. I would like to see the environmental movement be more active and serious about all three of these necessary steps to reversing overshoot.

There is a huge difference between a movement and an organization. The movements for peace, civil rights, womens rights, and others have survived for centuries because they have a robust constituency and clear goals that have not yet been fully achieved. Similarly, the ecology movement will likely endure long into the future.

Organizations, on the other hand, can come and go. Social organizations gain support and prominence because they address an issue that people care about and they appear effective. I say appear because an organization may endure, through reputation and self-promotion, even if it becomes less effective than its supporters believe. For an effective social organization to endure, however, requires a constituency that believes the organization plays an essential role, that the leadership has integrity, and that it can achieve genuine change.

Typically, successful organizations arise because some group of people have a creative idea about how to address a problem about which the public is generally aware. Creativity is essential in the birth and growth of an organization. However, as an organization grows and becomes more structured, it is possible that creativity is stifled rather than encouraged. Maintaining creativity is a key quality of successful organizations. By definition, there is no formula for creativity. Rather than attempt to formalize creativity, successful organizations learn to create the conditions for creativity, to overcome bureaucratic roles, and allow new ideas to flourish at every level of the organization.

This is a popular question these days, I believe because so many of us feel the concern about humanitys future. We meet discouraging obstacles, resistance, subversion, and indifference, so we naturally seek hopefulness. Hope is a good frame of mind, because it opens paths to action, but hope is not a strategy. To solve problems, one must deeply understand the problem, the conditions, and appreciate the larger systems and forces at work. Delusional hope is definitely not helpful.

Humanity exists now in a tremendous bind. The powerful and wealthy have plundered the Earth to enrich a few, while billions live on the edge of starvation. Meanwhile, species diversity plummets, the atmosphere fills with carbon-dioxide, the oceans turn acidic and are choked with plastic, and we face myriad ecological tragedies. I do not find hope in political conferences, governments, corporations, nor in appeals to the general good of humanity. In my experience, most people are decent and fair, but greed, fear, and ignorance can create chaos and harm.

I find hope in nature itself, in the wild world, in the power of life to create new conditions, in the shared learning and co-evolution of all nature. This is where, I believe, humanity has to turn. We are not solving our problems with conferences, technologies, space travel, or economic growth. These delusions create more problems. I believe we have to rejoin the ecological community. We have to become apprentices to nature and learn how the natural world actually endures and survives as a living system. I believe we have to shed our human pride and re-align ourselves with all our relatives, with the systems and processes of the entire natural Earth. Im with the Taoists and certain Indigenous teachers on this: We have to learn to respect our Mother Earth, the source of all life.

Nothing survives alone. We only survive in relationship with the living matrix. That is where I look for hope.

Read more from the original source:
50 years of Greenpeace: Q&A with Rex Weyler - Greenpeace International