| 1. The church that is a streaming evangelical music machine. "Hillsong’s three bands in their various formations have produced almost 100 albums. Their songs are sung by an estimated 50 million people across denominations and countries each week, and in January 2018, they won their first Grammy. According to data given to The FADER by Nielsen, songs written by the three Hillsong bands have been streamed on-demand more than 760 million times since December 29, 2017. For comparison, over the same time period, that’s only 10 million fewer than Justin Bieber." 2. The AI world is a flutter at this new Google "pre-training" technique, with some saying we're seeing a burst of text-related advances comparable to what happened with images a few years ago. "BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE benchmark to 80.4% (7.6% absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7 (5.6% absolute improvement) and the SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5% absolute improvement), outperforming human performance by 2.0%." 3. A fascinating dissertation on Gertrude Stein, DFW, radio, and the internet. "As Goble argues, 'The mediated life of modern U.S. culture takes shape as a network of desires for more intimate, material, and affecting relations with technology.' Radio first offered that promise of brief connection, creating feelings of community at the same time that it lent to that modern feeling of fragmentation. Douglas notes, 'Radio has worked most powerfully inside our heads, helping us create internal maps of the world and our place in it, urging us to construct imagined communities to which we do, or do not, belong.' She adds further, 'Radio, by cultivating different modes of listening, also fostered people’s tendency to feel fragmented into many selves, which were called forth in rapid succession, or sometimes all at the same time' ... the cultural imaginations and structures of feeling that many associate with the early (and even today’s) internet has its roots in the imaginations and feelings of early radio." 4. Or as they put it in Goodfellas, "Fuck you, pay me." "According to more mainstream feminists like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, the answer was to put women on the same footing as men, liberate them from the shackles of their kitchens, and send them into the workforce, where they’d be able to compete with men on a level playing field. But for a small group of Marxist feminists, this strategy completely missed the point. The problem, they argued, was never with housework itself. The problem was that housework had never been truly respected as work." 5. DPReview going super deep on the Pixel 3's computational photographic capabilities is the right kind of nerdy. "Such 'merged' Raw files represent a major threat to traditional cameras. The math alone suggests that, solely based on sensor size, 15 averaged frames from the Pixel 3 sensor should compete with APS-C sized sensors in terms of noise levels. There are more factors at play, including fill factor, quantum efficiency and microlens design, but needless to say we're very excited to get the Pixel 3 into our studio scene and compare it with dedicated cameras in Raw mode, where the effects of the JPEG engine can be decoupled from raw performance." Bonus: The NAACP came out for a "guaranteed annual income" in January, 1968. "The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is committed by a convention resolution to ‘the principle of a guaranteed annual income for all at a reasonable figure.’ … A direct attack on poverty involves a guaranteed minimum income for all. At present almost none of those on relief get that. Public welfare relief payments range from nothing in Mississippi through a wide variety of amounts, but all below the generally accepted poverty level." + I pulled this one from the archives myself, so sorry about the little fingertips at the bottom of the PDF's images. [that promise of brief connection, creating feelings] | 