We would like to hear about the highs and lows of university clubs and societies
As a new academic year approaches, we would like to hear from students and recent graduates (five years ago or less) about their experiences of university clubs and societies that freshers might find instructive.
What was your best experience of a university club or society? And what was your worst?
Continue reading...As global anxieties multiply, video games from Resident Evil to Mouthwashing are providing rich source material to help decode society’s problems
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Horror is so hot right now. There’s Obsession, Evil Dead Burn and Hokum in the cinema, Widow’s Bay, From and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen on TV, and, of course, a rotting smorgasbord of horror games including Resident Evil Requiem (pictured top) and Reanimal, soon to be joined by Silent Hill: Townfall, Silver Pines and Dreadmoor. We’re also seeing weird cross-pollinations, with horror movie studio Blumhouse making games, while games themselves become horror films and the whole backrooms genre infects every medium it touches.
So it was fascinating to attend last week’s horror and gaming conference at Falmouth University, in Cornwall: a gathering of students, researchers and lecturers, all engaged in the academic study of horror games. There were brilliant talks on zombies and posthumanism, the gothic in games, and the role of monstrous little girls in survival horror (there are a lot of them!). Subjects as diverse as masculine fragility, disability and ageing came up; Will Doyle, creative director at Supermassive Games, gave a great keynote on the art of creating horror in games using tools such as revulsion, spatial alienation and the human instinct of apophenia. I learned a lot about theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Mark Fisher, and about the technical similarities between indie horror games and film noir (for example, the use of darkness and creative camera techniques to “hide” budget restrictions). It was incredible fun.
Continue reading...Engeland en Argentinië spelen vanavond in Atlanta tegen elkaar voor een plek in de finale op het WK voetbal. Vanwege de geschiedenis is het een beladen duel, waarin de Engelsen hun hoop gevestigd hebben op een wonder.
"Dit is niet zomaar een potje", zegt oud-doelman Peter Shilton. "Je hebt de Falklands als politieke dimensie, je hebt de rode kaart van David Beckham in 1998, je hebt alle dubieuze momenten die dit toernooi in het voordeel van Argentinië zijn uitgepakt. Daar moet je als Engeland dan tegen strijden. Ik denk dat we iets heel bijzonders nodig hebben. Ik noem maar iets: een uittrap van Emiliano Martínez die tegen de kabel van een camera aankomt en zomaar uit de lucht valt, zodat Jude Bellingham kan scoren. De Kabel van God. Een mens mag dromen, toch?’’
De FIFA heeft laten weten dat de Engelsen nergens op moeten rekenen.
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Maar, handen heeft-ie! En als de menselijke operators genoeg trainingsdata hebben gegenereerd om NEO autonoom te maken, krijg je deze autonome vingers er gratis bij. Snappen we verder allemaal niks van, maar NEO zelf beschrijft het handwerk als volgt:
"We zijn verheugd onze baanbrekende, door pezen aangestuurde handen met 25 vrijheidsgraden voor het NEO-humanoïdeplatform te introduceren; ze bieden een behendigheid, kracht, veiligheid en betrouwbaarheid die bijna op menselijk niveau liggen. Deze handen zijn ontworpen met een fundamenteel doel: de hardwarematige beperkingen wegnemen die bepalen wat humanoïde robots kunnen doen, zodat data – en niet de hardware – de enige grens vormt voor hun capaciteiten. Doordat ze op alle relevante vlakken gelijkwaardig zijn aan of zelfs beter presteren dan menselijke handen, zorgen ze ervoor dat onze AI-modellen niet langer worden beperkt door een gebrek aan behendigheid. NEO kan nu vrijwel elke taak uitvoeren die een mens met de handen kan doen, en dat met de precisie, het aanpassingsvermogen en de voorzichtigheid die vereist zijn in praktijkomgevingen."
Meer beeld onderstaand en hele demo onderaan.
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James Webb Space Telescope posted a photo:
The newly discovered third planet orbiting Beta Pictoris, Beta Pictoris d, appears in reconstructed imagery from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph). NIRSpec’s Integral Field Unit (IFU) was used to map chemical contents of the Beta Pictoris system. This allowed researchers to confirm the bright point of light, as seen in the image, was actually a planet by detecting its chemical composition.
Modeling suggests its orbit is comparable to the region occupied by Neptune in our own solar system.
Read more: science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-discovers-hidde...
Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Science: Aidan Gibbs (UC San Diego), Jean-Baptiste Ruffio (UC San Diego); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Image Description: An image of the Beta Pictoris system, with two exoplanets shown. The view is black. At the center of the image, there is a white star symbol, which represents light blocked from the host star. Immediately to the left of the star symbol, there is a bright orange-whitish smudge, labeled b. To the right of the star symbol, further away, is a blurry orange smudge labeled d. There is a blue dashed circle around the entire system, labeled “size of Neptune’s orbit.”
James Webb Space Telescope posted a photo:
Researchers used the NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) Integral Field Unit on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to map chemical contents of the Beta Pictoris system. As a result, they discovered a third planet, Beta Pictoris d, orbiting the young star.
Instead of identifying the planet as a bright point of light, as seen in the reconstructed image, researchers searched the spectroscopic data for the molecular signatures expected from a giant planet atmosphere, allowing the object to stand out from the surrounding debris disk.
The extracted NIRSpec and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) spectra of Beta Pictoris d display a distinctive series of carbon monoxide (CO) absorption lines. This molecular “fingerprint” identified the object as a giant planet, while measurements of the Doppler shift of the spectral lines provided the planet’s radial velocity, confirming it is gravitationally bound to the Beta Pictoris system.
Read more: science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-discovers-hidde...
Credit: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Leah Hustak (STScI); Science: Aidan Gibbs (UC San Diego), Jean-Baptiste Ruffio (UC San Diego), Alexis Bidot (STScI); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI
Image Description: Infographic titled “Gas Giant Exoplanet Beta Pictoris d; Atmospheric Composition.” The image at the left shows two exoplanets of the Beta Pictoris system. At the center, there is a white star symbol, which represents light blocked from the host star. Immediately to the left of the star symbol, there is a bright orange-whitesh smudge, labeled b. To the right of the star symbol is a blurry orange smudge labeled d. There is a white circle around this smudge with lines drawn to the spectrum at the right. The x-axis is labeled “Wavelength of Light” and extends from 4.2 to 5.2 microns. The y-axis is labeled “Brightness.” An up arrow is labeled “brighter,” a down arrow “dimmer.” There are two jagged horizontal lines across the graph. One is white, then other is maroon (the former labeled “Webb data”, the latter labeled “Best fit model” in the bottom left corner). A blue vertical column spanning from about 4.3 microns to 5 microns is labeled Carbon Monoxide, CO.
Rarely do artists conceive of work that is prescient and, decades on, more urgent than when it was created. One who has accomplished this is certainly Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), whose interdisciplinary practice merged photography, land art, sculpture, film, and more. And in a large-scale, immersive survey of her work that opens today at Tate Modern, more than 120 pieces revisit the groundbreaking artist’s key series and empathetic exchange with land and nature.
Mendieta is best known for her Silueta Series, in which she impressed the shape of the human body in water, mud, rock, and forests. These sometimes consisted of outlines “drawn” onto surfaces, such as a gunpowder tribute on a fallen tree, which exists eternally half-ablaze in a photograph. Others are impressed directly into the earth, as if a person had been lying there for millennia as the desert or stone formed around her.
In what she described as “earth-body” works, Mendieta explored vital relationships between humans and nature, absence and presence, experience and temporality, and place and identity. She often turned the lens on herself, building compositions that plumb the tensions between beauty, ruggedness, vulnerability, and strength. Her practice can easily be viewed through the lens of ecofeminism, a movement that emerged around the same time Mendieta was working, but it is also profoundly personal.
At 12 years old, Mendieta was separated from her parents and brother, who remained in her home country of Cuba, when she and her sister were exiled to the U.S. following the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Throughout her life and brief career, she grappled with themes of displacement and disconnection. “My art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe,” Mendieta said. “It is a return to the maternal source.”
There is also humor in her approach to self-representation, such as her early series of self-portraits in which she documented her wet hair in wild, sculptural forms or produced a sequential series of images in which an arrangement of flowers gradually conceals her face. Within a few years, the work adopted a more solemn, enigmatic tone, characterized by voids, organic forms, gesture, and ephemerality.
Mendieta also drew on her fascination with archaeology to create multimedia works that delved into the relationship between humans and the land. “My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic art,” she said in 1984. “I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones.”
The artist’s interest in the ancient past ultimately lends a timelessness to themes that resonate through her personal narrative but also, incidentally, the ills of the present. One might think of our screen-fueled social discord and the accelerating climate crisis, both also defined by a sense of alienation and disjointedness. Though Mendieta couldn’t have conceived of these things as we experience them today, she nevertheless tapped into a kind of visceral biophilia that’s more critical than ever. The exhibition at Tate highlights not only the artist’s the desire to connect with nature but also casts a light on how far removed from it most of us have become.
Ana Mendieta continues through January 17, 2027, in London. Plan your visit on Tate’s website.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Experience Ana Mendieta’s Visceral, ‘Neolithic’ Work in a Major Survey appeared first on Colossal.
At Flickr, we’re committed to maintaining a platform that’s secure, trustworthy, and built for photographers who are passionate about sharing their work. As part of that ongoing commitment, we’re introducing a policy to remove inactive accounts that have never been used. These are free accounts that have been inactive for at least 90 days and contain no photos, no comments, no favorites, and no group activity – but they do represent real security risk, including potential for account takeover, spam, and abuse.
Dormant, empty accounts are a target for bad actors. Keeping millions of unused accounts in our system creates unnecessary exposure for our platform and, by extension, for the active community members who depend on Flickr. Cleaning up these accounts helps us run a safer, healthier platform.
Starting July 15th, 2026, we will:
Simply log in to your Flickr account at flickr.com before August 31st, 2026. Logging in is all it takes to keep your account active. If your account has been locked and you’d like to reclaim it, contact our support team at flickrhelp.com – we’re happy to help.
For accounts that are removed, all associated data – including profile information and account credentials – will be permanently deleted in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
Because these accounts contain no photos, no comments, no groups, and no social connections, the data involved is minimal: essentially an email address, a username, and authentication credentials.
Visit our Help Center at flickrhelp.com or review our Terms of Service for more information.
We appreciate your understanding as we work to keep Flickr a safe and vibrant home for photography.
— The Flickr Team
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De Hogeschool Utrecht probeert het beeld te kantelen dat ICT studeren geen nut meer heeft omdat programmeurs vervangen worden door AI. Studenten leren hoe ze met software echte problemen oplossen, die worden aangedragen door opdrachtgevers.
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The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers, as well as Stripe payment information, they said.
The hacked data is a rare look at exactly how AI models and tools are built. Suno is one of the largest AI music generation tools on the internet, and has been the subject of several major lawsuits from the record industry, which accused the company of training on millions of copyrighted songs. As part of these legal proceedings, Suno previously admitted that it was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” which included a total of “tens of millions of recordings.” Suno has been making the argument that it is allowed to train on copyrighted works as fair use in those cases, one of which has been settled.
The lawsuits have made clear that Suno did train on huge amounts of copyrighted works, but the hacked data shared with 404 Media sheds more light on how Suno scraped songs from the internet and where it took them from. The Recording Industry Association of America accused Suno of ripping songs directly from YouTube; the hacked data seen by 404 Media confirms this.
The hacked material includes source code that appears to be from 2023 and 2024 that includes scraping instructions and details about the scope of at least some of the scraping. For example, the comments in one file note that they will pull from “genius_hq, youtube_music, freesound, jamendo, imp, deezer, ytm_tagged,” and that “non-music will be filtered out.” A file called “youtube_music” notes that at the time the file was last updated, it had ingested “2,013,545 music clips.” Another file contains comments about different datasets Suno had created, which included “113,879 hours of youtube_music,” “17,615 hours of genius_hq,” “410 hours of free sound,” “19,514 hours of imslp,” “3,726 hours of jamendo,” “62,117 hours of pond5_music,” “12,287 hours of deezer,” “152,162 hours of ytm_tagged,” and “103 hours of musescore_lyrics.” In total, this is at least decades worth of music.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
100000% this: I Hate The Way We Talk Online. “Let’s discuss topics without feeling the need to win a non-existent argument. Hot takes? No. Engage with nuance. Show the grace you would extend offline to those you meet on these virtual streets.”
