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A recent paper in the Journal of Marketing Research has identified a group of customers whose support for a product is a “harbinger of failure,” a signal that the product will eventually flop. “Increased sales of a new product by some customers can actually be a strong signal of future failure,” researchers write. So who…
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$10 “bean to bar” chocolates were made from melted down Valrhona
mostlysignssomeportents: The Mast Brothers, a pair of bearded chocolatiers in Brooklyn, have built an empire on beautifully packaged “artisanal” chocolates that run $10/bar, billed as “bean to bar” confections. Other chocolatiers were skeptical of the “bean to bar” claim, because the production volume as well as the product’s taste and texture beggared belief. The company,…
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the-drawing-center: A Page from the Drawing Papers Archive This page from Drawing Papers 89 features Untitled, an ink and graphite drawing created by Jerome Marshak in 2009. Selections Spring 2010: Sea Marks was comprised of works by Agnes Barley, Jerome Marshak, and Peter Matthews, three artists selected from the Viewing Program who notate, describe, and interpret…
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We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories. Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (via wordsnquotes)
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Teaching or Learning?
willrichardson: Is your school culture one that’s focused on teaching, or is it focused on learning? Depends on what you believe, right? If you believe that learning is measured by test scores, then odds are you’re focused on helping teachers become technically better at delivering the outcomes spelled out in the curriculum. The focus is…
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superheroesincolor: Star Wars: A consideration of the great new S.F. film by Samuel R. Delany, (Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1977) “…Sometime, somewhere, somebody is going to write a review of Star Wars that begins: “In Lucas’s future, the black races and the yellow races have apparently died out and a sort of mid-Western American (with…
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Black women are already superheroes
mostlysignssomeportents: What can game developers do to better represent black women in games? “They need to get some fucking empathy,” says Tanya dePass, a campaigner for better representation inside game worlds and among those who create them. She curates websites, hosts podcasts, maintains the#INeedDiverseGames tag on Twitter, works as a diversity consultant andspeaks at conventions…
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For Fury Road’s fluid editing, Miller called upon his wife, Margaret Sixel, who had spent most of her career editing documentaries and had never cut an action movie before. ‘We’ve got teenage sons, but I’m the one who goes to the action movies with them!’ laughed Miller. ‘So when I asked her to do Mad…
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Film Review: ‘Embrace of the Serpent’
Film Review: ‘Embrace of the Serpent’ The ravages of colonialism cast a dark pall over the stunning South American landscape in “Embrace of the Serpent,” the latest visual astonishment from the gifted Colombian writer-director Ciro Guerra. Charting two parallel journeys deep into the Amazon, each one undertaken by a European explorer and a local shaman,…