Not quite the end of the month yet, but let’s get this out of the way:
The biggest bit of news naturally is that Chinese scientists have used the CRISPR/Cas9 technique that I talked about last month to experiment on human embryos. The news first appeared in Nature, but not as a paper since it was rejected. The team used non-viable embryos that could never have fully developed to stave off ethical concerns and the attempt to modify the gene responsible for β-thalassaemia is considered to be a failure because only a small proportion of the sample accepted the modifications and there a large number of unintended mutations. Nevertheless the wider implication is that germ-line gene editing on human samples is now no longer a secret.
The next two articles deal with Internet culture and online behavior. The first one talks about an algorithm that can be used to identify online trolls which might be used to help police online spaces like social networks and forums.
The second one talks about the toxicity of the comments in many online articles and posts. In particular, it discusses findings about how even reading prejudiced comments can cause other people to post more prejudiced comments themselves, leading to a downward spiral of poor quality comments.
Continuing on in the sphere of the social sciences, this paper discusses how organizations that explicitly frame themselves as being meritocratic actually end up favoring men instead over women. This matters because I’ve often had occasion to debate people who oppose feminism on the grounds that they favor egalitarianism instead of measures that actively promote the interests of women over men.
Finally, on a more lighthearted note, here’s an article from The Economist about a robot chef that soon become a commercial reality. The idea is to have it replicate precisely the movements of celebrity chefs. However the technology isn’t quite there yet since the robot isn’t even trusted with a knife at the moment and a human still needs to prepare all of the ingredients and put them within reach of the robot.
This pick for the Marriage in the Movies course is the longest one to date. At a full three hours long, it apparently qualifies as an epic and indeed includes both an overture and an intermission with orchestral scores! It’s also clearly an American propaganda film, made to bolster morale on the homefront while the Second World War was still raging. In most cases, that’s a recipe for a bad film yet Since You Went Away manages to be surprisingly effective and affecting.
As the biggest winner of last year’s Oscars, Birdman is a film that should automatically on any film aficionado’s must-watch list. But even apart from that I knew I wanted to watch it because it’s basically Michael Keaton playing a version of himself as a washed-up actor famous only for playing a superhero more than twenty years ago. Now that I’ve watched it, I’m glad to report that this is one of the rare occasions when the Academy pick for Best Film is absolutely the correct one.
Out of all of the all selections for the Marriage and the Movies course, this was the one that I looked forward to watching the most. Just imagine the thought of Alfred Hitchcock directing a marriage movie! As you might expect of the director and a film bearing the title Suspicion, it’s more about the shadow of murder hanging over a couple than a love story. I predict that the course’s professor will have interesting things to say about it!
Small in scope and modestly budgeted, In Bloom nevertheless earned major plaudits both at home and abroad. Critics, rather grandiloquently in my opinion, have been heralding it as the first in a New Wave of Georgian cinema. That’s certainly enough to get my attention but I confess that I was rather more attracted by its exoticism, since I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Georgian film before.
A couple of months ago, I met up with the cinephile friend I occasionally mention here over the Chinese New Year holidays. He asked to see the list of to-watch movies that I’d compiled and this was the entry that puzzled him the most. Is this that ’80s action movie starring Sylvester Stallone, he asked, why would you ever want to watch this? Indeed it is, and indeed it is a film that has a terrible reputation and deservedly so. But it’s also a film that exemplifies the excesses of the era like no other and that’s why this is an interesting film to watch.
Since I had some time until my next Coursera course is scheduled to start, I’ve been slowly watching the lecture videos for this one from the University of Edinburgh. It was previously offered as a normal course at least once before but has since been put into an at-your-pace mode, which means it’s always available but no professor is actively involved in it. This is the first time I’ve taken a course in this mode on Coursera.
