Split (1)

train · 2.6M rows

text stringlengths 12 27.8k
Robert Spano announced Tuesday that he will conclude his tenure as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra after the 2020-2021 season.
At that point, Spano will have led the orchestra for two decades — a long time for any director of a major orchestra. He will stay on as “conductor laureate,” and continue to lead the orchestra on a regular basis, but his main energies will be redirected to something new.
Spano has led the orchestra during a period of growth, with nine performances at Carnegie Hall over the past 17 years and six Grammy awards among the ASO’s 20 recordings under his baton.
One of the director’s signal achievements is the championing of new music, which he stated as part of his mission upon his arrival in 2001.
Spano built trust with his audience and gained acceptance for the music of living composers — including those from his Atlanta School of Composers (such as Higdon) — by choosing music that stressed tonality and melody, and by satisfying the demand for music from the classical canon.
Spano has been at the helm during turbulent times. In 2014, after years of deficits, the ASO administration insisted on reducing the orchestra’s size to cut costs, and the musicians balked, and were locked out for nine weeks, delaying the start of the season.
To address the shortfall, the orchestra launched the Musicians’ Endowment Campaign, co-chaired by Spano, which raised more than $27 million to fund 11 additional orchestral positions in perpetuity. The orchestra has finished the past three seasons with a financial surplus.
As music director for two decades, Spano comes close to the longevity of the ASO’s Robert Shaw, who directed the orchestra from 1967 to 1988.
Deciding when to leave is tricky, Spano said. One wants to exit while the music is still playing.
Spano and the ASO board began discussing his departure last fall, during negotiations for the renewal of his contract. He was 40 when he arrived in Atlanta and will be 60 when he leaves the role of music director.
The ASO will soon begin a search for a new musical director to take over in 2021. Spano has vowed not to meddle with that process.
Two people have been placed under arrest and multiple investigations are underway in India over a fatal accident that saw a man carrying a metal oxygen tank pulled into an MRI machine earlier this week. The local government of India's capital city, the MRI machine maker and the hospital involved are all looking into th...
"A team from Philips company, the manufacturer of the MRI machine, will visit Nair hospital today following the fatal accident a couple of days back," Dr. Ramesh Bharmal, head of the BYL Nair Charitable Hospital, told India's PTI news agency.
The city government of Mumbai also announced an investigation into the death of Rajesh Maru, whom relatives say only entered the MRI room after being assured by a junior member of the hospital staff that it was safe to do so while carrying the oxygen tank. Metal objects are forbidden in MRI rooms as the machines use an...
Man dies in MRI accident: How does this happen?
"We have arrested a doctor and another junior staff member under section 304 of the Indian penal code for causing death due to negligence," Mumbai police spokesman Deepak Deoraj told French news agency AFP.
The incident occurred on Saturday night at the Indian financial capital's Nair Hospital.
Police said preliminary reports suggested that the man had died from inhaling liquid oxygen that leaked from the cylinder.
It is thought the cylinder was damaged after hitting the machine.
Bharmal, the dean of the hospital, told AFP that an investigation had been launched to determine the exact cause of death, adding CCTV footage of the incident had been handed over to police.
The victim's uncle said Maru had been asked to carry the cylinder by the junior staff member who assured him the machine was switched off.
"The ward boy who was supposed to prevent such incidents told my family members to go inside when the machine was turned on. We are shocked and devastated," Jitendra Maru told AFP.
The state government of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, announced compensation of 500,000 rupees ($7,870) for the victim's family.
Though rare, accidents involving MRI machines have harmed people in the past.
In 2014 two hospital workers sustained injuries when they were pinned between an MRI machine and a metal oxygen tank for four hours at a hospital in New Delhi.
In 2001, a 6-year-old boy undergoing an MRI scan in New York was killed when a metal oxygen tank flew towards the machine and crushed his skull.
By now most people are familiar with the introduction of Apple’s(s aapl) iPhone, which debuted in a 2007 Steve Jobs presentation that literally paused the humongous Consumer Electronics Show hundreds of miles away.
I vividly remember because I was at that CES and Apple’s announcement took the wind out of everyone’s sails that day. But the story of how the iPhone came to be is less well-known. The concept began in earnest 2.5 years prior to launch, according to Apple senior software engineer Greg Christie.
While Christie’s team worked on the software — at one point using an old Mac and plastic touchscreen device to simulate the slower performance of a phone using ARM chips — Jony Ive was working on the glass and overall phone design.
According to Christie, Ive didn’t even see the iPhone software for months, not until the third major presentation of the nearly finished product. That speaks to the secrecy of the effort, which also required that work take place in rooms that only a few employees could access.
Even after the famous iPhone presentation, Christie says major changes to iOS took place in the final months leading up to the June 29, 2007 launch date. Mail, for example, originally used two viewing panes — one for the email list and one for reading actual messages, much like how Mail works on the iPad today. Jobs sm...
After all these years, why would Apple make Christie available to tell the iPhone back story? It’s all about the patents. Christie is listed on five Apple patents, including the “slide to unlock” feature, all of which are part of Apple’s current suit against Samsung for copyright infringement.
Who would have thought, the iPhone stemmed from “… an old Mac and plastic touchscreen device ….” Jobs was ahead of his time by light years.
Jobs was a masterful nit-picker. Small things that cumulatively would irritate were things he spotted and demanded they be fixed.
That attention and unwillingness to accept “minor” flaws and compromises are what made the Mac and later iOS interfaces so comfortable.
It’s a new day on Capitol Hill with the 2018 elections finally (mostly) in the past. Incoming members from across the country poured into D.C. this week for their first glimpse of their new jobs, while leadership elections began and incumbents returned to the House and Senate floors following a month of recess. See the...
It was a busy couple of days on Capitol Hill this week, with the blitz to get to know Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in full swing, plus a House hearing on the 2016 texts of embattled FBI agent Peter Strzok and Speaker Paul D. Ryan talking about his car getting eaten by woodchucks.
Kids always get bored watching adults at work, even if that workplace happens to the U.S. House of Representatives, as Rep. Greg Walden and his pint-sized guests learned on Tuesday. See this week’s Congressional Hits and Misses for that plus flag-waving, a Superman reference and a euphemistic way of swearing during a n...
Nicolas Anelka, friend of anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala, makes Nazi-style gesture during soccer game; media shocked.
Politicians and Jewish leaders expressed outrage as French soccer player Nicolas Anelka Saturday, after he made a post-match gesture many interpret to be a modified 'Nazi-style' salute.
The 34-year-old striker thrust his straightened right arm downwards while tapping his bicep with the other hand after scoring a goal in a game in Britain between his West Bromwich Albion team and West Ham United.
The gesture - an imitation of a salute frequently used by a French comedian friend of Anelka's who has been convicted several times for anti-Semitic public comments - was immediately and widely condemned.
"This salute is merely a lesser known Nazi salute and we expect the same kind of punishment to be handed down by the authorities as if Anelka had made the infamous outstretched arm salute," said European Jewish Congress president Moshe Kantor in a statement.
Online, a storm brewed, with some Twitter users calling Anelka, a former member of France's national team, "loathsome" and "racist".
Anelka himself took to Twitter to try to defuse the row, saying in messages in French and in English: "This gesture was just a special dedication to my comedian friend Dieudonne."
West Bromwich Albion's coach, Keith Downing, echoed that in a post-match press conference in which he said the footballer was "totally surprised" by the backlash.
Anelka's salute, Downing said, was "dedicated to a French comedian he knows very, very well... He is totally unaware of what the problems were or the speculation that has been thrown around."
The French comedian in question is Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala, who has outraged French authorities and Jewish organizations many times with his frequent anti-Semitic tirades. He has been fined seven times for defamation, insult and provocation to hate, and for racial discrimination.
The comic, widely known by his first name, has popularized the straight-arm gesture, which he calls a "quenelle" -- a balled food item made of fish or meat.
Although his supporters say it is merely "anti-establishment", it is frequently used by French anti-Semites, many of whom photograph themselves making the "modified" Nazi salute in front of Jewish establishments, holocaust memorial sites and even with unsuspecting Jewish passersby.
French Interior Minister Manuel Valls released a statement Saturday in which he said he would seek to ban Dieudonné's performances altogether.
"Despite a conviction for public defamation, hate speech and racial discrimination, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala no longer seems to recognize any limits," the statement, read, according to France 24.
"Consequently, the interior minister has decided to thoroughly examine all legal options that would allow a ban on Dieudonné’s public gatherings, which no longer belong to the artistic domain, but rather amount to a public safety risk."
Anti-Semitism in France has skyrocketed in recent years. A report found anti-Semitic incidents rose 58% in 2012, with most attributed to Muslim extremists. That year saw the infamous Toulouse shooting in 2012 in which a rabbi and 3 Jewish children were murdered in a shooting-spree by a French Muslim extremist.
The Israeli government recently announced a program to help French Jews emigrate to Israel en masse - after reports have surface showing a mass exodus of Jews from France to other Western countries.
(kazinform) - Governments of Kazakhstan and Tatarstan consider it possible to construct highway from Europe to China through Russia and Kazakhstan, Daniyal Akhmetov, Premier of Kazakhstan, has uttered after today's bilateral negotiations with his Tatar counterpart Rustam Minnikhanov.
We found out we have a unique opportunity to build the shortest highway from Russia to China. As far as the Russian Federation borders on Europe, it will be possible to connect it with China. The road, that we provisionally named Europe-Saint-Petersburg-Moscow-Kazan-Orenburg-Kyzylorda-Shymkent-Khorgos route, will be ab...
Two development institutes Kazakhstani Kazyna Sustainable Development FundJSC and Tatar Ak Bars OJSC were charged to study possible construction.
Prime Minister of Kazakhstan stated also he was going to discuss that issue with his Russian colleague Mikhail Fradkov during his official visit to Moscow in the nearest future, reports Trend.
An artist's conception of the Kepler space telescope.
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has been peering deep into the Milky Way galaxy for nearly a decade. It has spotted over 2,500 confirmed planets orbiting distant stars, and over 2,500 more possible worlds are waiting to be confirmed. Thirty of these confirmed planets live inside their host stars' habitable zones, places where...
But Kepler is now running low on gas.
"With nary a gas station to be found in deep space, the spacecraft is going to run out of fuel," Charlie Sobeck, the system engineer for the Kepler space telescope mission, said in a NASA statement.
"We expect to reach that moment within several months."
NASA placed the Kepler telescope 94 million miles away from Earth, in an orbit around the sun. This way, Earth's gravity and reflected light don't interfere with Kepler's precise measurements of distant planets.
Out there, in the void, it's extremely unlikely that Kepler will become a threatening piece of space junk that could pose collision hazards to other satellites.
An artist's conception of the Earth-sized exoplanet Kepler-186f, which orbits a star some 500 million miles away from Earth.
"Deep space missions like Kepler are nowhere near Earth or sensitive environments, which means we can afford to squeeze every last drop of data from the spacecraft," said Sobeck.
It's incredible that Kepler is still working at all.
In 2013, a wheel used to keep the spacecraft pointed in the right direction broke, meaning that Kepler's entire mission — which hinged on pointing in one specific direction — had to change.
However, NASA found a way to temporarily stabilize the telescope for months at a time by using pressure from sunlight, "like a kayak steering into the current," said Sobeck.
An artist's conception of the exoplanet Kepler-22b, a planet about two and half times that of Earth orbiting in its solar system's habitable zone.
Since then, Kepler has spotted hundreds more exoplanets, over 300 of which have been confirmed.
When Kepler spots an exoplanet, however, it doesn't actually capture an image of the distant planetary body — they're much too far away. Instead, Kepler watches a star for dips in brightness as a planet occasionally transits in front of the distant star.
NASA scientists can then judge the size and possible composition of the exoplanet based upon how long it took to travel around the star and how much light the planet temporarily blocked.
In December 2017, Kepler shifted its view and caught a blast of reflected light from Earth in its extremely sensitive camera, ultimately appearing as a vertical beam of light.
Although Kepler will soon be spent and left to its long, lonely orbit in space, the spacecraft will soon be replaced by another exoplanet-hunting space telescope, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
TESS is set to launch into space on April 16.
"TESS will search nearly the entire sky for planets outside our solar system, focusing on the brightest stars less than 300 light-years away, and adding to Kepler’s treasure trove of planet discoveries," said Sobeck.
WATCH: 'I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die.': some of Stephen Hawking's most inspirational quotes.
Vivo is all set to launch its flagship model, Vivo Nex in India on July 19. The Chinese smartphone brand unveiled two handsets from its latest Nex series- Nex S and Nex A. Vivo’s latest flagship model is listed on the e-retail platform, Amazon India.
As part of the Prime Day launch, Amazon has put a dedicated live page for Vivo’s new flagship model, the Vivo Nex. The listing shows a mysterious price tag that reads Vivo Nex at ‘Rs 4_,990.’ Previous reports have suggested that the Vivo smartphone could come for a price of Rs 48,990. Amazon is providing an additional ...
In order to be eligible for the offer, a user will need to have an active Prime subscription. In case you already have Prime membership, purchase the Vivo Nex Gift card on Amazon for a denomination of Rs 1000 or higher. Users will have to make the purchase between July 16 and July 17.
Following this, those who pre-order the new Vivo Nex smartphone between July 19 and July 25 get Rs 1,000 cashback via Amazon Pay and extended warranty which will be valid for 6 months.
Users should keep in not that both the gift card and smartphone purchase will have to be made from the same Amazon account. Further, the Amazon e-mail gift card or Amazon Pay Balance cannot be used in conjunction with the EMI during the delivery payment option.
The Amazon Pay cashback will be credited on or before August 15. Besides extra Rs 1000 off, Amazon will offer additional Rs 5000 off on exchange, no cost EMI for up to 12 months, Jio data offer, cashback offer on HDFC credit and debit card and assured buyback.
Vivo Nex series smartphones were launched in China in May this year. The highlight of the new Vivo Nex smartphone series is pop-up camera system that retracts from the top shelf. As for the specifications, Vivo Nex S features a 6.59-inch full HD+ (2316 x 1080 pixel resolution) Super AMOLED ultra full view display. The ...
On the camera front, Vivo Nex S sports a dual rear camera setup, having a 12MP primary sensor and 5MP secondary sensor with four-axis OIS. Up front, it has an 8MP camera for selfies. Vivo Nex runs FunTouchOS 4.0 based on Android 8.1 Oreo. It is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 SoC paired with 8GB RAM. The phone com...
Katherine Ellis Nixon has been named chief investment officer for personal finance services at Northern Trust, the Chicago bank announced Wednesday. Nixon will manage more than $163 billion in assets and oversee portfolio managers at Northern Trust's Personal Financial Services offices across 18 states. She joined Nort...
To kick off the show, Frank is joined on air with entrepreneur and motivator to millions, Elena Cardone. Elena talked to Frank about her new book Building An Empire: How To Have It All and how sacrifice is everything in order to appreciate what you have and also to motivate yourself to work harder when it comes to gett...
To keep up with Elena on all her social media just follow her @Elenacardone and to learn more about her book or purchase her book go to grantcardone.com!
If you are looking for a great business idea, it is advisable to ask the people closest to the problems that need to be fixed. In Josh Stein’s case, this meant going to his parents.
Mr Stein, the son of a doctor and an occupational therapist, had caught the start-up bug working for a clutch of New York-based online delivery services and he was soon yearning to be an entrepreneur in his own right.
He reasoned that medicine was a market large enough to generate a major win given the right product or service, but since none of his previous employers operated in this market he turned to his parents for advice.
It was the inspiration he needed for his company AdhereTech, which he set up to make smart pill bottles, a mass market product built with sensors and a wireless chip that track patient usage and alert them if they miss a dosage.
Failure to take prescribed medicine costs the US healthcare system $300bn each year, including $100bn in lost revenues, and results in 125,000 premature deaths, Mr Stein notes. “Technology use has expanded into all facets of modern life but the healthcare industry has tended to be slower to adopt it,” he says.
AdhereTech was launched while Mr Stein was completing the MBA programme at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He removed himself from New York’s buzzing start-up scene to start the course in 2010.
Support came both in terms of resources and teaching as the school runs an incubator and other schemes to nurture early-stage ventures. “Lots of the students were pursuing entrepreneurial ventures so you got to pick the brains of good people,” Mr Stein recalls. It also helped that Wharton is among the top US schools fo...
Among the teaching staff, Mr Stein picks out Adam Grant, one of the school’s youngest tenured professors. “He helped me negotiate a patent agreement that is one of the cores of our business,” Mr Stein explains.
Putting intelligence into everyday objects, as AdhereTech has done, is widely regarded in Silicon Valley as the next big evolution of online technology. By compiling usage information, which Mr Stein stresses is anonymised and compliant with data protection rules, AdhereTech has also become a data-driven business with ...

Subsets and Splits

No community queries yet

The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.