Latest news with #Fiasco
Time of India
20-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Out-of-course questions: Retest in CUET paper
NEW DELHI: National Testing Agency has offered a retest for students who took the accountancy paper between May 13 and May 16 in the ongoing CUET-UG exams, after it was found that the exam paper included out-of-syllabus questions. The decision, disclosed in a public notice Monday, is the latest in a series of setbacks that have plagued this year's undergraduate entrance test. Acknowledging the discrepancy, NTA stated: "To achieve convergence between the notified syllabus and the design of the question paper, the accountancy paper will now include an option (to choose between questions from 'Unit V' or 'Optional to Unit V')", adding that this revised format would roll out from May 22. Fiasco latest in series of crises to have hit CUET-UG 2025 T his move (to choose between questions) marks a deviation from the pattern introduced this year, where all questions in CUET-UG papers were made mandatory, requiring students to attempt all 50 questions instead of choosing 40 out of 50, as in the previous editions. With this change now applying only to the accountancy paper, concerns are emerging about uniformity and standardisation of the test. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Click Here - This Might Save You From Losing Money Expertinspector Click Here Undo So far, seven accountancy sessions have already been held and 13 remain, as per the original schedule. Candidates who took the exam between May 13 and 16 will be given the option to either retain their earlier score or appear for the revised version. 'NTA will provide this option to eligible candidates through its official website. Further details in this regard will be announced soon,' the notice said. Accountancy fiasco is the latest in a series of challenges CUET-UG 2025 has faced. The exam began on a shaky note after being postponed from its original May 8 date due to logistical unpreparedness.
Irish Examiner
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Podcast Corner: New show offers insight into Jerry Springer
Jerry Springer died over two years ago and so far in 2025 we've had the two-part Netflix documentary Jerry Springer: Fights, Camera, Action, and now Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer, a nine-part documentary exclusive to Audible and likely for a wider release later this year. It's hosted by Leon Neyfakh, who's headed Slow Burn and Fiasco over the years. Those shows - and Neyfakh himself - are meticulous. During the second episode of Final Thoughts, he details a decades-old itinerary for a given day when Springer was running for Cincinnati city council: 'On one Saturday alone, he attended a local civics meeting, a neighbourhood festival, two parades, and a college football game. He then went to a wedding and a high school fair, and closed out the day with a telethon, a church dinner banquet, a cocktail party, and a visit to a local Democratic club.' This is where the podcast outranks the Netflix show - the first four episodes focus on his pre-chat show life rather than the de rigueur outrages for which his show became known. Springer was born in London during the Second World War to Jewish refugee parents, who emigrated to the US a few years later. They always discussed politics around the dinner table; it's where he started pontificating, says his sister. Springer was a city councilman, mayor of Cincinnati, a rising star in the Democrat Party (soundbites compare him favourably to Bill Clinton and he's dubbed 'Kennedy-esque'), and spent a decade as a news anchor. He undertook stunts for causes he believed in, such as sleeping overnight at a prison to explain the circumstances facing inmates. As his news anchor personality grew (was he news or opinion? The line grew every more blurred), stunts included dressing as a homeless man. The podcast naturally hits the same beats as the Netflix documentary from there, as The Jerry Springer Show - 'the worst TV show of all time' - battles for ratings and top spot with Oprah, runs ever crazier plots, is morally questionable with the guests it books, and producers detail the impact it took on their own lives ("Can we get this over with so I can leave? I don't want to do this, I don't know why I'm doing it, I'm tired of talking about the show, it's been a whole lifetime ago," says Richard Dominick, who viewers of the Netflix show will remember and was key to Springer's ascension). The show ran for 27 years and over 4,000 episodes, ending in 2018. Neyfakh ponders the impact it has left and offers a reason for the podcast's raison d'etre: 'It doesn't seem crazy to suggest that this globally iconic show had a real impact on how people treat each other and talk to each other and what sorts of things we're willing to share in public about our private lives. "It also doesn't seem crazy to suggest that Springer softened the ground for well, y'know...'' - cutting to a soundbite about Trump, a soundbite declaring him 'the Jerry Springer Show of politics'. Read More Young Offenders creator Peter Foott to make new film set in Kerry
Boston Globe
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Lupe Fiasco on his MIT course and rap's stature in academia
All 80 of Artfinity's events, including Fiasco's upcoming show, are free and open to the public. This includes dozens of concerts and performances as well as films, installations, exhibitions, and augmented reality experiences. Fiasco tells the Boston Globe that 'GHOTIING MIT: Public Art' is a site-specific experience that challenges the traditional approach to rap creation. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'I don't teach hip-hop explicitly — I teach 'Rap Theory and Practice.' Hip hop is more of a cultural studies thing, and I focus solely on teaching the techniques and the background of rap. I base it in a fine arts program using en plein air,' Fiasco explains. En plein air is a technique where painters immerse themselves in a setting to capture its essence in real time. Advertisement Ghotiing (pronounced 'fishing') encourages students to engross themselves in different art forms and environments to devise original work. According to Fiasco, According to Fiasco, inspiration is taken from appreciating the landscape and outdoor painting as opposed to a recording studio. The result is usually music that feels deeper and more organic. 'Ghotiing is a mix of en plein air painting and field recording and rap,' he says. 'So it's like, go outside, get out of the studio, take your recording equipment with you…don't bring any raps with you. 'Find a subject out there in the world and sit on site with the subject and write and record in that moment and capture all of the sounds and the things that are happening. It's really up to the artist to choose what they want to leave in and leave out. For some people, it might be purely biographical. It opens you up to a wider kind of perspective and understanding of the things that are in your community.' Fiasco and his students engage directly with the sculptures, murals, and installations all over campus, using their forms, histories, and surroundings as creative sparks. By recognizing ambient sounds and writing lyrics in response to each piece, the project turns public art into a living sonic experience. Fiasco, who has been in the music industry for more than two decades, has interests that extend far beyond music, with a focus on organizations that uplift communities, including the Society of Spoken Art, We Are M.U.R.A.L, The Neighborhood Start-Up Fund, and his cross-cultural content venture, Studio SV. Advertisement He has also done work with Yale University. For Fiasco, being a lover of the culture never stops–even as it pertains to his work outside of academia. 'I'm constantly doing things like the Society of Spoken Art, which is about exploring all of these other possibilities with rap…the cognitive side, the computational side. I'm always exploring all of the different ways that rap can be rapped,' he says. 'So for me, it's just part of my grander creative approach and process. With ghotiing, you definitely develop new kinds of skillsets or things that you wouldn't normally have to use if you were just in the studio. You get a different relationship with the piece.' Fiasco's imminent future extends far beyond MIT, as he'll be touring this summer with Cypress Hill, Atmosphere, and The Pharcyde. He takes pride in the work he has done in higher education and rap pedagogy as a whole. He also respects what other institutions are doing as well. 'I think it's great to see rap in the academic space… it has been in the academic space for a while. My brother Dee-1 is over at Tufts, Harvard has the Hip Hop Archive. 'There's all of these things that I want to see rap doing and it's like… I have to make it happen. This isn't a natural thing — rap proved itself. Johns Hopkins is starting a hip hop degree program with Professor Wendel Patrick, which I'm a part of. Just to see rap spread and expand and be taken with a certain level of seriousness not only by the students, but also by the people teaching it, has been very fulfilling.' Advertisement Fiasco ultimately wants his hard work to live on for years to come. 'It really took years of practice to just build a curriculum and work through what a rap curriculum looks like to sit on the same level as a quantum physics curriculum at MIT, a drama class at Yale, or a law class at Harvard. Hopefully, this is something that we can canonize and pass on to the next generation of rap academics and professors.' LUPE FIASCO, MIT FESTIVAL JAZZ ENSEMBLE, FRED HARRIS At Kresge Auditorium, MIT, on Friday, May 2. 8 p.m., Free
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lupe Fiasco on his new art project and looking at rap ‘in a deep academic way'
'What does it mean to record outside, not just rap outside like a cypher, but actually record outside with the intention of completing a full song completely written and inspired outdoors?' rapper Lupe Fiasco mused while discussing his latest project, Ghotiing (pronounced 'fishing'). 'What are the limitations and constraints? What do you have to prepare to go into that environment? Onlookers, insects, the weather, noise, any kind of distraction.' En plein air rapping, as Fiasco calls it – after the school of painting that was popularized by Impressionists like Monet and Renoir – involves going to a promising location and fishing for lyrics and beats. He has been fine-turning the practice ever since he came on as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 2022-23 academic year – ghotiing throughout MIT, in LA, and elsewhere, while also teaching it to his students. 'It's a practice that I've been using and playing with and working through for the past few years,' he said. Fiasco has just released the first project of this site-specific rapping via the MIT List Visual Arts Center's website. The nine-track effort (seven which are currently available) is a cohesive collection of music with a distinct jazz flavor that feels like a throwback to the Native Tongues era of hip-hop. For Fiasco, these tracks are an emanation of the environment that he fished them from. 'The goal is to have a certain level of ownership of the space by being completely aware of all the objects that are around it,' said Fiasco, 'and how these objects are affecting or influencing, consciously or unconsciously, your experiences.' To celebrate the release, Fiasco will be holding a concert on 2 May as a culmination of the Artfinity Festival. Sonically and lyrically, there's a certain kind of beguiling simplicity to these tracks, with lines that tend to be short and filled with internal rhymes. There's a sense that the Chicago rapper is more after sound than sense, as in the triplet, 'Filling up the staircase / Airspace tethered to the pear tastes / Electron share shape.' Elsewhere, Fiasco plays with the everydayness of the MIT campus, as when rapping about a giant steel sculpture made by Alexander Calder: 'Tourists on their summer trips give it OKs like the number six / Walk around alongside or up under it / Or ignore it / Like can't see the trees, cause the forests / Or adore it / And explore it.' As the rapper shared, the mundanity is very much the point. 'One of my key creative functions is decorating the mundane, finding the profound narratives or insights in the mundane,' he said. 'You can see that tradition from Kick, Push, which was about skateboarding. For me it was very mundane, it was a toy. It was like, make a song about this toy. I try to look for the things that people perceive to be mundane and unpack the profound things that are within it.' Ghotiing required Fiasco to solve the many technical challenges raised by site-specific recording. According to him, it could make for awkward moments to be channeling hip-hop inspiration in public environments where anyone might intervene. Being a veteran performer helped, as did putting on his 'ghotiing uniform' – usually an MIT jacket – to let people know he was up to something and to give space. Surprisingly, Fiasco said that being a celebrity didn't pose much of an issue for him. 'People don't really care,' he said. 'There's a certain kind of, 'Oh that's Lupe,' or 'That's Professor Lupe, he's a dope-ass dude.' That has its own kind of reputation. Sometimes people sneak out like, 'Yo, lemme get a selfie,' but for the most part, in terms of ghotiing, people don't really care.' As for creating beats, Fiasco enlisted AI for assistance – he primarily used Suno, a generative AI program founded in Cambridge, MA, that specializes in making music. 'You get people to make beats, and they'll probably make one beat for months. You can't really do that when you got the battery on your laptop running down and the sun's going down and it's getting cold.' Fiasco worked by putting the AI-generated beats through an editing process, going through dozens of generations of the same beat to get one that was of interest. Fiasco situated AI on a spectrum of the many different tools that musicians have created and adapted for themselves. 'It's like if the saxophone player made the saxophone – which is rare, but real,' he said. 'My students can write their own music production software, which is akin to someone like Havoc from Mobb Deep, right, who makes the beats and raps over his own beats. So I see that tradition as just as valid as going into the lab and making the AI that will sit and train the data.' Fiasco's intention to exhaust the potential of a particular place, as well as to embrace everything uncontrollable about recording outside in order to make his compositions more creative, brings to mind the French writing collective the Oulipo, or Workshop of Potential Literature. That group embraced constraint in writing as a means of inspiring creative freedom and would often work in situ as Fiasco does. It's a group that the rapper knows well, assigning their literature to students in the course he teaches at MIT, as well as making it a part of the entry exam to his Society of Spoken Art (SOSA) guild of rappers. 'One of the mandatory readings in my class is Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, one of the leaders of the Oulipo school,' he told me. 'And then also, one of the tests that people take to get into SOSA is A Void, the book that's written without the letter 'e'. So that same approach to heavily constrained writing is embedded in the process.' Ultimately, the Chicago rapper has big goals for his work with higher education. He wants to approach rap in a way akin to how linguists have approached the study of language, breaking it down into discrete chunks that can be analyzed, and putting it through formal rigor. One day, he'd love to see programs at prestigious universities make the sorts of things he's pioneering as part of a whole hip-hop curriculum. 'Maybe one day there will be a graduate program, and there's a hip-hop degree, and I'm teaching the rap portion of it. The hope is that rap gets put into a space where people can take it and run with it in a very deep academic way. Maybe eventually you can become a tenured professor in the rap department at MIT.'
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Social Media Erupts Over Trump's Dismissal Of Mike Waltz
Donald Trump'sdismissal of former National Security AdviserMike Waltz on Thursday was immediately felt on social media. Waltz's departure from the Trump administration comes weeks after The Atlantic reported that he accidentally added a journalist to a group chat in which highly sensitive national security matters were discussed. Trump saidno one would be fired for the incident, but other media outlets soon learned of other potential security leaks. Naturally, there was snark to spare on social media after Waltz's dismissal. Ironically, the announcement that Waltz was leaving the Trump administration came just hours after he appeared on Fox News to heap praise on the much-beleaguered secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth. Michael Waltz Is Leaving The Trump Administration Following War Plan Group Text Fiasco Mike Waltz's Team Used Signal To Discuss At Least 20 Crises: Report National Security Adviser Mike Waltz Used Gmail For Government Work: Report Mike Waltz Suggests Journalist May Have Intentionally Infiltrated 'War Plans' Group Text
