Questões de Concursos Adjetivos Adjectives

The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games traditionally offers the host city the opportunity to celebrate sporting excellence and international unity while also presenting to the world a flattering portrait of its own nation, informed by its own culture. [...]

[...] Entitled ‘Ça ira’ (‘It’ll be all right’), the show garnered mixed reviews in the French press. It was described variously as magical or catastrophic, as an astonishing apotheosis or a distressing accumulation of kitsch. Lady Gaga performed up and down a flight of stairs, dressed in feathers. The French singer Philippe Katerine, covered in blue body paint and dressed up as Bacchus, reclined in a platter of fruit. A threesome blossomed in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Decapitated figures of Marie-Antoinette holding their singing heads appeared at the windows of the Conciergerie. A floating piano was set on fire. The ceremony was conceived over two years by a committee made up of historian Patrick Boucheron (a member of the prestigious research institute, the Collège de France), the scriptwriter Fanny Herrero (creator of the Netflix series 10 Pour Cent/Call My Agent), the novelist Leïla Slimani (winner of the Goncourt literary prize for her novel Chanson douce/Lullaby), and the dramatist Damien Gabriac, who were all assembled in 2022 by the event’s master of ceremonies, theatre director Thomas Jolly. to co-write the script of their celebration of France.

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The man behind Le Puy du Fou is entrepreneur and politician Philippe de Villiers. Although de Villiers briefly served as Secretary of State for Culture under Socialist President François Mitterand, he is currently a member of French nationalist party Reconquête!, whose leader is the far-right firebrand Eric Zemmour. De Villiers is a Christian traditionalist who has expressed hostility towards Islam and has maintained that during the French Revolution a political ‘genocide’ was perpetrated against the Royalist people of Vendée.

It was therefore important for Jolly and his team firmly to distance their own project from Le Puy du Fou and to offer instead, as Jolly said: ‘the opposite of a virile, heroic and providential history’, of ‘an ode to grandeur’ or to the ‘manifestation of force’. Besides de Villiers’ theme park, another anti-model may have been the opening ceremony of the 2023 Rugby World Cup. Hosted by the popular actor Jean Dujardin and featuring a playful celebration of traditional French life, it was criticised for portraying a nostalgic and ‘rancid’ version of France. To be sure, at a time when France is politically and culturally riven, it would have seemed important to tell a national story that would unite rather than divide. In contrast, Jolly aimed for a celebration of ‘planetary multi-ethnicity’. But was it not in hindsight a mistake, a missed opportunity, to throw out, for fear that it might be politically toxic, anything that might be perceived as a celebration of French history, or the shared heritage that binds all French people together?

Patrick Boucheron, the historian in Jolly’s team, has declared his ‘resistance’ to the idea of a ‘roman national’, the strengthening story a nation collectively weaves about itself – the word roman meaning in this instance at once a narrative and a romance. Boucheron favours instead a decentring of national consciousness and a deconstruction of national history. There was always a danger in rejecting historical greatness for ideological reasons. Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte – both absent from the celebration – really do belong to all French; including them in the narrative would not have made it reactionary. Meanwhile Jolly’s desire systematically to foreground pop culture in order not to appear elitist often felt parochial. What is the long-term cultural significance of Nicky Doll, Paloma and Piche, stars of the reality show Drag Race France? Was the performance of John Lennon’s song Imagine really, as a sports historian declared in thenewspaper Libération, ‘heavy with meaning’ because of its nature as a ‘political and cultural allegory’?

Wasn’t it also a pity not to celebrate France’s contemporary achievements, especially the rebuilding of Notre-Dame after its devastation by fire, and the Grand Paris Express transport network being developed for better integration of central Paris and its banlieues?

But above all, what was missing from the show, with rare exceptions – such as the sight of the Olympic cauldron rising into the sky tethered to a gigantic hot air balloon – was beauty. This signalled a lack of cultural confidence on the part of the ceremony’s storytellers. It was telling, for example, that Marcel Proust, one of France’s most exceptional writers, was featured as a caricatured carnival head, alongside Little Red Riding Hood and Marcel Marceau. Nor was placing the ceremony under the auspices of ‘Ça ira’, a 1790 anthem of the French Revolution as familiar to the French as the Marseillaise, an expression of intellectual confidence. Like the Marseillaise, ‘Ça ira’ is a call to violence – an ode to the systematic hanging of aristocrats from lamp-posts – and insisting, as Jolly did, that it can be reframed as a message of hope and of ‘union and unity within diversity’ is meaningless.

Ultimately, whether any of this landed with its audience remains doubtful. In spite of the driving rain, the French enjoyed the show’s wackiness, the party atmosphere, the excitement and anticipation of the Games. And the Games themselves were a wonderful success. But a message was sent nevertheless. And now that the Olympic truce is over, Emmanuel Macron must once again face up to a divided nation

In: https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/what-the-paris-olympics-openingceremony-reallymeant/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwuMC2BhA7EiwAmJKRrLbi3d14OiB6WRug_hjU2I-75FCfTsQ0RitnqNM3GJxOqz9UCUlUBoCZ4IQAvD_BwE

Businesses are starting to introduce new options for tipping at self-checkout machines, putting even more pressure on customers amid rising inflation costs. Despite having zero interaction with employees during transactions, self-checkout machines at places such as coffee shops, bakeries, airports, and sports stadiums are giving customers the option to leave the typical 20% tip, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Business owners believe that the prompt for a tip can boost staff pay and increase gratuities — but customers are questioning where and to whom the extra cash is going, considering self-checkout is done by the customers themselves. “They’re cutting labor costs by doing self-checkout. So what’s the point of asking for a tip? And where is it going?” are some of the questions customers ask. But tipping researchers claim this is a way for companies to put the responsibility of paying employees on the customer rather than increasing employee salaries themselves. Self-tipping is viewed by many customers as a way to guilt-trip the person into tipping on something when they typically wouldn’t.

Many companies told the Journal that these tipping prompts are optional, and the extra gratuity is split between all employees. However, experts say that tips at a self-checkout machine might never even get to an actual employee since protections for tipped workers in the federal Fair Labor Standards Act don’t extend to machines.

Internet: <https://nypost.com> (adapted).

READ THE TEXT AND ANSWER QUESTION:

Thinking and learning about artificial intelligence are the mental equivalent of a fission chain reaction. The questions get really big, really quickly.

The most familiar concerns revolve around short-term impacts: the opportunities for economic productivity, health care, manufacturing, education, solving global challenges such as climate change and, on the flip side, the risks of mass unemployment, disinformation, killer robots, and concentrations of economic and strategic power.

Each of these is critical, but they’re only the most immediate considerations. The deeper issue is our capacity to live meaningful, fulfilling lives in a world in which we no longer have intelligence supremacy.

As long as humanity has existed, we’ve had an effective monopoly on intelligence. We have been, as far as we know, the smartest entities in the universe.

At its most noble, this extraordinary gift of our evolution drives us to explore, discover and expand. Over the past roughly 50,000 years—accelerating 10,000 years ago and then even more steeply from around 300 years ago—we’ve built a vast intellectual empire made up of science, philosophy, theology, engineering, storytelling, art, technology and culture.

If our civilisations—and in varying ways our individual lives—have meaning, it is found in this constant exploration, discovery and intellectual expansion.

Intelligence is the raw material for it all. But what happens when we’re no longer the smartest beings in the universe? We haven’t yet achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI)—the term for an AI that could do anything we can do. But there’s no barrier in principle to doing so, and no reason it wouldn’t quickly outstrip us by orders of magnitude.

Even if we solve the economic equality questions through something like a universal basic income and replace notions of ‘paid work’ with ‘meaningful activity’, how are we going to spend our lives in ways that we find meaningful, given that we’ve evolved to strive and thrive and compete?

Adapted from https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/artificialintelligence-and-the-future-of-humanity/

Despite the tricky and life-threatening relationship between Paleolithic humans and the megafauna that comprised so much of their environment, twentieth-century scholars tended to claim cave art as evidence of an unalloyed triumph for our species. It was a “great spiritual symbol,” of a time when “man had just emerged from a purely zoological existence, when instead of being dominated by animals, he began to dominate them.” But the child-like and highly stylized stick figures found in caves do not radiate triumph. By the standards of our own time, they are excessively self-effacing and, compared to the animals portrayed around them, pathetically weak.

While twentieth-century archeologists tended to solemnize prehistoric art as “magico-religious” or “shamanic,” today’s more secular viewers sometimes detect a vein of sheer silliness. India’s Mesolithic rock art portrays few human stick figures; those that are portrayed have been described by modern viewers as “comical,” “animalized” and “grotesque.” As Judith Thurman wrote about the artists, “despite their penchant for naturalism, rarely did they choose to depict human beings, and then did so with a crudeness that smacks of mockery.”

But who are they mocking, other than themselves and, by extension, their distant descendants, ourselves? Of course, our reactions to Paleolithic art may bear no connection to the intentions or feelings of the artists. Yet there are reasons to believe that Paleolithic people had a sense of humor not all that dissimilar from our own.

Barbara Ehrenreich. The Humanoid Stain. Later on. Internet: (adapted).

The family of teenager Gaia Pope are appealing for people to create and donate artwork to honour her memory a year after her death.

The 19-year-old was reported missing from Swanage on 7 November. Her body was found 11 days later near the Dorset coast path.

Her family said as the anniversary of her disappearance approached they were "asking people to make something to show she is not forgotten".

The artwork will be displayed online.

Miss Pope, from Langton Matravers, near Swanage, made an allegation she was raped two years before her death.

Her family claimed an alleged failed police investigation "severely affected Gaia's mental and physical state".

Art, particularly pyrography (woodburning), became a form of therapy for the teenager, her family said.

Her mother Natasha Pope said: "I don't speak about my daughter in the past tense - I utter her name as I always have because I know she is still with me, every moment, in all we're doing.

"Gaia's art and poetry, inspired by the beauty of nature and the strength of femininity, is her way of connecting with her true self. In spite of all she's been through she is not defined by that.

"Our Gaia would want to provide a forum for others to find their voice and create."

Miss Pope's cousin Marienna Pope-Weidemann added: "Some things are so big, run so deep, they can only be expressed through art. Our love and our grief for Gaia feels that way.

"The love we've felt from the community felt that way too. We want to honour that, make it visible, maybe do something to show other survivors, families who's lost someone too soon, that they are not alone."

The family said the project was inspired by the #JusticeForLB social media campaign and want people to share their art on Twitter via #JusticeForGaia.

The #JusticeForLB campaign was set up by Dr Sara Ryan - the mother of 18-year-old Connor Sparrowhawk, who had epilepsy and drowned in a bath after having a seizure in Oxford.

Dorset Police is being investigated over the way it handled the rape allegation and its response to Miss Pope's disappearance.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-dorset45571415