Some fascinating things I read last week

On conducting music: 

All great conductors share this same ability to impose their will on an orchestra—and that, after all, is the heart of the matter. A conductor can be effective only if the orchestra does what he wants. It is not like a piano, whose notes automatically sound when the keys are pressed, but a living organism with a will of its own. Conducting, then, is first and foremost an act of persuasion, as Mauceri acknowledges:

The person who stands before a symphony orchestra is charged with something both impossible and improbable. The impossible part is herding a hundred musicians to agree on something, and the improbable part is that one does it by waving one’s hands in the air.

See here: https://www.instapaper.com/read/995003573/7199280

On China's scoring system :

If you live in the United States, you are by now accustomed to relinquishing your data to corporations. Credit card companies know when you run up bar tabs or buy sex toys. Facebook knows if you like Tasty cooking videos or Breitbart News. Uber knows where you go and how you behave en route. But Alipay knows all of these things about its users and more. Owned by Ant Financial, an affiliate of the massive Alibaba corporation, Alipay is sometimes called a super app. Its main competitor, WeChat, belongs to the social and gaming giant Tencent.
In 2015 Ant Financial was one of eight tech companies granted approval from the People’s Bank of China to develop their own private credit scoring platforms. Zhima Credit appeared in the Alipay app shortly after that. The service tracks your behavior on the app to arrive at a score between 350 and 950, and offers perks and rewards to those with good scores. Zhima Credit’s algorithm considers not only whether you repay your bills but also what you buy, what degrees you hold, and the scores of your friends. Like Fair and Isaac decades earlier, Ant Financial executives talked publicly about how a data-driven approach would open up the financial system to people who had been locked out, like students and rural Chinese. For the more than 200 million Alipay users who have opted in to Zhima Credit, the sell is clear: Your data will magically open doors for you.
An article on the portal Sohu.com explained that my score put me in the category of “common folk.” The page read: “Cultural level is not high. Retired or nearly retired.” In China, where many elderly lost out on years of education during the Cultural Revolution, this was not a compliment. According to Sohu, only 5 percent of the population had scores worse than mine.

Source: https://www.instapaper.com/read/994056493/7192903

On Snapchat: 

It’s clear why the show connected with him. Snapchat was initially best known for its disappearing messages, gaining it a reputation as the “sexting” app. But if it has one standout feature in 2017, it’s the app’s reality-warping lenses. Tap one button and pores are smoothed over, eyes enlarged and cheekbones sharpened; tap another and a dog’s nose and ears are superimposed on your face; tap a third and a dancing hotdog appears in your living room. “I think art has always played with this concept of reality,” Spiegel says, “and so I think it’s very exciting now that technology is playing a much bigger role in art.”
“On my Discover page, I have the Economist, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And I have some new shows, one from CNN and one from NBC,” he says. “I would suggest to you that historically there’s always been a spectrum … We’d like to give you lots of choices in terms of the stories that you’d like to watch. Some of it will be very serious and some will be more lighthearted – and I think that speaks to the range of human expression.”

Source: https://www.instapaper.com/read/994984983/7192047