Raquel Maldonado

Symphony

It is well known that A.I. companies have red-teaming, RLHF, and guardrail teams specialized in protecting against hate speech, bomb-making, or any crazy idea that pops into a person’s destructive mind. However, even with protection, the A.I. can be “tricked” and bypass the blockade, creating monstrosities. If there are psychopathic humans capable of manipulating and convincing crowds, just imagine a tool built with data from the entire internet.

Watching William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is always a delve into the delightful confusion between desire, identity, and illusion, in a dramatic comedy that plays with what we feel and how we show ourselves. In the production directed by Miranda Stewart, presented at the Ramo Auditorium between April 25th and 27th by EXPLiCIT (EXtracurricular PLayers at the California Institute of Technology—the ‘i’ is imaginary), the 1601 classic from the Elizabethan era gains new life with freshness, rhythm and a staging that honors the carnival spirit of the work without losing its emotional depth.

I’m Still Here is a 2024 Brazilian historical drama that won Best International and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Actress in a Leading Role at this year’s 97th Academy Awards. It is set in the 1970s, in Rio de Janeiro, during the dictatorship that lasted 20 years in Brazil. The story portrays a beautiful family consisting of Rubens Paiva (played by Selton Mello), Eunice Paiva (played by Fernanda Torres), and their five children.

I analyzed my dreams for two years using AI, and this is my testimony.

I died, and it wasn’t from pain, or old age, or illness. I died, and it wasn’t from mourning, from ending, from longing, from joy. I died, and it wasn’t sadness, hate, work. I died, and it wasn’t in past lives or future lives. I died, and it wasn’t from anguish, loneliness, bitterness. I died! I died of being me.

You’ve probably heard a joke about JPL standing for Jack Parsons Laboratory. Or at least you’ve heard that Jack Parsons was one of the founders of JPL and that a crater on the moon’s dark side is named after him. But have you ever delved into the subtext, personality, habits, and life of Jack Parsons?

Sandy Krasner has dedicated over 45 years to his work as a System Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He is also the leader of the Pasadena-Foothills chapter of Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), an international nonprofit organization advocating for national and global climate action, and a Pasadena 100 climate coalition member.

Nicholas Winton is an English stockbroker who has a comfortable life in 1930 London but knows that Hitler’s Germany is invading Praga, Czechoslovakia; with a humanitarian group, he helps save 669 children from Nazism. Winton worked quickly to find foster families for hundreds of children—a beautiful and sad biographical story. Winton was a kind of Schindler but an English one. Nicholas saved these children, but always wondered what was going on with them. He kept this story a secret. Only the people who helped save these children knew until his wife found a scrapbook with photos of the children decades later (in 1988) and, talking to her husband, discovered the whole story. Grete, his wife, shared this story with a historian, which led to a British TV show. This widely-watched program interviewed him and allowed him to meet these “children” again, who were already adults at the time, in a very moving encounter that was the film’s climax.