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Serial murderer Myra Hindley is often portrayed as an “evil icon”. Her crimes of sadistic murder against children continue to shock. There are few artistic sights so terrifying as the giant portrait of Hindley composed of the handprints of children.
CEOs make mistakes due to their own psychological biases – but they also profit from the biases of others. Some exploit investors by catering to sentiment – adding “.com” to their name during the Internet bubble or entering “hot” industries to inflate their valuations.
On 17 August 1982, the first commercial CD was released. Digital recording and editing have changed the face of music by making recordings easy to originate and share. But has this affected musical quality, and what are the financial and artistic consequences?
Prokofiev’s piano music struck his contemporaries as matching the new era: its dynamism was compared to sport (“football music”), and its grinding repeated patterns to industrial sounds (“machine music”).
We often think that leaders are particularly strong in decision making – that’s why they’ve made it to the top. But evidence shows that even senior executives are prone to psychological biases, such as overconfidence, groupthink, and applying one-size-fits-all rules.
Canons of taste and value in other media, such as literature, art and music, have been challenged in recent decades by proponents of sexual and ethnic equality.
For nearly seventy years, what might be called ‘the canon’ of greatest films has been arbitrated by an international poll of critics delivering a ‘ten best’ list every decade, published in the BFI’s Sight & Sound.
Is the jury system the bulwark of individual liberty? This lecture will look at the role of the so-called “perverse jury” in acquitting defendants where the law, or the charge itself, is deemed unjust.