Latest news with #Birnbaum
New York Post
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Five hungry goats set to compete in Manhattan in first-ever goat eating competition
Move over Joey Chestnut, there's going to be a new food contest GOAT in town. Five of the stubborn barn yard animals will go horn-to-horn this Saturday for the first-ever competitive eating event involving the barnyard species — and they're all hungry for the new title. 'The Great Goat Graze-Off' is an evolution of the annual Running of the Goats at Riverside Park, which sees the hairy little beasts use their chompers to clear acres of invasive species, like poison ivy and mugwort, from the Manhattan Park. Advertisement 4 This Saturday will mark the first-ever eating competition between goats. Riverside Park Conservancy¿ 'We know that the girls are very excited and they've been practicing — we've heard — getting ready for the big moment this weekend,' Merritt Birnbaum, the CEO and President of the Riverside Park Conservancy, told The Post. 'Really, it's just a taste of what is to come for their summer that they'll be spending in the park with us.' Advertisement The gobbling goat contest will kick off the sixth summer that the four-legged weed whackers are being shipped in from upstate to help clear the grounds. Last year, the conservancy celebrated the start of the grazing season with a literal Running of the Goats, but quickly realized 'running' wasn't really in the animals' nature. 4 The goats will be given pre-prepared bundles of mugwort, an invasive species. Riverside Park Conservancy¿ 'We were thinking about what would really be the best way to welcome them to the park this year, and the idea of letting them do what they do best came to mind,' Birnbaum said, explaining how the eating contest was born. Advertisement And the contest will be just as serious as the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island. The goats will each have their own coaches and counters, much like Chestnut was equipped with when he soared to victory after downing 70.5 glizzies last week. The five goats — Romeo, Mallomar, Butterball, Kash and Rufus — will be given just five minutes to scarf down a pre-prepared bubble of mugwort as a crowd of eager onlookers cheer on their favorites. 4 This will be the sixth summer the goats are shipped in from upstate to help clear the brush from the park. Riverside Park Conservancy¿ George Shea, host of the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest and chair of Major League Eating, will be emceeing the blockbuster event. Advertisement It's not yet clear who the favorite is to win the 'The Great Goat Graze-Off — though Birnbaum teased that Kash, a newcomer to Riverside Park, has 'perhaps a stronger jaw than some of the other goats.' 'But that's really just speculation. We know that the goats don't really love to be told what to do, so it's kind of anyone's guess who will triumphing in this,' she continued. 4 'We know that the goats don't really love to be told what to do, so it's kind of anyone's guess who will triumphing in this,' said Merritt Birnbaum. Riverside Park Conservancy¿ 'I think we can expect to witness a world-breaking weed-eating, but unsure what that world record will be.' The five competitors will stick around at Riverside Park for the rest of the summer, munching their way through a two-acre plot at West 143rd Street that every year becomes overtaken with invasive species, like mugwort and poison ivy. The animals are so efficient that in the past that some goats were relieved of their duties and sent home early.
Yahoo
25-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI companies are throwing big money at newly minted PhDs, sparking fears of an academic ‘brain drain'
Larry Birnbaum, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University was recruiting a promising PhD to become a graduate researcher. Simultaneously, Google was wooing the student. And when he visited the tech giant's campus in Mountain View, Calif., the company slated him to chat with its cofounder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, who are collectively worth about $140 billion and command over 183,000 employees. 'How are we going to compete with that?' Birnbaum asks, noting that PhDs in corporate research roles can make as much as five times professorial salaries, which average $155,000 annually. 'That's the environment that every chair of computer science has to cope with right now.' Though Birnbaum says these recruitment scenarios have been 'happening for a while,' the phenomenon has reportedly worsened as salaries across the industry have been skyrocketing. The trend recently became headline news after reports surfaced of Meta offering to pay some highly experienced AI researchers between seven- and eight-figure salaries. Those offers—coupled with the strong demand for leaders to propel AI applications—may be helping to pull up the salary levels of even newly minted PhDs. Even though some of these graduates have no professional experience, they are being offered the types of comma-filled levels traditionally reserved for director- and executive-level talent. Engineering professors and department chairs at Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, Northwestern, and New York University interviewed by Fortune are divided on whether these lucrative offers lead to a 'brain drain' from academic brain drain camp believes this phenomenon depletes the ranks of academic AI departments, which still do important research and also are responsible for training the next generation of PhD students. At the private labs, the AI researchers help juice Big Tech's bottom line while providing, in these critics' view, no public benefit. The unconcerned argue that academia is a thriving component of this booming labor market. Anasse Bari, a professor of computer science and director of the predictive analytics and AI research lab at New York University, says that the corporate opportunities available to AI-focused academics is 'significantly' affecting academia. 'My general theory is that If we want a responsible future for AI, we must first invest in a solid AI education that upholds these values, cultivating thoughtful AI practitioners, researchers, and educators who will carry this mission forward,' he wrote to Fortune via email, emphasizing that despite receiving 'many' offers for industry-side work, his NYU commitments take the days before ChatGPT, top AI researchers were in high demand, just as today. But many of the top corporate AI labs, such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta's FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), would allow established academics to keep their university appointments, at least part-time. This would allow them to continue to teach and train graduate students, while also conducting research for the tech some professors say that there's been no change in how frequently corporate labs and universities are able to reach these dual corporate-academic appointments, others disagree. NYU's Bari says this model has declined owing to 'intense talent competition, with companies offering millions of dollars for full-time commitment which outpaces university resources and shifts focus to proprietary innovation.' Commitment to their faculty appointments remains true for all the academics Fortune interviewed for this story. But professors like Henry Hoffman, who chairs the University of Chicago's Department of Computer Science, has watched his PhD students get courted by tech companies since he began his professorship in 2013. 'The biggest thing to me is the salaries,' he says. He mentions a star student with zero professional experience who recently dropped out of the UChicago PhD program to accept a 'high six-figure' offer from ByteDance. 'When students can get the kind of job they want [as students], there's no reason to force them to keep going.' The job market for computer science and engineering PhDs who study AI sits in stark contrast to the one faced by undergraduates in the field. This degree-level polarization exists because many of those with bachelor's degrees in computer science would traditionally find jobs as coders. But LLMs are now writing large portions of code at many companies, including Microsoft and Salesforce. Meanwhile, most AI-relevant PhD students have their pick of frothy jobs—in academia, tech, and finance. These graduates are courted by the private sector because their training propels AI and machine learning applications, which, in turn, can increase revenue opportunities for model were 4,854 people who graduated with AI-relevant PhDs in mathematics and computer science across U.S. universities, according to 2022 data. This number has increased significantly—by about 20%—since 2014. These PhDs' postgraduate employment rate is greater than those graduating with bachelor's degrees in similar fields. And in 2023, 70% of AI-relevant PhDs took private sector jobs postgrad, a huge increase from two decades ago when just 20% of these grads accepted corporate work, per MIT. Make no mistake: PhDs in AI, computer science, applied mathematics, and related fields have always had lucrative opportunities available after graduation. Until now, one of the most financially rewarding paths was quantitative research at hedge funds: All-in compensation for PhDs fresh out of school can climb to $1 million–plus in these roles. It's a compelling pitch, especially for students who've spent up to seven years living off meager stipends of about $40,000 a year. The all-but-assured path to prosperity has made relevant PhD programs in computer science and math extremely popular. AI and machine learning are the most popular disciplines among engineering PhDs, according to a 2023 Computing Research Association survey. UChicago computer science department chair Hoffman says that PhD admissions applications have surged by about 12% in the past few years alone, pressuring him and his colleagues to hire new faculty to increase enrollment and meet the demand. Though Trump's federal funding cuts to universities have significant impacts on research in many departments, they may be less pertinent to those working on AI-related projects. This is partially because some of this research is funded by corporations. Google, for example, is collaborating with the University of Chicago to research trustworthy AI. That dichotomy probably underscores Johns Hopkins University's decision to open its Data Science and AI Institute: a $2 billion five-year effort to enroll 750 PhD students in engineering disciplines and hire over 100 new tenure-track faculty members, making it one of the largest PhD programs in the country. 'Despite the dreary mood elsewhere, the AI and data science area at Hopkins is rosy,' says Anton Dahbura, the executive director of Johns Hopkins' Information Security Institute and codirector of the Institute for Assured Autonomy, likely referring to his university's cut of 2,000 workers after it lost $800 million in federal funding earlier this year. Dahbura supports this argument by noting that Hopkins received 'hundreds' of applications for professor positions in its Data Science and AI Institute. For some, the reasons to remain in academia are ethical. Luís Amaral, a computer science professor at Northwestern, is 'really concerned' that AI companies have overhyped the capabilities of their large language models and that their strategies will breed catastrophic societal implications, including environmental destruction. He says of OpenAI leadership, 'If I'm a smart person, I actually know how bad the team was.' Because most corporate labs are largely focused on LLM- and transformer-based approaches, if these methods ultimately fall short of the hype, there could be a reckoning for the industry. 'Academic labs are among the few places actively exploring alternative AI architectures beyond LLMs and transformers,' says NYU's Bari, who is researching creative applications for AI using a model based on birds' intelligence. 'In this corporate-dominated landscape, academia's role as a hub for nonmainstream experimentation has likely become more important.' This story was originally featured on
Boston Globe
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Dara Birnbaum, 78, dies; video was her medium and her message
The six-minute piece that resulted, 'Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman,' begins with 11 straight explosions, followed by Lynda Carter spinning in circles under more explosions as she transforms into the Amazon superhero of the show's title. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up It was a simple change, but a profound one. By stripping these effects from their ordinary fairy-tale context, Ms. Birnbaum made it easier to see the violence and sexual objectification they transmitted along with their nominal story. Perhaps more important, she also demonstrated -- to a whole cohort of later artists, including Cory Arcangel and Martine Syms -- that mass media was fair game as artistic material and that its power could, if only temporarily or in principle, be turned against itself. Advertisement Ms. Birnbaum died in a hospital in New York City on May 2. She was 78. Her brother and only immediate survivor, Robert Birnbaum, a physician scientist, said the cause was metastatic endometrial cancer. Advertisement Ms. Birnbaum also made more introspective work, like the three-part video series 'Damnation of Faust,' a haunting meditation on the Faust myth shot in Lower Manhattan, as well as elegantly designed installations to house her videos and inventive drawings. But she never lost her interest in the moving image, or in coercion and control -- though those interests converged in different ways as her work became less focused on the dangers of video than on its potential to reveal other dangers. Her 1990 piece 'Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission' used found footage and a claustrophobic installation of multiple monitors to consider both the previous year's protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the Chinese government's suppression of information about them. The six-channel installation 'Psalm 29(30),' made after Ms. Birnbaum had recovered from a grave illness in 2014, juxtaposed views of Lake Como in Italy, shot while she was a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center there, with images of the Syrian civil war. Dara Nan Birnbaum was born in New York City on Oct. 29, 1946, to Mary (Sochotliff) Birnbaum, a medical technician turned homemaker, and Philip Birnbaum, a prolific architect of residential buildings known for the efficiency of his apartment layouts. After graduating early from Forest Hills High School in Queens, Ms. Birnbaum enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh as a premed student, but she switched to architecture. After earning her bachelor's degree in 1969, she moved to San Francisco to work for Lawrence Halprin & Associates; when the oil crisis hit and business slowed, she enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1973. Advertisement In 1974, she moved to Florence, Italy, where she took classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti -- and had an encounter that changed her life. Stopping one night to look at a pair of lithographs in the windows of a gallery called Centro Diffusione Grafica (later known as art/tapes/22), she noticed a group of people in the back, huddled around a television set. When they beckoned her to join them, she found that they were watching neither the news nor a soap opera but a video art piece by Allan Kaprow. Through the gallery, she met artist Vito Acconci and others. With their encouragement, she returned to New York and its vibrant art scene, though not specifically to its galleries. 'I initially avoided galleries like the plague,' she told Arcangel when he interviewed her for Artforum in 2009. 'I didn't want to translate popular imagery from television and film into painting and photography. I wanted to use video on video; I wanted to use television on television.' Her earliest video works were philosophically tinged experiments with the medium like the black-and-white 'Mirroring' (1975), in which Ms. Birnbaum, captured in front of a dull gray backdrop, seems to go in and out of focus as she approaches the camera. In fact, the camera is trained on a mirror, as is revealed when the artist doubles herself by slipping in front of the lens. But by 1978, she had begun to work with appropriated material -- first with an installation featuring footage from 'Laverne & Shirley,' then in 'Technology/Transformation' and later with images borrowed from 'Hollywood Squares' and, in 'PM Magazine,' a mashup of entertainment news and commercials for Wang computers. Advertisement Within a few years, she was showing at galleries, museums and film festivals worldwide. She would eventually have retrospectives in Tokyo; Milan; Vienna; Porto, Portugal; and Ghent, Belgium. In 2017, Carnegie Mellon's School of Art created the Birnbaum Award in her honor. Of all her edits and remixes, Ms. Birnbaum's most subversive response to mass media may have been simply to turn down its volume. 'Everything seems to be changing and failing and falling out from under us,' she told curator Lauren Cornell in a 2016 ARTnews interview. 'So a kind of numbness has developed, and that's why some art attempts to yell so hard at its viewers. But if one comes from a place of solemnity and from a whisper, in a society that's constantly yelling, maybe it's a strong whisper that can best be heard and then matched with full integrity.' This article originally appeared in
New York Post
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Photographer revives iconic NYC album covers on Instagram
New York City's streets hide legendary rock 'n' roll moments you never knew were there — until Steve Birnbaum brings them back to life. The Big Apple-based photographer and filmmaker is the brain behind @TheBandWasHere — a viral project that resurrects iconic album covers right where they were shot decades ago. Birnbaum tracks down where famous band photos were snapped, then goes back to those exact spots to re-create the shots — album covers, promo pics, you name it. 9 Steve Birnbaum hunts down the exact spots where iconic photos were taken decades ago — then re-creates them today, like this homage to Don Hunstein's 1963 cover shot for 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.' Olga Ginzburg for NY Post His feed is a roll call of NYC rock legends like the Strokes, Talking Heads, Blondie, Ramones, Bob Dylan, and Simon & Garfunkel — all brought back to life right where the magic originally happened. Think Bob Dylan strolling on the same chilly Greenwich Village sidewalk in 1963, or the Ramones posing outside that gritty East Village wall in 1976, all perfectly framed as they are today. But his collection doesn't stop there. He also has iconic images of the Notorious B.I.G., Bruce Springsteen, The Doors, Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Taylor Swift and more. What excites Birnbaum most is reconnecting New Yorkers with the invisible soundtrack of their daily lives. 'It's crazy how much you walk the streets and go past things … so many of us walk by where Stevie Nicks once twirled or where Debbie Harry once stood … and don't even notice.' Birnbaum's nostalgia-powered hustle taps into our obsession with 'then-and-now' culture and that classic NYC pride to hold on to the past — especially the golden eras of music that helped define the city's identity. 9 Birnbaum has spent years sleuthing out legendary photo shoot spots — digging through old interviews, tour clues and Google Maps. Here, his re-creation of Patrick Morgan's 2007 shot of Amy Winehouse. Steve Birnbaum/@TheBandWasHere His feed — he counts Blondie's Chris Stein, Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan and SZA as fans — is a living museum of rock 'n' roll history, proving that while skyscrapers sprout and neighborhoods morph, the soul of NYC music still lingers — if you know where to look. But don't mistake this for a quick snap-and-post hustle. Birnbaum calls himself 'a music historian' and makes it his ultimate priority to honor and credit each album cover's original photographer. He's spent years chasing down the exact locations of legendary photo shoots, piecing together clues from old interviews, concert tour dates and band itineraries and even scouring Google Maps for hours. 9 Birnbaum has spent years sleuthing out legendary photo shoot spots — digging through old interviews, tour clues and Google Maps — like for this re-creation of Danny Fields' 1977 Ramones cover for 'Rocket to Russia.' Olga Ginzburg for NY Post 'I do challenge myself and I try to find photos that would just be tough to do,' he said. He even studies the original photographer's angle and often finds himself crouching, contorting or lying on the ground to nail the shot. Birnbaum's journey began with personal memories — family albums and snapshots from his youth — but quickly evolved into a full-blown passion project after the seismic shift of 9/11. 'There was a cover of the Village Voice,' he recalls, 'where an artist photographer held up a picture of the World Trade Center just after the attacks. That inspired me artistically.' 9 Birnbaum's feed is a who's who of NYC rock legends — the Strokes, Talking Heads, Blondie and more — all resurrected where the magic first happened. Olga Ginzburg for NY Post What started as a quiet personal archive snowballed into a vibrant chronicle of pop culture and music history, all anchored to the very streets of New York. To uncover these sites, Birnbaum dives deep — and sometimes, a tiny detail can be the key. 'When I was looking for the original location for the shot of the Greatest Hits album from Simon & Garfunkel, I noticed Paul Simon was holding something that looked like an egg-shaped container for L'eggs pantyhose from the 1980s,' Birnbaum recalled. 'But it turned out to be my biggest clue to finding where Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel stood in the photo.' 9 Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits album, released in 1972. Steve Birnbaum/@TheBandWasHere He said walking by an Upper East Side park 'triggered my memory.' 'He was holding onto part of a fence at 7 East 94th Street,' he said. 'I was able to track down the location, which I never thought would still be around. There wasn't a lot to go from, but it was that little piece and detail.' 9 Birnbaum studies every angle of the original shot — whether the photographer crouched, tilted or shot from below — and isn't afraid to contort, crouch or lie flat to get the perfect match. Olga Ginzburg for NY Post But often it's a mix of intuition and persistence, plus knowing and loving NYC's vast neighborhoods. 'You have to be crazy at this at times,' he laughed. 'New York's been tough.' The city's rapid transformation — from the Lower East Side to Chinatown to towering new developments — forms a bittersweet backdrop to his work. Each photograph captures a moment frozen in time, but many of those moments are fading as buildings vanish or get repurposed. 'As much as I love New York, it really has changed a lot in the last five, 10 years,' he said. 9 In a fast-changing, digital world, Birnbaum's work hits a nostalgic nerve — reviving the golden ages of music that shaped NYC's soul. Olga Ginzburg for NY Post His photos, often taken with his iPhone or DSLR camera, serve as time machines, revealing the unseen layers beneath the city's concrete and steel. For Birnbaum, that's the true joy of his work. 'I do consider myself a music historian in regard to the photographs,' he said, noting he's proud to preserve NYC's rich musical legacy — one photo, one street corner at a time. 9 Snapped mostly on his iPhone, Birnbaum's shots — like this 1981 Mick Jagger still from the filming of the Rolling Stones' 'Waiting on a Friend' video — act as time machines, peeling back the layers of NYC's concrete jungle. Steve Birnbaum/@TheBandWasHere 9 'It's crazy how much you walk the streets and go past things,' he said. Olga Ginzburg for NY Post It's also a reminder that no matter how much New York changes, its soul never fades. 'I want people to look up and say, 'Hey, I'm standing where music legends once stood,'' he said. 'That connection, that history, is so important.' 5 NYC locations for legendary albums Led Zeppelin: 'Physical Graffiti,' (1975), 96 St. Marks Place, New York, NY, 10003 Bob Dylan: 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan,' (1963), middle of Jones Street, 50 feet from West Fourth Street, New York, NY, 10014 Ramones: 'Rocket to Russia,' (1977), back alley off First Street behind John Varvatos (formerly CBGB), 315 Bowery, New York, NY 10003 Neil Young: 'After the Gold Rush,' (1970), northwest corner of Sullivan Street and West Third Street, New York, NY, 10012 Simon & Garfunkel: 'Greatest Hits' (1972), 7 E. 94th St., New York, NY, 10128
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Lashes Out at Reporter Over Question About Putin ‘Disrespecting' Him
President Trump mocked a Washington Post reporter who asked him if he felt disrespected by Russia's Vladimir Putin. Speaking to journalists aboard Air Force One, Trump took exception to a question from the Post's White House reporter Michael Birnbaum. 'Is President Putin disrespecting you by attacking Ukraine when you're trying to make peace there?' Birnbaum asked. 'What did he do?' Trump asked in response. 'Well, he's attacked Ukraine,' Birnbaum answered. 'Is he disrespecting me?' Trump replied, before asking: 'Who are you with?' After Birnbaum identified himself as a Post reporter, Trump shook his head dismissively. 'You've lost a lot of credibility,' Trump said, before quickly moving on to take questions from others. Trump snubbed the question about Putin after attacks struck multiple parts of Ukraine over the weekend, killing 14 and injuring dozens more, according to Kyiv. A missile blitz on Saturday came hours after Trump said the Kremlin leader was 'doing what anybody would do.' One missile hit in Dobropillia in the eastern Donetsk region, destroying an apartment building. As emergency services rushed to the scene a second projectile hit. Eleven people were killed. Three more people died and seven were injured after a drone attack in the city of Bohodukhiv, in the Kharkiv region. Russian assaults on Ukrainian targets have picked up again after Trump temporarily pulled the plug on intelligence-sharing between Washington, D.C. and Kyiv. He also suspended military aid to Ukraine following his disastrous Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. 'This is what happens when someone appeases barbarians,' Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote in an X post after attacks over the weekend. 'More bombs, more aggression, more victims. Another tragic night in Ukraine.' Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to meet with Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia this week. Zelensky has said he has put 'realistic proposals on the table.' He too is expected in Riyadh Monday, officially, to meet crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
