Latest news with #JennaRussell
Telegraph
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why I hate giving standing ovations
You could have fried an egg on my face. I felt awkward, embarrassed and rude; but even as everyone around me steadily rose to their feet, I stayed put and applauded from my seat. It was the curtain call for The Great Gatsby (the musical currently playing at the London Coliseum) and most of the audience were standing to give a standing ovation. But even as every bone in my British body told me to get up with everyone else, I was determined not to stand up for a show that I just didn't think was very good. In the last couple of years, almost every show I've seen onstage – musicals and plays alike – has seen audiences routinely rising to their feet at the end. In fact, these days, the only thing rarer than getting a standing ovation at the theatre is…well, not getting a standing ovation. 'They happen so often now that you're very aware when they don't happen,' says musical theatre star Jenna Russell (Hello, Dolly!, Flowers For Mrs Harris), who agrees the standing ovation – once a rare honour – has 'become the norm' in all genres of theatre. I love to give a standing ovation – but I want to do it when I really, truly mean it. I want to reserve my standing ovations for when I feel like my life has been changed in some way by what I've just seen, or when I've had tears pouring down my face from the beauty or impact of the performances. Last year, I jumped to my feet at the end of Hello, Dolly! at the London Palladium, when I had emotions I couldn't even name coursing through me. I also couldn't stand up quickly enough at the curtain call for the West End's Cabaret in January – I can't imagine a day when it won't be one of the best pieces of theatre I've ever seen. Most shows don't have this impact on me. And yet so often, I've ended up standing to applaud with the rest of the audience because I worry I'm sticking out like the bitterest of sore thumbs if I don't. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed most productions I've seen; but enjoying a show doesn't mean I want to give it a standing ovation. Getting to my feet for something that hasn't really moved me feels like I'm diminishing the standing ovations I've given to shows that have moved me beyond belief. So I've made a vow to stop following the crowd, and to have more confidence in how I feel – which, more often than not, will likely mean staying seated while everyone else stands up. Are we being manipulated? In a way. Musical theatre star Charlie Stemp (Kiss Me Kate, Half a Sixpence), tells me that curtain calls – especially in modern musicals – are often the most choreographed part of the show. 'Most shows design their bows around getting a standing ovation,' he tells me. 'The music will build as the curtain call goes on; it's literally designed to try and make you stand up.' If you've been lucky enough to score tickets to this summer's hottest show – Evita at the London Palladium – you'll likely have seen this in action. Actor Richard E. Grant was there on press night, and he later wrote on Instagram: 'In [five] decades of theatre going, I've never seen a performance with multiple standing ovations, topped off by the longest curtain call ever experienced'. Even Evita's magic hasn't worked on everyone; friends of mine saw the show a few weeks ago. 'I really didn't enjoy Evita,' one told me. 'I did stand up during the bows, partly to show appreciation [for] the work put in by the performers but mostly because I would have felt embarrassed and judged to stay sitting down. It does feel like standing ovations are now an obligation.' I have no issue with other people standing at the end if they've enjoyed a show – goodness knows, we need more collective joy at the moment, not to mention more support for the arts – it's the obligatory element I take issue with. The idea that, if you don't stand for a show at the end, that must mean: 1) you hated the show; and 2) you're enormously rude for not standing up anyway. It was this social pressure that made me feel so embarrassed at the end of The Great Gatsby; but I'm determined to stop giving in to it. Of course, there's a hefty chunk of privilege with all this. I'm very fortunate to live in London and to see multiple shows a year; that's not the case for many. Theatre is prohibitively expensive; and if you've travelled hundreds of miles and spent hundreds of pounds, then of course you should give a standing ovation if you want to. 'I did a panto,' says musical theatre star Marisha Wallace (Cabaret, Guys & Dolls), 'and that's a very good example of people saving money the whole year to come to one show – and baby, they're gonna stand! They've saved all their money; they're just so excited to be there.' Russell points out that performers always know one type of standing ovation from another. 'You can feel when it's spontaneous,' she says. 'We're totally aware. And that has a different effect to seeing people go, 'Oh God, here we go, [let's] stand up'.' Stemp, too, knows the difference – he cites Chichester Festival Theatre as his favourite place to perform, because the audience tends to be within an older age range, and so the standing ovations are far more special. 'I think older generations reserve that large display of affection; so when you get [a standing ovation] in a place that has those old-school values, it means so much more,' he says. 'I'll never forget watching an old man turn to the person next to him [to ask for his help in getting up] so he could applaud a show that I was in. It's the most beautiful thing in the world to see.' It's reassuring to know that performers know the difference between a spontaneous standing ovation and an obligatory one; but that doesn't mean I'm ready to let go of my own personal definition of standing ovations being a rare show of appreciation for a show that, quite simply, isn't like the others. If all reviewers gave five stars to every single production, the reviewing system would be rendered completely meaningless. By that same token, I feel that if I give a standing ovation to every show I ever see, I'm never really giving a standing ovation to any show at all. And, given the immense quality of some productions out there, that feels like a real shame. So I'm (ironically) taking a stand against automatic, obligatory standing ovations. Unless a show's moved me beyond words (and merely clapping), I'll be applauding from my seat. And Marisha Wallace, for one, is fine with that. 'We have so many rules and pre-conceived notions of etiquette,' she says. 'For us to judge the audience…I don't think we can do that. I don't think we have that right. If you don't want to stand, don't stand. And if you like to stand, stand up. I just hate that people judge [others] either way. Let people feel the art the way they want to feel it.'
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Furniture, clothes and other cheap deals at Blue and Gold Mine Sale in Morgantown
: WVU Commencement starts Friday, to continue through the weekend MORGANTOWN, (WBOY) — Spare and used furniture, DVDs, mugs, glasses, cookware and just about anything else you can imagine were all for sale at this year's Blue and Gold Mine Sale held at Milan Puskar Stadium in Morgantown on Saturday. This unique United Way Fundraiser allows attendees to find antique furniture and other items that were gathered from dorms across the WVU campus and donated by residents around Morgantown. The funds raised from the sale of those items then support the United Way of Monongalia and Preston Counties. Essentially, the sale gives items a second life when they would otherwise have been thrown away or ended up in a landfill. 'We get all kinds of things here,' said Mon and Preston United Way Director of Development Jenna Russell. '[A] chair that came from the Mountainlair, we get full furniture sets, random things from people's apartments, all the cookware you could imagine. Pretty much anything you think you might need, we have it here.' Randolph County BOE notifies state it will be unable to balance budget During the sale, shoppers could fill a bag with whatever they wanted and walk away with a final price tag of $25. Through that, the sale has raised more than $200,000 for the United Way while keeping literal tons of would-be trash out of landfills over the 20 years the sale has been held. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Forbes
21-04-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Study Shows Experienced Humans Can Spot Text Created By AI
In this, the generation of generative AI, it's been proven several times that people aren't especially good at telling whether written material was spit out by an AI bot or through a labor of human love. The general inability to tell real McCoy from OpenAI has been a disaster for teachers, who've been overcome by AI-crafted homework and test answers, destroying what it means to earn an education. But they are not alone, as AI text has diluted every form of written communication. In this dynamic, where humans have proven to be unreliable at spotting AI text, dozens of companies have sprung up selling AI detection. Dozens more companies have been created to help the unscrupulous avoid being detected by those systems. But new research from Jenna Russell, Marzena Karpinska, and Mohit Iyyer of the University of Maryland, Microsoft, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, respectively, shows that, on the essential job of detecting AI-created text, people may not be useless after all. The research team found that people who frequently use AI to create text can be quite good at spotting it. In the study, the team asked a group of five humans to review three types of text – human written, AI created, and AI created but then altered or edited by systems that are designed to fool automated AI detectors. The last set is especially important because other tests have shown that editing text created by AI can confuse or degrade the accuracy of even the better AI detection systems. Their headline finding is 'that annotators who frequently use LLMs for writing tasks excel at detecting AI-generated text, even without any specialized training or feedback.' The research found that experienced humans reliably detected AI text even after it had been altered and edited, and that – with one exception – the human investigators outperformed every automated detection system they tested. The exception was AI detection provider Pangram, which matched the 'near perfect detection accuracy' of the humans. According to the research paper, Pangram and the human experts were 99.3% accurate at spotting text created by AI and 100% accurate at picking out the human text as human. That experienced humans may be able to reliably detect output from AI bots is big news, but don't get too excited or think that we won't need computer-based AI detectors anymore. For one, this paper asked the experienced humans to vote on whether written work was AI or not, using a majority vote of five experts to stand as the indicator. That means that to be really accurate at picking the automated from the authentic took five people, not one. This is from the paper, 'The majority vote of our five expert annotators substantially outperforms almost every commercial and open-source detector we tested on these 300 articles, with only the commercial Pangram model matching their near-perfect detection accuracy.' In fact, if you were to pit one single experienced human detector against the best automated system, Pangram was still more accurate. The automated detector, 'outperforms each expert individually,' says the paper. And, somewhat troubling, the paper also says that individual human AI sleuths, on average, indicated that human written text was written by AI 3.3% of the time. For a single human reviewer, that false positive rate could be a problem when drawn over hundreds or even thousands of papers. Moreover, while a group of experienced human reviewers were more accurate than a single human reviewer, hiring five people to review each and every writing composition is wildly impractical, which the study's authors concede. 'An obvious drawback is that hiring humans is expensive and slow: on average, we paid $2.82 per article including bonuses, and we gave annotators roughly a week to complete a batch of 60 articles,' the paper reports. There aren't many settings in which $2.82 and a week's time – per paper – are plausible. Still, in the world where parsing auto-bot text from real writing is essential, the paper has three important contributions. First, finding that humans, experienced humans, can actually spot AI text is a significant foundation for further discussion. Second, as the paper points out, human AI detectors have a real advantage over automated systems in that they can articulate why they suspect a section of text is fake. Humans, the report says, 'can provide detailed explanations of their decision-making process, unlike all of the automatic detectors in our study.' In many settings, that can be quite important. Finally, knowing humans can do this – even a panel of humans – may afford us a viable second opinion or outside double-check on important cases of suspected AI use. In academic settings, scientific research, or intellectual property disputes as examples, having a good AI detector and a different way to spot likely AI text, could be deeply valuable, even if it takes longer and costs more. In education settings, institutions that care about the rigor and value of their grades and degrees, could create a two-tier review system for written work – a fast, high-quality, and accurate automated review, followed by a human panel-like review in cases where authenticity is contested. In such a system, a double-verified finding could prove conclusive enough to take action, thereby protecting not only the schools and teachers, but also protecting the honest work of human writers, and the general public.
