19 minute read
you could receive social securiTy benefiTs from your sPouse
Víctor Rodríguez
Public Affairs Specialist (Puerto Rico and the USVI), Social Security Administration
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Do you qualify for spousal benefits?
Social Security benefits are a crucial part of millions of Americans’ retirement income. If you don’t have enough Social Security credits to qualify for benefits on your own record, you may be able to receive benefits on your spouse’s record.
Spousal benefits apply equally to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, as well as most states, do not recognize consensual union as legal marriage. Therefore, to qualify for possible Social Security benefits as a spouse, the union had to be formalized with a marriage certificate. At the time of applying for benefits, the couple must have been married for at least one year, unless they have biological children together.
To qualify for spousal benefits, you must be: • 62 years of age or older. • Any age and have in your care a child younger than age 16, or who has a disability and is entitled to receive benefits on your spouse’s record.
Your spouse’s full benefit could be up to one-half the amount your spouse would be entitled to receive at his/her full retirement age. It is important for people to know that the possible benefit to the spouse will not reduce the amount that the insured person receives from Social Security, unless there is a court order concerning child support or alimony. If you choose to receive your spouse’s benefits before reaching full retirement
In fact, age, you will get a permanently reduced benefit. Your spouse’s If you wait until full benefit could be you reach full up to one-half the retirement age to amount your spouse receive benefits, would be entitled to you’ll receive your receive at his/her full full spouse’s benefit retirement age. amount, which is up to one-half the amount your spouse can receive. You’ll also get your full spouse’s benefit if you are under full retirement age, but care for a child and none of the following applies: • The child is younger than age 16. • The child has a disability and is
entitled to receive benefits on your spouse’s record.
If you’re eligible to receive retirement benefits on your own record, we will pay that amount first. If your benefits as a spouse are higher than your own retirement benefits, you will get a combination of benefits that equal the higher spouse benefit.
For example, let’s say that Sandy qualifies for a retirement benefit of $1,000 and a spousal benefit of $1,250. At her full retirement age, she will receive her own $1,000 retirement benefit. We will add $250 from her spouse’s benefit, for a total of $1,250.
Want to apply for either your or your spouse’s benefits? Are you at least 61 years and nine months old? If you answered yes to both questions, visit www.ssa.gov/ benefits/retirement, to get started today.
Are you divorced from a marriage that lasted at least 10 years? You may be able to get benefits on your former spouse’s record. You can find out more by visiting www.ssa.gov/ planners/retire/divspouse.html for more information.
United Arab Emirates
bans Pixar’s ‘Lightyear’
Jon Gambrell – The Associated Press
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The United Arab Emirates on Monday banned the upcoming Pixar animated feature “Lightyear” from showing in movie theaters after its inclusion of a kiss between two lesbian characters.
The decision by the UAE comes as Malaysia also reportedly will ban the film, raising the possibility other Muslim-majority nations could follow suit on one of Disney’s biggest animated films of the year as the film industry comes out of the depths of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Emirates, home to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, announced through its Media Regulatory Office of the country’s Ministry of Youth and Culture that the film would not be opening in the country this Thursday.
The film “is not licensed for public screening in all cinemas in the UAE, due to its violation of the country’s media content standards,” the office said in a tweet. “The office confirms that all films screened in cinemas across the country are subject to follow-up and evaluation before the date of screening to the public, to ensure the safety of the circulated content according to the appropriate age classification.”
The office did not elaborate on the tweet and did not immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press. The tweet included an image of the film’s poster, with the profile image of its main character Buzz Lightyear with a “no” symbol over it in red.
Movie theaters in the UAE, a federation of seven sheikhdoms on the Arabian Peninsula, had already advertised showtimes for the film. But over the weekend, a social media campaign with the Arabic hashtag “Ban Showing Lightyear in the Emirates,” caught the attention of conservative Emiratis. They described showing a lesbian couple on screen as being against their culture and religion.
The movie, with actor Chris Evans voicing the
> Disney/Pixar via AP “[The film] is not licensed for public screening in all cinemas in the UAE, due to its violation of the country’s media content standards. Media Regulatory Office of the UAE inspiration for the Buzz Lightyear action figure from the “Toy Story” films,
In fact, includes a female character voiced by actress Uzo Aduba kissing her female partner. Studios have allowed censors to cut films in global distribution for content in the past, including in the Mideast market. The UAE, many other countries in the wider Mideast, is a Muslimled nation that criminalizes same-sex relationships. The U.S. State Department warns that Islamic, or Shariah, law in the UAE can include the death penalty for same-sex conduct, while Dubai can levy a 10-year prison sentence and Abu Dhabi allows for up to 14 years. However, such prosecutions are rarely reported and LGBTQ individuals do live in the skyscraper-studded city-state of Dubai, home to the long-haul carrier Emirates.
The $200 million “Lightyear” is expected to be a major draw for Disney, with analysts estimating it could gross over $100 million in its first weekend.
Studios have allowed censors to cut films in global distribution for content in the past, including in the Mideast market. Recently, Disney has faced protests from activists and its own staff over what they described as CEO Bob Chapek’s slow response in publicly criticizing Florida legislation that opponents dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in late March signed the bill, which forbids instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.
The moment had been earlier cut from the film but was restored after Pixar employees protested Disney’s response to Florida’s bill.
The movie also may be banned in Malaysia as well. The Star, the country’s top English-language newspaper, cited an anonymous, nongovernment source as saying that Lightyear will not be shown in Malaysian cinemas. No reasons were given. A newspaper in the Persian Gulf island kingdom of Bahrain similarly has speculated the film wouldn’t be shown there.
Officials from Malaysia’s Film Censorship Board and the Home Affairs Ministry, as well as The Walt Disney Co., could not be immediately reached for comment.
In fact,
Jon Rahm, of Spain, watches his putt on the 13th green during the second round of the Memorial golf tournament last Friday, in Dublin, Ohio. >AP Photo/ Darron Cummings Golf legend, Phil Mickelson, will be playing a major for the first time this year.
US Open heads to MA amid revolutionary battle in golf
Doug Ferguson – The Associated Press
It is one of the five founding clubs of the U.S. Golf Association. Its first U.S. Open in 1913 is what first put golf on the front pages of American newspapers when 20-year-old amateur Francis Ouimet took down a pair of British titans.
Beyond the ropes, it’s worth nothing the Boston area was the birthplace of the Revolutionary War, only fitting for these times.
That’s what it feels like golf is going through at the moment.
More than a dozen PGA Tour players, a few big names that include a trio of U.S. Open champions, are defecting to a Saudi-funded rival league and the PGA Tour is telling them they are no longer welcome. The battle lines are unlike anything this genteel game has experienced in its 162-year history.
And it’s enough to steal some of the attention away from the U.S. Open, the second-oldest championship known as the toughest test in golf.
“It’s a weird time in professional golf,” Rory McIlroy said. “And I said it a couple weeks ago, we’re just going to see how this season plays out.”
The U.S. Open is in Brookline, Massachusetts, for the fourth time on June 16-19, and it already features a few subplots that could be considered surprising.
Tiger Woods will be sitting this one out.
After making the cut in the Masters and the PGA Championship, Woods decided his right leg that was battered from a February 2021 car crash needs more time to heal and strengthen. He wants to be ready for the British Open next month at St. Andrews.
Phil Mickelson will be playing a major for the first time this year.
Lefty was recovering from a foot-in-mouth injury from published comments about the Saudi league that managed to offend both sides. He said he wasn’t ready to play the Masters or the PGA Championship, making his return at the LIV Golf Invitational outside London.
The USGA takes the name of its championship —“Open” — seriously enough to honor any player who earned his way into the field.
“Should a player who had earned his way into the 2022 U.S. Open, via our published field criteria, be pulled out of the field as a result of his decision to play in another event? And we ultimately decided that they should not,” the USGA said in a statement.
Fourteen players who qualified for the U.S. Open were in the first LIV Golf event, a group that includes past champions Dustin Johnson and Martin Kaymer. Another U.S. Open champion, Bryson DeChambeau, joined the Saudi league on Friday.
Mickelson, most famously, never has won the U.S. Open. Imagine if he were to finally win the major that has haunted him throughout his career, those record six runner-up finishes keeping him from the career Grand Slam.
“I don’t know how others will receive it but I would be quite favorable with it,” Mickelson said.
How others would perceive it is to be determined. For years among the most popular figures in golf, Mickelson has been viewed as the chief recruiter for Greg Norman and his LIV Golf series that has paid enormous sums just for players to sign up.
As for that pursuit of the career slam, Mickelson has had seven cracks at the U.S. Open since he picked up the third leg at Muirfield in the 2013 British Open. He has yet to finish among the top 25 in any of them, and turning 52 on the day of the opening round isn’t making it any easier.
Golf has been moving toward youth for some time now, and the recent majors are an example. The last four major champions are in their 20s, dating to defending U.S. Open champion Jon Rahm, who was 26 when he won at Torrey Pines last year.
“Should a player who had earned his way into the 2022 U.S. Open be pulled out of the field as a result of his decision to play in another event?” / USGA, in
Give this AI a few words and it produces a stunning image – but is it art?
Aaron Hertzmann, University of Washington
(THE CONVERSATION) – A picture may be worth a thousand words, but thanks to an artificial intelligence program called DALL-E 2, you can have a professionallooking image with far fewer.
DALL-E 2 is a new neural network algorithm that creates a picture from a short phrase or sentence that you provide. The program, which was announced by the artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI in April 2022, hasn’t been released to the public. But a small and growing number of people – myself included – have been given access to experiment with it.
As a researcher studying the nexus of technology and art, I was keen to see how well the program worked. After hours of experimentation, it’s clear that DALL-E – while not without shortcomings – is leaps and bounds ahead of existing image generation technology. It raises immediate questions about how these technologies will change how art is made and consumed. It also raises questions about what it means to be creative when DALL-E 2 seems to automate so much of the creative process itself.
A staggering range of style and subjects
OpenAI researchers built DALL-E 2 from an enormous collection of images with captions. They gathered some of the images online and licensed others.
Using DALL-E 2 looks a lot like searching for an image on the web: you type in a short phrase into a text box, and it gives back six images.
But instead of being culled from the web, the program creates six brand-new images, each of which reflect some version of the entered phrase. (Until recently, the program produced 10 images per prompt.) For example, when some friends and I gave DALL-E 2 the text prompt “cats in devo hats,” it produced 10 images that came in different styles.
Nearly all of them could plausibly pass for professional photographs or drawings. While the algorithm did not quite grasp “Devo hat” – the strange helmets worn by the New Wave band Devo – the headgear in the images it produced came close.
Over the past few years, a small community of artists have been using neural network algorithms to produce art. Many of these artworks have distinctive qualities that almost look like real images, but with odd distortions of space – a sort of cyberpunk Cubism. The most recent text-toimage systems often produce dreamy, fantastical imagery that can be delightful but rarely looks real.
DALL-E 2 offers a significant leap in the quality and realism of the images. It can also mimic specific styles with remarkable accuracy. If you want images that look like actual photographs, it’ll produce six life-like images. If you want prehistoric cave paintings of Shrek, it’ll generate six pictures of Shrek as if they’d been drawn by a prehistoric artist.
It’s staggering that an algorithm can do this. Each set of images takes less than a minute to generate. Not all of the images will look pleasing to the eye, nor do they necessarily reflect what you had in mind. But, even with the need to sift through many outputs or try different text prompts, there’s no other existing way to pump
out so many great results so quickly – not even by hiring an artist. And, sometimes, the unexpected results are the best.
In principle, anyone with enough resources and expertise can make a system like this. Google Research recently announced an impressive, similar text-to-image system, and one independent developer is publicly developing their own version that anyone can try right now on the web, although it’s not yet as good as DALL-E or Google’s system.
It’s easy to imagine these tools transforming the way people make images and communicate, whether via memes, greeting cards, advertising – and, yes, art.
Where’s the art in that?
I had a moment early on while using DALL-E 2 to generate different kinds of paintings, in all different styles – like “Odilon Redon painting of Seattle” – when it hit me that this was better than any painting algorithm I’ve ever developed. Then I realized that it is, in a way, a better painter than I am.
In fact, no human can do what DALL-E 2 does: create such a high-quality, varied range of images in mere seconds. If someone told you that a person made all these images, of course you’d say they were creative.
But this does not make DALL-E 2 an artist. Even though it sometimes feels like magic, under the hood it is still a computer algorithm, rigidly following instructions from the algorithm’s authors at OpenAI.
If these images succeed as art, they are products of how the algorithm was designed, the images it was trained on, and – most importantly – how artists use it.
You might be inclined to say there’s little artistic merit in an image produced by a few keystrokes. But in my view, this line of thinking echoes the classic take that photography cannot be art because a machine did all the work. Today the human authorship and craft involved in artistic photography are recognized, and critics understand that the best photography involves much more than just pushing a button.
Even so, we often discuss works of art as if they directly came from the artist’s intent. The artist intended to show a thing, or express an emotion, and so they made this image. DALL-E 2 does seem to shortcut this process entirely: you have an idea and type it in, and you’re done.
But when I paint the old-fashioned way, I’ve found that my paintings come from the exploratory process, not just from executing my initial goals. And this is true for many artists.
Take Paul McCartney, who came up with the track “Get Back” during a jam session. He didn’t start with a plan for the song; he just started fiddling and experimenting and the band developed it from there.
Picasso described his process similarly: “I don’t know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colors I am going to use … Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space.”
In my own explorations with DALL-E 2, one idea would lead to another which led to another, and eventually I’d find myself in a completely unexpected, magical new terrain, very far from where I’d started. drawings I make on my iPad.
Indeed some artists, like Ryan Murdoch, have advocated for prompt-based image-making to be recognized as art. He points to the experienced AI artist Helena Sarin as an example.
“When I look at most stuff from Midjourney” – another popular text-to-image system – “a lot of it will be interesting or fun,” Murdoch told me in an interview. “But with [Sarin’s] work, there’s a through line. It’s easy to see that she has put a lot of thought into it, and has worked at the craft, because the output is more visually appealing and interesting, and follows her style in a continuous way.”
Working with DALL-E 2, or any of the new text-to-image systems, means learning its quirks and developing strategies for avoiding common pitfalls. It’s also important to know about its potential harms, such as its reliance on stereotypes, and potential uses for disinformation. Using DALL-E 2, you’ll also discover surprising correlations, like the way everything becomes oldtimey when you use an old painter, filmmaker or photographer’s style.
When I have something very specific I want to make, DALL-E 2 often can’t do it. The results would require a lot of difficult manual editing afterward. It’s when my goals are vague that the process is most delightful, offering up surprises that lead to new ideas that themselves lead to more ideas and so on.
Prompting as art
I would argue that the art, in using a system like DALL-E 2, comes not just from the final text prompt, but in the entire creative process that led to that prompt. Different artists will follow different processes and end up with different results that reflect their own approaches, skills and obsessions.
I began to see my experiments as a set of series, each a consistent dive into a single theme, rather than a set of independent wacky images.
Ideas for these images and series came from all around, often linked by a set of stepping stones. At one point, while making images based on contemporary artists’ work, I wanted to generate an image of site-specific installation art in the style of the contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. After trying a few unsatisfactory locations, I hit on the idea of placing it in La Mezquita, a former mosque and church in Córdoba, Spain. I sent the picture to an architect colleague, Manuel Ladrón de Guevara, who is from Córdoba, and we began riffing on other architectural ideas together.
This became a series on imaginary new buildings in different architects’ styles.
So I’ve started to consider what I do with DALL-E 2 to be both a form of exploration as well as a form of art, even if it’s often amateur art like the
Crafting new realities
These text-to-image systems can help users imagine new possibilities as well. Artist-activist Danielle Baskin told me that she always works “to show alternative realities by ‘real’ example: either by setting scenarios up in the physical world or doing meticulous work in Photoshop.”
In fact, DALL-E 2, however, “is an amazing shortcut because it’s so good at realism. And that’s key to helping Many of these artworks have distinctive qualities that almost look like real images, but with odd distortions of space. others bring possible futures to life – whether its satire, dreams or beauty.” She has used it to imagine an alternative transportation system and plumbing that transports noodles instead of water, both of which reflect her artist-provocateur sensibility. Similarly, artist Mario Klingemann’s architectural renderings with the tents of homeless people could be taken as a rejoinder to my architectural renderings of fancy dream homes. It’s too early to judge the significance of this art form. I keep thinking of a phrase from the excellent book “Art in the After-Culture” – “The dominant AI aesthetic is novelty.” Surely this would be true, to some extent, for any new technology used for art. The first films by the Lumière brothers in 1890s were novelties, not cinematic masterpieces; it amazed people to see images moving at all. AI art software develops so quickly that there’s continual technical and artistic novelty. It seems as if, each year, there’s an opportunity to explore an exciting new technology – each more powerful than the last, and each seemingly poised to transform art and society.
