Archive for September, 2010
Video Game Players Make Faster Real Life Decisions
Kids, pay attention, here’s some ammo to fire back at your parents when they tell you that you spend too much time playing video games, via Reuters:
Violent video games like “Call of Duty” can help trigger-happy players make decisions faster in real life, according to a study released on Wednesday.
Researchers from New York’s University of Rochester found that first-person shooter games produced a heightened sensitivity and led to more efficient use of sensory evidence.
“These benefits of video games stem only from action games, which almost always means shooter games, where you go through a maze and you don’t know when a villain will appear,” researcher Daphne Bavelier said in a statement.
“It’s not exactly what you’d think of as mind enhancing. Strategy or role-playing games don’t have the same effect.”
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, involved testing 26 people aged 18 to 25, none of whom had played shooting…
Staying Online During Sex
And that’s just one of the Internet addictions revealed in a new study, via AFP:
Computer security firm PC Tools late Wednesday released a study showing that nearly a quarter of US residents think it is fine to be “plugged in” to the Internet during sex.
The survey conducted by Harris Interactive also showed that 29 percent of people in the country believe it is not a problem to be connected online during a wedding and the percentage climbed to 41 percent for family dinners.
When it came to protection from computer viruses or other Internet-transmitted woes, people said they would rather change a diaper, be stuck in traffic, visit a dentist or get a colonoscopy than clean machines…
Artist Runs Into Tornados
Francis Alÿs runs straight into a tornado in the name of art. The strange thing is, this wasn’t the first time Alÿs willingly put himself in danger. Alÿs’ video installation is coming to New York’s Museum of Modern Art next year. You can view a clip of the video here. Bloomberg reports:
A man walks into a tornado with a video camera. As the killer winds whip around him and dirt gets in his lungs, he records the experience for posterity.
The man is 50-year-old Francis Alys, a Belgian-born artist. He has plunged into tornadoes in the Mexican countryside several times over 10 years, all in the name of art.
The resulting video work “Tornado” (2000-10) is a highlight of his one-man show at London’s Tate Modern (through Sept. 5), which is at New York’s Museum of Modern Art next year.
An architect by training, Alys went to Mexico in 1986 to rebuild quake-hit areas and never left.…
Relentless Views of The Pope And His Opinions
In a letter to the Guardian, harsh words were written towards the pope’s visit to the country. Disagreeing with his religious and political actions, and lack of actions, the pope is presented in an interesting depiction from the eyes of these English citizens. From The Guardian:
We, the undersigned, share the view that Pope Ratzinger should not be given the honour of a state visit to this country. We believe that the pope, as a citizen of Europe and the leader of a religion with many adherents in the UK, is of course free to enter and tour our country. However, as well as a religious leader, the pope is a head of state, and the state and organisation of which he is head has been responsible for:
Opposing the distribution of condoms and so increasing large families in poor countries and the spread of Aids.
Promoting segregated education.
Denying abortion to even the most…
Vampire Books Are Changing Teen Minds
We are what we read? From Fox News:
It’s a potentially sucky situation. The vampire craze in teen literature – exemplified by the “Twilight” book series – could be affecting the dynamic workings of the teenage brain in ways scientists don’t yet understand.
“We don’t know exactly how literature affects the brain, but we know that it does,” said Maria Nikolajeva, a Cambridge University professor of literature. “Some new findings have identified spots in the brain that respond to literature and art.”
Scientists, authors and educators met in Cambridge, England, Sept. 3-5 for a conference organized by Nikolajeva to discuss how young-adult books and movies affect teenagers’ minds.
“For young people, everything is so strange, and you cannot really say why you react to things – it’s a difficult period to be a human being,”…
A History Of The Iraq War, Through Wikipedia Edits
Here’s how you write history in the contentious twenty-first century. Every edit made to the Wikipedia page The Iraq War, published as a bound, multi-volume set. Via booktwo:
This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.
It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.
This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.
And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief…
Religious Search Engines Provide A Blasphemy-Free Internet
A number of websites have sprung up that provide the pious with a way to surf the internet without the threat of un-biblical content. Search for “Obama” on the Christian search engine SeekFind, for instance, and rather than a standard biography, the first result is a page discussing the Antichrist. NPR reports:
In a world where Google has put every bit of information at our fingertips, some people are now demanding less information when they surf the Internet.
Some Jews, Muslims and Christians are abandoning Yahoo and Google and turning to search engines with results that meet their religious standards.
Shea Houdmann runs SeekFind, a Colorado Springs-based Christian search engine that only returns results from websites that are consistent with the Bible. He says SeekFind is designed “to promote what we believe to be biblical truth” and excludes sites that don’t meet that standard.
Houdmann says a search on his site would not turn up…
Pentagon Tries To Stop Book By Buying All Copies
Thanks to Isaac Hils for this. As publishers, this story definitely appeals to us at disinformation: Authors with books the Pentagon wants to stop, take note! From the Guardian:
It’s every author’s dream – to write a book that’s so sensationally popular it’s impossible to find a copy in the shops, even as it keeps climbing up the bestseller lists.
And so it is for Anthony Shaffer, thanks to the Pentagon’s desire to buy up all 10,000 copies of the first printing of his new book, Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan — and The Path to Victory. And then pulp them.
The US defence department is scrambling to dispose of what threatens to be a highly embarrassing expose by the former intelligence officer of secret operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and of how the US military top brass missed the opportunity to win the war against the Taliban.
The department of defence is in talks with St Martin’s Press to purchase the entire first print run on the grounds of national security…
Underage Sex For Sale On The Internet
Sickening stuff, from CNN:
Behind every adult service ad on the internet is a story.
Sometimes it’s a story of a grown woman who has chosen prostitution as a path to a better life. More often, it’s a story of a woman being forced to sell her body by a pimp.
And then there are the children, and the mothers that miss them.
“They told me to look on Craigslist and it almost blew my mind,” the mother of one missing 12-year-old told CNN. “She was there with a wig on. She was there in a purple negligee…
Insects: The Hot New Food?
Perhaps it’s good practice for a 2012 Apocalypse-type scenario, but it’s hard to believe that eating bugs will really catch on more than as a shock tactic. Sumathi Reddy reports for the Wall Street Journal:
He’s making “chocolate chirp cookies”—with crickets inside—for a coming art festival. He puts crickets in his tacos when he watches football. And his freezer is full of bags of various insects, including dry-roasted crickets from Thailand, wax- and silkworms, and domestic crickets he raised at home, fattened up on oatmeal and orange rinds.
“Hearing them chirp all night long is really kind of beautiful,” said Mr. Dennis on a recent evening as he prepared a bug dinner. “But then you’ve got to eat them, of course.”…
France Bans Burqas
I suppose it’s somewhat comforting to know that the United States is not the only country with xenophobic pastors and politicians who want to burn Korans, or in the case of France, ban women from wearing burqas (those head-veils) in public — but it’s not exactly going to make life any easier for the French, who have already seen a threat to the Eiffel Tower as a result!
Jon Stewart is the First “Journalist” To Hold Tony Blair Accountable for His Iraq War Position (Video)
Watch the whole thing online (wasn’t aired on TV) and decide. Just because he has a new book out Stewart and The Daily Show are doing the job the American mainstream media should be doing:
Is American Influence Making the Internet Prudish?
Good question. Jane Fae Ozimek writes in the Register:
Is US dominance of the internet — and particularly of the social networking space — leading to the export of US prudery across the globe? Or is the growing debate on international censorship a little more complicated?
As Becky Dwyer, a US citizen and, as member of CAAN Scotland, a campaigner for less censorship in the UK put it: “Isn’t this more about American Corporations forcing conformity upon private individuals rather than ‘American’ values?”
First off, examples of US social networking sites coming down hard on subscribers who fail to toe the line set by Ts & Cs are widespread. Let’s start with global social networking site, Facebook. Readers will by now be more than familiar with its policy when it comes to boobs: namely that above-waist nakedness, if it appears to be in the least bit sexualised, is a definite no-no…
Anti-Masturbation Candidate Christine O’Donnell Wins Republican Senate Primary in Delaware
Oh man, Joe Biden must be loving that anti-masturbation/Tea Party-backed candidate Christine O’Donnell is up for his old Senate seat:
My name is Christine O’Donnell. I am the President and Founder of The S.A.L.T. The S.A.L.T. stands for “The Savior’s Alliance For Lifting The Truth.” We choose sexual purity in our lives. We have God-given sexual desires and we need to understand them and preserve them to be used in God’s appropriate context. Our members are committed to be role models, committed to be the salt of the earth … We need to address sexuality with young people and masturbation is part of sexuality but it is important to discuss this from a moral point of view … The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can’t masturbate without lust.
Holy cow as the Washington Post reports. For more on O’Donnell check out this post from Irin Carmon on Jezebel and the mashup video below:
Kids On Dex
If you’re from the UK you’ve probably experienced the powerful drugs in over-the-counter cough medicines like codeine. In the US abuse of cough medicine hasn’t been quite the same, but nevertheless it looks like the government will make these drugs prescription only, as reported by CNN:
Last year, more than 8,000 people, mostly teens, were treated at emergency rooms because they abused over-the-counter cough suppressants, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Now in an effort to control these substances, the FDA is considering whether to make medicines like Nyquil, Robitussin and Tylenol Cold tablets, prescription drugs.
An FDA advisory committee, which is meeting today…
Facebook’s Asocial Mark Zuckerberg
Two weeks before the theatrical release of The Social Network, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gets an in-depth interview/profile in the New Yorker. “Zuck” comes across as enigmatic, unfeeling, and awkward — an odd person to be reshaping the nature of social interaction and connection on a global scale:
The typical complaint about Zuckerberg is that he’s “a robot.” One of his closest friends told me, “He’s been overprogrammed.” Indeed, he sometimes talks like an Instant Message—brusque, flat as a dial tone—and he can come off as flip and condescending, as if he always knew something that you didn’t.
Despite his goal of global openness, however, Zuckerberg remains a wary and private person. He doesn’t like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn’t seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him.
High Fructose Corn Syrup Changes Name To ‘Corn Sugar’
Who are they kidding? It’s not sugar and it’s not natural! From Fast Company’s Co.Design:
Cast as an evil, oozing harbinger of obesity and diabetes, sales of high fructose corn syrup have seen a downward spiral as companies swap the over-processed sweetener for healthier-sounding ingredients. So what’s the solution for the industry, according to the Corn Refiners Association? Change the name. To “corn sugar.” And presto! What was once a scary sounding goo becomes more natural-sounding, just as sweet and pure as cane sugar.
A new Web site and campaign rebranding HFCS as the innocuous term was launched today in the hopes that they will get FDA approval to change the name on food labeling. Over at CornSugar.com, ads and imagery of a maze mowed through corn fields symbolizes the path of misdirected customers confused by current labeling systems, as quotes from dietitians float helpfully above. (The Corn Refiners Association also own Corn.org and the icky-sounding SweetSurprise.com.)
[A brand-new ad, touting the subtle rebranding]
“This seems to be a last-ditch attempt to…
U.S Government Clamps Down On Natural Remedies
Arabic herbal medicine book c. 1334
You knew it was coming — $5 Billion of sales that Big Pharma would like for itself is surely enough to get the U.S. Federal government and its friends in the mainstream media to persuade the public that plant medicines don’t work and are dangerous, despite many centuries of effective use by peoples around the world. To wit, this article from the Wall Street Journal:
Elderberry extract and acai to boost the immune system. Black cohosh to lessen the discomforts of menopause. Soy capsules to prevent bone loss and prostate cancer.
Many botanical supplements—made from the seeds, bark, leaves, flowers and stems of a wide range of plants—have been widely used as folk remedies for centuries. Americans have been consuming growing quantities of the supplements in hopes of warding off disease and easing symptoms of various conditions. But there is scant scientific evidence to support their health…
God Has Poor Penmanship: ‘CAT’ Written in This Cat’s Fur
I guess God/Jesus was getting tired of throwing all the Jesus images all over the place. I like this, it means the Almighty has a sense of humor, but he really does have terrible penmanship. Via the Daily Mail:
All the clues are there: the whiskers, the purring, the miaowing and even the toy mouse under her front paws.
But just in case you were in any doubt as to what sort of animal Polly is, the ten-week-old tabby is happy to help out, thanks to her unusual markings, which spell out the word ‘cat’ on her left flank.
Garry Marsh and wife Joan, both 57, adopted Polly from a local cat rescue centre last weekend. But it was only as they admired their new pet’s colouring three days later that they noticed the marks.
Mr Marsh, a teacher, said: ‘We were commenting on how symmetrical her tabby patterns seemed when Joan suddenly…
