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As intellectual, compelling, and truthful Katie Couric’s opinions on the media representation of women are, the film would have been so much more balanced if they, for instance, gave the young high school students at the opening of the film as much face-time as they did their more privileged interviewees. The film ends up painting a very limited picture of what women are or should be, and this juxtaposed with its ideology of “you can’t be what you can’t see” raises a huge problem. The people we don’t see in Miss Representation are women of less privilege, women with disabilities, and so on; the film ends up obscuring the ways that women are different other than just existing as a collective sisterhood.
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The staggering statistics about how much of the media industry is owned and controlled by men and how lacking the industry is in gender equality is equally shocking.
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the thing that unsettles me most about Miss Representation is its glaring lack of sufficient representation for women of color, women with disabilities, and women of less privilege than the well-to-do upper-middle class CEOs, politicians, and celebrities that we see on screen. As professors and students alike pointed out in the panel discussion after the film, one can’t help but wonder if this approach is entirely too self-defeating. While the film’s aim is to point out the misrepresentation of women in the media, does it misrepresent women in the process of doing so?
I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good writer than being a good speaker.
Having good ideas is most of writing well. If you know what you're talking about, you can say it in the plainest words and you'll be perceived as having a good style. With speaking it's the opposite: having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.
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As you decrease the intelligence of the audience, being a good speaker is increasingly a matter of being a good bullshitter. That's true in writing too of course, but the descent is steeper with talks. Any given person is dumber as a member of an audience than as a reader. Just as a speaker ad libbing can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can only spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to hear it. Plus people in an audience are always affected by the reactions of those around them, and the reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are disproportionately the more brutish sort, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. Every audience is an incipient mob, and a good speaker uses that. Part of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at that conference was that everyone else did.
technology, despite its benefits, can add new pitfalls to an already grueling process. “Social media is going to make it even more difficult to make long-term investments” in cities, Mr. Bloomberg said.
“We are basically having a referendum on every single thing that we do every day,” he said. “And it’s very hard for people to stand up to that and say, ‘No, no, this is what we’re going to do,’ when there’s constant criticism, and an election process that you have to look forward to and face periodically.”
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long-term urban planning “requires leadership, and standing up, and saying, ‘You know, you elected me, this is what we’re going to do,’ and not take a referendum on every single thing.”
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the mayor had been speaking narrowly about how social media can shift the public discourse away from long-term thinking.
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What began as something spontaneous and unique has today become a parody of itself. What was exceptional and emergent in the realm of ideas has been bottled, packaged, and sold back to us over and over again. The whole TED vibe has come to resemble a sales pitch.
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In most TED venues, the stage on which the speakers perform (its hard to resist that verb in relation to TED talks) looks more like a TV set than a lecture hall. The videos are also very well produced, with lots of quirky PowerPoint and a big role for the audience, who you hear in the background and see in cutaways. It's all designed to enrich the viewing experience, and it has made TED into an online video sensation.
a cursory look at the “standard operating procedure” (SOP) laid down by the powers on high for our traditional media could well explain MHA’s “plan” to make the announcements on 25 January. The SOP would have required every reporter to check facts with the government with the understanding that the story cannot run until the government has replied. This is evidenced by the curious style of newspaper reports in Singapore: the government’s reply comes first before the substance of the story is reported in subsequent paragraphs. For decades, reporting any story without the government’s stand incorporated within it would constitute “unbalanced” reporting, a cardinal sin according to the high priests of Singapore. My guess is that Wanbao would probably have tried to check facts with MHA, and MHA must have stalled for time. In other words, MHA would have known for days, (weeks?) that the news was likely to break.
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I argued that at the technocratic level, the government is trying to be more effective and responsive in meeting housing, transport and similar bread-and-butter concerns. However at the paradigmatic level, they are still complacent. They still believe that the old ideology of craving foreign investment, throwing pieces of gold at top talent, keeping less-than-top talent as cheap as possible, going for broke over GDP growth, going as fast as they can on immigration, remain the best ideas there are. If there is voter resistance, it is the voter who is wrong, not the PAP, though small concessions and dollops of public relations may be used to bridge the gap.
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The third tier (which I called Group C in the earlier article) comprises the issues the party considers of existential importance. On these, they will resist as hard as they can. They are acutely aware that they risk losing power altogether if they let go of these old habits. Control of media, and the associated control of the national agenda are among them.
Scary climate stories rely on a simple narrative: more CO2 means more environmental damage and death – and the only way to address it is to cut carbon emissions. While this makes for a catchy political message, it has the distinct disadvantage of being wrong.
Global warming will cause certain phenomena, such as heat waves and hurricane wind speeds, to become more extreme, while others, including cold waves and hurricane frequency, will become less so. And, in some cases, such as increasing precipitation, global warming will have both positive and negative effects.
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Considerable evidence does suggest that global warming causes increases in rain, especially heavy rain. That has led many observers to blame global warming for devastating floods in Pakistan, Australia, and Thailand in recent years. But the IPCC tells a different story: the evidence cannot even reliably indicate whether increased precipitation has, in fact, affected the floods’ magnitude and frequency (in UN-speak, “low confidence at the global scale regarding even the sign of these changes”).
That may sound counter-intuitive. But much more important changes have taken place: in particular, construction of dams and large settlements on floodplains has left rivers nowhere to flood naturally. If we want to help potential flood victims, the evidence clearly shows that we should restore floodplains.
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Increased precipitation also has positive consequences – most significantly, more fresh water for a thirsty world. Today, about two billion people are water-stressed, meaning that they make do on less than 1,700 cubic meters (60,035 cubic feet) per year. Population growth alone suggests that this number could increase to about three billion towards the end of the century. But more precipitation from global warming will most likely bring the actual number down to about 1.7 billion.
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Over the course of my graduate degree, I slowly became more and more aware of the bad information in the media about science, ultimately leading to my interest in the skeptical movement. When I decided to a talk at Skepticamp Winnipeg 2011, I realized that I needed to address the way science exists in the public eye and how its relationship to media has changed over the years. There’s a little bit of history, a little bit of humour, and an honest assessment of where science needs to go if it’s going to continue to have a relationship with the public audience. If you want to see what’s written on the slides, I recommend going full screen in HD.
The growing use of videos, simulations, and sophisticated graphics (DNA analysis included) as a basis for legal judgments exposes the vicissitudes of justice in the digital age. Adapting to these changes with our justice systems’ credibility intact will require broad cultivation of a more refined capacity for critical visual judgment.
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Less discussed than the suspect DNA evidence is whether a graphic digital animation also contributed to Knox’s conviction. In his closing argument at trial, Perugian prosecutor Giuliano Mignini played a computer-generated simulation that showed an avatar-Amanda killing an avatar-Meredith. It ended with a gory crime-scene photo of Kercher’s body. The animation now seems to have been a mere fantasy, an animated version of the prosecution’s theory featuring Amanda Knox as a sex-crazed femme fatale, “Foxy Knoxy,” as the British tabloids called her, a “she-devil,” as many European journalists wrote, appropriating the prosecutor’s phrase.
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“In the end, it was the trial of a different culture, a clash of cultures more than a legal case,” Zucconi argued. “The same girl whom prosecutors depicted as a she-devil starved for sex and orgies was, in inverse proportion, perceived in American public opinion as a chaste diva who fell into a hornets’ nest of inept, evil men.”
But this view assumes that law and culture are two separate worlds. They aren’t. Effective prosecutors and defense lawyers mine the popular imagination for well-known characters (“she-devil,” “femme fatale”) and stock scripts (“sex game gone wrong”) to help frame their story in court. And, increasingly, their advocacy begins well before the courtroom doors open.
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UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.
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They used three different subjects for the experiments—incidentally, they were part of the research team because it requires being inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system for hours at a time. The subjects were exposed to two different groups of Hollywood movie trailers as the fMRI system recorded the brain's blood flow through their brains' visual cortex.
The readings were fed into a computer program in which they were divided into three-dimensional pixels units called voxels (volumetric pixels). This process effectively decodes the brain signals generated by moving pictures, connecting the shape and motion information from the movies to specific brain actions. As the sessions progressed, the computer learned more and more about how the visual activity presented on the screen corresponded to the brain activity.
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After recording this information, another group of clips was used to reconstruct the videos shown to the subjects. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie. Although the resulting video is low resolution and blurry, it clearly matched the actual clips watched by the subjects.
By all accounts the HGP was a huge success. But 8 years after the completion of the first human genome map there is the vague sense in the public that the promise has not been fulfilled. The public was promised that the HGP would allow us to identify genes associated with diseases, and then craft cures based upon that knowledge. So where are all the genetic cures we were promised?
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What is really going on is that even a big-picture successful science project like the HGP can be overhyped by the press. By mapping the human genome scientists were given a powerful tool with which to investigate disease. It still takes, however, a tremendous amount of research to translate that tool into specific knowledge about an individual disease, and then further translate that specific knowledge into a proven treatment. The pipeline for translating the basic knowledge of the HGP into an actual treatment is about 15-20 years optimistically (and that is after a specific disease is pursued genetically.
For environmentalists trying to use entertainment to shape broad public attitudes and behaviors, nothing could be more important than understanding how to reach these hard-to-get people. Something that will speak to them, something that will change their minds, and most importantly, something that will incite them to action. A documentary might not be that something.
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Environmental films tend to “draw a pretty pre-disposed audience,” said Susi Moser, a fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University and climate change communications specialist. A 2010 study on The Age of Stupid (a hybrid documentary, drama, and animation on climate change) found that most filmgoers were already quite concerned about climate change, and motivated to mitigate it, even before seeing the film. For audiences that are already devoted to an environmental cause, these films merely confirm their pre-existing beliefs.
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Documentary film director Louie Psihoyos anticipated this problem when he directed The Cove, a 2009 Oscar-winning documentary about mass dolphin hunting in Japan. His solution was to model the film after a popular Hollywood blockbuster.
“We wanted to do a ‘making-of’ style film that felt like Ocean’s Eleven,” he said. “That was a way in — to tell a dark story in a popular way.”
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It all unraveled when The Guardian reported that the tabloid had hacked into the voicemail of missing 13-year-old Milly Dowler, apparently in the hope of obtaining some private expressions of family members’ grief or desperation that it could splash on its front page. When the girl’s murdered body was found six months later, the family and the police thought she might still be alive, because The News of the World’s operatives were deleting messages when her phone’s mailbox became full. (According to Scotland Yard, Murdoch hacks reportedly bribed mid-level police officers to supply information as well.)
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A cover-up ensued. James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and Chairman and Chief Executive of News Corporation’s European and Asian operations, authorized a secret payment of £1 million ($1.6 million) to buy the silence of hacking victims. Millions of in-house emails reportedly have been destroyed. Still, it seems safe to say that the peculiarly repellant inhumanity of the original deeds will remain more shocking than the details of this or any other cover-up.
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While many industrial veterans here put the blame solely on the “bo chap” attitudes of the students, I wish to point out the fact that those industrial veterans in the animation industry are just too afraid to admit that it was the fault of the tertiary education systems. It is true that while some students have an attitude problem, the lecturers in the polytechnics and universities have their fair share of the blame too. I also wish to speak up for students who have the passion for the industry but they are not shown the right path. Otherwise how do you explain that it took my mentor 2 years and only half the price of the poly fees to teach me all that I needed to know to find a job in the CG industry?
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What is the truth regarding our local Animation industry, you ask? The truth is… our local industry… is dying. Dying from foreign competition from giants. Dying because our locals are not supportive of our native talents. Dying before we make an animation that is truly made in Singapore.
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our education system has failed its citizens to make sure that we are up to the mark for the various requirements of the job market in whichever industry. This made us much more vulnerable to the influx of foreign animators, who can accept lower pay and produce higher quality work than the locals; effectively starving out the local animators and animation companies.
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The Internet can't stop watching videos of the horrific earthquake and its aftermath. Why are we so fascinated?
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Why is there such an appetite for such terrible images? There is, after all, very little satisfaction to be gained in watching a wall of water cut a swath across the coastland.
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There may be a fair portion of the population that can't separate a truly ruinous tragedy from the kind of explosive spectacle you'd normally pay $11 a ticket for
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SINGAPORE (CBSBN) - The Singaporean authorities have announced a ban on April fool's jokes in the media.
In a memorandum circulated to television broadcasting stations, radio stations, and newspaper publications by the Media Development Authority (MDA), the authorities warned media outlets against running fake stories for the purposes of entertainment.
Internet-based news websites and the growing popularity of social media have broken the mainstream media's monopoly on news - though not completely. Singapore's PAP-led government was one of the first in the world to devise content regulations for the Internet, issuing restrictions on topics it deemed as sensitive as early as 1996.
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Internet-based news websites and the growing popularity of social media have broken the mainstream media's monopoly on news - though not completely. Singapore's PAP-led government was one of the first in the world to devise content regulations for the Internet, issuing restrictions on topics it deemed as sensitive as early as 1996.
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While political parties are broadly allowed to use the Internet to campaign, they were previously prohibited from employing some of the medium's most powerful features, including live audio and video streaming and so-called "viral marketing". Websites not belonging to political parties or candidates but registered as political sites have been banned from activities that could be considered online electioneering.
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t rather than being forced to wait for parliament to meet to air their dissent, now opposition parties are able to post pre-emptively their criticisms online, shifting the time and space of Singapore's political debate.
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rather than being forced to wait for parliament to meet to air their dissent, now opposition parties are able to post pre-emptively their criticisms online, shifting the time and space of Singapore's political debate
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Singapore's People's Action Party (PAP)-dominated politics are increasingly being contested online and over social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Pushed by the perceived pro-PAP bias of the mainstream media, Singapore's opposition parties are using various new media to communicate with voters and express dissenting views. Alternative news websites, including The Online Citizen and Temasek Review, have won strong followings by presenting more opposition views in their news mix.
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the media and pundits stepped on the "fear creation accelerator" focussing on the possibility of disastrous outcomes while ignoring possible solutions and options.
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there is a tendency to conclude that govts with the best expert advice have made this decision because there is a real danger of something sinister happening. But remember govts are also under pressure to act because they are made up of politicians - also they may be making precautionary moves because they have little to lose and have to be seen as being pro-active. How real is the danger of harmful radiation reaching Tokyo and should you leave if you're in Tokyo? There were many people doing a "wait and see" before Wednesday but once the US & UK govt called for a pull-out, the fear factor rose several notches and if you're a Japanese in Tokyo watching all the foreigners "abandoning" your city, you start to feel some anxiety and later panic. One EU official used the word "apocalypse"[Link] to describe the situation in Japan and the fear index hit the roof....then a whole herd of experts came out to paint more dire scenarios saying the Japanese have lost all control of the nuclear plants. All this lead the public to think that calamity is the most likely outcome of the unfolding saga and if make a decision from all this, you will just run for the exits if you're in Tokyo. All this is happening while the Japanese govt is trying to calm the people and prevent a pandemonium after the triple disaster hit the country. In China, people have emptied the supermarket shelves of iodized salt because of media reports that the consumption of iodine can block radioactive iodine from being absorbed by thyroid glands causing thyroid cancer. There are also reports of people getting ill after ingesting iodine pills out of fear of radiation.
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the media and pundits stepped on the "fear creation accelerator" focussing on the possibility of disastrous outcomes while ignoring possible solutions and options.
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