Despite once describing the US as “the only remaining primitive society”, Baudrillard was a tireless enthusiast for America. “Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the US is a paradise,” he wrote. “Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.” Beautiful

Court blocks access to YouTube in Turkey A court in Turkey on Wednesday ordered blockage of all access to YouTube, the popular video-sharing Web site, over a video deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The ban followed a week of what the media in Turkey dubbed a “virtual war” of videos between Greeks and Turks on YouTube and came as governments around the world — including France — grappled with the freewheeling content now readily posted on the Internet. … YouTube expressed dismay over the move, adding that the offending video had been removed and that the company was working with the government to resolve the situation. “We are disappointed that YouTube has been blocked in Turkey,” the company said in a statement. “While technology can bring great opportunity and access to information globally, it can also present new and unique cultural challenges.” … YouTube faced a court-ordered national ban in Brazil for several days in January after footage of a model cavorting in the sea with her lover kept reappearing on the site. Separately, activists in France this week warned that a recent law against posting video of violent acts would stifle free expression. The French law, which was intended to criminalize “happy slapping” — acts of violence committed for posting on the Internet — could also criminalize the recording of police brutality, activists said. “I don’t think the French government intended to attack user-generated content, but that is the effect,” said Julien Pain, a spokesman for the press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders. “If someone films a policeman wrestling someone to the ground, that can be considered a criminal act.” While the French law has provisions to protect professional journalists or those who record violence to turn it over to the authorities, passersby […]

I’m posting them here to flag them for eventual posting on my class blog. We just started the technology unit of the course, but we wont get to cyborgs for another few weeks. Also, this suit, which I’ve posted about before, gives a pretty good demonstration. Unfortunately, they disabled embedding. But click the link anyway: HAL

Yes, I’m making up for my lackluster posting these last few months. The confrontation between Dexter and the bot on the Segway is hilarious.

This is This By Eric Joyner

If you haven’t been paying attention, Frontline is doing a four-part documentary about the challenges facing the news media. Like all Frontline programs, it is excellent. The first three parts have already aired, and you can watch them online: Frontline – News War “The battle between the White House and the national media is the battle over who controls the national agenda,” says commentator Patrick Buchanan. Mark McKinnon, former media adviser to President George W. Bush, agrees: “The Washington press corps for years thought that unless you talked to The New York Times and CBS, that you weren’t talking to the American public. Well, that’s just not the case anymore.” McKinnon feels that it is a White House prerogative to choose its own communications strategy: “Presidents … ought to determine who they want to talk to and when they want to talk to them,” he says. But William Safire, author and former New York Times political columnist, fears that hostilities between the administration and the press could threaten the media’s ability to hold government accountable. “The great check and balance that was built into the Constitution is under challenge,” he says. “You’ve got to have a relationship between the government and the press that’s adversarial, but not an enemy.” Drawing on more than 80 interviews with key figures in the print, broadcast and electronic media, and with unequaled, behind-the-scenes access to some of today’s most important news organizations, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman examines the challenges facing the mainstream news media, and the media’s reaction, in “News War,” a special four-part series. The first two parts involve the relationship between government and the media, and discuss the Plame affair and other issues in the run up to war. The third part, which I am currently watching, discusses the way newspapers and […]

The New York Times recently ran an article about flaming on the internet, and tied it to neurophysiological research dealing with online behavior. The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming. This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track. … Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say. True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way. The article concludes with a proposed solution that looks about 20 […]

Excellent article from NYMag: Kids, the Internet, and the biggest generation gap since Rock and Roll And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not. So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it. Shirky describes this generational shift in terms of pidgin versus Creole. “Do you know that distinction? Pidgin is what gets spoken when people patch things together from different languages, so it serves well enough to communicate. But Creole is what the children speak, the children of pidgin speakers. They impose rules and structure, which makes the Creole language completely coherent and expressive, on par with any language. What we are witnessing is the Creolization of media.” That’s […]

Acquired by an unintentional email mishap: The Social-Cue Reader (NYT) The Emotional-Social Intelligence Prosthesis, developed by Rana el Kaliouby and Rosalind Picard, consists of a small camera mounted on a cap or glasses that monitors a conversation partner’s facial expressions and feeds the data into a hand-held computer. Software tracks the movement of facial features and classifies them using a coding system developed by the psychologist Paul Ekman, which is then correlated with a second taxonomy of emotional states created by the Cambridge autism researcher (and Ali G cousin) Simon Baron-Cohen. Almost instantaneously, the computer crunches each raised eyebrow and pucker of the lips, giving a whispered verdict about how the person is feeling. (Another version of the device, meant to be used separately, points back at users, allowing them to better understand — and perhaps modify — the face they present to the world.)