11/28/2009

Neil Postman in The Daily Show

It's not that I don't like Rob Corddry and his ridiculously ridiculous ideas that make us laugh hard. But I really wished they payed more attention to my favorite scholar, Professor Neil Postman, author of the book Technopoly. His ideas are great warning and are worth spreading.

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I am glad that they showed both sides, but I'd still be happier if Jon Stewart would have done that interview. Well, there are other interviews with Neil Postman out there...




8/06/2009

Chipms or Orangutanes?

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"When humans lost all these hair, did we retain a single stripe of the hair on the top of the head?"

7/09/2009

US media crazy about Twitter

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"This new technology sounds adorable! Here is how Twitter works: I have no f***ing idea!" As Samantha Bee says: "Young people love it, according to reports about young people made by middle-aged people."

"Because we're rotting corpses grabbing for any glimmer of relevance,” eplains Sam why all the politics and media truckle towards young people with facebooks, tweets and similar gimick.

5/31/2009

Milgram experiment and Asch's experiment

One of the most famous psychological experiments with, for me, very disturbing results and implications. In Milgram experiment, participants were instructed to ask other participants series of questions. If "student" reply was wrong, they were instructed to administer an electric shock. This experiment was to test how many people are willing to knowingly push a switch causing someone a pain or even endanger their life - simply because an authority told them to.


I really recommend to read the full Wikipedia article about this experiment, this is just a brief description.

Of course, no real danger is present, but participants do not know that. We must assume that the behaviour they show is similar to how they would react in real life. And the thought is quite scary.

When Milgram asked his coleagues, experienced psychologists, how many percent of participants will administer the lethal shock (450 V), they estimated noone would ever do that. In reality, more than 60 % of participant did. Two thirds of people were knowingly causing a threat of death just because an unknown authority told them so.

Many variants of this experiment in 1961 and following years showed that this was not a random behavior, but rather significant phenomenon - people are tought since their childhood to follow authorities' orders, even if they seem strange. They don't feel like decision-making people then, but rather they think of themselves as mere tools.

Sources:

5/18/2009

White House Organic Garden Spikes Controversy

Samantha Bee investigates why Michelle Obama opening organic, green garden at the White House could be harmful. Frankly, I think she does a good job humiliating the hypocritical clerks and exposing their hidden motives.

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Obama's spokesman confiscates Journalist's cellphone



Way to get the press coverage. These are the enhanced interrogation techniques, I guess...

3/06/2009

Search for reviews on Google - QRS

How to find reviews using Google? Quick Review Search might be the answer. It is basically a Customized Google Search, specialized on searching reviews on trusted domains. Trusted reviews can by found on sites like gizmondo.com or dpreview.com, and these are the domains this new customized search looks in. QRS might prove useful, since otherwise the search results on product reviews are full of ads and e-shops.
Using Google for review searching is sometimes very tedious work - there is just too many e-shops. This Custom Search uses Google to search only trusted review webservers. Please give it a try and let us know how it goes.

3/04/2009

Obama's turning troops into GeekSquad, Jon says

The troops will have different tasks. Again. Jon highlight the similarities of Obama's and Bush's plans on how to "end" war in Iraq.




Maybe you should reclassify the soldiers as trees so they never have to go...b

2/22/2009

George Bush and his Watergate

What was president Bush's "Watergate"? It might very well be his handling of Enron scandal...



Lewis Black notices how similar the rhetorics of Bush and Cheney are to the ones of Nixon...

1/24/2009

FOX News biased against Barack Obama



This is crazy. FOX News start blaming president Obama only 24 hours after he's sworn in. Wow. Some of those are really childish claims, too.