BBC NEWS | Health | Romantic love ‘lasts just a year’

For shame BBC for posting this kind of nonsense.

This is a article about how some bunch of Italian scientists has apparently proven that “romantic love” (what a scientific phrase that is) only lasts a year.

From the article it seems that what they really found was some protein that is more present in people at the start of relationships.

They decided that this protein was the “love protein” and used this brilliant piece of scientism to deduce that romantic love lasts but a year.

Who approves this shit?

This week’s Earshot was a holiday special put together from interviews I did during the Open Media Development Summit last month.

Chris, Mo, Mouna and Sean all came by while I aired it. Good times.

Listen to Earshot

I just read chapters 5 & 6 of Solove’s The Digital Person. It’s about the limitations of the idea of the market providing adequate protection to people’s privacy. The idea that people don’t care about their personal information because they are prepared to sign it away for free is one of those disingenuous arguments that could only possibly be made by the very literal-minded or the very determined to get their hands on your information and not take any responsibility for it.

People have no choices when it comes to privacy policies – if they want to use the world wide web they are agreeing to privacy policies they haven’t even read just by clicking on a website. There is no appreciable difference between most privacy policies offered and they are long and hard to read and full of exceptions, making it virtually impossible for even the most time-rich and privacy-obsessed individual to know exactly what they are agreeing to when they give up their information.

Solove makes a case that the problem is architectural – i.e. that the way US bureaucracies are set up makes people vulnerable to identity theft. The solution to the risk of identity theft must come from changing the ways that information is gathered and used, not by treating an identity thief as a burglar who stole a TV.

I also read an article called “Congress Close to Establishing Rules for Driver’s Licenses” from the New York Times from last year. I guess it’s probably behind their sucky pay wall. Anyway, the interesting thing is that last year Congress tried to pass a bill regarding standardising Drivers’ Licenses that could be eventually be required by the Department of Homeland Security as a type of internal passport.

We were talking in class about the OnStar telematics system that could eventually send information from a crash to emergency services, the police, or (contentiously) insurance companies. It seems to me a good thing that the police have access to data like this when attempting to establish what happened during a car crash, but some of the others had concerns about this kind of “scientific” data being interpreted without any consideration of context.

I also read “Identity Chip Planted Under Skin Approved for Use in Health Care”, another NYT article from last year behind the pay wall. It’s pretty interesting, particularly in the light of Meghan Trainor’s thesis project from last year. I’ve heard Meghan talking about a lot of these issues – how much is possible and how much is not.

An interesting article by David Lazarus of The San Francisco Chronicle: “The Devil’s in phone bill details”. It’s from 2002 when PacBell notified its customers that it was going to share their information with all SBC subsidiaries unless they opted out by phone.

Another pay article from the Wall Street Journal from 2001: “Big Brother-in-Law”. This is interesting though – it’s about the ChoicePoint database and how goverment agencies including the FBI are using data collected about citizens to get around Privacy Act (1974).

Plus a module on Privacy in the Workplace from the Department of Cyberlaw at Harvard. Basically if you’re an employee you have no rights. But we all knew that. Your employer can spy on you even if they promise they won’t.

RSS is so cool. The more I find out about it the more amazing I think it is. I’ve been happily getting news and video by RSS for a year now but I’m only now thinking about how versatile a way it is to distribute media. I read earlier that is is a new media in the same way the WWW was. I guess there is some truth to that.

RSS Spec

More on this later.

So for our group assignment this week Sean, David, Monica and I had to do a group study of Flickr. I’ve never used Flickr, except to look at other people’s pictures, mostly of TNO, so it was really interesting for me.

We were looking at how Flickr interacts with the “real world”, or the incursion of people’s real lives into what used to be called cyberspace. In a very fundamental way the sharing of pictures of yourself is an activity changes online bulletin board communities. Sometimes people feel compelled to show one another what they look like and it has an impact to find out what your online friends really look like. Flickr is a service based entirely on sharing picture of you and your life often including your friends. Although some people take pictures of beautiful things in nature, most contributors allow other users to learn about them and their lives.

Sean showed us the Memory Maps people have started making using pictures from Google Earth of places they know well. It’s a really beautiful idea – marking a satellite photograph and marking it with your own stories, your own identification with a place. It adds something that is neither real world, nor cyberspace but relies on both to exist. I wonder if people with memory maps of the same area ever find each other and compare notes? That would be sweet.

A VC: The Future of Media (aka Please Take My RSS Feed)

This week’s Earshot was about Community Broadband. I spoke to Ben Scott from Free Press, and also to Mo SantRam, my friend who is part of Neighbornode.

Listen to Earshot

NeuroPop White Paper – this is the White Paper of a company that claims to be able to affect your brain with their sound design. Sciency.

Sonic Weapons – an interesting Fortean Times article about the myths related to the use of sound as a weapon.

Neural Noise Synthesiser – another company that claims to be able to play with your brain through sound. This one seems both less threatening and less silly than the NeuroPop crowd.

NeuroPop Website – this website is funny for having the worst ever intro with the most annoying music. When you finally reach the home page you are assaulted by more annoying “brain wave” sounds. It’s fun to look at though – especially the big sound-nerd list of all their equipment.

This stuff if fascinating. That sound can have profound physical and emotional effects on people I have no doubt. I remain to be convinced that it is even theoretically possible to codify those effects and how they could be reproduced and don’t believe anyone has figured it out. From our class discussion it seems that pre-cortical responses can be elicited using sound – by playing different frequencies of sound in each ear. Ben knows all about it. Is it useful to be able to make a person look down? Useful if you sell shoes I guess. Beyond that though I feel the effects of sound aren’t unchanging – sound that you once loved can become annoying, you can phase out sound once you get used to it. Although perhaps when you’re not aware of it it’s having it’s greatest effect a la Muzak. Lots of thought fodder anyway.

The Overload – Sonic Intoxicant CD from NeuroPop is worth a listen. The third track did nauseate me as promised. I’m no stranger to being made feel ill by certain kinds of droney music – at least this time I didn’t throw up everywhere. The other two tracks are just spacey stuff that makes you feel a bit spacey. It’s funny.

McQuarrie and Mick, Visual Rhetoric – this is a long and pretty boring paper about a set of experiments to prove that people are affected by visual rhetoric. A field must really be in trouble if its writers need to be this turgid in their writing. It does contain the following gem in describing how people from different cultures won’t get “tropic” rhetorical devices:

That [croissant] looks like a foot, [while the other] is obviously a smiley face. . . . Is it because they have the almond on it so it becomes a happy face, and if you don’t have the almonds, then you’re not happy and you become a stinky foot? (Informant no. 11, Taiwanese, with respect to the visual pun in the almond ad)

Hee hee.

Direct and Indirect Approaches to Advertising Persuasion by YouJae Yi – this is a little easier on the sleep muscles. It’s a study that looks at the relationship between direct and indirect messages in advertising, both visual and verbal.

Here is my example of visual design intended to influence:

I think this is clever because the images of the blood clots echo the images of the cranes and scaffolding, which clearly dwarf the man. This supports the assertion of the text that the man is less strong than the clots, because the clots are associated with the machinery.

In season 3 of Primetime it’s impossible for the Networks not to lose money. You can’t get enough money from the advertisers to come even close to covering even an A show.

Our response has been to create the cheapest TV possible – 3 hours of DV footage shot by a homeless person and edited by a student intern on $10 an hour for 8 hours.

This is the show as I have proposed it. The others may well change it.

Candid Bums

We gave a video camera and some tapes to a homeless drunk for a week – this is the exclusive footage.

A cutting edge, low-budget documentary from the makers of Extreme Makeover. This feature-length show is the result of a daring expermiment – giving a $2000 video camera and some DV tapes to a homeless drunk. We showed him how to use the equipment and sent him off to record his life on the streets. The resulting footage is disturbing, moving, and must-see viewing for anyone who thinks they know New York City. This is a view you won’t get to see again. Meet Walt, his friends and enemies on the street, and the members of the settled community who come in their lives.

I signed up to VLOGDIR The Videoblog Directory

I guess my blog only has videos occasionally, but I’m working on changing that.

Still and all, it’s pretty cool. I’ll probably find a few new feeds to subscribe to on FireANT. Hurrah!

© 2011 Dee Blind Mice Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha