I missed this the first time around, I guess, since it was posted over at 23/6 towards the end of October. But this video of all three debates synchronized really makes you wonder whether the Presidential debates are worth watching at all. I enjoyed the occasional cleverness in them, but I explicitly remember not gaining any new information.
This is a fantastic experiment that you can try on yourself, put on the web by Matt Davis of the The MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University. Essentially, when you first listen to the sound of a piece of speech that is artificially distorted, you won’t be able to make out much. Then, listen to the clear version of the speech and finally, listen to the distorted speech a second time. You’ll be surprised to discover just how much of it you can understand the second time. This effect results from your brain first attempting to make sense of stimulus for which it has no pattern to compare to. Once your brain is given a hint (through the clear speech sample) it can set up some expectations and decode the new stimulus utilizing those expectations.
This kind of experiment shows just how susceptible perception can be to top-down prediction in the brain and there are analogous effects on vision. I find that shows like Ghost Hunters and their audiences be getting fooled by just this kind of effect. Not to deny them their evidence—they have no doubt collected evidence—the question remains, how much can we trust ourselves to interpret the evidence perceptually? Objective measurement in these scenarios is crucial. The show isn’t called “Thermal Anomaly Hunters,” is it? So, I think its safe to say that the evidence is being examined with some bias. To the credit of the ghost hunters, I’ve never seen them state that they have caught a ghost or spirit on tape or with thermal imaging, only that they have observed something very strange, which is true. The question remains, what have they captured and how much of the picture are our own brains filling in for us?
Palins Big Oil infatuation – Los Angeles Times.
Robert Kennedy, Jr. takes a hard look at the fact that oil companies are still funding organizations who spread disinformation about global warming. If you want to know more about how Exxon funnels money to these organizations, Greenpeace spells it out for you.
I love Jean Baudrillard though I often don’t agree with him. Still though, cynical though this quote may be, and given the current spirit of the election—a holyier-than-thou multiple personality clash rather than an intelligent debate—I wonder if he’s not right.
A blog appears on the internet, written by a man named Håkan Nordkvist who claims to have traveled to the future and that he has proof. Later, a video surfaces. Apparently, this man crawled under his sink and into the future where he met himself and took a mobile phone video of the event. The video is viewed thousands of times and debated by many. The problem? The entire matter was conceived by AMF Pensions to market to a “younger” generation. This video is part of a portfolio of “guerrilla” marketing campaigns propagated by Forsman & Bodenfors. The apparent logic of the marketing campaign is that you should give your money to people who are willing to deceive and lie to you for a good laugh. The problem with this sort of campaign is that not everyone finds out that the matter is a hoax; more disinformation is created in an already incredibly noisy environment. This kind of marketing is simply unethical and is the worst kind of propaganda because it is in no way concerned with the truth or even willing to make a case, based on evidence, for the value of the product. It’s bullshit is what it is.
