by cameron | May 24, 2012 | US politics
As the power elite continue to struggle to re-gain control of an increasingly rabid populace, we will continue to see all manner of bizarre suggestions. From Senator Conroy’s “Filter The Internet” initiative here in Australia to this one from New York:
Legislation is pending in Albany that would make illegal anonymous online commenting, City & State tweeted this morning. Looks like Wired was among the first to report on the measure.
The bill’s backers, according to the mag, want to curtail “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks” and “spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.”
The legislation would make New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”
via Disinformation: Everything You Know Is Wrong.
Personally I’ve always been more than happy to attach my name to my online opinions (which is why my ID is always “cameronreilly”), but I can fully understand why some people would like to be more cautious – people like Bradley Manning, etc. In this current era of “Kill The Whistleblower”, we need to provide anonymous avenues for concerned citizens to leak what they know about the workings of the power elite. And, of course, it stands to reason that the elite will want to destroy those avenues as much as they can.
Personally I don’t think they are going to succeed. For every website they shut down, for every piece of pseudo-fascist legislation they erect, there will be one hundred tools and channels invented by people like Assange that route around the control mechanisms.
by cameron | May 24, 2012 | Uncategorized
I just installed this great Chrome extension called “Murdoch Block”.
What does this app do?
– Blocks websites owned and operated by News Corp
Ok cool! Which websites are blocked?
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_Corporation
– The default setting blocks only news and publication sites but that can be customized on the options page.
And how is a site blocked?
– When the user opens a blocked site, a warning is displayed and the user is given an option to continue to the site.
Can the list of blocked sites be customized?
– The options page provides a full list of blocked sites which can be customized by the user. An initial list of blocked sites is set for you by default and consists of news and publication sites.
Sounds great but why should I install this app?
– Install this app to if you want to estimate News Corp’s influence on your internet life, install it to make a statement to the Murdoch empire or install it because you’ve just had enough lies.
by cameron | May 23, 2012 | capitalism
The propaganda model is a theory advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky that alleges systemic biases in the mass media and seeks to explain them in terms of structural economic causes.
The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: the Political Economy of the Mass Media, the propaganda model views the private media as businesses selling a product — readers and audiences (rather than news) — to other businesses (advertisers) and relying primarily on government and corporate information and propaganda. The theory postulates five general classes of “filters” that determine the type of news that is presented in news media: Ownership of the medium, the medium’s Funding, Sourcing of the news, Flak, and Anti-communist ideology.
The first three (ownership, funding, and sourcing) are generally regarded by the authors as being the most important. Although the model was based mainly on the characterization of United States media, Chomsky and Herman believe the theory is equally applicable to any country that shares the basic economic structure and organizing principles the model postulates as the cause of media biases. After the Soviet Union disintegrated, Chomsky said terrorism and Islam would be the new filter replacing communism.
(Source: Wikipedia)
by cameron | May 22, 2012 | Neuroscience, science
If you’ve read my book “The Three Illusions”, you already know that the world we think we see around us is an illusion of the senses. Our eyes take in photons, which are turned into electrical signals, sent to the brain, which then interprets them into what it thinks we are looking at. The brain literally just MAKES IT UP.
But brains aren’t perfect – by a long stretch. Which is why optical illusions are so much fun. And this is one of the best.
The below videos demonstrate what’s known as the “Flashed Face Distortion Effect” — an optical illusion first described last year by University of Queensland researchers Jason Tangen, Sean Murphy and Matthew Thompson.
We describe a novel face distortion effect resulting from the fast-paced presentation of eye-aligned faces. When cycling through the faces on a computer screen, each face seems to become a caricature of itself and some faces appear highly deformed, even grotesque. The degree of distortion is greatest for faces that deviate from the others in the set on a particular dimension (eg if a person has a large forehead, it looks particularly large). This new method of image presentation, based on alignment and speed, could provide a useful tool for investigating contrastive distortion effects and face adaptation.
If you haven’t seen them before these will blow your mind.
Here’s a version with pretty girls:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM6lGNhPujE]
Here’s another version, this time with Hollywood celebrities:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT9i99D_9gI]
(HT: io9)
by cameron | May 21, 2012 | Australian politics
Reading the Craig Thomson transcript today and wondering “who is Marco Bolano?”. I must admit, I don’t follow the HSU that closely.
As part of my research, I came across this 2009 video on YouTube from a HSU “Crisis Meeting”. Looks like an interesting bunch.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm28jYV7388&w=560&h=315]
