Future Salon

Pleasure seeking: the basis for all decisions

Is each of our decisions is ultimately driven by pleasure-seeking, even though it might not be obvious all the time?

The new pleasure seekers
Cabanac then promised the students increasingly large lumps of cash to endure the pain. The more he offered, the longer they suffered. Ironically, Cabanac's experiment was part of a broader investigation into the science of pleasure.

New language center found in the brain
British scientists have found a third area of the brain critical to learning language that connects the two main cerebral centers of language in the cortex. The region is in the parietal lobe of the cortex. Using brain scans, scientists discovered it was connected in a round-about way to language centers called Broca's area and Wernicke's area.

Brain Region Identified That Controls Collecting Behavior
Most people have a collection of some kind at some point in their lives. By studying patients who developed abnormal hoarding behavior following brain injury, neurology researchers have identified an area in the prefrontal cortex that appears to control collecting behavior. It is right mesial prefrontal cortex.

Brain Power
Scientists here are using a magnetoencephalography machine to see if the hearing part of a schizophrenic's brain works the same way it does in a healthy brain. The evidence suggests it does not, and the answer is vital not only to Charles but to 2 million other people with schizophrenia and their families.

Human Emotion Processing in Individual Brain Cells
A rare surgical situation allowed the UI Health Care researchers to record the activity of individual brain cells, neurons, in an awake, alert patient as he was shown images designed to elicit an emotional response. cells in the right prefrontal cortex responded remarkably rapidly to unpleasant image. Happy or neutral pictures did not cause the same rapid response.  The brain has systems that can respond extremely rapidly to potentially dangerous or threatening stimuli.

Brain activity reflects complexity of responses to other-race faces
The amygdala is associated with a measure of unconscious race bias. The fusiform gyrus can moderate the amygdala activity. This suggests that the conscious brain can compensate for unconscious prejudices.

How we recognise faces from birth
The fusiform face area (FFA) processes visual information. It is the face as a whole that is recognised, rather than the individual features. "This study suggests it is just faces that activate this area."

WMD Film Notes Plus Citizen Journalism Project

Notes from the Movie: Weapons of Mass Deception viewed last night and a very hopeful development around Dan Gillmor.

The filmmaker Danny Schaechter was at the movie and joked that he embedded himself in his living room to watch and record the TV news every move leading up and during the war, at least as much as he could stand.

I think this graph is a great illustration of the problem with the TV News. It is derived from a study done by PiPA Program in International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

Misconception throughout the board with varying degree of severity.

At Stanford last week ABC News president David Westin apologized to the American people for the poor coverage:

The executives also discussed their stations’ coverage leading up to the war in Iraq and failure to more carefully examine the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

“[ABC] let down the American people,” Westin said. “I sincerely regret that.”

Random thoughts from the movie:

The film is powerful because Danny Schaechter has been on the other side in the newsrooms, so he can call the bluffs of the news anchors. ABC: "Nothing like this is happening in the newsrooms." Danny: "Yes it does, I was there".

As a reporter you can greatly advance your career two ways: Entertainment or war. This is why the reporters are so eager to cover it. They want the "war correspondent" title next to their name. You have to be there reporting into the camera while the bombs are falling in the background.

There are 5 Iraqi wars going on at the same time. The one where the bombs are falling the real combat (which besides the soldiers no one gets to see), the news that were shown in the US, the one in Europe, the one for India and Asia and the one that the Arabian news agencies were showing in the Middle East. [Bonus link 1: Al-Jazeera covered more hours of the Republican National Convention then any of the major American networks combined.]

The real interesting thing is that CNN has two news teams, one for the US and one international and there the movie left me wanting more. How about a side by side comparison of what the American audience got presented and what the rest of the world that tuned into CNN got to see? That would have really crystallized the point.

I also would have loved a bit more about the list on the white board in one of the news rooms: Things not to report on: Depleted uranium ammunitions, cluster bombs [2], ... It passed so fast, that I didn't get it all.

The main reason why the news network don't ask the tougher questions is, that for example NBC is run by a general.

General Electric owns NBC, others are owned by Westinghouse, ... big conglomerates. They all want to be on the good side of the administration, when the big contracts are given for example to rebuilt or arm the US. It's a total conflict of interest.

Cable News channels do get more important, but are still way behind the network news outlets: Example August 11th: Networks: NBC 8.3M , ABC 8.1M, CBS 6.6M; Cable News: FNC 2.1, CNN 0.7, MSNBC 0.4, CNBC 0.2

Danny ends his film with a call for action. Get the message out. But there is also something more going on.

We once had Howard Rheingold speak at the Future Salon and he told the story about a Korean news network OhMyNews.com (in Korean) that is getting more and more popularity and is created by 80% volunteer journalists. He said that it was the main reason for the election of their last president and he thanked them by giving his first public interview after the election on the OhMyNews network.

Mister We the Media Dan Gillmor announced that he is leaving the San Jose Mercury News and I wanted to speculate, that he is going to create such a citizen journalism project here in the US, but now I read on his blog, that he has announced it already.

This is one of the best news I heard in a very long time. I am wondering how they will differentiate themselves from Indymedia.org. Actually with Dan on board I don't see a problem.

He has the integrity and the cloud to pull it off and I wish him all the best and offer him my support. The state of the media as reported in the WMD movie proofs, that such a citizen journalism project is dearly needed.

Bonus link 2: How the investigative journalism is done at the good old New York Times. Greg Palast reporter for the BBC covering the election wrote on November 4th: Kerry Won. Here are the Facts. 

Here his account on what happened next:

And I got a letter, an e-mail, from the New York Times. Here it is. They wanted to follow – they wanted to investigate! Cool! And they asked me, question 1: “Are you a conspiracy nut?” Question 2: “Are you a sore loser?” Question 3: there is no question three…that was the end of the interview. And so they ran a story on the front page saying, “Internet Theories of Bush Loss Easily Debunked.”

Bonus link 3: If you want real investigative journalism track Seymour Hersh. He mostly writes for the New Yorker (This article is a year old, but could have been written this month). 

Interrupting your busy Holiday Schedule

On our bafuture yahoo group there is quite some discussion going on regarding the What is wrong with TV News? post.

Quite fitting to that theme, there is a great chance to see how the media is covering the Iraq war in the new movie: Weapons of Mass Deception playing this weekend at the Embarcadero (and in Berkeley too).

Please take a break from the Holiday frenzies and join us for the 7:30 showing tomorrow Saturday 11th of December at the Embarcadero theater. Danny Schechter the director will be at hand to answer some questions after the film. If that wasn't enough, we will head to the next watering hole afterwords for more discussions too.

The Chicago Reader says it goes beyond Michael Moore and offers a "comprehensive and devastating critique of the TV news networks complacency and complicity in the war in Iraq ....brilliantly argued and well documented ." .

Noam Chomsky in 1988 talks about manufacturing consent. I am sure that we will see some of that documented tomorrow night. (Another summary of Chomsky's book written by David Cromwell)

Think about all the things that don't get reported too, or did you know about the Cuban political prisoners in the US? I didn't until I read a Chomsky interview:

Cuba approached the United States with an offer to cooperate in combating terrorism and, in fact, the FBI sent people to Cuba to get information from the Cubans about it. The next thing was that Cubans who had infiltrated the terrorist groups in the United States were arrested. That is utterly shocking! Do you think it's reported? Nobody knows about it. I mean, here are Cubans who are infiltrating illegal, terrorist organizations in the United States, which are violating US law and the infiltrators are arrested, not the terrorists.

Shocking. He is referring to this William Blum's article in Counter Punch as one of the few good accounts.

Quite some food for thought and discussion tomorrow night. See you all there.

Smart Car Finally Here

Finally you can get/auction your 60 mpg Smart Car to drive here in the US. The eBay thing is a publicity stunt, don't bid on that car, it is way to expensive already, although there are still 8 days left to bid. They are testing the water. It should be way cheaper than the Mini which starts around 18K.

I hope they bring the Diesel version too, that gets you additinal 10 mpg: 70 mpg take that you heavy hybrids :-) 

What is wrong with TV News?

On my way home today I was listening to NPR's Cleveland City Club Forum with Av Westin presenting: What is Wrong with Television News?

He sees politicization, as some call it foxification, as the worst trend in network news. "The reporter being visibly appalled when hearing an opposing opinion." Av stressed, that his is not talking about the opinion journals like the Bill O'Reilly show, which was the first face that came to my mind when I heard this.

The reason behind it is not a conspiracy, but quite simple the ratings game. If you ask the American populace they are about evenly divided into 40% that call themselves conservative and 40% on the liberal side and 20% that don't want to be put in either of these boxes.

Now the interesting difference is, that the conservative camp is watching more TV news and stays longer on the same channel, therefore provides more ad revenue for the program.

There is your target audience, if all that counts is ratings. The networks also realized, that if you play to audience' emotion, if you take the neutrality out, people stay even longer. Fox was the first one to figure that out and the others are playing catch up.

Not owning a TV myself I realized, that I am part of the problem. My apologies, but I will not change my evil way for the greater good of more balanced TV News. :-)

Clear proof that the free market forces don't always bring out the best for society. Please give me BBC and some public service stations. Think about it, the only TV cameras at the Accelerating Change 2004 were from Arte(french) a European niche player mostly financed by the French and German government.

Oh and being at it, if you want to have an example where governmental guidance is working phenomenally well check out the city Curitiba in Brazil:

Residents of Curitiba, Brazil, think they live in the best city in the world, and a lot of outsiders agree. Curibita has 17 new parks, 90 miles of bike paths, trees everywhere, and traffic and garbage systems that officials from other cities come to study. Curibita's mayor for twelve years, Jaime Lerner, has a 92 per cent approval rating.

When was the last time you met a government official with such a approval rating? Here is what sounds like his work statement:

'There is no endeavor more noble than the attempt to achieve a collective dream. When a city accepts as a mandate its quality of life; when it respects the people who live in it; when it respects the environment; when it prepares for future generations, the people share the responsibility for that mandate, and this shared cause is the only way to achieve that collective dream.'

Just replace city with world and you have the collective dream of a world that works for all of us. [via WorldChanging]