Group items tagged

NPR short on artist Liu Bolin.  Bolin, we are told, “has a habit of painting himself” so as to disappear into his surroundings.  The idea is to illustrate the way in which humans are increasingly “merged” with their environment.

One might argue that it was Bolin who had the idea to illustrate the contemporary human condition in this way. That the “art” in this work is really in his inspiration, while the “work” in this art is what is being done by the assistants. Yet clearly there is “art” in their work, too, given that they are to be credited for creating the eerie illusions with paint. Yet it is Bolin who is named as the artist; his assistants aren’t named at all.  What is it about the art world — or our world more generally — that makes this asymmetrical attribution go unnoticed so much of the time?

At the time of the post describing Amina's arrest, "A Gay Girl in Damascus" was generally accepted at face value. But the young woman's story began to fall apart under the scrutiny of the bloggers and journalists attempting to fact-check it and follow up. She frequently canceled interviews at the last minute. A photo that Amina sent to The Guardian turned out to be stolen from the Facebook account of a British-Croatian woman named Jelena Lecic. NPR's Andy Carvin discovered that no one—not even her Canadian girlfriend—had met Amina in person.

MacMaster confessed on the blog: Apology to readers I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about. I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience. This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism. However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers. Best, Tom MacMaster, Istanbul, Turkey July 12, 2011 The sole author of all posts on this blog

MacMaster, fighting the good fight against liberal Orientalism, hasn't harmed anyone, huh? We wonder if "Amina"'s girlfriend feels the same way.

chief minister of Malacca, Mohamad Ali Rustam, was quoted in the Guardian as saying that God created monkeys and rats for experiments to benefit humans.

Here is the head of a Malaysian state justifying the establishment of a scientific enterprise with a comment that flies in the face of everything science tells us.

Though the chief minister is, presumably, a Muslim, there is nothing specifically Islamic about the claim that God created animals for our sake. Similar remarks have been made repeatedly by Christian religious figures through the millennia, although today some Christian theologians offer a kinder, more compassionate interpretation of the idea of our God-given dominion over the animals. They regard the grant of dominion as a kind of stewardship, with God wanting us to take care of his creatures and treat them well.

Security is a hot issue in the computing world. Hackers broke into Sony's networks and accessed the information of more than 1 million customers, the latest of several security breaches.The breaches were the latest attacks on high-profile firms, including defense contractor Lockheed Martin and Google, which pointed the blame at China.

Analysts and industry experts believe hardware-based security provides a higher level of protection than software with encryption added to data in the servers. Chipmakers are working to build more authentication into the silicon.

one of the problems cloud faces is that it is a fragmented market where many vendors provide different security solutions based on their own standards.Intel's rival ARM and Advanced Micro Devices are also in the process of embedding higher security in their chips and processors, but working with different partners.If there was an open standard to follow, it would help the industry to build a much secure cloud system, according to AMD.

In all areas of life, people will often go to extraordinary lengths to maintain prior beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary.

Apocalypse Now is a much more interesting prospect than Apocalypse Some Time in the Distant Future.

If the Bible is both true and complete, it follows that it ought to be possible to decode it and so work out when the End will come.

The Roy Orbison looking Eyez will feature a 720p HD recording camera, microphone, Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity, 8 GB flash memory, and three hours of battery life. Using an iPhone or Android app you can transmit what your Eyez record directly to the web, or you can save and upload it later using a microUSB port. Here’s a promo clip of the glasses from ZionEyez, the start-up company developing them:

At $150 a pair, these glasses are cheap enough to become invaluable tools for journalists in volatile regions, especially those living under regimes who restrict free speech and press — where being seen recording video can be dangerous

the notion of more and easier surveillance will draw the inevitable comparisons to Big Brother — and certainly, the notion that our deeds could be surreptitiously captured by strangers, even friends, without our knowledge is an uncomfortable one. But some would argue that given the amount of surveillance we now face by the state, the amount of information we willingly volunteer about ourselves to corporations and on social media sites anyways, pervasive video-taking goggles seem like a natural stage in the evolution towards something like David Brin’s transparent society.

A man was caught with more than 500 offensive photos in his mobile phone. This happened after a woman complained against him taking a picture of her chest at a shopping centre.

"My husband and I were shocked when we were shown the data because there were more than 500 pictures of various women that this man took. All the pictures were of their chests and breasts. From the angle of the shots, I could see that the women in these pictures were not aware that they were victims."

According to the law, anyone who takes offensive photos of a woman in a public place without the lady's prior consent can be charged for outrage of modesty. If found guilty, the persons involved faces a fine, up to a year in jail or both.

Just how far divorced from reality we are was shown recently in an elegant study by Oriel Feldmanhall, a PhD candidate at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University, England. She's just presented the research at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco, California.

she studied two groups of people. The first group she asked them to imagine a scenario where they would get paid a small sum to deliver painful but harmless electric shocks. 64% said they would never deliver a shock, and on average the participants would only deliver enough shocks to earn a paltry £4. The second group got the real deal. They actually administered the shocks, and saw the response on video (they were in an MRI scanner at the time). This time, a massive 96% of participants administered shocks. Those who saw video of the grimacing faces of their victims pocketed £11.55. Those who were spared that and only saw the hands walked away with a cool £15.77.

Brains scans vividly illuminated the emotional turmoil going on in the subjects who participated in the real experiment. They had a lot of activity in their insula, a deep, primitive part of the brain thought to be linked to moral intuition. People who did the pen-and-paper, hypothetical version had no such turmoil.

the vast majority of the world's scientists back urgent action on carbon emissions: energy must be made much more expensive. Oh, wait, we didn't mean for us!World-class research into future sources of green energy is under threat in Britain from an environmental tax designed to boost energy efficiency and drive down carbon emissions, scientists claim.Some facilities must find hundreds of thousands of pounds to settle green tax bills, putting jobs and research at risk.

Among the worst hit is the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, a facility for research into almost limitless carbon-free energy. The lab faces an estimated £400,000 payment next year, raising the spectre of job losses and operational cuts. "Considering our research is aimed at producing zero-carbon energy, it seems ironic and perverse to clobber us with an extra bill," a senior scientist at the lab said. "We have to use electricity to run the machine and there is no way of getting around that."

how many adult women actually take the images in fashion magazines — artificial as they are, feats of makeup and lighting and camera angles, even without retouching — at face value? “Our readers are not idiots,” Christine Leiritz, editor of French Marie Claire, told the New York Times last year, “especially when they see those celebrities who are 50 and look 23.” Most of us who read fashion magazines don’t feel we’re confronting reality when we see a photograph of a grown woman with preteen thighs. (We certainly see enough countervailing tabloid shots to know exactly what celebrity thighs look like.) If such photos enrage us, and often they do, it’s not because they damage our self-esteem, nor — let’s be honest — because we’re constantly fretting, like some earnest psychologist or crusading politician, about the emotional repercussions for adolescent girls. Our interest in altered images is not purely moral; it’s also aesthetic. We believe that a picture should convey, “objectively,” without undue intervention, what the lens originally captured. But these days, come to a fashion, consumer, or celebrity magazine with this quaint puritanical notion in mind, and you’re bound to be disappointed: Many contemporary images are illustrations masquerading as photographs, cartoons composed with a computer rather than a pen.

The truth is that most retouched photos fail as aesthetic objects, not because they’re deceptive, but because they’re timid, feeble, and inhibited. Constrained by their origins as photographs, they stop short of embracing full stylization. They force themselves to walk a very fine line: romanticize without being preposterous, improve upon nature without grossly misrepresenting a famous physique with which viewers are familiar. When an apparently hipless Demi Moore graced the cover of W last year, readers blanched. Likewise when Gwyneth’s Paltrow’s head appeared oddly detached from her body on the May 2008 cover of Vogue, giving her an upsetting alien-from-outer-space vibe. What were the editors thinking? That we wouldn’t notice? And yet perversely, artificial as these images are, they’re actually not artificial enough. It would be better, perhaps, if art directors just went all the way, publishing, without apologies, pictures of incarnate Betty Boops or Jessica Rabbits. Too many magazine images nowadays are neither fish nor fowl, neither photographs of integrity nor illustrations of potency. They’re weird in-between creatures, annoying and unsettling.

surely many women wear them just because they in general accept their social and religious customs. As stupidly degrading as such customs are, if the women are simply accepting their religious and social position, then it at least becomes on the scale of the high heels, thin jeans, woman-as-object problem that women face in this country, one that they cannot reject without becoming socially outcasted, at least to some degree, as well.

BECAUSE SCIENCE TELLS US “INCONVENIENT TRUTHS.” If the process of science were all a delusion based on our biases and preconceptions and wishes, it would not give us answers that we don’t like or agree with. Yet scientists often discover things that go against our belief systems, but they must put aside their favorite ideas and face this reality. When Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that the earth (and us) are not in the center of the universe, the idea wasn’t accepted by the Church or the world in general—but it was true. Everyone except a handful of religious nuts and the uneducated now look at the sun “rising” and “setting” and accept the counterintuitive notion that it is the earth turning instead. When Darwin showed that life had evolved and that we are all closely related to other living things, not specially created, it offended many people (and still does)—but its truth was soon acknowledged by the entire scientific community and nearly all educated Westerners who weren’t religiously biased, even before Darwin died. As the web cartoon puts it: “Science: if you ain’t pissing people off, you ain’t doin’ it right”.