December 27, 2009
FBI: Gun sales up, murders down
via Gun News on 12/24/09
The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports a ten percent drop in murders during the first six months of 2009, while at a time US gun sales are going through the roof, according to reports obtained by the National Association of Chiefs of Police.
Posted via email from realthinktank's posterous
Celebrities Busted Staring At Boobs
Malcolm Gladwell's Stickiness Problem [Op-ed]
Dec 23, 2009 (4 days ago)
Malcolm Gladwell's Stickiness Problem [Op-ed]
It's tough out there for science writers following in Malcolm Gladwell's footsteps. Not because he's so good, but because he's so wrong. Here's a rant by author Jeff Wise, republished from Psychology Today, on undoing Gladwell's damage to the facts.The aughts been a good decade for Malcolm Gladwell. The reigning king of urban intellectuals has never not had a book among the New York Times's top 10 bestsellers since his first book, Tipping Point, debuted in 2000. (Currently, he has four.) With so much success, of course, invariably come brickbats. The latest volley of slings and arrows has arrived from the direction of Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychology professor who, reviewing Gladwell's book What the Dog Saw in the New York Times Book Review last month, declared that the author "unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and... occasionally blunders into spectacular failures."
As someone who has just published a somewhat Gladwellian tome myself, I have a somewhat different perspective. The problem, I've discovered, isn't just that Gladwell is wrong. It's that his formulations are so darn sticky.
I stumbled upon this realization when, last year, I began writing my book, Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. In the course of my research I delved into all the major manifestations of the emotion, including the phenomenon of athletes choking on the playing field. Gladwell, I already knew, had famously dealt with the subject in a 2000 New Yorker article entitled "The Art of Failure." He summed up the topic with breathtaking concision. Choking, he declared, is the opposite of panic. "Choking is about thinking too much," he wrote. "Panic is about thinking too little."
It was the epitome of a Gladwellian idea: counterintuitive, startling, yet immediately graspable. In other words, sticky — the supreme attribute for a successful meme. And thus it spread. Read anything about choking in the popular press these days and you'll likely get the Gladwell line. Here's Jonah Lehrer, writing in his book How We Decide: "Choking is actually triggered by a specific mental mistake: thinking too much." (Italics his.) And here's John Paul Newport, writing this February in the Wall Street Journal: "Choking... is essentially the opposite of panic."
The only problem is that, from a neuroscientific perspective, Gladwell's "choking is the opposite of panic" doesn't make any sense. It's like saying "dogs are the opposite of cats" — a stimulating proposition, perhaps, but logically unparsable.
Meanwhile, as it happens, a great deal of fascinating research has gone into figuring out how choking actually works. The phenomenon is an expression of a specifically social kind of fear, a variety of performance anxiety related to stage fright, panic attacks, and the "shy bladder" syndrome familiar to men at airport urinals. It has nothing to do with a negation or undersupply of panic.
Okay, so who cares? If half the United States is walking around with the erroneous notion that they are in possession of a really nifty insight into the nature of choking, so be it. No harm, no foul. But some bogus memes are less innocent.
One of the chapters in Gladwell's second book, Blink, concerns the work of the University of California psychologist Paul Ekman, a man who, according to Gladwell, has mastered the secret of lie detection. Thanks to a combination of innate skill and scientific savvy, Ekman has supposedly trained himself to detect fleeting "micro-expressions" on a liar's face and so can determine their true emotional state with stunning accuracy.
It was the best chapter of the book, maybe the best chapter Gladwell has ever written. When Universal Studios paid $1 million for the movie rights to Blink, this was the part they really wanted; when the deal was inked, the studio announced that Steven Gaghan was attached to the project to write and direct, and Leonardo DiCaprio would star as an Ekman-like character. That film is still gestating, but meanwhile the Gladwell/Ekman juggernaut has already steamrollered across the public consciousness through the Fox TV show Lie to Me, currently in its second season. In the show, Tim Roth stars as Dr. Cal Lightman, the protagonist with Ekman-type powers. The real Ekman serves as a script adviser to the show and writes about each episode on his blog.
The chapter's most profound impact played out not on the screen but in the real world, when the Department of Homeland Security enlisted Ekman, soon after Blink's publication, to help implement a project to detect would-be terrorists in airports around the country. Called "Screening Passengers by Observation Technique," or SPOT, the program debuted in December, 2005. By 2008, TSA officers were pulling aside nearly 100,000 passengers a year for screening. (Of those, fewer than one percent were eventually arrested, and the TSA won't say how many were convicted.)
You might think, given Ekman's cultural ubiquity, that his discoveries on the subject of lying have laid the groundwork for a whole sub-field of research psychology. On the contrary. In fact, it has been well established by peer-reviewed studies that, Ekman's claims notwithstanding, no person can reliably tell whether or not another human being is lying simply by looking at them. "It's hokum," says Yale psychologist Charles A. Morgan III.
So SPOT, it turns out, was a $3-million-a-year waste of taxpayer money. So "Lie to Me" is scarcely more scientifically grounded than Ghost Whisperer. Well, okay. Dumb TV shows and wasteful government programs are nothing new. What's really disturbing, though, is that once Gladwell had granted Ekman his intellectual seal of approval, no one in the popular media was willing or able to point out that the good professor's claims were spurious.
For four years.
That's the problem of Gladwell in a nutshell. He's masterful at brewing up memes so potent that they travel far beyond the realm of where the mere modest truth would go. They spread. And they stick. And having stuck, they proceed to affect the decisions that people make, the policies they implement, the laws that they pass. A normal person, when he is wrong, adds a little drop of erroneousness in the great sea of human conversation. Gladwell, when he is wrong, creates a tsunami of wrong.
And it just goes on and on.
RE:1978 Chevy Nova 4DR 21,000 original miles (fullofcrapville)
I did not write this. However, I am always entertained by those folks that think a Craigslist ad deserves a response?
Theres nothing special about a 78 4 door 6 cylinder nova ya dumbshit.
Another CL classic dreamer hahahaha.
via craigslist | motorcycles/scooters in tucson on 12/27/09
What moron at state farm valued a 78 4 door 6 cylinder nova at $7000? Regardless of the bullshit mileAGE.You must mean Stale form insurance co of watadumbass Inc. Theres nothing special about a 78 4 door 6 cylinder nova ya dumbshit.
Another CL classic dreamer hahahaha.
Posted via email from realthinktank's posterous
40 Fantastic to Freaky Merry Christmas Greetings in Graffiti!
via WebUrbanist by Angie on 12/23/09
Graffiti decorates walls, subways and trains all over our globe. Since the first tags appeared in the 1970s, graffiti has grown in popularity until now it can be a commercialized venture. Legalization offers the graffiti artists a chance to spread their message over entire murals. Spray paint in aerosol cans is the primary method of production, however different techniques, styles and even ability levels keep graffiti as varied as the artists who create it. The debate rages on if graffiti is art or vandalism. Whether freaky or fantastic, one common theme to all of these writers and their street art is the spreading of holiday cheer with these 40 Merry Christmas graffiti greetings.
Merry Christmas Tacheles
(image credits:digitus_malus)
Kunsthaus Tacheles in Berlin was once a large department store but now is run by artists. The exterior has huge, colorful graffiti-style murals. As you can see, the graffiti flowed out in a cheery greeting of Merry Christmas.Christmas Graffiti at Madison Event Center
(image credits:Phoenix New Times)
The “legal wall” of Madison Event Center was recently made festive and bright by graffiti artists DEXTER, PAGE, CRE, BLAME, APHEN, GNES, SREK, AREA, SERP, and DOSE. Dexter wants her to eat his candy. Dose created a vicious snowman. Besides legal graffiti like Nightmare Before Christmas, Page adds detail to Santa’s machine gun. Srek also sends his Merry Christmas.Merry Christmas Nola Limo
(image credits:wikimedia)
This limousine was tagged after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The Christmas graffiti occurred after Wal-Mart was looted. Even in the midst of disaster and bad times, street artists who some consider vandals still tried to offer peace and season’s greetings.Christmas Graffiti on Trains
(image credits: VANDAL TEAM SUPREME, 14-2-1, mightyquinninwky©™)
Trains are an extremely common place to find graffiti. Street artists tag trains and send their graffiti on its way to chug through an endless path of cities and towns. Trains are a popular target all over the globe. Many graffiti loving people post their artistic finds such as candy-cane train, the blue famous freight train painted end-to-end with Christmas graffiti, and the Merry Christmas tag on the bottom train.Tag-n-Run
(image credits:brookenovak, Texas Escapes, crazbabe21, kewlio, vitostreet, Señor Codo)
Some graffiti is simple. The point is to tag and run. These spray paint tags started in NYC and Philadelphia but now are found all over the world. Tags are not always about gang markings. It is a debate among many if graffiti is a form of street art or vandalism. From sweet or funny tags to more sinister Christmas works, urban walls and trains are common places for graffiti writers to leave their holiday message.Evil Santa
(image credits: gekimo)
This wall was photographed and posted as Evil Santa. This particular wall can be found in Greece. With a project this large, the undertaking is much less of a tag and more of a celebrated work of art. Graffiti in all forms can be found spray painted in all corners of the planet. It is one more common bond that makes us all united, as is celebrating this holiday season.Banksy Dove
(image credit:Ashour talk)
(image credit: hazy jenius)
Beloved graffiti artist Banksy visited Bethlehem in December 2007 and left his art in a series of subversive murals. A Palestinian boy looks at one of six images painted by Banksy as part of a Christmas exhibition. Also on “the wall” of Bethlehem, a painted lone tree stands among scores of cut-down olive trees and confiscated land. It is not uncommon for graffiti to still send a political message.Subway Christmas Graffiti
(image credits:Field87, The Osterley Times, Drax WD)
Subways are another popular place for graffiti artists to tag. It is dangerous because of the moving cars and due to law enforcement cracking down. Writers still tag subways though, even to send their holiday greeting. In the bottom image, this whole subway train is decorated in end-to-end high style. Car 1 says, “MERRY CHRISTMAS TO” while Cars 2-5 have the names of graffiti writers and crews. Finally on Car 6, it is signed, “FROM ROBBO & DRAX”.Stencils and Wheatpasted Street Art
(image credits:sin against nature, Kriebel, Robyn Gallagher, Simon_K)
Stencil and pasted graffiti is some of the fastest tagging that can be done. The effect is usually mass produced in many areas as opposed to the writer with a spray can whose work is a one-of-a-kind. Although stencils can be created to deliver any message, many of the holiday ones have a sharp sarcastic, humorous, or political edge.Storefront Graffiti
(image credits:??? flowinlikeanocean,kewlio )
In cases such as these, graffiti is celebrated not as vandalism but as works of street art. Sometimes store owners ask writers to display their art on the store front. Above are two examples of Christmas graffiti greetings covering the entire front of buildings, top to bottom.Legal Graffiti
(image credits:sevigraffiti,micklynch)
In some cities throughout the world, graffiti is encouraged to help keep writers out of other kinds of trouble. Walls are set up in parks for the specific purpose of inviting writers to show off their art.More Legal Graffiti
(image credits:• Christian & Cie • ,earthfromtheground)
Legal graffiti can be major and celebrated works of street art. Aerosol artists take advantage of this invite and spray their Christmas greeting for one and all to enjoy, without risking fines or jail time.
(image credits:virtualtourist, goddess_spiral, SupaDope, SupaDope,mishfit)
If given time and permission, graffiti can become a huge wall mural or a very detailed picture. Around the holidays, graffiti under the name of street murals are encouraged in many places around the globe. Certain walls or temporary “billboards” are built for the specific purpose of holiday street art.Future Art
(image credits:raezz_ki, supersolveig, outdoors webshot)
It is up to each individual to decide if graffiti is a work of art or a work of vandalism. Consider however that drawing on chalkboards are encouraged for young school children. Are these the future graffiti artists?
The fake decade!
The years from 2000 to 2009 were unified by fakeness — high-profile charlatans penetrated virtually every area of life (as Frank Rich also pointed out). From fake celebrities to fake journalists, here's a top ten of our favourite* frauds.[*Ed. note: Ravi's currently writing from London, so we'll let that slide.]
Fake journalism: on May 11, 2003, the New York Times published a 7,239 wordarticle on the frauds that Jayson Blair, a staff reporter, perpetrated while under their banner. Here's how they summed up his misdeeds:He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He lifted material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not.Those fabrications encompassed the DC sniper story, and the saga of private Jessica Lynch among 600 other pieces he wrote or contributed to. The scandal went to the top — it led to the resignation of executive editor Howell Raines. Blair is now a life coach. Which leads nicely on to:
Fake jobs: 'Life coach' is a job that can exist only in a decade with not one but two economic bubbles, and the frantic prosperity they led to. The job — which is basically therapy given by those with no qualifications — garners over 42 million results on Google. Creative coach gets almost 27 million. Accountant, to put that in perspective, gets 31 million. Even those at the top of their fields, like Tony Robbins, who's even given a TED talk, have wound up in court for misrepresenting the impact of their nice words and quizzes. This year three people died when self-help 'guru' James Arthur Ray forced them to sit in a sweltering hot tent as a 'spiritual ceremony'. Also: The Secret is bullshit. If you want something, go out and work for it. Thinking about it doesn't affect the universe. Thanks.
Fake religion: It is a small step from there to a full-blown fake religion. A fact illustrated by the rise, in column inches at least, of Scientology in the last decade — fuelled by celebrity followers like Tom Cruise, Will Smith and John Travolta. The religion (or cult, or fraudulent pyramid scheme, depending on your point of view) is like a satire on a religion. Sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard made up a bunch of tenets and a lot of jargon and now vulnerable people like Tom Cruise spend millions on upholding and promoting his ideas. Here's the religion in a nutshell: an evil galactic overlord named Xenu flew his followers to earth in DC-8 aircraft, trapped them in volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their spirits now stick to us and are the cause of human problems. Thus psychology and psychiatry are evil, and the only way to happiness is to spend hundreds of thousands to 'clear' yourself of these spirits. Fake.
Fake prosperity: what's almost more interesting than the multi-billion dollar fraud Bernie Madoff perpetrated are the many other alleged Ponzi-schemers coming out of the woodwork in Indiana(Tim Durham, pictured above with friend Ludacris) or Florida or wherever else. It seems that the idea of living a lifestyle based on nothing but plausibility — nice literature, offices full of Eames chairs and a convincing tone of voice — was a pervasive one. It's too easy to use this as a metaphor for the wider economy. Which is why I'm going to. It goes hand in hand with:
Fake celebrity: We are now so inured to pointless celebrities that this barely seems like a category — it's more like the definition of celebrity has just been widened. But a look at some of the biggest figures of the last ten years is a sobering one. Will we really tell our grandchildren that we were there when Paris Hilton got done for drink driving? How will we define her role? Heiress? Singer? Celebrity is the only word that covers it. And it's become fake.
Fake television: reality TV is not real. But the people who are desperate to get on it are, and they perpetrated their own fakeness in an attempt to become fake celebrities in a giant loop of fakeness. The Heene family captivated the media (us very much included) when they pretended their son had been swept aloft in a giant balloon. The Salahis captivated the media (us very much included) when it was revealed that their gatecrashing the White House was the last in a long line of frauds and switches they'd pulled. Both sets of people were involved with the murky world of reality TV — and producers vowed to vet their 'characters' more carefully in future. We bet they won't.
Fake faces: the desire to look young is not new. But this decade had Botox — its own unique version of the creams, lotions and surgeries that have been around since ancient Man looked at his or her reflection in a still pool and thought 'fuck! crow's feet!'. Directors like Martin Scorsese and Baz Luhrmann, as well as many casting directors, went as far as to publicly say they were sick of actors who could not move their faces. While there is no evidence that high profile stars like Nicole Kidman have had botox, we have used our (still expressive) eyes and come to the following conclusion — Nicole Kidman, a talented actor, can no longer move her face. She is not alone.
Fake athletes: injections of a different kind plagued sports. Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds and Manny Ramirez succumbed to steroids in baseball. And persistent rumours of less-detectable HGH use plagued countless more athletes. Even Tiger Woods' doctor was found to be involved.
Fake political outrage: do we really care if our politicians sleep around? No, we just find their hypocrisy funny. Is Sarah Palin really mortally wounded every time someone criticizes her? Almost certainly not. Is Fox News actually incensed every time something they don't like happens? No. (Glenn Beck is, we think being serious, which is worrying in a different way.) How about, for 2010—2020, we accept that people are flawed and horny, and stop the outrage-fest. That is not to say that we won't continue to laugh at dumb things politicians do. But to pretend that there's some higher moral reason for covering these stories, and call for resignations every five minutes, is immoral. Um, not immoral. Bad. Wrong. Fuck. It's hard to stop condemning things.
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