Lara Croft and rape stories: breaking down the bitch A few weeks ago, a viral blog served up a refreshingly compassionate interpretation of privilege for the Portal generation. If life were a video game, the writer John Scalzi explained, "straight white male" would be "the lowest difficulty setting there is". "This means that the default behaviours for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise," wrote Scalzi. "The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. Keep that in mind, because we’ll be coming back to it. This is a story, like so many epics, about being, and about becoming. It’s almost as if sexual assault were understood as an immutable part of human culture, painful but inevitable, rather like a young man’s first experience of heartbreak – unfortunate but ultimately benign and probably a learning experience for everyone. Being Lara
Trollarchy in the UK: the British Defamation Bill and the delusion of the public sphere [UPDATE 26.06.2102: A French version of this post is now available on the news website OWNI. As usual, thanks to Guillaume Ledit for translating it.] These days, the House of Commons has been debating an amendment to the British Defamation Bill specificially designed to tackle Internet trolls. Now website owners and internet access providers will be forced to reveal the IP and personal information of users identified as authors of ‘vile messages’. It is business as usual: whenever some ICT-related news story catches the public eye, British policy makers come up with an ad hoc law. Why mainstream media are scared of trolls In a remarkable effort to lull the general public in a false sense of understanding digital cultures, The Guardian has devoted a special session of its June 12, 2012 edition to this peculiar online phenomenon. Understandably, mainstream media have no option but to back British government liberticidal political agenda. The trolls and the online public sphere Comments
Latest Empirical Findings on Democratic Effects of the Internet This post was originally published on iRevolution Jacob Groshek from Iowa State University recently published the latest results from his research on the democratic effects of the Internet in the International Journal of Communication. A copy of Groshek’s study is available here (PDF). Groshek published an earlier study in 2009 which I blogged about here. The purpose of this blog post is to summarize Groshek’s research so I can include it in my dissertation’s literature review. Some Background: “Technological developments, especially communicative ones, have long been positioned — and even romanticized — as powerful instruments of democracy (Dunham, 1938; Lerner, 1958). The Methodology: “Though there are many ways to operationalize democracy and measure the prevalence of media technologies, this study relies principally on macro-level time–series democracy data from an historical sample that includes 72 countries, reaching back as far as 1946 in some cases, but at least from 1954 to 2003.
Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis | Wired Magazine Illustration: Thomas Ng We’re often told that the Internet has destroyed people’s patience for long, well-thought-out arguments. After all, the ascendant discussions of our day are text messages, tweets, and status updates. The popularity of this endless fire hose of teensy utterances means we’ve lost our appetite for consuming—and creating—slower, reasoned contemplation. I’m not so sure. When something newsworthy happens today—Brett Favre losing to the Jets, news of a new iPhone, a Brazilian election runoff—you get a sudden blizzard of status updates. The long take is the opposite: It’s a deeply considered report and analysis, and it often takes weeks, months, or years to produce. The long take also thrives on the long tail. The real loser here is the middle take. This trend has already changed blogging. “I save the little stuff for Twitter and blog only when I have something big to say,” as blogger Anil Dash put it. Which, despite reports to the contrary, we are.
Laurie Penny: Don't listen to what G4S say. Look at what they do - Commentators - Opinion I mention all this because G4S will shortly be patrolling the London Olympics with more than 10,000 private security agents. The British-based company, billing itself as the "world's leading international security solutions group", will be the main provider of all manner of surveillance services to the Games, which will all cost hundreds of millions to the British taxpayer – a bill which has tripled from original estimations. Questions are being asked in Parliament about G4S's human rights record, but the biggest question has yet to be raised: are we really happy for global security, from prisons to police, to be in the hands of private firms that turn immense profits from the business of physical enforcement and are accountable almost exclusively to their shareholders? The first thing you need to know about G4S is that it's enormous. This is the new face of the global for-profit security business. Technically, we are not allowed to call these people mercenaries.
Syria After the Massacre Damascus Parts of Syria are convulsed by civil war, while in other areas life continues almost as normal. At the same moment as more than 30 children had their throats cut and dozens of civilians were killed by shelling in Houla in central Syria on Friday, people in Damascus were picnicking on the slopes of Mount Qassioun, overlooking the capital. Syria yesterday denied that its forces had carried out the massacre of at least 116 people including dozens of children in Houla, claiming that the slaughter was the work of rebels. But it did not give a detailed account of what had happened that would convincingly refute allegations by insurgents, largely supported by UN monitors, that military units and militia men loyal to the government had carried out the killings. Sources in Damascus told me yesterday that they believed the attack had been carried out by regime forces in revenge for the killing of a government informant in the nearby Alawite village of Kabou a month earlier. A Long War Looms
How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet Patrick Cockburn: The attempt to topple President Assad has failed - Commentators - Opinion Severe economic sanctions were slapped on Syria's already faltering economy. Every day brought news of fresh pressure on Assad and the momentum seemed to build inexorably for a change of rule in Damascus. It has not happened. Syria will not be like Libya. "Nobody is discussing military operations," the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, said last week. What went wrong for the advocates of regime change? This has been the experience of revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries throughout the ages. Conditions are very different in Syria. In the second half of last year Assad appeared to be facing an all-powerful international coalition. The Syrian protesters did everything they could to give the impression that what happened in Libya could be repeated in Syria. One of Barack Obama's themes in the presidential campaign will be that it was his administration that killed Osama bin Laden and focused, unlike President Bush, on eliminating the perpetrators of 9/11.
Edzard Ernst: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Amongst the many misleading arguments, which are frequently used to promote useless treatments, this one occupies a prominent place. When I first heard it, I was impressed: it is succinct and elegant. In fact, it is also entirely logical: the absence of evidence for extra-terrestrial life represents no evidence that such life does not exist; just because you have not seen someone being struck by lightning does not mean that lightening does not hit people; you may never have seen the Northern Lights, yet they do exist. If the argument is correct, how can it be simultaneously misleading? The fallacy arises not from the argument itself, but from the way it is often used in the promotion of quackery. In alternative medicine, this argument is used to silence doubters and critics. This argument can appear so compelling that it is easy to forget why it is misleading. Not so in alternative medicine!
Is there Nothing Wrong with Being Religious? March 17, 2012 It feels unnatural to be reading philosopher Alain de Botton’s new book, Religion for Atheists. His title doesn’t have a ghost of a chance with me. Keeping up with scientific accounts of religion myself, I don’t need reminding that De Botton is expressing a theory that certain forms of religious life meet human needs -- the aesthetics, the communal practices, the rites of passage, the psychologies of comfort, etc. Maybe that theory is right. What disappoints me is the way that De Botton makes a huge leap from a thin theory about how religion appeals to people to an overblown claim that all people need some religion. * There’s Nothing Wrong With Religion * If De Botton is right that even atheists need religion, then there can’t be anything *that* wrong with religion. I’m mildly interested, to be sure, in the way that De Botton is surveying a few rationales for religious humanism. Consider how De Botton goes about calling for more religion in everyone’s lives. Comments:
What We Have Here Is A Failure To Replicate Scientific research is difficult to do well, and people are flawed and biased. As Carl Sagan noted, science is not just an ideal abstraction, but is very much a human endeavor, and as such is messy and imperfect. Nature itself is random and quirky and doesn’t always cooperate with our desires to penetrate its secrets. The power of science as a tool for understanding the world comes largely from the fact that it is self corrective – it doesn’t always get it right the first time, but it has the potential to fix any mistakes and get it right eventually. This fact has particularly plagued parapsychology research, whose research paradigms have not historically survived replication. The latest psi research to fall victim to a failure to replicate is Daryl Bem’s “feeling the future” research. The Experiment In early 2011 Bem published a series of 9 studies in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a prestigious psychology journal. A Bayesian Analysis Other Criticisms of Bem Dr.