BBC Radio 4's Digital Human
For Todd Matthews, it all started with a ghost story shared among teenagers. It was Halloween night 1987. A 17-year-old Matthews listened as friends tried to spook each other with scary tales – but one story told was true. Lori Riddle, the woman who would become Matthews’ wife within a year, spoke of the dead body her father stumbled upon in Scott County, Kentucky in the spring of 1968. “It was a strange story. Investigators were unable to identify the murdered woman, making her one of the estimated 40,000 nameless people laying dead in the medical examiners’ and coroner’s offices across the country. “I thought there was one. For 30 years the slain woman was known as “Tent Girl” – a reference to the tent bag that held her decomposed body. “It was a name on a grave, but it was ‘Tent Girl,’ not her real name,” he said. Her death stirred memories of his brother and sister who passed away as infants. “She was no different from my siblings,” he said. Read more:
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Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT
Philip J. Hilts, the director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and a former science reporter for The New York Times and The Washington Post, has announced that he will retire at the end of June. Hilts, who took over the program in 2008, expanded its international reach and added training in video and audio storytelling. And under his leadership, the number of applicants for the year-long Knight Science Journalism fellowships for science reporters grew from about 80 per year to about 150 per year. "The Knight Program has been a tremendous asset to MIT, and a powerful resource for our understanding of the relationship between science and technology and the public," said Deborah Fitzgerald, the Kenan Sahin Dean at the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. "I am...
« Perdre son temps sur Internet », nouveau cours d'une fac américaine
Chaque mercredi du prochain semestre, des étudiants de la réputée université de Pennsylvanie devront, lors d'un cours de trois heures, surfer sans but précis sur le World Wide Web, avec le soutien actif de leur professeur, Kenneth Goldsmith. Ce critique américain et poète reconnu, qui fonda en 1996 le site UbuWeb, est l'initiateur de ce nouveau module du département de littérature, baptisé « Perdre son temps sur Internet », complémentaire d'un atelier d'écriture. « Je suis très fatigué de lire chaque semaine dans le New York Times des articles qui nous font culpabiliser de passer tant de temps sur Internet, et de nous disperser. Il est complètement faux de dire qu'Internet nous rend plus bêtes. Le matériau glané en ligne permettra de faire œuvre de littérature. « Pourrions-nous reconstruire notre autobiographie en utilisant seulement Facebook ?
Hi, I’m Claire Barratt | Claire Barratt
you may remember me from such projects as…. Salvage Squad, C4 (3 series x 10 x 60 minutes of 8pm engineering then repeated endlessly on Discovery) An eccentric mix of hard-core engineering, dusty archive and hands-on greasy good fun. 30 projects each got an hour to strut their stuff so we managed to cover an awful lot. Salvage Squad was really all about the people who had fallen in love with the machines and convincing the audience to love them too. History really roared to life as neglected classic vehicles were restored to their former glory. The Spotter’s Guide to Urban Engineering, various publishers – UK, USA, Australia Infrastructure and Technology in the Modern Landscape. Britain’s Secret Treasures, ITV (6 x 60 minutes) A top 50 countdown of archaeological discoveries made by the British public. As an Industrial Archaeologist I’d rather be tackling a blast furnace than digging around in the dirt for pot shards but this was pretty good. History Detectives, BBC Two (6 x 60 minutes)
Humans in Design
A classic nudge - a tiny behavioural intervention that leads people to a particular behaviour but doesn’t force it - is the placement of graphs on power bills. Specifically graphs that compare your current rate of use to your neighbours and, sometimes, yourself. But can a tiny graph really work? Yes it can. This little intervention has been proven to lead to a decrease in power use that is at least somewhat sustained over time. The psychological reason that this works is multifaceted, but the main explanations I saw was the impact of social heuristics; specifically the imitate-the-majority (follow the herd) and imitate-the-successful heuristic (follow the leader). So, knowing about this, I thought it was cool when a couple of years ago I saw graphs appearing on my utility bills in Australia. Things got interesting to me when we moved to from Brisbane to Melbourne. This got me thinking of the current intellectual debate on what drives behaviour. So what’s the lesson here?
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