Video footage of the legendary Doctor Fox lecture. "The lecture that Myron L. Fox delivered to the assembled experts had an impressive enough title: 'Mathematical Game Theory as Applied to Physician Education'. Those responsible for running the University of Southern California School of Medicine's psychiatry department's continuing education programme had taken themselves off to Lake Tahoe in northern California for their annual conference and a continuing education program. There, Fox - who was billed as an 'authority on the application of mathematics to human behaviour' - presented the first paper.
His polished performance so impressed the audience of psychiatrists, family doctors and general internists that nobody noticed that the man standing at the lectern wasn't really Myron L. Fox from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine but Michael Fox a movie actor who though having considerable experience in playing doctors in TV shows didn't know the first thing about game theory."
[Via]
posted by homunculus
on Sep 23, 2011 -
37 comments
"When legal teams need to prove or disprove the authorship of key texts, they call in the forensic linguists. Scholars in the field have tackled the disputed origins of some prestigious works, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers."
Decoding Your E-Mail Personality
Ben Zimmer, of Language Log discusses the Facebook case and
forensic linguistics in the NY Times.
[more inside]
posted by iamkimiam
on Aug 2, 2011 -
13 comments
"
On GChat, I type many things – sincere and not – that I would never say in person because it’s easy, when typing certain things into a box, to forget whom you are typing to." From
Thought Catalog, writer Caroline Bankoff lists 45 things she thinks about when she thinks about google's chat service.
[more inside]
posted by Potomac Avenue
on Jan 6, 2011 -
34 comments
"
Voice of San Diego reporter Adrian Florido set out to find a family,
he writes, "whose experience could illustrate
the day-to-day challenge for Burmese refugees" in San Diego, since "more than 200 Burmese families have arrived [in that city] since 2006." In the process, Florido met a 24-year-old man named Har Sin" who was unable to hear, speak, read, write or use sign language, and wound up writing a two-part story about him:
In a New Land, Hoping to Hear and
Breaking Free of a Life Without Language.
The story is available as a downloadable pdf: A Silent Journey Series. / Via The Kicker, the daily blog of the Columbia Journalism Review [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Oct 13, 2010 -
5 comments
...and there was just rope everywhere--it went around the whales mouth, around the whale's head, across her eye, over her back wrapped around the pectoral fins, all the way down to its tail. I thought there was no hope, there was no chance, we're looking at a dead whale, the whale just doesn't know it yet--but I knew that I had to try. ...It was a very surreal moment looking down and seeing the 20 crab traps and buoys just disappear into the abyss... And just like that, the whale was gone. ...I'm spinning around, where'd she go, where'd she go ? ...Now here's where the story takes a pretty startling turn. ...Next thing I know there's this fifty ton whale coming right at me...
From about 4:00 to 14:30 in nearly 23 minutes of the segment,
Animal Blessings--in
mp3 here, all 20 megs of it. Or you can try the podcast at
RadioLab: Animal Minds. Either way, you are in for a most truly awesome anecdote. And listen to the whole program to have some back and forth science dropped on you in regards to what we think we know about what and how animals think.
[more inside]
posted by y2karl
on May 26, 2010 -
69 comments
M. Sartre goes to Hollywood. In 1958, John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a biopic of Sigmund Freud. "The
Huston-Sartre collaboration fell apart in 1959, when Sartre travelled to Huston's home in Ireland to work on the script. The two didn't work well together. 'There was no such thing as a conversation with him,' Huston later recalled. 'He talked incessantly, and there was no interrupting him. You'd wait for him to catch his breath, but he wouldn't.' Meanwhile Sartre, in his letters to Simone de Beauvoir, described Huston as 'perfectly vacant, literally incapable of speaking to those whom he has invited.'"
[
via Bookslut] [more inside]
posted by Paragon
on Mar 1, 2010 -
27 comments
Shoot It! Create and mail a real [paper!] postcard from anywhere and to anyone around the world.
posted by ColdChef
on Aug 12, 2009 -
34 comments
Recently, there have been a host of websites that delight in exposing the inanity and stupidity of our society. There is the granddaddy,
Overheard in New York, which recounts silly conversations heard in the Big Apple, as well as a
host of similar sites.
There are now a variety of such websites, dedicated to different aspects of our society.
[more inside]
posted by reenum
on Jul 28, 2009 -
51 comments
"Web professionals are often expected to be “always on”—always working, absorbing information, and honing new skills. Unless our work and personal lives are carefully balanced, however, the physical and mental effects of an "always on" life can be debilitating." Burnout: Running On Empty [more inside]
posted by netbros
on May 27, 2009 -
56 comments
"Thanks to tremendous progress achieved by the General Packet Radio System (GPRS), the wireless communication protocol, it is now possible for Africans to send articles and images (still and moving) about events taking place in their countries without using a computer and without having internet connection. Under those circumstances, the bigger the number of people expressing their opinions through that technology, the stronger becomes democracy, and the more valuable is the contribution to good governance efforts in Africa" -
Voices of Africa, Mobile stories and videos from Africa. Quote above from article
Mobile Reporters in Africa.
posted by infini
on Jul 27, 2007 -
11 comments
Oceangram is billed as an "online message in a bottle website." Send an anonymous message and it floats to another user in the world. They will add to it and it floats to another and so on. You'll get a bottle sent to you and you can add to it. [mi]
posted by daninnj
on Aug 5, 2006 -
11 comments
"... we are sweeping everything under the carpet, but the oddness is cropping up all over the place. And then, the carpet starts to move…".
Michael Haneke, "le manipulateur" who introduced his latest film,
Caché, at Cannes with a half-amused “
I wish you a disturbing evening”, is the proponent of a "
cinema of disturbance". A cinema of
loving self-mutilation, where
time is non-linear and everything happens in
long take shots; in Haneke's world, guilt destroys lives
decades after the original sin. All his male characters are "Georges" and his female characters are either "Evas" or "Annas", "
because I lack fantasy". Unsurprisingly, he is a
Bresson and Tarkovsky fan. He'll direct
"Don Giovanni" at the Paris Opera in early 2006: "In 20 years of working in the theater, I only staged one comedy, and that was my single failure".
posted by matteo
on Nov 18, 2005 -
19 comments
