March 30, 2012
Communal reinforcement is a social phenomenon in which a concept or idea is repeatedly asserted in a community, regardless of whether sufficient empirical evidence has been presented to support it. Over time, the concept or idea is reinforced to become a strong belief in many people’s minds, and may be regarded by the members of the community as fact. Often, the concept or idea may be further reinforced by publications in the mass media, books, or other means of communication. The phrase ‘millions of people can’t all be wrong’ is indicative of the common tendency to accept a communally reinforced idea without question, which often aids in the widespread acceptance of urban legends, myths, and rumors.
Communal reinforcement works both for true and false concepts or ideas, making the communal reinforcement of an idea independent of its truth value. Therefore, the statement that many persons in a given communities share in a common belief is not indicative of it being valid or false information’s. An idea can be accepted and spread throughout a community regardless of the validity of the claim.
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March 29, 2012
A debate exists within the United States government, and American society at large, over whether the one-cent coin, commonly known as the penny, should be eliminated as a unit of currency in the United States. Two bills introduced in the U.S. Congress would have ceased production of pennies, but neither bill was approved. Such a bill would leave the nickel, at five cents, as the lowest-value coin. The chief argument for its elimination is the fact that pennies are produced at a loss. In 2012, it costs about 2.4 cents to mint a penny. By 2007, even the price of the raw materials it is made of exceeded the face value, so there is a risk that coins are illegally melted down for raw materials.
Additionally, pennies are of limited utility; they are not accepted by all vending machines or many toll booths, and pennies are generally not accepted in bulk. In addition, people often do not use cents to pay at all; they may simply use larger denominations and get pennies in return. Pennies end up sitting in jars or are thrown away and are not in circulation. The purpose of the monetary system is to facilitate exchange, but… the penny no longer serves that purpose. Many countries outside the United States have chosen to remove low-value coins from circulation including Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia.
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March 28, 2012
John Heartfield (1891 – 1968) born Helmut Herzfeld, was a pioneer in the use of art as a political weapon. His photomontages were anti-Nazi anti-Fascist statements.
Heartfield also created book jackets for authors such as Upton Sinclair, as well as stage sets for such noted playwrights as Bertold Brecht and Erwin Piscator.
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March 28, 2012
Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung (b. 1976) is a Chinese-American new media artist who lives and works in New York. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Arts degree from San Francisco State University. Hung’s works are digital collages of popular culture and current events.
His media includes hi-definition video animation, video games, net.art, digital graphics and mixed-media installations. Hung has been called the ‘John Heartfield of Digital Era.’ He loans 5 percent of his art earnings to low-income entrepreneurs listed on Kiva Microfunds.
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March 27, 2012
Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is a Chinese contemporary artist, active in sculpture, installation, architecture, curating, photography, film, and social, political and cultural criticism. Ai collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron as the artistic consultant on the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics.
As a political activist, he has been highly and openly critical of the Chinese Government’s stance on democracy and human rights. He has investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of so-called ‘tofu-skin schools’ in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2011, following his arrest at Beijing airport, he was held for over two months without any official charges being filed; officials alluded to their allegations of ‘economic crimes’ (tax evasion).
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March 27, 2012
The Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures was initially a humorous hoax from the interactive encyclopedia ‘Baidu Baike’ which became a popular and widespread Internet meme in China in early 2009. These hoaxes, ten in number, originated in response to increasingly pervasive and draconian online censorship in China, and have become an icon of citizens’ resistance to censorship. The meme initially began as a series of vandalized contributions to ‘Baidu Baike,’ through the creation of humorous articles describing a series of fictional creatures, each with names vaguely referring to Chinese profanities (utilizing homophones and characters using different tones). Eventually, images, videos (such as faux-documentaries) and even a song regarding aspects of the meme were released.
It was thought that the Baidu hoaxes were written in response to recent strict enforcements of keyword filters in China, introduced in 2009, which attempted to eliminate all forms of profanity. The ‘Baidu Baike’ ‘articles’ initially began with ‘Four Mythical Creatures’ (‘Grass Mud Horse,’ ‘French-Croatian Squid,’ ‘Small Elegant Butterfly,’ and ‘Chrysanthemum Silkworms’), and were later extended to ten. The memes became widely discussed on Chinese Internet forums, and most netizens concluded that the initial aim of the hoaxes were to satirize and ridicule the pointlessness of the new keyword filters. The meme is interpreted by most Chinese online as a form of direct protest rather than motiveless intentional disruption to ‘Baidu’ services. After the hoaxes were posted, news of the articles spread quickly online on joke websites, popular web portals and forums.
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March 27, 2012
The Grass Mud Horse or Caoníma, is a Chinese Internet meme widely used as a form of symbolic defiance of the widespread Internet censorship in China. It is a play on the Mandarin language words which translate literally to, ‘fuck your mother,’ and is one of the so-called ’10 mythical creatures’ created in a hoax article on ‘Baidu Baike’ (a collaborative encyclopedia) in early 2009 whose names form obscene puns. Official ‘cleanup’ of the internet, which threatens the Caonima, has led Chinese internet users to create other ‘Mud Horse’ variants, such as the ‘Rolling Mud Horse’ and ‘Working Mud Horse,’ which are also puns for ‘fuck your mother.’
The ‘China Digital Times’ sees Caonima as the ‘de facto mascot of netizens in China fighting for free expression, inspiring poetry, photos and videos, artwork, lines of clothing, and more.’ It is an illustration of the ‘resistance discourse’ of Chinese internet users with ‘increasingly dynamic and sometimes surprising presence of an alternative political discourse: images, frames, metaphors and narratives that have been generated from Internet memes [that] undermine the values and ideology that reproduce compliance with the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian regime, and, as such, force an opening for free expression and civil society in China.’
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March 27, 2012
Very erotic very violent is a Chinese internet meme that originated from a news report on China Central Television’s flagship ‘Xinwen Lianbo’ program (a daily news show) allegedly quoting a schoolgirl describing a web page. On the Chinese Internet, this incident was widely parodied and weakened the credibility of the state broadcaster’s newscasts. This Chinese phrase follows the form of ‘very good very mighty,’ a snowclone (cliché template) for Internet slang popularized earlier that year.
In late 2007, ‘Xinwen Lianbo’ aired a report about the wide and easy availability of explicit content on the internet. The report appealed to juristic institutions and those seeking legislation in order to purify the internet environment. In the report, a young student described a pop-up advertisement she saw as being ‘very erotic, [and] very violent.’ After the airing of the report, internet users began to ridicule and parody the quote and question the program’s credibility, believing that it would be unlikely for a person of that age to find a web page to be both erotic and violent at the same time.
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March 27, 2012
Vagina dentata is Latin for ‘toothed vagina.’ Various cultures have folk tales about women with toothed vaginas, frequently told as cautionary tales warning of the dangers of sex with strange women and to discourage the act of rape. Jung disciple Erich Neumann relays one such myth in which ‘a fish inhabits the vagina of the Terrible Mother; the hero is the man who overcomes the Terrible Mother, breaks the teeth out of her vagina, and so makes her into a woman.’ The legend also appears in the mythology of the Chaco and Guiana tribes.
In some versions, the hero leaves one tooth. An Ainu language (of Japan and Russia) tale containing this element was published as ‘The Island of Women’ by Basil Hall Chamberlain, where it was described as a well known Japanese tale by E. B. Tylor. In his book, ‘The Wimp Factor,’ Stephen J. Ducat expresses the view that these myths express the threat sexual intercourse poses for men who, although entering triumphantly, always leave diminished. The grain of truth in these stories is that dermoid cysts, which can occur anywhere in the body, often contain teeth. Although there are no documented sightings, it is theoretically possible for a tooth-containing dermoid cyst to develop in a woman’s vagina.
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March 26, 2012
Librarian.net was founded in 1999 by Jessamyn Charity West (b. 1968), an American librarian and blogger. West characterizes librarian.net as generally ‘anti-censorship, pro-freedom of speech, pro-porn (for lack of a better way to explain that we don’t find the naked body shameful), antiglobalization, anti-outsourcing, anti-Dr. Laura, pro-freak, pro-social responsibility, and just generally pro-information and in favor of the profession getting a better image.’
‘Wired’ described her as ‘on the front lines in battling the USA PATRIOT Act,’ particularly the provisions that allow warrantless searches of library records. The act not only prohibits libraries from notifying the subjects of such searches, it prohibits them from disclosing to the public whether any such searches have been made. In protest, West created a number of notices that libraries can post which she suggests are ‘technically legal.’ One of them, for example, reads: ‘The FBI has not been here. Watch very closely for the removal of this sign.’ The Vermont Library Association provided copies of this sign to every public library in Vermont.
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March 26, 2012
The Onion is an American news satire organization. It is a newspaper and a website featuring satirical articles reporting on international, national, and local news, in addition to a non-satirical entertainment section known as The A.V. Club (which features interviews and reviews of various newly released media, as well as other weekly features). Since 2007, the organization has been publishing satirical news audios and videos online, as the ‘Onion News Network.’
The Onion’s articles comment on current events, both real and fictional. It parodies such traditional newspaper features as editorials, man-on-the-street interviews, and stock quotes on a traditional newspaper layout with an AP-style editorial voice. Much of its humor depends on presenting everyday events as newsworthy and by playing on commonly used phrases, as in the headline ‘Drugs Win Drug War.’
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March 23, 2012
Confirmation bias is a tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. For example, in reading about gun control, people usually prefer sources that affirm their existing attitudes. They also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position.
Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series), and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
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