English riots 2011: new research shows why crowd behaviour isn’t contagious Bad behaviour can spread quickly. Riots and uprisings – and violence and aggression more generally – can grow and proliferate in such a way that they’re often described as being “contagious”, like a disease. In fact, contagion is one the most persuasive metaphors for explaining collective behaviour. It seems to capture something so fundamental in human behaviour that it is invoked to explain both the spread of simple behaviours like smiling and yawning, and more complex interactions such as the spread of ideas in society or rapid changes in financial markets. But despite the apparent success of this metaphor, research evidence suggests that such language actually conceals more than it reveals. Specifically, new research my colleagues and I have carried out on the August 2011 riots in England suggests the violence did not spread mindlessly. In this early usage, we can see the defining features of the contagion concept and some of its problems. A new account
What is a malaphor? It's not rocket surgery! Have you ever mixed up your idioms and come out with something slightly… odd? Maybe you meant to comment on the relative trustworthiness of an acquaintance, but instead of saying ‘I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him’ – i.e. not even a little – you crossed this with ‘I wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole’, and ended up telling the world at large that you ‘wouldn’t trust him with a bargepole’. An altogether different kettle of worms. But while your newly coined expression may technically be incorrect, it still manages to get your point across; if you don’t trust him even a little, why would you trust him with bargepole? This phenomenon of mixing idioms has a name and it’s called a malaphor. And it’s a word that is on our radar, which means while it does not currently boast a definition in any of our dictionaries, our industrious team of lexicographers are tracking the word’s usage in anticipation of the moment that it meets our entry page requirements. It’s not rocket surgery!
Facing disasters: lessons from a Bangladeshi island The death toll of Bangladesh’s brutal monsoon season keeps growing. Authorities estimate that flooding has killed at least 120 people and affected some 5 million others since mid-July. Disasters are common in Bangladesh. These days, climate change is making such events both more frequent and more intense for Bangladeshis. In a global effort to reduce such hazards, the United Nations has crafted the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience, a 15-year plan to reduce the human, social and economic impacts of disasters. Adopted in 2015, this international strategy aims to help countries that are particularly vulnerable to climate change prepare for the challenges they face. Our ongoing study, which began in 2013, offers some insight into their reasoning. Life on Mazer Char One study site from our nationwide research painfully demonstrates this point: Mazer Char, a delta island in Pirojpur district, is located about 330 kilometres southwest of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital.
For a primer on how to make fun of Nazis, look to Charlie Chaplin White nationalists and neo-Nazis are having their moment. Former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke is back, yet again, in the media spotlight, while newer figures such as white supremacist Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell are broadcasting their views via social media feeds and niche internet channels. Many Americans are wondering if this resurgent movement should be ignored, feared or fought. What about laughter? While the August 12 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia was no joke, the images of armor-clad, tiki-torch-wielding white nationalists did give fodder to late-night talk show hosts and editorial cartoonists. In a different age, another ascendant white supremacist – Adolf Hitler – used a combination of garbled ideas, stagy phrasing and arch gestures to bewitch much of his nation, even as the rest of the world looked on in disbelief and terror. Chaplin homes in on his target In late 1940, producer-director-star Charlie Chaplin released “The Great Dictator.”
The First Sunday Newspaper In The World Was? Answer: The Observer Today, it’s tough to imagine a world without a Sunday edition of the paper. The arrival of the thick edition of the paper with a wide range of news, Sunday comics, sales circulars, and, come the holidays, giant glossy Christmas toy advertisements, has been a staple experience for people throughout most of the 20th century and into the present. Yet once upon a time, the idea of a Sunday paper was entirely unheard of. Papers published the news during the week, large papers might have a Saturday edition, and nobody published on Sundays. While other newspapers later followed suit, Britain, to this day, maintains a curious distinction with its newspapers.
The Promise delivers but still divides | Television & radio The Promise is a riveting drama likely be judged according to the preconceptions of the people who watch it. Photograph: Channel 4 It's hard to think of a more politically sensitive subject for a primetime TV series, and Peter Kosminsky's The Promise (Channel 4) has gone boldly where those who have gone before bear the scars. The Israel-Palestine issue divides and polarises like little else. So it's a real achievement that this four-parter is so well-grounded in the history of the world's most intractable conflict. But the problem with the past, as someone once pointed out, is that it's not even past. Kosminsky's version of Britain's 30-year rule over Palestine – "what they used to call Israel" – is straight enough. The Promise's hero, paratroop Sergeant Len Matthews, ended the second world war in Germany, where footage of emaciated corpses being bulldozed into mass graves in Belsen establishes Nazi atrocities as the indispensable background to what happened in the Middle East.
The Most Expensive Typo In History Was Created By...? Answer: NASA Programmer When it comes to typos, there’s no shortage of costly examples in history. Sometimes it takes the form of errors in advertising. A car dealership in New Mexico once sent out scratch-off tickets to 50,000 potential customers where one of them should have won a thousand dollars. Instead, every ticket was, erroneously, a thousand dollar winner (for a grand total of 50 million dollars)—the dealership cleaned up the mess by issuing a total of 250,000 dollars worth of prize money to all the ticket holders. Other times, there are bookkeeping errors. If you really want to hit the grand slam though, that’s all chump change compared to the power wielded by NASA programmers. Mere moments after launching a hulking Atlas LV-3 Agena-B rocket packed with fuel, it began responding erratically to guidance system commands from Ground Control. How expensive was the catastrophic failure of the Mariner 1 launch?
Solar eclipse 2017: an event so awe-inspiring it can turn people into addicts... Asking an eclipse chaser why they go to such great lengths to spend a minute or two beneath a darkened sky is like asking a person why they bothered to fall in love. Words, they stress, are mere approximations; it’s impossible to actually describe the feeling. But they try anyway: I didn’t have a choice, it just happened. You won’t get it until you see one. Unlike anything else. Gobsmacking. It takes us to another place. It really is a sort of high without ingesting anything. I hear the words “overwhelming” more times than I can count from this group of people who proudly self-identify as addicts. He calls the affliction “umbraphillia” and himself an “umbraphile,” a lover of the moon’s shadow (“umbra” is Latin for “shadow”). “You’re feeling celestial mechanics happen around you,” Schneider continues, his voice becoming full of an urgency I rarely hear in interviews, especially from scientists. It’s a lifestyle The experience of a solar eclipse itself may be personal and even solitary.
The Military Could Be About to Make Solar Power Way Better Giant solar farms are springing up all over the country, and companies like Tesla are making it easier for the average consumer to buy rooftop solar panels to power their own homes. But solar is still only around 2 percent of the energy market, and the high tech involved means progress can sometimes be slow. That's why it's great news that the military is looking to increase its use of solar panels. The Department of Energy recently released a comprehensive look at the U.S. energy grid and concluded that the military needs to rely more on solar power in order to eliminate weaknesses in the grid. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below While this report is focused mainly on the ways the military can safeguard against electrical outages or attacks, it's also a sign of how far solar power has come in recent years. That by itself is great news for the solar industry, but if the military is adopting solar power generation then the industry may be about to kick into high gear.
You know things are bad when Stacey Dooley comes to town… | Slugger O'Toole You get the feeling they must be tripping over camera crews in loyalist areas. The recent DUP/Conservative deal has turned the eyes of the UK media towards Northern Ireland. A steady stream of film crews has been making the trip recently. The latest documentary is from Stacey Dooley. I don’t know about you, but I always get a wave of despair sweeping over me when I watch these shows. The show had some moments of comic relief. The star of the show was Ruth, the daughter of Ian Paisley Jr’s election agent. But to be fair most of the people interviewed had pretty moderate views when it came to gay marriage.
Booze in Space: The Universe Is Drowning in Alcohol A cold beer on a hot day or a whisky nightcap beside a coal fire. A well earned glass can loosen your thinking until you feel able to pierce the mysteries of life, death, love and identity. In moments like these, alcohol and the cosmic can seem intimately entwined. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the universe is awash with alcohol. The chemical elements around us reflect the history of the universe and the stars within it. These have mostly been manufactured since the Big Bang through nuclear reactions in the hot dense cores of stars. Lighter ones such as carbon and oxygen are synthesised in the life cycles of very many ordinary stars – including our own sun eventually. Which is great news for booze enthusiasts. Interstellar intoxication The spaces between stars are known as the interstellar medium. Yet while we tend to focus on the colourful parts of nebulae like Orion where stars are emerging, this is not where the alcohol is coming from. Soot and fire water
Retracing Ernest Shackleton's Famous Antarctic Expedition in South Georgia Island Eventually, the trail I followed took a turn and plummeted down a slope for several hundred feet, crossing snow, mud, and loose scree. At the bottom of the steep hill the ground leveled off and ran flat for a mile all the way back to the ocean, where the shell of the Stromness whaling station stood waiting. It is a mere shadow of what it must have been when the explorer himself trudged in after months brutal survival and hardship. It would be another three months before a ship could reach the crew of the Endurance still stranded on Elephant Island, but when all was said and done, not a single soul was lost. An Island Reclaimed By the Wild By the mid-1960s, the whaling industry had essentially abandoned South Georgia altogether. A blue whale on the flensing plan at Grytviken, South Georgia. GettyScott Polar Research Institute/University of Cambridge In the years that followed, the island began to reclaim the areas once inhabited by humans. Kraig Becker
Lip-syncing Obama: New tools turn audio clips into realistic video Engineering | News releases | Research | Science | Technology July 11, 2017 University of Washington researchers have developed new algorithms that solve a thorny challenge in the field of computer vision: turning audio clips into a realistic, lip-synced video of the person speaking those words. As detailed in a paper to be presented Aug. 2 at SIGGRAPH 2017, the team successfully generated highly-realistic video of former president Barack Obama talking about terrorism, fatherhood, job creation and other topics using audio clips of those speeches and existing weekly video addresses that were originally on a different topic. “These type of results have never been shown before,” said Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, an assistant professor at the UW’s Paul G. In a visual form of lip-syncing, the system converts audio files of an individual’s speech into realistic mouth shapes, which are then grafted onto and blended with the head of that person from another existing video.