Not-for-profit, activist organization seeks THREE freelance videographers with their own video camera & tripod for taping of presentations at upcoming Socialism 2009 conference in June. Professionals or budding professionals. [You mean students?]
PAY: $200 per day*
CAMERA REQUIREMENTS: [Professional $10K cameras listed]
LOCATION: Wyndham Hotel
(* Socialism 2009 is an advocate of unions and union rates-of-pay. However, as a non-profit, our budget is super tight, and 3 shooters over 3 days adds up. Can you work with us on this?)
No, I can't 'work with you on this'. If I weren't so lazy, I'd look up the Wyndham Hotel to see if it IS a Union hall. That would be funny.
Apparently, the ‘close doors’ button on most elevators do not actually work. You may have already expected that pearl of wisdom. But why are they there? They are there to give passengers the illusion of control. We press it but the control mechanisms decide when the doors should actually shut according to their pre-programmed cycles.
Human brains are finely tuned belief engines. Millions of years of evolution [or 6,000, depending on your Board of Education] have honed our grey stuffs to spot causation in the world and form beliefs about what makes cause and effect. It helps us survive when we notice that certain events always follow other events. Such knowledge helps us reliably find food, mates, shelter and conspiracy theories. But our brains are taking efficient shortcuts. We filter out and ignore failures and remember and reinforce successes. And most of the time this works. But beliefs formed in this way can lead to mistakes. Pressing the button may well be a false conclusion drawn from past experience because of a failure to spot hidden causes and alternatives to the obvious. Maybe it really is just the elevator closing the door without intervention?
This all is related to the illusion of control psychological effect studied by Ellen Langer and others, where people are shown to believe they have some control over things they clearly don’t: in most cases, a button does afford us control, and we would rationally expect it to, and if we’re used to it not doing anything, we either no longer bother pressing it, or we still press it every time “on the off-chance that one of these days it’ll work”.
By now you should be wondering why even install the close door button if it doesn’t work?
There are a few options:
The button really does work, it’s just set on time delay. Suppose the elevator is set so that the doors close automatically after five seconds. The close-door button can be set to close the doors after two or three seconds. The button may be operating properly when you push it, but because there’s still a delay, you don’t realize it.
The button is broken. Since a broken close-door button will not render the elevator inoperable and thus does not necessitate an emergency service call, it may remain broken for weeks.
The button has been disconnected, usually because the building owner received too many complaints from passengers who had somebody slam the doors on them.
The button was never wired up in the first place.
But thinking about this more generally: how often are deceptive buttons/controls/options – deliberate false affordance – used strategically in interaction design? Are there any examples of products (other than, say, children’s toys) deliberately designed with fake controls to make the user feel in charge even though he/she isn’t?
This says a lot to me about war. Sometimes when the poo-poo hits the fan you have to get out and be ready to fight right away. And yes, I know what I'm talking about. The Soldier on the left was asleep at what is probably a small patrol base in Afghanistan when Taliban scum began shooting. The Soldier threw on his OTV and helmet and got to his firing position immediately. There is no time for fashion in a firefight. I say good for him for getting right in the mix and protecting his fellow American Soldier. Nice boxers!
"Lost's Elizabeth Mitchell and Alan Tudyk of Dollhouse play Homeland Security agents investigating a terrorist sleeper cell in New York. Morris Chestnut is a businessman whose shady past plays into the aliens' arrival. Joel Gertsch is a priest who struggles with his faith in the wake of an alien encounter, and then he's thrust into a conspiracy when a dying man comes into his church and gives him info on the aliens. And Morena Baccarin is the leader of the aliens, named Anna. Scott Wolf is a journalist. The whole thing is played very seriously and shot in a very J.J. Abrams style. [AICN]"
Whoa- does that mean lots of lens flare and very little plot?
Oh good, cause I was afraid they were going to screw it up.
It appears that initial reports about the EPA memo missed a key passage. The internal memo, marked “Attorney Client Privilege”, did warn about the negative impact EPA regulation of CO2 would have on the economy. But The Hill reports that it also challenged the notion that the EPA or anyone else had proven CO2 or other greenhouse gases to be harmful to humans:
An EPA finding last month that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health rests on dubious assumptions and could have negative economic impacts, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) warned.
The memo has no listed author but is marked “Deliberative–Attorney Client Privilege.” A spokesman for OMB told Dow Jones Newswires that the brief is a “conglomeration of counsel we’ve received from various agencies” about the EPA finding, the conclusions of which would trigger regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
The author(s) of the memo suggest the EPA did not thoroughly examine the relationship between greenhouse gases and human health.
“In the absence of a strong statement of the standards being applied in this decision, there is concern that EPA is making a finding based on…’harm’ from substances that have no demonstrated direct health effects,” the memo says, adding that the “scientific data that purports to conclusively establish” that link was from outside EPA.
The memo then borders on secular heresy by suggesting that if warming was indeed the result of man’s activity, it may have beneficial effects rather than being a net negative:
Finally, in language sure to anger climate change activists, the memo questions whether climate change might bring benefits that would mitigate the costs.
“To the extent that climate change alters out environment, it will create incentives for innovation and adaption that mitigate the damages,” the memo reads. “The [EPA finding] should note this possibility[.] … It might be reasonable to conclude that Alaska will benefit from warmer winters for both health and economic reasons,” the authors note.
Senator John Barasso calls the memo a “smoking gun”, and notes the memo insists that the EPA has shown no deleterious effects from the gases Lisa Jackson wants regulated:
To defeat this cap-and-trade garbage, we must embrace this EPA report that casts doubt on global warming science. And Science in this case means "faith." ClimateFaith(tm). Global Warming has never been about the environment or saving the planet. It's always been about reparations and control.
