Business & Finance

Hey. So, here's an article to get you started on the theme for this week:
http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105

If you're completely financially and economically illiterate, first off, congratulations, you've avoided the indoctrination. However, your ignorance is the weapon the elite use to make things worse for the rest of us. It would be helpful if you knew what the sequester is, here's a relatively good article about it that you could read:
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/03/the-sequester-explained

Of course I've written something about it, though it was called the 'fiscal cliff' at the time:
http://theendisalwaysnear.blogspot.com/2012/12/its-not-end-of-world.html

If you feel you need a little lesson in economics, this post I wrote isn't too bad if I do say so myself:
http://theendisalwaysnear.blogspot.com/2011/11/crack-in-curtain.html

I've also written quite extensively about inequality, how it came about and where it's heading. If you've got the time you could browse some of these:
http://theendisalwaysnear.blogspot.com/2010/09/lessons-on-killing-golden-goose.html
http://theendisalwaysnear.blogspot.com/2011/09/let-them-eat-ipads.html
http://theendisalwaysnear.blogspot.com/2010/12/bah-humbug.html
http://theendisalwaysnear.blogspot.com/2010/12/fix-needs-leak.html

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

By Joseph E. StiglitzIllustration by Stephen Doyle

THE FAT AND THE FURIOUS The top 1 percent may have the best houses, educations, and lifestyles, says the author, but “their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.
Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in which most citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.
First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.
Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead.
None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had. They also worry about strong government—one that could use its powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes.
Economists are not sure how to fully explain the growing inequality in America. The ordinary dynamics of supply and demand have certainly played a role: laborsaving technologies have reduced the demand for many “good” middle-class, blue-collar jobs. Globalization has created a worldwide marketplace, pitting expensive unskilled workers in America against cheap unskilled workers overseas. Social changes have also played a role—for instance, the decline of unions, which once represented a third of American workers and now represent about 12 percent.
But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride. Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest.
When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it’s tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we’re doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.
America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.

Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.
In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry. These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.
As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.
Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.
The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Media Presentation

Hey everyone. This is for the 1MA/3 class. If you're 1MA/4 your article for this week is here. 1MA/3 here's 2 articles to read for Thursday:

http://socyberty.com/society/fear-and-consumption-in-the-mass-media/
http://dreamera.hubpages.com/hub/bowling-for-columbine-culture-of-fear

Fear and Consumption in the Mass Media

by Carlos h in Society, November 20, 2008

Does the mass media have an interest in keeping the public fearful?

Plot to blow up Heathrow jets, T.V girl’s stalking, Brit woman executed by Taliban, Alarm as violent crime soars, City worker kills wife ­­- just another average week or so in the newspaper headlines, as we are left scarcely wondering where the saying “no news is good news” comes from.  More often than not, what we read about in the paper, and what we see in television reports is in many ways morbid, in most ways heart-wrenching, often tragic or saddening and rarely without the stigma of fear attached.  But why? – Surely there is some good in the world? -  We all know that there is.  Surely the mass media can find something, many things to report on that are positive and comforting?  Or is it simply in their interest to keep the public fearful?

Consider this:  Every day, your chosen newspaper only ever reported on good deeds and upward turns, the news you watched at night only ever showed pleasant and heart-warming images, and ever so slowly you felt safer and more secure with each passing day.  Eventually, you stopped watching the news and would rarely read the paper, as you found less and less reason to pay money to be comforted.  – The mass media relies on our fear to create consumption.  If we weren’t worried about where not to go at night, if we weren’t fearful of terrorism coming to our homes, if we weren’t worried about murderers, rapists, paedophiles and other criminals, if we weren’t worried about our kids becoming drug addicts, if we didn’t fear rising oil prices or dire inflation and economic times we would rarely find the need to find out where, how, when and why it was going to happen next.  Granted, the mass media plays a certain role in ensuring public safety by allowing that we know these often gruesome facts, but how often are the headlines and more ambiguous details misconstrued in ways that pique our fears, and play on our often fragile emotions.  How many people are going to walk past a newspaper headline that reads: Man kills family in brutal home invasion?

The human race has long been living vicariously through other people’s misery.  We gain perspective and positivity in our lives by lapping up the misery that others are experiencing – whether we like it or not, and whether we are actually even aware or free to choose.  We tune in to our favourite reality T.V shows to see who gets voted off next (and how many of those are saturating our screens these days!) we watch documentaries on the lives of the latest, sad freaks of nature that television producers have found in some obscure community somewhere in our world, we watch people dying in horrific accidents on the latest “World’s scariest moments caught on tape!”, and the news itself – you get what I am talking about …
So what’s my point?  -  The point is, while there is obviously some need for us to be aware of what bad is being done in our world, maybe the gross amount of fear that the mass media creates (almost always for their own gain) is actually perpetuating the violent crime and addictions,  rising oil prices and economic hardship that we are being warned against?  -Maybe the fear that is ensuring our consumption is far more real and far more prevalent than it needs to be?  After all, no news is good news right?

Bowling for Columbine -"Culture of Fear"

Bowling for Columbine

For the past decade many schools have presented Bowling for Columbine. The documentary presented the viewers with the idea of how schools, society and the government have a delicate relationship to one another. In this movie we were presented with the idea of fear. “Culture of fear” is a term used by many politicians, scholars and authors who believe that public figures/icons in America try to incite fear into people for their own personal gain. The reward for public figures who promote this fearful behavior is money and incentives. Fear leads to consumption and consumption means large profits for corporations like ADT (home security and Surveillance Company) because consumers are purchasing their merchandise. My paper will try to explain why people are afraid of things, in which reality are harmless.

In the documentary Bowling for Columbine Michael Moore demonstrates that people are afraid of things that shouldn’t be feared of. For example, during the 1990’s as crime rates dropped majority of Americans believed that crime incidents were on the rise. Why did people in the 1990’s rank drug abuse as the greatest danger to America’s society but when in reality drug abuse decreased? How and why are people afraid of things that they shouldn’t be? The answer lies within the idea “culture of fear”.

The picture of fear is unfortunate. A crystal clear, real life example of fear is the tragedy that occurred at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in April 1999. Two high school boys killed 12 students and one teacher along with wounding many other students. In Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore defines fear when students and teachers are hiding underneath tables when Eric and Dylan raided their schools with shotguns, pistols and rifles. At the end, the students turned the guns on themselves. Eight years later there was another deadly massacre that occurred on school grounds at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. A student went on a rampage and killed 32 including him.

Fear plays an important part in society on a macro and micro perspective. When there is panic in the atmosphere everyone gets affected. There was once a time when parents felt comfortable sending their kids to school but nowadays their constantly reminding their kids to be careful to who you talk to and associate yourself with. When I went to high school we had to go through metal detectors. Besides having to go through metal detectors, we had to at all times have our I.D’s visible. More and more elderly people are afraid of going outside of their home alone.

Once again why are people afraid? I believe that the media feeds into people’s fear. The nightly news, television shows like Criminal Minds and C.S.I Miami creates fear for people. A large portion of the nightly news is either broadcasting a murder, rape or drug case. The news media spends less than ten minutes on something positive that happened locally or globally. When people watch these types of announcements and absorb more violence than peace they get emotions like fear and panic. They fear that they or their loved ones can be murdered or raped.

So how has all this fear affect us on a small scale and as a nation? The fear of terror has had a negative impact in our society in all ways imagined: politically, socially and economically. Because of fear and for the fight against terrorism the United States government, along with support of many citizens, allowed the National Security Agency to listen to phone conversations and store 1.7 billion emails. .After the attack on the twin towers mass fear was created in our society. Because of fear of Muslims, people across New York City were afraid/against the construction of a mosque and community center because of what happened on September 11, 2001.

So who’s the to blame for the massacres and violence that happens in our society? Is it the president of the United States? Is it the president of the NRA (National Rifle Association), who promotes the use of guns in communities? In conclusion if someone is going to be blamed it should be the media. If the media changed the way they broadcasted national television then a lot of people wouldn’t have thoughts and fears to begin with. If you display peaceful actions you’re more prone to do a peace than violence. If the media displays more events that settles problems in a passive way people will realize. Many people don’t realize that the media affects our life in every possible aspect. With that being said the media can affect our lives in a positive way instead of always a destructive way.

Media 2

Hey there. Here's the article for next week's class. For now, it's for both 1MA/3 and 1MA/4. However, I'd like Weronika to get in contact with me (email is best) as soon as possible because theoretically she should be doing a presentation this week in 1MA/3. If she gets in touch the article may change for Thursday but for now, this is the article: http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisstokelwalker/how-golden-eagle-snatches-kid-ruled-the-internet

How “Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” Ruled The Internet

Four Canadian film students were assigned a project: Create a YouTube hoax video that gets 100,000 views. They got nearly 42 million instead. Here’s the definitive behind-the-meme look at how — and why — their homework snowballed into one of the most popular and rapidly spread videos ever. posted on February 21, 2013 at 10:48pm EST

Chris Stokel-Walker BuzzFeed Contributor

It's one depressingly typical minute of the 6.2 million uploaded to YouTube every day: In a Montreal park, nothing much is happening. The camera pans around a clear blue sky, tracing the arc of a golden eagle as it twists and turns through the air. The bird pulls a generous sweep around a large tree, 30 feet or more, shorn of its branches by the bitter frost that hits the Quebec city this time of year. And then things turn from dull nature documentary into snuff film.

The eagle doesn't continue its elegant acrobatics. Instead, it suddenly picks up pace. The sweep becomes a swoop, and it's dropping altitude. Eleven seconds into the video, a small boy in a warm insulated jacket comes into frame. He's sitting faced away, staring into space.

Eleven seconds into the video, you realize what's going to happen. Eleven seconds into the video, the eagle is 10 feet behind the little boy, and you're damned if the way the bird's wings are drawn up doesn't remind you an awful lot of the way Dracula wraps himself in his cloak before biting. It's horror-movie stuff.

A second later, the eagle's talons have latched on and the boy's taken up off the ground; he's dead weight. A guy in a black-and-white striped sweater rooting around in a bag nearby runs over as the boy takes flight. He's in mid-air, and when the talons release, he's flying for a split second before hitting the ground.

We hear an appropriately startled "Oh, shit!" and the cameraman sprints over, the grass speeding past as the lens points down. The little boy is crying. He's wearing a bright red hat with big googly eyes, and his face is that emotionless expression small humans get when they just don't have an appropriate response to what's gone on. The boy is alright, and the horror you felt gives way to relief. Thirty-five seconds in, the video replays the moment in slow motion because that's what happens at the end of every dunk on SportsCenter. The screen fades to black.

And then you copy the video URL, go to your Facebook account, and paste it in the status box, add a "what the fuck!" or something equally trite, and share.

You've just done precisely what Professor Robin Tremblay wanted you to do.

Robin Tremblay of Centre NAD

Tremblay is a lecturer at Centre NAD, a technology university in Montreal, where he's been teaching a video-effects class since 1992. In October, he challenged his students — as he did the previous two semesters — to make a viral hoax video. If it got more than 100,000 views, then congratulations, you got an A.

"The students have to shoot live-action, integrate 3-D effects, and make it so believable that it can look real," he explains in a thick French-Canadian accent. That's the core component of the VFX course and has been for years. "But I was always trying to think of new ways to teach it. New ideas. I think, 'Oh, maybe I should try a prank film.'"

Though the primary aim of Tremblay's class was to teach his students how best to use software to create 3-D visual effects, the assignment became an object lesson in what we find interesting, why we find it interesting, and how we disseminate things we find interesting. What do we believe, and why? And unlike 2009's Balloon Boy debacle, which smacked of opportunism and exploitation, this was the rare public hoax that remains victimless and good-natured and unmotivated by malice or greed — one that could actually be a teachable moment, not just for the perpetrators, but for all of us who participated by clicking, or by telling others to. And these moments are worth examining closely because they're the ones in which we're all watching, and wondering, together, in real time, if only for a short time.

Four of Tremblay's most industrious students, Normand Archambault, Félix Marquis-Poulin, Loïc Mireault, and Antoine Seigle, created a video called "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" — 17 million views within a day, just shy of 42 million views in total, 14 million minutes in viewing time in the U.S. alone, embedded on major news websites worldwide, broadcast on morning talk shows, and linked from countless message boards — which proved this in historically impressive style."I still don't understand how it went that big," says Marquis-Poulin, 23. "I go from step one to the final result. I see all the work we did. I can't comprehend somebody on their phone, watching the video, saying, 'Look at this! An eagle catches a baby! That's awesome.' I can't imagine how many people had this moment. It's weird."
They got an A.

1. Thunderbirds Are Go

Tremblay wants his students to be at least as adept as the major professional movie studios they will hopefully end up working for. He also knows that the way visual effects are being deployed is changing — they're no longer used only to portray the incredible; often they're used in place of the mundane. If a director doesn't want to deal with 4,000 extras cheering in a football stadium, he'll populate the stands with computer-generated fans waving banners. Tremblay also knows how much video content we watch and share (4 billion hours a month on YouTube alone), and that if you can separate yourself from the dross, there is a potentially huge audience out there.

Tremblay's 25 students were separated into teams of two to five, and let loose. "Babies and animal videos were very much popular," explains Mireault, 21. "We started brainstorming how we could mix those two ideas."

"We didn't have the idea right away," explains Archambault, 22, who seems the natural leader of the group, comfortable explaining the process behind the creation of the video and the least fazed of the four by the attention the runaway success of the video eventually garnered. In November, he says, the four began batting around potential concepts for the project, including exploding pigeons and a plane landing on a busy Montreal street."But we decided an eagle would be more..." — there's a slight pause to find the right word — "subtle than a plane," adds Marquis-Poulin. Montrealers would be more likely to question why they didn't hear the sound of a 747 touching down on Saint Catherine Street; they could feasibly miss a bird snatching a child in a park. And while the students' reasoning may have ultimately boiled down to a simple tenet that serves to remind how much W.C. Fields would have loathed the internet, there is much historical precedent to suggest that the concept of a bird attack had the potential to be shared widely.

Enough people saw Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds 50 years ago for it to earn more than $11 million at the box office — nearly four times its $3.3 million budget. French avant-garde filmmaker François Truffaut was "convinced that cinema was invented so that such a film could be made." Certainly it got people's attention, and it hardened the primal premise in our minds that birds are considered potential human predators.

Indeed a whole academic field is devoted to such events. Some cryptozoologists spend their life's work trying to piece together historical references to (often giant) birds snatching babies and adults from their comfortable lives and flying them away. One of the most respected in this field is Mark A. Hall, 66, who worked for the USDA after gathering intelligence in West Berlin during the Cold War. He isn't coming up with these theories off the top of his head: There are firsthand historical written accounts testifying that bird attacks are real.

Roc from Arabian Nights

Though some might question whether birds with a 25-foot wingspan ever existed (Hall believes they could have), there are certainly stories, apocryphal or not, that nod to their existence. Early Native Americans told stories around campfires of attacks by birds, including those of the Piasa, or "Bird that Devours Man." In One Thousand and One Nights (also known as Arabian Nights), the giant bird Roc features heavily in the narrative. Like stories of gorgons, mermaids, and Cyclopes, historical, scientific, or factual evidence is scant, but the looming shadow of birds has hung over humanity for thousands of years.One such report was contained in the May 17, 1888, edition of The Equity newspaper out of Bryson, Quebec, a three-hour drive from Montreal. Seven-year old Georgie Richards of Brier Hill, New York, repelled "a very large bald eagle" with "as large a club as he could wield." The paper said it was "the first instance in which one of these voracious birds has attempted to carry off a child in St. Lawrence County."

"Looking back over the century and a half of reports," Hall wrote in his 2004 book Thunderbirds: America's Living Legends of Giant Birds, "it would seem encounters in which a person is harmed occur every 30 to 40 years. At that pace, it's about time for another incident of such a dangerous and dramatic nature."
The students figured that if they could present footage that backed up
thousands of years of apocryphal written evidence, that video could be huge. Their research uncovered a series of reported bird attacks throughout history — mostly based in northern Europe, says Archambault — and knew they could tap into that fear for their viral video.

"We had to do two kinds of research: one about the anatomy and the feathers, and the other was how the eagle flies," Marquis-Poulin explains. "How he moves, how he attacks his prey."

The video-effects course aims to accurately mimic the process of producing a real movie, says Professor Tremblay. That meant the students had to scout out locations, storyboard the action, and find some leading players.

Original storyboards for "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid"

"When we got the idea, we wanted to make sure it was possible to see an eagle in that region of the province," adds Archambault." We saw it could be in Montreal — but it's rare. It's possible."

The students had their arch villain, but now they needed their ingenue to be swept away. Seigle, the oldest of the group at 24, seemed the most likely to know someone who had a child willing to take part. Eventually, a friend's 18-month old son, Jacob, was cast. "It was the only available baby we had access to," Seigle admits, laughing.

The choice of location seemed obvious to the group: It had to be Mount Royal Park. The 500-acre expanse of greenery is pretty much the only place in the city you might see a rare golden eagle and a happy, innocent child in the same space. It had some name recognition, and the right kind of surroundings to correctly frame and track the shot so that the 3-D smoothly integrated with the real-life footage.

A group of eight, including their teacher, young Jacob, and Jacob's parents, gathered near the 155-year-old stone-built Smith House inside the park and shot their footage on Nov. 18. On arrival, the group made a crucial executive decision: Initially, the bird was going to fly away with the child. "We decided on a happy ending," says Mireault.The crew spent two hours filming four or five takes in the park. In one, explains Archambault, "the baby actually cried for real. We really liked that, so we put it in."

Over the next month, they ran their footage through three different programs: Autodesk Softimage (a 3-D-modeling app where they created the eagle and the computer-generated baby), Autodesk Maya (a program used to texture the eagle's feathers), and NUKE, a post-production program that digitally composited the different source material and gave the studio-quality footage a believable rough quality.

All told, from being given the assignment on Oct. 29 to turning it in on Dec. 18, the four estimate they worked some 400 hours on the project. "We did a couple of all-nighters," adds Mireault, during which the group would act as a tag team: One person would take a much-needed nap while the others worked. When refreshed, they'd swap roles.

With weary eyes, the 25 or so students in the course gathered in the Blinn/Phong screening room on campus at 4:00 p.m. EST on Dec. 18. People sat on the floor and propped themselves up against the walls: This was the conclusion of their class, and everyone wanted to see what everyone else had produced. One team made an infomercial for an alarm clock (402 views to date), another for an iPhone app that punches people in the face (2,634 views). "We still had our doubts, right until the end," says Seigle. But the video was well-received.

"Everyone applauded, everyone laughed at the little slow motion at the end," says Archambault. "There are more things to improve, but we had to hand it in." He pauses. "We thought it looked pretty good."

As soon as the class screening was over, all four quickly made their way to a computer. Seigle pushed the big red upload button on YouTube at around 7:00 p.m., surrounded by his three classmates. An innocuous username — MrNuclearCat — was chosen for the account. (The name was a breadcrumb for those on the trail of unveiling it as a hoax; the students had created a video earlier in the semester called "Nuclear Cats," which they had submitted to the Montreal International Game Summit.) Within 30 minutes, the first post on Reddit appeared. Within an hour, the first user tweeted out the video. Major sites were picking up on the story by midnight.The four students, meanwhile, were with their classmates in Le Pourvoyeur, a red brick building on Rue Jean Talon Est, a 15-minute walk from the Centre NAD campus. It's the students' regular haunt, bustling, even on a Tuesday night —upwards of 60 students and their teachers, powered by adrenaline, relief, and 5.0% ABV beer.
Tremblay was proud of his students' work, and told them so. "It was kind of a big endeavor to animate a bird and everything," says Marquis-Poulin. "He was very proud of us for succeeding on something he himself was calling very difficult."
The teachers had taken the students out to decompress, but easier said than done: They were all on their phones. "We checked how it was going, and it was around 1,000 views. We were already very happy with that," says Archambault.

"The first comments on the video were very positive. Everybody was fooled, and that was kind of a good sign," adds Marquis-Poulin, who had managed to sneak in a power nap before presenting to the class at 4:00 p.m. "We were expecting to have at least 10,000 views in the morning. We weren't expecting 1.2 million."

Not everyone was fooled, though.

2. Outbreak

Mark Twain once said, "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." Except that he didn't, because C.H. Spurgeon said it first — in 1859 — and said it a little differently: "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on." Even that is an adaptation of a Jonathan Swift quote first penned 150 years earlier. The major aphorism people use to warn about the spread of falsehoods is itself based on a lie so widely spread that it has turned into one of those common cultural constants everyone knows and parrots back to each other.

"Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" didn't just pull on a pair of jackboots; it slipped itself into Nike running shoes, did some stretches, and set off at a sprint. The race to debunk the video was on.
Cyatek, real name Tiago Duarte, lives in Barcarena, Portugal, less than 10 miles west of Lisbon. Like a lot of teenage boys, when not on YouTube he spends a lot of time playing hyperrealistic video games like Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and he's a whiz at Photoshop. And to him, watching the video 20 minutes after it was uploaded, the whole thing just didn't sit right.
"It looked so fake to me," he explains. "The main thing that gave it away was the baby falling down." When the eagle snatches the child in its talons, it drags along the ground. As the bird gains a little altitude, the child slips. "It really looked like a 3-D model to me," the kind of models that populate Call of Duty, says Duarte. This was a worry of the students too: "Making a realistic human in 3-D is very hard. When it looks fake, it's very unconvincing," explains Archambault.

But others were less skeptical than Duarte. "Every single person was believing it, and the top comment at the time was something like, 'If you want to say this is fake, you better provide some proof.' So I did."

Duarte downloaded the video from YouTube and opened his copy of Sony Vegas Pro 11, a video editing package. He ran the file through some manual stabilization filters and corrected the color to make his proof more vivid. A frame-by-frame analysis found that at one stage of the video, the shadow of the bird disappears, and when the little boy slips from the eagle's talons, he in fact still travels upward for a fraction of a second. All in all, it took the 17-year-old less than five hours to debunk a month-and-a-half's worth of work.

Duarte used his video editing skills to put together a short video. "If I just commented [on the original YouTube video], people would just call me names," he says, so he uploaded his version to YouTube at 5:20 a.m. Western European Time (12:20 a.m. EST), a couple of hours before the four students headed home from the bar.

At that point everything "happened so fast," he says. Duarte's first move was to go to the original video and link to his response. People still didn't believe him; two users ganged up in a chain of comments, one asking, "How is this proof?" The other said it was "proof Cyatek is retarted [sic]."

Duarte didn't mind: That's the internet, after all, and people "really believed it was legit." Rather than deal with YouTube commenters, he thought he'd post the rejoinder to the Centre NAD video to Reddit, where he'd first seen the original.

He was too late. He tried to upload his clip, "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid — Fake," but the site threw up an error page — someone had already put his clip up. It had been only five minutes, max. Now there were two videos in circulation, one countering the other. Both were racking up views, comments, and coverage at a prodigious rate, and neither creator had control over their spread.

3. Moon Unicorns and Space Monkeys
The person who oversees YouTube's vision of what will become viral is Kevin Allocca. He's the company's trends manager, a buzzy title that essentially means he is ahead of the curve when it comes to babies on Roombas and cute dogs burping the alphabet. Allocca has identified three pillars of virality: tastemakers (those who decide what is cool, and spread it), communities (such as Reddit), and unexpectedness (which a bird-brained kidnapping has in droves).
"If there's anything we like more than watching outrageous footage of the impossible, it's discussing and reacting to outrageous footage of the impossible," he says. The video lingered, even after its debunking, because it gave people, he continues, "a topic for us to engage on and debate with each other about. We know that videos depicting the seemingly implausible — especially in nature — can become very popular. Add in the fact that there's just a lot to react to and that tons of blogs and news sites were embedding the video, and you've got a recipe for viral success."

Ryan Cordell, a lecturer at Northeastern University specializing in 19th-century periodical literature, analyzes how newspapers and other mass media of the time disseminated news, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the criteria for what makes a story spread haven't changed much. "It needs to be easily shared; have some level of cuteness — or," he explains, "in this case be something horrifying; and have some kind of challenge, or puzzle, or mystery." "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" has all three.

One of the most outlandish hoaxes in history was gently ushered into the world via the pages of the New York Sun in August 1835. A supposed friend of famous astrologer Sir John Herschel wrote in the paper that he had been pointing his telescope (one made "of an entirely new principle") at the surface of the moon one night and saw — amongst other things — unicorns, goats, and men with wings building giant temples to their gods. The story is, of course, baloney, but no more so, certainly in 1835, than the notion a bird could swoop down and snatch a child from a Montreal park.

Eventually the hoax was uncovered — but not before it got the Sun an awful lot of new readers handing over their one cent each day to see what new miracles would happen. This was one of the first big hoaxes that fooled people in great numbers. After it, says Cordell, "lots of others came along and tried to mimic it, but lots failed. People had become attuned to be skeptical of similar things." That skepticism has continued ever since.

For some hoax creators, the goal is monetary gain and notoriety. Smart advertising companies have co-opted the popularity of the viral video to get their clients' products in front of millions of eyeballs. Some work, some don't. Some wear their branding on their sleeve, while others (such as this video of a Fiat attempting a U-turn in Naples, Italy) don't seem that blatant. Yet a lot of the people behind these hoaxes aren't necessarily trying to probe a boundary: They're simply responding to a common human impulse to fuck with our fellow man. And they find a receptive audience, because despite our pessimism, we're drawn to the extraordinary.

"Then, as now, we like to share things that resonate with our cultural ideas or values," Cordell says. "That gives us this sense that we are participating in and creating a community." And from time immemorial, one of our main cultural experiences is that we will do anything we can to make sure our young come to no harm.

Whereas previous bird snatchings in a pre-internet age still linger with uncertainty as to whether they're true or not, this one was categorically debunked — and quickly. "We're more and more on the lookout for a con," posits Cordell. One need only look at the skepticism in the initial online response to last week's footage of the Russian meteor shower; and when Iran's state news agency released photographs of the monkey it sent into space earlier this month, an online brouhaha broke out over its legitimacy. People believed it was fake based on, of all things, a mole on the animal's forehead. (The news agency wasn't trying to fool anyone: It simply used an archive photo of another space-bound monkey to illustrate the story.) If something seems remotely out of the realm of possibility — and we're presented with a lot of things that seem questionable on the internet — then our first response nowadays is to be circumspect.

Some believe what they see. Some don't. In a way, it doesn't matter.

From left: Mireault, Seigle, Marquis-Poulin and Archambault

4. The Morning After

More than 1 million people had seen the original video by the morning of Dec. 19. Everyone, from Professor Tremblay to the students, couldn't quite believe it. Being that kind of success was a crapshoot, believes Tremblay. "There's a lot of things we can't control. You can do the best thing," have the best and slickest 3-D effects, "but you need the spark," he says, when 72 hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute. "There's an undefinable quality to what makes a hoax a success. There's an X factor, which is kind of elusive."

Claude Arsenault, Centre NAD's public relations director, began getting press calls early on the morning of Dec. 19. "What happened was," says Arsenault, "we confirmed very quickly it was a hoax. It was not generally accepted that it was a hoax. There was a 12-hour window where no one claimed it. We claimed it very fast."
"Well, that's a lie," Tiago Duarte replies when this is quoted to him. He links me to a screenshot of his YouTube analytics screen for the video, and seems to have a point; around three quarters of a million people had seen "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid — Fake" by Dec. 19, around the time Centre NAD was releasing its admission — and getting its star pupils ready to meet the swarming press.
"We had to call the students to wake them up because camera crews were showing up" at the college, Arsenault explains.
There was one problem: Marquis-Poulin's cell phone was dead. Archambault was dispatched to bang on his front door. "I knew it was kind of a special situation then," Marquis-Poulin sheepishly explains.

All present and correct and groggy, the four students underwent a crash course in media training — the main tenet of which was breathe and think before you answer a question, but also to, for some reason, drink a lot of water and eat a lot of fruit — before being coaxed and cajoled from one TV studio to another.
"From noon until 9:00 p.m. they barely had time to eat," says Arsenault of the full press blitz. "It was interview after interview after interview." The students were caught off guard by the response, and found it challenging traversing the world's media in English and their native French. Not one of them was an eager interview subject. "They really just wanted to get back to their projects," Arsenault explains.

Amid the chaos of television, print, and radio interviews, the students still had term papers to hand in. (They were eventually given an extension for their essays into the holidays.) By the second day — and following a good night's sleep — the group were alternating interviews in groups of two and four with a little downtime to tend to their essays and play Ping-Pong in the student lounge downstairs from the press office.

The students were happy with one aspect of their fame, though. It allowed their family members to better understand what their degree involved beyond playing about on computers. "My family was treating me a little bit like a star," says Marquis-Poulin. "For them to be proud was the best feeling."
As people panicked and freaked out, the school had to admit the video was a hoax, and the second phase of the viral half-life of a YouTube video kicked into action. Now that people knew it was smoke and mirrors, they wanted to learn more about how it was done.

One fear — that potentially killer birds were on the loose — was replaced with another: If a bunch of students can make something so convincing, what's to say that CCTV footage, or news footage, couldn't be forged? That week before Christmas saw the students everywhere, on every channel, in every language.

Two months on and inevitably the number of views has slowed on the video. The graph's leveled out; in truth, it'd been inching toward a plateau 24 hours after it was first uploaded. Such is the supersonic speed of the internet, chewing trends up and spitting them out, before moving down the road and onto the next phenomenon. "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" did better than most, though. "There aren't a ton of videos so far that have been able to pick up over 15 million views in a single day," says Allocca. Centre NAD and Tremblay took some flack from veterinarians and wildlife rehabilitators. Their video — though meant in jest — gave a species struggling to survive around the world bad press. (It also freaked out a few kids.) Though largely, people were simply impressed by the quality of the fake.

Because the Centre NAD students made their video with educationally licensed versions of Autodesk Softimage, Autodesk Maya, and NUKE, they weren't entitled to make money from the video — and with nearly 42 million views, a potentially significant amount of revenue was about to go unclaimed. However, the school could take the money, which will be used to help fund a scholarship for students who ordinarily might not be able to afford Centre NAD's tuition.

The four students are happy with the impact their work will have on future students at the school. For now they're being coy about what'll happen when they graduate, though some already have work experience with professional studios. Archambault has won an individual VFX competition and will visit Pixar's studios in Emeryville, California this summer.

Tiago Duarte won't be making quite as much as Centre NAD from his video, though he was as quick off the mark. His debunking of the hoax, despite passing in front of more than 4 million pairs of eyeballs, has earned $94.77 as of Feb. 2. YouTube keeps $8.78 of that, and the remaining amount is split 40/60 between Duarte and a network called Maker Studios he joined months before coming across "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid." For a 17-year-old, that's not an inconsiderate amount of money — it'll keep him in games for a month or so — but it's not the amount it could've been. "Honestly, I don't really care much," he says. "I didn't want to have the video monetized in the first place…so I'll get whatever I get and I'm OK with it."

I mention to him that the profit from the original video will go toward scholarships.

"That's really awesome!" he responds. "Can't wait to see what they produce this year."

5. "We're Under Scrutiny"

A good portion of the nearly 42 million people (as many people as the entire population of Argentina) who have watched "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" will be waiting for this year's hoaxes too. The next crop of students are already planning their hoax videos. Archambault, Marquis-Poulin, Mireault, and Seigle are still at the school, jokingly goading their peers to top them. They hope their success motivates those who come next, and by all accounts they're already impressing. Robin Tremblay knows people are now on the lookout, and he also knows how difficult it will be to follow up on this year's success.

Tremblay began working on Hollywood movies in 1995 with work for the schlocky Witchboard III: The Possession and Screamers. Since then he's contributed to 30 or so films since as a matte painter and digital effects artist. (The movies have stepped up in quality: Tremblay has since worked on 300 and Brokeback Mountain.) In his years in the business, he's seen a change in the way special effects are produced, and a way in which his work is distributed and received.

In the two months since "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid," the school has fielded calls from people who have seen natural disasters and wondered whether they had something to do with it. They even took queries over the Russian meteorites, Arsenault says.

That people are linking such events to Centre NAD shows both how impressive 3-D computer-generated animation has become — even outside of professional Hollywood studios — and how suspicious people have grown. The balance of power has shifted: Hearsay was once the preserve of the people, while the media were detached and coolheaded. "Golden Eagle Snatches Kid" inverted those roles. "The press is now less skeptical than many of the citizens they purport to serve," believes Clay Shirky, one of the foremost thinkers on the social impact of the internet.

Truthers, conspiracy theorists, and cranks are no longer out on a limb in distrusting everything they see. Given that undergraduates have the computing power and the tools to distort reality, there's no telling what more power and higher investment can do. Tricks that were once Stalinist methods of rewriting history are now within the reach of anyone with a copy of Photoshop.

Tremblay, forever the wide-eyed youngster watching Hollywood's finest effects — one of his first works as a child auteur was to make his brother, playing a wizard, appear and disappear in a short film called The Evil Witchcraft — prefers to look at the positive reasoning behind why the video spread so quickly. "We crave the unexpected, the crazy, the impossible," he says. "Like the poster in Mulder's office in The X-Files, 'We Want To Believe.'"

That's going to be harder and harder to do. "A lot of people are now familiar with VFX techniques," says Tremblay. "They know what to look for to detect computer imagery. People are now used to seeing great VFX and they know it is not real. We're under scrutiny."

But Centre NAD will continue to try to push the boundaries of computer-generated effects while fooling the general populace. It'll be difficult, Tremblay points out, but don't worry.

"I have a few more tricks up my sleeve."

Mock Exam 2

Don't forget the Pub Quiz tomorrow night, 8:30pm at Tanner's. I know you've gotta get ready for the mock, but you don't need to drink too much! https://www.facebook.com/events/336170996486838/?ref=ts&fref=ts

Surprisingly (that's sarcasm by the way), we've run into some problems with the mock exams. I've heard some reservations expressed by students about being able to get prepared in time plus Marianna's schedule has changed (yep, in the 3rd week of the semester, that's pretty normal for a university I'm sure). Anyway, for these reasons, I've been forced to move the time of the mock exams. The only available time for all parties concerned (you, me and Marianna) and rooms being open is Friday around office hours; therefore, we (1MA/3 and 1MA/4) will be holding the mock exams starting from 11:00 Friday, March 8th in room 316A (It may not start until 11:15) until we finish, depending on how many people come, should be before 1pm. I apologize for all those not able to make it. If you can't come and are still worried about it, just let me know and we can arrange for some extra practice, most likely during other office hours in the next couple of months. There will be no regular classes this week, the mock exam is not obligatory but still suggested for many. I'm putting the questions below once again as last time the format was difficult to read.

Technology
1. What is hacktivism? What are some methods of hacktivism?
2. Do you agree/disagree with hacktivists' actions?
3. Do you know any controversial cases involving hacktivism?
4. Should information be completely free?
5. How technology can be used to improve/alternate our bodies?
6. Would you ever consider putting implants in your body (if yes, what kind of implants)?
7. Discuss pros and cons of smartphones.
8. In what ways can smartphones improve our lives?

Politics and Society
1. Elections, democratic or oppressive?
2. How is the president elected in the US?
3. What is bipartisanship and how does it relate to American politics?
4. What are some of the arguments presented in favor of the legalization of marijuana?
5. Discuss some of the protest movements and root causes for the protests seen around the world in the last two years.
6. Discuss some of the different protest movements and similarities between them.
7. What are the some of the causes of mass murders and how should we punish the mass murderers?
8. What was the Maple Spring and how was it different than movements such as Occupy Wall Street?
9. Why did the Maple Spring movement develop and why can it be viewed as more successful than other protest movements.
10. What is neoliberalism and what part has it played in the protest movements?
11. Is there a relationship between the social contract and protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street?

Personal Relations (group 4)
Discuss benefits of choosing polyamorous relationships over monogamous ones.
How do relationships affect children?
What should be done to stop sexual harassment?
What are the different forms that sexual harassment may take?
What are the ways of sexual harassment that may be noticed in workplaces?
What are the different reactions of victims of sexual harassment in workplaces?
What are the benefits of relationships with convicts and ex-convicts?
What can people do to help convicts to reenter the society?

Personal Relations (group 3)
1. What is polyamory?
2. Are polyamorous relationships beneficial for children?/How does polyamorous relationship affect children?
3.Should polyamorous families have the right to raise children?
4. Are polyamorous people smarter?
5. What are the alternatives to monogamy?
6. Is monogamy natural?
7. Why do some women begin relations with locked up men?
8. Discuss the role of pen pals of prisoners- What role pen pals play in the resocializationo process?
9. How have technological devices changed the way we communicate?
10. Is it possible to be truly alone in a technology driven society?
11. What are the benefits of being disconnected?
12. Can technology be a true substitute for face-to-face interaction?
13. Can we compare technology dependency to an addiction?

Lifestyle (group 3)
Consumerism:
1.Discuss some of the most prevalent methods used by advertiser and media to influence our behavior?
2.Do things and money bring us happiness? If not what do?
3.Can consumerism be seen as a method of social control?
4.How does consumerism affect children?
5.What impact does consumerism have on holiday?
Feminism:
6.What should feminists be fighting for or against nowadays?
7.Why do you think the term ‘feminist’ has negative connotation? OR Why do you think being labeled as feminist has negative meaning?
8.Why are most feminists extremists?
9.What are some of the means feminists use to attract attention? Justify their choice?
(Are men and women equal in 21st century society and is equality possible?)

Lifestyle (group 4)

1. What is couch-surfing? What are the aims of this form of traveling?
2. Are there any dangers in couchsurfing and what tips would you give someone to avoid them?
3. What are some other creative and unconventional ways of traveling?
4. What techniques do advertisers use to convince people to “spend money they don’t have on things they don’t need?”
5. How has Black Friday changed the way Americans celebrate Thanksgiving?
6. How do you understand the term conscious consumerism?
7. Black Friday fever - Has holiday shopping gone too far?

Travel & Tourism

1. Is the urge to travel genetic?
2. Describe the influence of technology on traveling.
3. How do cameras affect our travel experience?
4. Discuss couch-surfing. Would you participate in it?
5. Why is extreme tourism growing in popularity?
6. Which disaster sites (if any) would you be interested in seeing? Why?
7. How does tourism affect people's traditions and customs?
8. Is it ethical to travel to war affected areas?

Media and Journalism 1MA/3

1.What impact does a president have on manipulating media content? How and why he does it?
2.What impact does technology have on journalism?
3.What are the core components of creating a successful Internet/ YouTube video?
4.What is the correlation between fear and consumerism?
5.Does fear evoked by TV news stimulate people’s urge to buy?

Mock Exams

Hey guys. Seems like Marianna was kind enough to let the 1MA/4s know that both of my 1MA classes (along with group 3) are having mock oral exams next week. As I mentioned to group 3, it is not obligatory but suggested if you've never done an exam at IFA (WA) or have had trouble in the past. If you want to make a schedule among yourselves as to what time everybody will be examined, go ahead, give each person about 10-15 minutes. Otherwise, see you at the regular class time and we'll just put everybody through one at a time. Below I'm copying and pasting the questions I've received from students and some I've done until now. If noted the questions are for one group or the other it's because there are questions that may have to do with a student presentation the other group didn't have or didn't receive any questions from one of the presenters. See you.
Technology
1. What is hacktivism? What are some methods of hacktivism?
2. Do you agree/disagree with hacktivists' actions?
3. Do you know any controversial cases involving hacktivism?
4. Should information be completely free?
5. How technology can be used to improve/alternate our bodies?
6. Would you ever consider putting implants in your body (if yes, what kind of implants)?
7. Discuss pros and cons of smartphones.
8. In what ways can smartphones improve our lives?

Politics and Society
1. Elections, democratic or oppressive?
2. How is the president elected in the US?
3. What is bipartisanship and how does it relate to American politics?
4. What are some of the arguments presented in favor of the legalization of marijuana?
5. Discuss some of the protest movements and root causes for the protests seen around the world in the last two years.
6. Discuss some of the different protest movements and similarities between them.
7. What are the some of the causes of mass murders and how should we punish the mass murderers?
8. What was the Maple Spring and how was it different than movements such as Occupy Wall Street?
9. Why did the Maple Spring movement develop and why can it be viewed as more successful than other protest movements.
10. What is neoliberalism and what part has it played in the protest movements?
11. Is there a relationship between the social contract and protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street?

Personal Relations (group 4)
Discuss benefits of choosing polyamorous relationships over monogamous ones.
How do relationships affect children?
What should be done to stop sexual harassment?
What are the different forms that sexual harassment may take?
What are the ways of sexual harassment that may be noticed in workplaces?
What are the different reactions of victims of sexual harassment in workplaces?
What are the benefits of relationships with convicts and ex-convicts?
What can people do to help convicts to reenter the society?

Lifestyle (group 3)
Consumerism:
1.Discuss some of the most prevalent methods used by advertiser and media to influence our behavior?
2.Do things and money bring us happiness? If not what do?
3.Can consumerism be seen as a method of social control?
4.How does consumerism affect children?
5.What impact does consumerism have on holiday?
Feminism:
6.What should feminists be fighting for or against nowadays?
7.Why do you think the term ‘feminist’ has negative connotation? OR Why do you think being labeled as feminist has negative meaning?
8.Why are most feminists extremists?
9.What are some of the means feminists use to attract attention? Justify their choice?
(Are men and women equal in 21st century society and is equality possible?)

Travel & Tourism

1. Is the urge to travel genetic?
2. Describe the influence of technology on traveling.
3. How do cameras affect our travel experience?
4. Discuss couch-surfing. Would you participate in it?
5. Why is extreme tourism growing in popularity?
6. Which disaster sites (if any) would you be interested in seeing? Why?
7. How does tourism affect people's traditions and customs?
8. Is it ethical to travel to war affected areas?

Media

Hey there. Here's your articles for Media and Journalism. Don't forget about final exam questions for technology and to remind me about mock exams next week:

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/obama-the-puppet-master-87764.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/19/msnbc-axelrod-gibbs-obama

Obama, the puppet master

By JIM VANDEHEI and MIKE ALLEN | 2/18/13 10:29 PM EST Updated: 2/19/13 1:53 PM EST

 

President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.

Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.

The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.
“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press,” said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”
McCurry and his colleagues in the Clinton White House were hardly above putting their boss in front of gentle questions: Clinton and Vice President Al Gore often preferred the safety of “Larry King Live” to the rhetorical combat of the briefing room. But Obama and his aides have raised it to an art form: The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities. Why bother with The New York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on “The View”?
At the same time, this White House has greatly curtailed impromptu moments where reporters can ask tough questions after a staged event — or snap a picture of the president that was not shot by government-paid photographers.
The frustrated Obama press corps neared rebellion this past holiday weekend when reporters and photographers were not even allowed onto the Floridian National GolfClub, where Obama was golfing. That breached the tradition of the pool “holding” in the clubhouse and often covering — and even questioning — the president on the first and last holes.
Obama boasted Thursday during a Google+ Hangout from the White House: “This is the most transparent administration in history.” The people who cover him day to day see it very differently.
“The way the president’s availability to the press has shrunk in the last two years is a disgrace,” said ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton, who has covered every president back to Gerald R. Ford. “The president’s day-to-day policy development — on immigration, on guns — is almost totally opaque to the reporters trying to do a responsible job of covering it. There are no readouts from big meetings he has with people from the outside, and many of them aren’t even on his schedule. This is different from every president I covered. This White House goes to extreme lengths to keep the press away.”

One authentically new technique pioneered by the Obama White House is extensive government creation of content (photos of the president, videos of White House officials, blog posts written by Obama aides), which can then be instantly released to the masses through social media. They often include footage unavailable to the press.
Brooks Kraft, a contributing photographer to Time, said White House officials “have a willing and able and hungry press that eats this stuff up, partly because the news organizations are cash-strapped.”

“White House handout photos used to be reserved for historically important events — 9/11, or deliberations about war,” Kraft said. “This White House regularly releases [day-in-the-life] images of the president … a nice picture of the president looking pensive … from events that could have been covered by the press pool. But I don’t blame the White House for doing it, because networks and newspapers use them. So the White House has built its own content distribution network.”

When Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, she gave one interview — to White House TV, produced by Obama aides.
“There’s no question that technology has significantly altered the playing field of competitive journalism,” said Josh Earnest, principal deputy White House press secretary — and the voice of “West Wing Week,” produced by the administration.
“Our ongoing challenge is to engage media outlets with audiences large and small — occasionally harnessing technology to find new ways to do so.”
By no means does Obama escape tough scrutiny or altogether avoid improvisational moments. And by no means is Obama unique in wanting to control his public image and message — every president pushes this to the outer limits. His 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, was equally adept at substance-free encounters with reporters.
But something is different with this White House. Obama’s aides are better at using technology and exploiting the president’s “brand.” They are more disciplined about cracking down on staff that leak, or reporters who write things they don’t like. And they are obsessed with taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every other social media forums, not just for campaigns, but governing.
“They use every technique anyone has ever thought of, and some no one ever had,” New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker told us. “They can be very responsive and very helpful at pulling back the curtain at times while keeping you at bay at others. And they’re not at all shy about making clear when they don’t like your stories, which is quite often.”

Conservatives assume a cozy relationship between this White House and the reporters who cover it. Wrong. Many reporters find Obama himself strangely fearful of talking with them and often aloof and cocky when he does. They find his staff needlessly stingy with information and thin-skinned about any tough coverage. He gets more-favorable-than-not coverage because many staffers are fearful of talking to reporters, even anonymously, and some reporters inevitably worry access or the chance of a presidential interview will decrease if they get in the face of this White House.
Obama himself sees little upside to wide-ranging interviews with the beat reporters for the big newspapers — hence, the stiffing of even The New York Times since 2010. The president’s staff often finds Washington reporters whiny, needy and too enamored with trivial matters or their own self-importance.

So the White House has escalated the use of several media manipulation techniques:

*The super-safe, softball interview is an Obama specialty. The kid glove interview of Obama and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by Steve Kroft of CBS’s “60 Minutes” is simply the latest in a long line of these. Obama gives frequent interviews (an astonishing 674 in his first term, compared with 217 for President George W. Bush, according to statistics compiled by Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University), but they are often with network anchors or local TV stations, and rarely with the reporters who cover the White House day to day.
“This administration loves to boast about how transparent they are, but they’re transparent about things they want to be transparent about,” said Mark Knoller, the veteran CBS News reporter. “He gives interviews not for our benefit, but to achieve his objective.” Knoller last talked to Obama in 2010 — and that was when Knoller was in then-press secretary Robert Gibbs’s office, and the president walked in.
* There’s the classic weekend document dump to avoid negative coverage. By our count, the White House has done this nearly two dozen times, and almost always to minimize attention to embarrassing or messy facts. “What you guys call a document dump, we call transparency,” the White House’s Earnest shot back. If that’s the case, the White House was exceptionally transparent during the Solyndra controversy, releasing details three times on a Friday.
* There is the iron-fisted control of access to White House information and officials. Top officials recently discouraged Cabinet secretaries from talking about sequestration. And even top officials privately gripe about the muzzle put on them by the White House.
* They are also masters of scrutiny avoidance. The president has not granted an interview to print reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO and others in years. These are the reporters who are often most likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions.

Kumar, who works out of the White House press room and tallies every question a journalist asks the president, has found that in his first term Obama held brief press availabilities after photos ops or announcements one-third as often as George W. Bush did in his first term — 107 to Bush’s 355.
* While White House officials deny it is intentional, this administration —like its predecessors — does some good old-fashioned bullying of reporters: making clear there will be no interviews, or even questions at press conferences, if aides are displeased with their coverage.

Still, the most unique twist by this White House has been the government’s generating and distributing of content.

A number of these techniques were on vivid display two weekends ago, when the White House released a six-month-old photo of the president shooting skeet, buttressing his claim in a New Republic interview that he fires at clay pigeons “all the time” at Camp David.
Obama and his team, especially newly promoted senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, often bemoan the media’s endless chase of superficial and distracting storylines. So how did the president’s inner circle handle the silly dust-up about whether the president really did shoot skeet?
Pfeiffer and White House press secretary Jay Carney tweeted a link to the photo, with Pfeiffer writing that it was “[f]or all the skeeters” (doubters, or “skeet birthers”). Longtime adviser David Plouffe then taunted critics on Twitter: “Attn skeet birthers. Make our day - let the photoshop conspiracies begin!” Plouffe soon followed up with: “Day made. The skeet birthers are out in full force in response to POTUS pic. Makes for most excellent, delusional reading.”
The controversy started with an interview co-conducted by Chris Hughes, a former Obama supporter and now publisher of The New Republic. The government created the content (the photo), released it on its terms (Twitter) and then used Twitter again to stoke stories about conservatives who didn’t believe Obama ever shot a gun in the first place.
“The people you need to participate in the process are not always the people hitting ‘refresh’ on news websites,” said Jen Psaki, the Obama campaign’s traveling press secretary, who last week was appointed the State Department spokeswoman. “The goal is not to satisfy the requester, but doing what is necessary to get into people’s homes and communicate your agenda to the American people.”

MSNBC boldly moves to plug its one remaining hole

By hiring long-time Obama spokesmen Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod, the cable news network clarifies its function

MSNBC today hired long-time Obama political adviser David Axelrod, right. Photograph: Jason Reed/Reuters

 

Last month, MSNBC's Al Sharpton conducted a spirited debate about whether Obama belongs on Mount Rushmore or instead deserves a separate monument to his greatness (just weeks before replacing frequent Obama critic Cenk Uygur as MSNBC host, Sharpton publicly vowed never to criticize Barack Obama under any circumstances: a vow he has faithfully maintained). Earlier that day on the same network, a solemn discussion was held, in response to complaints from MSNBC viewers, about whether it is permissible to ever allow Barack Obama's name to pass through one's lips without prefacing it with an honorific such as "President" or "the Honorable" or perhaps "His Excellency" (that really did happen).
Yesterday, Chris Matthews - who infamously confessed that listening to Obama (sorry: President Obama) gives him a "thrill going up his leg" - hosted another discussion, this one involving former Obama campaign aide and MSNBC contributor Joy Reid, about whether the Honorable President should be mounted on Mount Rushmore (Matthews restrained himself by explaining that "I'm not talking about Mt. Rushmore but perhaps the level right below it", but then shared this fantasy: "If [Obama] were hearing us talking about him maybe mounting Mount Rushmore, getting up there with the great presidents...what would he be thinking? 'That's exactly what I'm doing?'"). A Pew poll found that in the week leading up to the 2012 election, MSNBC did not air a single story critical of the President or a single positive story about Romney - not a single one - even as Fox aired a few negative ones about Romney and a few positive ones about Obama. Meanwhile, Obama campaign aides who appeared on MSNBC were typically treated with greater deference than that shown to the British Queen when one of her most adoring subjects is in her presence for the first time.
Surveying this assembled data, one does not need to be a veteran cable news executive to see what MSNBC has been so sorely lacking: people who loyally defend President Obama. Thankfully, MSNBC is now boldly fixing that glaring problem; they began two weeks ago with this:

"Former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs has become a contributor for MSNBC. Rachel Maddow introduced Gibbs as a new member of her network's stable in the final minutes before President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday night. . . . Gibbs was White House press secretary from 2009 to early 2011, when he left to become a senior campaign adviser for Obama's re-election."

I wonder: does someone who goes from being an Obama White House spokesman and Obama campaign official to being an MSNBC contributor even notice that they changed jobs?
But MSNBC wasn't content merely to hire Obama's former Press Secretary; today they did this:

"David Axelrod, the former White House senior advisor and senior strategist for President Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns, has joined NBC News and MSNBC as a senior political analyst, the networks announced today. . . . Like Gibbs, Axelrod will appear across the networks' programming."

Impressively, David Axelrod left the White House and actually managed to find the only place on earth arguably more devoted to Barack Obama. Finally, American citizens will now be able to hear what journalism has for too long so vindictively denied them: a vibrant debate between Gibbs and Axelrod on how great Obama really is.
All the usual and substantial caveats apply when discussing the generalized attributes of MSNBC or comparing it to Fox News (just today, my former Salon colleague Joan Walsh, an MSNBC contributor, wrote about a study that "finds 'liberals' [are] more likely to favor targeted killings once they know it's Obama's policy", and on the weekends, Chris Hayes regularly criticizes Obama from the left while, post-election, Rachel Maddow sometimes does the same). Still, there's still something disturbing, even dangerous, about media outlets, even those overtly ideological ones, that are generally designed for the mission of defending those in power: a critique that Media Matters once compellingly voiced about Fox News, in part by quoting me expressing that same concern about Fox.
MSNBC is far from aberrational. The overriding attribute defining the relationship of the US media to those in power is servitude (recall how even George Bush's own Press Secretary wrote a book mocking the media for extreme deference to the Bush White House). Politico today has a long article voicing the complaints of the White House press corps about a lack of access to the president. Revealingly, these complaints exploded into public view this weekend when Obama played golf with Tiger Woods and didn't let the angry journalists even see the match or take pictures of Tiger!
The golf grievances were led by White House Correspondents Association President Ed Henry of Fox, who a couple of years ago demonstrated exactly what kind of "access" he craves when he publicly celebrated in the most giddy way imaginable how he got to play water sports with Rahm Emanuel at Joe Biden's official Vice President house (yes, that also really happened). In response to the ensuing criticism over how strangely happy he obviously became at being squirted in the face by Obama's then-Chief of Staff, Henry appeared on NPR where the following irony-free exchange, one of my favorite ever, actually occurred:

"NPR's BROOKE GLADSTONE: 'If these events don't influence coverage, why do you think the White House throws them? Do they just want to shoot you with a super-soaker?'
"ED HENRY: 'Maybe they wanna actually get to know us as people sometimes.'"

"Maybe they wanna actually get to know us as people sometimes": that's why Obama officials throw parties for White House journalists, said Ed Henry. That is easily one the funniest sentences ever. Did I mention that Ed Henry is the head of the White House Correspondents Association?
Notably, these "frustrated" White House journalists now complaining about a lack of "transparency" aren't objecting to Obama's concealment of multiple legal documents which purport to authorize radical powers he claims or to his war on whistleblowers. Instead, they're objecting that the White House doesn't "cooperate" with them enough (Obama officials release official photos and quotes through social media rather than to reporters) and they don't get to see the president enough or sit with him for interviews.
That you can cover what political officials do more effectively when you act adversarially and without their "cooperation" doesn't seem to occur to them. Moreover, getting to sit for personal interviews with the president usually produces anything but adversarial questioning. As even Politico admits: "some reporters inevitably worry access or the chance of a presidential interview will decrease if they get in the face of this White House." And indeed, see what happened in 2008 when Politico's own Mike Allen interviewed George Bush with questions so vapid and reverent that it would have shamed his profession if it were capable of that. Or just review the questions asked of Obama the last time he sat for an "interview", this one with the founder of My.BarackObama.com Chris Hughes, who just purchased the New Republic.
Still, MSNBC is going a few steps further. Most shows there are suffused with former DNC spokespeople, Obama aides and other types whose overarching political mission is a defense of the president. I suppose there's some commendable candor in hiring Obama's two most recognizably loyal aides in less than two weeks: any lingering doubt about its primary purpose as a network is dispelled, so that, I suppose, is good on some level (just as Fox's heavy reliance on long-time GOP operative Karl Rove had the same clarifying effect). As the Atlantic's Connor Simpson asked today about what he called "the most White House-friendly network": "How Much Is Obama Controlling the Message on MSNBC?" His answer: the administration knows there is a "fading need for a White House press corps when it has guys like Axe and Gibbs to unofficially lean the right way on a left-leaning network."
But whatever one wants to call this, "journalism" is the wrong label. Even ideologically-friendly media outlets which claim that mantle should be devoted to accountability and treating those who wield power adversarially, not flattering the preexisting beliefs of their audience and relentlessly glorifying political leaders. Presidents have actual press secretaries and Party spokespeople for that.

Tech 3

Hi everyone. Hope you had a restful break and are ready to get back to class! 1MA/4 your articles are at this hyperlink. Here's the article for this week's class for 1MA/3:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/technology/personaltech/09PHONES.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

How I Learned to Stop Worrying by Loving the Smartphone

Angelica Rogers

By DAMON DARLIN

Published: June 8, 2011

WHEN I think back to what I was like before the advent of the smartphone, I realize I must have been a quivering ball of anxiety.
I’d come out of a subway and walk for blocks in the wrong direction, searching as my appointment neared for a public map only to find the “You Are Here” X blotted out by the thousands of lost souls before me who pressed their fingers to the same spot in hopes of somehow getting reoriented.
I’d stand drumming my fingers in a long checkout line full of people who believed that the best time to pull out a checkbook was after the last item had been scanned and the bill totaled.
I’d begin worrying about memory loss when I could no longer remember important facts like what Longfellow tavern Henry Ford had bought and restored.
Now I’m sunny and carefree, and it’s not because of some pharmacological miracle. It’s all because of a bundle of plastic, glass, microchips and loads of software: my smartphone.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the device is changing our lives. Historians will remember the advent of the smartphone as something as important as the elevator,  air-conditioner and automobile. Those inventions reshaped our external lives with tall buildings in sprawling cities in previously inhospitable places. The smartphone has changed our internal lives.
Some people see those inventions as ruining our world. And judging by the hand wringing of any number of social critics, like Jaron Lanier or Nicholas Carr, who had the attention span to write whole books on the subject, the smartphone is changing their world for the worse.
One of the more accessible takes on what these critics think will happen is in “Super Sad True Love Story,” the dystopian novel by Gary Shteyngart. The hero, like nearly everyone else, wears a smartphonelike device, an äppärät, around his neck that gives him all the information he needs and tracks his bank accounts as well as his popularity. Despite the device, the hero is a quivering ball of anxiety.
But for most people — and as the technology gets cheaper, billions more people will have access to the machines — a smartphone will change their lives and most likely for the better. The little improvements in life will matter. How? Don’t get me started.  
1. I am never lost.  
It is more than the Google Maps on a smartphone that keep me from going in the wrong direction. Transit maps like Pocket MUNI for when I am in San Francisco or NYC Mate and iTrans NYC for when I am in New York help prevent me from getting lost underground. NextBus, a wonderful Web site that monitors the arrival of city buses in many big cities, is a godsend.
As is SitOrSquat, an app for finding public restrooms.
And it is not just the maps. The translation software on a smartphone like Google Translate with its ability to “hear” foreign languages  is good enough that I could ask a stranger in a strange land how to find a bathroom without resorting to the desperate use of pantomime.
I can also navigate nearly any menu — although I am still waiting for an app that can read handwritten Chinese characters on a menu. (If an app like Leafsnap can distinguish a mulberry leaf from a sycamore leaf, why can’t a phone translate the specials written on the walls?)
The anxiety that I felt traveling has nearly disappeared. Best of all, I never look like a tourist anymore because instead of a map signaling “Mug me” or “Fleece me,” I am just one more person staring into the phone.
(The corollary to this is that I am never late. Actually, I suspect that I am late a lot more than I ever was. But now the guilt is gone. I figure I keep no one waiting by calling ahead.)
2. I never pay too much.
Speaking of getting fleeced, the phone relieves the anxiety of thinking — no, knowing — that somewhere you could have bought it for less. There are apps like SnapTell, which gives you the price of books online when you snap a picture of the cover, and Hipmunk for airfares. Going to price comparison sites is nothing new, but having them available in the store is.
3. I am never bored or wasting time.
The slow checkout line? The delayed flight? These are no longer sources of distress. They are opportunities to relax by playing games, listening to the soundtrack of your life that is always with you or reading.
It gives me a chance to catch up on all the online articles that I saved using Instapaper, which automatically downloads them to my phone in readable format. I’ve started buying books and magazine subscriptions because it is so handy to carry my bookshelf with me on the phone.
There is a downside to all this information all the time. It aggravates another disorder — a short attention span. It’s not wasting time to flit from one thing to another, often stopping at Google or in-phone reference guides. That’s just the price I pay for the next benefit.
4. I am never without an answer.
Not to sound like a know-it-all, but it is now easy to be a know-it-all. How many times in a conversation have you been stumped by a question? You used to drop the topic and move on. Now when you hit a wall, you have the answer no matter where you are. The conversation, refreshed, moves to the next point.
5. I never forget anything.
Well, hardly anything. O.K., not as much as I used to. Of course, Google begins to substitute for my memory of that useless trivia. That may be changing our inner lives by making us all a little bit dumber. But if the smartphone can help us recall events in our own lives, it has yet another purpose that makes us, if not smarter, at least wiser. The smartphone gives me the ability to record my life and becomes an auxiliary memory of everything I do. Granted, most of it is trivial. I use Evernote to record the wine I drink or the names of restaurants — because I have no memory for that sort of thing. It captures and organizes all my business cards. But it also holds snatches of conversation, ideas for articles and things I research.
So I’d like to think that it frees my mind for more important things and helps me make connections. Now what was my next point?