"We show that in group discussions, power differentials between participants are subtly revealed by how much one individual immediately echoes the linguistic style of the person they are responding to", say Cornell University's Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee, Bo Pang and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27437/ http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3670
Adam Curtis - click the tag for more on him - has just blogged "a brief history of the appearance of ghosts and poltergeists and other spirits on television. Not fictional ghosts - but real ones, or the reports of their appearances, that you find in various news and documentary programmes. But as so often when one looks at material in the archives, it turns out that it tells you less about the subjects of the programmes - the ghosts - than about the strange medium that possesses modern society - television.
In 1992 the BBC transmitted a drama that was based on a number of the factual reports I am going to show. The underlying aim of the makers of the drama was not just to frighten, but to demonstrate in a vivid way what had happened to the very idea of reality in television. It was called Ghostwatch, and it caused a national sensation because thousands of viewers believed it was real. And, at the time, the BBC promised never to show it again.
I want to tell the story of the rise of the suburban poltergeist in factual tv from the 1970s onwards, how those reports inspired Ghostwatch, and how the extraordinary reaction on the night Ghostwatch was transmitted in 1992 showed clearly where the real ghosts of our society had now gone to live. They are inside television itself - a strange nether world of PR driven half truths, synthetic personalities, and waves of apocalyptic fear."
Marc Holthof on potlatch vs the prisoner's dilemma, and re: the VRT's foolish econologic decision to end "Music for Life" …
"It is the "prisoner's dilemma" in the early 1950's by the mathematician AW Tucker was formulated and a classic of game theory. […] Focusing less on the economic implications of this situation. There is currently no serious economics textbook in which the prisoner's dilemma is not mentioned. It is an economic response to another parable: Adam Smiths 'Invisible Hand of God'. According to this principle on a magical way contributes to the overall good (thanks to the hand of God) if everyone pursues his own interest. Tucker makes the prisoner's dilemma, however, firewood for the neoliberals sacred principle that everyone is better competition by demonstrating mathematically that everyone is worse. […] It is the dominant mechanism behind the so-called global economy, the engine driving the financial markets dominate the world. The dilemma of the prisoner by capitalism with very great success on the competition between different national and local economies. Even the once mighty Europe - a principle based on trust and solidarity - is because of the crisis of the victim. The European Union has now become 'a dysfunctional organization of fanatical right-wing governments and negligent Social Democrats who unprecedented savings, unemployment and poverty to the people impose', or to impose, because they are trapped in a very tough fiscal competition with each other. […] There is no competition staged this play, not in competition with groups together and against each other - which according to the prisoner's dilemma inevitably results in a downward, dialectical spiral. From that downward spiral can only escape if you choose to trust and solidarity. Music for Life is based precisely on solidarity, with beneficiaries in Africa, but much more among the participants who constitute a community of benefactors. A non-exhaustive society of donors, where everyone can participate. […] This is remarkable, because only highly exceptionally escapes something to the game of give and take in our over-economic society. Music for Life is a bit of that, a harbinger of a community that is averse to competition, which escapes the fatal dilemma The prisoner, who does not see the community as a function of the economy, but in function of the real basic premise of any social: the gift giving."
