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Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing them. It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology. […] The most famous case in the early study of cognitive dissonance was described by Leon Festinger and others in the book When Prophecy Fails. The authors infiltrated a group that was expecting the imminent end of the world on a certain date. When that prediction failed, the movement did not disintegrate, but grew instead, as members vied to prove their orthodoxy by recruiting converts. |
✖ Via Wikipedia: “Cognitive dissonance” Learn more about Leon Festinger and his famous book When Prophecy Fails |
• May 07, 2010 link notes tagged:
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The importance of hubs may have been overstated, say Kitsak and pals. “In contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people,” they say.
At first glance this seems somewhat counterintuitive but on reflection it makes perfect sense. Kitsak and co point out that there are various sceanrios in which well connected hubs have little influence over the spread of infromation. “For example, if a hub exists at the end of a branch at the periphery of a network, it will have a minimal impact in the spreading process through the core of the network.”
By contrast, “a less connected person who is strategically placed in the core of the network will have a significant effect that leads to dissemination through a large fraction of the population.” |
✖ Via Technology Review: “Best Connected Individuals Are Not the Most Influential Spreaders in Social Networks”, Feb. 02, 2010 Read the original study conducted by Maksim Kitsak, Lazaros K. Gallos, Shlomo Havlin, Fredrik Liljeros, Lev Muchnik, H. Eugene Stanley and Hernan A. Makse : “Identifying influential spreaders in complex networks” (submited to Physics and Society on Jann 28, 2010). |
• Apr 01, 2010 link notes tagged:
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Perhaps a thorough investigation will reveal the “real” reasons for the murders. Perhaps Amy Bishop is mentally ill, or perhaps she is, quite simply, evil. |
✖ Via National Review Online: “Don’t Over-Generalize From the Huntsville Murders” by David French, Feb. 18, 2010 David French starts by arguing against what he believes to be an overstatement published in a post on the Chronicle of Higher Education website: “Academic life as a “petri dish for madness”? We may have a winner for overstatement of the year. At this point, we don’t even know if Amy Bishop was mentally ill. Nor do we know if academic life had anything to do with her killing spree.” On one hand, French is right : to suggest that academic life alone can explain Bishop’s behavior is to give way to much importance over this single factor while ignoring others. Though it’s true there has been at least one other similar incident (Valery Fabrikant) one needs to take into account multiple factors when trying to understand Bishop’s behavior (she killed here brother in 1986, was charged with assault on another woman in 2002, etc.) On the other hand, while French condemns what he sees as the “overstatement of the year”, he goes on suggesting that Bishop is perhaps quite simply evil… Looks like a self-contradictory argument. More importantly, it’s emblematic of what Dana L. Cloud calls a “therapeutic discourse” that is the “dislocation of social problems into a private, familial or psychological frame”. “Such discourse”, adds Cloud “emphasizes individual responsability for and the necessity of private rather than societal response to social problems.” (“Deranged Loners and Demented Outsiders? Therapeutic News Frames of Presidential Assassination Attempts, 1973–2001” by Kristen E. Hoerl, Dana L. Cloud & Sharon E. Jarvis, Communication, Culture & Critique, vol. 2, no 1, p. 84, March 2009). Dana L. Cloud’s book Control and Consolation in American Politics and Culture: Rhetorics of Therapy (London, Thousand Oaks: Sage Press, 1998) is available online free of charge. |
• Feb 22, 2010 link notes tagged:
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Film-makers have got better and better at constructing shots so that their lengths grab our attention,” says James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He analysed 150 Hollywood movies and found that the more recent they were, the more closely their shot lengths tended to follow a mathematical pattern that also describes human attention spans. |
✖ Via New Scientist: “Solved: The mathematics of the Hollywood blockbuster” by Ewen Callaway, Feb. 18, 2010 Professional website of James Cutting, author of the study. Full PDF of the study (James E. Cutting, Jordan E. DeLong and Christine E. Nothelfer, “Attention and the Evolution of Hollywood Film” Psychological Science, XX(X) 1-8, published online on Feb 5, 2010). Interesting study (it’s far from being the first scientific attempt at explaining box office success), VERY BAD TITLE from the New Scientist. Nothing was “solved”, for at least two reasons.
1) Some common aspects were observed in 150 movies, after the fact. Therefore, the study could have the value of a good but limited deduction. Its inductive and predictive potential still needs to be demonstrated.
2) More importantly, one won’t be able to find any satisfactory description of what a “blockbuster” is in this study. In fact, there isn’t any mention of the word “blockbuster” in it. Instead, one will notice a normative effort to classify a number a films according to a certain number of criteria : “We chose 150 films, 10 released in each of 15 years, every 5 years from 1935 to 2005. The Supplemental Material available on-line provides the complete list. Assembled from information in several on-line databases, the films from 1980 onward were among the highest grossing of their year and the earlier films were among those with the largest number of viewer ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb; http://us.imdb.com). The films were also chosen, as best we could, to represent five genres—action, adventure, animation, comedy, and drama— although their distribution could not be uniform because of vagaries in Hollywood production and changes in social milieu and viewers’ taste. Genres were defined by the first-designated category for each film on the IMDb.” Same problem with the title Neatorama chose for the post they published about the story : “The Code for Making Hollywood Blockbusters”. But Neatorama is no weekley international science magazine… |
• Feb 21, 2010 link notes reblogged from austinkleon [via] tagged:
art
communication
film
movie
blockbuster
science
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