Fingerynth

I missed this at Greenbelt; but this video has me charmed.

Frosty The Snowman Melted By Global Warming

YouTube - Frosty The Snowman Melted By Global Warming

This Is Your Brain On Violent Media

Does violence on TV or in films cause or strongly influence violence in real life. Well, here's a smoking gun of research if not the in flagrante: "“Our findings demonstrate for the first time that watching media depictions of violence does influence processing in parts of the brain that control behaviors like aggression. This is an important finding, and further research should examine very closely how these changes affect real-life behavior.”"
This Is Your Brain On Violent Media:

TV and Film Violence

Those of us who are used to thinking about the Pauline advice about our minds tending to influence attitudes and habits and actions, have tended to think that there must be a link between violence (and sex, for that matter) portrayals in media and acting out. This article is a kind of 'where the research seems to have got to' on the portrayal and consumption of images of violence and the effects in society. As such it's really helpful. It acknowledges that it's not a simple thing but that there are correlations showing up in the studies. For example, "Even though we can't establish a simple, direct, cause-and-effect relationship between media violence and violence in our society, we can draw some conclusions from the data. Studies show that people who watch a lot of TV violence not only behave more aggressively, but are more prone to hold attitudes that favor violence and aggression as a way of solving conflicts. These viewers also tend to be less trusting of people and more prone to see the world as a hostile place."
Which is the kind of thing that I had naively hypothesised; so I would be feeling chuffed were it not for the subject matter. How to respond is a further matter only really hinted at. However, an intriguing link is mention in passing, to do with advertising smoking ...
The article mentions an article for greater depth and it appears to have moved. I think that this is it. It's also worth checking out a wider range of articles here.
TV and Film Violence:

The free open-source video platform

This could be what I've been looking for, and it may yet herald an age without TV channels. Download: Get Miro: "The free open-source video platform"

A visual history of art

This may delight you -or possibly infuriate. It's a romp through various mainly 20th century painters using a morphing animation. It's an interesting way to see pictures; click on the title of this post.
DNAStream - Mutant Television

Save YouTube Videos To Your Hard Drive

If only I'd known this a few months back when trying to find video clips to use in class and having a school version of net nanny that simply disallowed any and all sites such as YouTube. So to have been able to download some stuff at home and take it in would have been great.

There's no direct or easy way to download YouTube videos from the site, but thankfully there are ways to make a local copy for personal use.

Save YouTube Videos To Your Hard Drive / Wired How To's:

Technology and worship: video -again!

In this Leadership Journal piece, there is a useful intro to McLuhan's approach which is really helpful.
"...four questions he believed were crucial to understanding media.
First: What does the medium enhance and extend? For instance: The wheel is an extension of the foot.
Second: What does the medium obsolesce? And 'obsolesce' doesn't mean get rid of. It means change the function of. So, for example, the automobile extends our speed of transportation, but it obsolesces the horse-drawn carriage. The horse-drawn carriage doesn't disappear; it simply changes its function. It's now used for romance and entertainment, but it is still used.
Third: What does the medium retrieve from the past? This is the conviction that nothing is new under the sun. And so every new medium retrieves some older medium. For example, security cameras retrieve the medieval city wall which simultaneously protects and imprisons its citizens.
Fourth: What does the medium reverse into? This means that every medium will always reverse into some form of its opposite when it is overused. So for example, when the automobile, which is designed to increase speed, is overextended or overused, it actually reverses into traffic jams and even fatalities."

So far, so good. However I'm not sure about the following: whether it stands up to brain science (for example the rather old and inaccurate right brain thing) and whether it isn't more reliant on a particular set of cultural practices from the late twentieth century. "The messages that are best conveyed by video or multimedia are almost exclusively emotional and entertaining. The bias of these media is that they exercise the right hemisphere of the brain, which evokes emotions, impressions, and intuitions." One of the reasons I doubt that is that it is increasingly the case in education and training that the visual is being used to extend abilities to process information rationally and to make connections. I suspect that the bias against appreciating the visual as a thinking tool and consigning it to the 'feelies' says more about entrepreneurship in the twentieth century and peoples' desires for entertainment through the dominant aspects of our sensorium. That said, because of the cultural background we inherit, we can't ignore the push towards entertainment values that such media give. However, I don't think that they are as intrinsic as the author thinks they are. And when he says; "We need to understand that we're dealing with an incredibly powerful medium that all too easily leans towards manipulation—a subtle form of coercion" I feel that it is a little unfair to do so as if what already goes on does not contain its entail of manipulation and coercion. It's just that the unfamiliarity foregrounds the matter. Let's face it; all communication is manipulation; just not all of it is with ill intent or negatively coercive. All of the criticisms that follow about the use of connotative meaning bypassing 'argument' are simply the visual equivalent of the tricks of rhetoric in the verbal and written media. It may be, in fact, that what visual media do is extend our rhetorical vocabulary.

Is Video Technology in Church Manipulative? | Out of Ur | Following God's Call in a New World | Conversations hosted by the editors of Leadership journal:

Reasons to consider Linux

Dell have recently started to ship computers in the USA with Linux, and in this brief vid, we learn why.