The Small Faces - Live: 1966-1968
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Thursday, 9 September 2010
Scientists identify moves that make men irresistible on the dancefloor
The enduring mystery of why men rarely flatter themselves when they take to the dancefloor may finally have been solved. A team of psychologists used video footage of men strutting their stuff to pinpoint the killer moves that separate good dancers from bad. Men who were judged to be good dancers had a varied repertoire and more moves that involved tilting and twisting the torso and neck.
But the majority of men displayed highly repetitive moves that used their arms and legs, but not the rest of their bodies.
"It's rare that someone is described as a good dancer if they are flinging their arms about but not much else," said Nick Neave, a psychologist at the University of Northumbria, who led the study.
"Think about a head banger. Their head movement has a large amplitude, but it's not changing direction or showing any kind of variability. That's a bad dancer. Or someone who is just twisting and turning left and right? That's a bad dancer too."
While features such as body shape and facial symmetry are well known indicators of healthy development, a person's dance moves may send out more subtle clues about their potential as a mate, Neave said.
Neave's team recruited 19 male volunteers aged between 18 and 35 and asked them to dance to a simple drum beat in front of a video camera for 30 seconds. To capture the dance moves, 38 infra-red reflectors were attached to their clothing. These produce bright spots that allow the movement of every limb and joint to be tracked and studied in detail.
The researchers used software to transfer each man's dance routine to an avatar on a computer screen. This ensured that the judges ranked the dancers according to their moves and not their height, looks or other physical features.
The dancers were judged by 37 straight women, also aged 18 to 35, who watched the avatar perform 15 seconds of each man's routine before ranking them on a scale of one to seven, where one was very bad dancing.
"The head, neck and upper body come out as the key features that are important for good dancing and that surprised us," said Neave, whose study is published in the journal Biology Letters. "When you see brilliant dancers, you'll see their bodies, heads and necks are all doing ever so slightly different things in time to the music."
Will Brown, a psychologist at the University of East London, said more work was needed to disentangle why dancing is attractive and its biological significance.
"When you have so much movement data from a relatively small sample of dancers, you might get chance associations between certain moves and dance attractiveness," he said.
"Flexing the trunk while dancing may be attractive, but we need to show it is indicative of a better quality male using an independent measure of biological quality."
Neave said his group is working through the results of blood tests on the men, which appear to show that the better dancers are healthier.
Ian Sample @'The Guardian'
This Sucks
Meet Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center, the 50-member church in Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville is where I live. This hate monger has turned our wonderful community into a lightning rod for hate and ignorance. Saying his church has 50 members is a stretch as he's lost some in the past weeks. On top of that, he has 9 kids so his family actually makes up 20% or more of the congregation. There happens to be a home football game of 90K fans this Saturday, 9/11/10. The FBI, Homeland Security are in town, and all local law enforcement are on super high alert. We have been informed by Homeland Security that we will not be reimbursed for the exorbitant costs of all this extra security, so our already overstretched local resources will be put over the limit all in the name of his selfish hatred for Islam. On top of all that, the image of our wonderful community will be forever tarnished.
Since the start of this, I've heard people say, "He should be ignored." However, stories like this are like crack for the media, and sure enough, the story is now international. The media satellite trucks outside this church now outnumber the vehicles of its congregation. It sucks to say Gainesville has fallen victim to fear and loathing.
Since the start of this, I've heard people say, "He should be ignored." However, stories like this are like crack for the media, and sure enough, the story is now international. The media satellite trucks outside this church now outnumber the vehicles of its congregation. It sucks to say Gainesville has fallen victim to fear and loathing.
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@'The Gainesville Sun'Mark Stewart on The Pop Group reunion
Mark’s a giant of a man. He’s one of those guys who has to stoop to get in rooms. He looks - to borrow his favourite word - like a clash of a 50s matinee idol, Reg Presley of The Troggs and an Easter Island Statue come angrily to life. His head’s velocity is too fast for anyone currently trapped in his orbit. I see Jim Sclavunous (Bad Seeds/Grinderman/occasional Quietus writer) afterwards and say that ideally I’d like to interview Stewart again because even though I liked him, maybe I'd caught him on a particularly manic day. Spending two hours with him was a bit like spending 20 hours trapped on a passenger jet that's full of children and constantly threatening to fall out of the sky. Jim smiles indulgently and says that he's always out there: "I've known Mark for years and he's always been far out on some distant cosmic plain that makes him hard to reach sometimes."
During the interview in The Griffin on Leonard Street, I feel like his brain is skimming on far ahead like a stone across a pond surface. I ask one thing and he answers some other question that I’ve not even dreamed up yet. He's like a chess grandmaster who has malfunctioned and found himself suddenly only able to play the moves that are the furthest ahead - ten steps into the future. These moves may make sense to him but don't always to those round him. There is much bright and probably brilliant talk occluded into partial uselessness by this. He reacts to everything around him. His face darts about changing expression constantly. He isn’t pulling focus and he’s omni-intent on the interview, my beard, the barwoman, his friends Andy Fraser of Some Friendly and Paul Smith of Blast First sat at the bar, the cold wave compilation being played on the stereo, his notes that he has written onto a sheet of paper in front of him, something else that he can see over my shoulder. He sneers loudly at nearly everything I say in about an hour and a half which can, and does, get slightly grating. Even if I had turned up totally unprepared, which I haven't, I still would have hit the mark with at least a third of the questions. He’s a nice guy though and an energizing presence. It’s sad he comes into this naturally presuming I’m on the opposite side to him. Part of him still acts as if it’s 1980 and the guy from the NME is here to stitch him up. In fact he constantly refers to me as being from the weekly (which I do write for) but he doesn’t hear when I tell him that the piece is for a more humble institution.
He admits himself that he's frozen in time in some ways: "I haven't changed since I was 14."...
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John Doran @'The Quietus'
John Doran @'The Quietus'
A virtual counter-revolution
The first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious movement. Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital paradise in which not only would commerce be frictionless and growth exponential, but democracy would be direct and the nation-state would no longer exist. One, John-Perry Barlow, even penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”.
Even though all this sounded Utopian when it was preached, it reflected online reality pretty accurately. The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier. For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with anyone else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone else for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a thing of the past. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” Mr Barlow wrote.
The lofty discourse on “cyberspace” has long changed. Even the term now sounds passé. Today another overused celestial metaphor holds sway: the “cloud” is code for all kinds of digital services generated in warehouses packed with computers, called data centres, and distributed over the internet. Most of the talk, though, concerns more earthly matters: privacy, antitrust, Google’s woes in China, mobile applications, green information technology (IT). Only Apple’s latest iSomethings seem to inspire religious fervour, as they did again this week.
Again, this is a fair reflection of what is happening on the internet. Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, it has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but related forces...
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Wednesday, 8 September 2010
Abuse in the Name of Treatment - Drug Detention Centers in Asia
According to estimations, there are hundreds of thousands of people kept in compulsory drug detention centers in Vietnam, China, Thailand and Laos. It is easy to get in to one of these centers. Some people enter voluntarily in the hope of kicking their drug habit, others are sent there by their families who pay for their “treatment”; but in some cities, it often happens that the military police just collect street children, drug users, sex workers and other groups on the street considered “deviant” by the authorities and detains them in a camp for years, without any due process or right of appeal. It’s easy to get in – but it’s hard to get out. Detainees are often forced to work for free, starved, beaten, tortured and raped – but they don’t get any treatment or rehabilitation. If they finally leave the camps, they feel more disintegrated from society than at any time before. The vast majority of detainees who leave the camps start to use drugs again or engage in other illegal activities. The governments of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand received millions of dollars from Western governments to build camps to treat drug addicts. Tax payers in donor countries had no idea what is happening in these camps before Human Rights Watch documented the widespread human rights abuses. One of the centers – Koh Kor – was closed thanks to human rights advocacy but there are still too many in operation. HCLU, along with international organizations such as UNAIDS or UNODC, is calling for the closure of these camps. We hope after watching our new movie more people will join us and put pressure on these governments to stop the abuse in the name of drug treatment.
If you want to learn more read the related reports of Human Rights Watch:
Sarosip @'DRUG reporter'
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