New US weapon to catch dastardly Taliban revealed

...after all EVERYONE likes beer don't they!

♪♫ NIN - Gave Up (Broken)

trent_reznor I awake to sad news. RIP Peter Christopherson - friend and huge inspiration. http://bit.ly/fAwO6G http://bit.ly/dIvd3V 14 minutes ago via web

'The game has changed' - of course it fugn has!

Met Police commissioner predicts 'disorder on our streets'

Wikileaks documents show Turkey helped al-Qaida

 ...Other documents show that the US has supported the PKK, which has been waging a separatist war against Turkey since 1984 and has been classified by the State Department as a terrorist organization since 1979. The US military documents call the PKK "warriors for freedom and Turkish citizens," and say that the US set free arrested PKK members in Iraq. The documents also point out that US forces in Iraq have given weapons to the PKK and ignored the organization's operations inside Turkey...

 @'Jerusalem Post'

Primal Scream to work with Kevin Shields on Screamadelica 20th Anniversay reissue

Primal Scream have just announced that they will we releasing a remastered version of their seminal 1991 album Screamadelica in March next year to mark the 20th Anniversary of the album’s release. Exciting as this is, turns out that not only have they remastered the album, but they got legendary My Bloody Valentine guitarist Kevin Shields to help out in the process along with original producer Andy Weatherall.

Speaking to NME, singer Bobby Gillespie said that Shields was an obvious choice for the project. “He’s just really good with sound and frequencies, we thought it was a fun thing to do. Kevin, Andrew [Innes,Primal Scream guitarist] and myself went down to the mastering room. Kevin’s the one person in the world that all remastering engineers would hate to see walking into the studio, when we walked in the guy nearly had a fucking heart attack!”

Shields has worked with the group before, playing with them live from 99 to 06 as well as working on their album Xtrmntr and Evil Heart.

The reissue that will see see the album repacked with bonus material, falls in line with the band’s Screamadelica live shows, that will see the band play the album in it’s entirety for the first time, the show landing on our shows in January as part of this year’s epic Big Day Out festival. 

Michael Carr @'Musicfeeds'

Demdike Stare - Voices of Dust

    

A simple change in the law could open up online access to the BBC's archives

BBC iPlayer: a wealth of archive dramas, documentaries and interviews are unavailable on the BBC's on-demand service. Photograph: Alamy

In the melee of the last days of the Labour government, among the casualties were clauses in the digital economy bill that would have solved the intractable problems that stand in the way of giving public access to this country's great archives of radio and television programmes.

Think of George Orwell and W H Auden, of Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft, of any British artist or musician you can name. The BBC's archives are a treasure trove of their work, of interviews with them and discussions and documentaries about them.

But the BBC can't make them available to us, as it would like to, because of the prohibitive administrative costs of clearing the rights.

All this was set out in the Digital Britain reports that prompted the inclusion of those clauses in the bill. After running a pilot project to clear the rights for 1,000 hours of archive programming for online use, the BBC calculated it would take 800 people three years of full-time work to clear the rights to its archive, assuming that all rights owners could be found and that every one was prepared to grant the rights.

At a time when the BBC has just had hundreds of millions of pounds removed from its annual income for the next six years, its archive project is not going to be given the kind of money it would need to spend on administrative work of that scale.

But nor should it need to when there is a simple, fair and equitable solution at hand.

The government should move now to reintroduce the orphan works and extended collective licensing provisions, which the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats were instrumental in removing from the digital economy bill when they were in opposition.

They sided with a lobby campaign mounted by photographers against these provisions, effectively sealing up archives in which photographs either form no part (radio), or in which they are of relatively small importance (television).

Reintroducing those provisions now would give us legitimate access through online on-demand services to that wealth of dramas, documentaries, histories, debates and interviews that can tell us so much about the society and world of which we are the inheritors.

We can read about it in books, but radio and television tell it and show it in ways that the written word cannot match. Rights owners have nothing to fear: the statutory scheme was designed to safeguard their interests, to ensure they would receive fair remuneration and that the integrity of their rights would be respected. Few of them would prefer their work to be made available on illegal services instead, but where there's a vacuum, that's how it will be filled.

Buried in the depths of David Cameron's plans to create a silicon valley in London's Olympic park was a statement that all digital media content providers should welcome, and the importance of which deserves more recognition than it has been given. The accompanying review of the UK 's intellectual property regime is to look at "barriers to new internet-based business models, including the cost of obtaining permissions from existing rights holders".

Creating a silicon valley in London's East End, however, will not be an easy task. By contrast, what a simple thing it would be to steer a short enabling bill through parliament to remove the barrier that rights-clearance administrative costs pose to opening up the broadcasters' archives.

Stephen Edwards @'The Guardian'

20 Minutes with Gaspar Noe

New York Times Cover Story on "Growing Up Digital" Misses the Mark

The Threshold HouseBoys Choir

Live at The Equinox Festival London 14 June 2009

HERE

Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson RIP

1955-2010

chris_carter_ Our dearest beautiful Sleazy left this mortal coil as he slept in peace last night. Words cannot express our grief. 1 minute ago via Twitter for iPad

UK-based Taliban spend months fighting Nato forces in Afghanistan

No surprise...

Looking for empathy and support? You're more likely to get it from a poor person than you are from a rich one, according to new research published in Psychological Science.

In a series of experiments, the new study found that lower-class people were better at reading emotions on others' faces — one measure of what researchers call empathic accuracy — than people in the upper class. "A lot of what we see is a baseline orientation for the lower class to be more empathetic and the upper class to be less [so]," says Michael Kraus, a co-author of the study and a postdoctoral student at the University of California, San Francisco. 

Why might that be? "Lower-class environments are much different from upper-class environments," explains Kraus. "Lower-class individuals have to respond chronically to a number of vulnerabilities and social threats. You really need to depend on others so they will tell you if a social threat or opportunity is coming and that makes you more perceptive of emotions."

Study co-author Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, agrees that people in lower socioeconomic classes "live lives defined by threat. They are threatened by the environment, by institutions and by other people. One of most adaptive strategies in response to threat is to be very vigilant and carefully attend to others and try to promote cooperation to build strong alliances." 

An earlier study by the same researchers found that those of lower socioeconomic status were also more helpful and generous, suggesting that it's not just empathic accuracy but empathy itself that may be enhanced by circumstance. "Coming from an environment where you're more vulnerable, you solve problems by turning to others," says Kraus. That increases empathy and strengthens social bonds.

For the new study, Kraus and his colleagues conducted three different experiments. The first involved 200 university employees, some with college degrees and some without; the university setting is one in which educational attainment is particularly linked to job status and can be used as a proxy for social class. When asked to look at photographs of faces and identify the emotions portrayed, those with only a high school degree did better than their college-educated counterparts. 

This measure of empathic accuracy — "a person's ability to accurately read emotions that other people are feeling," says Kraus — is important because it is a key part of empathy itself: if you can't recognize what someone else is going through, it's hard to respond with kindness to their needs.

The second experiment involved college students who were asked to rate their own class status by placing themselves on a ladder representing various class ranks. In previous studies, subjective measures of class similar to this one have been found to accurately predict psychological and physical problems among lower status people.

In the experiment, two participants alternately watched and then took part in a hypothetical job interview with an experimenter. Once again, people who judged themselves to be lower class outperformed the those who identified as upper class in reading the emotions of their fellow participant.

In the third experiment, students were asked to compare their own class status with either someone at the top of the socioeconomic ladder — or someone at the bottom. People who compared themselves with a lower-class person, which made them think of themselves as having a higher status, were less accurate at reading emotional expressions. Conversely, those who were made to feel that they were in a lower class were better at reading emotions.

"I think [the study] is really well done and extremely compelling,” says Jamil Zaki, a postdoc at Harvard who studies empathy but was not associated with the research.

In addition to navigating lives that involve more social threats and vulnerabilities, the impact of power relations could also help explain why people lower on the class ladder might be better able to read emotional signals. When your job depends on knowing when the boss is angry, for instance, you're more likely to try to get better at reading him than he is to bother worrying about reading you. 

"People induced to feel more power do all sorts of things that show that they are not paying as much attention to people and to the emotions of others," says Zaki.

The influence of power could also be the reason that some studies find a gender difference in empathetic accuracy favoring women: they frequently have less power than men. "There are likely to be many determinants" of the gender difference, says Keltner. "One is that having lower power status makes women more attuned. Another may be that they more systematically take on caregiving roles. A third may be basic biology. If women do indeed have higher levels of the [bonding chemical] oxytocin and we know that oxytocin promotes empathy, that may be involved."

In an economy that puts more and more people at risk of falling out of the middle or upper classes, the reduction in empathy seen in the upper classes is troubling. ?)

"We are living in a period of historically high inequality. Health problems and psychological problems are correlated with inequality and we have rising inequality," says Keltner. "People in positions of power are not going to see [the inequality]. They're going to be blind to it and that has enormous implications for how we educate leaders, why they may not see [what's] obvious [to everyone else] and why they may not even understand the suffering of the people below them."

The good news for those stuck on the bottom, however, is that the people around them may be nicer.

Maia Szalavitz @'Time'

doctorow TSA motto: you can't see London, you can't see France, until we see your underpants #reddit