E. Howard Hunt names the men who killed Kennedy

On November 23, 1963 I was a grade two student. I sat in the desk in the front row next to my friend Bruce. I remember that it was very unusual that the Sister who taught us rolled a television set into the classroom. She seemed to be very upset. There was the sense of something being very wrong. She turned on the black and white television and explained to us that the President had been killed. Today is the 45th anniversary (do you call it an anniversary if it was a tragedy?) of the murder of JFK
The following is a re-post of an article from May of 2007.
——–

I'm not familiar with prisonplanet.com, but they tell the story of a recording E. Howard Hunt made on his deathbed. The tape was recently made public by Howard Hunt's son, Saint John Hunt. On the tape Howard Hunt describes a bitter LBJ and his involvement with the murder of JFK. Hunt names others who were involved in the conspiracy. Five minutes of the tape were aired recently on CoastToCoastAM.com
There is a direct link to the mp3 file here.

What's been bugging me about it is, what if it's true? I mean – just for a minute – inhabit a world where the Kennedy assassination has been solved- We know who did it, who helped who and why.
Now what?
How is justice served over 40 years later? Who's going to pay?
What does it mean? What would change?
How do I heal, or why, or who cares?
Is it just miscellaneous information?

Attention Economy – Google Insights For Search

This from Berkman Center For Internet & Society New Media analyst, Hal Roberts. Fascinating blog post on using Google's new Insights For Search tool to extract, well… insights.

Digital Cameras v. Nigeria

One of my guiding theories of the modern media / advertising landscape is that the extensive real time surveillance of consumers by online advertisers and content providers encourages the growth of content about digital cameras (the content about which is easily monetized) at the expense of hard news, especially international news about developing countries like Nigeria.

The following google insights chart of digital camera v. Nigeria searches over time strikes a blow against that theory:

Read the rest of the post here
.

See also!!!

Who Wants What? Google Insight on Spam, Pirated Software and Other Fun Stuff

From WorldChanging's Ethan Zuckerman
I'm wondering what other pockets of "undesirable" behavior are mappable via this technique. For instance, searches for "keygen", a popular site that offers serial numbers and software keys to enable pirated software shows a heavy concentration the former Warsaw Pact nations, with some strength in Southeast Asia as well.

See Also!!!

Early adopters vs the Mainstream: Google Insights points out websites only used by Silicon Valley nerds.

From Andrew Chen's blog.
Netvibes is California only – perhaps this is a good candidate for an early-adopter-only crowd?

Here's a couple of my own.
American Idol (red) vs. Global Warming (blue).

Batman (red) vs. Darfur (blue).

Media Maven Robert Logan's new $45 book out The Extended Mind!

Logan's jammed web site for all the free stuff

Media Ecology Convention at Santa Clara, CA, 19-22 June, 2008

Amazing!   Walter Ong surfaces!   One of McLuhan's major Mentors!

The Ninth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association
2008 Call for Awards Nominations  

Communication, Technology and the Sacred
Santa Clara, California
June 19-22, 2008

Convention Coordinators:

If, as Walter Ong suggests, technologies of communication and information affect noetic economies (structures of thought); and if noetic economies have to do with what it means to be human; it seems important to consider how the spoken and the mediated word and image contribute to the human soul – or to the sacred. How have technologies and the larger media world altered our experiences of the sacred?

Daniel Kahneman – A Bat and a Ball Cost $1.10

Daniel KahnemanRIP Danny. Thank you for your insights and stories. I'm glad of the opportunity to know your work. You made a difference.

[Update 9/8/2010 A paper Danny co-authored, "Income's Influence on Happiness" has just been released.]

… the bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Daniel Kahneman KNOWS that the first thought that entered your head was $.10–even if you're a Computer Science major at MIT. But that's the wrong answer.

Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling On Happiness" led me to Nicholas Taleb's "Fooled By Randomness". Both books cite the work of Danny Kahneman. I blogged a bit about him here. I have been rummaging around the internet looking for whatever I can find on Danny and his work and have come up with some excellent content. But let me give you a taste of the sort of fascinating facts you'll hear in Danny's lectures first.

In a study Danny (I don't know him personally but after listening to all these lectures, I feel as though I do. He could no doubt name the cognitive bias this suggests) mentions in one of his talks, people are asked how much pleasure they derive from their car. They are then asked enough questions about the car to determine its blue book (resale) value. It turns out that there IS a correlation between the amount of pleasure the subject reported and the dollar value of the car. i.e. Yes, that late model BMW in the garage DOES give you more pleasure than my 20 year old Honda would. BUT! They then go on to ask the subject if they find their commute to work pleasurable, and guess what?– nobody does!. It turns out that the ONLY time people derive pleasure from their car is when they are THINKING about it.

From Wikipedia:
With Amos Tversky (Kahneman's longtime research partner, with whom he would have shared the Nobel prize had Tversky not died in 1996) and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973, Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982), and developed Prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). He was awarded the 2002 the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in Prospect theory.

Major Contributions:

  • anchoring and adjustment -describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.
  • availability heuristic -where people base their prediction of the frequency of an event or the proportion within a population based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.
  • conjunction fallacy -when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a general condition that contains the specific condition. (i.e. You think you're MORE likely to die in an air disaster brought on by a terrorist event, than you are to die in ANY kind of air disaster).
  • framing (economics) -reversals of preference when the same problem is presented in different ways. (10% fat vs. 90% fat-free!)
  • loss aversion -the tendency for people strongly to prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains. (Why New Yorkers stay in New York for the culture, and Angelenos stay in LA for the weather!!).
  • peak-end rule – we judge our past experiences almost entirely on how they were at their peak (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended.
  • prospect theory -how people make choices in situations where they have to decide between alternatives that involve risk.
  • reference class forecasting -predicts the outcome of a planned action based on actual outcomes in a reference class of similar actions.
  • simulation heuristic – people determine the likelihood of an event based on how easy it is to picture mentally. (Why we buy lottery tickets.)
  • status quo bias -in other words, people like things to stay relatively the same.

Media – Most of these lectures have a fairly long-winded intro. Skip ahead if you don't need the background info.

Explorations of the Mind – Well-Being: Living and Thinking About It. (YouTube)

Conversation With History – Intuition and Rationality. (YouTube)

Conversation With History – Intuition and Rationality. (Audio)

Explorations of the Mind – Intuition: The Marvels and the Flaws. (YouTube)

Nobel Prize Lecture. (YouTube)

Update March 2009- Kahneman and Taleb on the same stage discus the crash. (YouTube)

Update March 2010. From the February 2010, Ted Talk Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory. (YouTube)

Found a few more DK links.
A Perspective on Judgment and Choice 24pg. PDF doc. on the subject of his Nobel Prize.
The Allais Paradox Wired magazine 10/10 (Archive)

.

Lev Manovich @ D|MA UCLA May 1, Thur., 2008 12:30PM

lev-manovich

Lev Manovich is the author of Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), Black Box – White Cube (Merve Verlag Berlin, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which is hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." UCLA listing and details.

WARK! a UCLA 22 April 12:30 PM talk followUP^!

Ken Wark gave a mind-blowin' talk yesterday at UCLA!  Hopefullly, video/audio should be available from D!MA archives. A Wonderful flow of jargon, tags, andnew categories!  Someday we will have tags here on our WordPress app! Wark mentioned WordPress more than once.See a piece here from his new book due out laterfrom Sit  

Game

Sunday, April 13
The Guy Debord that is best known is the one who is the author of The Society of the Spectacle, but in many ways it is not quite a representative text. Lately there has also been a revival of Debord the film maker, but here I want to think about Debord is a slightly different light. So I will discuss not so much his writing or his films, and still less his biography, but a game. Beside being a writer, a film maker, an editor, and a first rate professional of no profession, he was also, of all things, a game designer.http://totality.tv/2008/4/13/game  

MACKENZIE WARK, GAMER THEORY

THEORY PROFESSOR CANDIDATE

 

April 22, 2008, 12:30 pm       »  

McKenzie Wark is the author of Gamer Theory (Harvard UP), A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP), and various other things.

http://www.dma.ucla.edu/events/calendar.php?ID=536

 

 

 

Keep the InterNETS Free! Stanford FCC event for Net Neutrality

online liveJoin the conversation at the Free Press Action Network where we'll be live blogging during the hearing. We'll be discussing the hearing, current Internet policies, and what we can do to protect Internet freedom for the future.Live Chat During the FCC HearingDATE: Thursday, April 17TIME: 3- 10 p.m. ET / 12-7 p.m. PTLOCATION:  www.freepress.net/actionIn recent months, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon have been caught blocking, filtering and spying on your Internet activities. This event is one of our best chances to tell Washington policymakers that the Internet must remain open.  http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/04/16/tune-in-online-to-fcc-hearing-on-future-of-the-internet/

 

       okAn  FCC hearing  schedule for Thursday at Stanford University will focus on whether ISPs can shape, filter and even block content that travels over their networks. (The public –more than 1.5 million  of whom have spoken out against such violations – has a rare opportunity to testify before the commission during the hearing.)http://savetheinternet.com/=stanford  

IRC interview with Douglas Rushkoff, Tuesday, April 15th, 8PM ET

media maven out of NYC    Join us tomorrow at 8PM Eastern as we hold a live discussion with author, teacher, and documentarian  Douglas Rushkoff  in the #boingboing IRC channel, to talk about some of the work he's doing to move his studies in a "'new' direction," to focus less on the tech/media sphere and towards the nature of money and corporatism  

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/04/14/irc-interview-with-d.html

 tags go along here?  

Horizon: Psychedelic science by Bill Eagles

mind-hacks.png

Mind Hacks is a collection of probes into the moment-by-moment workings of our brain with a view to understanding ourselves a little better and learning a little more, in a very real sense, about what makes us tick. It's by Tom Stafford and Matt Webb, and published by O'Reilly.

psychedelic-splash

And from the Mind Hacks Blog: In 1997, BBC science programme Horizon broadcast a legendary edition on the use of psychedelic drugs in medicine. Luckily, it's been uploaded to Google Video and you can now watch the whole thing online. Read more…

TVO's 'Big Ideas' – Another treasure trove.

Big Ideas video podcast TV Ontario produces a lecture format show featuring heavy thinkers. You can subscribe   here. I'm posting links to a particular show I found especially illuminating on the subject of micro-financing and a new book, 'A Billion Bootstraps' by Eric Thurman. Here's the mp3 lecture but check out TVO's Big Ideas Past Episodes page – hundreds of hours of pro audio lectures from the likes of Deepak Chopra,and Naomi Klein, as well as many you've not heard of before.