Archive: The Gnovis Blog
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Thank You For Riding Metro (and Conforming to Social Norms)
“Ding. Doors opening, step BACK to allow customers to exit. When boarding, please move to the center of the car.”
Oh, the Metro. Affectionately monikered by my friend Diala as “the ‘Tro,” the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority’s Metro system is a rich study in public human behavior. I’m guessing that just bringing up the subject of the Metro has you thinking about some of your own weird experiences…
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Will Obama's Health Care Address Work?
Make no mistake: after a contentious summer, President Obama’s upcoming address on health care reform to a joint session of congress is a critical moment for his presidency. The question on everyone’s mind is whether or not the speech will be enough to reenergize, reframe, and restart the health care debate in a way more favorable to the White House. Will it work? To put it in a rather Clintonian way, it may depend on what the definition of “work” is.
The “Bully Pulpit”
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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We don't need no education; We don't need no thought control
Evoking Pink Floyd’s “Another brick in the wall” lyrics, conservatives have lambasted President Obama’s upcoming Web address on education. The President will use the opportunity to speak directly to students across the nation on Sept. 8. But right-wing political leaders and think tanks have dubbed this a lesson in brainwashing and a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign targeted at America’s youth.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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The Kennedy Cognitive Dissonance
The recent death of Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) got me thinking about legacies. Everyone strives to make some sort of familial, societal, political or cultural impact during the course of their lives. To say Ted Kennedy made an impact is an extreme understatement. His fingerprints can be found on some of most monumental pieces of legislation of the last half century. Yet, his personal failings became political media fodder and part of the calculus used in summing up his legacy.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Hey Baby, What's Your Schemata?
A guy walks up to a girl in a bar and says: “Hey baby, what’s your schemata?”
I’m not a psychologist and I don’t play one on the internets, but I do find myself desperate for an empirical model to study the interaction between people and culture. Enter psychology. Psychologists have long used the theory of schema to understand the byzantine mental structures used by our brains to process information. And increasingly, social scientists are using schemata in their investigations of culture.
Yet settling on what we all mean by culture (which varies by discipline, by university, and by individual) can be tricky.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Real Estate Killed the Radio Star?
No, not quite. That happened years ago when MTV began tinkering with its programming and started slowly phasing out music-related content. New Yorkers, at least some of them anyway, are mourning the loss of MTV’s iconic Times Square studio on Broadway after landlord S.L. Green and the music network’s parent company, Viacom, opted not to renew the space after the 12-year lease term ends.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Ann Arbor loses the News
On July 24, the Chicago Tribune printed a mournful column, lamenting the death of the Ann Arbor News. Unlike many other cities, the death of the Ann Arbor News is the death of the only major news source in the area.
The News was not just a hometown paper for the 114,000 residents of this university town about 45 miles west of Detroit, it was the hometown paper. Ann Arbor has become the first American city of any size to lose its only full-time daily.
But perhaps understandably(less so for the many journalists sitting in the seats), they are starting from the ground up. The editors are trying a business model that has been semi-successful for other digital news outlets: small staff, small circulation, niche advertising (see AnnArbor.com–oh and the top story this morning is dead swans).
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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The Unvampire-like Vampires of True Blood
So I just finished reading the book Dead Until Dark, by Charlene Harris. As a fantasy fiction writer, I try to keep up with the hot trends in books, movies, television etc. and True Blood (which is based on Dead Until Dark) has been getting quite a bit of press. If you’ve watched an episode, it’s easy to see why. You’ve got sex, you’ve got murder and you’ve got…well, more sex.But I have to admit, I’ve always liked a good vampire story. I’m the kid that grew up reading Stephen King and Anne Rice (I was actually forbidden to read Anne Rice, so I would sneak the books out of my mothers bedroom or read chapters at a time at the local bookstore). I plowed through Salem’s Lot while in grade school and then Dracula while on a family trip one heart-racing summer not long after. Dead Until Dark itself isn’t brilliant. It’s basic pop fiction fare: lots of dialog, little description, a fast-paced plot that ends in about 300 pages. What is brilliant is the world she creates. Because Harris departs from the traditional vampire lore in some very interesting ways:
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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My Tubeless Summer (In Context)
After having Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” book referenced in nearly half of my class-related readings, I decided to take a closer look and make that one of my summer reads. And the timing could not have been better – coming in the midst of my television-less summer.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Social Networking and Public Grief: the Death of Michael Jackson and the End of an Era
In the past, opportunities for individual participation in public rituals of mass grieving were few and far between. Social networking technologies have allowed for a new form of public mourning to
Category: The Gnovis Blog