Elephant Language

Researchers listening to elephant sounds and observing their behavior are compiling an elephant dictionary.



Bob Simon goes to Central Africa to listen to the forest elephants first hand.

What To Do During Police Interviw?

A law school professor and former criminal defense attorney tells you why you should never agree to be interviewed by the police.


The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, protects against abuse of government authority in a legal procedure.


According to wikipedia, its guarantees stem from English common law which traces back to the Magna Carta in 1215. For instance, grand juries and the phrase "due process" both trace their origin to the Magna Carta.

Alexander Petrov: Animation as art

Aleksandr Konstantinovich Petrov (July 17, 1957) is a Russian animator and animation director. Petrov won an Oscar in 2002 for his cartoon adaptation of Hemingways "The Old Man and the Sea".


Petrov's style from the late 1980s onward can be characterized as a type of Romantic realism. People, animals and landscapes are painted and animated in a very realistic fashion, but there are many sections in his films where Petrov attempts to depict a character's inner thoughts and dreams. In "The Old Man and the Sea", for example, the fisherman dreams that he and the marlin are brothers swimming through the sea and the sky. In "My Love", the main character's illness is represented by showing him being buried beneath freshly-fallen snow on a dark night.


His technique involves oil painting on glass. But how does such an artist feel about working in an industry dominated by computer graphics?

Last Lecture

Randolph Frederick "Randy" Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American professor of computer science and human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.


Pausch learned that he had a terminal case of pancreatic cancer in September 2006. He gave an upbeat lecture entitled "The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon, which became a popular YouTube video and led to other media appearances


. He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture on the same theme, which became a New York Times best-seller.


Pausch died of complications from pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008.

Economics of Attention

A Panel to look at how the attention economy is informing new business models in advertising, media, and design.


Panelists included Richard A. Lanham, Professor Emeritus of English at UCLA and author of The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, and David Merkoski, Creative Director at frog design. Marty Kaplan, Director of the Norman Lear Center, moderated.


Richard A. Lanham is probably most widely known for his textbooks on revising prose to improve style and clarify thought. He is also a notable scholar of the history of rhetoric who has published notable books on the subject. His latest work, The Economics of Attention, was published in 2006 by the University of Chicago Press.


Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems.

In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport and J. C. Beck define the concept of attention as :

"Attention is focused mental engagement on a particular item of information. Items come into our awareness, we attend to a particular item, and then we decide whether to act" (Davenport & Beck 2001, p. 20)


In accordance with Wikipedia, Herbert Simon was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention economics when he wrote:

"...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it" (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

He noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information (Simon 1996, p. 143-144).

In recent years, Simon's characterization of the problem of information overload as an economic one has become more popular. Business strategists such as Thomas H. Davenport or Michael H. Goldhaber have adopted the term "attention economy" (Davenport & Beck 2001).

Some writers have even speculated that "attention transactions" will replace financial transactions as the focus of our economic system (Goldhaber 1997, Franck 1999). Information systems researchers have also adopted the idea, and are beginning to investigate mechanism designs which build on the idea of creating property rights in attention.

Trevor Paglen's Experimental Geography

* First Video: Trevor Paglen At The Colbert Report (on his book: "I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me")

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Trevor Paglen
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

** Second Video: Trevor Paglen's Lecture (On His Book: "Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World")




Runtime: 59mn 37sec


Trevor Paglen is an American artist, geographer, and author.


He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley, where he currently works as a researcher.


Paglen is the author of three books including "Torture Taxi", (co-authored with investigative journalist A.C. Thompson) which was the first book to comprehensively describe the CIA's extraordinary rendition program , and "I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me" (Melville House, 2007), which is a look at the world of black projects through unit patches and memorabilia created for top-secret programs.


Paglen's most recent book, "Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World" is a broader look at secrecy in the United States.


Trevor Paglen is credited with coining the term "Experimental Geography" to describe practices coupling experimental cultural production and art-making with ideas from critical human geography about the production of space, materialism, and praxis. The 2009 book Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism (Melville House, 2009), edited by Nato Thompson is largely inspired by Paglen's work.

Private Lives and Public Consquences

Interview with William H. Chafe, author of "Private Lives Public Consquences" for the television program Books of Our Time.


Chafe, a history professor at Duke University, details the influence of personality on politics in Modern America.


Subjects covered include: The Roosevelts, Martin Luther King Jr, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Muhammad Yunus

In 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank for their efforts to create economic and social development from below. "Lasting peace can not be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights."

In his new book, Professor Yunus describes the role of business in promoting social reform and his vision for an innovative business model that would combine the power of free markets with a quest for a more humane, egalitarian world that could help alleviate world poverty, inequality, and other social problems.