Tonight, I want to take a moment to pay tribute to one of the finest of the funny men in Hollywood's history. He had nothing to do with my directly having read any materials over the year, with the exception of his news obituary. I invite you to read it as well:
http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/28/actor-leslie-nielsen-dies-of-complications-from-pneumonia/
Leslie Nielsen, I was first exposed to your Naked Gun movies at what was likely far too young of an age. For that reason, though I have to thank you for creating a movie that amused me from age 8 to age 20 and beyond. It was only relatively recently that I watched Airplane! and I enjoyed myself just as much as I did for 2 1/2 and 33 1/3. Your deadpan delivery and wild faces were always well appreciated in my house. Your Mr. Magoo lives on in mind every time I look at my crazy little bulldog.
Thank you, Leslie Nielsen, for taking the time to make us laugh until our sides split and we had to rewind the movie to hear what was said after the punchline. Thank you. We really, really loved you.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Saturday, November 20, 2010
And they say it ain't a science...
I am here today to comment on several news articles I have read online. In talking with my parents, having just booked holiday flights, I was reminded of something that I initially thought was a joke: The New TSA Security Measures. I have been reading numerous articles about the science, reasoning, backlash, and response to these measures. Regardless of the fact that I am looking forward to my holiday airport experience that much less, I would still like to take the time provide an psychological analytic perspective to all this.
From what I have heard and read, there are already horror stories abound concerning these new machines. I feel the need to clarify some facts about them, however. According to the most recent article I read on NPR*, there are currently 400 of these full-body image scans in use at 70 of the nation's airports. Furthermore, passengers are not required, per se, to go through these. They are instead "randomly" selected to go through the machine. The full-body pat-downs, one step away from a cavity search according to the descriptions, are required only in the cases where a person refuses a scan or something suspicious appears, the latter of which might be an understandable circumstance.
Does anyone else see the faulty logic in the rest of that, though? If I am not required to go through the machine just by going through security and am instead happily "volunteered" for the scan, should I not be able to refuse it in lieu of a magnetic scan? Apparently not. Issues have arisen with this, somewhat understandably, in which individuals have refused both and experienced a less than friendly removal from the airport.**
However, moving on from that, we hear from the head of the TSA that he is doing what he has to do to keep us safe from terrorists.*** Countries where people bomb each other every day are laughing at us. Laughing! This is apparently the only way to invade our privacy just enough to keep us safe. And boy, oh boy, is this an invasion of privacy. I get it! There are bad people out there who want to hurt us all, but there is a point at which ensuring our safety does less to reduce our fear than to increase it. I think we've reached that point. Hell, I'm pretty sure we're far past it.
That said, now for the psychological aspect of this analysis and commentary. For those of you who are familiar with Milgram and Zimbardo, you should already be thinking what I'm thinking. For those who are not, allow me to clarify.
Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments after WWII to figure out juuuust what made the German soldiers do what the German soldiers did. His design essentially fooled a subject by making them think they had just chosen/had just been led/had just been forced to shock another man to death. (Yeah yeah yeah, there were loooots of ethical issues). What he hypothesized is that people wouldn't do it. What he found was that people would. Which brings me to my first point: Though these TSA agents are only doing their job of forcing people to a scan, looking at scanned xrays, or doing one step short of a cavity search, they do not have to do it. Repeat: they are simply following orders. Sheep get nothing accomplished; they just get eaten by the wolf.
Philip Zimbardo conducted the sometimes slightly more well know Stanford Prison Experiments. He took every day people and assigned them to one of two roles: they could either be a prisoner, or a prison guard. I am not familiar with his specific hypothesis, but I know what he found. Just a few days into the experiment, he saw people genuinely assuming the roles that they had been assigned. The prisoners felt frightened and became compliant; the guards became abusive and used brutality. Here again, I see the TSA agents (innocent for now) as being those guards. They have, in their menial, minimum-wage jobs, been given a position of a power. It's powerful because they get to hurt and alienate people. Soon, they're going to begin abusing this power. From what I've heard, they already have (see if you can find the video of the 3 yr old body search - it seems to have been "copyrighted). Meanwhile, we as the prisoners, have no choice but to comply.
I don't care what people think about the scientific status of psychology, the fact remains that the findings of Milgram and Zimbardo are both significant and applicable. These men didn't conduct research just to go, "Golly gee, so that's why 6 million Jews were killed." These men took the time to conduct their studies over and over again with different designs to prove what humans are capable of as a means of preventing us from fulfilling that potential. But yet again, here we are doomed to repeat it. Only this time, the experiment is again real life and there is no safety of a laboratory.
I apologize for the long links; blogspot didn't want to insert my links tonight.
*http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131470688
**http://articles.cnn.com/2010-11-15/travel/california.airport.security_1_alternative-screening-tsa-physical-pat-down?_s=PM:TRAVEL
***http://articles.cnn.com/2010-11-17/travel/airport.security_1_pat-downs-body-scans-tsa?_s=PM:TRAVEL
For more info on Milgram and Zimbardo, do a search, find their pages, read some articles, search on Wikipedia, or take my word for it. It's fascinating stuff.
From what I have heard and read, there are already horror stories abound concerning these new machines. I feel the need to clarify some facts about them, however. According to the most recent article I read on NPR*, there are currently 400 of these full-body image scans in use at 70 of the nation's airports. Furthermore, passengers are not required, per se, to go through these. They are instead "randomly" selected to go through the machine. The full-body pat-downs, one step away from a cavity search according to the descriptions, are required only in the cases where a person refuses a scan or something suspicious appears, the latter of which might be an understandable circumstance.
Does anyone else see the faulty logic in the rest of that, though? If I am not required to go through the machine just by going through security and am instead happily "volunteered" for the scan, should I not be able to refuse it in lieu of a magnetic scan? Apparently not. Issues have arisen with this, somewhat understandably, in which individuals have refused both and experienced a less than friendly removal from the airport.**
However, moving on from that, we hear from the head of the TSA that he is doing what he has to do to keep us safe from terrorists.*** Countries where people bomb each other every day are laughing at us. Laughing! This is apparently the only way to invade our privacy just enough to keep us safe. And boy, oh boy, is this an invasion of privacy. I get it! There are bad people out there who want to hurt us all, but there is a point at which ensuring our safety does less to reduce our fear than to increase it. I think we've reached that point. Hell, I'm pretty sure we're far past it.
That said, now for the psychological aspect of this analysis and commentary. For those of you who are familiar with Milgram and Zimbardo, you should already be thinking what I'm thinking. For those who are not, allow me to clarify.
Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments after WWII to figure out juuuust what made the German soldiers do what the German soldiers did. His design essentially fooled a subject by making them think they had just chosen/had just been led/had just been forced to shock another man to death. (Yeah yeah yeah, there were loooots of ethical issues). What he hypothesized is that people wouldn't do it. What he found was that people would. Which brings me to my first point: Though these TSA agents are only doing their job of forcing people to a scan, looking at scanned xrays, or doing one step short of a cavity search, they do not have to do it. Repeat: they are simply following orders. Sheep get nothing accomplished; they just get eaten by the wolf.
Philip Zimbardo conducted the sometimes slightly more well know Stanford Prison Experiments. He took every day people and assigned them to one of two roles: they could either be a prisoner, or a prison guard. I am not familiar with his specific hypothesis, but I know what he found. Just a few days into the experiment, he saw people genuinely assuming the roles that they had been assigned. The prisoners felt frightened and became compliant; the guards became abusive and used brutality. Here again, I see the TSA agents (innocent for now) as being those guards. They have, in their menial, minimum-wage jobs, been given a position of a power. It's powerful because they get to hurt and alienate people. Soon, they're going to begin abusing this power. From what I've heard, they already have (see if you can find the video of the 3 yr old body search - it seems to have been "copyrighted). Meanwhile, we as the prisoners, have no choice but to comply.
I don't care what people think about the scientific status of psychology, the fact remains that the findings of Milgram and Zimbardo are both significant and applicable. These men didn't conduct research just to go, "Golly gee, so that's why 6 million Jews were killed." These men took the time to conduct their studies over and over again with different designs to prove what humans are capable of as a means of preventing us from fulfilling that potential. But yet again, here we are doomed to repeat it. Only this time, the experiment is again real life and there is no safety of a laboratory.
I apologize for the long links; blogspot didn't want to insert my links tonight.
*http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131470688
**http://articles.cnn.com/2010-11-15/travel/california.airport.security_1_alternative-screening-tsa-physical-pat-down?_s=PM:TRAVEL
***http://articles.cnn.com/2010-11-17/travel/airport.security_1_pat-downs-body-scans-tsa?_s=PM:TRAVEL
For more info on Milgram and Zimbardo, do a search, find their pages, read some articles, search on Wikipedia, or take my word for it. It's fascinating stuff.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Whoops!
Yeah, so I haven't written since April after only doing a few posts. Whoops.
I figured this would be a good way to start again. I saw the following list a while ago and was reminded of it recently by a friend. According to her post, according to the BBC, people have read an average of only six books on this list. I'm proud to say while I've read more than that, I still have many to read. I'm also proud to report that many of the books on the list that I haven't read are on my "To Read"* list. Here's the list!
bold denotes I've read it; italics denotes I've read part of it**; this nice font denotes I plan to read it.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien***
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling***
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (in progress on my ipod)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (most of it)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien***
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling***
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (in progress on my ipod)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (most of it)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
*Everyone should have a "To Read" list - I don't care if the only thing on it is this week's People Magazine, we should all have one.
**Some books get boring. Some of these are series. Parts of others were read for class.
***Some of these books clearly count as multiples. Given that, I've completely read 34 books; put a valiant effort in on 8+ books ("The Complete Works of Shakespeare? Really? I've read a lot of his plays and sonnets - that is not one book); and I have desires to read 7 books.
Not bad, I'd say. How'd you do?
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