"Wim Wenders closing speech – I'm talking about us, Europeans!


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Wim Wenders closing speech – I’m talking about us, Europeans!

from LabforCulture Blog

Closing speech by Wim Wenders, President of the European Film Academy, during the European Culture Forum.

The speech was read out by EFA director Ms Döring, and is available for download as a PDF on the European Commission website.


A few months ago, the European Film Academy organised a think tank dedicated to “THE IMAGE OF EUROPE”.

 

The think tank took place under the patronage of the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, who actually joined us on that occasion and took a very active and very outspoken part in it.

and Erkan’s rounup of interesting things from the web:

A new type of activism is being born,

from open Democracy News Analysis – by Guy Aitchison

Is activism dead ? or is it blooming? Some look at the G20 demos or student occupations and see a vibrant youthful movement, taking on the injustices of the day. Others look at the same gatherings and see only a confused bedraggled crowd, a mere shadow of 1960s mobilisations.

Fans and Fears of ‘Lecture Capture’

November 9, 2009

DENVER ? If professors record their lectures and put them online, will students still come to class?

That question came up in two different sessions at the 2009 Educause Conference here on Friday. And in both cases, the panelists cited research indicating that students? likelihood of skipping class has no correlation with whether a professor decides to capture her lecture and post it the Web.

Mythical Venn

via: Venn diagram of mythical creatures

Somatic surveillance: corporeal control through information networks

from Social Science Open Access Repository by Monahan, Torin; Wall, Tyler

The politics of paranoia: paranoid positioning and conspiratorial narratives in the surveillance society

from Social Science Open Access Repository by Harper, David

Science fiction as a predictor of the present

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Tin House, a literary magazine, asked me to introduce the current science fiction issue with an overview of the field. I wrote them an essay called “Radical Presentism,” about the way that science fiction reflects the present more than the future.

Love of Shopping is Not a Gene: exposing junk science and ideology in Darwinian Psychology

from Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Anne Innis Dagg’s “Love of Shopping” is Not a Gene is a scathing, entertaining and extremely accessible geneticist’s critique of “Darwinian Psychology” — that is, the “science” of ascribing human behavior to genetic inevitability. Dagg, a biologist/geneticist at the University of Waterloo, identifies Darwinian Psychology as a nexus of ideological pseudoscience cooked to justify political agendas about the inevitability of social inequality, especially racial and sexual inequality.

How networked public spheres die

from Net Effect by Evgeny Morozov

The Internet has often been praised for allowing new, fluid and hard-to-control public spaces to emerge. Often, these new public spaces would help to bring attention to stories/developments that may go unnoticed otherwise.

This has certainly been the case in Russia, where the vast majority of journalists had to tone down their criticism of the government for fear of being fired or worse. LiveJournal, by far the most influential blogging platform in the country, allowed dissidents to express their views, share news that didn’t make it to the mainstream media, or bring public attention to important activist campaigns that needed funding or participants.

New Report Debunks Common Myths about Energy
Source: Pacific Research Institute

The Pacific Research Institute, a free market think tank based in San Francisco, released a new report debunking the common myths about energy in America. Top Ten Energy Myths, by Thomas Tanton, senior fellow in Energy Studies, confronts ten popular myths about America?s energy sources, uses, and risks.

image

A Chennai-based Indian agency brings us a series of anti-smoking posters that compares smoking related deaths to those caused by guns, drugs, poison, etc. Another example of images speaking louder than the statistics themselves.found at So Much More

A reluctant and fearful West

from Eurozine articles by László Borhi
Documents recently released from the Hungarian archives reveal how western leaders, without exception, deferred to the Soviet Union in 1989. The threat of regional chaos meant overwhelming support for preserving the status quo as the events unfolded.

 

Wide Dissatisfaction with Capitalism — Twenty Years after Fall of Berlin Wall

from The Reflection Cafe

WORLDPUBLICOPINION.ORG
November 9, 2009Full Report (PDF)

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC World Service global poll finds that dissatisfaction with free market capitalism is widespread, with an average of only 11% across 27 countries saying that it works well and that greater regulation is not a good idea.

In only two countries do more than one in five feel that capitalism works well as it stands–the US (25%) and Pakistan (21%).

November 13, 2009

As communications scholars gather, they consider how to teach its use in public speaking courses, and how to use digital slides in their own lectures.

Georg Baselitz at CFA Berlin

found in Week in Review: November 15, 2009

Oxford Names ?Unfriend? as Word of the Year

from Daily Bits by Arnold Zafra

And here?s how Oxford  defines the Word of the Year:

unfriend ? verb ? To remove someone as a ?friend? on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Wow! It looks like the folks at Oxford did a lot of ?unfriending? of their Facebook friends this year that they decide to name ?unfriend? as Word of the Year.

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