In the Internet age, could there be another MJ?

The extravagant mourning for Michael Jackson has some critics wondering whether the pop singer’s global superstardom could ever be duplicated in an Internet era offering endless entertainment choices.

Jackson’s sudden June 25 death caused an outpouring of praise for the singer, whose 1982 “Thriller” album is the best-selling of all time with estimated sales of 50 million copies. In death, Jackson’s personal scandals no longer seemed so important to his fans and those caught up in the moment.

“In the world of YouTube, no one could occupy the worldwide effect of Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’” said Jonathan Taplin, a University of Southern California professor.

“I was scouting a movie for Walt Disney in 1983 in Congo, Gabon and Ivory Coast. All you heard on the radio was Michael Jackson,” said Taplin, a former television and film producer.

The Internet has joined the world together in new ways and can elevate unknowns to stardom in an instant, as illustrated by Susan Boyle, the dowdy British singer who shot from obscurity to international fame when her performance on a British talent show was posted on YouTube.

But such fame is fleeting and one Internet sensation is quickly replaced by another. “There will be thousands of Susan Boyles, but no Michael Jacksons or The Beatles,” Taplin said.

Before the emergence of cable TV and then the Internet, tens of millions of people regularly tuned into the same hit shows at the same time. Now, the Internet has flooded the world with choice and diluted audiences.

Dubbed the “King of Pop,” Jackson, 50, sang with his brothers in the “Jackson 5” before achieving solo stardom with hits like “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” which he promoted with boundary breaking videos on cable music video network MTV.


JACKSON WOULD FIND IT HARDER

But MTV no longer plays hours of prime time music videos and the Internet allows anyone to post songs and videos online. The New York Times’s David Segal wrote that this probably spelled the end of fame on the level achieved by Jackson.

“That’s why even Michael Jackson would have a hard time becoming Michael Jackson these days,” he wrote. “There is something sad about our infinite menu of options. It could very well mean the end of true superstardom.”

Jackson won 13 Grammy Awards and during his lifetime sold an estimated 750 million albums.

Susan Ohmer, who teaches modern communication at the University of Notre Dame, likened Jackson’s fame to that of Britain’s Princess Diana, saying that while people may not have known the real Jackson or Diana, the personas they portrayed on camera captured the world’s attention.

“Michael Jackson came of age when music was becoming more international,” Ohmer said “Like Princess Diana, his style and movements seemed to come alive on camera.”

Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, said it would be more difficult for another global icon to be created in a “fragmented era of modern technology,” — but still possible.

“The Internet has allowed a new route to fame,” Thompson said. “But becoming truly famous is still something that happens very rarely.”

Thompson and Ohmer both pointed to US President Barack Obama as one of the world’s new icons, but based on a record of political achievement and real intellectual power rather than songs and dance moves.

“In any new medium, stars emerge,” Ohmer said. “Celebrities become global icons because they interact with media in ways that fascinate the public and because they speak to us in some way about our lives and times.” — Reuters

The Future Source of Energy ?

LIFE, an acronym for Laser Inertial Fusion-Fission Energy, is an advanced energy concept under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Based on physics and technology developed for the National Ignition Facility (NIF), LIFE has the potential to meet future worldwide energy needs in a safe, sustainable manner without carbon dioxide emissions.

By burning nuclear waste for its fuel, LIFE has the added benefit of dramatically shrinking the planet's stockpile of spent nuclear fuel and other materials that lend themselves to nuclear proliferation.

NIF, a project of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, is the world's largest and highest-energy laser. On track for completion by March 2009, NIF is designed to achieve thermonuclear fusion ignition and burn in the laboratory using inertial confinement fusion (ICF) (see How to Make a Star). As such, NIF is the culmination of nearly 60 years of research into controlled fusion – capturing the energy of the sun and stars to provide clean, limitless energy on Earth.

Ignition experiments designed to accomplish NIF's goal will begin in 2010, and successful demonstration of ignition and net energy gain on NIF will be a transforming event that is likely to focus the world's attention on the possibility of ICF as a potential long-term energy option.

The Promise of Hybrid Nuclear Power

Success on NIF will serve as a springboard for LIFE, a hybrid technology that combines the best aspects of nuclear fusion, a clean, inherently safe and virtually unlimited energy source (see Inertial Fusion Energy), with fission, a carbon-free, reliable energy technology that currently provides about 16 percent of the world's electricity. Through the combination of fusion and fission, LIFE power plants could generate gigawatts of power 24 hours a day for as long as 50 years without refueling while avoiding carbon dioxide emissions, easing nuclear proliferation concerns and minimizing the concerns associated with nuclear safety and long-term nuclear waste disposal.

Existing and future inventories of spent nuclear fuel, natural and depleted uranium and weapons-grade plutonium could produce enough energy to meet the world's energy needs for hundreds to thousands of years. Besides offering energy independence and security, LIFE power plants could provide the United States with an enormous economic competitiveness edge in the energy sector in the coming decade.

The LIFE engine would use an ICF laser system similar to the one now under development at NIF to ignite fusion targets surrounded by a spherical blanket of subcritical fission fuel. The fuel could be one of many fertile or fissile materials, including thorium, light-water reactor spent nuclear fuel, weapons-grade plutonium, highly enriched uranium, and natural and depleted uranium. (Fertile material is nuclear material that can be converted to fissile material through the capture of a neutron, such as uranium-238.)

LIFE provides a point source of ICF-generated neutrons to extract virtually all of the energy content of its fuel. LIFE would close the nuclear fuel cycle without the need for chemical separation and reprocessing. The system would require about half as much laser energy input as a pure fusion plant, and thanks to the extra gain from the fission blanket, produce 100 to 300 times more energy than the input energy. LIFE would be proliferation-resistant and passively safe, require no uranium isotope enrichment and minimize the need for long-term geologic storage of nuclear waste.

LIFE would enable the worldwide expansion of nuclear power in a safe, secure and sustainable manner. A number of reviews and discussions of the proposal with energy experts over the last year have been positive and supportive of the concept. A LIFE development team of about 40 physicists, materials scientists, engineers and energy and national security experts from LLNL, the University of California at Berkeley and other institutions is on track to complete and review a "point design" – the target and laser features for specific experiments – and propose a path forward for LIFE in Fiscal Year 2009.

Here are links to more information on the LIFE project:
• Why Do We Need LIFE?
• Benefits & Challenges
• How LIFE Works
• Project Plan

Dinner with Nick Miller

Crammed TV screens a strain on the brain?

Ever since television executives decided viewers wanted screens crammed with banner headlines across the top, crawls along the bottom, talking heads in tiny boxes, moving graphics and unmoving logos, all of it pasted over a background of shape-shifting patterns, scientists and others have tried to figure out how well our brains are handling the information overload.

They're still trying to figure it out.

“The concept of utility, or how much information is getting processed, depends on how a person derives satisfaction,” said David Kirsh, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California San Diego.

“Some people like deep processing – examining a football game, for example, in a detailed way: Who's playing well? What are the weaknesses on each side? What are the coaching strategies? If they're experts, these viewers might not need more than a glance to know what's going on, like a chessmaster who can play multiple games blindfolded. That kind of deep understanding doesn't need much working memory.”

Most people, however, are more the checkers sort, one game at a time.

In case you've forgotten, working memory is short-term memory, somewhere between sensory memory and long-term memory. Sensory memories are brief, unprocessed signals that last only a fraction of a second. Think about those times when you scan a parking lot searching for your car. You see many other cars, but they flit through your head, quickly forgotten. They're sensory memories.

Long-term memories, like your mother's face or the name of your best friend in sixth grade, are more enduring.

Working memory is the selected information we consciously juggle in our heads at any particular moment. It persists as long as we're actively using it, but it is also limited. Studies indicate that working memory for most people consists of no more than three, maybe four, items retained at a time – a name and phone number, for example, or as many words as you can speak in two seconds.

Or maybe the last three plays of your favourite team’s scoring drive.

Given these limits and what is known about human brain function, some researchers wonder whether phenomena such as cluttered cable news screens are examples of cognitive overload.

A 2005 experiment at Kansas State University found that viewers who watched TV broadcasts with a news crawl remembered 10 percent fewer facts than those who watched the same broadcast without the stream of headlines, sports scores and weather updates.

The fact is, many researchers say, our brains aren't as good at multitasking as we think. Kirsh notes, for example, that it is impossible to read and really pay attention to someone speaking at the same time.

“The brain has to rapidly toggle back and forth, sampling each stimuli,” Kirsh said. “If what's being said isn't very informative, that quick sampling may be good enough to get the information. But if the message is more difficult or complicated, then one of the activities will require more thinking and focus.”

In a 2001 study at Carnegie Mellon University, study participants were asked to perform two mental tasks, sequentially and then simultaneously, while undergoing an MRI. Researchers reported that when participants multitasked, brain activity was just 56 percent of what it was when they focused on each problem separately.

Put another way, it may be hit-and-miss whether TV viewers can seriously evaluate how the Team A are positioning themselves in the field and simultaneously scrutinize camera angles of Team B’s positioning.

Still, our cerebral capacity is pretty remarkable, the product of more than 100 billion intricately connected neurons. Sheree Josephson, a professor of communication at Weber State University, said her students during lectures appear capable of writing, talking, eating, texting and surfing the Internet all at once.

Whether they are also learning is less certain.

Joseph Allen Schroeder, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Connecticut College, said human brains are good at filtering and focusing, but he wonders about the depth of knowledge acquired this way.

People have grown accustomed to instant information and lots of it, he said. But hardly anyone seems to linger, thinking.

It remains to be seen what viewers think about multiscreen Chelsea games or eight EPL contests at a time. Steve Mosier, Cox Digital's senior product marketing manager, said testing indicated that viewers enjoyed seeing six camera angles simultaneously.

Or at least they did “once they learned how to watch a game that way,” Mosier said.

Robert Mercer, director of media relations at El Segundo-based DirecTV, said the “Game Mix” package involved “no neuroscience.”

“Eight cells on one screen was the maximum that didn't look overwhelming, with each large enough so the individual images were easily viewable,” Mercer said. “Based on the feedback we've received, our NFL superfans and their neurons love this feature.”

Just don't ask them who won.

The Future of Education

This is an excellent talk by Ken Robinson expounding on the role of creativity in the future of education of our children.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga2CYYCrtNE