Monday, February 28, 2005
Red whortleberry birth and pochard eggs as world origin
Also, there's Marjatta who conceives a child from a red whortleberry. Being fatherless, her son is condemned to death, but the child speaks out against the sentence and is christened King of Karelia. And the whereabouts of the miracle mill Sampo are fascinating as well. A national epic truly worthwhile reading. For a resumé of the poems in English, go here.
Sunday, February 27, 2005
The paradisegate won the International Ice Sculpture Competition
Even though it's freezing cold outside (although the sun is warming quite a bit already) the interest in the competition and voting for the best sculpture was so great that the organizers ran out of voting ballots. The sculpture with the snake by the gate to paradise was both the audience's and the jury's favorite.
If you want to have a look at the sculptures who came in second and third, and at a selection of the masterpieces in the competition, go here.
Oscar delay
While getting in the mood for tonight’s glamorous Oscar gala, you might want to check out the blog posts by the producer of the show, Gil Cates. “I think it's wrong to have a tape delay because we run the risk of infringing upon the right to free speech.” is his comment to the fact that there will be a network delay this year as well, as a consequence of “Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction during the Super Bowl halftime show”.
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Be a champ at wife carrying!
The registration for the wife carrying world championships in
The event takes place 1-3 July this summer. For information, go here and choose “Wife carrying” to the left.
Friday, February 25, 2005
Article on the lab
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Banner ads do catch our attention
Cool weekend
The square in Vasa is a cool place to be nowadays, as it is covered with 2 times
The actual competition starts at Friday, which is two days away from now. But there’s no need to worry about the ice melting. The temperature here in Vasa was -17 this morning.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Reactions to strong scenes on TV
I got the hardbound copy of the master’s thesis by two students, who conducted their study for the Master’s degree in our iDTV Lab, yesterday. I read it at a stretch last night as they, Klas Backholm and Sebastian Lindqvist, had chosen a fascinating theme.
The purpose of their study was to see whether there are differences in how people with different characteristics react to strong (violent, emotional and scary for example) film scenes. In order to find out, they showed 20 scenes from movies, documentaries and news features to about 60 persons, who started off the test by filling out the NEO Five-Factor Inventory personality test. While the viewers watched the scenes, psycho-physiological tests were conducted. The skin conductance, i.e. sweating, was measured, as was the viewers’ pulse with the help of a photopletysmograph. Backholm and Lindqvist also used video surveillance, self-reports and questionnaires in the study.
The conclusion that the guys come to, based on the questionnaires, pshycho-physiological results and self-reports on the scenes, is that emotional scenes in a film do invoke physiological effects in human beings, at least in short term. And what’s more, we react differently to programmes on television or to film scenes. One of the findings is that “nice”, caring persons (scoring high on agreeableness) tend to react physiologically stronger to television and film scenes in general. They also tend to react in a more negative manner to unpleasant scenes than persons with other personalities.
Another finding in the study is that women rated romantic scenes higher than men, who tended to like scenes with eroticism, humour and violence more. This comes quite close to traditional, stereotypical roles of the sexes, where women are supposed to be into romance and men supposedly dig violence and action. And naturally, I seem to belong to the standard deviation in this matter. Last weekend, I saw a romantic comedy that my boyfriend picked out, Girl fever, and I fell asleep while watching it. The only romantic movie that has passed my test yet is Love actually.
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Passion for TV
I had a look at Malax TV's website and I found a great collection of links. Among many other interesting things, I found a database of Swedish newsreels and short films from way back. I've had a look at something similar in the UK but I didn't know about the Swedish one. I loved the commersials, especially the animated one about the bank dating back to the 1920's. Definitely worth a look!
Sunday, February 06, 2005
Science transparency and the origins of aids
Yesterday at Göteborg Film Festival, I saw an interesting and controversial documentary suggesting that someone else than God or homosexuals is the originator of aids, namely the West. The movie "The origins of AIDS" pictures the 1950's, when there was a race going on in the laboratories in Western countries. Many doctors and researchers wanted to find a cure for the disease that affected millions of people at the time, the polio. With the purpose to develop medicine with the help of tissues from chimpanzee kidneys, a laboratory is built in Leopoldville,
As I'm no virologist, I can't say whether this hypothesis – that the origin of aids is mass vaccination - is likely to be true or not. But being fond of conspiracy theories, I like the message in the movie. The idea that it was Western doctors that transplanted HIV from monkeys to human beings is not new though. Journalists have written about it before, for instance in the Rolling Stone. But their findings and hypothesises were dismissed by scientists. They didn't take the theories very seriously and thus, the Rolling Stone was made to publish an excuse for including the article in one of their issues.
This troubles one of the directors of the documentary, Catherine Peix, who stopped by for a short Q & A session after the film. According to her, the science society dismissed the book containing this theory and upon which the documentary lies (The River by Ed Hooper) in 3 minutes. Researchers didn't even bother to look at it, let alone to challenge the notion that the polio vaccine that was given to people in large scale had its origin in chimpanzee tissues, and thus being a possible carrier of HIV. Neither did the minister of public health in
The obvious ”backing each other up” among researchers bothers Peix. So does the hush-hush around the research for a polio vaccine and the insufficient procedures. An obvious way of testing the hypothesis of the film would be to analyze the vaccine, 10A11, to see if there are traces of SIV and S40 that chimpanzees carry. But, according to Peix, there were no notes taken at all at the laboratory in
Unfortunately, I missed the debate with Ed Hooper, Catherine Peix and a professor in virology yesterday. I heard that it was far from a dull one.