i-eclectica.org

Designer legend Raymond Loewy was the creative force behind some of the greatest 20th-century industrial design innovations. For more than 50 years, Loewy’s designs helped furnish, accessorise, and shape the color scheme of the American dream. From the sleek Studebaker in the garage to the Formica countertops in the kitchen, his innovations cast a modernising spell over households across the country.

“His designs are so influential and easily understood. Even though some of us don’t immediately recognise his name, we live in Raymond Loewy’s world,” said Hilary Anderson, director of exhibitions and collections at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington, which has put together a travelling exhibition of his work. It honours Loewy, who died in 1986, with an array of original drawings, models, products, advertisements, photographs, and rare film footage of the master at work.

His work was not limited to refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, pencil sharpeners, and other basic household items; his designs extended to Air Force One’s interior, NASA’s Skylab, locomotives, and Americana such as the US Postal Service emblem and the Lucky Strike cigarettes, Nabisco, Exxon, Shell, and Coca Cola logos. “His style was sleek but at the same time glitzy and polished. His look can be identified by softened lines and shapes, which are seen throughout his various projects. The locomotives reflect the waffle irons. The refrigerators reflect the lipstick containers. It’s all very pleasing and ultramodern. The word ‘cool’ comes to mind,” said John Ott, executive director of the museum. Loewy’s philosophy, as he put it, was to create the “most advanced, yet acceptable” designs. One result: The French-born designer streamlined every corner and curve, from the well-rounded Filben Maestro jukebox of 1947 to the iconic Greyhound Scenicruiser of 1954.

“His style is a little hard to describe, but to my eye, his designs make things look like they work. Everything is smooth; he left no visible parts. His designs are inviting and easy to the touch. He did a great job redefining modern,” said Anderson, who observed a strong connection between Loewy’s eye and design aesthetics in today’s market. There was a time a product simply had to work well to gain shelf position. Now it has to look good, too. “He had a real sense of public taste. Everything he designed was modern but not too modern. Another aspect of his success was he could think big. Everything designed was a complete experience. He reshaped our world as consumers.”

Take, for example, the famous bullet-shaped passenger locomotives that he designed for the Pennsylvania railroad. Loewy believed passenger trains ought to be pleasing to the eye, both inside and out. “People like Loewy took something practical and made it look really handsome, even it was just a means of transportation,” said Ott. From iPods to sticks of deodorant, today’s consumers might be a little keener on quality design as a result of Loewy’s handiwork.

[source for text: Boston Globe]

The Knife - Silent Shout

A brother and sister duo hailing from Stockholm, Sweden, the Knife takes inspiration from vintage synth pop and forward-thinking electronic music, crafting a sound that is equally unsettling, playful, and beautiful. Olof and Karin Dreijer formed the Knife in 1999 and worked on their music in their home studios, releasing their first single, Afraid of You, in 2000 and their 2001 self-titled debut album on their own Rabid Records label. In 2003, the Knife was nominated for two Grammis, one for Best Pop Group of the Year and one for Best Pop Album for their second album, Deep Cuts. However, the Dreijers boycotted the ceremony, sending two people in gorilla costumes to protest the dominance of male acts in the music industry. They also released the Hanna Med H Soundtrack later that year. In 2004, the Knife began work on their third album in unusual locations, including a former carbon dioxide factory and the vaults of Stockholm’s Grand Church, before finishing their sessions in a more conventional studio. The following year, José González’s cover of the Deep Cuts single “Heartbeats” (which was from his 2003 album Veneer) appeared in a commercial for Sony’s Bravia and became a hit, earning more acclaim for the Dreijers outside of Sweden. Early in 2005, the Knife performed their first-ever live show at London’s ICA, appearing with Rex the Dog (who also did a remix of González’s version of “Heartbeats”) and playing in front of video created for the event by artist Andreas Nilsson. His work also appeared on How I Found the Knife, a DVD/CD set that included all of the band’s videos, short films, and remixes, which was released that summer. The Knife and Nilsson teamed up again for the video for the title track of the group’s third album, Silent Shout, which was released in early in 2006 in Sweden and that summer in the U.S. (by Mute) and U.K. (by Brille). The Knife’s darkest, most ambitious work to date, the album featured singles such as We Share Our Mother’s Health, which included a mix by Trentemøller. The duo played a handful of European, Scandinavian, and North American dates in 2006, accompanied by more of Nilsson’s visuals. That fall, Mute reissued The Knife and Deep Cuts.

The Knife - We Share Our Mother’s Health

[allmusic]

This brainworks series looks at what is reality, and the conclusion so far is: whatever we make it to be. This post looks at another example of reality as brain (mind?) creation: even when we think we act act consciously, it seems that more often than not does our subconscious sit in the driver’s seat.

The groundbreaking research that put a question behind free will took place in 1983 at the University of California. Benjamin Libet set up an experiment in which participants were asked to make voluntary movements whenever they liked, such as lifting a finger. Using an EGG to monitor brain activity, he found that the subjects became aware of their intention to act only a few hundred milliseconds after their brain had initiated the movement. Libet was forced to conclude that what feels like a conscious decision may in fact be nothing of the sort (Brain, vol 106, p 623). Today it is an established theory in neuroscience that a major proportion of our thoughts and actions - even things we believe we are in conscious control of - actually take place in your unconscious. Most of the time we are essentially operating on autopilot.

We don’t need an EGG to test this theory; instead we can trigger at home what is known as the ideomotor effect, a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject acts without conscious awareness (examples for the ideomotor effect range from welling up tears to people responding to stage hypnotist’s suggestions; automatic writing, dowsing, facilitated communication, and Ouija boards have also been attributed to the effect of this phenomena). The idea behind this concept is that people’s actions originate solely from within themselves, at least in the vast majority of cases (which makes claims about divination etc. in most cases highly questionable).

In our case, we need to create a pendulum (e.g. with a piece of thread and a paper clip) and ask simple yes/no questions like “Do I own a car?” or “Am I at home?”. Tell yourself that if the pendulum swings clockwise, the answer is yes, while anticlockwise means no. While it seems quit spooky that the pendulum will rotate in the direction of the correct answer, there is nothing supernatural about it. The unconscious brain fires up motor preparation circuits in anticipation of the answer it expects to see. These circuits initiate subtle muscle movements that we are not normally aware of - except when they are amplified by a pendulum (or dowsing stick or Ouija board). This is your unconscious brain in action. (People being able to successfully dowse for water also demonstrate that we know much more than we are aware of; it’s all hidden in the subconscious).

Another area of subconscious reality creation is what is called ‘implicit assumptions’. Our subconscious does not only plan and execute actions, it also spends a great deal of time analysing the world around us. The conclusions it comes to are called ‘implicit assumptions’, subtle prejudices about people and events. In evolutionary terms they serves us well - most of the time. Sometimes though they can actually conflict with our conscious values and beliefs, leading for example to racist, sexist or ageist undertones in how we judge the world. Brian Nosek at the University of Virginia and colleagues have devised a test as a way to access implicit assumptions - it’s well worth taking it at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit).

The next post will look at how we pay attention; the previous one dealt with the curious consequences of having a split brain.

[Source: New Scientist]

Wed Sep 26, 6:08 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Primate scientist Jane Goodall said on Wednesday the race to grow crops for vehicle fuels is damaging rain forests in Asia, Africa and South America and adding to the emissions blamed for global warming.

“We’re cutting down forests now to grow sugarcane and palm oil for biofuels and our forests are being hacked into by so many interests that it makes them more and more important to save now,” Goodall said on the sidelines of the Clinton Global Initiative, former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s annual philanthropic meeting.

As new oil supplies become harder to find, many countries such as Brazil and Indonesia are racing to grow domestic sources of vehicle fuels, such as ethanol from sugarcane and biodiesel from palm nuts.

The United Nations’ climate program considers the fuels to be low in carbon because growing the crops takes in heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide.

But critics say demand for the fuels has led companies to cut down and burn forests in order to grow the crops, adding to heat-trapping emissions and leading to erosion and stress on ecosystems.

“Biofuel isn’t the answer to everything; it depends where it comes from,” she said. “All of this means better education on where fuels are coming from are needed.”

Goodall said the problem is especially bad in the Indonesian rain forest where large amounts of palm nut oil is being made. Growers in Uganda — where her nonprofit group works to conserve Great Apes — are also looking to buy large parcels of rain forest and cut them down to grow sugar cane, while in Brazil, forest is cleared to grow sugar cane.

The Goodall Institute is working with a recently formed group of eight rain forest nations called the Forest Eight, or F8, led by Indonesia. The group wants to create a system where rich countries would pay them not to chop down rain forests and hopes to unveil the plan at climate talks in Bali in December.

Scientists from the forested countries are trying to nail down exactly how much carbon dioxide the ecosystems store, but the amount has been estimated to be about double that which is already in the atmosphere, Goodall said.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner)

[For further background information see “Why biofuels are no panacea“]

There is a popular psychology myth which states that our brain hemispheres create different personality types: the rational, calculating left makes us logical and analytic, while the intuitive, artistic right brings out our creative and empathic nature. The myth arose in the early 1970s from experiments done on people who had had their corpus callosum cut as a last-ditch treatment for epilepsy (see video below showing what happens to patients as a result of such surgical intervention).

Today scientists have realised that this dichotomy is too simplistic. While the two hemispheres produce differences in information processing, they are much more subtle than previously suggested: the left seems to have a bias towards detail while the right seems to have a more holistic outlook. One example where both hemispheres operate differently is face recognition. For most of us seeing a face, the right hemisphere does the main work, recognising its gender and decoding its expression. And because the right brain is fed information by the left visual field, we have a left-sided bias when judging faces.

The image to the right is called a chimeric face; it is created by taking two pictures of the same face, one with a neutral expression and the other smiling. The pictures are then chopped in half and then rejoined as mismatches. Our general bias towards the left side of the face (as we look at it) makes us see the faces as different even though they are essentially equivalent; in this particular case it makes most of us interpret the bottom picture as showing a happier expression.

There is some evidence that emotional processing might be lateralised too, with the right hemisphere more specialised for negative emotions and the left for positive ones. Research to support this view needs to be treated with caution though as it might simply resurrect the old myth of right brain / left brain differences. Much of it seems to be based on getting people to move parts of body either on the left or right (e.g. the corner of their mouths or contracting their left or right hands) and then measuring emotional responses.

While claims of resulting happiness or sadness could not always be verified while replicating the tests, EEG has been used last year to show that flexing ones hand produces emotional changes - but only when preceded by activation of the opposite cortex. While the jury therefore is still out on how fundamentally different both hemispheres process information, we can say that differences seem to exist (as the picture to the left and the video below show). That again means that reality is not necessarily what we think it is.

The next post will look at the workings of the unconscious mind; the previous one dealt with the unreliability of our body self image.

[Source: New Scientist]

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