Dexway English Magazine: C1 – Edition 1
The future of film
Want to go on a multi-sensory journey to explore nature and see animals and sense everything through sight, smell, touch and sound…. But still be a movie theatre? This is the experience that one Japanese high-tech cinema-based company is offering to really immerse movie goers. Orbi, who have merged SEGA Technology and BBC Earth Content onto Japan´s largest screen (40 m Wide X 8 m High) with impressive audio and visual effects. They will be bringing nature to city environments showcasing the 50,000 + hours of BBC of nature footage.
The first showing will be “Ice Worlds”, a 15 minute film that many frames all stitched together to make it ultra-wide. There are up to 100 sources of footage all put together.
They believe that theatres will no longer be just a dark room with a screen, they are launching an experimental new concept with urban theme parks and where watching a movie will be just the beginning.
Merging both gaming and movies through technology now available like flexible screens, smart glasses, motion controls. There will be a seamless blend between virtual and real world environments. Buying virtual reality headsets such as Meta and Oculus Rift have just become to the public, this will change how we experience everything!
When you think about it cinema is only one century old! There has been major advancement from the days of no sound and grainy flickering visuals. We are only at the forefront of an ex-citing era for film.
Knowledge
THE KNOW HOW….
Knowledge as defined by Wikipedia is “a familiarity, awareness or understanding of someone or something, such as facts,information, descriptions, or skills, which is acquired through experience or education by perceiving, discovering, or learning”. Knowledge can take 2 forms; implicit, which is practical skill and expertise, the second is explicit, which is a theoretical understanding of something.
Plato set out to define knowledge and he decided that knowledge was defined as “justified true belief”, in short where P is the proposition or subject under study and S is us. P can only be true if: S believes P to be true and S is justified into believing P to be true. He says that a statement has to meet three criteria: it has to be justified, true and believed. Maybe the subject of our article should be justification as it would seem we cannot have knowledge without having justification for that knowledge or without justification, knowledge is not knowledge.
Justification is the reason somebody holds a belief. If somebody attacks a belief, for example, someone tells me that the world is not round and I disagree with them. The next stage is for me to ask for justification of this side of the argument. Show me pictures or show me someone who can back this up. Once I have seen this justification then I can form my own belief of that subject, I have constructed that knowledge in my head, maybe I have replaced the old belief I had held and overwrote my previous knowledge. I have learnt.
# Hashtag
META-TAGGING
The # otherwise known as a hashtag or meta tagging has exploded across the internet, now it is common to see hashtags in places other than Twitter. What does it mean? How did it start? How has it changed? People think the hashtag first started on the pages of twitter after #flight1549 crash landed in the Hudson River. Instantly this made the post more recognisable and as more and more people tweeted on the same subject, the use of # went viral.
Twitter now uses the Meta tag to categorise or organise posts of interests.
For example if I was tweeting about a cake I had made, I would make the subject of my tweet #cake, everybody who was following my tweet would clearly be able to find the post, this is called the key word or phrase and when put into a twitter search engine, the search would show the results of my cake tweet and any other tweets about my cake using the same hashtag.
But the meta tag has changed, its role has changed, it´s become a monster and can be seen in twitter, facebook and other social networking sites.
The hashtag can be used to say something from a different point of view, as if you were having a conversation with yourself, for example:
“Dan knew that if he threw out the last of the toothpaste, I’d have to go shopping at some point tonight and buy him milk #wellplayed”. “#wellplayed” this part of the phrase you are meant to say in a different voice to yours!
Sustainable development
The word sustainable gets thrown around a lot these days, but I can’t think of a topic that is more urgent than sustainable development. Everyone knows that we live in a world that has limited re-sources. Sustainable development is a branch of economics. Economics is the study of how limited resources are allocated among people. There are two branches of economics, macroeconomics (the study of the behaviour of the world economy) and microeconomics (the study of individual consumers and their behaviour). Sustainable development is a train of thought that falls under the study of macroeconomics. Sustainable development is a way of organizing and developing the world’s population that can sustain a good standard of living for many years.
In the last two hundred years, the development of the world has seen incredible progress. We have seen the standard of living in many parts of the world increase dramatically because of countries becoming more connected through trade and communication. But is this development that is happening in our modern world sustainable?
Many people would argue that it is not. They would argue that modern development only focuses on our needs here and now, but not on the needs of future generations. For example, many Asian countries have seen their standard of living and economies increase drastically over the last fifty years, such as China, India, and Vietnam. However, as these countries are producing and consuming more, there is a growing pollution problem that is occurring because there are not as many environmental laws that have been put into place. They are only thinking about the here and now.
Digital revolution
The Information Age or the third industrial revolution is a movement away from analogue technology to the digital technology that we see today. The digital revolution started in the 1980s and marked the beginning of the Information Age with the widespread use and mass production of the personal computer (PC) and the mobile phone. Just think in the 1980´s, 11.2 million people used a cell phone and now there are 4 billion! That is 67% of the world population! How times have changed!
Do you remember dial up connections when your computer literally spoke to another computer and you could hear the conversation or waiting for your download to actually download. The internet has now celebrated its 25th birthday this year, the concept was hatched in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and first available only to government and university institutions. It officially was accessible to the public in 1991. The very first digital HDTV broadcast happened in Spain and Italy for the 1990 World cup. It played in 10 movie theatres. Now we use digital signals, infra-red fibre optic cables and ADSL to reach speeds that would never have been possible in the 80s, the benefit for us is the quality of the sound on our digital radios or the quality of the call across the fibre optic cable. Digital signals can be scrambled, stacked and do not lose integrity over distance and they are less likely to collect hitchhiking white noise then the old analogue signals.
The internet and the use of digital media and entertainment has become to ingrained into our lives and is an integral part of how we live. It is getting harder and harder to remember what life was like before all this technology.
Psychology in practise
We try to live our lives by being nice to each other, we join clubs, we make friends and put out roots and settle, but what if it could be proved that you are actually are evil with the capacity to harm another human being. You would probably say I was the crazy one!
In this short article I would like to discuss an experiment which was carried out by a man called Stanley Milgram in 1963 and repeated again in 2012 by the Discovery Channel. He suggested that a subject would openly hurt another subject when asked to by somebody in authority.
To test this theory he recruited people from a wide range of social background and asked them to attend on a particular day, he told the subjects that they would be paid for their time even if they didn’t do the experiment.
There were two actors involved; one actor placed the part of the investigator and the other actor played the part of subject B or the learner.
Subject A (the teacher) was introduced to subject B; both were lead into a room where the learner was strapped to a chair.
The teacher was then taken out of the room and placed in front of a large machine; the teacher was told that they were to ask some questions to the learner, if the learner got the question wrong, the teacher was to administer an electric shock.
The shocks ranged from 5 volts to 160 volts. At first the learner got all the questions correct but then they started to get them wrong and the teacher was forced to give them electric shocks. When 125 volts were reached the teacher could hear the learner screaming in pain.
At this point the teacher would often turn to the experimenter and say “I can’t go on, I’m hurting him.” The experimenter would say “Please continue.” And then “The experiment requires that you continue.”
And then “It is absolutely essential that you continue.” And finally “You have no other choice, you must go on.”
This was the make or break point, the teacher would either not continue or to consciously decide to continue to hurt somebody they have never met before.
In 1963 77% of “teachers” continued to hurt somebody they had never met and in 2012, 77% percent of those tested continued with the experiment.
Has society really changed?
