Search results for "amusement"

Staged Wrecks: The Railroad Crash Between Infrastructural Lesson and Amusement

2019

To explore infrastructures and publics from a historical perspective, in this paper I will focus on the entangled development of transport infrastructures in the nineteenth century on the one hand and the rise of amusement cultures on the other. More specifically, I will examine a phenomenon that became popular at US State Fairs at the end of the century, namely staged railroad crashes with two steam locomotives.

Restoration of the Zisa Palace, Palermo

1993

The building of the Zisa, commissioned by William I, began in 1164-1165; it was completed by William II in the years immediately following. It was built as a splendid place for rest and amusement, ...

Canned Emotions. Effects of Genre and Audience Reaction on Emotions

2017

Laughter is said to be contagious. Maybe this is why TV stations often choose to add so-called canned laughter to their shows. Questionable as this practice may be, observers seem to like it. If such a simple manipulation, assumingly by inducing positive emotion, can change our attitudes toward the film, does the opposite manipulation work as well? Does a negative sound-track, such as screaming voices, have comparable effects in the opposite direction? We designed three experiments with a total of 110 participants to test whether scream-tracks have comparable effects on the evaluation of film sequences as do laugh-tracks. Experiment 1 showed segments of comedies, scary, and neutral films an…

Correction to: Ernst Mach’s „Bekehrung“ zum Atomismus/Ernst Mach’s “Conversion” to Atomism – A Dialogue Between Mach and Popper-Lynkeus by Otto Blüh

2019

Otto Bluh was a great admirer of Ernst Mach’s and contributed a number of papers to Machian scholarship. It is believed that he wrote this skit around 1966, perhaps to coincide with the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Mach’s death and most likely for Bluh’s own amusement, as it was never published. It consists of an imaginary conversation in pseudo-Viennese dialect, between Mach and his friend, Josef Popper-Lynkeus based on the questionable tale of Mach’s conversion to atomism. This paper includes a brief introduction to the skit as well as its transcription and translation into English, published for the first time. It was also dramatized for the first time in occasion of the Ernst …

'Just can't hide it': a behavioral and lesion study on emotional response modulation after right prefrontal damage.

2015

INTRODUCTION: Historically, emotion regulation problems have been reported as a common consequence of rPFC damage. It has been proposed that the rPFC, particularly the rIFG, has a key role inhibiting prepotent reflexive actions, thus contributing to emotion regulation and self-regulation. This study is the first to directly explore this hypothesis, by testing whether damage to the rIFG compromises the voluntary modulation of emotional responses, and whether performance on inhibition tasks is associated with emotion regulation. Method: 10 individuals with unilateral right prefrontal damage and 15 matched healthy controls were compared on a well-known response modulation task. During the task…

Human‐centred design and assessment of information technologies in traffic

2013

It is not without amusement that we sometimes notice how dangerously some in-vehicle technologies were regarded in the past, and that are now are seen as innocuous. Radios in cars, for example, were deemed such a source of dangerous distraction when they were introduced that it was proposed to ban them in some states of the US. Fortunately, nowadays, we can behold these old views as very naive, as it has been clearly demonstrated that they were completely unfounded - or has it?

Cinema, popular entertainment, literature and television

2012

In an excellent methodological essay, Rick Altman (1996) has argued that the notion that cinema has a stable identity across time is, at best, an illusion. Specifically, its identity has become diffuse at moments when it has entered into circuits of transformative exchange and competition with other forms of leisure activity. Altman focused on the age of the nickelodeon (exhibition at fairgrounds or amusement parks, early cinema theaters) and on the sound revolution (producing forms such as “radio with images” and filmed theater), proposing a “crisis model” of historiography in which what we call cinema includes heterogeneous, unstable scenarios that have emerged at crisis points in its his…

Philosophy and science: the axes of evil in disability studies?

2007

In this review, I concentrate on analysing the response Tom Shakespeare’s Disability rights and wrongs has awoken in the disability studies community. I argue that the complicated relationship between politics and science is the underlying cause for many controversies in disability studies. The research field should regain its autonomy and scrutinise properly its ontological premises. The field of disability studies in the UK is in turmoil. During the past 10 years or so, there have been several debates that have revolved around the social model of disability. The latest source of a heated debate is Tom Shakespeare’s Disability rights and wrongs . Many of us working outside the UK have foll…

Playing games in the cultural transformations in the second half of the twentieth century

2013