The Null Device

2008/9/18

The US election season is proving a bonanza to scientists studying deception, from incongruous body language to the vague phraseology of "spin":

BLINK and you would have missed it. The expression of disgust on former US president Bill Clinton's face during his speech to the Democratic National Convention as he says "Obama" lasts for just a fraction of a second. But to Paul Ekman it was glaringly obvious.
"Given that he probably feels jilted that his wife Hillary didn't get the nomination, I would have to say that the entire speech was actually given very gracefully," says Ekman, who has studied people's facial expressions and how they relate to what they are thinking for over 40 years.
Another algorithm scores politicians on the amount of spin, or manipulative content-free language, in their speeches, using word frequencies:
The algorithm counts usage of first person nouns - "I" tends to indicate less spin than "we", for example. It also searches out phrases that offer qualifications or clarifications of more general statements, since speeches that contain few such amendments tend to be high on spin. Finally, increased rates of action verbs such as "go" and "going", and negatively charged words, such as "hate" and "enemy", also indicate greater levels of spin. Skillicorn had his software tackle a database of 150 speeches from politicians involved in the 2008 US election race (see diagram).
In general though, Obama's speeches contain considerably higher spin than either McCain or Clinton. For example, for their speeches accepting their party's nomination for president, Obama's speech scored a spin value of 6.7 - where 0 is the average level of spin within all the political speeches analysed, and positive values represent higher spin. In contrast, McCain's speech scored -7.58, while Hillary Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention scored 0.15. Skillicorn also found that Sarah Palin's speeches contain slightly more spin than average.
So whilst Obama is one slick player, the straight-talkin', plain-dealin' McCain has little to rejoice about, according to a different metric:
"The voice analysis profile for McCain looks very much like someone who is clinically depressed," says Pollermann, a psychologist who uses voice analysis software in her work with patients. Previous research on mirror neurons has shown that listening to depressed voices can make others feel depressed themselves, she says.
Additionally, McCain's voice and facial movements often do not match up, says Pollermann, and he often smiles in a manner that commonly conveys sarcasm when addressing controversial statements. "That might lead to what I would call a lack of credibility."

(via /.) deception politics psychology science 0

There is now an Asiavision Song Contest. A company named Asiavision Pte. Ltd. (which sounds like they're based in Singapore) has licenced the Eurovision format, and the inaugural Asiavision Song Contest is expected in mid-2009.

"The format is highly suited to the Asia region and its people who love popular music and have a strong national pride", says Andreas Gerlach, CEO of Asiavision Pte. Ltd. "Asia today is all about competition, economically and politically. The Song Contest is a friendly competition between cultures. Like in Europe, the universal language of music will help to bring people closer together and nurture mutual understanding in the region," Gerlach believes.
The annual song contest is planned to be a six-month regional and national tournament culminating in the Grand Final. The song contest will be distributed in the following countries: China, Cambodia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Macao, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. Targeting the most populous region in the world with more than three billion people the show has a potential audience of over 500 million viewers. A number of broadcasters have indicated their desire to be the Host Broadcaster for the first ever Asiavision Song Contest.
Australia is notable by its absence from this list, and presumably won't be sending competitors there. I imagine that Australians will continue to watch Eurovision (broadcast on the Sunday after, due to time differences), often having parties to do so. Whether Asiavision will get broadcast there (i.e., whether SBS will pick it up or it'll be confined to some ethnic-interest cable channel) remains to be seen.

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