Lindalaura

doyouresearch: and that was the late evening of July 14th, 2011 in London…

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 04:05:06 -0400

doyouresearch:

and that was the late evening of July 14th, 2011 in London…

attackofthegreylantern: Exclusive still from ‘The Voorman...

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:31:06 -0400

attackofthegreylantern:

Exclusive still from ‘The Voorman Problem’. My film is now making it’s way onto the world festival circuit.

That’s really really a surprise!

Sherlock series one filming photos.

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 23:43:29 -0400

lookivegotablanket:

I don’t know how these were just uncovered out of no where, but Martin Freeman your stupid face.

Read More

okyuri: the background music of Tinker tailor soldier spy’s...

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 03:24:44 -0400

okyuri:

the background music of Tinker tailor soldier spy’s trailer {Danny Elfman – Wolf suite, part 1}

Wonderful

Photo

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 08:49:00 -0400

Photo

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 08:49:00 -0400

Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 05:08:16 -0400

Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?:

youmightfindyourself:

Flannery O’Connor once described the contradictory desires that afflict all of us with characteristic simplicity. “Free will does not mean one will,” she wrote, “but many wills conflicting in one man.” The existence of appealing alternatives, after all, is what makes free will free: What would choice be without inner debate? We’re torn between staying faithful and that alluring man or woman across the room. We can’t resist the red velvet cake despite having sworn to keep our calories down. We buy a leather jacket on impulse, even though we know we’ll need the money for other things. Everyone is aware of such inner conflicts. But how, exactly, do we choose among them? As it turns out, science has recently shed light on the way our minds reconcile these conflicts, and the result has surprising implications for the way we think about one of society’s most intractable problems: poverty.

In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”

Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”

In addition, researchers have expanded the theory to cover tradeoff decisions, not just self-control decisions. That is, any decision that requires tradeoffs seems to deplete our ability to muster willpower for future decisions. Tradeoff decisions, like choosing between more money and more leisure time, require the same conflict resolution as self-control decisions (although our impulses appear to play a smaller role). In both cases, willpower can be understood as the capacity to resolve conflicts among choices as rationally as possible, and to make the best decision in light of one’s personal goals. And, in both cases, willpower seems to be a depletable resource.

This theory of depletable willpower has its detractors, and, as in most academic topics studied across disciplinary fields, one finds plenty of disputes over the details. But this model of self-control is now one of the most prominent theories of willpower in social psychology, at the core of what E. Tory Higgins of Columbia University described in 2009 as “an explosion of scientific interest” in the topic over the last decade. Some skeptics correctly emphasize the vital role of motivation, and some emphasize instead that “attention” is limited. But the core of the breakthrough is that resolving conflicts among choices is expensive at a cognitive level and can be unpleasant. It causes mental fatigue.

Nowhere is this revelation more important than in our efforts to understand poverty. Taking this model of willpower into the real world, psychologists and economists have been exploring one particular source of stress on the mind: finances. The level at which the poor have to exert financial self-control, they have suggested, is far lower than the level at which the well-off have to do so. Purchasing decisions that the wealthy can base entirely on preference, like buying dinner, require rigorous tradeoff calculations for the poor. As Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir formulated the point in a recent talk, for the poor, “almost everything they do requires tradeoff thinking. It’s distracting, it’s depleting … and it leads to error.” The poor have to make financial tradeoff decisions, as Shafir put it, “on anything above a muffin.”

Last December, Princeton economist Dean Spears published a series of experiments that each revealed how “poverty appears to have made economic decision-making more consuming of cognitive control for poorer people than for richer people.” In one experiment, poor participants in India performed far less well on a self-control task after simply having to first decide whether to purchase body soap. As Spears found, “Choosing first was depleting only for the poorer participants.” Again, if you have enough money, deciding whether to buy the soap only requires considering whether you want it, not what you might have to give up to get it. Many of the tradeoff decisions that the poor have to make every day are onerous and depressing: whether to pay rent or buy food; to buy medicine or winter clothes; to pay for school materials or loan money to a relative. These choices are weighty, and just thinking about them seems to exact a mental cost.

In a paper in April 2010, Harvard behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan (for whom, full disclosure, I once worked) and MIT’s Abhijit Banerjee applied this same notion to decisions requiring self-control. If a doughnut costs twenty-five cents, they wrote, then that “$0.25 will be far more costly to someone living on $2 a day than to someone living on $30 a day. In other words, the same self-control problem is more consequential for the poor.” And so, in addition to all the structural barriers that prevent even determined poor people from escaping poverty, there may be another, deeper, and considerably more disturbing barrier: Poverty may reduce free will, making it even harder for the poor to escape their circumstances.

All of this suggests that we need to rethink our approaches to poverty reduction. Many of our current anti-poverty efforts focus on access to health, educational, agricultural, and financial services. Now, it seems, we need to start treating willpower as a scarce and important resource as well.

Some promising approaches have already been tried. Starting in 2002, economists Nava Ashraf, Dean Karlan, and Wesley Yin created and analyzed a unique type of savings account at a small rural bank on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. The Green Bank of Caraga’s SEED accounts (Save, Earn, Enjoy Deposits) let clients place restrictions on when they could access their money. SEED clients could set either a date before which or a minimum savings amount below which they couldn’t access their own funds. Twenty-eight percent of existing bank clients who were offered the accounts enrolled in them, and, after one year, the economists found, customers saved over 300 percent more with SEED accounts than they would have without them. The accounts offered an opportunity to circumvent self-control failure, in the same way Ulysses bound himself to the mast to resist the Sirens’ call.

The developed world offers numerous such “commitment products”: certificates of deposit, pension plans, government savings bonds, and education savings accounts, to name a few. But, in the developing world, institutional supports for flagging willpower are far fewer. To make use of these new discoveries, similar products that explicitly attempt to reduce willpower costs could be developed in numerous fields, from health to education to agriculture to financial management.

This brings up a second, similar point: Comfort goods like washing machines and dishwashers free up valuable time and attention. Think of all the things the wealthy do to spend more time focusing on what’s important. They can pay bills automatically, they can hire babysitters and have food delivered, they can have their homes and clothes cleaned for them. But, in the developing world, cost-effective time savers have come much more slowly to those who most need them. Five-dollar, energy-efficient stoves can cut firewood usage, improving children’s health and halving the amount of time it takes to gather enough firewood to cook. Small solar panels systems, too, as The New York Times recently reported, can play “an epic, transformative role” in homes off the electrical grid, saving families time and money on kerosene. Broadly distributed, such simple innovations would allow the poor to avoid difficult tradeoff decisions about how they spend their time or even their money.

Third, money itself can go a long way toward altering the dynamic that leads to willpower depletion among the poor. Government transfers of money have proven successful in Mexico and Brazil, for instance. In particular, attaching conditions to these transfers—such as requiring school attendance, regular clinic visits, and savings behavior—may allow for an end-run around the kind of willpower-based poverty traps that too frequently seem to end with the poor making unwise decisions.

Finally, what about the possibility of strengthening the willpower “muscle”? Here, the research is complicated. While one line of research has found reason to think that drained willpower can be restored in the short term—by taking a walk in nature or watching a humorous video, for instance—studies on how to strengthen the willpower muscle in the long term are far less conclusive. This second line of research seems to be more promising in children than in adults. As Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota, who has done extensive research on willpower, put it, “There might be something of a developmental sweet spot.” In twelve U.S. states, a program called Tools of the Mind is explicitly aimed at improving willpower functions in prekindergarten and kindergarten children. While some of the strategies would be quite difficult in much of the developing world, many are not, or could be adapted.

Of course, to argue that stressful decisions can exhaust precious mental resources is not to suggest that the decisions of the poor can’t be attributed to human agency. Still, while free will is real, it is also subject to complications. The economist Amartya Sen, in his well-known volume Development as Freedom, notes how an individual’s “freedom of agency” is “constrained by the social, political and economic opportunities” available to them. He’s right: Fewer options do reduce freedom. But now, we may need to grapple with a new possibility: that poverty doesn’t simply reduce freedom by constraining an individual’s choices, but that it may actually alter the nature of freedom by reducing an individual’s willpower.

s0mmerspr0ssen: How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 11:39:31 -0400

s0mmerspr0ssen: How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?:

itsacrimescene:

s0mmerspr0ssen:

thatneedstogo:

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world. Read the full article at Edge.org

Well, that’s nice. Also, I don’t quite believe it. After all, the world “girl” is neuter in German. But I am pretty sure if you ask my fellow Germans to describe “girl”, they won’t use descriptions like “no personality”, “object-like” or “lifeless”.
*rolls eyes*

Der, die, das isn’t really connected with an idea of gender. How can a table be “masculine”? How is a girl “neuter”, a lamp “feminine”? It just uses that article, but it doesn’t make the object any less of an object or the person less or more of a person.

I don’t know why this bugs me so much. It just seems quite far-fetched. “In one study, we asked” - says it all.

While I do believe that language CAN influence the way we think in some ways, I don’t think that it works like this, especially not when gender is concerned. Just take the fact that ‘girl’ is a neuter in German whereas ‘boy’ has a masculine article. This shows that it’s just an article and has nothing to do with the word itself, because what could be more feminine than a girl?

And what about synonyms? Take sofa/couch, for example. In German, ‘sofa’ is a neuter while ‘couch’ is feminine, although they both refer to the same object. How would the participants in this study describe that big-thing-with-lots-of-cushions-that-we-sit-on-when-we’re-watching-TV? Probably something like ‘comfy’, which I wouldn’t label as neither particularly masculine, nor as particularly feminine. Actually, stating that words like ‘heavy’ or ‘useful’ are more masculine and less feminine than words like ‘little’ and ‘pretty’ seems somewhat discriminating to me. They are just words and, like s0mmer said, have nothing to do with actual gender.

This may seem weird to people who don’t use grammatical gender, and I really have no idea why we even have it because it doesn’t make much sense to me, but all I can say is that I don’t think of my floor as more masculine than my walls or my ceiling. And I’m pretty sure that no one would describe a wall as ‘slender’, ‘pretty’ or ‘lovely’ just because it is used with a feminine article.

Sherlock BBC Fic -- MASTER List

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 04:43:18 -0400

bloodyawfulcabbie:

Seriously, this thing is massive. It’s like 15 pages in Word. I’m sorry. 79 of my favorite Sherlock fanfics behind the cut!

Read More

matt-smith-: robin-sparkles: poisonedandhopeless: Doctor Who...

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 06:50:46 -0400

matt-smith-:

robin-sparkles:

poisonedandhopeless:

Doctor Who

Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC. The programme depicts the adventures of a mysterious and eccentric Time Lord known as the Doctor who travels through time and space in his time machine, the TARDIS (an acronym for Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space), which normally appears from the exterior to be a blue 1950s British police box. With his companions, he explores time and space, faces a variety of foes and saves civilizations, helping people and righting wrongs.

Season 1 DVDrip
1.01 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XB8C1N3H
1.02 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZPGGO479
1.03 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=B81IDGBF
1.04 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GRAYZP0D
1.05 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=M7MOHD7S
1.06 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IA6HRYJQ
1.07 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=I1VMAAW1
1.08 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=82ENURGE
1.09 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=54YKT73S
1.10 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IAV2CWON
1.11 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HATRNG13
1.12 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Q35ODNNA
1.13 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4QCEJFR6

Doctor Who 2005 Christmas Special: Christmas Invasion
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1WRMJCK3
Doctor Who Children in Need Special 2005: The New Doctor
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5X1RUNZH

Season 2 DVDrip
2.01 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=L62ZWWNJ
2.02 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MAGPIDV4
2.03 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=B7QBT21G
2.04 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=WQFHVTVL
2.05 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=38KTC1OL
2.06 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ENJ1UB5F
2.07 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OU4ZCH5M
2.08 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7C8L4NN7
2.09 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=X0YUGFHI
2.10 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9YLM23EU
2.11 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=19N08Y20
2.12 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=DN3JT6QD
2.13 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IL8PGWEB

Season 3 DVDrip
3.00 Runaway Bride Special
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TUT2UVB2

3.01 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AV6TO3BY
3.02 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AGHLM2I2
3.03 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9ATEC1WS
3.04 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HTMDUWD1
3.05 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OQKG1B9N
3.06 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ELAO5HWV
3.07 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=Z7SGE8C5
3.08 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=98D91ZEO
3.09 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=48JA8E2N
3.10 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GYFZPL2B
3.11 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=J4HXIYA3
3.12 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NU8G2M82
3.13 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0UD1KZ4I

Children in Need Special 2007 : Time Crash
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=M2GGKPYI
Weakest Link Special 30 March 2007
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8JO1LAFX

Season 4 HDTV
4.00 Christmas Special: Voyage of the Damned
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=RDGC16JP

4.01 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6OZODJ9D
4.02 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8HI72IGB
4.03 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=W92DV1AD
4.04 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=L7JUPSQ0
4.05 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3DBONOYP
4.06 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=EOHELAKV
4.07 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=A95YH5MQ
4.08 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=W4LOLRX3
4.09 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=J2OMEI19
4.10 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZAATIP24
4.11 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=LEBVKPS7
4.12 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OIG343UF
4.13 http://www.megaupload.com/?d=SRBVT54I

Dr.Who.The.Next.Doctor.Xmas.Special.2008
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MM4YKVTL
Dr.Who.Planet.of.the.Dead.Special.2009
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5COIQG2Z
Doctor Who • 2009 Special • Waters of Mars
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=B1XKLYIZ
Doctor Who • Xmas 2009 Special • The End Of Time Part One
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AKQJSN6B
Doctor Who • Xmas 2009 Special • The End Of Time Part Two
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=T10ASVSY

Season 5 DVDrip
1. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=X5SJN34N
2. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=K8ZKH1D1
3. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=F3P1MCIV
4. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AES8F6KJ
5. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QFW5O9W4
6. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ICU2D1FX
7. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=IQNICBZP
8. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4SFH7ZDH
9. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4RS8YBEL
10. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=XVJV2Y6R
11. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QAAAD1T4
12. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=84KO8JRG
13. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OQYKATFX

Doctor Who at The Proms 2010
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=94U90I3V

Doctor Who 2005 A Christmas Carol 2010 Special
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZER8L1O7

Doctor Who Comic Relief Space & Time
www.megaupload.com/?d=6T9PA6RK

Photo

Tue, 31 May 2011 10:27:13 -0400

Photo

Fri, 13 May 2011 08:15:36 -0400

look! I have the-one jacket too!

Fri, 13 May 2011 08:10:43 -0400

lazyocean:

not my picture. dug it outta my folder. =)

mustachejulia: TV guide also contains this golden “Me and...

Thu, 12 May 2011 05:48:54 -0400

mustachejulia:

TV guide also contains this golden “Me and Sherlock Holmes” AKA John’s first blog entry which will never not be hilarious.

“I don’t know how I’m ment to be writing this. I’m not a writer. Ella thought keeping a blog would help but it hasn’t because nothing ever happens to me. But today, something did. Something happened.

I was walking in the park and I bumped into Mike Stamford. We were sort of mates when we were students. We went for coffee and I mentioned that I wanted to move. He said he knew of someone in a similar situation. So we went to Barts and he introduced us. Except he didn’t. He didn’t introduce us. The man knew who I was. Somehow he knew everything about me. He knew i’d served in Afghanistan and he knew I’d be invalided. He said my wound was psychosomatic, so he didn’t get everything right, but he even knew why I was there, despite the fact Mike hadn’t told him.

I googled him when I got back to the flat and found a link to his website The Science of Deduction.

It’s mad. I think he might be mad. He was arrogant and quite rude. He looks about 12 and he’s clearly a bit public school and ,yes, I definitely think he might be mad but he was also strangely likeable. He was charming. It really was all just a bit strange.

So tomorrow, we’re off to look for a flat. Me and the madman. Me and Sherlock Holmes.”

Why I’ve never seen this before?

Hello! Thanks for answering my question. I like dogs and Martin Freeman so I followed you. :)

Tue, 10 May 2011 05:43:54 -0400

Hi! Thank you for your following. That’s so sweet.^^ I also love Benedict Cumberbatch and BBC Sherlock, so we may share a lot in the future.<3

isayrather: HOLY SHIT AHHHHH HOW HAVE I NEVER SEEN THIS ONE...

Wed, 04 May 2011 20:55:51 -0400

isayrather:

HOLY SHIT AHHHHH HOW HAVE I NEVER SEEN THIS ONE BEFORE?

I didn’t see either.

martinfreemansigh: I CAN’T EVEN I’ve never watched this...

Tue, 03 May 2011 03:50:00 -0400

martinfreemansigh:

I CAN’T EVEN

I’ve never watched this before. It’s pretty likely to be a young Martin.

That was the most ridiculous thing I've ever done: I don't think you understand how much I love Martin Freeman

Mon, 02 May 2011 22:32:00 -0400

That was the most ridiculous thing I've ever done: I don't think you understand how much I love Martin Freeman:

anarmydoctor:

Made of kittens, chiselled from marshmallow, jam lover, jumper enthusiastic. Martin Freeman, beyond the metaphors, beyond the fandom creations, is an actor of awesome talent and a fascinating man. Don’t get me wrong, I love that colourful, surrealistic universe that we’ve built around him, and…

Good compilation. Now your love for “the adorable and hot” guy rubs off on me.

CABIN PRESSURE

Sun, 01 May 2011 21:18:17 -0400

benedictatorship:

So the wait is over…. here IS MY CABIN PRESSURE STORY: [warning may be spoilery but MEH]

Read More

norwegianpornfaerie: MOAR pilot!John. I like his eyes here.

Sun, 01 May 2011 07:19:06 -0400

norwegianpornfaerie:

MOAR pilot!John.

I like his eyes here.

Lindalaura

doyouresearch: and that was the late evening of July 14th, 2011 in London…

attackofthegreylantern: Exclusive still from ‘The Voorman...

Sherlock series one filming photos.

okyuri: the background music of Tinker tailor soldier spy’s...

the background music of Tinker tailor soldier spy’s trailer {Danny Elfman – Wolf suite, part 1}

Photo

Photo

Why Can’t More Poor People Escape Poverty?

s0mmerspr0ssen: How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?

Sherlock BBC Fic -- MASTER List

matt-smith-: robin-sparkles: poisonedandhopeless: Doctor Who...

Photo

Photo

look! I have the-one jacket too!

mustachejulia: TV guide also contains this golden “Me and...

Hello! Thanks for answering my question. I like dogs and Martin Freeman so I followed you. :)

isayrather: HOLY SHIT AHHHHH HOW HAVE I NEVER SEEN THIS ONE...

martinfreemansigh: I CAN’T EVEN I’ve never watched this...

That was the most ridiculous thing I've ever done: I don't think you understand how much I love Martin Freeman

CABIN PRESSURE

norwegianpornfaerie: MOAR pilot!John. I like his eyes here.