Trivialized Content, Elevated From: Aesthetics of Secrecy in Turkish Politics in the 2000s

This essay will first provide a brief history of the Islamist party\u27s coming to power by means of its effective use of a populist imagery. The paper will then focus on the emergence of a new regime of secrecy in Turkish politics by looking at two high-profile legal cases, Ergenekon and the “Cosmic Room,” in which one can observe the blueprints of a struggle between different factions for taking over the state. During the investigations, secret documents about the wrongdoings of the secular establishment were leaked to and widely covered by the media. Sober debates on the contents of such documents were dwarfed by the tendency to scandalize, stigmatize, and foster fascination for the purported clandestine organizations within the state in line with conspiracist aesthetics. In later sections of the paper, the elements of entertainment and seriousness of this conspiracist aesthetics are analyzed

Electrophysiological Studies of Visual Attention and of Emotion Regulation

Electrophysiological methods, such as electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiography (ECG), measure biological activity that allow us to infer underlying cognitive processes. In the first study, we use EEG to track feature-based attention (FBA), a form of visual attention that helps one detect objects with a particular color, motion, or orientation. We explore the use of SSVEPs, generated by flicker presented peripherally, to track attention in a visual search task presented centrally. Classification results show that one can track an observer’s attended color, which suggests that these methods may provide a viable means for tracking FBA in a real-time task. In the second study, we use cardiovascular measures to examine influences of the emotion regulation strategy of reappraisal. We examine cooperation and cardiovascular responses in individuals that were defected on by their opponent in the first round of an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. We find significant differences between the emotion regulation conditions using the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat, where participants primed with the reappraisal strategy were weakly comparable with a threat state of the BPS model and participants without an emotion regulation were weakly comparable with a challenge state of the BPS model. In the third study, we use EEG to study the chromatic sensitivity of FBA for color during a visual search task. We use SSVEP responses evoked through peripheral flicker to measure the spectral tuning of color detection mechanisms and how attentional selection is affected by distractor color. Our results find smaller responses for the distractor colors and suggest that feature-based attention to a particular color involves chromatic mechanisms that both enhance the response to a target and minimize responses to distractors

Peripheral Notifications: Effects of Feature Combination and Task Interference

Visual notifications are integral to interactive computing systems. The design of visual notifications entails two main considerations: first, visual notifications should be noticeable, as they usually aim to attract a user`s attention to a location away from their main task; second, their noticeability has to be moderated to prevent user distraction and annoyance. Although notifications have been around for a long time on standard desktop environments, new computing environments such as large screens add new factors that have to be taken into account when designing notifications. With large displays, much of the content is in the user's visual periphery, where human capacity to notice visual effects is diminished. One design strategy for enhancing noticeability is to combine visual features, such as motion and colour. Yet little is known about how feature combinations affect noticeability across the visual field, or about how peripheral noticeability changes when a user is working on an attention-demanding task. We addressed these questions by conducting two studies. We conducted a laboratory study that tested people's ability to detect popout targets that used combinations of three visual variables. After determining that the noticeability of feature combinations were approximately equal to the better of the individual features, we designed an experiment to investigate peripheral noticeability and distraction when a user is focusing on a primary task. Our results suggest that there can be interference between the demands of primary tasks and the visual features in the notifications. Furthermore, primary task performance is adversely affected by motion effects in the peripheral notifications. Our studies contribute to a better understanding of how visual features operate when used as peripheral notifications. We provide new insights, both in terms of combining features, and interactions with primary tasks

Detect the unexpected: a science for surveillance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for research development focused on addressing the neglected role of visual perception in real life tasks such as policing surveillance and command and control settings. Approach – The scale of surveillance task in modern control room is expanding as technology increases input capacity at an accelerating rate. The authors review recent literature highlighting the difficulties that apply to modern surveillance and give examples of how poor detection of the unexpected can be, and how surprising this deficit can be. Perceptual phenomena such as change blindness are linked to the perceptual processes undertaken by law-enforcement personnel. Findings – A scientific programme is outlined for how detection deficits can best be addressed in the context of a multidisciplinary collaborative agenda between researchers and practitioners. The development of a cognitive research field specifically examining the occurrence of perceptual “failures” provides an opportunity for policing agencies to relate laboratory findings in psychology to their own fields of day-to-day enquiry. Originality/value – The paper shows, with examples, where interdisciplinary research may best be focussed on evaluating practical solutions and on generating useable guidelines on procedure and practice. It also argues that these processes should be investigated in real and simulated context-specific studies to confirm the validity of the findings in these new applied scenarios

Resurrecting Keynes to Revamp the International Monetary System

There is a broad consensus that the current, large U.S. current-account deficits financed with foreign capital inflows at low interest rates cannot continue forever; there is much less consensus on when the system is likely to end and how badly it will end. The paper resurrects the basic principles of the plan Keynes wrote for the Bretton Woods Conference to propose an alternative to the current international monetary system. We argue for the creation of a supranational bank money that would coexist along side national currencies and for the establishment of a new international clearing union. The new international money would be created against domestic earning assets of the Fed and the ECB. In addition to recording credit and debit entries of the supranational bank money, the new agency would determine the size of quotas, the size and time length of overdrafts, and the coordination of monetary policies. The substitution of supranational bank money for dollars would harden the external constraint of the United States and resolve the n-1 redundancy problem.Keynes Plan, external imbalances, exchange rates, international monetary system, key currency, supranational bank money