Beaked Whales Respond to Simulated and Actual Navy Sonar

In this presentation, Camila and I talk about an interesting research on whales and their response to sonar sounds, which may be the source of mass stranding. The media coverage was very varied, some sources were true to the article, while others actually invented information. We tried to show how media manipulates the data for their own purposes.

So, we would like to pose the following questions: What do you think about the Telegraph's decision of inventing information about the research? Do you think this is a common practice in journalism? Why? Why not? What do you think about the damage that the US government is causing to beaked whales?

As you can see, there are different questions that arise from this subject, and we would like you to watch the following video to contextualize a little bit this issue.

We hope you find this presentation insightful.

Do Videogames Elicit Violence in People?

When it comes to videogames, people and governments tend to say that they are a vivid source of violence, and games are blamed for shootings and killings that sometimes shake their countries. Moreover, the media and many research studies have eagerly shown how violent videogames are and how they are responsible of such accidents. Would you dare to contradict them?

Well, I would. The problem with the media and the governments in general is that they seem to need an entity on which they can blame for any negative event that produces fear. Noticeably, in developed countries, shootings happen every now and then, and since the media and the government do not know why those events happen, they blame videogames because of trivial details like “investigations on the killers showed that they played games on a daily basis.” But, does that mean that videogames are the reason why these murderers commit their crimes?

To support such statements, researches on videogames and violence are commonly carried out to verify the connection. However, the results are somewhat shaky because they do not show the link between playing videogames and those terrible outcomes. Moreover, several other elements are not taken into account such as family violence and mental illnesses.

All in all, the non-existent connection between videogames and violence is commonly used by the media and the governments to overlook the real problem behind the mortal incidents, which may refer to a society that every day becomes more and more dehumanizing; and researchers are not responsible either, for they are not consistent with their results.