Can You Feel It?

[rionaleonhart]

I watched Derren Brown's The Heist yesterday, and it was excellent. For those who do not know the premise: Derren Brown offers a motivational seminar to a group of respectable businessmen and women. The seminar is a cover for manipulating them into robbing a security van. It is a fascinating study of what people can be persuaded to do, and of the little-known danger that the song 'Can You Feel It?' by the Jackson Five poses to society.

I think my favourite part was the shop assistants becoming increasingly frustrated by the endless parade of people in suits coming in and stealing sweets. Hee! (I can't believe people did that. Derren Brown says 'steal from this shop! :D' and people - people who clearly haven't been hypnotised, although they have been manipulated somewhat - actually do it? I would probably have assumed he was joking.)

The replication of the Milgram experiment was just disturbing. HUMAN BEINGS. WHY SO CREEPY?


Here is a Heist-related quote from Tricks of the Mind that I rather enjoyed:

Had the final armed robberies not worked - though I had no doubt they would - I had a very vague plan B and C up my sleeve to ensure that the show would come together in some form. But I didn't need to go down those routes. (Let's just say that I had a lot of dancers tucked around corners, waiting for a signal.)


It looks as if you can watch the entire awesome thing here! It is fifty minutes long, and it is so interesting, so please do watch it if you have a spare hour right now. If you enjoy it, you could consider buying Derren Brown's DVDs.

Alternatively, if you do not have the time to watch the entire thing, here is a two-minute cut-down, speeded-up version set to 'Yakety Sax'.

Comments

[amy-wolf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, here the usual way of doing is to have sixty-five to seventy percent be just barely passing (D to C in letter grades), seventy to eighty be adequate but not that great (C to B), eighty to ninety be good (B to A) and anything over ninety percent be very good (sometimes, depending on how extra-credit is scored, people can get over a hundred percent, which looks slightly nonsensical at first). Of course, different schools tinker with that to some extent, there's the pluses and minuses, and some schools (or some classes within a school) use the bell curve to grade people which complicates things and isn't very popular with students I've met.

I was really freaked out when I studied in France for a semester and a lot of my scores were in the fifty or sixty percent range. I was convinced I was failing so badly. Fortunately my school in the US knew how to convert grades from Europe, and I ended up with a lot of Bs and a few As (apparently, getting eight out of ten on any test rather blows teachers in France out of the water).

[dracothelizard.livejournal.com]

I still don't understand using letters for grades. How am I supposed to figure out my average grade if I get an A? You can't add A + B and divide by two. And the letters equate to numbers any way, so why bother with the letters? And then Scottish universities use LETTERS AND NUMBERS. A5? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?