Mommy, it's Saturday, can we watch an infomercial

Those of you who are like me can remember how much you liked Saturdays...what my kids now affectionately refer to as one of the "stay at home days."

One of the great things about Saturdays was flopping down in front of morning cartoons while eating Honey Comb cereal right outta the box.

Those days are over.
Financial woes are partly to blame, as are cable networks like Cartoon Network...but here's a story about Fox's decision to scrap Saturday morning cartoons for...infomercials.

Of course...this will grab headlines (like the title of my posting...only read by many more people). But, in reality, this may in fact result in better kids programming on Saturday mornings on Fox affiliates.

If you read the whole Variety article I link to above, you'll see that local affils are trying to find places to air their required E/I (educational/informational) programming. Saturday mornings used to be out because the network had that time all programmed nationally. Now, it seems the affils will be able to at least opt out of airing the informercials in favor of their own E/I fare.

First week of IFS is in the books

It's been a wonderful week in S105 as me and a group of 18 freshmen have embarked on exploring how the human brain interacts with mediated messages as psychological stimuli rather than just genres of entertainment.

I've been amazed at how far the group has come in a short time. They are exhausted and slightly overwhelmed at the speed with which we've covered stuff. And, frankly, so am I. That's why they are called INTENSIVE Fresmen Seminars, I suppose.

But, in five short days we've been able to have two different groups (my attention groups) come up with separate hypotheses concerning what causes us to pay different amounts of attention to media. Plus, we have been in the ICR lab collecting data to test those hypotheses. Interestingly, one of the hypotheses focused on television and the other on audio-only media (music).

Here's a few pictures of some of them in the lab yesterday.


Eliot making sure Brittany is comfortable getting ready to have her heart rate measured.

Eliot again (I think, with his back to us) and Alex (watching the EKG on the computer monitor) discuss the heart rate data being collected with my IFS intern Jeremy.
In Lab A, Tommy kept meticulous notes about the four subjects his group collected data from...plus had a great sense of humor about it all that helped those being "hooked up" relax.

Tommy's group has already been able to analyze their data, and found some pretty interesting results. I won't spoil the story now...they haven't presented it to the other students yet, but be checking back.