Mickey Mouse for President

According to American Partisen Mickey Mouse gets approximately 20,000 votes in each general election. Other notable write in candidates include Donald duck, Bart Simpson and Madonna. Those of you as old as I may remember the popular 1968 slogan “Pat Paulsen for president.”

In 1992 Pat Paulsen received enough votes in a few counties to come in 2nd to Bill Clinton. That same year he came in second to George Bush in the North Dakota Republican Primary. In the 1996 primaries Pat Paulsen received a total of 76,754 votes, although Paulsen died in 1997 he received 10,984 votes in the last republican primary - enough again to be considered a major spoiler in the election. This year because of feelings of national political hopelessness and discontent, political experts believe Paulsen has the potential to siphon votes off from both parties and become a spoiler once again.

On average only about 60% of registered voters vote in each election. Between 1-5% of those are willing to throw away their vote. So if you tell yourself that your vote doesn’t count, you are mistaken. In a country of 300 million people, a mere 10,000 votes can make or break an election. If every voter voted for a viable candidate, instead of throwing away their vote, the outcome might be different. Or if only 200 people from each state decided that their vote might count, and voted, they could change the outcome of American history.

Ventriloquism In Motion: How Sound Can Move Light

Ventriloquism In Motion: How Sound Can Move Light

ScienceDaily (Aug. 24, 2008) — Research led by Dr Elliot Freeman, lecturer in psychology at Brunel University’s School of Social Sciences, recently published in Current Biology, confirms that what we see can sometimes depend as much on our ears as on our eyes.

The study, conducted in conjunction with Prof. Jon Driver at University College London, revealed that the perceived direction of motion from a given visual object (in this case, red bars across a screen), depends on minute variations in the timing of an accompanying sound (a sequence of beeps, for example). This provides evidence that the brain’s integration of these visual and audio cues occurs at a very early stage of processing.

Every day examples of audio-visual integration include our ability to identify who is saying what in a noisy crowd and the illusion that sound comes directly from the an actor’s lips seen on a television, rather than from the loudspeakers; the latter is the well-known ‘Ventriloquist Effect’, where seeing influences the location of sounds.

The audiovisual illusion revealed by this new research could be dubbed ‘reverse ventriloquism in motion’, as it shows that sound affects what we see. This might explain why if we watch dancing without sound, the dancers appear to have no rhythm; and why the sound of a ball hitting a racket can help us to determine the direction of the ball in a game of tennis even though the ball moves faster that the camera or eye can track.

Dr. Freeman believes that his research could have profound implications for the understanding of the neural processes that underlie multisensory perception. This knowledge could be applied in a number of industries: “The illusion could be applied to novel displays that change their appearance depending on sound, which may be of use in advertising or providing an eye-catching multisensory warning or alert in safety-critical applications. It may also eventually be useful in detecting and diagnosing subtle perceptual differences thought to be characteristic of certain clinical conditions such as dyslexia and autistic spectrum.”

Adapted from materials provided by Brunel University.