Journey underground and backstage at the technological marvel that is Walt Disney World. Enter a make-believe world spanning some 27,000 acres, brought to life by cutting-edge technology. What was once Florida swampland now boasts the world's largest theme park. The ride technology ranges from space-age centrifuges to enhanced motion vehicles powered by 3,000 PSI of hydraulic pressure.
Showing posts with label Society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Society. Show all posts
Walt Disney : Modern Marvels
Journey underground and backstage at the technological marvel that is Walt Disney World. Enter a make-believe world spanning some 27,000 acres, brought to life by cutting-edge technology. What was once Florida swampland now boasts the world's largest theme park. The ride technology ranges from space-age centrifuges to enhanced motion vehicles powered by 3,000 PSI of hydraulic pressure.
Mental: A History of the Madhouse
Documentary which tells the fascinating and poignant story of the closure of Britain's mental asylums. In the post-war period, 150,000 people were hidden away in 120 of these vast Victorian institutions all across the country. Today, most mental patients, or service users as they are now called, live out in the community and the asylums have all but disappeared. Through powerful testimonies from patients, nurses and doctors, the film explores this seismic revolution and what it tells us about society's changing attitudes to mental illness over the last sixty years. The World's Most Expensive Paintings : BBC
Art critic Alastair Sooke tracks down the ten most expensive paintings to sell at auction, and investigates the stories behind the astronomic prices art can reach. Gaining access to the glittering world of the super-rich, Sooke discovers why the planet's richest people want to spend their millions on art.Featuring works by Picasso, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Klimt and Rubens, Sooke enters a world of secrecy and rivalry, passion and power. Highlights include a visit to the art-crammed home of millionaire author Lord Archer; a rare interview with the man at the heart of the sale of the most expensive old master of all time; privileged access to auctioneers Christie's; and a glimpse of the world of the Russian oligarchs.
These revelatory journeys allow Sooke to present an eye-opening view of the super wealthy, and their motivations as collectors of the world's great art treasures.
Living With Size Zero
The celebrity trend for size zero has been criticised worldwide for encouraging women to starve in secret.This film explores the impact the trend is having on real people living real lives.
From Kellie who is striving dangerously to achieve the skinny look, to Victoria who feels that her natural size zero frame is a poisoned chalice, this film exposes the contradictions surrounding women’s perceptions of size.
World in the Balance: The People Paradox
Essential concepts:Demographics, birth rate, death rate, fertility rate, developing countries, developed countries, pronatalist factors, antinatalist factors, demographic transition model.
World in the Balance: The People Paradox (20 Apr. 2004)
Cities of the Underworld : Paris
In every major metropolis, skyscrapers loom above, taxis and vendors clamor at street level, and subways rumble below. But deeper beneath the hectic surface lie other, silent worlds, each with its own mysterious and fascinating history.Cities of the Underworld peels away the layers of time-often literally hundreds of feet thick-to expose the incredible pasts lurking beneath some of the most populous cities on earth.
Throughout the world, cities such as Paris, New York, Rome and Shanghai all harbor long-submerged networks that once served crucial functions, from eerie catacombs to clandestine hideouts and ancient aqueducts to underground societies.
Cities of the Underworld examines these mysterious realms, from the technological feats of their construction and the myths and lore that have cloaked these subterranean marvels for centuries.
Featuring rare location hi-definition footage, The History Channel shows a world filled with mysteries and secrets just below the ground we walk on.
Megacities : New York - National Geographic
They call it the Big Apple - the largest metropolis in America. Eight million people live in a city that never sleeps. Yet life here would slow to a crawl without one vital piece of infrastructure: the most extensive subway system on earth. Like the city, the subway never sleeps. Every week day, trains carry 4.5 million people – nearly the entire population of Norway - making it one of the world’s busiest subway systems. Yet daily, it faces a triple threat: from man, nature, and time. The threats range from breakdowns to flooding to terrorism. Within this vital organ, life pulses at the speed of a New York minute. And every day, the city struggles to keep it beating – and keep it safe. 
Black Coffee Documentary Film
Black Coffee is a 2007 Canadian documentary film examining the complicated history of coffee and detailing its political, social, and economic influence from the past to the present day.
The film details how coffee is the eighth most traded legal commodity in the world. It is also the fourth most valuable agricultural commodity. However, only one cent of a $2 cup of coffee goes to the grower. This inequality has helped shape the history of continents and the Cold War.
Black Coffee Episode 1- The Perfect Cup:
The 3rd and last episode heralds what some coffee experts have called “the romantic age of coffee.” North Americans rediscovered what their Europeans counterparts have known all along: coffee is better when it’s quality coffee, and the best place to drink it is in the relaxed and friendly atmosphere of the cafe.
Black Coffee Episode I – The Irresistible Bean:
The first episode explores coffee’s origins in Ethiopia and its triumphant spread over five Continents, sparking revolution, controversy, creativity, business and slavery along the way.
Black Coffee Episode - Gold in Your Cup:
The second episode takes viewers back to examine coffee’s 19th century stranglehold on Brazil and Central America. The oppression led to coffee barons, the subjugation of Indians and Africans, the destruction of rainforests and, ironically, the evolution of both democracy and dictatorships.
Intelligent Design on Trial
In this two-hour special, NOVA captures the turmoil that tore apart the community of Dover, Pennsylvania in one of the latest battles over teaching evolution in public schools. Featuring trial reenactments based on court transcripts and interviews with key participants, including expert scientists and Dover parents, teachers, and town officials, "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" follows the celebrated federal case of Kitzmiller v. Dover School District. This program was coproduced with Paul G. Allen's Vulcan Productions, Inc.In 2004, the Dover school board ordered science teachers to read a statement to high school biology students suggesting that there is an alternative to Darwin's theory of evolution called intelligent design–the idea that life is too complex to have evolved naturally and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent agent. The teachers refused to comply. Later, parents opposed to intelligent design filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the school board of violating the constitutional separation of church and state.
"There was a blow-up like you couldn't believe," Bill Buckingham, head of the school board's curriculum committee, tells NOVA. Buckingham helped formulate the intelligent-design policy when he noticed that the biology textbook chosen by teachers for classroom use was, in his words, "laced with Darwinism."
NOVA presents the arguments by lawyers and expert witnesses in riveting detail and provides an eye-opening crash course on questions such as "What is evolution?" and "Is intelligent design a scientifically valid alternative?" Kitzmiller v. Dover was the first legal test of intelligent design as a scientific theory, with the plaintiffs arguing that it is a thinly veiled form of creationism, the view that a literal interpretation of the Bible accounts for all observed facts about nature.
During the trial, lawyers for the plaintiffs showed that evolution is one of the best-tested and most thoroughly confirmed theories in the history of science, and that its unresolved questions are normal research problems–the type that arise in any flourishing scientific field.
U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III ultimately decided for the plaintiffs, writing in his decision that intelligent design "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents." As part of his decision, Judge Jones ordered the Dover school board to pay legal fees and damages, which were eventually set at $1 million.
"Judgment Day captures on film a landmark court case with a powerful scientific message at its core," says Paula Apsell, NOVA's Senior Executive Producer. "Evolution is one of the most essential yet, for many people, least understood of all scientific theories, the foundation of biological science. We felt it was important for NOVA to do this program to heighten the public understanding of what constitutes science and what does not, and therefore, what is acceptable for inclusion in the science curriculum in our public schools."
For years to come, the lessons from Dover will continue to have a profound impact on how science is viewed in our society and how it is taught in the classroom.
Capitalism - A Love Story
Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story comes home to the issue he's been examining throughout his career: the disastrous impact of corporate dominance on the everyday lives of Americans (and by default, the rest of the world).But this time the culprit is much bigger than General Motors, and the crime scene far wider than Flint, Michigan. From Middle America, to the halls of power in Washington, to the global financial epicenter in Manhattan, Michael Moore will once again take film goers into uncharted territory. With both humor and outrage, Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story explores a taboo question: What is the price that America pays for its love of capitalism? Years ago, that love seemed so innocent.
Today, however, the American dream is looking more like a nightmare as families pay the price with their jobs, their homes and their savings. Moore takes us into the homes of ordinary people whose lives have been turned upside down; and he goes looking for explanations in Washington, DC and elsewhere.
What he finds are the all-too-familiar symptoms of a love affair gone astray: lies, abuse, betrayal" and 14,000 jobs being lost every day. Capitalism: A Love Story is both a culmination of Moore's previous works and a look into what a more hopeful future could look like. It is Michael Moore's ultimate quest to answer the question he's posed throughout his illustrious filmmaking career: Who are we and why do we behave the way that we do?
