Take part in one of Derren’s TV shows. Status update.
For those of you who have been having trouble getting through might want to try again today. We’ve had a thousand questions about the application – the answers are below.
But if you’ve had trouble we so far do keep trying as the initial heavy load seems to have now died down and the servers are coping with traffic levels.
QUESTIONS:
I’m not 18 until (insert date) can I still apply?
You can apply and Objective will consider your proposal. If you aren’t 18 on the date mentioned in the application then the answer is “unfortunately no”.
I’m not from the UK can I still apply?
UK applicant only please. To find out where the UK is try this: http://bit.ly/1Tq9k5
Do I have to send the application back to the email I got it from?
Yes. The forms need to be sent to Objective, if you email them to us we can’t forward them on, they need to come from YOUR email address.
Do I put a specific title in the subject line?
Anything will do but to make it easier please put “Completed Application”.
I’m still getting a delivery failure notice, what do I do?
Keep trying each day. There’s PLENTY of time to get your forms in, it’s not a first come first served basis and we will be taking application forms for the rest of this week and in to next week as well.
I Never got a form, can I still apply?
Yes and for several days to come too.
How do I sign a digital format?
You can print it out and sign it, take a photo on your phone and email it to yourself and include it with the form. Alternatively take a picture of your signature and copy and paste that in to the document.
Is there any way to check if my form has been received?
Unfortunately no, thousands of people have applied and we can’t look through every request we get. Sorry.
I sent in my application and got a form sent back, do you have my application?
Once we have your email that’s the email we need you to send the form back with. If you apply via one email and reply via another we may not accept your form. Please only use one email address and note that once we have your email stored we can then accept a form off you.
Is this a silly trick by Derren to get us all worked up after he said there would be no questions answered?
No this is a GENUINE REQUEST. We will not be answering any questions about the show.
When is the show and what’s it about?
See the answer to the last question.
I was born on a leap year and my doctor said to stay away from goateed men and I have to wash my hamster that morning – should I still apply?
No.
TV Show – What? How do I apply?
Click here.
Thank you all for your patience.
P.
Take part in my new series
Right. I’m not going to answer any questions on this I’m afraid, and neither can anyone else. For all the usual reasons. But if you’re in the UK and over 18 and would like to apply to take part in my new projects, please email the address below. Your email will NOT be read, so no need to say anything: it will automatically bounce back with a big questionnaire for you to fill in and send back.
Here’s the address:
derrenbrown@objectiveproductions.com
Don’t do this unless you genuinely want to take part. Your decision.
X
‘Anonymous’ hackers declare war on Orlando
The hacker group Anonymous on Monday declared war against the city of Orlando, Florida, over the arrest of people handing out food to homeless people, according to a report in The Washington Post.
In a press release, the group announced the creation of “Operation Orlando” over the city’s treatment of the Food Not Bombs group.
The Orlando Sentinel reported that what started as a spat over distributing food without a permit in a park had escalated, with Mayor Buddy Dyer describing the activists charged with the misdemeanor offense as “food terrorists.”
This prompted one member, Ben Markeson, to threaten to file a defamation suit, the Sentinel reported. The Anonymous press release said the city had “ignored our warnings, and our generous offer of a cease fire.”
Full Story at MSNBC
Westminster Council in the UK have also recently published a by-law that covers the same issue. Are they next?
Study raises questions on how much info the brain can store throughout life
A little practice goes a long way, according to researchers at McMaster University, who have found the effects of practice on the brain have remarkable staying power.
The study, published this month in the journal Psychological Science, found that when participants were shown visual patterns – faces, which are highly familiar objects, and abstract patterns, which are much less frequently encountered – they were able to retain very specific information about those patterns one to two years later.
We found that this type of learning, called perceptual learning, was very precise and long-lasting, says Zahra Hussain, lead author of the study who is a former McMaster graduate student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour and now a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. These long-lasting effects arose out of relatively brief experience with the patterns about two hours, followed by nothing for several months, or years.
Over the course of two consecutive days, participants were asked to identify a specific face or pattern from a larger group of images. The task was challenging because images were degradedfaces were cropped, for exampleand shown very briefly. Participants had difficulty identifying the correct images in the early stages, but accuracy rates steadily climbed with practice.
About one year later, a group of participants were called back and their performance on the task was re-measured, both with the same set of items theyd been exposed to earlier, and with a new set from the same class of images. Researchers found that when they showed participants the original images, accuracy rates were high. When they showed participants new images, accuracy rates plummeted, even though the new images closely resembled the learned ones, and they hadnt seen the original images for at least a year.
Full Story with details at McMaster Uni
US Navy bought fake Chinese microchips that could be remotely shut down
Last year, the U.S. Navy bought 59,000 microchips for use in everything from missiles to transponders and all of them turned out to be counterfeits from China. Wired reports the chips weren’t only low-quality fakes, they had been made with a “back-door” and could have been remotely shut down at any time.
If left undiscovered the result could have rendered useless U.S. missiles and killed the signal from aircraft that tells everyone whether it’s friend or foe. Apparently foreign chip makers are often better at making cheap microchips and U.S. defense contractors are loathe to pass up the better deal.
The problem remains with these “trojan-horse” circuits that can be built into the chip and are almost impossible to detect — especially without the original plans to compare them to.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) is now looking for ways to check the chips to make sure they haven’t been hacked in the production process.
Full story at Business Insider
The Ledge, a movie guaranteed to cause controversy in the US
To all the liberal minded Brits who go about their day with nothing more than a rather infrequent “be a winner not a sinner” from a Christian with a megaphone outside Oxford St Tube, a story like the one told in the movie The Ledge might seem a little over dramatic. However the idea of “coming out as an atheist” to your family is downright scary to some and focusing your movie on the topic of free-thinking is a brave move for both actors and producers alike.
According to a recent gallup 2011 poll America is still a very religious society with over 92% saying “yes” to the question “Do you believe in God?”. It’s a regular topic of conversation on main stream news channels and has caused outrage even when used as a topic for jokes in mainstream entertainment.
Many stories have emerged of atheists being persecuted, mostly by the Evangelical groups inside institutions such as the Armed Forces, but there also instances where non-believers have received even harsher treatment when using legal methods to oppose religious practices, such as the case of Damon Fowler and Ellen Beth Wachs.
So the release of the film The Ledge will at least be a controversial one in the US – it’s being heralded as the “Brokeback Mountain” for American atheists and could cause a wave of renewed interest in the movement.
The story focuses on the lives of two people from opposing ends of the spectrum, who become enrolled in a lethal game that neither God nor the police can stop. It stars Charlie Hunnam from Sons of Anarchy, Patrick Wilson, Liv Tyler and Terrence Howard.
Indian woman cuts off attackers head and parades it through village
A 35-year old woman decided to take the law into her own hands when a man came up to her while she was gathering grass for her cattle and tried to sexually assault her. In the end, the man learned the hard way that you never, ever attack a woman using a large blade in an isolated field.
The scene from a horror movie took lace in the village of Makkapurva, which is about 170 miles south east of the city of Lucknow. When the man attacked her, she turned on him and eventually, well, cut his head off with a sickle. Not one to just let it alone, she held the trophy up high, parading it around the local market as people fled in horror.
Full story at Weird Asia
Videos of UFO’s over London
Several videos have cropped up claiming to be UFO sightings over London. At the moment many are claiming it’s a hoax by London visual FX specialists The Mill. The Telegraph newspaper has been quick to report it’s been happening for over a week – however there is little evidence to back this up.
Other video’s available here and here.
Even though the videos have only had a few thousand views the debunking has started to take place.
If other videos or theories appear please let us know in the comments.
Urban Miner scrapes over £600 worth of precious metals from cracks in London pavements
The Sunday Telegraph has collected quantities of the precious metal from cracks in the pavements outside the capital’s most famous jewellers.
Our quest was inspired by 43-year-old New Yorker Raffi Stepanian, who crawls around on the sidewalks of Manhattan’s “diamond district” looking for chips of gemstones and tiny pieces of gold.
The “urban miner” claimed last week to have collected a haul worth roughly $1,000 (£620) over the course of a fortnight – mostly gold fragments which are thought to rub off the clothes or shoes of jewellery workers.
The pieces can be so small that they are only recoverable when Mr Stepanian pans the scraped-up dirt using a bowl of water, like a nineteenth-century prospector.
Acoustic ‘cloaking device’ shields objects from sound
Scientists have shown off a “cloaking device” that makes objects invisible – to sound waves.
Such acoustic cloaking was proposed theoretically in 2008 but has only this year been put into practice.
Described in Physical Review Letters, the approach borrows many ideas from attempts to “cloak” objects from light.
It uses simple plastic sheets with arrays of holes, and could be put to use in making ships invisible to sonar or in acoustic design of concert halls.
Much research has been undertaken toward creating Harry Potter-style “invisibility cloaks” since the feasibility of the idea was first put forward in 2006.
Full Article at BBC News
