A new A&E documentary TV series produced by rapper Ice-T debuts tonight: The Peacemaker, starring ex-gang member turned mediator (and now, television host) Malik Spellman.
The five-episode series starts tonight at 10pm.
And, I'm proud to say, Boing Boing Video's own editor-producer-shooter Eric Mittleman worked on the show—he had some pretty intense behind-the-scene tales to share of what it's like to work on a project about mediating gang violence, with current and former gang members, in gang-controlled neighborhoods around Los Angeles.
Snip from the show description:
For the last 20 years Spellman has dedicated his life to ending gang violence, putting it all on the line to mediate truces between rival gangs in Los Angeles - adversaries sometimes separated by less than one city block. Whether he's in his classroom teaching life skills to middle school students, or riding through South Central on his bicycle, Spellman stays true to his purpose: keeping kids safe, out of trouble, and free from violence. Each episode of THE PEACEMAKER executive produced by rapper and actor Ice-T, provides an unprecedented look at gang life, following Spellman as he coordinates and oversees tense moments of mediation between enemies with long histories of hate and violence.
Cyclists, didja catch that? Spellman's a two-wheeler.
The structure of guilds in video games mirrors the structures of criminal gangs in the real world, and both can be modelled using the same mathematics, say a group of Chinese and American scholars. Unfortunately, their paper isn't published in a proper open access journal, so we can't review their findings -- only the abstract.
Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces--from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly by disaffected male youths to the massive global guilds in online role-playing games for which membership currently exceeds tens of millions of people from all possible backgrounds, age groups, and genders. We have compiled and analyzed data for these two seemingly unrelated offline and online human activities and have uncovered an unexpected quantitative link between them. Although their overall dynamics differ visibly, we find that a common team-based model can accurately reproduce the quantitative features of each simply by adjusting the average tolerance level and attribute range for each population. By contrast, we find no evidence to support a version of the model based on like-seeking-like (i.e., kinship or "homophily").
Quantifying human group dynamics represents a unique challenge. Unlike animals and other biological systems, humans form groups in both real (offline) and virtual (online) spaces--from potentially dangerous street gangs populated mostly by disaffected male youths to the massive global guilds in online role-playing games for which membership currently exceeds tens of millions of people from all possible backgrounds, age groups, and genders. We have compiled and analyzed data for these two seemingly unrelated offline and online human activities and have uncovered an unexpected quantitative link between them. Although their overall dynamics differ visibly, we find that a common team-based model can accurately reproduce the quantitative features of each simply by adjusting the average tolerance level and attribute range for each population. By contrast, we find no evidence to support a version of the model based on like-seeking-like (i.e., kinship or "homophily").