wow. what a zinger from the past. back in the halcyon, collegiate days of my youth i read “margins of reality”, which detailed the controversial experiments done in the princeton engineering anomalies research laboratory [PEAR]. what’s controversial about the research? well, from PEAR’s website:

“The most substantial portion of the PEAR program examines anomalies arising in human/machine interactions. In these experiments human operators attempt to influence the behavior of a variety of mechanical, electronic, optical, acoustical, and fluid devices to conform to pre-stated intentions, without
recourse to any known physical processes. In unattended calibrations these sophisticated machines all produce strictly random outputs, yet the experimental results display increases in information content that can only be attributed to the influence of the consciousness of the human operator. ”

slashdot has posted a piece concerning a patent that was granted which could possibly, someday, maybe [bigtime handwaving] be used to develop computer peripheral that can ‘read’ your mind [cough]. from the patent abstract:

“A method and apparatus of generating values and detecting whether the values fall outside chance probabilities. In one embodiment, a random-noise source provides a signal that is amplified, conditioned, and sampled to provide a series of random numbers. In one embodiment, conditioning includes inverting some of the values according to a pseudo-random sequence mask in order to remove certain first-order bias. Another aspect of this invention is to perform a statistical analysis of the values generated, and to control an output based in whether or not a chance expectation has been exceeded, or by the probability of a certain result obtained. Yet another aspect is to control a toy, game, appliance, or computer display
based on whether or not a chance expectation has been exceeded by a measured sequence of values.”

back in the day i enjoyed “margins of reality” in the ‘it’s-always-a-“good-thing ™”-to-stretch-your-brain-in-ways- that-it-may-not-be-used-to’ sort of way. however, the slashdot bit is pretty misleading, since it leads one to believe that ibm is somehow involved, therefore implying some sort of technology credibility. as one poster noted, ibm is not involved and it reflects poorly on slashdot to let such a sensationalist representation get through the ‘editors’.

of course, this misrepresentation and the enormous degree of handwaving in the patent don’t necessarily negate the findings of the PEAR lab. i’m no physicist and i don’t even play one on tv, so i’m not qualified to comment on the results one way or the other. at the very least, “margins of reality” gives you something to chew on which probably doesn’t fit into your normal views, and it can give you hours of ‘armchair’ philosophical enjoyment, if you’re into that sort of thing.

o.k. i can’t help it. i feel i must post something about that disturbing photo. as usual salon comes out of the gate quickly with a piece that comments on the juxtoposition of that photo with photos from later that day:

“But the new photos can’t make what Reno did right, just like the brutal pictures of the raid didn’t make her wrong. (If imagery was ever enough to justify federal action, the home videos of Elián defying his father would have been grounds for his removal by any means necessary.) The attorney general had the law on her side, even if the early war of images went against her. I admit I flinched Saturday morning, but I’m glad that this time Janet Reno did not. ”

a few people on metafilter are also discussing the photos.

mmmmmm, gadgets:

“This pen is chock full of electronics, and uses an unusual method of capturing handwriting. If you write on paper that is preprinted with a very special information-carrying grid (it looks to us humans like a slightly off-white tint of about 3% gray), the camera behind that transparent window uses the grid to track exactly where the ink is going. In fact, the pen also tracks its angle, it’s velocity, and the pressure applied at any instant, all of which can be very useful for signature capture and validation. But this gets even more interesting — the invisible grid is not just a standard grid, but one whose pattern allows the pen to recognize where in a half-continent-wide virtual sheet of paper it’s currently writing. ”

last night, during my oh-so-slow commute home to the far-far-far northwest suburbs of chicago, i heard an interesting bit on ‘marketplace’ about internet ipos looking alot like ponzi schemes. however, you won’t be able to hear it unless you decide to buy it from audible. which is unlikely, since you can’t even make ‘micropayment’ purchases – you would have to purchase a 1, 6 or 12 month subscription. i don’t get this logic at all. if you’ve heard of ‘marketplace’ you are probably not going to purchase a subscription because you know you can listen to it for free. if you haven’t heard of ‘marketplace’ you probably won’t buy the subscription just because i may listen to it on my long commute home. why don’t they just offer an audio feed on their site? now i’m forced to link to a recent siliconvalley.com which makes the same point – and is free:

“IF YOU need a poster child for the volatility of the market this year, you might choose VA Linux Systems Inc. (LNUX), the Sunnyvale company that produces workstations and servers embedded
with the open-source code first developed by Linus Torvalds.

VA Linux Systems’ great success might have been its greatest curse. Four months ago, it was
labeled the most successful IPO in history, soaring 700 percent above its offering price of $30. Its
first-day close was $239.25.

The stock has slipped relentlessly since, finishing at $38 Wednesday after dipping below its IPO price Friday. A child prodigy has become an ordinary teenager. A Mozart suddenly is churning out Muzak.”

“Consider this whole drama from the standpoint of the established players. What looks like something supremely irrational — how can VA Linux Systems be worth $10 billion in December and $1.6 billion in April? — suddenly begins to assume a vulgar rationality.”

Remember, the fund managers and institutional buyers who participated in the IPO got the stock at $30. And they were able to “flip” it for a big profit on the first day. Because supply was kept low — only 4.4 million shares were allowed to float initially — the demand insured a steep opening price. The stock cost $299 per share the first time the public could buy it. And many did, simply on the belief that it would go higher.”

For that matter, at least some of the institutional players and investment bankers were in a position to sell the stock short, which means they could make money as the shares declined in value. With more information about who was buying and who intended to flip, they could make better judgments than the average investor. The identity of short-sellers isn’t public, but the latest reports show that 1.6 million shares of LNUX are being held in a short position.”

“In fact, the only people who don’t benefit from this cozy arrangement were the investors who bought VA Linux during its first four months on the market. And as I say, it’s hard ordinarily to feel that sorry for people who swallow the hype. I just wish there wasn’t such a cottage industry producing it.”

i love these types of ‘percent confidence’ analysis because, by the laws of logic, since i am acutely aware of how pathetic i really am – i must be uber competent:

“Human beings, as it turns out, have too much faith in themselves. The detection of falsehood is scarcely the only domain where they overestimate their abilities. A survey of British motorists not long ago revealed that 95 percent thought they were better-than-average drivers. Similarly, most people think they are likely to live longer than the mean. In a classic 1977 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, and Sarah Lichtenstein reported that people often pronounce themselves absolutely certain of beliefs that are untrue. Subjects would declare themselves 100 percent sure that,
say, the potato originated in Ireland, when it actually came from Peru.

Overconfidence is nearly universal. In fact, a study some years ago found that the only group of people free from it–the only group with a realistic view of their own capacities–were the clinically depressed. But is overconfidence distributed equally? Not according to a widely publicized paper in last December’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The authors, David A. Dunning of Cornell and his graduate student Justin Kruger, drew a poignant conclusion from their research: The most incompetent people have the most inflated notion of their abilities. “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices,” the two psychologists wrote, “but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.””

in fact, at one time, i knew the actual percentage of people who were incorrect despite believing with 100% certainty that they were correct about some fact or another; however, i am so competent that i can’t remember the number and won’t claim to be certain as to what it is.

speaking of peer-to-peer systems (see yesterday’s post), it seems that there is a growing backlash against napster:

“Napster employees “neither protect, nor crack down on their user base, and therefore they have gotten away with being the cozy middleman for almost a year now,” he wrote. “In doing so, Napster is giving the MP3 format a bad name.” Paulson insists that the company’s goal should be to promote new artists, not make it easy for people to pirate copyrighted recordings.”

the popularity of peer-to-peer systems like gnutella have been making this vision seem more and more plausible:

“A new model is emerging from the Internet. It represents the culmination of years of incremental evolution in the structure of the network and the clients that feed upon it. It is based upon the same principles upon which the Internet was founded. It is this: the client is the server.”

i think dave deserves credit for an early, clear articulation of this concept, which he termed (rather unwieldly) “Fractional Horsepower HTTP Servers”.

{ intertwingled since 2000 }