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Life Imitates Art at Intel
figa writes "Eric Paulos and Elizabeth Goodman at Intel's Research Laboratory at Berkeley are using the Situationists' exploration of urban space and psychologist Stanley Milgram's social experiments to design wearable devices."
I hope the put more thought into the sizing of these wearable devices than you see in normal clothing departments!
I'm 5'3", 125 lbs, but with 34DD boobs...yeah, the mall is a nightmare. Everything is made for all-over petites with small chests, or for people with big boobs and big waists. Whatever happened to the small people with curves?
Swim suit season is a bitch. I can't remember the last time I bought a swim suit that a)I liked, and b)fit right.
Following is a summary of the Milgram study to clarify misinformation in the parent post; a full explanation can be found in The Perils of Obedience, penned by Stanley Milgram. Additionally, a participant in the original experiment writes his personal account here; other discussion abounds.
The goal of Milgram's research was to see how people reacted to an authority figure telling them to administer electric shocks to a victim in the next room which would then protest in varying degrees depending on the amount of shock (actually a tape recording). These shocks were to be given when the 'subject' misperformed a simple memory task. With each wrong answer, the voltage of the shock was increased, starting at 14 volts ranging to 450 at the high end. The switches were labeled in groups of four, starting with 'slight shock' and the final two switches marked merely with 'XXX'.
The responses given by the 'subject' (who mentions his heart condition at some point) are: a grunt at 45 volts, loud complaining at 120v, an agonized scream at 285v, then eventually silence in response to the highest levels.
If the participant giving the shocks complained, the experimenter (Played by a tall, deep-voiced man dressed very scientist-y) as the authority figure told them to continue. Depending on the number of times a participant complained, they were told something else by the experimenter. These were:
'the experiment requires that you continue'
'it is essential that we continue'
'you have no other choice'
If the participant refused to continue after the final imperative, the experiment was halted. Milgram had predicted that only 4% of the participants would reach the 300 volt mark, and only 1 in 1000 would deliver the highest shock possible.
A full 25 of the 40 participants delivered the full range of shock. The experimenter halted the session the third time a 450 volt shock was delivered. This result generalizes across race, sex, country of origin and social status. Many of the participants did show signs of extreme stress towards the end of the experiment (clenching fists, laughter, squinting, sweating). Many people allege that there were long term effects (a la Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), though no one seems able to cite these cases. Many of the people in their short-term responses reported that they felt that overall it was a positive experience in which they could learn about themselves. Of course, that could just be a coping strategy to help deal with the trauma. People are built mentally tough, it is a rare person that would have severe long-term effects from this one isolated experiment.
The journal Internationale Situationniste defined situationist as "having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations." The same journal defined situationism as "a meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists."
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.