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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 they figure out a way to discreetly "wink" to a stranger in the room, without invading their privacy, or already having their phone#, over a mobile phone.
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make install -not war
Imagine bluetooth enabled wearable computers, that could become clusters when in close proximity of each other. Image everyone at a soccer game wearing them; not only do you get to enjoy the game, but you make one huge super cluster.
Setec Astronomy
I hope they're not designing the devices based on the experiment where Milgram asked subjects to electrocute other people strapped to chairs for getting answers to simple questions wrong. (They weren't really getting electrocuted, but they acted as though they were) Though, I guess it might be kind of funny.
The history of that experiment wasn't very humorous, however, as several participants sustained substantial psychological damage after they later realized they'd been willing to essentially kill another person via electrocution with only simple prodding to justify it. (This is one of the more interesting experiments along these lines that happened in the last half-century)
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
It's good and it's whack. The reason you can't make head nor tail of this is because you must first perform a paradigm shift of your perception. Then you will see that what matters most is not content but impressions about what you read. Then even if the description doesn't make any sense by itself, the impression that it radiate acts as the most precise description of it.
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 Situationists made the powers-that-be so nervous, that when they helped catalyze the revolt in 1968 that had virtually every blue collar worker in France on strike, it was the French Communist Party that ultimately had to put it down.
You can be sure Debord would put a gun to his head before doing R&D for the Intel corporation. In his last book, he said he feared the spectacle would try to integrate even his ideas in some borg-like fashion, and thus he had to be even more cryptic than he already was. It seems his fears have come true. Paulos is spectacular all the way.