You're arbitrarily assigning the label "robot" to something that has no genetic code and "human" to something that does. Why can't both labels be applied?
I think it's sad if you believe this. Just because a great deal of our culture is rehashed doesn't mean that there are no genuinely new ideas.
That's somewhat unfair. I was responding to someone who was pulling the usual "bah, nothing new here... Simpsons did it," routine with respect to what is largely being described as a very good film. I pointed out that his examples of originality could receive the same treatment, and that, in fact, just about anything could. I think it's sad that you only consider premise when evaluating the originality of a film, but then you're in a boat with most Americans, so don't feel too bad. Originality of writing, acting, photography and direction generally only glance off our subconscious, and only the high concept "things blow up in space and a guy gets the girl," type synopsis sticks.
So hang on... Asimov was the last guy with a new idea, then? So we ran out of new ones in the 1950s, roughly?
No, I'd say... probably around 4,000 BC, but then I'm basing that on some rather presumtive guesses about the origins of modern story-telling.
Fact of the matter is that novelists and screenplay authors (storytellers in general, actually) don't do original for the most part. That's not their thing. They combine the known in ways that inform our social and cultural conversation. We judge those works on their impact on that conversation.
Even someone like Clarke or Vinge who are taking the science they know and writing about it are only presenting ideas that are new to the lay person. Within their fields, these are the culmination of small contributions from a string of people dating back to the middle ages and beyond.
Does that mean that writing isn't a creative act? No, of course not. It just means that you can't define creativity in terms of the presence or lack of a completely unique concept, since that doesn't actually happen.
You can take any two stories and show that one is "just" the other with certain basic elements added or subtracted, but this does not define the work in question or its originality. Blade Runner was a visionary film based on an innovative novel, and its combination of plot, themes and imagery were indeed new.
And therein you make my point. Bladerunner, Moon, and many other works of fiction are both derivative and creative. Simply pointing at what's derivative and decrying the overall work as redundant is as absurd as pointing at the creative portion and claiming that the overall work is a paragon of creativity.
I can't agree totally with this. DRM makes content that would otherwise be unavailable in a digital format available, only because some companies refuse to license their content unless it is protected by DRM.
What happens if a virus, or some hacker attack on DRM devices erases all your electronic books?
Well, that's a problem with electronic media. Lack of DRM would just mean that if you happened to have a friend who also had that book, you could get another copy.
DRM is a problem because it puts control over your media into the hands of companies who exist to take as much of your money away as possible. I don't begrudge them that goal, but because I'm realistic about it, I'm careful about just how much of my neck I put into the noose.
Fantastic? Meh. It was a rehash of a lot of ideas we've seen done in films and books over the past 20-30 years, with nothing particularly new added. Go re-watch 2001, Bladerunner and re-read some early John Varley instead.
I'm getting so tired of this nonsense. Bladerunner was a film noir set in the future with robots. It wasn't new. Asimov did androids struggling with their (lack of) humanity in the 50s, and all Dick added was his drug addicted sense of a decaying reality to which Scott added a very provincially 1980s aesthetic. Go watch Metropolis and the Maltese Falcon. There, see how easy it is to throw stones at a good and viewing-worthy film?
Fact of the matter is that premise doesn't matter. Every premise has been done. Every idea has been pushed through the salad-tosser that is the writer's pen. What remains is the actual writing, and in the case of film acting and directing. Moon is, as I've heard (and I really do want to go see it), well written, acted and directed. If the idea is also compelling, that's great, but do we go to see a murder-mystery because we've never seen a detective confront the suspects before? Do we go to see space opera because we've never seen ships shooting at each other before? No, we go because we, as humans, enjoy the act of story-telling. It's an art, and good art is good art, even when the subject has been painted/drawn/written about/sculpted or filmed before.
We had a couple of mini-meltdowns of the market in the early 90s because of programmed trading that went haywire. Ever since, programmed trading and the arbitrage that comes from out-pacing the market by a few seconds (at first, and then a few tens of seconds and now milliseconds), there has been an ebb-and-flow that looks like this:
* Someone starts doing this (they think it's the next big thing) * They run into problems, and accidentally make the news * The news media is all shocked that this new thing is happening * The company (or project) that started it either goes away or settles down and becomes a mature member of the programmed trading community.
The interesting story, and the one never covered is the nature of the mature community. They essentially have a shadow-stock market that hasn't fully been regulated, and which is literally invisible to most humans. Now, these companies are mostly very large and stable organizations that want to stay that way, so for the most part, they implement controls that are sane, but as we've seen over the past few years, systemic mistakes which have no obvious downside until they cause wide-spread failure are not typically regulated well from the inside (alas poor Lehman, I knew you).
However, we should be clear here: this arbitrage is very often not as valuable as you would think. It costs a lot of money to do and has fairly small margins of return. It makes money, but there are easier ways to make money in the market. On the other hand, it has the virtue of very high turn-over, which means you can throw a pretty sizable chunk of money at it. When you're a large investment firm saying "sizable chunk of money," you typically mean, "dang, they won't let me buy more than 10% of IBM in this fund."
NPG already offered lower-res versions of the same photographs for Wikipedia to use free of charge. I think to retain good-will for all, and not appear to be selfish asstards, Wikipedia should take them up on the offer.
While the "not to appear to be selfish asstards," argument is tried and true in the courts, I suspect it's the wrong legal argument to make, here. In fact, the value in this case is establishing an important legal precedent which won't be established if Wikipedia caves.
The choice is: allow these pictures to be free copied and distributed ad high quality and not be able to raise revenue to allow FREE access to the gallery. Or, allow the status quo to continue and provide an excellent free service to all.
No, it's not. The choice is: enforce the laws as written or make an exception.
If you were talking about writing a new law, then I'd consider your argument (and probably still disagree). If you're talking about this case, then you're wrong.
However, to consider your logic, I think there's a third option: museums could publish online only sufficient quality images to use for educational and reference purposes (e.g. Wikipedia) while preserving the high quality digitized works for in-house use. They could even require that people using the full quality images sign an NDA. Nothing wrong with that, and it's certainly legally binding regardless of copyright. In essence: museums are relatively smart (or their out of business). They'll figure this out.
From Cosmos and his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show, Sagan became associated with the catch phrase "billions and billions". As Sagan himself stated, he never actually used the phrase in the Cosmos series.[18] The closest that he ever came was in the book Cosmos, where he talked of "billions upon billions":[19]
A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars -- billions upon billions of stars.
-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos, chapter 1, page 3[20]
However, his frequent use of the word billions, and distinctive delivery emphasizing the "b" (which he did intentionally, in place of more cumbersome alternatives such as "billions with a 'b'", in order to distinguish the word from "millions" in viewers' minds[18]), made him a favorite target of comic performers including Johnny Carson, Gary Kroeger, Mike Myers,[21] Bronson Pinchot, Harry Shearer, and others. Frank Zappa satirized the line in the song Be In My Video, noting as well 'atomic light.' Sagan took this all in good humor, and his final book was entitled Billions and Billions which opened with a tongue-in-cheek discussion of this catch phrase, observing that Carson himself was an amateur astronomer and that Carson's comic caricature often included real science.[18]
I read an interview with him once where he was asked about it, and he responded that it makes him kind of frustrated, since the phrase is nonsensical. There's no change in order of magnitude, so there's no point in tacking on the extra "and billions."
You can disagree all you want, but you have yet to respond to my point: These tests (the Rorschach in particular, I'm not as familiar with more modern projective tests, but pending evidence of their reliability and validity I will remain sceptical because of their methodology) have no epistemologically or methodologically scientific basis, that I am aware of. Please present one if you are.
I want to tackle this point on its own. No, I'm not going to review 60 years of psychology journals for you. If you believe that psychology as a science is incapable of rigor at the most basic levels, then I think it's incumbant upon you to explain why other than, "no one bothered to personally demonstrate otherwise to me." That's just a lazy man's argument that you could throw at any field at any time. Please, go find two papers from peer reviewed psychology journals that you feel don't measure up to the standards of other fields, and THEN I'll grab some counter-examples.
This is where you are wrong. The placebo effect is not the only problem here. In the case of projective tests, such as the Rorschach, the real problem is the therapist-patient interaction. Because the therapist is inherently not an objective observer, nor a removed observer there is an interactional dynamic that renders the results unreliable--different therapists will score the test differently.
All valid criticisms of any tool which requires skill in the interpretation of results (e.g. MRI, stethoscope, etc.) I agree that these limit the value of the tools, but in all of the cases we're talking about, here, the tools remain extremely valuable, even given their limitations.
No, PUBLIC card numbers start with 4. 2020202020202024 might well be an internal testing number.
I'm not saying this is terribly likely, I'm just saying that the original speculation from the article is not the only, or even most likely reason, as it seems to imply.
Yeah, to make the jump from hexidecimal representation for a number to ascii is rather a long-shot.
Here's another:
Represented as 2-nibble-per-byte packed BCD (Binary Coded Decimal), this is the exact correct number of digits for a Visa card number. What you could well be looking at is a pre-initialized dummy card number overlayed with a price (stored in the last two bytes). If so, the expected value of the original default would be:
20 20 20 20 20 20 20 24
That is, a card number that stores 2 in every odd position and zero in every even position followed by a trailing 4 to make the checksum work.
But I suppose that's because I'm usually on the phone less than an hour a month.
I don't see why time on the phone is meaningful in evaluating Google Voice (and frankly, I'm shocked to hear that there's "hysteria", given that everyone I talk to has never heard of it.
Google Voice provides a number of useful features: portable phone numbers that can be directed at multiple devices simultaneously; Web-accessible voice mail; voice main transcription and so on. They're useful features. That's really all there is to it.
There's this fascinating science called psychology that tells us why double-blind studies are valuable. I think you'd like it.
What the hell was this supposed to mean?
I thought it was obvious, but let me explain: the value of the double-blind trial is that it avoids the communication of subtle cues from the administrator of the test to the subject. These cues are only problematic because of a psychological phenomenon known as the placebo effect. I was pointing out that he was relying on the validity of psychology as a basis for his criticism of psychology which was kind of amusing. However, if you want a serious response about double-blind tests, you're going to have to explain how you intend to apply one to a diagnostic tool, since they're intended for therapeutic tools. It's possible, but in the end, I'm not sure that you would be describing something that most researchers would call a "double blind".
As I said in my post, it was a snarky answer, and I went on to ask what I thought were valid questions. Perhaps you could touch on those?
Modern psychology is rather different from psychology in the first part of the 20th century. The Rorscach belongs firmly in the latter.
No, I disagree. The projective tests (let's isolate ourselves from Rorschach as a specific example, though we can go back to it, later) are very much a tool of modern psychology. They're invaluable tools in many respects, but they require skill (just like any medical tool) to use correctly.
Oh, and citations to peer-reviewed reputable journals please, since you're the one arguing for effectiveness you'll need to provide evidence for it.
Ignoring the fact that you're just being rude because you can, I direct you to the Wikipedia article in question which brings up a number of useful references including those originating from the The British Psychological Society, American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and Journal of Personality Assessment. All of these organizations and journals have been involved in decades-long, peer-reviewed research on a number of projective tests including the Rorschach.
However, I'm curious... how are you suggesting a double-blind trial could be applied to a projective personality test? For that matter, how do you apply a double-blind test to an X-Ray machine? There's no therapeutic benefit, so I'm not sure what exactly you were looking to test for.
Evaluations of projective personality tests would compare known disorders to a variety of test results and establish statistical correlations.
The Rorschach test has been researched extensively. The research is ignored by many practitioners.
Now this is an important point. I've argued, here, that the Rorschach test has value, not because asking someone how they feel about a coffee stain is diagnostically valuable, but because the test itself is more sophisticated than that.
Of course, this assumes that the test is administered and the results interpreted correctly. Like any diagnostic tool (I used the stethoscope as an example elsewhere, and it's ideal here too but you could use an MRI or X-Ray just as easily to illustrate the point), Rorschach requires knowledge, training and skill to use correctly. Used incorrectly, it's just as useful and useless as a stethoscope in the hands of a lay person. Sure, you can tell if someone's heart has a major problem (e.g. massive arrhythmia or at the extreme... that it's stopped) without ever having used one, and you can tell if someone is suffering a psychotic break using Rorschach cards if you've never been trained, but in both cases, you could probably have just looked at the patient and diagnosed them.
To use the tool well is a matter of training based on decades of research, and if you ignore the training and research you have either some plastic tubing connected to a metal disc or some paper cards with coffee stains. Either way, it's not the tool's fault.
There are much better projective personality tests now.
Oh that may be, and yes, I'm arguing for projective personality tests, not Rorschach as a specific case. The problem with releasing the Rorschach images is that, right now, Rorschach is the 8th most commonly used test (projective or otherwise) in outpatient psychiatric care (per Wikipedia's claim), and that means that you'd be forcing these providers, who are already in a budget crunch, to update their testing. It's a rather large pain.
Anyway, the cat's significantly out of the bag, so I don't know that it matters all that deeply anymore. Still, it was not the simple issue of Rorschach being useless that some wanted to make of it.
You're right, but sadly (as with today's Android/Blackberry Google Voice announcement), almost all of those apps with deeper functionality will come out last for the iPhone until Apple starts to treat app vendors like partners, rather than serfs.
A stethoscope doesn't provide a diagnosis...it just allows the user to hear things that normally can't be heard. It's not subjective at all.
Nor are the results of the Rorschach test. If they are evaluated subjectively, you've done it wrong. It's just a stethescope. I'm not interested in how your responses make me feel. I'm interested in how your responses meet certain basic, fixed parameters. I am essentially listing to the sound of your mental state for certain irregularities which promote one diagnosis over another. That's what a stethescope does, and it's what a Rorschach does.
The effectiveness of the stethoscope can easily be measured and confirmed. The sounds the stethoscope pick up (typically heart beats/breathing - I'm guessing?) have been *proven* as a useful diagnostic tool.
Quite true.
The problem most people have with the Rorschach test or 'tool', however you want to word it - is that it doesn't measure anything. It's some pictures. They don't do ANYTHING.
Well, in that sense, a stethescope is just some tubes and connectors. It doesn't do anything.
You can show them to someone and then interpret their answers
You can, but then you would be administering a test of your own devising. That's fine, but it's not a Rorschach test, even if you used the standard Rorschach series cards.
But, we (as a scientific community) still don't understand the inner workings of the mind. Someone's answers are highly open for interpretation.
Yes and no. There's as much interpretation in the results of a Rorschach test as there is in the results of a stethescope. You have to listen carefully and discern small variations. The parameters are well-understood, but there's a skill in applying them correctly in both cases. Even in the interpretation of an MRI or infrared sky survey there's a great deal of skill involved and the interpretation can most certainly be done wrong in all of the aforementioned cases. The universe is a messy place, and all data is suspect.
Even if we can agree that a certain type of answer or behavior while answering is 'abnormal'
Abnormal isn't useful. What's useful is data.
When you look through a telescope and see that it's light bends a certain way when pushed through optics, you don't say, "that star is abnormal" and leave it at that. You classify the star's optical properties and compare that to the optical properties of other stars. There's no difference, here. The test is designed to allow you to derive a set of metrics by which one patient can be compared to a universe of other patients.
we don't know what causes it.
We don't know what causes gravity and electromagnetism to interact in the way they do, but that doesn't stop us from classifying the behaviors of stars.
Then it should be fine to use any 10 random, symmetrical images. The APA's claim that only these 10 specific images have diagnostic value is what smacks of quackery.
Well... there's the problem, you see. Any old tool that allows you to measure angles would work just as well as the standard protractor, but if you invalidate the assumptions of the protractor (e.g. by requiring that all engineering diagrams be drawn on a sphere), then the protractor is now useless.
The same problem exists with the test in question. You could devise an entirely different test, but you'd have to perform all of the research that's gone into the Rorschach all over again to verify how people with specific conditions do or do not respond to, interact with and behave when presented with the test.
People often think that the Rorschach test is about evaluating one's response to random, meaningless input. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Rorschach test is a protractor whose properties are very, very careful controlled. You can, for example, perform the test in a way that's entirely useless while using the correct cards.
There's this fascinating science called psychology that tells us why double-blind studies are valuable. I think you'd like it.
Snarkiness aside, you'll be glad to know that psychological researchers don't get published without valid experimentation (that's a broad statement, and just as with physics, there are sad exceptions... but on the whole it's roughly correct in both fields). You're conflating pop-psych and psychoanalysis with psychology. Don't do that or I'll start explaining to you that physics is all nonsense based on my viewing of the most recent Transformers film.
First off, let me be clear: I'm not saying that mathematical rigor isn't required in psychology. Certainly where math is required (e.g. for statistical modeling of behavior or when sampling a population or when describing the propagation of activity in the brain), it must be rigorous. This is not to be conflated with the lack of a mathematical basis for, and thus availability of proofs with respect to most of the field.
If you don't have a consistent model of what is going on to test
You'll note that that's not what I said. You dropped the word "mathematical" from my statement. Convenient, that.
you don't have a hypothesis and aren't doing science.
If you have a hypothesis (e.g. people who exhibit trait "a" will also exhibit trait "b"), then the fact that you don't understand how the brain works has no more bearing on the validity of the hypothesis than the fact that we have no model that explains how gravity and electromagnetism function in the same universe. I can still form a hypothesis and test it, even if I can't fathom how the two relate to each other.
Having a consistent model ("mathematical" or otherwise) does not obviate the need for experimental controls,
Which is entirely true. However, you can play fast-and-loose with controls in physics because you can fall back on math. Ask a physicist not to ignore second-order effects and he'll (or she'll) look at you like you have seventeen heads. It's absurd. They wash out in the math. Well, there's little math that can describe the behavior of human beings because we're an emergent phenomenon from underlying, complex systems that are not yet fully understood. Thus there is not consistent math.
That doesn't mean that we can't perform experimentation and build a body of knowledge. Nor does it mean that that body of knowledge is somehow non-scientific.
It's hard to isolate experimental evidence from math when they're tightly entwined in many sciences, but they're not actually the same thing, and bother us though it might, math isn't a science. Rather, like the related field of logic, math is a tool which science employs. When that tool is rendered less valuable in a given scenario, that doesn't mean that you can't perform good science. It does, however, make that science harder.
>...you don't have data, you just have hand-waving.
We're discussing psychology here. Hand waving is already all we have.
That's simply not true. Psychology (not *pop* psychology which is 90% snake oil, nor the practice of psychoanalysis which is by necessity half the application of psychology and half the application of interpersonal skills) is rigorous science. In fact, in many cases, it's far more rigorous than the "hard" sciences because it lacks a consistent mathematical model for what is being tested, and thus must rely wholly on experimental controls to establish fundamental principles.
Physics, for example, is half experimental science and half applied mathematics. However, remove the math from physics (making it an experimental science only), and it would most certainly still be a science. It would be difficult to make concrete statements about how large, complex systems would behave, but the understanding that a heavy ball and a light ball fall at nearly the same rate (modulo air resistance) would still be an important and very scientific principle.
Slashdot Mirror
You're arbitrarily assigning the label "robot" to something that has no genetic code and "human" to something that does. Why can't both labels be applied?
I think it's sad if you believe this. Just because a great deal of our culture is rehashed doesn't mean that there are no genuinely new ideas.
That's somewhat unfair. I was responding to someone who was pulling the usual "bah, nothing new here... Simpsons did it," routine with respect to what is largely being described as a very good film. I pointed out that his examples of originality could receive the same treatment, and that, in fact, just about anything could. I think it's sad that you only consider premise when evaluating the originality of a film, but then you're in a boat with most Americans, so don't feel too bad. Originality of writing, acting, photography and direction generally only glance off our subconscious, and only the high concept "things blow up in space and a guy gets the girl," type synopsis sticks.
So hang on... Asimov was the last guy with a new idea, then? So we ran out of new ones in the 1950s, roughly?
No, I'd say... probably around 4,000 BC, but then I'm basing that on some rather presumtive guesses about the origins of modern story-telling.
Fact of the matter is that novelists and screenplay authors (storytellers in general, actually) don't do original for the most part. That's not their thing. They combine the known in ways that inform our social and cultural conversation. We judge those works on their impact on that conversation.
Even someone like Clarke or Vinge who are taking the science they know and writing about it are only presenting ideas that are new to the lay person. Within their fields, these are the culmination of small contributions from a string of people dating back to the middle ages and beyond.
Does that mean that writing isn't a creative act? No, of course not. It just means that you can't define creativity in terms of the presence or lack of a completely unique concept, since that doesn't actually happen.
You can take any two stories and show that one is "just" the other with certain basic elements added or subtracted, but this does not define the work in question or its originality. Blade Runner was a visionary film based on an innovative novel, and its combination of plot, themes and imagery were indeed new.
And therein you make my point. Bladerunner, Moon, and many other works of fiction are both derivative and creative. Simply pointing at what's derivative and decrying the overall work as redundant is as absurd as pointing at the creative portion and claiming that the overall work is a paragon of creativity.
I can't agree totally with this. DRM makes content that would otherwise be unavailable in a digital format available, only because some companies refuse to license their content unless it is protected by DRM.
What happens if a virus, or some hacker attack on DRM devices erases all your electronic books?
Well, that's a problem with electronic media. Lack of DRM would just mean that if you happened to have a friend who also had that book, you could get another copy.
DRM is a problem because it puts control over your media into the hands of companies who exist to take as much of your money away as possible. I don't begrudge them that goal, but because I'm realistic about it, I'm careful about just how much of my neck I put into the noose.
salad-tosser that is the writer's pen
Yeah, I think I meant Salad Shooter(tm) there. We'll just ignore what salad-tossing pens might be a metaphor for....
Fantastic? Meh. It was a rehash of a lot of ideas we've seen done in films and books over the past 20-30 years, with nothing particularly new added. Go re-watch 2001, Bladerunner and re-read some early John Varley instead.
I'm getting so tired of this nonsense. Bladerunner was a film noir set in the future with robots. It wasn't new. Asimov did androids struggling with their (lack of) humanity in the 50s, and all Dick added was his drug addicted sense of a decaying reality to which Scott added a very provincially 1980s aesthetic. Go watch Metropolis and the Maltese Falcon. There, see how easy it is to throw stones at a good and viewing-worthy film?
Fact of the matter is that premise doesn't matter. Every premise has been done. Every idea has been pushed through the salad-tosser that is the writer's pen. What remains is the actual writing, and in the case of film acting and directing. Moon is, as I've heard (and I really do want to go see it), well written, acted and directed. If the idea is also compelling, that's great, but do we go to see a murder-mystery because we've never seen a detective confront the suspects before? Do we go to see space opera because we've never seen ships shooting at each other before? No, we go because we, as humans, enjoy the act of story-telling. It's an art, and good art is good art, even when the subject has been painted/drawn/written about/sculpted or filmed before.
Correction: I'm told I'm behind the times. The current advantage is in microseconds, not milliseconds.
We had a couple of mini-meltdowns of the market in the early 90s because of programmed trading that went haywire. Ever since, programmed trading and the arbitrage that comes from out-pacing the market by a few seconds (at first, and then a few tens of seconds and now milliseconds), there has been an ebb-and-flow that looks like this:
* Someone starts doing this (they think it's the next big thing)
* They run into problems, and accidentally make the news
* The news media is all shocked that this new thing is happening
* The company (or project) that started it either goes away or settles down and becomes a mature member of the programmed trading community.
The interesting story, and the one never covered is the nature of the mature community. They essentially have a shadow-stock market that hasn't fully been regulated, and which is literally invisible to most humans. Now, these companies are mostly very large and stable organizations that want to stay that way, so for the most part, they implement controls that are sane, but as we've seen over the past few years, systemic mistakes which have no obvious downside until they cause wide-spread failure are not typically regulated well from the inside (alas poor Lehman, I knew you).
However, we should be clear here: this arbitrage is very often not as valuable as you would think. It costs a lot of money to do and has fairly small margins of return. It makes money, but there are easier ways to make money in the market. On the other hand, it has the virtue of very high turn-over, which means you can throw a pretty sizable chunk of money at it. When you're a large investment firm saying "sizable chunk of money," you typically mean, "dang, they won't let me buy more than 10% of IBM in this fund."
NPG already offered lower-res versions of the same photographs for Wikipedia to use free of charge. I think to retain good-will for all, and not appear to be selfish asstards, Wikipedia should take them up on the offer.
While the "not to appear to be selfish asstards," argument is tried and true in the courts, I suspect it's the wrong legal argument to make, here. In fact, the value in this case is establishing an important legal precedent which won't be established if Wikipedia caves.
The choice is: allow these pictures to be free copied and distributed ad high quality and not be able to raise revenue to allow FREE access to the gallery. Or, allow the status quo to continue and provide an excellent free service to all.
No, it's not. The choice is: enforce the laws as written or make an exception.
If you were talking about writing a new law, then I'd consider your argument (and probably still disagree). If you're talking about this case, then you're wrong.
However, to consider your logic, I think there's a third option: museums could publish online only sufficient quality images to use for educational and reference purposes (e.g. Wikipedia) while preserving the high quality digitized works for in-house use. They could even require that people using the full quality images sign an NDA. Nothing wrong with that, and it's certainly legally binding regardless of copyright. In essence: museums are relatively smart (or their out of business). They'll figure this out.
Wikipedia points out:
From Cosmos and his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show, Sagan became associated with the catch phrase "billions and billions". As Sagan himself stated, he never actually used the phrase in the Cosmos series.[18] The closest that he ever came was in the book Cosmos, where he talked of "billions upon billions":[19]
A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars -- billions upon billions of stars.
-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos, chapter 1, page 3[20]
However, his frequent use of the word billions, and distinctive delivery emphasizing the "b" (which he did intentionally, in place of more cumbersome alternatives such as "billions with a 'b'", in order to distinguish the word from "millions" in viewers' minds[18]), made him a favorite target of comic performers including Johnny Carson, Gary Kroeger, Mike Myers,[21] Bronson Pinchot, Harry Shearer, and others. Frank Zappa satirized the line in the song Be In My Video, noting as well 'atomic light.' Sagan took this all in good humor, and his final book was entitled Billions and Billions which opened with a tongue-in-cheek discussion of this catch phrase, observing that Carson himself was an amateur astronomer and that Carson's comic caricature often included real science.[18]
I read an interview with him once where he was asked about it, and he responded that it makes him kind of frustrated, since the phrase is nonsensical. There's no change in order of magnitude, so there's no point in tacking on the extra "and billions."
You can disagree all you want, but you have yet to respond to my point: These tests (the Rorschach in particular, I'm not as familiar with more modern projective tests, but pending evidence of their reliability and validity I will remain sceptical because of their methodology) have no epistemologically or methodologically scientific basis, that I am aware of. Please present one if you are.
I want to tackle this point on its own. No, I'm not going to review 60 years of psychology journals for you. If you believe that psychology as a science is incapable of rigor at the most basic levels, then I think it's incumbant upon you to explain why other than, "no one bothered to personally demonstrate otherwise to me." That's just a lazy man's argument that you could throw at any field at any time. Please, go find two papers from peer reviewed psychology journals that you feel don't measure up to the standards of other fields, and THEN I'll grab some counter-examples.
This is where you are wrong. The placebo effect is not the only problem here. In the case of projective tests, such as the Rorschach, the real problem is the therapist-patient interaction. Because the therapist is inherently not an objective observer, nor a removed observer there is an interactional dynamic that renders the results unreliable--different therapists will score the test differently.
All valid criticisms of any tool which requires skill in the interpretation of results (e.g. MRI, stethoscope, etc.) I agree that these limit the value of the tools, but in all of the cases we're talking about, here, the tools remain extremely valuable, even given their limitations.
No, PUBLIC card numbers start with 4. 2020202020202024 might well be an internal testing number.
I'm not saying this is terribly likely, I'm just saying that the original speculation from the article is not the only, or even most likely reason, as it seems to imply.
Yeah, to make the jump from hexidecimal representation for a number to ascii is rather a long-shot.
Here's another:
Represented as 2-nibble-per-byte packed BCD (Binary Coded Decimal), this is the exact correct number of digits for a Visa card number. What you could well be looking at is a pre-initialized dummy card number overlayed with a price (stored in the last two bytes). If so, the expected value of the original default would be:
20 20 20 20 20 20 20 24
That is, a card number that stores 2 in every odd position and zero in every even position followed by a trailing 4 to make the checksum work.
Just as plausible.
But I suppose that's because I'm usually on the phone less than an hour a month.
I don't see why time on the phone is meaningful in evaluating Google Voice (and frankly, I'm shocked to hear that there's "hysteria", given that everyone I talk to has never heard of it.
Google Voice provides a number of useful features: portable phone numbers that can be directed at multiple devices simultaneously; Web-accessible voice mail; voice main transcription and so on. They're useful features. That's really all there is to it.
There's this fascinating science called psychology that tells us why double-blind studies are valuable. I think you'd like it.
What the hell was this supposed to mean?
I thought it was obvious, but let me explain: the value of the double-blind trial is that it avoids the communication of subtle cues from the administrator of the test to the subject. These cues are only problematic because of a psychological phenomenon known as the placebo effect. I was pointing out that he was relying on the validity of psychology as a basis for his criticism of psychology which was kind of amusing. However, if you want a serious response about double-blind tests, you're going to have to explain how you intend to apply one to a diagnostic tool, since they're intended for therapeutic tools. It's possible, but in the end, I'm not sure that you would be describing something that most researchers would call a "double blind".
As I said in my post, it was a snarky answer, and I went on to ask what I thought were valid questions. Perhaps you could touch on those?
Modern psychology is rather different from psychology in the first part of the 20th century. The Rorscach belongs firmly in the latter.
No, I disagree. The projective tests (let's isolate ourselves from Rorschach as a specific example, though we can go back to it, later) are very much a tool of modern psychology. They're invaluable tools in many respects, but they require skill (just like any medical tool) to use correctly.
Oh, and citations to peer-reviewed reputable journals please, since you're the one arguing for effectiveness you'll need to provide evidence for it.
Ignoring the fact that you're just being rude because you can, I direct you to the Wikipedia article in question which brings up a number of useful references including those originating from the The British Psychological Society, American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and Journal of Personality Assessment. All of these organizations and journals have been involved in decades-long, peer-reviewed research on a number of projective tests including the Rorschach.
However, I'm curious... how are you suggesting a double-blind trial could be applied to a projective personality test? For that matter, how do you apply a double-blind test to an X-Ray machine? There's no therapeutic benefit, so I'm not sure what exactly you were looking to test for.
Evaluations of projective personality tests would compare known disorders to a variety of test results and establish statistical correlations.
The Rorschach test has been researched extensively. The research is ignored by many practitioners.
Now this is an important point. I've argued, here, that the Rorschach test has value, not because asking someone how they feel about a coffee stain is diagnostically valuable, but because the test itself is more sophisticated than that.
Of course, this assumes that the test is administered and the results interpreted correctly. Like any diagnostic tool (I used the stethoscope as an example elsewhere, and it's ideal here too but you could use an MRI or X-Ray just as easily to illustrate the point), Rorschach requires knowledge, training and skill to use correctly. Used incorrectly, it's just as useful and useless as a stethoscope in the hands of a lay person. Sure, you can tell if someone's heart has a major problem (e.g. massive arrhythmia or at the extreme... that it's stopped) without ever having used one, and you can tell if someone is suffering a psychotic break using Rorschach cards if you've never been trained, but in both cases, you could probably have just looked at the patient and diagnosed them.
To use the tool well is a matter of training based on decades of research, and if you ignore the training and research you have either some plastic tubing connected to a metal disc or some paper cards with coffee stains. Either way, it's not the tool's fault.
There are much better projective personality tests now.
Oh that may be, and yes, I'm arguing for projective personality tests, not Rorschach as a specific case. The problem with releasing the Rorschach images is that, right now, Rorschach is the 8th most commonly used test (projective or otherwise) in outpatient psychiatric care (per Wikipedia's claim), and that means that you'd be forcing these providers, who are already in a budget crunch, to update their testing. It's a rather large pain.
Anyway, the cat's significantly out of the bag, so I don't know that it matters all that deeply anymore. Still, it was not the simple issue of Rorschach being useless that some wanted to make of it.
You're right, but sadly (as with today's Android/Blackberry Google Voice announcement), almost all of those apps with deeper functionality will come out last for the iPhone until Apple starts to treat app vendors like partners, rather than serfs.
A stethoscope doesn't provide a diagnosis...it just allows the user to hear things that normally can't be heard. It's not subjective at all.
Nor are the results of the Rorschach test. If they are evaluated subjectively, you've done it wrong. It's just a stethescope. I'm not interested in how your responses make me feel. I'm interested in how your responses meet certain basic, fixed parameters. I am essentially listing to the sound of your mental state for certain irregularities which promote one diagnosis over another. That's what a stethescope does, and it's what a Rorschach does.
The effectiveness of the stethoscope can easily be measured and confirmed. The sounds the stethoscope pick up (typically heart beats/breathing - I'm guessing?) have been *proven* as a useful diagnostic tool.
Quite true.
The problem most people have with the Rorschach test or 'tool', however you want to word it - is that it doesn't measure anything. It's some pictures. They don't do ANYTHING.
Well, in that sense, a stethescope is just some tubes and connectors. It doesn't do anything.
You can show them to someone and then interpret their answers
You can, but then you would be administering a test of your own devising. That's fine, but it's not a Rorschach test, even if you used the standard Rorschach series cards.
But, we (as a scientific community) still don't understand the inner workings of the mind. Someone's answers are highly open for interpretation.
Yes and no. There's as much interpretation in the results of a Rorschach test as there is in the results of a stethescope. You have to listen carefully and discern small variations. The parameters are well-understood, but there's a skill in applying them correctly in both cases. Even in the interpretation of an MRI or infrared sky survey there's a great deal of skill involved and the interpretation can most certainly be done wrong in all of the aforementioned cases. The universe is a messy place, and all data is suspect.
Even if we can agree that a certain type of answer or behavior while answering is 'abnormal'
Abnormal isn't useful. What's useful is data.
When you look through a telescope and see that it's light bends a certain way when pushed through optics, you don't say, "that star is abnormal" and leave it at that. You classify the star's optical properties and compare that to the optical properties of other stars. There's no difference, here. The test is designed to allow you to derive a set of metrics by which one patient can be compared to a universe of other patients.
we don't know what causes it.
We don't know what causes gravity and electromagnetism to interact in the way they do, but that doesn't stop us from classifying the behaviors of stars.
Then it should be fine to use any 10 random, symmetrical images. The APA's claim that only these 10 specific images have diagnostic value is what smacks of quackery.
Well... there's the problem, you see. Any old tool that allows you to measure angles would work just as well as the standard protractor, but if you invalidate the assumptions of the protractor (e.g. by requiring that all engineering diagrams be drawn on a sphere), then the protractor is now useless.
The same problem exists with the test in question. You could devise an entirely different test, but you'd have to perform all of the research that's gone into the Rorschach all over again to verify how people with specific conditions do or do not respond to, interact with and behave when presented with the test.
People often think that the Rorschach test is about evaluating one's response to random, meaningless input. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Rorschach test is a protractor whose properties are very, very careful controlled. You can, for example, perform the test in a way that's entirely useless while using the correct cards.
Really? And what double-blind study shows this?
There's this fascinating science called psychology that tells us why double-blind studies are valuable. I think you'd like it.
Snarkiness aside, you'll be glad to know that psychological researchers don't get published without valid experimentation (that's a broad statement, and just as with physics, there are sad exceptions... but on the whole it's roughly correct in both fields). You're conflating pop-psych and psychoanalysis with psychology. Don't do that or I'll start explaining to you that physics is all nonsense based on my viewing of the most recent Transformers film.
First off, let me be clear: I'm not saying that mathematical rigor isn't required in psychology. Certainly where math is required (e.g. for statistical modeling of behavior or when sampling a population or when describing the propagation of activity in the brain), it must be rigorous. This is not to be conflated with the lack of a mathematical basis for, and thus availability of proofs with respect to most of the field.
If you don't have a consistent model of what is going on to test
You'll note that that's not what I said. You dropped the word "mathematical" from my statement. Convenient, that.
you don't have a hypothesis and aren't doing science.
If you have a hypothesis (e.g. people who exhibit trait "a" will also exhibit trait "b"), then the fact that you don't understand how the brain works has no more bearing on the validity of the hypothesis than the fact that we have no model that explains how gravity and electromagnetism function in the same universe. I can still form a hypothesis and test it, even if I can't fathom how the two relate to each other.
Having a consistent model ("mathematical" or otherwise) does not obviate the need for experimental controls,
Which is entirely true. However, you can play fast-and-loose with controls in physics because you can fall back on math. Ask a physicist not to ignore second-order effects and he'll (or she'll) look at you like you have seventeen heads. It's absurd. They wash out in the math. Well, there's little math that can describe the behavior of human beings because we're an emergent phenomenon from underlying, complex systems that are not yet fully understood. Thus there is not consistent math.
That doesn't mean that we can't perform experimentation and build a body of knowledge. Nor does it mean that that body of knowledge is somehow non-scientific.
It's hard to isolate experimental evidence from math when they're tightly entwined in many sciences, but they're not actually the same thing, and bother us though it might, math isn't a science. Rather, like the related field of logic, math is a tool which science employs. When that tool is rendered less valuable in a given scenario, that doesn't mean that you can't perform good science. It does, however, make that science harder.
> ...you don't have data, you just have hand-waving.
We're discussing psychology here. Hand waving is already all we have.
That's simply not true. Psychology (not *pop* psychology which is 90% snake oil, nor the practice of psychoanalysis which is by necessity half the application of psychology and half the application of interpersonal skills) is rigorous science. In fact, in many cases, it's far more rigorous than the "hard" sciences because it lacks a consistent mathematical model for what is being tested, and thus must rely wholly on experimental controls to establish fundamental principles.
Physics, for example, is half experimental science and half applied mathematics. However, remove the math from physics (making it an experimental science only), and it would most certainly still be a science. It would be difficult to make concrete statements about how large, complex systems would behave, but the understanding that a heavy ball and a light ball fall at nearly the same rate (modulo air resistance) would still be an important and very scientific principle.