Your question is moot. The only point that matters here is whether there is a scientific basis for lie detectors, and there is. I know this is Slashdot, but we don't have to argue just for the sake of arguing.
No, this is wrong. One method is to encourage confession. But there is theory behind the detectors themselves. The examiner asks a question which he or she assumes you will lie to, then measures your autonomic response. If you then show higher autonomic response to a question than you did to the lie-baseline question, then the assumption is you are lying. This is an oversimplification (many things can influence this measurement), but that doesn't mean it isn't founded in scientific truth.
Even the link you have in your comment says that the FBI uses polygraph to screen FBI job applicants. You really think that if polygraph didn't work, they would use it on people who would know this?! How would they get such people to confess?
And... Slashdot posts an article raving about research which hasn't been written up anywhere and won't ever see print in anywhere legitimate, and I'm the one kneejerking?
That's a ridiculous statement. So, all of psychology doesn't exist? Just because something is extremely complex (like the variables in lie detection) doesn't mean it can't be done. The process is fundamentally flawed, but that has no impact on the fact that there is an autonomic impact to fear.
If I could tell from your initial comment that you didn't understand perception, I could have avoided the "20 questions."
No, you still don't really get it. Perception is in between sense and higher cognitive functions. It's not tied to modality. In fact, there have been plenty of studies that indicate that animals can smell or hear "in color", for example. Same perception from an entirely different modality. Not only that, but a researcher from MIT reconnected portions of the midbrain in infant rodents such that the auditory tract connected to the occipital lobe, which is the typical location for the visual cortex. The rodents were able to hear fine (and interestingly, the visual cortex formed somewhat similarly to the usual auditory cortex, showing that there is a large influence on formation from inputs).
The questions you are asking are largely irrelevant if you understand perception. I am not a perception expert, but I did conduct research in a cognitive neuroscience laboratory for 4 years. Could the same effect occur if it was just someone in a room hearing someone faking the sounds of electrocution? The answer is: it depends. If that sound conjures the perception of someone being electrocuted, then of course. Usually, though, one modality is only a part of the bigger picture. Sensory information converges to produce a perception. It is entirely irrelevant whether that perception is created from audio information, visual information, touch information, a neuronal malfunction, etc.
This is why the question "Would x create this perception?" has only the answer "I don't know, would it?". It is not a generalizeable question. Does red make people think of ice cream? It's a question without a useful answer. You can take a survey or conduct an experiment and find out that 1% of people think of ice cream when they see red, but this gives no insight into anything. It is an entirely individualized experience.
The bottom line is this: if this study was about which modalities in Milgrams experiment could be removed without removing the perception of electrocution, then there is perhaps some (minor) value (it would answer: what minimum information is necessary for people under stressful, authoritarian conditions to believe someone is being electrocuted?). But if the answer is simply whether the same behavior is observed when you remove the real visual information and replace it with "virtual" visual information, then it's a complete waste of time that is only trying to get "Milgram" into the abstract for the mainstream media. We already know the answer to this: visual information is only one small part of the big picture (no pun intended). Admittedly, it is a larger part of the picture for humans than for many species, but we still rely on hearing, olfactory, and touch very heavily. If these modalities persist, then there will be little or no change in the results.
The only way this would be interesting is if the researcher found a direct correlation between the % of the modalities that remained and the % of autonomic response. That might indicate that the autonomic response is correlated to the level of "believability" of the perception (or, alternatively, the level to which sensory information from different modalities conflict). Even then, this is probably expected and perhaps already confirmed by other studies (again, I'm not an expert in the perception field).
It was a mainstream media play, plain and simple. It happens all the time. Slashdot bought it. Moving on...
Deadpan voice? Of course that wouldn't evoke an emotional response. I don't get your point. Simple perception of frequency is not at all a higher cognitive function. It happens exactly at the level of transduction to neural signals.
Pushing a button isn't really a sensory act -- I definitely don't get your point there.
The boxy figure looks like a human. But vision is probably not what is evoking the response. It's almost certainly the audio.
Why is that? Autonomic responses happen at a lower level of cognition. It's not surprising at all to me that it happens before the level that determined realism. Surely violent video games would be entirely boring if this weren't the case. And, that's not limited to virtual vs. real. What about roller coasters?
Because the victims are the participants, not the "victim" in the other room. That's why it's unethical. Feeling forced to harm someone that horribly is extremely psychologically traumatic.
Your logic escapes me. Sensitization is a cognitive phenomenon. It doesn't magically make death a non-event.
Using your logic, if you step into very hot water, then get used to it, then suddenly the water is no longer hot? It's the same temperature. Or, you walk into a room and smell something horrible. 5 minutes later you don't smell anything. The chemicals producing the smell have disappeared? No, they're still there.
Sensitization is a human perception issue. The fact that we get sensitized to other humans dying is just depressing (no wonder no one cares about the Iraq death toll -- just a number, right?).
Insightful? No, actually I was reading that and assuming that no one was hurt until I got to the very end. Before then, I thought "good, just infrastructure."
People die every day. But I don't think that means that we should mention when a telephone wire goes down 5 sentences before we mention "oh yeah, someone got hurt, too."
That's what works for me. Need to implement a large piece of code and don't know where to start? Pick the easiest part of the project, and implement that. Repeat. Before you know it, you're all done.
Um, I know where you're coming from, but this is exactly the opposite of what you should do. If you have a large project, you want to pick the most difficult, most risky portion and dig into that first. Why? Because if you need to scrap an idea, you need to know ASAP.
This is one of the toughest things to learn as a manager. And just because you aren't a "manager" doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you (self-management). If your approach is risky and will end up not working out, you need to know that ASAP so you don't waste your time and get weird looks from PHB asking why you just scrapped 3 weeks of work to try another approach.
You laugh, but Breakfast Pants is the first person on Slashdot ever to use a semicolon correctly. If that's why people attend Yale, and I submit that it is, then Yale did its job.
In my day we called it "remixing", and you had to do it under candlelight, using toothpicks, bubblegum, and pieces of film, while walking in 2 feet of snow, uphill both ways.
There are so many things wrong with that analysis, it's not even funny. Your assumption that developers write a constant number of lines per unit time is flat out wrong. Number of lines is a horrible measure for almost everything. You see it often because it's the best objective measure we have, really, and in your mind you assume that must mean it's a good measure. It's not. It's horrible and have very low correlation with complexity, difficulty, and even file size.
If I asked you to measure the complexity of a programming solution, and you give me a count of the number of carriage returns in the file, you'd get a pretty strange look from me.
If you need proof, look at a perl program.
And that leads into my next point: you aren't considering maintenance costs, which are the biggest costs in the software development life cycle. "Dense" languages typically cost more to maintain, because the code is less verbose and less self-documenting.
According to the data, drinking a moderate amount of alcohol -- up to four drinks per day in men and two drinks per day in women -- reduces the risk of death from any cause by roughly 18 percent
This is why journalists shouldn't be able to read scientific articles. It reduces the risk by 18% without considering cause. If what this guy's interpretation were true, then drinking 4 drinks/day would reduce the risk of death from drunk driving accident or from alcohol-related organ damage.
Like most every other debate, both sides are wrong. The answer to "should I build it myself or buy COTS?" is "Whichever is cheaper." You decided that building your own CMS is cheaper than using a free one due to maintenance costs. If this is the case, you made the right decision. But the problem most software developers have is that they turn this into a blanket decision. It really shouldn't be a "mindset". If it is, the implication is that you're sometimes biased against choosing the cheaper solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Your question is moot. The only point that matters here is whether there is a scientific basis for lie detectors, and there is. I know this is Slashdot, but we don't have to argue just for the sake of arguing.
No, this is wrong. One method is to encourage confession. But there is theory behind the detectors themselves. The examiner asks a question which he or she assumes you will lie to, then measures your autonomic response. If you then show higher autonomic response to a question than you did to the lie-baseline question, then the assumption is you are lying. This is an oversimplification (many things can influence this measurement), but that doesn't mean it isn't founded in scientific truth.
Even the link you have in your comment says that the FBI uses polygraph to screen FBI job applicants. You really think that if polygraph didn't work, they would use it on people who would know this?! How would they get such people to confess?
Read more here: http://antipolygraph.org/
Pot. Kettle. Black?
o ld=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=17382018#17382 796
And... Slashdot posts an article raving about research which hasn't been written up anywhere and won't ever see print in anywhere legitimate, and I'm the one kneejerking?
Anyway, see: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=213804&thresh
That's a ridiculous statement. So, all of psychology doesn't exist? Just because something is extremely complex (like the variables in lie detection) doesn't mean it can't be done. The process is fundamentally flawed, but that has no impact on the fact that there is an autonomic impact to fear.
If I could tell from your initial comment that you didn't understand perception, I could have avoided the "20 questions."
No, you still don't really get it. Perception is in between sense and higher cognitive functions. It's not tied to modality. In fact, there have been plenty of studies that indicate that animals can smell or hear "in color", for example. Same perception from an entirely different modality. Not only that, but a researcher from MIT reconnected portions of the midbrain in infant rodents such that the auditory tract connected to the occipital lobe, which is the typical location for the visual cortex. The rodents were able to hear fine (and interestingly, the visual cortex formed somewhat similarly to the usual auditory cortex, showing that there is a large influence on formation from inputs).
The questions you are asking are largely irrelevant if you understand perception. I am not a perception expert, but I did conduct research in a cognitive neuroscience laboratory for 4 years. Could the same effect occur if it was just someone in a room hearing someone faking the sounds of electrocution? The answer is: it depends. If that sound conjures the perception of someone being electrocuted, then of course. Usually, though, one modality is only a part of the bigger picture. Sensory information converges to produce a perception. It is entirely irrelevant whether that perception is created from audio information, visual information, touch information, a neuronal malfunction, etc.
This is why the question "Would x create this perception?" has only the answer "I don't know, would it?". It is not a generalizeable question. Does red make people think of ice cream? It's a question without a useful answer. You can take a survey or conduct an experiment and find out that 1% of people think of ice cream when they see red, but this gives no insight into anything. It is an entirely individualized experience.
The bottom line is this: if this study was about which modalities in Milgrams experiment could be removed without removing the perception of electrocution, then there is perhaps some (minor) value (it would answer: what minimum information is necessary for people under stressful, authoritarian conditions to believe someone is being electrocuted?). But if the answer is simply whether the same behavior is observed when you remove the real visual information and replace it with "virtual" visual information, then it's a complete waste of time that is only trying to get "Milgram" into the abstract for the mainstream media. We already know the answer to this: visual information is only one small part of the big picture (no pun intended). Admittedly, it is a larger part of the picture for humans than for many species, but we still rely on hearing, olfactory, and touch very heavily. If these modalities persist, then there will be little or no change in the results.
The only way this would be interesting is if the researcher found a direct correlation between the % of the modalities that remained and the % of autonomic response. That might indicate that the autonomic response is correlated to the level of "believability" of the perception (or, alternatively, the level to which sensory information from different modalities conflict). Even then, this is probably expected and perhaps already confirmed by other studies (again, I'm not an expert in the perception field).
It was a mainstream media play, plain and simple. It happens all the time. Slashdot bought it. Moving on...
Deadpan voice? Of course that wouldn't evoke an emotional response. I don't get your point. Simple perception of frequency is not at all a higher cognitive function. It happens exactly at the level of transduction to neural signals.
Pushing a button isn't really a sensory act -- I definitely don't get your point there.
The boxy figure looks like a human. But vision is probably not what is evoking the response. It's almost certainly the audio.
Why is that? Autonomic responses happen at a lower level of cognition. It's not surprising at all to me that it happens before the level that determined realism. Surely violent video games would be entirely boring if this weren't the case. And, that's not limited to virtual vs. real. What about roller coasters?
Because the victims are the participants, not the "victim" in the other room. That's why it's unethical. Feeling forced to harm someone that horribly is extremely psychologically traumatic.
Have you watched the tapes of the experiment? There is no question that it was harmful to the psyches of the participants.
Hey, surprise! Autonomic responses can't be suppressed by conscious, upper cognitive reasoning. If it could, lie detectors wouldn't exist.
This is a great example of a researcher doing an experiment with zero scientific relevance solely for mainstream press coverage.
(Yes, lie detectors are BS, but the principle upon which they are based would be entirely useless, not just mostly useless.)
Your logic escapes me. Sensitization is a cognitive phenomenon. It doesn't magically make death a non-event.
Using your logic, if you step into very hot water, then get used to it, then suddenly the water is no longer hot? It's the same temperature. Or, you walk into a room and smell something horrible. 5 minutes later you don't smell anything. The chemicals producing the smell have disappeared? No, they're still there.
Sensitization is a human perception issue. The fact that we get sensitized to other humans dying is just depressing (no wonder no one cares about the Iraq death toll -- just a number, right?).
No one is saying it doesn't matter.
Insightful? No, actually I was reading that and assuming that no one was hurt until I got to the very end. Before then, I thought "good, just infrastructure."
People die every day. But I don't think that means that we should mention when a telephone wire goes down 5 sentences before we mention "oh yeah, someone got hurt, too."
So, wait.
People were injured and died in this quake, and the headline is Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet ? You insensitive clods.
That's what works for me. Need to implement a large piece of code and don't know where to start? Pick the easiest part of the project, and implement that. Repeat. Before you know it, you're all done.
Um, I know where you're coming from, but this is exactly the opposite of what you should do. If you have a large project, you want to pick the most difficult, most risky portion and dig into that first. Why? Because if you need to scrap an idea, you need to know ASAP.
This is one of the toughest things to learn as a manager. And just because you aren't a "manager" doesn't mean it doesn't apply to you (self-management). If your approach is risky and will end up not working out, you need to know that ASAP so you don't waste your time and get weird looks from PHB asking why you just scrapped 3 weeks of work to try another approach.
You laugh, but Breakfast Pants is the first person on Slashdot ever to use a semicolon correctly. If that's why people attend Yale, and I submit that it is, then Yale did its job.
In my day we called it "remixing", and you had to do it under candlelight, using toothpicks, bubblegum, and pieces of film, while walking in 2 feet of snow, uphill both ways.
Give it a rest, gramps.
There are so many things wrong with that analysis, it's not even funny. Your assumption that developers write a constant number of lines per unit time is flat out wrong. Number of lines is a horrible measure for almost everything. You see it often because it's the best objective measure we have, really, and in your mind you assume that must mean it's a good measure. It's not. It's horrible and have very low correlation with complexity, difficulty, and even file size.
If I asked you to measure the complexity of a programming solution, and you give me a count of the number of carriage returns in the file, you'd get a pretty strange look from me.
If you need proof, look at a perl program.
And that leads into my next point: you aren't considering maintenance costs, which are the biggest costs in the software development life cycle. "Dense" languages typically cost more to maintain, because the code is less verbose and less self-documenting.
Again, if you need proof, look at a perl program.
According to the data, drinking a moderate amount of alcohol -- up to four drinks per day in men and two drinks per day in women -- reduces the risk of death from any cause by roughly 18 percent
This is why journalists shouldn't be able to read scientific articles. It reduces the risk by 18% without considering cause. If what this guy's interpretation were true, then drinking 4 drinks/day would reduce the risk of death from drunk driving accident or from alcohol-related organ damage.
He should have based his appeal on the fact that none of those qualify as movies.
Isn't the point of working from home to be "disconnected from corporate life"?
This new term will catch on like... like a... a bacterial infection.
Like most every other debate, both sides are wrong. The answer to "should I build it myself or buy COTS?" is "Whichever is cheaper." You decided that building your own CMS is cheaper than using a free one due to maintenance costs. If this is the case, you made the right decision. But the problem most software developers have is that they turn this into a blanket decision. It really shouldn't be a "mindset". If it is, the implication is that you're sometimes biased against choosing the cheaper solution.
Spot on. Government spends money to develop programs to enforce rules with extremely low efficiency that could simply be done with market forces.
This is coming from a consultant in the public sector, by the way.
When AJAX is most useful and appropriate, offering a plain HTML option is not useful and potentially impossible.