I don't have access to the soviet leadership during the 1961-1969 time frame, so I cannot ssay for certain what they were thinking.
I am mostly responding to the fact that all the children in our schools (Pittsburgh) were issued dogtags, and the reason given was that they might be necessary in case of "emergency".
One would hope that nobody in either government was *that* stupid. But at the time all this was happening, the second world war was only 16-23 years in the past, the memory of all-out war was much more recent in people's minds at the time, and the common experience, again from WWII that war could be both necessary and decisive.
And OF COURSE I watched Wargames, in a first-run theater when it came out. I credit that movie, and many like it, for an important shift in public attitude about what "thermonuclear war" meant. Before that movie and the others like it, I believe that most people failed to understand just how crispy their world would get until it was dramatized for them.
So we could *hope* that it would not happen, but from everything I saw then and for many years afterward, I saw way too little evidence that the extremity of war in the nuclear age was well enough understood to serve as a real deterrent.
Thus was born Jerry Pornelle's description of AT&T back then: "The company that couldn't sell eternal life"...
In 1986 I was trying to price out a few superminicomputer systems, investigating DEC, AT&T, Sun and a few others.
Guess which one couldn't answer the phone when we called? Absolutely impossible to do business with.
Here's the real irony: The following year, I was hired by AT&T BL! Best job ever. I only left at the end of 1995 describing my reasons thusly: "If these managers keep doing business this way they WILL be out of business, and soon."
Left AT&T, went with a small company that was bought by a bigger company which was bought by Lucent in 1999. Left *again* at the end of 1999, with exactly the same comment.
I am old enough to remember when this country was under a real external threat (thermonuclear attack) and our response was to encourage creativity, research and learning to outproduce the "other side". Now we have a new set of problems on the horizon and we need to adjust our basic priorities: to include basic research as a source of economic competitiveness.
Unfortunately significant advances generally upset the status quo. Recently Movement Conservatives seem afraid to lose the security of the existing status quo.
For example, I cite the power of extractive and fossil energy interests in discouraging broad funding of research in distributed and/or alternative energy sources over the last 40 years. They roll out their conservative protectors, screaming "socialism!" every time anyone brings up economic opportunity cost of preserving access to oil by military means, or the strategic loss of control of economic production due to the contribution of petroleum-based energy costs as a major part of our trade deficit. These factors affect our national security in significant ways, but fail because they threaten entrenched and very very wealthy interests.
I have been watching as a working software engineer during the last 33 years. Fear of a future that does not look like the past has caused significant delays in many areas of research and development. I hope it's possible to recover.
I've been thinking about how to say this without upsetting the whole applecart... My wife made me promise on scou^H^H^H^Hprogrammer's honor never to reveal the dirty little secret of the psychology biz...
About a century ago, a guy with heavy viennese accent and a monocle claimed to be able to see into people's subconscious minds, seeing all the stuff about mothers and Oedipus, Electra, and subconscious sexual confusion that other viennese guy, Freud, was going on about.
The American psychological "community", being *entirely* over-awed by the educated accents and general erudition of their viennese masters, heard about his test, and in fact, several others. Whereupon they accepted the claims of these brilliant and erudite masters of the world of the subconscious mind *uncritically*, simply accepting what their masters said.
It dawns on me at this late date, in 2009, that the dirty little secret is out.
Graduate students, professors, postdocs in the field of psychology, are all absolutely different from researchers in every other field of endeavor. Where the typical academic pattern is for everyone to always be "challenging" their peers' hypotheses (or less charitably pissing on their ideas in an endless game of one-upmanship), that model breaks down entirely in the psychology biz.
Psychological researchers have none of that need to find every nitpicky imperfection in the fields' consensus views like every other researcher in the known universe, they simply accept whatever the monocled masters said back then.
Or maybe, psychology is much like every other field of academic study and researchers spent most of the twentieth century challenging the validity of the existing status quo, by testing every detail, and arguing about ad nauseam.
I'll leave it to you and Occam to fiure out which way it went.
All kidding aside, these people have spent lifetimes of study validating the extant theories and measurements. If they are anything like other fields of academic endeavor, up-and-coming researchers spent years poking holes in every aspect of the field's standard theories, explanations and techniques. That's why I referred to peer review.
There is a good chance that the first hypotheses of Rorschach and his buddies in Austria may have been only a first order approximation to the underlying reality. I believe, however, that the competitive habits of subsequent researchers drove them to work long and hard to move their understanding asymptotically toward a more genuine and deeper understanding of the underlying realities of people's state of mind, to improve the quality of existing measures, and to develop new ones with better predictive power.
Oh and by the way, most students of psychology hear about Freud's biography one way or another, largely due to his beginning the process of treating psychology as a field worth studying in an organized way, rather than being a bunch of blathering by people claiming to know about the human mind without proper supporting research. But his hypotheses have been either updated beyond recognition or replaced entirely by subsequent research.
And I do have some skin in this game. The fact is that I have great respect for the decade that my wife put into her postgraduate education, and the care that she puts into every aspect of her practice. She can be *very* cynical about orthodoxy (that's one of the many reasons I treasure our relationship), and believes practically nothing without seeing hard evidence of its efficacy. That makes my life hard when I try to convince her of my point of view in arguments...:-)
Study the history and the big money spent on the research. It's not my work, I have no skin in the game.
There is a good chance that better techniques have been researched recently, and that the rorschach's day has come and gone. As I said earlier, my information is a few years old.
Of course psychologists enter situations, both in evaluation and practice, with biases. They've also been to school for *years*, followed by close supervision in internships, then under supervision during postdoctoral studies, to continue learning about the principles that guide the practice of their profession. Very high on the list of lessons that are taught to these people is recognizing the presence of those biases and correcting for them.
You clearly have not studied any of this. All of these psychometric tests have been studied and their results corroborated through many ways. I guess you don't think all those profs and grad students studying this stuff for a century weren't smart enough to recognize and correct for temporal conditions in their subjects lives.
I can hear it now... "Breakfast? Oh rats! DAMN! why didn't we think of that before! Here we were wasting time on all these bogus subtleties of psychodynamic personality effects, and we FORGOT about the effect of breakfast!" You're a big slashdot commenter, smart enough to get most of your spelling and syntax right. That means that you should be smart enough to recognize that most of these questions have been asked and answered in peer-reviewed journals.
We *were* having a discussion about the validity of a psychological measurement system that has been used for nearly a century as one verifiably useful tool to help guide treatment of people needing some help. And a slashdot commenter (aka "shadow of eternity") who made no claim to have studied any research validating or questioning the rorschach test, who provided no references to any research backing up his claims, wrote a comment that at least appears to be informed by absolute ignorance of the principles behind the process.
Somehow, the word "masturbate" showed up in a discussion of psychometric measurement techniques.
If the story you tell is true, then the assholes who did that deserve *very long* prison sentences in the "fuck you in the ass" prison system. (H/T to Office Space:-) )
I don't know where you live, but in every place in America that I know of, the big problem is not "facilities holding patients against their will", it's "finding places for people who are desperately in need of a protective place to recover". My wife'e psychiatrist friends are essentially unable to persuade inpatient facilities to accept even their most self-destructive on-suicide-watch patients.
One reason there's such a big homeless problem these days is that many homeless people are former patients who can't manage the complexities of life and are consequently unable to maintain a home.
The test involves learning of the perceptions of someone who has not been trained (== having seen and therefore thought about) the images before administration of the evaluation.
This is not a security question, it's a question of getting access to perceptions before the subject has had a chance to think through the process beforehand.
It's like an IQ test. Testing someone who saw the test ahead of time, couldhink through it (or worse discover hints and answers with teh google) isn't an IQ test, it's a test of their memory and access to the Internet.
The work of determining just which blots were effective, and then the person-years of building up the statistical models that produce valid correlations is *huge*. And publishing those ten images invalidates all that investment.
Nope. You haven't ever met a psychologist who does evaluations. The process is highly technical (as much as any heavy duty hacking session I've ever done), and involves the highest responsibility on the part of the psychologist to be certain that the resulting analytical report is supported by the data.
For which the psychologist *never* gets paid fully for her hours of effort.
As long as there are valid replacement measurement systems, then it would be interesting to see how people respond to the images.:-)
The origin of the test is 100 years ago, but it's been renormalized regularly since then, at relatively high cost. It's a major undertaking to validate the population samples etc. etc. The statistical correlation processes are by no stretch of the imagination, a "placebo". A single administration of the Rorschach is a multidimensional appraisal of correlated observations by the subject in order to discern patterns of perception that correlate with known patterns of the control populations studied during the test normalization process.
My data may be out of date, since my reference point (my wife) stopped doing psych evals 15 years ago.
She was required by both law and her own ethics to release test materials only to credentialed professionals or the fireplace.
That being said, the correlative data that makes a Rorshcach test useful is not a collection of 'correct' versus 'incorrect' answers, rather it shows the most popular response.
Close but not quite. The psych research community tests statistically valid (randomly selected, nonbiased samples, etc.) populations of all kinds of people, including people who are known to have various sorts of pathological diagnoses (That is particularly important in developing the statistical models indicating what responses tend to track these diagnoses). They track how all those people responded to the images, and record the resulting statistics.
FYI, the reference doesn't say "When the subject sees a Bat in card #7, he is likely schizoid". As I recall from watching my wife score Rorschachs so many years ago, one needs to count up multiple responses on multiple cards to build up a model of he underlying thought processes of the subject. Any given diagnostic information offered by the test only becomes a strong probability when the same processes are observed repeatedly in multiple aspects of the measurement.
In response to the question, "should the images be placed on WikiPedia", my response is to ask another set of questions:
1) Is there a suitable replacement? Once those images are available for view ahead of time, the test is ABSOLUTELY USELESS from that point onward.
2) There is literally MILLIONS of dollars of research, and hundreds of thousands of person-hours invested in this test. Is it a good idea to devalue that investment?
The Rorschach has only ever been intended to be one part of a substantial toolkit for helping guide practitioners in understanding the mindset of people they are trying to help.
The interpretation of the test involves careful filtering of the subject's responses using a 1000+ page set of reference books that contain statistical data generated by tracking thousands of people with known states of mind at the time they were asked to respond to the images on the cards.
The test was re-normalized every few years (5-10 years) with brand new control groups, and the test references updated accordingly.
So we have a set of practices familiar anyone who has ever bothered to read anything about science:
1) Control populations rigorously selected for statistical validity;
3) Results of these experiments correlated with additional and separately valided personality measures.
I have given up many many weekend nights with my wife who spent hours poring over both the test responses and considering those responses against the statistical results from those books. Scoring the Rorschach alone was 4-6 hours; integrating the resulting data with the reults of the other tests, inventories and profiles was usually 12 hours; finally writing the report and validating that written report, point by point, against the original test results was usually another 12 hours. The measurements and interpretations are performed under strictly defined guidelines in order to produce a report based strictly on the information gleaned from multiple personality inventories, only one of which is the Rorschach.
And the only psychologist who begins a psychological evaluation wanting a particular outcome should be strung up. The first and last goal of any psychologist doing any of these *extremely* labor intensive testing procedures is easy to describe: Try to get as close as possible to the root causes that are interfering with subjects' abilities to live their lives fully, in order to be sufficiently informed to guide their treatment processes.
As with any population, there are incompetent assholes who walk into situations presuming that they know the story without bothering to listen first.
Mod parent up, daethon is essentially right. IBM got their asses handed to them in the '80's, learned very hard lessons, and built a set of tools and technologies for a specific marketplace. During that time, they perfected both their technologies and the match between their technology and their chosen market. I think I've heard of mainframe applications running continuously for decades... Too lazy to find a specific link though.
7) Hipervisor: Its a network in a box. Applications talking to each other use IP, not TCP/IP, so you aren't sending 35% data, 65% header when applications talk. Network is at the speed of memory. zVM has been developed for over 20 years.
I remember booting VM/CMS and DOS (which is all we had licenses to run) under VM/370 in 1975, though of course the networking was not quite as polished then!:-):-) (that is the DOS that eventually grew into DOS/VSE their second-tier OS.) I've long forgotten the begats leading from OS/360 through MFT, MVT, etc. which led to VM/370 and on to today's Z series, but as I look back through all that history I see that IBM has built a truly remarkable system that almost certainly deserves the praise it receives for reliability and scalability.
IBM (who at the time were RAGING monopolists and on occasion behaved as as badly as Microsoft is behaving today) has been researching, implementing and improving virtualization technology for *at least* 35 years, could be 40.
I also remember an event that I believe brought the mainframe to relative currency, in 1998 or 1999: The day that a developer ported Linux to an S/390, and just for the adventure of it, tried to find a limit of the number of Linux images he could run on it. I remember indistinctly that he quit trying at 40,000 instances. It's not really functional (see this article but it still gives a hint of the capabilities that modern mainframe technology offers.
Apparently you've never heard of the history of Central American ultra-runners.
They run at least 40 or 50 miles in a day. An observation that I remember being interesting is that it's not a youth-oriented contest. The runners didn't start getting really good at it until beyond 30 or even 40 years of age.
(Sorry, no link. I cannot remember where I read this 10 or more years ago. SciAm? Discover? I just don't remember. Google "ultrarunning" for more. It is *very* interesting.)
I have also heard of people running deer to death, somewhat like "abigsmurf" who recalls meeting a guy who used to run elk to death.
I remember when Microsoft was "not unfriendly" to developers, before they decided that everyone producing a broadly useful application was their competition to be either absorbed or destroyed.
It is possible for them to be competitive without being the force of destruction that they became in the mid 1990's.
QEMU is a very good answer. I have recently begun using QEMU to emulate Gumstix Connex and Verdex processors used in a few UAV projects.
I am modifying the Gumstix bootloader, and QEMU gives me the ability to modify u-boot without concern for "bricking" the unit. I have verified that it runs all the normal Gumstix Linux systems without modification, so I am confident that QEMU is a relatively accurate emulation.
I voted for Colbert too. I have two reasons: one was curiousity what NASA (and Colbert) would do, and the other is to give an infinitesimal increase the popular relevance to ISS.
I am 52 and the space program during the '60's was a significant contributor to my education and my career choices.
the promise of the internet is free and open communications.
What we do with our data is entirely up to us, and nobody else. Not "the government", not ISPs. This includes encrypting whatever is being transmitted.
You may share any paper, report, program, comment that is yours to publish. Some communications using the Internet should be more like a phone conversation (before USAPATRIOT stupidity), in which a modicum of privacy is a reasonable presumption.
I'm probably exaggerating his position a little bit
In terms of "information processing capability", you are not exaggerating Kurzweil's position my much at all. His main thesis in The Singularity Is Near is that even "professional futurists" fail to recognize that future development is exponential or even greater (in the book, he does occasionally mention the phrase "double exponential").
In general however, he does not speak of exponential growth in energy production or energy consumption. He talks about growth in capability but not necessarily physically.
No, they have it in bank accounts and in stock portfolios, in other words they are driving the economy with their wealth.
As is the case for most large, influential companies, their capital can move much more fluidly than people can move themselves or their skills.
The consequence is the economic whipsaw that fucks normal people over while giving large companies freedom to get their labor from places where the political/governmental systems prevent their workers from demanding parity.
America benefited from *open* market economy, back when production and consumption were both much more decentralized.
When you refer to State Ownership of the means of production (dog-whistle talk for "communism"), you are bringing in several connotations, the most important of which is the failure of the concept of the "planned economy".
Keep that thought, then count how many people are planning *this* economy. You will learn that the concentration of influence (4 major banks, 3 big auto companies, 5 communication companies, etc etc) results in exactly the same problem: Too few people are pulling the levers of the eca similarlythe same pessimal situation as the classical planned economies of "communism".
My favorite exmple is banking: There are 4 major banks now, but only one attitude.
We left the equity market, half in November 2007, and finished the job in January 2008. We knew that the financial markets were being manipulated, and we got out. We should have pulled it all in November but I am a bit conservative.
Sorry about the delay in responding, it's a big family day...
<inference> Based on my conversations with the legal eagles, Mr. Connell would have preferred not to testify at all, and was stuck in the unenviable position of being required to discuss things he would rather not discuss and separately because he was concerned about how it would frustrate the people he worked for.
So there is a good chance that whatever he knew, he wasn't going to simply tell all he knew, he would make sure the questioners would have to work hard for every answer. </inference>
I was hoping that there's a cache of interesting stuff just waiting to be released in case anything untoward happened. Apparently that only really happens in movies.
In answer to "who I am in all of this": My wife and I became interested in election technology in 2003 when we began hearing that J. Kenneth Blackwell was considering a contract to purchase direct recording electronic voting machines without paper trail. My wife (a psychologist) talked with me (an embedded developer) about trustworthiness in DRE voting systems. My answer was that the transition between the privacy of voting and public counting is way more subtle than most people give it credit for, and a paper trail verifiable by the voter is absolutely critical for auditability. So wife and I were "hooked", and began to participate in various election related community activities in central Ohio. Cliff Arnebeck is basically a conservative former Republican who insists on honest ethical behavior, became interested in election issues during a contested Ohio Supreme Court race and continued to follow up on that interest through the strangeness of the 2004 election. Bob Fitrakis is an investigative journalist (earning several awards) who also studied law and is now an attorney. He has always been strongly populist politically.
When I talked with Cliff and Bob the day after the first deposition a few months ago, they reported that Mike Connell tried to avoid answering their questions.
They were looking forward to subsequent depositions in order to get better information.
We all had similar observations about Connell's situation: It seemed very very dangerous to him, and we were concerned for his safety. We were hoping to get better information more quickly in order to limit the amount of time during which Mr. Connell would be under threat.
This plane crash comes as no surprise to any of us.
Living in Columbus, we in the election protection community have witnessed several activities firsthand that give us pause.
We have, for instance, photographic records of some of the punchcard ballots in the 2004 election, before they were destroyed in direct violation of a court order as well as the orders of the new secretary of state.
The individual quantitative analysts ("quants") built redundancy into their individual company's systems by counting on external "randomness" (approximately), insuring against possible losses emanating from their highly leveraged transactions through insurance contracts (credit default swaps).
However, All the other quantitative models were built on essentially the same set of assumptions: That their insurers had sufficient capitalization to cover the CDS contracts. The triggering event, a loss in home valuations is particular markets, started an avalanche consisting of lots of finance companies invoking the CDS contracts, all at once. That's when they found out that the insurer (AIG, for example) was just as undercapitalized as everyone else. (There's way more to this sordid tale, so this is a necessarily compressed synopsis.)
Unless one counts "we got ours, you're fucked" as implying "working as advertised", then it didn't work by any stretch of the imagination.
Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's comments on the Black Swan Event for a properly thought and documented analysis.
BTW, The Edge is a great resource for the intelligent and curious reader. I have no financial interest in these guys, but I've found their insights to be highly informative and balanced.
The Telcos are lying to us (a lie of omission): They carefully avoid estimating the reduction in total bandwidth consumed due to the optimization that search engines provide. Search engines serve as a repository of index information used to optimize our access to internet services and products. The net effect is reduced resource utilization.
Earth to telcos: Google is an example of a service that increases the value of the internet, which drives our willingness to pay for it. I have been an internet user since modem dialup days. My use of the service has increased during the last 18 years because it provides value. Google improves that value. It's a big win for the telcos and service providers, and they are trying to prevent us from recognizing that fact.
Free bandwidth indeed! Google pays for every bit of their bandwidth just like everyone else, probably with a bulk discount just like every other customer of a service with a predictable and large utilization.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have access to the soviet leadership during the 1961-1969 time frame, so I cannot ssay for certain what they were thinking.
I am mostly responding to the fact that all the children in our schools (Pittsburgh) were issued dogtags, and the reason given was that they might be necessary in case of "emergency".
One would hope that nobody in either government was *that* stupid. But at the time all this was happening, the second world war was only 16-23 years in the past, the memory of all-out war was much more recent in people's minds at the time, and the common experience, again from WWII that war could be both necessary and decisive.
And OF COURSE I watched Wargames, in a first-run theater when it came out. I credit that movie, and many like it, for an important shift in public attitude about what "thermonuclear war" meant. Before that movie and the others like it, I believe that most people failed to understand just how crispy their world would get until it was dramatized for them.
So we could *hope* that it would not happen, but from everything I saw then and for many years afterward, I saw way too little evidence that the extremity of war in the nuclear age was well enough understood to serve as a real deterrent.
Thus was born Jerry Pornelle's description of AT&T back then: "The company that couldn't sell eternal life"...
In 1986 I was trying to price out a few superminicomputer systems, investigating DEC, AT&T, Sun and a few others.
Guess which one couldn't answer the phone when we called? Absolutely impossible to do business with.
Here's the real irony: The following year, I was hired by AT&T BL! Best job ever. I only left at the end of 1995 describing my reasons thusly: "If these managers keep doing business this way they WILL be out of business, and soon."
Left AT&T, went with a small company that was bought by a bigger company which was bought by Lucent in 1999. Left *again* at the end of 1999, with exactly the same comment.
False dichotomy AND strawman in two sentences.
I am old enough to remember when this country was under a real external threat (thermonuclear attack) and our response was to encourage creativity, research and learning to outproduce the "other side". Now we have a new set of problems on the horizon and we need to adjust our basic priorities: to include basic research as a source of economic competitiveness.
Unfortunately significant advances generally upset the status quo. Recently Movement Conservatives seem afraid to lose the security of the existing status quo.
For example, I cite the power of extractive and fossil energy interests in discouraging broad funding of research in distributed and/or alternative energy sources over the last 40 years. They roll out their conservative protectors, screaming "socialism!" every time anyone brings up economic opportunity cost of preserving access to oil by military means, or the strategic loss of control of economic production due to the contribution of petroleum-based energy costs as a major part of our trade deficit. These factors affect our national security in significant ways, but fail because they threaten entrenched and very very wealthy interests.
I have been watching as a working software engineer during the last 33 years. Fear of a future that does not look like the past has caused significant delays in many areas of research and development. I hope it's possible to recover.
I've been thinking about how to say this without upsetting the whole applecart... My wife made me promise on scou^H^H^H^Hprogrammer's honor never to reveal the dirty little secret of the psychology biz...
About a century ago, a guy with heavy viennese accent and a monocle claimed to be able to see into people's subconscious minds, seeing all the stuff about mothers and Oedipus, Electra, and subconscious sexual confusion that other viennese guy, Freud, was going on about.
The American psychological "community", being *entirely* over-awed by the educated accents and general erudition of their viennese masters, heard about his test, and in fact, several others. Whereupon they accepted the claims of these brilliant and erudite masters of the world of the subconscious mind *uncritically*, simply accepting what their masters said.
It dawns on me at this late date, in 2009, that the dirty little secret is out.
Graduate students, professors, postdocs in the field of psychology, are all absolutely different from researchers in every other field of endeavor. Where the typical academic pattern is for everyone to always be "challenging" their peers' hypotheses (or less charitably pissing on their ideas in an endless game of one-upmanship), that model breaks down entirely in the psychology biz.
Psychological researchers have none of that need to find every nitpicky imperfection in the fields' consensus views like every other researcher in the known universe, they simply accept whatever the monocled masters said back then.
Or maybe, psychology is much like every other field of academic study and researchers spent most of the twentieth century challenging the validity of the existing status quo, by testing every detail, and arguing about ad nauseam.
I'll leave it to you and Occam to fiure out which way it went.
All kidding aside, these people have spent lifetimes of study validating the extant theories and measurements. If they are anything like other fields of academic endeavor, up-and-coming researchers spent years poking holes in every aspect of the field's standard theories, explanations and techniques. That's why I referred to peer review.
There is a good chance that the first hypotheses of Rorschach and his buddies in Austria may have been only a first order approximation to the underlying reality. I believe, however, that the competitive habits of subsequent researchers drove them to work long and hard to move their understanding asymptotically toward a more genuine and deeper understanding of the underlying realities of people's state of mind, to improve the quality of existing measures, and to develop new ones with better predictive power.
Oh and by the way, most students of psychology hear about Freud's biography one way or another, largely due to his beginning the process of treating psychology as a field worth studying in an organized way, rather than being a bunch of blathering by people claiming to know about the human mind without proper supporting research. But his hypotheses have been either updated beyond recognition or replaced entirely by subsequent research.
And I do have some skin in this game. The fact is that I have great respect for the decade that my wife put into her postgraduate education, and the care that she puts into every aspect of her practice. She can be *very* cynical about orthodoxy (that's one of the many reasons I treasure our relationship), and believes practically nothing without seeing hard evidence of its efficacy. That makes my life hard when I try to convince her of my point of view in arguments... :-)
Study the history and the big money spent on the research. It's not my work, I have no skin in the game.
There is a good chance that better techniques have been researched recently, and that the rorschach's day has come and gone. As I said earlier, my information is a few years old.
Of course psychologists enter situations, both in evaluation and practice, with biases. They've also been to school for *years*, followed by close supervision in internships, then under supervision during postdoctoral studies, to continue learning about the principles that guide the practice of their profession. Very high on the list of lessons that are taught to these people is recognizing the presence of those biases and correcting for them.
You clearly have not studied any of this. All of these psychometric tests have been studied and their results corroborated through many ways. I guess you don't think all those profs and grad students studying this stuff for a century weren't smart enough to recognize and correct for temporal conditions in their subjects lives.
I can hear it now... "Breakfast? Oh rats! DAMN! why didn't we think of that before! Here we were wasting time on all these bogus subtleties of psychodynamic personality effects, and we FORGOT about the effect of breakfast!" You're a big slashdot commenter, smart enough to get most of your spelling and syntax right. That means that you should be smart enough to recognize that most of these questions have been asked and answered in peer-reviewed journals.
We *were* having a discussion about the validity of a psychological measurement system that has been used for nearly a century as one verifiably useful tool to help guide treatment of people needing some help. And a slashdot commenter (aka "shadow of eternity") who made no claim to have studied any research validating or questioning the rorschach test, who provided no references to any research backing up his claims, wrote a comment that at least appears to be informed by absolute ignorance of the principles behind the process.
Somehow, the word "masturbate" showed up in a discussion of psychometric measurement techniques.
Coincidence?
If the story you tell is true, then the assholes who did that deserve *very long* prison sentences in the "fuck you in the ass" prison system. (H/T to Office Space :-) )
I don't know where you live, but in every place in America that I know of, the big problem is not "facilities holding patients against their will", it's "finding places for people who are desperately in need of a protective place to recover". My wife'e psychiatrist friends are essentially unable to persuade inpatient facilities to accept even their most self-destructive on-suicide-watch patients.
One reason there's such a big homeless problem these days is that many homeless people are former patients who can't manage the complexities of life and are consequently unable to maintain a home.
You do not understand the process.
The test involves learning of the perceptions of someone who has not been trained (== having seen and therefore thought about) the images before administration of the evaluation.
This is not a security question, it's a question of getting access to perceptions before the subject has had a chance to think through the process beforehand.
It's like an IQ test. Testing someone who saw the test ahead of time, couldhink through it (or worse discover hints and answers with teh google) isn't an IQ test, it's a test of their memory and access to the Internet.
The work of determining just which blots were effective, and then the person-years of building up the statistical models that produce valid correlations is *huge*. And publishing those ten images invalidates all that investment.
Nope. You haven't ever met a psychologist who does evaluations. The process is highly technical (as much as any heavy duty hacking session I've ever done), and involves the highest responsibility on the part of the psychologist to be certain that the resulting analytical report is supported by the data.
For which the psychologist *never* gets paid fully for her hours of effort.
As long as there are valid replacement measurement systems, then it would be interesting to see how people respond to the images. :-)
The origin of the test is 100 years ago, but it's been renormalized regularly since then, at relatively high cost. It's a major undertaking to validate the population samples etc. etc. The statistical correlation processes are by no stretch of the imagination, a "placebo". A single administration of the Rorschach is a multidimensional appraisal of correlated observations by the subject in order to discern patterns of perception that correlate with known patterns of the control populations studied during the test normalization process.
My data may be out of date, since my reference point (my wife) stopped doing psych evals 15 years ago.
She was required by both law and her own ethics to release test materials only to credentialed professionals or the fireplace.
Close but not quite. The psych research community tests statistically valid (randomly selected, nonbiased samples, etc.) populations of all kinds of people, including people who are known to have various sorts of pathological diagnoses (That is particularly important in developing the statistical models indicating what responses tend to track these diagnoses). They track how all those people responded to the images, and record the resulting statistics.
FYI, the reference doesn't say "When the subject sees a Bat in card #7, he is likely schizoid". As I recall from watching my wife score Rorschachs so many years ago, one needs to count up multiple responses on multiple cards to build up a model of he underlying thought processes of the subject. Any given diagnostic information offered by the test only becomes a strong probability when the same processes are observed repeatedly in multiple aspects of the measurement.
In response to the question, "should the images be placed on WikiPedia", my response is to ask another set of questions:
1) Is there a suitable replacement? Once those images are available for view ahead of time, the test is ABSOLUTELY USELESS from that point onward.
2) There is literally MILLIONS of dollars of research, and hundreds of thousands of person-hours invested in this test. Is it a good idea to devalue that investment?
The Rorschach has only ever been intended to be one part of a substantial toolkit for helping guide practitioners in understanding the mindset of people they are trying to help.
The interpretation of the test involves careful filtering of the subject's responses using a 1000+ page set of reference books that contain statistical data generated by tracking thousands of people with known states of mind at the time they were asked to respond to the images on the cards.
The test was re-normalized every few years (5-10 years) with brand new control groups, and the test references updated accordingly.
So we have a set of practices familiar anyone who has ever bothered to read anything about science:
1) Control populations rigorously selected for statistical validity;
2) Repeated experiments, statistically verified results;
3) Results of these experiments correlated with additional and separately valided personality measures.
I have given up many many weekend nights with my wife who spent hours poring over both the test responses and considering those responses against the statistical results from those books. Scoring the Rorschach alone was 4-6 hours; integrating the resulting data with the reults of the other tests, inventories and profiles was usually 12 hours; finally writing the report and validating that written report, point by point, against the original test results was usually another 12 hours. The measurements and interpretations are performed under strictly defined guidelines in order to produce a report based strictly on the information gleaned from multiple personality inventories, only one of which is the Rorschach.
And the only psychologist who begins a psychological evaluation wanting a particular outcome should be strung up. The first and last goal of any psychologist doing any of these *extremely* labor intensive testing procedures is easy to describe: Try to get as close as possible to the root causes that are interfering with subjects' abilities to live their lives fully, in order to be sufficiently informed to guide their treatment processes.
As with any population, there are incompetent assholes who walk into situations presuming that they know the story without bothering to listen first.
Mod parent up, daethon is essentially right. IBM got their asses handed to them in the '80's, learned very hard lessons, and built a set of tools and technologies for a specific marketplace. During that time, they perfected both their technologies and the match between their technology and their chosen market. I think I've heard of mainframe applications running continuously for decades... Too lazy to find a specific link though.
I remember booting VM/CMS and DOS (which is all we had licenses to run) under VM/370 in 1975, though of course the networking was not quite as polished then! :-) :-) (that is the DOS that eventually grew into DOS/VSE their second-tier OS.) I've long forgotten the begats leading from OS/360 through MFT, MVT, etc. which led to VM/370 and on to today's Z series, but as I look back through all that history I see that IBM has built a truly remarkable system that almost certainly deserves the praise it receives for reliability and scalability.
IBM (who at the time were RAGING monopolists and on occasion behaved as as badly as Microsoft is behaving today) has been researching, implementing and improving virtualization technology for *at least* 35 years, could be 40.
I also remember an event that I believe brought the mainframe to relative currency, in 1998 or 1999: The day that a developer ported Linux to an S/390, and just for the adventure of it, tried to find a limit of the number of Linux images he could run on it. I remember indistinctly that he quit trying at 40,000 instances. It's not really functional (see this article but it still gives a hint of the capabilities that modern mainframe technology offers.
Apparently you've never heard of the history of Central American ultra-runners.
They run at least 40 or 50 miles in a day. An observation that I remember being interesting is that it's not a youth-oriented contest. The runners didn't start getting really good at it until beyond 30 or even 40 years of age.
(Sorry, no link. I cannot remember where I read this 10 or more years ago. SciAm? Discover? I just don't remember. Google "ultrarunning" for more. It is *very* interesting.)
I have also heard of people running deer to death, somewhat like "abigsmurf" who recalls meeting a guy who used to run elk to death.
I remember when Microsoft was "not unfriendly" to developers, before they decided that everyone producing a broadly useful application was their competition to be either absorbed or destroyed.
It is possible for them to be competitive without being the force of destruction that they became in the mid 1990's.
QEMU is a very good answer. I have recently begun using QEMU to emulate Gumstix Connex and Verdex processors used in a few UAV projects.
I am modifying the Gumstix bootloader, and QEMU gives me the ability to modify u-boot without concern for "bricking" the unit. I have verified that it runs all the normal Gumstix Linux systems without modification, so I am confident that QEMU is a relatively accurate emulation.
So you're the joker in this thread?
I voted for Colbert too. I have two reasons: one was curiousity what NASA (and Colbert) would do, and the other is to give an infinitesimal increase the popular relevance to ISS.
I am 52 and the space program during the '60's was a significant contributor to my education and my career choices.
the promise of the internet is free and open communications.
What we do with our data is entirely up to us, and nobody else. Not "the government", not ISPs. This includes encrypting whatever is being transmitted.
You may share any paper, report, program, comment that is yours to publish. Some communications using the Internet should be more like a phone conversation (before USAPATRIOT stupidity), in which a modicum of privacy is a reasonable presumption.
I'm probably exaggerating his position a little bit
In terms of "information processing capability", you are not exaggerating Kurzweil's position my much at all. His main thesis in The Singularity Is Near is that even "professional futurists" fail to recognize that future development is exponential or even greater (in the book, he does occasionally mention the phrase "double exponential").
In general however, he does not speak of exponential growth in energy production or energy consumption. He talks about growth in capability but not necessarily physically.
Mod parent up, folks.
RAMBUS just successfully got away with *not* playing by rules of ethical behavior.
Until we wring their sort of fraud out of common practice, this society will continue to be whipsawed by alternating cycles of greed and failure.
As is the case for most large, influential companies, their capital can move much more fluidly than people can move themselves or their skills.
The consequence is the economic whipsaw that fucks normal people over while giving large companies freedom to get their labor from places where the political/governmental systems prevent their workers from demanding parity.
America benefited from *open* market economy, back when production and consumption were both much more decentralized.
When you refer to State Ownership of the means of production (dog-whistle talk for "communism"), you are bringing in several connotations, the most important of which is the failure of the concept of the "planned economy".
Keep that thought, then count how many people are planning *this* economy. You will learn that the concentration of influence (4 major banks, 3 big auto companies, 5 communication companies, etc etc) results in exactly the same problem: Too few people are pulling the levers of the eca similarlythe same pessimal situation as the classical planned economies of "communism".
My favorite exmple is banking: There are 4 major banks now, but only one attitude.
Yes.
We left the equity market, half in November 2007, and finished the job in January 2008. We knew that the financial markets were being manipulated, and we got out. We should have pulled it all in November but I am a bit conservative.
Sorry about the delay in responding, it's a big family day...
<inference>
Based on my conversations with the legal eagles, Mr. Connell would have preferred not to testify at all, and was stuck in the unenviable position of being required to discuss things he would rather not discuss and separately because he was concerned about how it would frustrate the people he worked for.
So there is a good chance that whatever he knew, he wasn't going to simply tell all he knew, he would make sure the questioners would have to work hard for every answer.
</inference>
I was hoping that there's a cache of interesting stuff just waiting to be released in case anything untoward happened. Apparently that only really happens in movies.
In answer to "who I am in all of this": My wife and I became interested in election technology in 2003 when we began hearing that J. Kenneth Blackwell was considering a contract to purchase direct recording electronic voting machines without paper trail. My wife (a psychologist) talked with me (an embedded developer) about trustworthiness in DRE voting systems. My answer was that the transition between the privacy of voting and public counting is way more subtle than most people give it credit for, and a paper trail verifiable by the voter is absolutely critical for auditability. So wife and I were "hooked", and began to participate in various election related community activities in central Ohio. Cliff Arnebeck is basically a conservative former Republican who insists on honest ethical behavior, became interested in election issues during a contested Ohio Supreme Court race and continued to follow up on that interest through the strangeness of the 2004 election. Bob Fitrakis is an investigative journalist (earning several awards) who also studied law and is now an attorney. He has always been strongly populist politically.
When I talked with Cliff and Bob the day after the first deposition a few months ago, they reported that Mike Connell tried to avoid answering their questions.
They were looking forward to subsequent depositions in order to get better information.
We all had similar observations about Connell's situation: It seemed very very dangerous to him, and we were concerned for his safety. We were hoping to get better information more quickly in order to limit the amount of time during which Mr. Connell would be under threat.
This plane crash comes as no surprise to any of us.
Living in Columbus, we in the election protection community have witnessed several activities firsthand that give us pause.
We have, for instance, photographic records of some of the punchcard ballots in the 2004 election, before they were destroyed in direct violation of a court order as well as the orders of the new secretary of state.
Absolutely not.
The individual quantitative analysts ("quants") built redundancy into their individual company's systems by counting on external "randomness" (approximately), insuring against possible losses emanating from their highly leveraged transactions through insurance contracts (credit default swaps).
However, All the other quantitative models were built on essentially the same set of assumptions: That their insurers had sufficient capitalization to cover the CDS contracts. The triggering event, a loss in home valuations is particular markets, started an avalanche consisting of lots of finance companies invoking the CDS contracts, all at once. That's when they found out that the insurer (AIG, for example) was just as undercapitalized as everyone else. (There's way more to this sordid tale, so this is a necessarily compressed synopsis.)
Unless one counts "we got ours, you're fucked" as implying "working as advertised", then it didn't work by any stretch of the imagination.
Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's comments on the Black Swan Event for a properly thought and documented analysis.
BTW, The Edge is a great resource for the intelligent and curious reader. I have no financial interest in these guys, but I've found their insights to be highly informative and balanced.
The Telcos are lying to us (a lie of omission): They carefully avoid estimating the reduction in total bandwidth consumed due to the optimization that search engines provide. Search engines serve as a repository of index information used to optimize our access to internet services and products. The net effect is reduced resource utilization.
Earth to telcos: Google is an example of a service that increases the value of the internet, which drives our willingness to pay for it. I have been an internet user since modem dialup days. My use of the service has increased during the last 18 years because it provides value. Google improves that value. It's a big win for the telcos and service providers, and they are trying to prevent us from recognizing that fact.
Free bandwidth indeed! Google pays for every bit of their bandwidth just like everyone else, probably with a bulk discount just like every other customer of a service with a predictable and large utilization.