Tracy › Likes

Great article, but it left out that statisticians need some CS muscle to effectively operate on large scale data. It's the combination that make Carrie -- and others like her -- 'Internet-age' statisticians. - Michael E. Driscoll

Michael, plenty of CS muscle, and also training in specialized packages like/from the SAS http://www.sas.com/technol... etc. - ianf ⌘

Oh, this is old from 2009.... Silly me. Bumped because of spammy comment? - Joe Boone

Graphics programmers have the best demos. Hands down. - no name

The site is down at the moment, but here's a direct link to the video: http://vimeo.com/6496886 - Ben Darnell

This made me wonder once more how things spread through the social web. When I posted this the site was up! Then it got on gizmodo, reddit, etc. and the site went down. :( - Amit Patel

Ming-Ming Cheng just received a Google China Fellowship:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010... - Jenny Zhou

it's amazing - Yicong Liang

crazy good! - Private Sanjeev

"Risks that increase the annual death risk by one micromort, and their associated cause of death: [...] living 2 months in Denver (cancer from cosmic radiation) [...] eating 40 tablespoons of peanut butter (liver cancer from aflatoxin B) [...] travelling 6 minutes by canoe (accident) [...] receiving one chest X-ray in a good hospital (cancer from radiation)" - Tudor Bosman

Where did I see this before on here? - Stephen Mack #TeamMomo

If you read the original paper, Bem has a simple test to select for people who get a 57% (on average) hit rate on the photo prediction test. - Private Sanjeev

What's the test? - Paul Buchheit

You should know already.... - Roberto Bonini

Rebuttal from the point of view of statistical methodology. (PDF link) http://www.ruudwetzels.com/article... But I'd like to see more about this in a few months or a year, after more people attempt to reproduce Bem's results. - Tudor Bosman

How much do you agree with the following two statements: 1. I am easily bored? 2. I often enjoy seeing movies I've seen before. - Private Sanjeev

So people who are easily bored but enjoy rewatching movies are most able to predict photos? - Paul Buchheit

I read an article a while back in New Scientist that theorised that Quantum Entanglement may be heavily involved in DNA. And further theorised that it may be in use throughout the body including the brain. Hence quantum physics weirdness, including time paradoxes, showing up in psychological processes is a natural extension of that theory. - Roberto Bonini

The latter question was reversed scored: so people who "are easily bored" and "do not enjoy re-watching movies" predicted the erotic pictures better. - Keith Coleman

Also, regarding the stimuli-oriented group: "The difference between their erotic and nonerotic hit rates was itself significant with 71% of participants achieving higher hit rates on erotic trials than on nonerotic trials. Their psi scores on nonerotic trials did not exceed chance." - Keith Coleman

I guess James Randi needs to comment. - Sue - Friendfeed is best

Suezanne: Read the PDF link I posted. The guidelines for Randi's $1M prize follow those indicated in that paper for confirmatory studies, which Bem's studies are not. Randi would be unfazed. - Tudor Bosman

They're doing it wrong, you need to do the confirmatory studies *before* you do the exploratory ones. :) - Private Sanjeev

I like to think of the evolutionary advantage of this kind of power :) (which explains why it works only for erotic images) - Paul Buchheit

I bet they could boost the hit rate by replacing the images with, uh, something more stimulating :) - Paul Buchheit

They actually did. The original photo set was not sufficiently explicit to stimulate male subjects, so they had to go out on the internet to get better material. I had a crazy idea to turk this and make a high frequency trading algo out of it. YC startup idea? Just make sure Randi is not in the room or you'll lose money. - Private Sanjeev

Does a roulette wheel that displays erotic pictures to winners differ in performance from one that doesn't? - Sue - Friendfeed is best

Tudor Bosman: "Suezanne: Read the PDF link I posted" - I have read it now; I hadn't till you told me to. - Sue - Friendfeed is best

For (Ex-)Googlers: Daryl is Jeremy Bem's father. - Simon

Paul, Tudor's PDF does discuss the evolutionary advantage. Page 5: "Note that precognition conveys a considerable evolutionary advantage (Bem, in press), and one might therefore assume that natural selection would have lead to a world filled with powerful psychics (i.e., people or animals with precognition, clairvoyance, psychokineses, etc.). This is not the case, however (see also... more... - Stephen Mack #TeamMomo

Obviously there's a tradeoff. Precognition makes it easier to get sex (which I assume is what it's for given the need for stimulating images), but causes bordom, which must be some kind of disadvantage. - Paul Buchheit

And, in fact, it must be the case that practically all reproducing males who have ever existed had this ability. "My boy," he said, "you are descended from a long line of determined, resourceful, microscopic tadpoles -- champions every one." (_Galápagos_, by Kurt Vonnegut) - Stephen Mack #TeamMomo

I think I'll go and predict some porn now. :) - Morton Fox

I think that what happens is that those with the psi abilities use it to seek out porn rather than reproducing, thus negating any evolutionary advantage it may impart. - Gabe

Simon: whoa, that's quite interesting. - Ruchira S. Datta

Heidegger said roughly the same thing, also Binswanger did some great existential psychology around time issues. It turns out that the future is highly determining of the present. I tracked down some early Nietzsche with just this sort of speculation during my undergrad degree. - Jeff McNeill

"The most important flaws in the Bem experiments, discussed below in detail, are the following: (1) confusion between exploratory and confirmatory studies; (2) insufficient attention to the fact that the probability of the data given the hypothesis does not equal the probability of the hypothesis given the data (i.e., the fallacy of the transposed conditional); (3) application of a test... more... - Goran Zec

(totally OT: I hope you like this one - http://ff.im/wjm73) - PaperDoll

well, it's about future :) - PaperDoll

Wow, weird. I wish I still had vocab tests. I would totally do that "study a list after a test" thing. Just in case. - Chieze Okoye

so, future can change past? - vovasty from BuddyFeed

len ben türküm - Ender Mert Karagür

«This is not the first time a prominent psychology professor has found statistical evidence of extrasensory perception, but in these experiments, the methods are classical, simple, well known and repeatable. Already one attempt to repeat Bem's work has failed» - 9000

Very relevant: http://friendfeed.com/marebv... - Goran Zec

Fixed. Thanks. - Paul Buchheit

Maybe service OS might fit better? Services are being composed together. Cloud OS already has the notion of running a cloud inside a datacenter or across datacenters. Though that's just a nit, I agree with the larger points. - Todd Hoff

Great post, Paul. There's a slight aesthetic issue with having different UI for apps and browser tabs. The typical window managers couldn't accommodate heavy web browsing. Chromium breaks down with too many tabs (although side tabs could change this. There's also an extension for searching open tabs.) And the stock Android experience for app and browser window switching is less than ideal. Heh, I should take a crack at this since I'm so opinionated. - Vezquex from Android

After reading your blog, I thought of a great slogan. "The network is the computer." I'm pretty sure that one hasn't been taken yet :) - Rob Hoeting

Yeah, Sun was right about the big picture, but couldn't translate that into products worth buying. - Paul Buchheit

We used a heck a lot of Sun's diskless workstations. Worked nicely, even with the anemic networking of the time. Just too early on the whole portable device thing. - Todd Hoff

"Once Android has all the benefits of ChromeOS, the most obvious difference will be that ChromeOS lacks the thousands of native apps which are popular on Android. Android apps are closer to web apps than Windows apps in terms of security and manageability, so eliminating them doesn't seem like much of an advantage for ChromeOS." Nicely put. Here's to hoping that Android makes web apps as powerful and integrated as possible so the only reason to go native is for things like video uploading and games. - Karl Rosaen

Might help to think of devices as memes -- Chrome OS as part of the cloud OS meme cannot die but only help evolution. Having a cloud OS as a mere theoretical concept versus actually playing around with one is the difference between reading a book on color theory versus actually sinking your paint brush into oil colors and putting them down on the canvas. As a web developer playing... more... - Philipp Lenssen