Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
Can you see me now?
I'm not quite sure what to make of this:
Twitter's first scientific study needs you!
Can some people correctly identify a place using mind power alone?
Psychologist Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, wants to find out, and New Scientist readers can help.
Over the course of this week, we'll be carrying out an experiment to find out if there's any substance to claims that some people are "remote viewers" – able to psychically identify a distant location without being shown or told where it is through conventional means.
I dunno - I'd think that twits and woo make a bad combination. The sort of thing that would have you hunched over a toilet after the party, if you know what I mean. But the way that they are doing it at least seems reasonable on first glance:
So, how is the experiment going to work?
Well, at 3pm (UK time) each day, I will travel to a randomly selected location. Once there, I will send a Tweet, asking everyone to Tweet about their thoughts concerning the nature of the location. Thirty minutes later, I will send another Tweet linking to a website that will allow everyone to view photographs of five locations (the actual location and four decoys), think about the thoughts and images that came to them in the thirty minutes before, and vote on which of the five they believe to be the actual target location.
If the majority of people select the correct target then the trial will count as a hit, otherwise it will count as a miss. There will be trials at 3pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week. Three or more hits in four trials will be seen as supporting the existence of extrasensory perception.
Not in any way scientific (I can think of many ways the results could be skewed), but could be interesting. And is at least as good a use of Twitter as any that I have heard of so far.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. Cross posted to my blog.)
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Wiseman isn't a woo-meister
He co-conducted a recent James Randi Challenge test. See here: http://tinyurl.com/d42nba
Note his books there.
The 'design' of the exercise looks to me like a preliminary filtering for potential remote viewers, with (like the Randi test) more stringent testing later.
Remote Viewing
As to researching remote "viewing," to make it really scientific, they should use only blind people. If you can see a distant place without any sort of light transmission, lens, or magnifying mechanism, I'd think blind people could do it. (In fact, they'd be motivated to develop the skill, if it was doable at all.)
I'm trying to come up with some guess as to the nature of the next wave of psychic fluffery. Just as gullible people once believed in garden fairies, and that was replaced in the science fiction and space age with believers in flying saucers and space aliens, I'm imagining there will be computer-age myths that such people will adopt.
You give people a glimpse of a new concept, and no capacity to understand how the thing works, and the only way they can deal with it is to turn it into some sort of cultish belief system.
Are we seeing the first stumbling steps to turn Twitter into a tool for psychics?
Oh, wait, I guess the idea that we're all living in The Matrix might qualify.
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By the way, you Twitter fans will love this crazy shit:
Tweets of Hate: The actual Tweets of right-wingers, some of them with their real names, about the shooting of Dr. Tiller. They applaud the murder with sanctimonious zeal.
http://carnalnation.com/content/7628/3/tweets-hate-crazy-right-twitters-...
"George Tiller the baby killer was shot dead this morning. God bless the gunmen who hopefully won't be caught. - readnwatchchris, Creedmor. NC"
"Glad someone offed Tiller. Baby Killer. - Kat , Kansas"
"Karma is a beautiful thing. Cheers to the hero who sent George Tiller where he belongs... straight to hell." - Matthew Kamar
"The left-wing nutjobs don't understand that Tiller the baby killer was not human. No human kills babies, only monsters. Good riddance" - Sami Shamieh, Walnut Creek, CA
"omg!george tiller abortion dr. was killed n his church parkn lot! hell yea!" - Sarah Gulick, Wtichita, Ks
Really...? Either he is
Really...? Either he is being really loose with his words while describing his procedure, or this "experiment" is too flawed to deserve the name.
"If the majority of people select the correct target then the trial will count as a hit, otherwise it will count as a miss"
Gah, this only works under the assumption that a large enough population is capable of performing reliably enough. If the "gifted" people are a terribly small subset of the population, or people have an inclination rather than a full on ability, then this would never detect that. Granted the flaws make it biased towards disproving remote viewing, which isn't the direction you'd normally expect something like this to fail, but that is still no excuse!
The only way to reasonably go about something like this is to get a large data set and compare it to what one would expect if people were guessing at random. Getting adequately over 20% should be considered a success, not 50%. Of course, that too assumes they'd get everything else procedurally correct, which at this point I'm disinclined to believe...