Re: [silk] SNAFU and FUBAR
I overlooked only one thing: I have absolutely no sense of direction. After running for an hour, I noticed that Boston was not where I thought it was. After two hours, I was jogging past eerie, deserted factories. After three hours, my world was empty country roads in a pitch-dark blizzard. Peter Levine would have been proud of the way I eventually freaked out, stomping, kicking, and, yes, using strong language. My tantrum freed me to release my expectations of knocking this off in a few hours and accept that I was well and truly lost. This allowed me to narrow my focus to the immediate situation, and I immediately formulated a plan: Retrace my route by following my own footprints. And then there are the studies that find venting increases anger and aggression rather than dousing it! :) http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/6/724 Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding Brad J. Bushman Iowa State University, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Does distraction or rumination work better to diffuse anger? Catharsis theory predicts that rumination works best, but empirical evidence is lacking. In this study, angered participants hit a punching bag and thought about the person who had angered them (rumination group) or thought about becoming physically fit (distraction group). After hitting the punching bag, they reported how angry they felt. Next, they were given the chance to administer loud blasts of noise to the person who had angered them. There also was a no punching bag control group. People in the rumination group felt angrier than did people in the distraction or control groups. People in the rumination group were also most aggressive, followed respectively by people in the distraction and control groups. Rumination increased rather than decreased anger and aggression. Doing nothing at all was more effective than venting anger. These results directly contradict catharsis theory. -- Also: http://www.physorg.com/news91899145.html In study after study, subjects who vented anger against inanimate objects, who vented directly against the person who induced their anger, who vented hostility by playing football or who vented verbally about an employer - all showed more resentment than those who had not vented. In some experiments, venting led to aggression against innocent bystanders. Even those who firmly believed in the value of venting ended up more hostile and aggressive after thumping pillows or engaging in other expressions of anger. What people fail to realize is that the anger would have dissipated had they not vented. Moreover, it would have dissipated more quickly had they not vented and tried to control their anger instead, the researchers wrote. -- Peter Levine, by the way, is apparently the originator of something called Somatic Experiencing which claims that trauma is due to quoteun-discharged survival energy (that) remains stuck in the body and the nervous system./quote[1] Sounds slightly new-age to me! Venky. [1] http://www.traumahealing.com/intro.html
Re: [silk] Wikipedia
On 10/31/07, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 10/31/07, Charles Haynes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Shrug. Wikipedia isn't perfect, the criticisms are valid, but... so what? Good question. I just have this vague unease that it's becoming a _de facto_ reference, and wanted to spend some cycles in clarifying my own misgivings about it. For many ... generic searches (ie. stockholm) on Google you are directed to Wikipedia. Which indicates... something... which I think lends to that feeling of unease. Personally Wikipedia is a place where I might go to get some general ideas about something, but is by no means a place I actually start my searches for information. The fact that Google points me to Wikipedia indicates at least one of two things: 1.) That other people have linked to Wikipedia based on what I'm searching for. 2.) Google is encouraging people with generic searches like the above to go there. I think either is interesting. I wouldn't say it is bad, but I do think I understand Udhay's unease. Cheers. Casey
[silk] the_new_nostradamus
The New Nostradamus Words By Michael A.M. Lerner Photos By Ethan Hill Can a fringe branch of mathematics forecast the future? A special adviser to the CIA, Fortune 500 companies, and the U.S. Department of Defense certainly thinks so. If you listen to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and a lot of people don't, he'll claim that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. What's more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. Naturally, there is also no shortage of people less fond of his work. Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is, says one colleague. Others think he's a quack. Today, on a rare sunny summer day in San Francisco, Bueno de Mesquita appears to be neither. He's relaxing in his stately home, answering my questions with exceeding politesse. Sunlight streams through the tall windows, the melodic sound of a French horn echoing from somewhere upstairs; his daughter, a musician in a symphony orchestra, is practicing for an upcoming recital. It's all so complacent and genteel, which is exactly what Bueno de Mesquita isn't. As if on cue, a question sets him off. I found it to be offensive, he says about a colleague's critique of his work. This is absolutely, totally, and utterly false, he says about the attack of another. The criticism rankles him, because, to his mind, the proof is right there on the page. I've published a lot of forecasting papers over the years, he says. Papers that are about things that had not yet happened when the paper was published but would happen within some reasonable amount of time. There's a track record that I can point to. And indeed there is. Bueno de Mesquita has made a slew of uncannily accurate predictions—more than 2,000, on subjects ranging from the terrorist threat to America to the peace process in Northern Ireland—that would seem to prove him right. The days of the digital watch are numbered, quipped Tom Stoppard. After spending a few hours with Bueno de Mesquita, you might come to believe that so is everything else. Numbered as in mathematics—more precisely, game theory, an esoteric branch of mathematics used to analyze interaction. Game theory is math for how people behave strategically, Bueno de Mesquita says. Bueno de Mesquita has big ideas, and he's more than happy to put his career on the line for them. Back in March 2004, when al-Qaeda bombed a Madrid train station, influencing the course of Spain's general election three days later, a lot of U.S. security folks were nervous. Worried that al-Qaeda might try something similar here in the run-up to the November, 2004, presidential elections, the Pentagon hired Bueno de Mesquita to run some data through his forecasting model to tell them what to expect. The results were unequivocal. I said there would be no homeland attack. I also indicated that bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, would resurface around Thanksgiving, 2004, he says. Just after the elections in November that year, Zawahiri released a new videotape. Bueno de Mesquita was right on both counts. One of the things government needs most is advice that's not wishy-washy. I try to be as precise as I can. For the record, this man is not some lunatic soothsayer sequestered in a musty, forgotten basement office. He is the chairman of New York University's Department of Politics, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the author of many weighty academic tomes. He regularly consults with the CIA and the Department of Defense—most recently on such hot-button topics as Iran and North Korea—and has a new book coming out in the fall that he cowrote with his pal Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. His curriculum vitae, which details his various Ph.Ds, academic appointments, editorial-board memberships, writings, honors, awards, and grants, runs 17 small-font pages long. He is wildly controversial, though. As one of the foremost scholars of game theory—or rational choice, as its political-science practitioners prefer to call it—Bueno de Mesquita is at the center of a raging hullabaloo that has taken over some of the most prestigious halls of learning in this country. Exclusive, highly complex mathematically, and messianic in its certainty of universal truths, rational-choice theory is not only changing the way political science is taught, but the way it's defined. To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley's more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. We tested Bueno de Mesquita's model on scores of issues that were conducted in real
Re: [silk] the_new_nostradamus
On 11/1/07, Gautam John wrote: The New Nostradamus Words By Michael A.M. Lerner Photos By Ethan Hill Can a fringe branch of mathematics forecast the future? A special adviser to the CIA, Fortune 500 companies, and the U.S. Department of Defense certainly thinks so. It sounds suspiciously like the same department of the US government described in much detail in the book Men who stare at goats : http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1355882,00.html
Re: [silk] the_new_nostradamus
On 11/2/07, shiv sastry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thursday 01 Nov 2007 11:46 pm, Gautam John wrote: A sample of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's wilder—and most accurate—predictions However, more than this gent's prediction successes. I would like to know where he has failed - because that information is just as important. shiv quote from the article: a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. Inaccurate basic input would be his explanation for all the failures? What I would like to know is cases where he too accepts the input data as accurate...and THEN the prediction failed. My father in law,was an amateur astrologer. I still have not been able to figure out, objectively, what was his accuracy was, with forecasts. I think we all tend to remember only the ones which turned out correct and forget the others. But one thing which he used to say was, Astrology is fairly exact, but if the input data were to be flawed, so would the results be. A difference of a few minutes in recording the time of birth could change someone's horoscope, and then it would appear that it is not accurate. I still have a not-completely-closed mind on the ability of astrology (or any other system) to forecast the future, and one reason has been the number of times my father in law was accurate in his predictions, even when they were inconvenient or went counter to what was *likely* to happen. On the other hand, whatever I read about future forecasting, seems to be accurate about what has already happened, but not so accurate about predictions for the future...Jeanne Dixon is one example that springs to mind...and her famous prediction that the Russians would land on the moon first. After every event, so many forecasters crawl out of the woodwork with their I-told-you-sos...but I have yet to see, and trach a forecaster who has been steadily accurate for the past, say, decade or so. Deepa.
