Contact Lens Monitors

The ultimate in wearable computers. It is interesting to witness the process of science fiction becoming science fact.

Brain Teasers 6

Got this one here at Sharp Brains. It is called party for polyglots written by Wes Carrol. Enjoy.

'Of the 100 peo­ple at a recent party, 90 spoke Span­ish, 80 spoke Ital­ian, and 75 spoke Man­darin. At least how many spoke all three languages?'

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Hopefully this useless text that I am now writing is enough to keep your peripheral vision from accidentally picking up the answer. The answer is 45. The explanation is '10 could not speak Spanish, 20 could not speak Italian, and 25 could not speak Mandarin. So there could have been 10 people who spoke none of those languages. However, that would maximize the number of people who could speak all three, and the problem asks at least how many speak all three. Therefore, we must assume that these 10, 20, and 25 people are all separate people. Having identified 55 each of whom is missing one language, the remaining 45 speak all three.

First Generation Holodeck?

Well maybe it is a long way off from the Star Trek holodeck but it is amazing technology from Microsoft Research.

Reductio ad absurdum

Reductio ad absurdum (reduction to the absurd) is a logical argument where you accept some proposed hypothesis for the sake of argument, arrive at some absurd result, and then conclude that the original hypothesis cannot be true since it leads to the incorrect result.  The argument makes use of the law of non-contradiction which says that a law cannot be both true and false.

For example, if John says 'Raising tax rates always brings in more revenue for the government, I could respond with a reductio ad absurdum saying 'Lets imagine that the government raises taxes to 100%.  Then people would have no incentive to work thus leading to less production and lower tax revenues.'

Though the reductio ad absurdum is a legitimate logical argument, you have to be aware of when it is being used against you to simply win a debate.  Using the above example, perhaps John really only was arguing that taxes should be raised to a higher level than what they are currently at.  To respond to my reductio ad absurdum, he needs to rework his original statement.  Perhaps he might say that he misspoke with his original statement and he believes that raising tax rates an additional 10% would increase tax revenues.

Corning: A Day Made Of Glass 2

Here is the sequel to Corning's A Day Mad Of Glass.

Flexible Screens

I remember back in the early 90's reading an article in Mondo 2000 where the writer (Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling) predicted that computers may one day take on the form of a fabric like material which when not being used, would take on the role of a decorative piece of clothing such as a scarf or tie.  Though this has not yet become a reality, we are quickly approaching the point where this sort of technology will be achieved.  For instance, we will soon see a wave of devices utilizing flexible screen technology similar to this:

It will be interesting to see what new and inventive ways this technology will be utilized.

Outcome Bias

Outcome bias is the tendency to judge a decision by its outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.  This is an unfair method of judgement since the person evaluating the decision knows what the outcome of the decision was while the decision maker did not have this information at the time the decision was made.

Probably the most famous paper on the subject was written by Baron and Hershey in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1988) titled Outcome Bias in Decision Evaluation.(1)  They hypothesized that outcome  bias may exist because the "generally useful heuristic of evaluating decisions according to their outcomes might be overgeneralized to situations where it is inappropriate. It might be learned as a rigid rule, perhaps from seeing punishment meted out for bad outcomes resulting from reasonable decisions."

To test their theory, they devised a set of 5 experiments. For example, one of the experiments involved a questionnaire of 15 medical decisions the subjects were asked to evaluate.  For instance, one of the questions was:

"A 55 year old man had a heart condition. He had to stop working because of chest pain. He enjoyed his work and did not want to stop. His pain also interfered with other things, such as travel and recreation.
A type of bypass operation would relieve his pain and increase his life expectancy from age 65 to age 70. However, 8% of the people who have this operation die from the operation itself.² His physician decided to go ahead with the operation. The operation succeeded.
Evaluate the physician's decision to go ahead with the operation."

Another question in the questionnaire asked essentially the same question with the same probabilities but with the operation resulting in the death of the patient.

The results were that they found consistent outcome bias in all five experiments.



(1) http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/papers.htm/judg.html

http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/08-080.pdf

How The Mighty Fall: A Blade Runner Retrospective

Though not a financial success, Blade Runner has become a major sci-fi cult classic. Released in 1982 the film's plot takes place in a dystopian future Los Angeles.  For the early eighties, the visuals were stunning and in my humble opinion are still quite amazing even by today's standards.  The city is dark, crowded and polluted with a mixture of both decaying old buildings and new modern architectural behemoths.  Featured on the sides of these buildings, as well as on the streets, are advertisements for various mega-corporations such as Atari, Pan Am, Coca-Cola, Polaroid, Cuisinart, Hilton, RCA, Toshiba, etc.

At the time the movie was released, these were all major corporations and it would have been easy to envision there continued success well into the future.  But unfortunately for most, the real world was not as kind to many of the companies as their fictional futures presented in the movie.  Pan Am, which was the largest international air carrier in the United States when Blade Runner was released, declared bankruptcy in 1991.  In the late 70's and early 80's, Atari was king of  home video gaming consoles.  Yet by the early 90's it had suffered a number of huge loss years and was repeatedly bought and sold.  Now it really only lives on in memory.  Such fates also fell upon Polaroid, Cuisinart and RCA. When I think of today's top companies, names like Walmart, Apple, Starbucks and Google come to mind. Though they now seem like unstoppable titans, I wonder how many of them will be gone twenty or thirty years from now as competitive pressure forces them out in order to make way for the new kids on the block?