It’s whiteboard pong - apparently from Eness, an Australian “interactive experiences” company. They don’t give anything in the way of details on how it works, but the programming mechanism is fairly obvious. It’s how it’s reading the information on the whiteboard that’s the mystery.
Cool as this is, it also struck me as a particularly boneheaded presentation. For an “interactive experiences” company, they don’t seem to have too much grasp on human (a) attention span and (b) curiosity. The video is only a minute and a half long, demonstrates a bit of cool, mind-blowing technology, and I was already dozing off by the end. There’s just really only so long Pong can fascinate anyone who’s not playing, ESPECIALLY when it’s going this slow and the mechanism is this dumb (honestly - you have to erase your paddle each time???). I think 10-15 seconds would’ve been sufficient to get the point across. And speaking of “the point,” these people also seem to have little appreciation for human curiosity. I mean, fine, watching people play pong on a whiteboard with a projected dot is neato skeeto, but then you want to know what else the thing can do. Obviously there’s no point playing Pong with this kind of mechanism when anyone with a healthy dose of Python can write one of these games in half an hour these days. So you start to naturally wonder - well, what else can it do? What if I drew a box around the ball with a little slit. Would it bounce around until it found its way out? Does it do mazes? Can we program it to understand “gravity,” such that one side of the screen is “down?”
So - Eness gets a gold star for cool device skills, but not for presentation skills.
This looks like fun. The link goes to Steve Winters‘ (formerly here at IU in Pisoni’s lab) presidential picks page. It works like this: the page shows you all 50 states, and you call each one either for Obama or McCain. Then, you rank each state from 1 to 51 (because DC gets to vote too!) based on how confident in your pick you are. So - for example, I gave Wyoming 51 - because I’m really, really sure that one’s going for McCain - and I gave Virginia 1 - because I JUST DON’T KNOW what to think about that one. Your score is the sum of the ranks you gave each state you called right on election day. And if you win you get … an ego boost. And out of a pool of what looks like as many as 6 participants at the moment, it’s some pretty heady bragging rights, let me tell you what.
My general strategy is to rank all the states that seem solid for one candidate or the other high, and then call a couple of states for McCain that probably aren’t really gonna break for him. For example - Ohio, Nevada, Florida. At some point the day before, I switch one of those iffy calls to a really high ranking and hope for the best. Officially, it seems I’m calling the overall election for Obama, though: 286ev for Obama, 252ev for McCain. You need 270 to win, so that means Obama by a hair. I guess the actual spread will be a little bigger than that (since not all of my McCain states will really go for McCain - that’s just a strategy to win the game) - but I do think the election will be closer than current polls suggest, even if there’s not much ground to doubt at this point that Obama’s going to win. That predicted landslide just ain’t comming.
I got a 43 - out of what I guess is a possible 70. I missed none of the native speaker accents, and got the city bonus on just over half (56%) of them. I’m pretty weak on foreign accents, though, having gotten 63% of those wrong.
Silly? Sure. But hey, who knows where this kind of nostalgia comes from? I have only vague memories of us having a rotary phone in the late 70s, but that doesn’t stop me “missing” them.
This is making something of a splash on the internets. It’s a study that shows that people’s perceptions of “fairness” are different depending on whether they judge from an abstract or contextualized perspective.
It works like this. A group of subjects were asked whether they agreed that it was fair that genetically-advantaged people make more money than others. This is the “abstract” perspective. Another group of subjects was told a story about two girls who both aggressively pursued (in the sense of taking appropriate lessons and spending appropriate amounts of time practicing) careers as jazz singers, but one is more successful than the other because she has a naturally greater vocal range. This is the “contextualized” perspective.
Surprisingly, subjects who were given the abstract question said that it was not fair, but subjects who were given the concrete question said that it actually was fair!
I fail to see what’s “surprising” about this. As Michael Giberson points out in the comments, it’s a question of inputs and outputs. In the “abstract” perspective, the input is innate ability and the output is level of success. In the “contextualized” perspective, however, the inputs also include effort, which makes a bit of a difference on our judgements. Though presented as “the same situation from different perspectives,” it isn’t clear at all that these are the same situation from the point of view of the subject. It seems more likely that the same “fairness” function is being applied in both cases but to perceptually distinct situations. The second is true-to-life, whereas the first is a bit like playing Dungeons and Dragons and letting your charisma rolls do all the talking for you.
What’s interesting about this to me isn’t so much the results of the experiment but the framing of it. In all tests of economic “fairness” that I’ve ever read about, the experiment is focused solely on the job-seekers. This case is no different. But actually, there are (many) more than two people involved here. It isn’t just a question of who puts effort into what, it’s also a question of everyone who pays to attend their shows. The people who fork over cash for tickets want - and presumably have a right - to pay for the performance they prefer to attend. What would be UNfair from their perspective would be to ration tickets in such a way as to ensure that equal numbers attended each girl’s concerts - say, by issuing tickets on the basis of lottery, or putting a freeze on the more successful girl’s concerts until the less successful one had “caught up,” or whatever. It may, in some sense, be “unfair” that a girl who wants to be the number one jazz singer can’t be because her genes won’t cooperate, but in the larger, more global sense, it’s quite fair that money flows to the person that people most want to hear sing. That is, that the market provides a greater incentive to that person to continue performing than it does to the person the public is somewhat less interested in hearing.
In particular, the framing of this study reveals a number of biases about “fairness” in economics/politics that people need to be more aware of.
(1) If someone wants to “win” and is willing to work for it, people seem to assume they’re somehow entitled to. But how is that fair to other people who want to “win?” It’s inconsistent with the concept of “top” that two people could ever both be the top jazz singer, and that being the case, we shouldn’t think of it in terms of entitlement. More specifically, “top” is a social, rather than an individual, function, and thinking of it in terms of an individual’s desires without reference to the voting public is inappropriate.
(2) There is a distinction between being a good jazz singer and being a successful performer that is being confused here. In particular, the experiment seems to assume that the public makes “rational” assessments of what makes a good jazz singer (they prefer the girl with greater range, etc.). But we know that public tastes aren’t generally so easily explicable. Should we, to put a fine point on it, consider it “unfair” to the skilled jazz singer that the public, by and large, prefers pop singers with narrower range to jazz singers with more impressive range? And if we demand that the public prefer singers with greater range and training, then shouldn’t we require that opera be more popular than jazz? Is it “unfair” to opera performers that jazz singers are more popular, and in turn “unfair” to jazz performers that pop singers are more popular? Obviously this line of reasoning is absurd. Even if people (apparently) think that effort entitles one to be the “top” jazz singer or the “top” muscial performer, surely no one believes anyone is entitled to be both at the same time! The skillsets involved in being the most popular musical performer and the best jazz singer are distinct. Pointedly, it’s not only that they’re distinct, but that no one is entirely sure what either of them is. Being a good performer and a good musician are NOT the same thing, and while being a good musician is judged according to a set of criteria that are a bit better understood than the criteria of what makes a good performer, we’re still a very long way from saying what makes someone a “good” musician for all people across all contexts! All of this is in large degree in the eye of the beholder - as is, one hastens to add, the degree to which being a “good” musician is even associated with being a good performer in the first place. Absent a clear checklist of what is required for success, it’s a bit silly to judge entitlement on the basis of “effort.”
(3) This whole getup depends on these girls’ arbitrary desires to be successful jazz singers. We might as well turn the whole thing on its head and ask why it’s “fair” for the girl with the lesser vocal range to want such a thing, given that she can’t ever be the best at it. In these cases, people generally talk about people “not being fair to themselves” in harboring desires not commensurate with their abilities.
I think what this study tells us is that “fair” is a concept that doesn’t generalize well to complex situaitons. It’s fine for the preschool playground, when the “economy” is that the teacher owns all the toys and rations who gets to play with what when, but it doesn’t apply so well to large-scale economies of autonomous individuals with full right of choice. This is what our teachers and parents are preparing us for by telling us that “life isn’t always fair.” But it might be more helpful for them to additionally teach us that it isn’t so much that life isn’t always fair but just that there’s a point beyond which fairness ceases to matter or even be detectable. To use Giberson’s terms, there’s a point beyond which the system is so complex that it’s impossible to even track, much less manage the outputs of, the manifold of variables.
An interesting sociological experiment. Reps from moneysupermarket.com walked the streets of London and Manchester with signs offering a free 5-pound giveaway. All you had to do was ask, and the guy wearing the sandwich sign would hand you a fiver, no questions, no strings.
The point of the survey was to demonstrate financial inertia in Britain. People are unwilling to do anything about their credit situation, even when help is free.
Maybe.
But I’m gonna go with this explanation:
Six in ten people say they their cynicism would prevent them from asking for free cash as they would suspect a catch or trick.
That’s me too. I wouldn’t take $10 from a stranger on the street for mostly that reason. In second place for me is a disincentive to take “free” money. I believe I should earn my dosh - but I’m also aware of being more willing to take free money if it’s in small sums than in large sums (with inheritance from relatives being an exception). Apparently that reason is roughly 10 percent of respondants to a later poll.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Men are more likely than women to take the money. Of the 28 people who took the guy up on his offer, 21 were men and 7 were women. This corresponds to responses to the followup survey (in which participants were asked what their response would be to a hypothetical situation of this kind) in which 64 percent of women said they would turn down the offer compared with just 41 percent of men.
I’m curious what the reasoning is? I can think of two explanations. First - golddigger stereotypes are flat wrong, and women are less likely to want the unearned than men. Second - women are warier of strangers than men, especially when offers involve “no strings attached.” They are, after all, the ones who get their drinks bought for them in bars. Unfortunately, no data were provided for rationale for refusing the money by demographic group.
A cool new tool from Google - the walk score. Put in an address, and it tells you how “walkable” your neighborhood is. That is, how convenient is it to be a pedestrian there? On a scale of 1 to 100, of course.
Where I live now gets a 38. Where I used to live in North Carolina gets a 34. So, not a significant change. And yet, I feel it’s much more convenient to get what I need walking here than it was in Charlotte.
I’m not usually one for paparazzi reports, but this is some very encouraging news. It seems Matt Damon was spotted at a coffee shop test-driving a Tesla Roadster, which I have blogged about before. It’s to be the first “cool” green car - a $90k sportscar (actually, a variant of the Lotus Elise) that runs entirely on battery power. At the equivalent of about 135mpg, it’s certainly efficient. The only thing keeping the rest of us from buying one is the price.
The report is that Damon is impressed and will probably buy one. I hope so. The more celebs seen in these things, the “cooler” they become, and Tesla is actually banking on the cool factor for reinvestment capital in a more affordable line.