A woman parked her brand-new Lexus in front of her office ready to show it off to her colleagues. As she got out, a truck passed too close and completely tore off the door on the driver's side. The woman immediately grabbed her cell phone, dialed 911, and within minutes a policeman pulled up. Before the officer had a chance to ask any questions, the woman started screaming hysterically.
Her Lexus, which she had just picked up the day before, was now completely ruined and would never be the same, no matter what the body shop did to it. When the woman finally wound down from her ranting and raving, the officer shook his head in disgust and disbelief. "I can't believe how materialistic you women are," he said. "You are so focused on your possessions that you don't notice anything else."
"How can you say such a thing?" asked the woman.
The cop replied, "Don't you know that your right arm is missing from the elbow down? It must have been torn off when the truck hit you."
"OH MY GOD!" screamed the woman. "Where's my new bracelet !!!"
Showing posts with label whacky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label whacky. Show all posts
Friday, July 2, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Measuring the Observer Expectancy Effect
If you are performing an experiment in which you tell the participant what you are expecting, then this biases the result due to placebo effect. This is the observer expectancy effect. How can you measure this? Intuitively, the solution seems simple. Do the experiment twice, in the first, tell the participant about the expected outcomes and in the second don't tell him anything about the experiment. Then, you measure the difference in outcomes to calculate the variance introduced due to observer expectancy effect. But, is that accurate?
Lets consider a simple example. Suppose you are to create stress relief program. How would you measure if stress is relived or not? If you tell your subjects that they were participating in stress relief program, placebo effect will come into account and you cannot truly determine if the reduction in stress is actually due to the program you created. If you don't tell anyone about anything, including researchers and participants, you can get rid of the observer expectancy effect. This is the Double Blind trial strategy.
Coming back to the original question, if you do the experiment twice, one with the expectancy effect and another using double blind strategy and consider the difference in performance, do we then have the measure of observer expectancy?
The answer is NO because in both the experiments the state of the participant is different. To be accurate, you'll have to conduct both the experiments in which the researchers, participants and in fact the entire universe is in the same state, i.e., do both the experiments simultaneously, which obviously doesn't work out.
How else can we go about this problem? First we start by formalizing the problem, making it concise. For simplicity, let us consider a single participant. In a given experiment, let the state of the participant be Sp (could involve factors such as personality etc..) and the state of everything else be Se (state of the environment, ideally the entire universe, but a local region would suffice). Therefore, the state of an experiment can be defined by the Tuple (Sp, Se).
Now, perform N experiments with blind trial strategy, each represented by different tuples (S1p, S1e) ... (Snp, Sne) You can now build a regression model to determine the the outcome of the experiment as a function of Se and Sp, after collecting data from sufficiently large number of experiments.
Now we can apply the strategy discussed before. We perform experiment with double blind trial with parameters (S1e, S1p). The second experiment (with expectancy effect) with parameters (S2e, S2p). We can now extrapolate the outcomes of first experiment if parameters S2e and S2p were used instead of S1e and S1p. Since, both the experiments are now virtually conducted simultaneously, we can now determine the observer expectancy effect by computing the difference in outcome.
More accurate the regression model, better is the accuracy of the observer expectancy. With few obvious modifications, one can also build a model to estimate observer expectancy as a function of experiment, Se and Sp.
On a second thought, who gives a damn? If the stress relief program works, be it due to expectancy, that's all we really care about.
Lets consider a simple example. Suppose you are to create stress relief program. How would you measure if stress is relived or not? If you tell your subjects that they were participating in stress relief program, placebo effect will come into account and you cannot truly determine if the reduction in stress is actually due to the program you created. If you don't tell anyone about anything, including researchers and participants, you can get rid of the observer expectancy effect. This is the Double Blind trial strategy.
Coming back to the original question, if you do the experiment twice, one with the expectancy effect and another using double blind strategy and consider the difference in performance, do we then have the measure of observer expectancy?
The answer is NO because in both the experiments the state of the participant is different. To be accurate, you'll have to conduct both the experiments in which the researchers, participants and in fact the entire universe is in the same state, i.e., do both the experiments simultaneously, which obviously doesn't work out.
How else can we go about this problem? First we start by formalizing the problem, making it concise. For simplicity, let us consider a single participant. In a given experiment, let the state of the participant be Sp (could involve factors such as personality etc..) and the state of everything else be Se (state of the environment, ideally the entire universe, but a local region would suffice). Therefore, the state of an experiment can be defined by the Tuple (Sp, Se).
Now, perform N experiments with blind trial strategy, each represented by different tuples (S1p, S1e) ... (Snp, Sne) You can now build a regression model to determine the the outcome of the experiment as a function of Se and Sp, after collecting data from sufficiently large number of experiments.
Now we can apply the strategy discussed before. We perform experiment with double blind trial with parameters (S1e, S1p). The second experiment (with expectancy effect) with parameters (S2e, S2p). We can now extrapolate the outcomes of first experiment if parameters S2e and S2p were used instead of S1e and S1p. Since, both the experiments are now virtually conducted simultaneously, we can now determine the observer expectancy effect by computing the difference in outcome.
More accurate the regression model, better is the accuracy of the observer expectancy. With few obvious modifications, one can also build a model to estimate observer expectancy as a function of experiment, Se and Sp.
On a second thought, who gives a damn? If the stress relief program works, be it due to expectancy, that's all we really care about.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
How to solve puzzles
I recently came across this puzzle called as frog leap. Its an interesting puzzle, so, I sat down trying to solve it. I quickly lost my patience, and being a computer science student, decided to write an AI to solve it. It just took me 20 minutes to write an AI that solves this puzzle! boy am i glad not to have wasted my time thinking about the puzzle.
I decided to go ahead an start a project that allows you to solve single player puzzles such as "Sudoku", "Rubik's cube", "Missionaries and Cannibals problem", the notorious euclidean traveling salesman problem etc.. Its called JSimpleAI and is open sourced @ java.net. I currently implemented TSP and Frog Leap solvers as demos. I'll be more than happy if any of you are interested in implementing suduko, rubiks cube etc..For the algorithmically oriented, you can implement SMA* algorithm. Think about the number of people that can benefit from this!
I decided to go ahead an start a project that allows you to solve single player puzzles such as "Sudoku", "Rubik's cube", "Missionaries and Cannibals problem", the notorious euclidean traveling salesman problem etc.. Its called JSimpleAI and is open sourced @ java.net. I currently implemented TSP and Frog Leap solvers as demos. I'll be more than happy if any of you are interested in implementing suduko, rubiks cube etc..For the algorithmically oriented, you can implement SMA* algorithm. Think about the number of people that can benefit from this!
I am very proud of the project logo that i chose:
It shows the search landscape and the local optima's. Cool isn't it!In case you're wondering about the solution for frog leap, there are two of them. Here is a screenshot from JSimpleAI. It took 0 secs to solve it! Why dont you go ahead and try writing a code to solve missionaries and cannibals problem? It'll be fun
Monday, January 11, 2010
The irony..
A Japanese fisher man loves to fish. He sells just enough fish to pay for his bills; and enjoys a happy family life since his fishing does not take up all his time. A business man comes along, shakes his head and suggests that the fisher man buys a boat, hires men and fishes in deeper waters. That way, he advises, the fisherman can catch more fish... See More, make more money, and in turn buy more boats and hire even more men!
The fisher man asks, "for what reason would I do such a thing?" The businessman smiles and says that once he has established a thriving business, he has then the option to sell it so that he can live a more leisurely life; perhaps spend more time with his family and hobbies. The fisherman smiles and says – "I already have that now…why would I waste time walking in circles only to come back to where I am now?"
The fisher man asks, "for what reason would I do such a thing?" The businessman smiles and says that once he has established a thriving business, he has then the option to sell it so that he can live a more leisurely life; perhaps spend more time with his family and hobbies. The fisherman smiles and says – "I already have that now…why would I waste time walking in circles only to come back to where I am now?"
Friday, June 5, 2009
My theory on time travel...
Already tortured people by giving this presentation back in my 8th semester...here goes:
I have two solid conclusions:
1) Its possible to view past.
2) Not possible to travel back in past or is a very bad idea!
1st assumption is an easy one to crack...you see this phenomenon every day (every night actually). Just look up at the sky...see the stars. What u actually see is the past. That star might have died by now...since it is 100's of light years away...what you're actually seeing is 100 light years backward.
As for the 2nd assumption...lets start with the hypothesis that it is possible to travel to past. Now imagine that you do something to trigger the death of your past self...It means that you never took the path that led you to travel back to the past, a direct contradiction.
so let us now suppose that its not possible to kill your past self. It might mean that your consciousness might merge with the past self and u forget everything about the future u came from...meaning that in future u again do the same time travel thingy., come back to past. Dude, you're now stuck in an indefinite loop.
Third option, according to string theory, every universe represents a possibility. suppose u travel in past and do something different it means that you have shifted the future timeline to a new parallel universe...meaning that u effectively destroyed the current universe and connected the future events to another one...destruction of a universe...certainly sounds like a bad idea!
Crazy comments are most welcome!!
I have two solid conclusions:
1) Its possible to view past.
2) Not possible to travel back in past or is a very bad idea!
1st assumption is an easy one to crack...you see this phenomenon every day (every night actually). Just look up at the sky...see the stars. What u actually see is the past. That star might have died by now...since it is 100's of light years away...what you're actually seeing is 100 light years backward.
As for the 2nd assumption...lets start with the hypothesis that it is possible to travel to past. Now imagine that you do something to trigger the death of your past self...It means that you never took the path that led you to travel back to the past, a direct contradiction.
so let us now suppose that its not possible to kill your past self. It might mean that your consciousness might merge with the past self and u forget everything about the future u came from...meaning that in future u again do the same time travel thingy., come back to past. Dude, you're now stuck in an indefinite loop.
Third option, according to string theory, every universe represents a possibility. suppose u travel in past and do something different it means that you have shifted the future timeline to a new parallel universe...meaning that u effectively destroyed the current universe and connected the future events to another one...destruction of a universe...certainly sounds like a bad idea!
Crazy comments are most welcome!!
My theory of good and bad
Pardon me for the language folks, but i think good and bad is BULL CRAP! Here's what i believe...
Some clever saint/person must have thought of this idea to keep things in control...so that the world doesn't go chaotic.
Just think of this for a moment...U say that a good thing is good because if gives u the internal satisfaction or whatever. You know what i think...i feel its because of the society/environment you're brought up in. Imagine a society where they'd preach that hurting some one is a good thing. In that case, hurting someone may give u that internal satisfaction...just like the way animals kill each other...no moral code whatsoever.
So in conclusion...there is no good and bad. Its human invented! Don't get the wrong idea, im not telling u to become bad or something. Its just my option...thought it was interesting and shared it!
Some clever saint/person must have thought of this idea to keep things in control...so that the world doesn't go chaotic.
Just think of this for a moment...U say that a good thing is good because if gives u the internal satisfaction or whatever. You know what i think...i feel its because of the society/environment you're brought up in. Imagine a society where they'd preach that hurting some one is a good thing. In that case, hurting someone may give u that internal satisfaction...just like the way animals kill each other...no moral code whatsoever.
So in conclusion...there is no good and bad. Its human invented! Don't get the wrong idea, im not telling u to become bad or something. Its just my option...thought it was interesting and shared it!
Give...dont expect things back!
Expectation is your worst enemy. Always help...if possible go out of the way to help others. I believe in karma and have a belief that whatever u do comes back to you. Please don't expect things in return...I have seem many people getting hurt because of this. Just take the happiness as a return gift for the moment. In the worst of times, the favor will return by itself!
Afterall they're humans too!
Were there times when u get scared of your boss, faculty, giving presentations? Just remember this one thing, bottom line they're also humans...just like us. They have also made mistakes and must have been nervous at some point.
Just imagine yourself in their position. Would have just laughed it off wouldn't you? So just tell them whatever it is that you're so hesitant about. Want a pay raise...wouldn't agree with their ideas, SPEAK OUT! At the most what will happen? You may get fired or ridiculed at...but will always be happy that you did the RIGHT THING!...In the end its the satisfaction that matters.
Just imagine yourself in their position. Would have just laughed it off wouldn't you? So just tell them whatever it is that you're so hesitant about. Want a pay raise...wouldn't agree with their ideas, SPEAK OUT! At the most what will happen? You may get fired or ridiculed at...but will always be happy that you did the RIGHT THING!...In the end its the satisfaction that matters.
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