I stumbled across Unskilled and Unaware of It, and thought it was a rather interesting read. It is a summary of psychological research at Cornell on self-assessment. An oversimplification is that pretty much everyone considers themselves to be slightly above average, while in actuality may be at either end of the scale. Like I said though, that doesn't really tell the whole story, so I'd recommend reading it. They even quoted (sorta) Jefferson's "He who knows best knows how little he knows."
I was thinking while reading it that we could all be idiots and not have a clue. Thus one of the best parts of the article was this sentence in the closing remarks. "Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish."
On a more serious note though, I find the whole topic rather interesting. There is some hypothesis about correlation with physical impairment and brain's interpretation of no problem. I don't really think it's that surprising though. No other system can really be designed to properly evaluate performance without having information on what that performance should entail. I think it's something to really keep in mind while learning new things.
Saw this and had to grab it. "Is that how you — I was practicing all night. Pretty good, huh?"
Rather unfortunate for Microsoft, but also for people who use their software. He was always out explaining what and why of Windows security to groups of people. Should be interesting to see what happens in that regard with Microsoft in the future.
Monopoly Here and Now Electronic Banking. It's a newish UK version available here. They've apparently dropped the cash completely, and switched to using debit cards and the banker controls the machine to and and remove value.
Scoble posted links to Senator Ted Stevens: The Remix, and Senator Ted Stevens' InterTubes.
I found this article somewhat interesting. Apparently they found that having a mobile phone at the max power (which is higher there than in the US) next to ones head for an hour can hurt reaction time, but improve working memory. So you can calculate, sort and map better (provided it's more complex - just sorting numbers and it's worse), but your driving gets worse. And that's before the conversation is in the equation. They do talk about a lot of previous studies and how inconsistent they've been. There were tests going both ways, no change, and even one with differences based on gender. Of course they talked about how this one was a larger sample, double blind and had a better washout.
I'd have to think too hard and remember too much stats to figure out the relative significance, but I found it interesting how much the values changed from the pre-testing to testing during both real and placebo exposures. It seems that strapping an object to one's head and/or thinking that there may be RF energy having an effect on the brain was way more significant than whether the phone was active. At that point I don't think I really care about the results of the test for the short term significance.
More on the whole Ted Stevens/Network Neutrality thing.
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
