» Strange Tales How to Spot a Psychopath

NOBODY SAY ANYTHING ABOUT THIS SECRET MICROSOFT SURVEY, OK?

3 July 2009 — dan

This looked like another boring spammy e-mail asking me to link to a site full of crap or post someone's ready-made advertorial in return for a kickback, but it turned out to be a lot more entertaining.

From: Strickman Ripps <sri-australia@live.com>
To: <dan@dansdata.com>
Subject: Hey Dan, what about this idea?
Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 16:32:40 -0400

Hi Dan. My name is Jeremiah Pietroniro and I am working with Strickman Research out of NYC. We are looking for people who have made suggestions about operating systems in forums over the course of the last few years. We think that your readers might be just the people we're looking for. If you are interested in posting something to get their attention and get them to speak with us, we have a proposal for you.

I've included a form letter that explains in greater detail what and who I am talking about. Thanks for taking a moment to check it out.

Jeremiah

Subject: Research Proposal

Dear Administrator:

My name is Jeremiah Pietroniro and I am with Strickman Research in New York City. We have been hired by Microsoft to conduct a paid, international blog and forum research study, finding people who have commented on various versions of their Windows OS. You have probably already been contacted by Microsoft about this research study. We are looking for people who have previously made suggestions or expressed their wishes about certain features or functions they would like to see in future versions of Windows and/or features that they currently appreciate in the Windows 7 Beta.

We are wondering if we could pay you for your assistance in reaching out to your site users? We would like to find these people by announcing our search in a system-wide email to all your users. In order to preserve the integrity of our findings, we must withhold Microsoft's name from this study. We kindly ask for your understanding and cooperation in this. It is imperative that Microsoft's name not appear in any further written or verbal communication.

We are proposing a $500 US up-front payment to your website (via Paypal) for sending out our call for submissions by email to all your users. (Please see the text of our proposed email below.*) You would receive an additional $25 US per person for each person from your site that qualifies for and participates in our research video interview, for which they would be paid $100 US.

We realize that privacy is a concern and can assure you that any respondents who choose to participate will only be contacted in connection with this project and their personal information will not be stored or shared for any other purpose.

We thank you for your consideration and for providing such a great platform for the tech community.

Please let me know your thoughts about this proposal or any facet of our project. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Jeremiah Pietroniro
Strickman Research
66 W. Broadway #602
New York, NY 10007
australia@strickman-ripps.com

Proposed e-mail from Hosts to Members

Subject: your opinion + 20 minutes = $100

Dear Member:

Strickman Research, a marketing research firm, has contacted us for assistance in reaching out to you with this invitation to participate in a paid research study. If you qualify for the study, they would ask for no more than 20 minutes of your time and would pay you $100 US:

What are we researching?

We are looking for people who have left comments on various blogs and forums about operating system software they've used. We are looking for people who have previously "published" their suggestions online and expressed their wishes for certain features or functions they would like to see in future versions of various PC operating systems. Such comments can run the gamut from very technical to very broad, for instance comments like: "I wish it would boot faster." or "How can I share files between my home computers?" would suffice. The wishes and suggestions can be implied in a question where one is hoping to find a solution to a particular problem.

We are looking for comments published online between 1/2005 – 12/2008. More recent, positive assessments of newer operating systems published in 2009 may also be pertinent.

How do I participate?

If you left a written comment on a blog, forum or informational website which was, broadly speaking, a suggestion or wish for a certain feature or function you would like to see improved in your computer's operating system, please find your specific comment or comments online and paste the address/es in an email to us at australia@strickman-ripps.com

Please include:

1. The link to your comment/s including the date when it/they was/were posted

2. Your username on that/those site/s

3. Full name

4. Email address

5. Phone number

6. Location (CityState/Country)

7. Best time to be reached

What should I expect?

Once we have received your email, and reviewed your comment/s, a representative from Strickman Research will contact you by phone to ask you a few qualifying questions. This call will take no more than 10 minutes of your time. If you qualify (95% of applicants should qualify) we will schedule you for a recorded internet video chat at your convenience that would take no more than 20 minutes of your time and for which you would be paid $100 US in the form of a VISA cash card.

What if I don't qualify?

If you do not meet the criteria for our research study, we will most likely let you know in the first few minutes of our phone call. We will not trouble you any further and we will not store or share you contact information.

What if I have other questions?

Please email us. We look forward to hearing from you.

Many thanks for your consideration,

Jeremiah Pietroniro
Strickman Research
66 W. Broadway #602
New York, NY 10007
www.strickman-ripps.com

Insert movie times and more without leaving Hotmail®. See how.

(That's right - Mr Pietroniro is sending his super-secret big-buck Microsoft marketing messages from a Hotmail account.)

My favourite part is definitely "...to preserve the integrity of our findings ... It is imperative that Microsoft's name not appear".

I really don't know what to make of this. It's weird. I mean, even ignoring the DON'T TELL ANYBODY IT'S COMMISSIONED BY MICROSOFT OMG part for a moment, look at the bizarrely huge payouts they're offering. You usually only see promised rewards of this magnitude in classic "Make Money By Filling Out Surveys!" scams.

"95% of applicants should qualify", times the number of applicants even moderately popular sites like mine could drum up in response to a "$US100 for a 20 minute survey" offer, would start running into the millions of dollars in only a day or two. All you need to make it past the starting gate, after all, is a comment on a forum somewhere in which you express your wish that future operating systems will include one of those fascinating doughnut-making machines. Write your comment, e-mail the survey people, wait for your promised 95% chance of making $US100 in 20 minutes.

Perhaps Strickman Research only have enough people in their phone bank to handle a small number of surveys a day, which'd keep the total cost down. But then, of course, a more accurate description of the deal would be that "99% of applicants will never even get a call".

(The payment, via "Visa cash card", may be on the dodgy side too; those things are apparently often something of a rip-off all by themselves, and I've no idea how, or even if, the deal would work for people outside the USA.)

Keeping the identity of the sponsor a secret is not actually, by itself, an ethical problem. You need to disclose who sponsored a survey if and when you publicly release the results, but there's no need to disclose the sponsor to the people being surveyed - actually, disclosing the sponsor can often prejudice the results. This especially applies in situations like political polling, where telling someone that the survey is being run by the party they hate, or indeed by the party they love, may plausibly cause them to say things they don't really believe just to move the poll results one way or another. (This is kind of the opposite of a "push poll"; there's a lengthy analysis of these issues here.)

This same argument definitely also applies to people's computer-operating-system preferences. There are plenty of people who have a more distinct preference for a particular OS than they have for any political party.

But then again, people are perfectly happy to offer Microsoft advice on improving Windows for free, all the time, all over the place. This offer is only extended to people who've already expressed such an opinion, and I find it hard to believe that just being honest and saying "Microsoft is soliciting user feedback about features you'd like to see in future versions of Windows" wouldn't be just as effective.

Do they really think they'll gain access to some wellspring of OS-design inspiration by offering large amounts of money from a secret source?

Actually, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing turned out to be some kind of scam, that doesn't actually have anything to do with Microsoft at all. While fishing around to see what the heck is going on, I found this blog post, from someone who just received an instant message from another "Strickman Ripps" person. That blogger has, I think not unreasonably, decided the message could be from a scam artist, based on this same weird promise of lots of money for no real effort, from someone with another darn Hotmail address.

Even if this really is a genuine offer from a rather unprofessional company whose services Microsoft have actually retained, offering someone a substantial lump of money in return for (a) publicity and (b) keeping something about the publicity deal secret... that just smells wrong, to me.

Accepting restrictions on journalistic freedom in return for "access" to news sources is bad enough. Accepting restrictions in return for a plain old pile of money is way over the line.

I'm not suggesting that some survey about computer operating systems is a major journalistic-ethics battleground. I think it's actually only a couple of notches above the everyday situation where entertainment reporters can have their very own five-minute interview with Mister Big Movie Star, on condition that they don't ask him anything about his bizarre religion.

But I'm generally in favour of letting cats out of bags. Especially if some PR agency with an advanced Web site demands that the cats remain within said bag.

That $500 would have been a nice contribution to my new-PC fund. But it now occurs to me that you readers can all pretend you read about the deal somewhere else and never saw the word "Microsoft" anywhere, then write an OS-feature-suggestion comment on your favourite scrapbooking or Twilight fanfic forum, then apply for your 95%-guaranteed hundred bucks, and after you get your money, kick back a little of it to me!

What could possibly go wrong?!

Posted in Shop talk, Strange Tales. 22 Comments »

If only Steorn had been taking bets

29 June 2009 — dan

To the surprise of absolutely nobody - well, OK, maybe to the surprise of some of the more enthusiastic editors at PESWiki - perpetual-motion-machine-makers Steorn haven't managed to demonstrate that their machine is any better than the thousands of other useless perpetual-motion machines.

There's a little more to this story, though. Steorn did not follow the standard script of the perpetual-motion scam artist, in which you make sure, at all costs, that nobody ever gets to examine your machine.

Instead, Steorn for some reason allowed actual scientists to examine their gadget. Those scientists have, predictably, now concluded that it doesn't bloody work.

This won't make any difference, of course. Perpetual motion, like magic car-enhancing gadgets and pills, is an evergreen scam. There'll be another one along in a minute.

(I particularly like commenter adipocere's modest proposal, on that Metafilter page, that we should create a Hall Of People Who Thought They Were Smart. Oh, and see also Adam Savage's comment on their preparation for the "Free Energy" tests on MythBusters.)

Posted in Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 10 Comments »

Psychoceramic literature

27 June 2009 — dan

There was me thinking that vanity-published books-by-loonies didn't come any better than the inimitable Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs. (The same author, with her husband, has also written Spicy True Stories, Investigators Lies, Slanders And Stocks. This latter volume is a chronicle of paranoid-delusion which I contend is indeed made more "spicy" by the author's decision to spell the word "stalk" as "stock", throughout the work.)

All that is in the past, though, for I have just this moment - which is to say, a couple of months after a million other people - discovered the landmark work Birth Control Is- I'm sorry, BIRTH CONTROL IS SINFUL IN THE CHRISTIAN MARRIAGES and also ROBBING GOD OF PRIESTHOOD CHILDREN!!, by Ms Eliyza- oh, darn it, I made that same mistake again, I meant to say by MS ELIYZABETH YANNE STRONG-ANDERSON.

MS ELIYZABETH would just be another unhinged religious ranter were it not for two decisions on her part.

The first is that she appears to have decided upon a list price for her book of one hundred and fifty US dollars. (Currently on special for only $135!)

The other, a true stroke of genius, is that BIRTH CONTROL IS SINFUL ET CETERA appears to be ENTIRELY IN UPPER CASE. Amazon have a "Look Inside" for the work, which only gives you the usual few pages, but reveals a distinct lack of lower-case anywhere other than the "and also" on the cover, and the text of the copyright page.

Amazon reviewers have rewarded MS ELIYZABETH with the adulation she deserves.

Posted in Books, Language, Religion, Strange Tales. 11 Comments »

Attack Of The Green Slime

22 June 2009 — dan

A few months ago, I built myself a new server and from the outset it had that smell of new electronics breaking in. But the smell never went away. Not a burning smell, more like electrolytic caps. I'm always alert for scorching odour.

Today I needed to open up the system and unplugged its power cord and was surprised to find green slime on the contacts. Admittedly I mated a new power supply with a cord that is probably 10-15 years old.

It has a slight dimple on one face which makes the lettering appear curved in the photo.

Any idea what caused this?

Thanks,

Paul

The green-ness is a dead giveaway that this is one or more copper compounds, from corrosion of the contacts inside and/or the metal of the pins in the IEC socket.

Many copper compounds are green. The "verdigris" that makes the Statue of Liberty green, for instance, is primarily copper (II) carbonate. In the case of your goopy power plug, the wetness of the goop means that if the computer isn't sitting under a roof leak, there must be a hygroscopic (water-attracting) compound in there. That rules out copper carbonate, but there are several other copper compounds that'll suck water out of the air to one degree or another.

I think this process can be self-accelerating - a tiny bit of the hygroscopic compound is formed, it sucks up some water which dampens the area and accelerates the corrosion, and in the case of an electrical contact may further accelerate the reaction by increasing resistance so the area warms up. It's the warm copper compounds and/or plastic that's making the funny smell. It's also possible that outgassing from the plastic of the plug on the back of the new computer, or degeneration of the plastic in the old cord, has contributed to the reaction. Cable insulation is normally made from PVC, which stands for polyvinyl chloride, and every link in the PVC chain has a chlorine atom just waiting to be liberated, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was copper(II) chloride in the slime.

You can see similar green compounds discolouring the edges of copper or copper-alloy fittings in clothing, like riveted jeans or brass belt buckles. The copper compounds form a sticky goop there that's probably based on clothing fibres, sweat and shed skin flakes, all coloured (and flavoured!) by the copper compounds. (I presume hipsters who never wash their jeans develop particularly impressive rings of green goop.)

Fortunately, none of this is a big problem. Just discard the old IEC lead, make sure the pins inside the plug are clean (a pen eraser should be adequate to remove any tarnish), and plug in a new lead.

Posted in Electricity, Strange Tales. 14 Comments »

Geek ink

10 June 2009 — dan

A reader writes:

Just wondering if I could pick your brains (or maybe, more specifically your funny-bone)?

I fancy having a little tattoo done, but have been struggling with what to have permanently etched into my flesh. I've been looking round the web at geeky logos and pictures, scientific equations and symbols, even romantic stuff I could possibly have about the girl I'm marrying in 2 months (not sure about that idea, kids are for life, but divorce can happen after all, haha). Then I hit on the idea of having a funny little "program" or code snippet done, something to insult/amuse the reader. That would be just the right amount of "geek". Doesn't have to be syntactically correct obviously, pseudocode would be fine too. But I'm struggling with it, as I'm no programmer and basically have very poor creative ability.

This is what I've conjured up so far, but I'm not happy with it yet :

TimeInSecs = 0
While YouReadThis = True
AnIdiotIsDistracted = TimeInSecs + 1

See what I mean? Very poor so far I think. It needs a little more, *something* doesn't it... So I know it's an odd request for help, but I thought I'd try my luck, as your writing style always gives me a good laugh and you always seem to help where you can.

Jonathan

I'm not a programmer either, so I can't help you a great deal with code-tattoos, but there's a whole genre of science and other "nerd" tattoos, as you've noticed.

If someone pointed a gun at my head and said "You! Decide on a tattoo for yourself in five seconds, or die!", then I would immediately nominate the "Hacker Emblem" glider, with or without the grid-lines. At the moment that symbol is tainted with the egotistical aroma of Stephen Wolfram, but after his crank theories have been forgotten, Life will endure.

(The Life motif also, obviously, gives you lots of other possible tattoos. Your second tattoo could be an R-pentomino, for instance.)

If you're going with code, consider some famously elegant algorithm, rather than just a gag. Usually, the whole idea of a tattoo is for it to say something about you; if you're a programmer, some landmark piece of code from your field would serve the same purpose as a cosmic-background-radiation tat would for the right sort of astronomer or physicist.

If you're not a programmer, though, I think getting a code-tattoo is a bit like all of those people walking around with tattoos in languages they cannot read (often in languages that don't even exist).

I sent a slightly smaller version of the above to Jonathan, then realised I could turn it into this post with a bunch of pics plundered from the Flickr Geek Tattoos group. I invite readers to contribute their own suggestions, and also to show off their own totally rad whole-back IK+ screenshot or whatever. If you want an image in your comment (which the commenting system won't let you have), just give the image URL and I'll pic-ify it.

And now, on with the tats!

UL fo' life, yo.

source: jon_gilbert

A classic periodic table:

source: o2b
(You might also like to consider the Chemical Galaxy or some other alternative table.)

Geometry Classic™!

source: normalityrelief

Salt...

source: megpi

...and a smaller tat of a bigger molecule:

source: thiswasmeantforyou

Marrella splendens.

source: Anauxite

This isn't quite a science tattoo, but there is an Aperture Science tat:

source: vissago

If you're going to go evil, of course, you might as well go ancient incomprehensible evil:

source: scragz

Or try to ward it off:

source: iamthechad

source: Yabon_Gorky
(If you could get someone to engrave Elbereth somewhere on you too, you'd be pretty much set.)

"It's not the East or the West Side." "No, it's not."

source: katie cowden

Technical but abstract:

source: bdjsb7

Hindu Mario!

source: artfisch

Real computers are magnesium cubes:

source: lantzilla

Ubuntu - but ooh, what a giveaway...

source: Myles Braithwaite

More generic techno-symbols:

source: Rain Rabbit

The Answer to the Question.

source: sensesmaybenumbed
(That one's actually a temporary tattoo, but it looks good enough to me.)

The BSD Daemon...

source: andyi
...which can be useful for detecting advanced Christians.

The original:

source: Arkhan

Dammit, Jim!

source: Mez Love

From the same artist:

You gotta be pretty hardcore to successfully rock a GOB tat.

Oh, you're gonna pop a cap in my ass? Then I might just erase your species from history. How you like that, bitch?

source: Diamond Geyser
(Another Seal of Rassilon, with further sci-fi and anime tats, here. Also, it now occurs to me that it would be awesome if the Twelfth Doctor was Samuel L. Jackson.)

Reduced to its essentials:

source: HB Art

"NCC-1701. No bloody A, B, C, or D."

source: hunedx

And the opposition, plus some triangles of no importance.

source: thatgrumguy

And then there's this Romulan spy infiltrating a Gay Pride parade:

source: djwudi

The Glorious Revolution of Comrade Bushnell!

source: evil angela

This could just be camouflage for a pool shark.

source: Fujoshi

A collection of ancient technological talismans:

source: fejsez

(You can get geeky temporary tattoos, too. Oh, and if anybody knows where you can buy those fabric fake tattoo sleeves with stuff other than the generic tough-biker or B&W-tribal tats on them, do share. UPDATE: DealExtreme have a bunch of very cheap sleeves now, including a few less-Hell's-Angel-or-pirate options.)

UPDATE: Cracked tells you everything you need to know about tattoos!

Posted in Nerdery, Strange Tales. 24 Comments »

The boy who cried wolf 155 times

1 June 2009 — dan

Every now and then I check back in with "The Lord's Witnesses" at TrueBibleCode.com. (The Lord's Witnesses may be an actual group of people, or maybe just one guy called Gordon.)

Since 2006, the Lord's Witnesses have been confidently predicting the start of Armageddon, usually to be heralded by nuclear explosion in Manhattan, in the very near future. Which is to say, weeks, or a few months at most, from the date on which the prediction is made. It's all based on careful analysis of encoded data in the Bible. It's really very simple.

Over and over and over, the Witneses have been wrong. But there's seldom even breathing space of a few days between the expiration of the last nuked-New-York deadline and the arrival of another, equally confident prediction that it's now very likely to happen by a new deadline. They always apologise for their previous error.

The Lord's Witnesses (who aren't connected with the Jehovah's Witnesses, except that Gordon used to be a JW) are so darn snappy about producing the new predictions that I suspect they may work on the new predictions before the old ones have expired, possibly just so as to have something to do while waiting for the Whateverocalypse.

The Witnesses have now reached the entertaining conclusion that the large number of times they've been wrong to date (155 times, according to them; a few more if you take every line of the frank list of mistakes on the front page as one error) may, itself, have numerological significance!

This stands to reason, of course. Why would God tease them like this, if not to enlighten them to another aspect of His ineffable plan?

(A plan which seems to have been in progress for rather a while. According to the Bible, Jesus Himself clearly predicted His own second coming before everybody then alive had died. Perhaps there's some troublesome immortal out there extending the deadline.)

It's refreshing to see an apocalypto-church, however small, whose org-chart doesn't taper to a point composed of people who are making out like bandits, and socking away the believers' cash in investments that're obviously incompatible with an actual belief in the imminent end of the world.

But at least sometimes those guys get caught. In the early 1990s, there was a Korean church called "Mission for the Coming Days" whose Australian branch was headquartered in a block of flats just up the road from my house. (Apparently there was a Korean "Hyoo-go", meaning "Rapture", movement at the time, and the Mission for the Coming Days was the biggest single church in the movement.)

The MftCD predicted the end of the world on October the 28th, 1992; that date stuck in my mind, since it was printed in big letters on the side of their van, which I passed every time I went to buy groceries.

As you may have heard, it didn't happen.

Some Korean followers of the Mission for the Coming Days committed suicide, I would imagine at least partly because they'd given everything they owned, including their homes, to one Lee Jang Rim, the guy in charge of the church. Some other Hyoo-go enthusiasts tried to kill their preachers.

I think that Lee Jang Rim himself, though, moulders in a Korean jail to this day. The giveaway was his substantial investments, some of which matured after the predicted end of the world.

Posted in Religion, Strange Tales. 18 Comments »

My two alien implants

30 May 2009 — dan

A couple of years ago, I went to the dentist. I don't go to the dentist very often, because I have no need for their services; all of my teeth are in excellent condition, presumably partly thanks to the evil fluoride conspiracy, and partly because of my enthusiasm for cleaning between them.

(I have now written more about my crackpot theory of dental care.)

This time, though, I suspected I had a supernumary wisdom tooth pushing up under one of my existing ones. That's a very uncommon complaint, but it was the only thing I could think of that explained the uncomfortable developments in my jaw. A small but definite bony protrusion was poking out of the inside edge of my left lower jaw.

It wasn't an extra tooth, though. There just seemed to be too much gum hanging on around one of my ordinary, non-supernumary wisdom teeth. This is a much more common problem, and easy to cure - numb it, carve away the excess, job done.

But my extra-tooth suspicion was partly triggered by the fact that there really was some surplus toothy stuff in there. A little shard of tooth, pushing out on my gum. It wasn't part of the wisdom tooth, it wasn't part of another tooth. The dentist and her assistant didn't know what the heck it was.

It's great when medical professionals peering into you through double eye-loupes say "Amazing!". I suggested they take it a bit further, and go for "Holy crap - what the hell is THAT?!", or indeed "Aaaa! The Antichrist! The Antichrist!".

But I digress.

My dentist's best guess was that the mystery object might have been a shard of a baby tooth that'd just sat peacefully in my jaw for twenty-something years, until my body decided to push it out, as bodies sometimes do. Many people's jaws are in a state of continental drift, as it were, that doesn't tally at all with the subjective feeling of a bunch of very hard things set very firmly in place.

But the dentist cheerfully admitted that she was just guessing, never having even heard of such a thing before.

Maybe a year later, it happened again. Same spot, same funny little shard of tooth or bone or whatever poking up out of my gum. I knew what it was this time, so I just dug it out myself with a pair of tweezers. (Unfortunately, this was before I reviewed the ETime Home Endoscope, which would have allowed me to take fascinating pictures of the little shard in-situ.)

The shard was kind of woody-feeling, not rock-hard like tooth enamel. So I suppose it might indeed have been bone, or perhaps dentin. I presume there's just a little glitchy bit of my jaw that decided to sprout a couple of these things. It's not unusual for a bit of normal tissue to occasionally grow in the wrong place, but it's only really noticeable when it has more dramatic results, like a dermoid cyst.

If I were inclined to believe in alien woo-woo or sorcery, though, I could easily have convinced myself that these strange objects were "implants", or voodoo thingummies, or some other phenomenon of great occult significance. After it happened the second time, there would have been no possible question - the Greys were clearly abducting me, shoving an implant into my jaw, wiping my memory and letting me go.

After the dentist thwarted their plan the first time, they just did it again! Clearly, it'd be time for me to find myself a "therapist" to hypnotise me into remembering the aliens putting the stuff in my mouth, not to mention all the times the witches/ghosts/aliens paralysed me as I lay in my bed, and of course that guy sacrificing giraffes to Satan in the tunnels under the day-care centre.

(Oh, and apparently you can remove alien implants with ear candles!)

Back in consensus reality, if you look closely enough at the body of anyone who's been on the planet for at least a few decades, you'll very probably find some little bits of something stuck in 'em somewhere. My girlfriend's got a tiny grey tattoo in the middle of her chest, under which somewhere is the bit of pencil lead that caused it when she managed to stick herself with it as a child. Anybody who lives an active life probably has quite a few tiny scar-encapsulated bits of wood or stone under their skin. Someone who works in a machine shop will light up like a Christmas tree in a full-body scan; heck, some of them have tiny metal turnings in their eyes that they don't know about, until they encounter a very strong magnetic field.

Given this, there's a very good chance that anybody whose mind turns to thoughts of alien abduction will be able to find disturbingly personal "concrete evidence" of said phenomenon, if they look hard enough.

Posted in Science, Strange Tales. 19 Comments »

The Preliminary Proving of Pat Putt, Psychic

14 May 2009 — dan

Apropos, given recent discussions:

"Professional medium Patricia Putt was last week subjected to a rigorous scientific test of her powers as the first stage of her bid to claim a $1m prize from the James Randi Educational Foundation."

And was Mrs Putt, who is apparently a dab hand at removing evil spirits from houses, the very first person in the history of the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to pass the preliminary test?

Nope.

Mrs Putt claims to have the ability to psychically read people just by "being near them and hearing their voices". So ten volunteers were disguised, and faced away from her while reading from a set text, and Mrs Putt produced personalised psychic readings for each of them. The volunteers then perused all of the readings and picked the one which they thought best described them.

If five or more subjects picked the right reading, Mrs Putt would have passed the preliminary test and been able to take the final, more rigorous, million-dollar test.

(Which isn't to say this preliminary test was sloppy. As with every other preliminary test, the protocol was well-thought-out, with thorough precautions to avoid even quite subtle cheating.)

Precisely none of the subjects picked the reading that was allegedly about them.

To Mrs Putt's credit, she didn't then do what so many failed contestants have done - say the testers must have been cheating, the challenge is rigged, Randi is a child molester, blah blah blah.

Some failed challengers are all smiles when they leave and then immediately start pumping out press releases about how the scientific method is a Satanic plot, but Mrs Putt's Web site has no such updates (there seem to have been no updates at all for a few years, actually). Randi has also had to endure loud complaints from various people who never even made it to the preliminary test, because they refused to say exactly what it was they proposed to do, or proposed a test that could reasonably be expected to result in serious injury or death, or wouldn't say what would constitute failure. Or, most commonly, because they just broke off correspondence with Randi, since they had no time to talk to him between all their blog and Usenet posts about how Randi is too cowardly to face them.

But Mrs Putt took her defeat with dignity. For a few days. Then she gave in to temptation, as is explained in a stop-press at the end of the Guardian article. She announced that because the subjects were "bound from head to foot like black mummies, they themselves felt tied so were not really free to link with Spirit making my work a great deal more difficult".

(The subjects were actually wearing a ski mask and wraparound shades, and draped with a graduation gown. None reported feeling "tied".)

The fact that not a single one of the subjects picked the right reading opens a well-known psychic escape hatch, which goes something like: "In the pressure of the test, my powers must have fouled up and started working in reverse! Surely if I failed every single round of the test, when you would have expected me to get some right by random chance, that still indicates that something spooky is going on!"

Mrs Putt hasn't tried that one (yet), but I think it's instructive to run the numbers to see just how unlikely this event was, assuming everything was just random chance.

In the Putt test, each subject got their own set of all ten of the readings to choose from. This is good, for two reasons.

One, if they were all choosing from one pile of ten readings, then Subject 3 (say) could take Subject 7's reading, making it impossible for Subject 7 to pick the right one.

And two, it meant I didn't have to tie myself up in conditional-probability knots to figure out how likely it actually was that no subjects would choose the right reading by random chance.

As I've discussed before, this is also the way to go about calculating how likely it is that one or more subjects would choose the right reading randomly, because that probability is the inverse, or "complement", of the probability that none would.

If you've got ten subjects each randomly choosing from ten readings, one of which is "theirs", the probability that each individual subject will choose the wrong reading is 9 out of 10, or 0.9. Since there are ten subjects, the probability that no subject will get the right reading by random chance is 0.9 to the power of 10, or 0.349. Which means the probability that at least one subject will get the right reading is 0.651.

So it's only slightly odd that nobody picked the right reading by accident. The possibility still remains that Mrs Putt actually did do some "reverse psychic-ology" and produce readings that were completely unlike the person she was attempting to describe, and that the zero result thereby does indicate something odd going on. But given that the same test done entirely at random will give you this same zero-hits result seven times out of every twenty, the result doesn't look peculiar at all.

(The chance that all of the subjects would randomly choose the right reading is 0.1 to the power of 10, or one in 10,000,000,000. Mrs Putt would only have needed five or more of the subjects to randomly choose the right reading in order to pass the test, though. I leave calculating the probability of that as an exercise for the reader.)

Posted in Scams, Science, Strange Tales. 24 Comments »

« Older posts

Newer posts »