Ewan's Corner

Archive for the ‘sci-tech’ Category

I’m tired of seeing Power Balance bracelets being worn around the office⁽¹⁾, I’m tired of being spammed via email and twitter and web adverts and magazines, I’m tired of seeing so called sporting celebrities endorsing them, and most importantly I’m tired of people being ripped off financially and mentally by a blatant lie.

Last night’s official South African Power Balance launch in Cape Town was the final straw, so I’m joining the growing online education effort and trying to help expose Power Balance for what it really is – a hoax and a scam, preying on innocent people and (perhaps worst of all) promoting bad science.

To be clear, wearing a bracelet _may_ help with your strength / balance / whatever, but it is *NOT* the bracelet (and in particular not the utterly fake and useless hologram) which helps. That’s all – literally – in your mind, and any perceived or measurable benefit is NOT due to a Power Balance product. What I really object to is people making money by duping people into buying their fake product, people who convince innocents that some outside woo woo technology is helping them, rather than the readily available (and free) power of their own minds.

Ash Donaldson’s interesting TEDx Canberra talk on “Cognitive Dissonance” specifically mentions how whole industries and hoaxes (like Power Balance, which he directly references as an example) grow up around innate flaws in our ability to think and reason logically. Skip to 11 minutes into the talk if you’re impatient.

“Multiple-TED attendee and human factors expert, Ash Donaldson, wants us to better understand why we believe what we do. In this talk, Ash explains how our minds build belief and then breaks it down, showing us how and why humans are fooled into believing that things like Power Bands, anti-aging treatments and supplements actually work. Along the way, he tells us how as a trainee pilot he managed to nearly get himself killed by allowing his beliefs to rule logic and provable fact.”

Some great references:

• Power Bollocks: holograms, unicorns, and Shaquille O’Neal’s magic underpants
• How do those Power Balance bracelets work? I think it’s because of the 20-Hz difference between a genius and an ascending colon.
• The entertaining and opinionated @kevipedia’s post: Powerbalance bracelets are complete and utter bullshit
• various posts and discussions on granitestateskeptics.org

If you want to see how the demonstrations given by the salespeople work (and are in fact old stage magician tricks), have a look at the following two YouTube videos:

• Power Balance Tests
• Applied Kinesiology – How it’s Done

And this Surfing Magazine article / interview “Do You Believe in Holograms” (which made me alternately want to cry and laugh) highlights the ridiculous lengths to which the Power Balance sales people are willing to go to promote their scam:

“if you put a Power Balance hologram under a glass of beer for five minutes, it will energize the beer and you can do the balance test before and after drinking the beer, and it should work because liquid, as a medium, absorbs the frequency. We were doing it the another night with martinis and everyone was flipping out.”

If that doesn’t ring alarm bells, all hope is lost.

Finally, go support SkepticBros and buy yourself a few Placebo Bands to further the movement :-)

Notes:

1. although that has largely stopped due to a tough-love grass-roots education process :-)

Thanks to @hfordsa for the heads up.
via http://bostonreview.net/BR35.6/toyama.php

"Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute."

If I were to summarize everything I learned through research in ICT4D, it would be this: technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute. If you have a foundation of competent, well-intentioned people, then the appropriate technology can amplify their capacity and lead to amazing achievements. But, in circumstances with negative human intent, as in the case of corrupt government bureaucrats, or minimal capacity, as in the case of people who have been denied a basic education, no amount of technology will turn things around.

….

Technology is a magnifier in that its impact is multiplicative, not additive, with regard to social change. In the developed world, there is a tendency to see the Internet and other technologies as necessarily additive, inherent contributors of positive value. But their beneficial contributions are contingent on an absorptive capacity among users that is often missing in the developing world. Technology has positive effects only to the extent that people are willing and able to use it positively. The challenge of international development is that, whatever the potential of poor communities, well-intentioned capability is in scarce supply and technology cannot make up for its deficiency.

….

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health. It seems obvious that the promise of scale is a red herring, but ICT4D proponents rely—consciously or otherwise—on it in order to promote their solutions.

”When a village has ready access to a PC, the dominant use is by young men playing games, watching movies, or consuming adult content.”

Disseminating a technology would work if, somehow, the technology did more for the poor, undereducated, and powerless than it did for the rich, well-educated, and mighty. But the theory of technology-as-magnifier leads to the opposite conclusion: the greater one’s capacity, the more technology delivers; the lesser one’s capacity, the less value technology has. In effect, technology helps the rich get richer while doing little for the incomes of the poor, thus widening the gaps between haves and have-nots.

….My point is not that technology is useless. To the extent that we are willing and able to put technology to positive ends, it has a positive effect. For example, Digital Green (DG), one of the most successful ICT4D projects I oversaw while at Microsoft Research, promotes the use of locally recorded how-to videos to teach smallholder farmers more productive practices. When it comes to persuading farmers to adopt good practices, DG is ten times more cost-effective than classical agriculture extension without technology.

But the value of a technology remains contingent on the motivations and abilities of organizations applying it - villagers must be organized, content must be produced, and instructors must be trained. The limiting factor in spreading DG’s impact is not how many camcorders its organizers can purchase or how many videos they can shoot, but how many groups are performing good agriculture extension in the first place. Where such organizations are few, building institutional capacity is the more difficult, but necessary, condition for DG’s technology to have value. In other words, disseminating technology is easy; nurturing human capacity and human institutions that put it to good use is the crux.

….

“Computers, guns, factories, and democracy are powerful tools, but the forces that determine how they’re used ultimately are human.”

We are in the midst of the largest ICT4D experiment ever. In 2009 there were over 4.5 billion active mobile phone accounts, more than the entire population of the world older than twenty years of age. The cell phone is overtaking both television and radio as the most popular consumer electronic device in history. Some 80 percent of the global population is within range of a cell tower, and mobile phones are increasingly seen in the poorest, remotest communities.

These numbers prompt suggestions that there is no longer a “digital divide” for real-time communication. Yet any demographic account of mobile have-nots will show them to be predominantly poor, remote, female, and politically mute. Whatever the case, if the spread of mobile phones is sufficient to help end global poverty, we will know soon enough. But, if it doesn’t, should we then pin our hopes on the next new shiny gadget?