Watch his great Nerdstock outtake on the fascinating placebo (and nocebo) affects, with obligatory homeopathy back-slap included – a cup of strong coffee beforehand is recommended :-) It’s properly outrageous.

Or use KeepVid to save the video locally as a high quality MP4 to entertain and educate your friends.

For more info on the placebo effect, the Skeptic’s Dictionary has a good writeup.

On the one hand you have a wonderful self-help self-motivated attitude displayed by Kobla (Ghana), Derick (Kenya) and Doug (Democratic Republic of Congo):

Caitlin (University Programs, Google): Finally, I was hoping you could share a few words of wisdom from your home countries with our readers?

Derick: Sure!  Mtaka cha mvunguni sharti ainame.  In Swahili, this means ‘If you need something that’s on the floor, you’ll have to bend to pick it up.’  In other words: ‘there’s nothing free in life, you have to work for it!’

Kobla: Here’s one from Ghana in the Akan language: Nyansa nnyƐ sika na woakyikyir wodze esie.  This means ‘Wisdom is not like money to be tied up and hidden’ or, more simply: ‘wisdom is to be shared.’

Doug: I like this one, in Lingala: Nguba bakalingaka yango na soni te.  Literally: ‘Don’t pretend to toast a peanut if you don’t know how to do it.’  Basically, this means that you shouldn’t pretend you know how to do something when you really don’t.  If you’re stuck, ask for help!

(via the Google Africa blog)

Contrast that with the attitude of entitlement displayed by some strikers, and this unnamed nurse in particular who clearly has a low external locus of control:

“Why should we care when someone dies, because we are not at work while the government doesn’t care about our lives,” said one nurse, who refused to give her name.

We are coming here every day to stand vigil and see bodies being removed from the hospital.

This is what the government wants. If they didn’t, then we would not have been here in the first place. Patients’ lives have been put at risk by our government.”

I’m all for people’s freedom of expression and right to demand a fair wage, but in this case the demands seem totally unrealistic, and the methods barbaric.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/eagleman09/eagleman09_index.html

from Ewan’s posterous

from Ewan’s posterous

Gillian appears to have taken on Ben Goldacre of Bad Science fame – an ill-advised move if ever there was one – which was then followed by what seems to be a massive PR blunder on her behalf via Twitter (details recorded by JackOfKent and others – The Integrity and Honesty of @gillianmckeith).

Quoting from Dara Ó Briain’s brilliant performance at the Theatre Royal:

“that hideous wench, that cow McKeith. Have you seen "You Are What You Eat"? Its hosted by a whiny, naggy, bony, seed pimp bitch who goes into
the homes of morbidly obese people….

The bit that irritates me the most is the bullshit science she comes up with. However there is a science to nutrition, there is technical information that need to be gotten across. she just makes stuff up i think some bullshit about the different vibrational energies for food and different colours and all this yadda-yadda-yadda she might as well just say "eat broccoli, because in it there live imps that will climb out of the broccoli and night and mine the fat off your arse”.

If you are what you eat, she’s eaten a fecking shrew"

And the best part of all – Ben’s post And then I was incompetently libelled by a litigious millionaire contains this little gem of a tune by DogHorse: DrGillian (lyrics).

Further reading:

• Wikipedia’s main article on Gillian – with mentions Ben and his highly recommended book Bad Science
• Wikipedia’s You Are What You Eat article, notable for the controversy section

“Perhaps chess is the wrong game for the times. Poker is now everywhere, as amateurs dream of winning millions and being on television for playing a card game whose complexities can be detailed on a single piece of paper. But while chess is a 100 percent information game—both players are aware of all the data all the time—and therefore directly susceptible to computing power, poker has hidden cards and variable stakes, creating critical roles for chance, bluffing, and risk management.

These might seem to be aspects of poker based entirely on human psychology and therefore invulnerable to computer incursion. A machine can trivially calculate the odds of every hand, but what to make of an opponent with poor odds making a large bet? And yet the computers are advancing here as well. Jonathan Schaeffer, the inventor of the checkers-solving program, has moved on to poker and his digital players are performing better and better against strong humans—with obvious implications for online gambling sites.

Perhaps the current trend of many chess professionals taking up the more lucrative pastime of poker is not a wholly negative one. It may not be too late for humans to relearn how to take risks in order to innovate and thereby maintain the advanced lifestyles we enjoy. And if it takes a poker-playing supercomputer to remind us that we can’t enjoy the rewards without taking the risks, so be it. “

Some other interesting quotes:

· “By the mid-1990s the number of people with some experience of using computers was many orders of magnitude greater than in the 1960s. In the Kasparov defeat they recognized that here was a great triumph for programmers, but not one that may compete with the human intelligence that helps us to lead our lives.”

· “Today, for $50 you can buy a home PC program that will crush most grandmasters. In 2003, I played serious matches against two of these programs running on commercially available multiprocessor servers—and, of course, I was playing just one game at a time—and in both cases the score ended in a tie with a win apiece and several draws.”

· “Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.”

· “Having a computer partner also meant never having to worry about making a tactical blunder. The computer could project the consequences of each move we considered, pointing out possible outcomes and countermoves we might otherwise have missed. With that taken care of for us, we could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations.”

· “Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”

“Their views on each issue were added together to produce one bumper score on the extent to which they thought science could be informative on all of these questions, and the results were truly frightening. People whose pre-existing stereotypes about homosexuality had been challenged by the scientific evidence presented to them were more inclined to believe that science had nothing to offer, on any question, not just on homosexuality, when compared with people whose views on homosexuality had been reinforced.

When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate bid to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken. This is an interesting finding. But I’m not sure it makes me very happy.”

If you want to upgrade (give you something to play with while we all wait for OS 6 later this year), the procedure is as detailed in my previous post Upgrading Your BlackBerry Operating System, and is much faster on the 9700 (took around 40 minutes). You can grab version 743 from the Rogers Wireless BlackBerry download page:

Package Version: 5.0.0.1254
Consisting of:

Applications: 5.0.0.743
Software Platform: 5.1.0.165
File name: 9700M_PBr5.0.0_rel1254_PL5.1.0.165_A5.0.0.743_Rogers_Wireless_Inc.exe
File size: 133.47MB

Improvements:

1. Generally improved phone responsiveness (no more occasional lagging when switching between running apps, media/photo browser is *far* faster with large collections, even the bootup process after a reset is somewhat faster)
2. Browser performance noticeably improved (hotspot / wifi browser in particular)
3. Better battery life (I don’t have metrics, but it definitely seems significantly better)
4. GPS locks are faster (previously locks would take ages, or simply fail after a few minutes)

Changes / potential issues:

• The lock button no longer password locks the phone. Screen is turned off and keypad locked (from accidental presses, like standby) but not password locked as it was before. Not a biggie, since you can still easily lock the phone using the lock icon.
• Standby (via the top mute button) no longer works. However the lock button does pretty much the same thing now as far as I am concerned.
• AT&T users bitching that visual voicemail is broken (not supported locally by MTN so no loss for me).

Disclaimer: Standard disclaimer here, if you’re not comfortable upgrading your phone then don’t. Backup! One of the great things about a BB is the ease of backing up (and should something go wrong, restoring) the phone. This is a new OS version, so you may want to search forums and the like for other user experiences with it before you upgrade.

“I’ve worked out what I want to be.

I want to be a code hitman.

I want to contract myself out to the highest bidder and get paid large sums of money to put hits on code. So basically, I get contacted through a secure channel and made aware of what contracts are on the table, then I decide which contract I’m interested in and I let the contractor know that I’m in. I get paid half up front and half when the job is done. I only use my own equipment, my own compiler and my own component libraries and I only handle the specific problem that I’m being paid for, no favours. I go in, I take ownership of the code, I locate the target, and I debug it, or even rewrite it if required. Once the job is done I leave, no questions asked and the other 50% is transferred to an offshore account specified by me. At no point do I get asked for documentation or a helpfile and I’m known in the industry only as “The Meerkat”.”