Flipping Coins To See The Future?

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Feb 14th, 2005 @ 12:05am

• Random Walk

  by dorpus

  We notice that none of the researchers mentioned in the article say which department they are from, only that they are from "Princeton".
  
  Ignoring the credibility of the article, randomization has a long history of usage in statistics. The bootstrap procedure, by which we take data from a real experiment, mix it up randomly, and repeat a "virtual" experiment, is a controversial procedure in the field of clinical trials. The bootstrap procedure could create an identical twin of you that shows up in the experiment twice. In a parallel universe, do you have a twin brother? About 1% of births are twins.
  
  In a similar argument I had on another forum about family values -- many people are proud to come from large families. But how many families are there whose 13th or 14th child was psychotic, therefore set fire to the house and burned the entire family alive, therefore nobody is left to brag about their big family? The more children a family has, the more likely that at least one of them will be a bad seed.
  
  
  

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Feb 14th, 2005 @ 2:33am

• In a parallel universe

  by dorpus

  What if you had striped skin? What if you were fused from two different egg cells, so you were really two people inside one body?
  
  
  http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/science/dual_identities.htm
  
  

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Feb 14th, 2005 @ 2:49pm

• Debunked years ago

  by Anonymous Coward

  This is complete and utter crap, the kind of data manipulation that makes real scientists cringe.

  "Over the coming year, Hagelin promised, the results would be carefully analyzed according to strict scientific standards. As promised, Hagelin was back a year later with a fifty-five-page report of the results of the project. It was a clinic in data distortion. A beaming Hagelin announced at a press conference that, during the period of the experiment, violent crime had been reduced by a remarkable 18 percent. "An eighteen-percent reduction compared to what?" a puzzled reporter for the Washington Post asked, recalling the dreadful murder rampage of the summer of '93. Compared to what it would have been if the meditators had not been meditating, Hagelin explained patiently. "But how could you know what the rate would have been?" the reporter persisted. That had been arrived at, Hagelin responded with just a trace of irritation, by means of a "scientifically rigorous time-series analysis" that included not only crime data but such factors as weather and fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field."

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