Peter Principle

A 2004 commemorative quarter issued by Royal Canadian Mint apparently caused a panic among U.S. contractors who thought they were covert surveillance devices.

Poppy quarter led to U.S. spy warnings

The odd-looking — but harmless — “poppy coin” was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors travelling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as “anomalous” and “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology,” according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.”

It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source,” wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. “Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top.”

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defence Security Service, an agency of the Defence Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors travelled through Canada.

In this month’s Scientific American article A Digital Life, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell describe their Microsoft MyLifeBits project. It’s an experiment in which Bell wears an automatic digital camera (a “SenseCam”) around his neck, and records every minute of his day digitally.

This is a logical progression of Vannevar Bush’s Memex (Memory Extender) proposal from 1945. The idea being that human memory is fallible, so we can use technology to record every aspect of our life. You even see it today among journal bloggers who record their lives in exquisite detail – and share it with the rest of us.

Of course, there’s a lot of potential problems with this effort. People’s privacy concerns are the most obvious ones. Most people, when told they’re being recorded, will ask that the cameras be turned off. But the project is dealing with some big technical difficulties as well. Bell generates about 1GB of video, photos, audio and document data every month. The MyLifeBits project struggles to archive, index and search through it all.

The idea of Lifeblogging holds a lot of appeal to me, since I don’t think I have a very good memory. I fear that I may forget some of the best experiences of my life, or some hard won lessons. But would capturing email and web logs and taking minute by minute photos help me retain it? Years from now, will wading through gigabytes of data really help me remember how I felt at the time?

When I moved recently, I uncovered boxes of old photographs. Some of them brought up instant associations. But I found myself gazing at other photos and wondering where and when they were taken. What was I doing there? What was I thinking? I’m afraid those memories are gone for good.

A Digital Life, Scientific American, March 2007.
Lifeblogging: Is a virtual brain good for the real one? Ars technica, 2/7/2007
On the Record, All the Time, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/4/2007
Digital Diary, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/28/2007
The Persistence of Memory, NPR Radio “On the Media” show, 1/5/2007

In an article for Scientific American, researcher Robert Epstein talks about his experience with online marketing. Online dating site marketing. When he met a woman who’s photo he had seen online, he was surprised that she looked nothing like the photo. She happily used photos of other women as a way of drawing traffic. And apparently offered no excuse or apology for the tactic.

So how common is lying on online dating sites? Epstein spills the beans in: The Truth about Online Dating.

[Surveys show] that about 20 percent of online daters admit to deception. If you ask them how many other people are lying, however–an interviewing tactic that probably gets closer to the truth–that number jumps to 90 percent.

And in what’s commonly known as the Lake Wogegon effect, apparently nobody has just average looks on these sites. Only 1 percent of participants in one study rated their appearance as “less than average.”

Online height is exaggerated by only an inch or so for both men and women but that women appear to understate their weight more and more as they get older: by five pounds when they are in their 20s, 17 pounds in their 30s and 19 pounds in their 40s.

For men, the major areas of deception are educational level, income, height, age and marital status; at least 13 percent of online male suitors are thought to be married. For women, the major areas of deception are weight, physical appearance and age.

Why so much deception? Because On the Internet, Nobody Knows you’re a Dog.

Because people typically use screen names rather than real ones, their ramblings are anonymous and hence not subject to social norms. There are also no physical cues or consequences–no visible communication gestures, raised eyebrows, grimaces, and so on–to keep people’s behavior in check. As a result, online daters tend to construct [...] an “ideal self” rather than a real one. A study published recently by Ellison and her colleagues even suggests that online daters often regret it when they do tell the truth, feeling that too much honesty, especially about negative attributes, creates a bad impression.

So your mom was wrong all this time. Honesty creates a bad impression.

But there’s more. Many of the online dating services advertise that their “scientific” approach leads to happy marriages. But there haven’t been any reliable tests of that claim.

In 2004 eHarmony personnel did present a paper at a national convention claiming that married couples who met through eHarmony were happier than couples who met by other means. Typically such a paper would then be submitted for possible publication in a peer-reviewed journal. But this paper has still not been published, possibly because of its obvious flaws–the most problematic being that the eHarmony couples in the study were newlyweds (married an average of six months), whereas the couples in the control group (who had met by other means) were way past the honeymoon period (married an average of 2.1 years).

In 2005, using eHarmony’s own published statistics, a team of credible authorities [...] concluded in an online white paper: “When eHarmony recommends someone as a compatible match, there is a 1 in 500 chance that you’ll marry this person…. Given that eHarmony delivers about 1.5 matches a month, if you went on a date with all of them, it would take 346 dates and 19 years to reach [a] 50% chance of getting married.” The team also made the sweeping observation that “there is no evidence that … scientific psychology is able to pair individuals who will enjoy happy, lasting marriages.”

Good grief! You have to stay on a dating site for 19 years? You’d be old and gray by the time you find anyone!

The only good thing is that you never have update your age or photo in all that time.

Why online should be off limits in the bedroom

Wherever you find a household with wireless technology, you will more than likely find a man who is trying to bring a laptop into bed and a woman who is trying to prevent him from doing it. One girlfriend of mine confided that she got wireless so her boyfriend wouldn’t retreat to his study all night. Now, the computer in bed is threatening their sex life.

I’m not sure exactly when or why reading e-mail, watching video clips, checking sports statistics, downloading pirated music or, in the case of one female friend’s nerdy husband, downloading 30-page essays on Spinoza at 4 in the morning, became normal bed practice, but it’s got to stop.

Men — whether they admit it or not — avoid pillow talk. The reason is simple: While snuggling and giggling and chatting in bed often leads to sex, more often than not, it also leads to more in-depth talk. And more in-depth talk leads to serious talk, which quickly gets converted into serious plans, which leads to making choices, which leads to not choosing other things, which leads to a feeling of vague, unshakable entrapment, which leads to misery, which leads to death.

BlackBerry Orphans

Like a bunch of teenagers, some parents are routinely lying to their kids, sneaking around the house to covertly check their emails and disobeying house rules established to minimize compulsive typing.

Elsa has hidden the BlackBerry on occasion — Hohlt says she tried to flush it down the toilet last year. [...] But Elsa also seems to recognize that it brings her mom comfort, not unlike a pacifier or security blanket. Recently, seeing her mom slumped on the couch after work, Elsa fished the BlackBerry from her mother’s purse and brought it to her. “Mommy,” she asked, “will this make you feel better?”

Safety is another issue. Will Singletary, a 9-year-old in Atlanta, doesn’t approve of his dad’s proclivity for typing while driving. “It makes me worried he’s going to crash,” he says. “He only looks up a few times.” His dad, private banker Ross Singletary, calls it “a legit concern.” He adds: “Some emails are important enough to look at en route.”

Remember that old New Yorker cartoon about anonymity on the web? “On the web, nobody knows you’re a dog”.

Michael Kinsley argues that in the days of MySpace and YouTube, the opposite is true: On the Internet, everybody knows you’re a dog

Anonymity does not actually seem to interest many of the Web’s most devoted users. They are the ones who start their own sites, or sign up for MySpace, or submit videos to YouTube. Quite the opposite: The most successful Web sites seem to be those where people can abandon anonymity and use the Internet to stake their claims as unique individuals. Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog. On the Internet, not only does everybody know that you’re a dog. Everybody knows what kind of dog, how old, your taste in collars, your favorite dog food recipe, and so on.

Stanford study identifies ‘Net addicts’

“We worry when people use virtual interactions to substitute for real social interactions — and seeing their real relationships suffer, as a result,” he said.

“Sneaking out of bed, once your partner is asleep, to go online. Missing deadline after deadline at work, while visiting chat rooms. And when you cut back, feeling irritable, anxious or restless. Those are red flags,” he said.

The MySpace population is aging rapidly, according to a recent analysis. Although it’s known as a site for teenagers, only 30 percent of users are younger than 25, and fully half are 35 or older.

Just a year ago, people under 18 made up about 25 percent of MySpace [...] that’s now down to 12 percent in the comScore analysis released Thursday. By contrast, the 35-to-54 group at MySpace grew to 41 percent in August, from 32 percent a year earlier.

MySpace has over 60 million unique users, and over 100 million accounts worldwide.