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Mind over machine and Murphy's Law
By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 07/19/05
A fascinating article in Wired discusses the work being done at Princeton in the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program to measure the effect that humans might have on machines. Surprisingly, it seems that at least statistically, we do! See the report Correlations of Random Binary Sequences with Pre-Stated Operator Intention: A Review of a 12-Year Program.
Yep, this isn't a new project. The project's Research Activities page explains:
Over the laboratory’s 20-year history, thousands of such experiments, involving many millions of trials, have been performed by several hundred operators. The observed effects are usually quite small, of the order of a few parts in ten thousand on average, but they are statistically repeatable and compound to highly significant deviations from chance expectations."
We don't know about you but this definitely is in line with our experiences with computers: When you want a machine to work and you're focused and intense, it won't. Conversely when you don't and you don't care and you're hardly paying it attention, it will. This requires an addendum to Murphy's law, perhaps we'll call it
The Attention Surplus Effect on Digital Equipment Enhancement to Murphy's Law:
When something digital might be capable of going wrong and you pay too much attention, it is far more likely that it will, indeed, go wrong.
But do read to the end of the Wired article to see that not everyone is convinced that this is really scientific:
Stanley Jeffers, a professor of physics at York University in Toronto, attempted to conduct experiments that were similar to Pear's, but couldn't replicate the results. Researchers at two German labs, working in cooperation with Pear, also were unable to replicate results using the same equipment that Pear used.
"If their claims are to be taken seriously in science, they have to be replicated," Jeffers said. "If they can't be replicated, it doesn't mean they're false, but science rapidly loses interest."
Sigh. Just when we thought that the force might be with us ...
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