NPR had a story about people who get lost, stranded, and even die in Death Valley because their GPS devices led them astray. After repeated instances like this, a Death Valley Ranger investigated and discovered that the devices were using old maps with roads that had long since disappeared. People following the GPS devices ended up on dirt roads that led nowhere.

I have written before at how surprised I am that people put their faith implicitly in technology. I find it incredible that anyone would even go to a place like Death Valley without at least some backup plan in case the GPS failed. Apart from errors, what would they do if the device started obviously malfunctioning or stopped working?

Just recently I had to go to someone’s home. Their address was on Shaker Boulevard, which is a very long street with a wide grassy median with few crossover points, so I put their street number into Google Maps to get a rough idea of where the house was. I was surprised to find that the location given was two towns away from mine, since I was pretty sure that they lived in my own suburb. So I tried MapQuest and sure enough, it was very near my home. Google Maps had made an error. My habit of being skeptical and checking saved me from wasting time.

I also recently drove to a distant town for a wedding party and as is my practice before I left got directions from Google Maps or MapQuest and compared it with a physical map. But when I got to that town, construction had closed off many of the streets that I was supposed to go on. This did not bother me because I had a map and quickly found an alternate route to my hotel.

I don’t have GPS but was wondering what it would do in situations where its directions cannot be followed due to various reasons. For example, for people traveling in Death Valley, if they sense that the dirt road they are asked to go on is a mistake, what options do they have? Does anyone know?

This week marked the 40th anniversary of the infamous experiment that showed how quickly people can turn into brutes when given unchecked power over someone else.

The video in the link is worth watching for its interviews with some of the original participants.

One of the most sickening cases of recent times was that of a Pennsylvania judge getting bribes from a builder of juvenile prisons, in exchange for which the judge sent thousands of children, many of them first-time offenders convicted of minor crimes and some as young as 10, to the private jails.

About 4,000 of those convictions have now been tossed aside because he violated the constitutional rights of the accused, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea. The judge was portrayed as not only corrupt but as “vicious and mean-spirited” who “verbally abused and cruelly mocked” the children whom he sent to jail.

His trial has ended with the judge being sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Another judge accused of a similar crime has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

Some of you may have read about a study that supposedly showed that people who used Internet Explore had lower IQs than those who use other web browsers. The hoax fooled many major news outlets like the BBC, which picked up and reported on it.

The hoax’s perpetrators explain why they did it and their surprise that so many people did not seem to question the results, as if it were fairly common knowledge that IE users were stupid. They listed eight things that should have quickly indicated to people, especially reporters, that the story was fake.

Christopher Budd explores what the widespread and uncritical acceptance of this hoax story might tell us about ourselves and the media.

Yesterday, August 6th was the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web, which was built on the foundation of the much older internet. The internet was the name given to the network of linked computers around the globe that was used in the early days primarily by research institutions to transfer data and send email.

The World Wide Web was a radical advance created by Tim Berners-Lee when he standardized the three protocols that now enable users to easily put up information on servers in a manner (using HTML) that other users can use their web browsers to find because of its unique address (the familiar URL), and then transfer that information from the remote servers to their own computers (using HTTP).

The internet and the World Wide Web certainly are the biggest revolutions in my lifetime, the one thing that I simply cannot imagine life without.

It is odd how society decides that some things are offensive. For example, raising your index finger is fine. Athletes often point to the heavens after a good play to thank their god for taking time out from his busy schedule to help them out. But the third finger pointing to the heavens is considered such a dire insult that it can result in murderous fury.

We know that certain words are not allowed on broadcast television. But when I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, they bleep out these words too, even though those shows are on cable and I watch them online.

But what surprised me is that when the people on these shows raise the third finger, it is pixelated. Despite the fact that many of the comedic segments on the show involve gestures that have obvious similarities to sexual acts and are not pixelated, ‘giving the finger’ is seen as so toxic that it gets special treatment.

I love it when regular people do this kind of unexpected stuff, bringing some fun into the daily routine.

I never unquestioningly accept the results produced by machines and as much as possible try to find independent ways to check if they make sense. The following story may explain why.

When I was in graduate school, my doctoral thesis involved a lot of detailed calculations that required using a computer. This was in the days prior to the personal computer and we used massive mainframes, entering the programs and data using punch cards and later advancing to remote terminals. Because the computer programs I had written were so complicated and there were so many opportunities for making errors, as much as possible I would check its output in special, simplified cases where I could also do the calculations using just a pocket calculator.

There was one occasion where I simply could not get the two results to agree. After days and days of work trying to find the source of disagreement, going to the extent of doing elaborate calculations without even the calculator, I found the source of the problem. It turned out that my hand calculator had this bug that if you had a number in the display that had the digit 8 in the fourth decimal place, and stored this number in the memory, when you recalled this number, the 8 would have been replaced with a zero. It was a very specialized error, occurring only with the digit 8 and only in the fourth decimal place. Everything else was fine. When I told my thesis advisor what had caused the problem he was shocked and said, “If you can’t trust your own calculator, what can you trust?”

It was the kind of bug that could escape detection for a long time because the chances of it making a noticeable difference in a calculation was extremely small but it shook me up so much that after more than three decades I still remember the details of that story.

I was reminded of this when I came across this item about a ‘Wrongulator‘, a gag calculator that always gives you the wrong answer.

I am not sure how it works. I would think that a calculator that is invariably wrong would be easy to detect unless you are totally innumerate. It also depends on how wrong it is. To fool someone, the error would have to be subtle, like my own experience. If the wrongulator said that 4×6=543, that would be easily detectable, whereas one that returned the answer of 26 may fool some.

I actually don’t like gag gifts like this. They could have very serious negative consequences in the hands of innumerate people who accept unquestioningly whatever machines tell them.

In October 2006, more than one hundred horses got trapped in a small patch of dry land as a result of a sudden flood in the Netherlands in which 18 horses drowned. All rescue attempts failed and the horses seemed to be getting desperate until four women decided to try a different approach.

The episode has been set to music. Watch.

None of us are in a position to figure out everything for ourselves. We are all dependent on experts in specific fields for knowledge. While an expert’s reputation and record of reliability and honesty can and should be factored in, we don’t want to unquestioningly accept the assertions of authorities since it is possible that they may be mistaken or not as expert or knowledgeable as they claim to be or may even be lying

So to what extent is it reasonable to depend on experts? Bertrand Russell in his 1941 book Let the People Think suggested that rather than depend on this or that expert, one should look at the views of the aggregate of experts and draw the following reasonable inferences:

1. “that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain;
2. that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and
3. that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.”

That seems like a good rule of thumb.

But of course, you will rarely get unanimity among experts. There will almost always be dissenters. But at least when it comes to scientific matters, there often tends to be an overwhelming consensus and what I do is see what the dominant views are. So for example, in the case of global warming, since an overwhelming majority of climate scientists say that it is occurring and is man-made, Russell would say (according to rule (1)) that it would be foolish to insist that they are wrong. Similarly, since an overwhelming majority of biologists accept the theory of evolution as the means by which speciation occurred, Russell would say that it would be silly to confidently deny it. At most one should voice tentative dissent.

When it comes to economic or political questions where there is often not only no unanimity but not even a dominant consensus, rule (2) comes into play and it is wise to not place one’s faith too strongly on one particular view.