Hidden Dangerous of the Ubiquitous iPod

It is somewhat unlikely that you will be hit by lightening, but not as unlikely as you may believe.

Here are some raw statististics, as reported by WLEXTV18 of Lexington, Kentucky

ODDS OF BECOMING A LIGHTNING VICTIM

• 280,000,000: U.S. 2000 Census population
• 1/700,000: Odds of being struck by lightning in a given year (reported deaths + injuries)
• 1/240,000: Odds of being struck by lightning in a given year (estimated total deaths + injuries)
• 1/3000: Odds of being struck in your lifetime (Est. 80 years)
• 1/300: Odds you will be affected by someone being struck (Ten people affected for every one struck)

We're gathered here today not to lament for that person you know or known to someone who you know, he or she who was struck by lightening that time, but instead to consider a new factor associated with this ancient peril.

The iPod. Bringer of lightening.

I suspect that any MP3 player -- any device with headphones -- would cause the same result, but iPod is the one everyone in the developed world has or seems to want, and iPod is the one in the news. Apparently if you wear it outside during a thunderstorm, you are taking quite a risk.

Beware: listen to an iPod outdoors during a thunderstorm, and the last thing you hear could be great balls of fire. (excerpt from a story in the Guardian Unlimited)

A number of cases in the US suggest that using the popular music player during a
thunderstorm increases the severity of injuries suffered by anyone struck by
lightning.

While lightning usually flashes over a victim's skin, the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine reports that the headphones of an iPod can act as a conductor, directing a bolt of electricity straight inside the listener's ear - rupturing eardrums and leaving severe burns.

(You'd think that, living in New England as I do, I would have read this in the New England Journal of Medicine rather than in the Manchester, England newspaper, but no.) Read the whole story here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2125560,00.html

First, let's consider the basic risk associated with all headphones, and thus with this immensely popular device, that of hearing loss. (Remember that Washington Post article? Oh, and you'll find dozens more - Slashdot, Buzzle, BetaNews. Or maybe you heard a rapper talk about this in your high school at a school assembly.) Just as keyboards are associated with an increased risk of repetitive motion, this technology comes at a price for some users. Yes, with all life, there is risk. This risk is worth thinking about, however, because it is related to a consumer choice under your control, and thus can, in theory, be more easily managed than many other types of risk. In fact, it can even be entirely avoided. But in our culture in 2007, what are the odds that you will forgo headphones and associated devices entirely?

And now let's consider what happens when you are struck by lightening. Instead of flashing over your skin and dispersing, scorching hair, perhaps leaving burns, the lightening follows the track of those ear buds straight to your eardrums, and, yes, also to your hip or whereever you'd stowed your iPod.


Jason Bunch recovers from his injuries in July 2006 after lightning struck nearby as he was listening to his iPod while mowing the lawn in Castle Rock, Colorado. Photograph: Helen H Richardson/The Denver Post/AP

I love technology and gadgets. They make life better. There should, however, be an evaluation of the associated risks.

My question has to do with risk and consumer choice. Whose responsibility is it to evaluate the risks of that hot new device that will change everything? Is it the inventor's, the manufacturer's, the consumer's, the government's? Another entity? Do these and/or others share the responsibility, or is it all in the hands of one party?

How you answer (and if you attempt to answer at all) will probably reflect the culture in which you were raised. Typical American answers vary a bit across the political spectrum, with the most common answer being that the manufacturer and consumer share responsibility: it is the manufacturer's responsibility to provide a quality product that functions as it is expected to, and the consumer's responsibility to choose the device and study the known risks and the fine print. The government is usually disinvited from the party by some and disproportionately held accountable by others.

What do you think?

Oh, and please be careful. Watch the skies.

Neuroeconomics / The Ultimatum Game

The ultimatum game is one in which one player has control of a sum of money, divides it up, and offers a share to another player. The share offered can be any size, so I could take 99 pennies out of the dollar and offer you one. If you reject the offer, we both get nothing. If you accept the offer, you get the penny and I get the 99 cents.

This game is the reason, or so a recent article in The Economist says, "psychologists know that economists are wrong." Economic principles, we're told, prescribe the acceptance of any offer that results in a financial gain, however small. Hey, it's free money, right? But in reality, there are those who will protest "a stingy offer" -- that's not fair! -- and refuse the offer on principle.

Interestingly enough, the refusers tend to have higher levels of the hormone testosterone. The title of the Economist article is "Men with a lot of testosterone make curious economic choices", something it's likely we all suspected to be so. Read the whole article here:
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=9433782&fsrc=nwlgafree

The article describes a study by a Dr. Terence Burnham, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, in which the ultimatum game was played and testosterone levels were measured:

... the responders who rejected a low final offer had an average testosterone level more than 50% higher than the average of those who accepted. Five of the seven men with the highest testosterone levels in the study rejected a $5 ultimate offer but only one of the 19 others made the same decision.

What Dr Burnham's result supports is a much deeper rejection of the tenets of classical economics than one based on a slight mis-evolution of negotiating skills. It backs the idea that what people really strivefor is relative rather than absolute prosperity. They would rather accept less themselves than see a rival get ahead. That is likely to be particularly true in individuals with high testosterone levels, sincethat hormone is correlated with social dominance in many species.

Economists often refer to this sort of behaviour as irrational. In fact, it is not. It is simply, as it were, differently rational. The things that money can buy are merely means to an end--social status--that brings desirable reproductive opportunities. If another route brings that status more directly, money is irrelevant.

There's a lot here. If this is what we do when the offer is one of free money just for saying yes, think of what we do when society itself -- the very context in which our social standing is so important -- is in the balance.

Are there other cases in which people (hormones or no) reject solutions that would benefit them? Why? If you can think of one example, that's plenty for now.

Artificial Intelligence / Limits of Possibility?

Writing for Technology Review, David Gelernter suggests that "it is hugely unlikely, though not impossible, that a conscious mind will ever be built out of software" and directs us to a debate centered around models that are labeled "simulated conscious mind" and "simulated unconscious intelligence." What can we build? Ever?

"Artificial Intelligence Is Lost in the Woods" (synopsis from Ray Schroeder, Techno-News Blog)

A conscious mind will never be built out of software, argues a Yale University professor. Artificial intelligence has been obsessed with several questions from the start: Can we build a mind out of software? If not, why not? If so, what kind of mind are we talking about? A conscious mind? Or an unconscious intelligence that seems to think but experiences nothing and has no inner mental life? These questions are central to our view of computers and how far they can go, of computation and its ultimate meaning--and of the mind and how it works.

http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/2007/07/artificial-intelligence-is-lost-in.html

Whole original Technology Review article by David Gelernter is here: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18867/

Yes, it's all fascinating, and it may offer a more specific vision of artificial intelligence, one that we may contrast with the many fictions that've shaped the definition of AI for the bulk of humanity.

It may also suggest that there will be things we can't quite achieve, goals which we may approach, catch sight of, but never actually realize.

Utopians in particular tend to view human potential as limitless, and any goal, particularly their own goals, as entirely attainable, whether or not (usually not) there are specific, funtional plans in place to reach them.

Is it possible that there are limits? That our progress in a given direction is asymptotic to our goal? It's unlikely this question can be answered, as it's a matter of faith: either we believe a goal is attainable, or we do not, and, as we have not reached it yet, either hypothesis is unproven. If it is a fact that particular goal is unreachable but that we may draw ever closer to it, it is probably useful to believe that we can attain the goal.

Goal-oriented thinking can be dangerous if the end (accepted as attainable on faith) is used to justify certain means.

Please do think about AI and the possibilities for a better future that might include it. But here's my question for you: what is an example of an unreachable goal? Explain.

Second Earth / WWW2B

It's coming soon - the 2nd Earth phase of the world wide web. If you use the internet, you're somewhat familiar with online multiuser environments. If you play a game like World of Warcraft or Second Life, then you've had a glimpse of things to come. The prediction (of people like Wade Roush of Technology Review) is that there will be a world wide simulated environment, a metaverse a little like the one described in Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash. Of course, we've heard these "everything will change" predictions before. It's possible that a backlash over privacy concerns (or intellectual property, or access and usability) could send us spinning in yet another direction. What do you think?

Second Earth -Wade Roush, Technology Review:

The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth.... This, then, is how the Metaverse will take shape: through the imaginations of the programmers, merchants, artists, activists, and networkers who are already moving there. If these part-time émigrés from reality want embellishments like running water or six sunsets a day, they'll code their universes that way. The rest of us may smile at their whimsy--but we will take up, and come to depend upon, the serious tools that underlie their play. And if the world we create together is less lonely and less unpredictable than the one we have now, we'll have made a good start.

http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/2007/07/second-earth-wade-roush-technology.html