A Four Line Summary of Ogi and Sai's Plan of Action, and a Useful Comparison to Other Research
So for anyone who doesn't want to wade through the entire history of SurveyFail, here is my four line summary of their plans (pulled from my comment to romaine24 here, and with apologies to the underpants gnomes.)
Ogi and Sai's Plan of Action:
1. Get PhDs
2. Sign Book Deal
3. ???????
4. Profit!
On a more serious note, there is an interesting comparison to be made between their ideas and another science fail that came out today. Netbase Solultions created a search engine called healthbase that is intended to provide useful answers to medical inquiries by gathering together written data from all across the internet. They ran into a few problems.
Jonquil has an excellent collection of laughter-inducing results here. My favorite? One cure for 'cognitive neuroscientist' is 'experimental design'. If only Ogi had had access to this database!
I'm not sure it was clear from my previous posts, but the fact that Ogi and Sai got their PhDs from the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems is somewhat of an academic formality/designation. In lay terms, they were computer scientists or computer programmers.
Netbase Solutions now has to tweak and refine their algorithm heavily to make sure that it is *useful* and ceases to present 'Dr. Pepper' as a treatment for 'Jew'.
What they were trying to do, which is pull out useful correlations from a gigantic pile of data, is very similar to what Ogi and Sai were attempting; you can be assured that any results the Drs. Programming-Makes-Me-An-Expert-In-Everything produce will have as much validity as offering up Freudian analysis as a cure for vampirism.
Ogi and Sai's Plan of Action:
1. Get PhDs
2. Sign Book Deal
3. ???????
4. Profit!
On a more serious note, there is an interesting comparison to be made between their ideas and another science fail that came out today. Netbase Solultions created a search engine called healthbase that is intended to provide useful answers to medical inquiries by gathering together written data from all across the internet. They ran into a few problems.
Jonquil has an excellent collection of laughter-inducing results here. My favorite? One cure for 'cognitive neuroscientist' is 'experimental design'. If only Ogi had had access to this database!
I'm not sure it was clear from my previous posts, but the fact that Ogi and Sai got their PhDs from the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems is somewhat of an academic formality/designation. In lay terms, they were computer scientists or computer programmers.
Netbase Solutions now has to tweak and refine their algorithm heavily to make sure that it is *useful* and ceases to present 'Dr. Pepper' as a treatment for 'Jew'.
What they were trying to do, which is pull out useful correlations from a gigantic pile of data, is very similar to what Ogi and Sai were attempting; you can be assured that any results the Drs. Programming-Makes-Me-An-Expert-In-Everything produce will have as much validity as offering up Freudian analysis as a cure for vampirism.