"He was educated at Ohio Northern University and the College of Wooster, after which he enlisted in the Marine Corps and was stationed in Santiago.
Afterwards, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he received his master's degree in botany in 1923 and a PhD in botany in 1925.
While there, he and his wife Louisa E. Rhine were impressed by a May 1922 lecture given by Arthur Conan Doyle exulting the scientific proof of communication with the dead.
Rhine later wrote, "This mere possibility was the most exhilarating thought I had had in years." Rhine's interest in this topic was furthered after reading The Survival of Man, Oliver Lodge's book about mediumship and life after death.
Rhine lent an insight into the medium Mina Crandon's performances. He was able to observe some of her trickery in the dark when she used luminous objects. Rhine observed Crandon in fraud in a séance in 1926.
According to Rhine, during the séance she was free from control and kicked a megaphone to give the impression it was levitating.
Rhine’s report that documented the fraud was refused by the American Society for Psychical Research, so he published it in the Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology. In response, defenders of Crandon attacked Rhine.
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a letter to the Boston Herald attacking Rhine's "colossal impertinence...stupidity and malignancy."
Rhine wondered why J. Malcolm Bird, with three years of experience, did not expose any of her tricks. Rhine suspected that Bird was a confederate of the medium "
____
"In 1934, drawing upon several years of meticulous lab research and statistical analysis, Rhine published the first edition of a book titled Extra-Sensory Perception, which in various editions was widely read over the next decades.
In the later 1930s, Rhine investigated "psychokinesis" – again reducing the subject to simple terms so that it could be tested, with controls, in a laboratory setting.
Rhine relied on testing whether a subject could influence the outcome of tossed dice – initially with
hand-thrown dice,
later with dice thrown from a cup,
and finally with machine-thrown dice."
"In 1940 Rhine co-authored with Joseph Gaither Pratt and other associates at Duke Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years,a review of all experimental studies of clairvoyance and telepathy.
It has been recognized as the first meta-analysis in the history of science "
"Rhine believed that a good groundwork should be laid in the lab, so that the scientific community might take parapsychology seriously.
In the early 1960s, Rhine left Duke and founded the Institute for Parapsychology, which later became the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man.
In the 1970s, several high-scoring subjects – Sean Harribance, M.B. Dykshoorn, and Bill Delmore – were tested in the lab, shortly before Rhine's retirement."
Rhine has been described as credulous as he believed the horse "Lady Wonder" was telepathic but it was discovered the owner was using subtle signals to control the horse's behavior.
Historian Ruth Brandon has written that Rhine's research was not balanced or objective, instead "motivated by the most extreme ideology" of vitalism."
*
(Vitalism is a belief that starts from the premise that
"living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some
non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things."
Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the "vital spark", "energy", "élan vital"
(coined by vitalist Henri Bergson), "vital force", or "vis vitalis", which some equate with the soul.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, vitalism was discussed among biologists, between those who felt that
the known mechanics of physics would eventually explain the difference between
life and non-life
and vitalists who argued that the processes of life could not be reduced to a mechanistic process. )
___
Zener cards are cards used to conduct experiments for extrasensory perception (ESP).
Perceptual psychologist Karl Zener (1903–1964) designed the cards in the early 1930s for experiments conducted with his colleague, parapsychologist J. B. Rhine (1895–1980).
The Zener cards are a deck of 25 cards, five of each symbol. The five symbols are a
hollow circle,
a plus sign,
three vertical wavy lines,
a hollow square,
and a hollow five-pointed star.
"In a test for ESP, the experimenter picks up a card in a shuffled pack, observes the symbol, and records the answer of the person being tested, who would guess which of the five designs is on the card.
The experimenter continues until all the cards in the pack are used. "
"Once Rhine took precautions in response to criticisms of his methods, he was unable to find any high-scoring subjects."
The chemist Irving Langmuir called Rhine's experiments an example of
pathological science–
the science of things that aren't so–
and criticized its practitioners not as dishonest people but as ones that have sufficiently fooled themselves.
During James Randi's TV special, Exploring Psychic Powers Live!, a psychic was tested on a deck of 250 Zener cards and was only able to predict 50 of them correctly, which is the
expected result of random guessing the cards.
In 2016, Massimo Polidoro tested an Italian mother and daughter who were claiming a 90% and above success rate of psychic transmission using Zener cards. Upon restricting them from seeing each other's faces and the use of a silent writing method, their success rate dropped to no better than chance.
The women were cognizant of the fact that they required visual contact to achieve transmission of the symbols,
saying, "This kind of understanding is so natural to us, all this attention to us is also very surprising.
There are no tricks, but surely we understand each other with looks. It always happens."
_____
"The results of many tests using Zener cards fit with a typical normal distribution.
Probability predicts these test results for a test of 25 questions with five possible answers if chance is operating:
79% of people will get between 3 and 7 correct
(probability is a more precise calculation).
The probability of guessing 8 or more correctly is 10.9% (in a group of 25, you can expect several scores in this range by chance).
Getting 15 out of 25 correct is about 1 in 90,000.
Getting 20 out of 25 correct is about 1 in 5 billion.
Getting all 25 correct has a probability of about 1 in 300 quadrillion. "
___
"Probability is the branch of mathematics and statistics concerning events and numerical descriptions of how likely they are to occur.
The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1; the larger the probability, the more likely an event is to occur.
A simple example is the tossing of a fair (unbiased) coin. Since the coin is fair, the two outcomes ("heads" and "tails") are both equally probable;
the probability of "heads" equals the probability of "tails";
and since no other outcomes are possible, the probability of either "heads" or "tails" is 1/2 (which could also be written as 0.5 or 50%)."
"These concepts have been given an axiomatic mathematical formalization in probability theory, which is used widely in areas of study such as
statistics, mathematics, science, finance, gambling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer science, game theory,
and philosophy to, for example, draw inferences about the expected frequency of events.
Probability theory is also used to describe the underlying mechanics and regularities of complex systems. "
____
'U.S. Route 30 or U.S. Highway 30 (US 30) is an east–west main route of the United States Numbered Highway System, with the highway traveling across the Northern U.S.
With a length of 3,112 miles (5,008 km), it is the third-longest U.S. Highway, after US 20 and US 6.
The western end of the highway is at US 101 in Astoria, Oregon;
the eastern end is at Virginia Avenue, Absecon Boulevard, and Adriatic Avenue in
Atlantic City, New Jersey."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Route_30
'Despite long stretches of parallel and concurrent Interstate Highways, it has not been decommissioned unlike other long-haul routes such as US 66.
It is also the only U.S. Highway that has always been coast-to-coast since the beginning of U.S. Numbered Highway System."
___
"The Pine Barrens territory helps recharge the 17-trillion-US-gallon (64-billion-cubic-metre) Kirkwood–Cohansey aquifer, containing some of the purest water in the United States."
"unique ecology of the Pine Barrens supports a diverse spectrum of plant life, including orchids and carnivorous plants.
The area is also notable for its populations of rare pygmy pitch pines and other plant species that depend on the frequent fires of the Pine Barrens to reproduce "
"As a result of all these factors, in 1978, Congress passed legislation to designate 1.1 million acres (4,500 km2; 1,700 sq mi) of the Pine Barrens as the Pinelands National Reserve (the nation's first National Reserve) to preserve its ecology. A decade later, it was designated by the United Nations as an International Biosphere Reserve."
____
"The most popular version of subjective probability is Bayesian probability, which includes expert knowledge as well as experimental data to produce probabilities.
The expert knowledge is represented by some (subjective) prior probability distribution. These data are incorporated in a likelihood function.
The product of the prior and the likelihood, when normalized, results in a posterior probability distribution that incorporates all the information known to date.
By Aumann's agreement theorem, Bayesian agents whose prior beliefs are similar will end up with similar posterior beliefs.
However, sufficiently different priors can lead to different conclusions, regardless of how much information the agents share"
____
"The word probability derives from the Latin probabilitas, which can also mean "probity", a measure of the authority of a witness in a legal case in Europe, and often correlated with the witness's nobility. "
'An example of the use of probability theory in equity trading is the effect of the perceived probability of any widespread Middle East conflict on oil prices, which have ripple effects in the economy as a whole.
An assessment by a commodity trader that a war is more likely can send that commodity's prices up or down, and signals other traders of that opinion.
Accordingly, the probabilities are neither assessed independently nor necessarily rationally.
The theory of behavioral finance emerged to describe the effect of such groupthink on pricing, on policy, and on peace and conflict."
'In addition to financial assessment, probability can be used to analyze trends in biology (e.g., disease spread) as well as ecology (e.g., biological Punnett squares).
As with finance, risk assessment can be used as a statistical tool to calculate the
likelihood of undesirable events occurring,
and can assist with implementing protocols to avoid encountering such circumstances.
Probability is used to design games of chance so that casinos can make a guaranteed profit, yet provide payouts to players that are frequent enough to encourage continued play"
"Another significant application of probability theory in everyday life is reliability.
Many consumer products, such as automobiles and consumer electronics, use reliability theory in product design to reduce the probability of failure.
Failure probability may influence a manufacturer's decisions on a product's warranty."
'The cache language model and other statistical language models that are used in natural language processing are also examples of applications of probability theory."
"Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence.
It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related to information retrieval, knowledge representation and computational linguistics, a subfield of linguistics.
Typically data is collected in text corpora, using either rule-based, statistical or neural-based approaches in machine learning and deep learning.
Major tasks in natural language processing are
speech recognition, text classification, natural-language understanding, and natural-language generation."
*
"1950s: The Georgetown experiment in 1954 involved fully automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English. "
"1960s: Some notably successful natural language processing systems developed in the 1960s were SHRDLU, a natural language system working in restricted "blocks worlds" with restricted vocabularies, and
ELIZA, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist, written by Joseph Weizenbaum between 1964 and 1966.
Using almost no information about human thought or emotion, ELIZA sometimes provided a startlingly human-like interaction."
'1970s: During the 1970s, many programmers began to write "conceptual ontologies", which structured real-world information into computer-understandable data. "
"Examples are MARGIE (Schank, 1975), SAM (Cullingford, 1978), PAM (Wilensky, 1978), TaleSpin (Meehan, 1976), QUALM (Lehnert, 1977), Politics (Carbonell, 1979), and Plot Units (Lehnert 1981).
During this time, the first chatterbots were written "
Up until the 1980s, most natural language processing systems were based on complex sets of hand-written rules.
Starting in the late 1980s, however, there was a revolution in natural language processing with the introduction of machine learning algorithms for language processing.
This was due to both the steady increase in computational power (see Moore's law) and the gradual lessening of the dominance of Chomskyan theories of linguistics (e.g. transformational grammar), whose
theoretical underpinnings discouraged the sort of corpus linguistics
that underlies the machine-learning approach to language processing "
*
"Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses."
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes.
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from both psychology and linguistics.
Especially during the age of symbolic NLP, the area of computational linguistics maintained strong ties with cognitive studies."
Apply the theory of conceptual metaphor,
explained by Lakoff as
"the understanding of one idea, in terms of another"
which provides an idea of the intent of the author
For example, consider the English word big. When used in a comparison ("That is a big tree"),
the author's intent is to imply that the tree is physically large relative to other trees or the authors experience.
When used metaphorically ("Tomorrow is a big day"), the author's intent to imply importance.
The intent behind other usages, like in "She is a big person", will remain somewhat ambiguous to a person and a cognitive NLP algorithm alike without additional information."
"Assign relative measures of meaning to a word, phrase, sentence or piece of text based on the information presented before and after the piece of text being analyzed, e.g., by means of a probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG).
The mathematical equation for such algorithms is presented in US Patent 9269353"
ideas of cognitive NLP are inherent to neural models multimodal NLP (although rarely made explicit)
and developments in artificial intelligence, specifically tools and technologies using large language model approaches and new directions in artificial general intelligence based on
the free energy principle
by British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London Karl J. Friston."
*
"The free energy principle is a theoretical framework suggesting that
the brain reduces surprise or uncertainty
by making predictions
based on internal models and updating them using sensory input.
It highlights the brain's objective of
aligning its internal model and the external world
to enhance prediction accuracy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle
"The free energy principle models the behaviour of systems that are distinct from, but coupled to, another system (e.g., an embedding environment), where the degrees of freedom that implement the interface between the two systems is known as a Markov blanket. "
The free energy principle is based on the Bayesian idea of the brain as an “inference engine.”
Under the free energy principle, systems pursue paths of least surprise,
or equivalently, minimize the difference between predictions based on their model of the world and their sense and associated perception.
This difference is quantified by variational free energy and is minimized by continuous correction of the world model of the system, or
by making the world more like the
predictions of the system"
