How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

— Charles De Gaulle, in “Les Mots du General”, 1962

From The Smoking Gun

(Kingston, ON) — Noting that the eyes have long been described as mirrors of the soul, a Queen’s computer scientist is studying the effect of eye gaze on conversation and the implications for new-age technologies, ranging from video conferencing to speech recognition systems.

Dr. Roel Vertegaal, who is presenting a paper on eye gaze at an international conference in New Orleans this week, has found evidence to suggest a strong link between the amount of eye contact people receive and their degree of participation in group communications. Eye contact is known to increase the number of turns a person will take when part of a group conversation. The goal of this study was to determine what type of “gaze” (looking at a person’s eyes and face) is required to have this effect.

Two conditions were studied: synchronized (where eye contact is made while the subject is speaking) and random contact, received at any time in the conversation. The Queen’s study showed that the total amount of gaze received during a group conversation is more important than when the eye contact occurs. more…

The telegraph is like a very long cat, stretching from San Francisco to New York. You pull its tail in San Francisco and it meows in New York. The wireless telegraph is the same only without the cat.

The dark side!

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.

— Al Capone

We heard an NPR news report this morning about how a second California college going to adopt the policy of asking for documentation of extra-curricular activities from their applicants. The story claimed that UCSD had adopted this procedure on an experimental basis last year and had randomly selected 300 applicants from whom documentation was requested. What makes this story interesting is the reported result of UCSD’s experiment. Every one of the 300 students asked to provide documentation did so!

We find it hard to believe that nobody even changed their photography club office from secretary to vice president. In fact, the result is ridiculous. Even those who were 100% truthful would have some difficulty getting the documentation together.

Possible explanations:

– The young have always been good liars. Perhaps this experiment shows that they are evolving to become good forgers too.

– Left-leaning NPR’s editorial staff believes that the practice is an infringement on privacy rights and fudged the result to infer that the policy is unnecessary.

– UCSD announced the policy and sent the requests for documentation. When the documentation arrived, it was opened and the paper clips and staples were removed. What remained was loaded into the recycling bin. They announced that everybody was honest to next years flock of liars and forgers.

– Real top honors high school students are threatening to bring a class action suit against the colleges for not verifying extra-cullicular activities. In response, the colleges are pretending to do something.

If you know anything about this or have ideas, email me