Things that might as well not be: January 2006

American Portrayal of Basque Terrorists

Yesterday, I went to see the new Spielberg film "Munich". I have to say Steve has more than made up for the mediocre "war of the worlds" and the disappointing "the terminal". Having seen the film in its original version in Spain, it is amusing to see Israeli terrorists fool Palestinians into thinking they are in fact ETA terrorists - an unlikely scenario seeing as those involved look about as basque as I look Outer Mongolian, as well as having quite marked Jewish complexions (at least 3 of them).

In any case - this made me recall a certain MacGyver episode in which our hero fights against a bunch of basque terrorists. Their portrayal is quite hilarious as the props make it look more like Colombia than Europe (straw huts, bananas and the lot), and some of the basques look more like Australian Aborigines rather than anything that could vaguely resemble an Euskaldun. The photo you can see is an image of one of these so called basques and clicking here will take you to an 8 minute clip of the episode. It´s in Spanish, but you get the picture. Enjoy.

The Submarine Experiment

To me it seems clear that in certain circumstances group intelligence based on the un-influenced opinion of each person in a diverse group, is far superior to individual performance. The question is how to harness this in a professional environment and what types of decisions are best suited to this method. The following extract is a striking example of such a situation, and is taken from "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki.

"In 1968, the US sub Scorpion disappeared in the North Atlantic… Although the Navy knew the sub’s last reported location, it had no idea what had happened to the Scorpion, and only the vaguest sense of how far it might have traveled after it had last made radio contact. As a result, the area where the navy began searching was a circle 20 miles wide and many 1000s of feet deep. You could not imagine a more hopeless task… A naval officer, John Craven concocted a series of scenarios… Then he assembled a team of men with a wide range of knowledge including mathematicians, submarine specialists, salvage men, etc. Instead of asking them to consult w/each other to come up with an answer, he asked each of them to offer his best guess about how likely each scenario was… He took all the guesses, and used a formula called Baye’s theorem to estimate the Scorpion’s final location. The location that Craven came up with was not a spot that any individual member of the group had picked… The final estimate was a genuinely collective judgement that the group as a whole had made, as opposed to representing the individual judgement of the smartest people in it… 5 months after the Scorpion disappeared, a navy ship found it. It was 220 yards from where Craven’s group had said it would be."