"Being an American" Poll... Check it out!!

The Des Moines Register ^ | 04/16/2003 | DAVID ELBERT

[cspackler]

Controversial researcher has new tools By DAVID ELBERT Register Business Editor 04/16/2003

Twenty-five years ago, Charles Cleveland, then a Drake University professor, captured attention with a computer program designed to identify people's attitudes based on what they said or wrote...

A 1978 Des Moines Register story about the project stirred up a hornets' nest. Privacy advocates worried that government agencies would use the program to develop psychological profiles that would lead to the dark futures portrayed by novelists George Orwell and Aldous Huxley...

[cspackler]

This is an article that links to an interesting survey. It's not really a survey, more of an on-line interview.

Here is the link to the interview
Use "America" for the userid and "American" as the password.
Come back and give your opinions.

[boris]

I played with it and was not impressed. It is about on the level that programs such as "Eliza" were in the 1970s. Big deal.

Eliza morphed into a different program that pretended to be a 'non directional' psychologist. I forget its name. It was amusing to feed the outputs of one into the other.

One time I decided to simulate a person with a deep psychosis (no jokes please). Pretty soon, I was typing "Ah! Ah! The bugs! They're all over me! Make them stop! Ah!"

"You seem to feel rather strongly about that," was the response.

--Boris

[cspackler]

Socrates is set up to be a stimulus-response research tool to gather in depth information on a variety of subjects. It is not designed (yet) to carry on a respondent driven conversation, but rather to gather information by asking questions and probing the responses. If the participant plays along and makes an effort to answer the questions posed, the quality of information gathered is incredible.