Talk:SRI International/Archive 1

Early documents
I have some early (1946) documents on the Dibble General Hospital which many of the original SRI buildings came from. (the current cafeteria was the chapel). I've got a 60 page non- copyrighted document (Recorder - sunset press california) that I thought about adding to SRI... Most of the original SRI buildings were originally a part of Dibble General Hospital which served the war efforts.

Would this be of value? I have the whole thing scanned in pdf if anyone would like a copy.

Wikiclarkco (talk) 20:20, 17 October 2009 (UTC) Hi, sorry to be anonymous, why is there no discussion of the book "changing images of man" ?

Hi, I'm a random user who clicked on the link in the paragraph about technologies invented in the 70's. I noticed that there is LaTeX listed there. The LaTeX page says it was invented in 1984. Who is right?


 * LaTeX certainly came later than TeX (version 2) which came out in 1983/84.

--Erp 02:25, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

File:Siri iOS.jpg Nominated for speedy Deletion
Hi, NightMonkey -- I'm not sure how else to get in touch with you. Sorry you don't like my "vanity edits" -- I just tried to provide an accurate, up-to-date entry about SRI with lots of links. While you include many interesting things in your version of our company history, there are a few inaccuracies I'd like to address. Perhaps we can work together on this. Mainly, my issue is that your article doesn't include much detail as to what SRI's working on *today*, and I think this would be of interest to readers. For example, while the remote viewing work of the early 70s might make for an interesting footnote, it's not at all relevant to our current work (and hasn't been for decades). I don't think it's important enough to be the second paragraph. Also, as you may have previously noted, we do not have more than 10,000 patents to our name. The number may be in the thousands, but I'd have to check. And lastly, we are not a "think-tank" as they are defined elsewhere.

Thanks for your ongoing interest in SRI International. I hope to hear from you via this platform.

Best regards, Marty at SRI

Vanity edits
OK, while I wish the article was better written, Wikipedia has policies against vanity edits, and an edit from an "anonymous user" from the SRI International's NetRange just ain't gonna cut it. I'm reverting the edits from 128.18.82.107.

Here's the whois output:

$ whois 128.18.82.107

OrgName:   SRI International OrgID:     SRIINT Address:   333 Ravenswood Avenue City:      Menlo Park StateProv: CA PostalCode: 94025 PostalCode: 94025 Country:   US

NetRange:  128.18.0.0 - 128.18.255.255 CIDR:      128.18.0.0/16 NetName:   SRINET NetHandle: NET-128-18-0-0-1 Parent:    NET-128-0-0-0-0 NetType:   Direct Assignment NameServer: NS.SRI.COM NameServer: NS1.SRI.COM NameServer: NSF.ALGX.NET Comment: RegDate: Updated:   2003-03-25

OrgTechHandle: LS732-ARIN OrgTechName:  Serrano, Louis OrgTechPhone: +1-650-859-5687 OrgTechEmail: louis.Serrano@sri.com


 * 1) ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2005-01-07 19:10
 * 2) Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS database.

--NightMonkey 12:03, Jan 8, 2005 (UTC)

MICR?
I was always under the impression that the check-sorting machine was called ERMA, not MICR. My grandfather was part of this project, and he always talked about ERMA. Perhaps MICR refers to something else, in which case it may be important to clarify and/or expand the information on this project. Thanks! Romarin 02:01, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
 * MICR refers to magnetic ink character recognition, which was used by ERMA. -- Beland 20:10, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Section rewrite?
Any suggestions about how to rewrite the Research Projects section? As (correctly) tagged, it does indeed read rather like an ad, and somewhat echoes the history timeline on the official SRI website. Perhaps someone could consider rearranging the more noteworthy items into a breakout by discipline rather than the current historical mish-mash. Thoughts? JXM 01:30, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Merge
This page has been subject to an official merge decision by an admin (see history). Content from that merge might not be to everybody's taste, but rather than deleting it outright it's probably best to take it up with the admin as they decreed that the contents of another page should be merged into this one and deleting the content will potentially put users in breach of the decision.

perfectblue (talk) 14:50, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

MOS
As per manual of style, paragraphed text should not be rendered in bold.

perfectblue (talk) 21:03, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Move 'outside the mainstream' elsewhere
SRI International's activities are described in 2281 words. Of these, 907 words are under the headline "Research outside of the mainstream". The only other headline on the same level is "Research History".

The 'research outside of the mainstream' section may be relevant for people with special interest in ESP and Clairvoyance. It is a VERY minor part of SRI, and is vastly overrepresented in the Wikipedia entry on SRI International.

I therefore suggest the following: 1. The section 'research outside of the mainstream' is merged into the Wikipedia entries for ESP and Clairvoyance 2. The section is replaced in the SRI Wikipedia entry by MAXIMUM ONE SENTENCE, which links to the entries which the section has been merged with.

This should go in effect within a few days. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dnordfors (talk • contribs) 23:01, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

This is the section I just removed (and added a fraction of to the history section), for future reference. —Disavian (talk/contribs) 05:43, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Clairvoyance and ESP
In 1972, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ initiated a series of human subject studies to determine whether participants (the viewers or percipients) could reliably identify and accurately describe salient features of remote locations or targets. In the early studies, a human sender was typically present at the remote location, as part of the experiment protocol. A three-step process was used, the first step being to randomly select the target conditions to be experienced by the senders. Secondly, in the viewing step, participants were asked to verbally express or sketch their impressions of the remote scene. Thirdly, in the judging step, these descriptions were matched by separate judges, as closely as possible, with the intended targets. The term remote viewing was coined to describe this overall process.

In order to explore the nature of remote viewing channel, the viewer in some experiments was secured in a double-walled copper-screened Faraday cage. Although this provided attenuation of radio signals over a broad range of frequencies, the researchers found that it did not alter the subject's remote viewing capability. They postulated that extremely low frequency (ELF) propagation might be involved, since Faraday cage screening is less effective in the ELF range. Such a hypothesis had previously been put forward by telepathy researchers in the Soviet Union. The first paper by Puthoff and Targ on psychic research to appear in a mainstream peer-reviewed scientific journal was published in Nature in March 1974; in it, the team reported some degree of remote viewing success. One of the individuals involved in these initial studies at SRI was Uri Geller, a well-known celebrity psychic at the time. The research team reported witnessing some of Geller's trademark metal spoon-bending performances, but admitted that they were unable to conduct adequately controlled experiments to confirm any paranormal hypothesis about them.

Electroencephalography (EEG) techniques were also used by team to examine ESP phenomena. In these investigations, a sender, who was isolated in a visually opaque, electrically and acoustically shielded chamber, was stimulated at random by bursts of strobe-light flickers. The experimenters reported that, for one receiver, differential alpha block on control and stimulus trials were observed, which showed that some information transfer had occurred. In contrast, this person's expressed statements of when the stimulus occurred were no different than that which would be expected by chance. The researches were unable to identify the physical parameters by which the EEG effect was mediated.

Psychokinesis
Another series of experiments in the early 1970s focused on psychokinesis, which concerns how human consciousness may influence the behavior of external physical systems. In these studies, the support came from NASA on a contract administered by JPL. They involved building an electronic apparatus that would randomize images presented to an individual, who was asked to predict them in advance. By coupling the randomizer with encouraging feedback and reinforcement for successful predictions, the system was intended to measure how individuals develop their clairvoyance or other telepathic powers. The entire data-gathering process was supposed to be automated, in order to limit the potential for experimenter interference. However, this part of the protocol had been violated for several experiments. A JPL review of the final report noted that, when these parts were omitted from analysis, no evidence of ESP performance could be identified. NASA concluded that there was no basis for further support of this work.

Replication studies
After the publication of these findings, various attempts to replicate the remote viewing findings were quickly carried out. Several of these follow-up studies, which involved viewing in group settings, reported some limited success. They included the use of face-to-face groups, and remotely linked groups using computer conferencing.

The various debates in the mainstream scientific literature prompted the editors of Proceedings of the IEEE to invite Robert Jahn, then Dean of the School of Engineering at Princeton University, to write a comprehensive review of psychic phenomena from an engineering perspective. His paper, published in February 1982, includes numerous references to remote viewing replication studies at the time.

Controversy
The descriptions of a large number of psychic studies and their results were published in March 1976, in the journal Proceedings of the IEEE. Together with the earlier papers, this provoked an extended debate in the mainstream scientific literature. Numerous problems in the overall design of the remote viewing studies were identified, with problems noted in all three of the remote viewing steps (target selection, target viewing, and results judging). A particular problem was the failure to follow the standard procedures that are used in experimental psychology.

Several external researchers expressed concerns about the reliability of the judging process. Independent examination of some of the sketches and transcripts from the viewing process revealed flaws in the original procedures and analyses. In particular, the presence of sensory cues being available to the judges was noted. A lengthy exchange ensued, with the external researchers finally concluding that the failure of Puthoff and Targ to address their concerns meant that the claim of remote viewing "can no longer be regarded as falling within the scientific domain".

Procedural problems and researcher conflicts of interest in the psychokinesis experiments were noted by science writer Martin Gardner in a detailed analysis of the NASA final report. Also, sloppy procedures in the conduct of the EEG study were reported by a visiting observer during another series of exchanges in the scientific literature.