Just waterboard them all!

Following Techsassy's twit on a Playboy video where a reporter let's himself be waterboarded, a thing or two came to mind. First, by reading the comments made by most of the readers of that post, I get the distinct impression that the possibility that at least some of the waterboarded guys are not necessarily terrorists (as in "innocent of the accusations"), never even crosses their minds. The reason why there is a judicial system is because civilized societies have developed this expensive and (in the case of Portugal, at least) time consuming process to determine the guilt of people accused of crimes. In the Middle Ages, which some people for some reason call the "Dark Ages" (imagine ominous music playing while you read those two words), they had a much more expedite process to determine the guilt of people. The suspects' arms and legs would be tied and they would be thrown into a lake. The guilt or innocence would be determined by capacity of the accused to float. Their investigation methods must have been very good at that time because that process usually confirmed the suspicions.

Another thing which came to mind is that what the video demonstrates is, and I can only imagine, a very soft version of the waterboarding technique. For one thing, the reporter had the control of the situation. He could stop whenever he wanted to, which, in that case, was something like after 6 seconds. For some reason I don't think that the nice interrogators in the US Armed Forces would stop after just 6 seconds. Another thing that comes to mind is that only a bit of the process is shown. Terrorism suspects are waterboarded for the acquisition of intel. So I'm going out on a limb here and risk saying that the technique (torture) will be restarted as many times as needed until the subject babbles something that might be of interest to the tort... I mean, "intel acquisition specialists". So, for this demonstration to be closer to reality what should have been done was to try to get him to confess something. And I'm particularly curious to know how many times they would have to waterboard the reporter before getting his confession that he was the guy on the grassy knoll. Not so curious that I'm willing to let myself be waterboarded, mind due. I'm also left wondering how do the interrogators decide that they have the wrong guy. Because both the terrorist and the innocent will surely start by saying they don't know the answers to the questions. Maybe the trick is to see who keeps saying he doesn't know the answers after, let's say, twenty plunges.

Many people argument that waterboarding is not a form of torture because it doesn't inflict physical pain. Without even going into that, I would point out that United Nations Convention Against Torture's definition of torture includes severe mental suffering. I'm only guessing here, but I'd say that if the process is repeated over and over, severe mental suffering is more or less guaranteed. Again I'm guessing, but I'm pretty convinced that the subjects of real waterboarding will almost certainly suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now, I don't want to be unfair to the reporter. His aim was not to replicate the conditions under which terrorism suspects, or any other, are subject to waterboarding. He just wanted to be able to explain as best as possible what does a person who is waterboarded feel. So my own aim with these words is only to debunk the arguments of those who would use this video to argument that waterboarding is not torture.

Note to self on GMail

I recently added some very simple filters to GMail that will help me use it as a memory enhancer in a much better way then just simply sending mails to myself. GMail's filters allow you to automatically execute a number of tasks. So what I did was to create a filter which will add a "Book" tag to any mails received with "Book:" on the subject, mark the message as read and archive it. Mails that I send to myself with mentions of books are not for immediate action. I just want to register somewhere that I found an interesting book that I may want to buy someday. So it's ok just to archive those mails with a tag. For notes to self or tasks I have a simpler filter. It just adds the corresponding tag but the mail stays in the Inbox.

Now that I'm thinking about this simple hack it starts to make sense to create an Ubiquity command to extract the relevant information from an Amazon page and send the message to myself. Have to relearn how to program Ubiquity commands since there were changes to the parser engine.

Gotta stop multitasking. You should too.

Yesterday I was listening to the excellent BBC Science in Action podcast and on of the pieces was with an investigator who is writing a paper about multitasking. If I remember it correctly, the study started because of his perception as a teacher that many people, including his under-graduate students, are pressed into multitasking. Either on their jobs or on their leisure times, people increasingly multi-task through their lives. This was puzzling because every psychology study written on the subject to this day seems to clearly state that the human brain can't multi-task. It's not physiologically prepared for that kind of processing. So he (and a team, I think) started comparatively studying high and low multitasking individuals. He identified three characteristics needed for multitasking and compared the test subjects on them. The characteristics are:

1. Ability to filter irrelevant information - this should be one of the main characteristics for a multi-tasker. When provided with different sources of information the perfect multi-tasker should be able to discard irrelevant information and concentrate on the most important data.
   
2. High capacity to change between tasks - changing from one task to the other should be a fast and effortless process.
3. Using good mental sorting, storage and accessing strategies and capacities - since information is gathered from different sources, the perfect multi-tasker should be able to mentally sort and store that information in "brain cabinets" and should also be able to find and access that information in a fast and efficient way.

Now, funny enough, when comparing the heavy multi-taskers to the serial-taskers, the second group evidenced better ratings at all the three multitasking required characteristics. This means that heavy multi-taskers are terrible at multitasking. And this raises some interesting questions. If people are so bad at multitasking, why do they do it? Since they can't really do things faster by multitasking, do they get some other rewards instead? Do they get pleasure from the constant flow of information without even a reasonable processing of that information? And many more interesting questions he must have thought about, I'm sure.

After listening to that podcast I thought about how it applies to me. It's true I've been adopting a more multitasking posture. I'm reading mails, twits, looking for articles, following links. Looking back a bit, I think I need to change my stance towards Twitter. Many times I end up reading a number of articles for which I don't really care about. It's like since I've been made aware of a certain article I feel a certain obligation to read it. Which is silly, of course. Another thing that is worrying me is that I've been feeling a certain degradation on my mental capacities. For instance, last Monday something funny happened to me. I had this DVD to return to the rental club. I should also get the groceries that my wife had left in the car. I take these opportunities without the wife and children to get up-to-date with my podcasts so, before leaving, I set up the headphones on my HTC and started a podcast. Half the way driving to the DVD rental I look down to the passenger seat. Hmm... so where's the DVD I should be returning? I turn back, get the DVD, walk to the rental only to find out that it closes at 2300 hours. Great, not only did I spend the diesel for nothing, now I'll have to pay double for the rental. I drive home, park the car in the garage, take the elevator, open the door.

- Didn't you return home a while ago? - asks my wife.
- Yeah (grumble).
- Don't tell me you forgot the DVD?
- Yeah (grumble).
- Oh. I thought you had gone back to get the groceries...
- OH FOR CRYIN' OUT LOUD!!!

So, I had two tasks to perform and ended up forgetting about them both. I didn't forget about my podcasts, though. I got the impression from the BBC podcast I mentioned, that, not only does multitasking not help in accomplishing more tasks done in less time, it might even hurt our brains. In face of this I think I'll adopt the following measures:

• Change my current policy on mail checking. This means lowering mail priority;
  
• Really rethink my usage of Twitter. I don't really need a social network and I definitely can get the good articles I get through Twitter by using other, less attention intensive means;
• Try to concentrate more on single tasks.

Hopefully I'll be able to increase my short term memory performance, which has been scary for some time now.