Dahn Yoga: Plea For Information

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I have received a heart-breaking series of emails from a reader about his wife’s experience in Dahn Yoga. Here is the first (I have changed the name and personal details and did some light editing to further disguise the emails’ origin):

Sent: Tue, June 14, 2011 1:01 PM
Subject: Dahn Information

Dr Briggs,

I am a post-doc new Metropolitan and found your blog about an experiment on Dahn yoga ( http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=290 ). My wife is involved in Dahn, and I strongly suspect that Dahn is a cult. Might I know if you can share some information you know about Dahn?

Best Regards,

G

Dahn YogaThe series of posts to which Mr G refers are the MIT HSP experiments, which I designed and oversaw. I summarized this experience in one post:

Dahn Yoga leader Ilchi Lee created the Korean Institute of Brain Science, a group that claimed it could train children to “read” colors of cards inside opaque envelopes, using “Heightened Sensory Perception.” Because I had experience in these matters and because I was an officemate with a physician who was also a Dahn member, I was able to run a test to see whether the extraordinary claims could be proven. They could not.

The experiment was a dismal failure and as clear a demonstration as you could wish of a failed idea. The series of posts which describe the experiment is here: I, II, III, IV, V.

On the subject of Dahn being a cult, however, I remain mute. I do not know what a cult is; that is, I could not write a testable, operational definition of one. I have read one book of essays on cults and have discovered (not surprisingly) that many experts disagree on the nature of cults. Further, it is irresponsible to throw around the word cult. To accuse an organization of being a cult is dangerous. Cult is a frightening word. Which is why you won’t see me saying Dahn is a cult. Cult—as far as Dahn goes—is just not a word I will use.

The gentleman who runs No Dahn Cult calls Dahn a cult, and adds evidence to back this up. CNN ran a report which asked if Dahn is a cult. Rick Ross, cult classifier, says Dahn is a cult. Rolling Stone, which has money for lawyers, suggests Dahn is a cult.

I told Mr G that I did not know if Dahn was a cult. But I offered my assistance in other ways. Time passed and Mr G wrote back:

Hi Matt,

Thanks a lot for your reply.

The most important question now is if you know any people that are ex-members of Dahn yoga near the Metropolitan area that I can contact. Now my wife does not want to listen to me at all because I do not know any, so I hope that I can find some ex-members to talk to her.

Best Regards,

G

I gave Mr G some more information, including that from a contact who wishes to remain anonymous. He thanked me for this. More time passed.

Sent: Mon, August 8, 2011 2:25 PM
Subject: Dahn Information

Hi Matt,

Sorry to bother you again, but my wife’s situation is getting worse, and she has made up her mind to quit her job and join Dahn.

I want to show her the blog you wrote about the experiment although I am not sure if it is useful, but I will try my best. One thing I am not sure about is that she might question how I can prove what you
wrote is not fake?

Might I know if there is any other information or proof that I can verify that the article you write is truth. I completely believe what you said about that.

Best Regards,

G

I gave him more information about the experiment and my role in it, etc. Unfortunately, this was not much new. But he thanked me and said he would try it with his wife.

My plea to you is if you have any information that might be useful to Mr G to please post it in the comments. I’ll make sure he sees it.

On another front, I received an email from a woman was interested in Dahn and found my blog posts. She said she would sign up for the “starter package” of 10 classes and keep a diary of what occurred. She promised to write up her experience as a blog post. The final email (name again changed) I received from her was this:

Hello

I just thought I would check in as I am half way through my 10 sessions.

The classes I have been to are usually of around 8 people (mostly women, but the occasional guy) and last 70 mins normally but probably only about 25 mins of ‘real yoga’. I like the yoga, but I don’t feel like there is any actual teaching involved, just a case of follow the leader, with the leader occasionally correcting your position. (But then maybe it’s like that in any other yoga class!) The part I struggle with most is the enforced smiling, the chanting and belly thumping to a drum beat. I just don’t ‘get’ that part at all.

Otherwise, the fake hugs from the instructors make me a little uncomfortable when, strangely, the other people in the class don’t tend to communicate much with each other. I also feel a little uncomfortable with some of the questions the lead instructor asks sometimes, especially as it is not chatty environment. For example, I have been asked if I live alone and whether I was worried about my work right now. But maybe I am reading too much into that.

After each session there is a corn tea ritual where are invited to various other workshops, retreats and events at varying costs. They even have a new piece of kit that measures your aura for $10 a go. I wouldn’t say their selling approach is overly aggressive, but I guess they hope you’ll feel bad saying no every visit and give in one day.

So, that’s it really. Nothing of substance to report. Just a general feeling that it’s all just very bizarre!

Kind regards

R

Despite my several attempts to contact Miss R, I never reached her after this communication. She may have just tired of the whole thing, changed her email, or stopped writing for dozens of other banal reasons.

Or she could have stopped because she got sucked into the Dahn organization.

Hurricane Irene: End Of The World? Obligatory Global Warming Post

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What do you call a Japanese lady with one leg shorter than the other?

Irene! Ha ha ha ha!

But, seriously. Hurricanes are no joke. Particularly this one, which the media assures us is the official frontman of the Four Horsemen of the—make that the—apocalypse. The headline at Yahoo news is:

Hurricane-force winds from Irene battered the North Carolina coast early Saturday as the storm started wreaking havoc even before a potentially catastrophic run up the Eastern Seaboard. [emphasis mine]

On the radio is a reporter saying something like, “I’m here in at the hotel Whatsitsname, Bob, in the Outer Banks. It’s raining and I see wind. That’s why I’m shouting, even though I’m safely ensconced in the room near the mini bar. If I look carefully I can see things blowing around. If you were in the path of one of these blowing objects, it would be almost certain execution. I urge all my listeners to take cover now! Unfortunately, I can’t see much damage.”

The reporter didn’t use the word unfortunately, but you can hear the gloom in his voice. The potential for winning an award for covering a horrific disaster has been blown away by anemic winds.

Hurricane IreneI am, very unfortunately in California, feeling sharp, stabbing pains of jealousy. I missed the earthquake and am going to miss the hurricane of the century! I do not jest. I started life as a meteorologist and love storms, as all weather people do. At least there is the internet. Sigh.

There has been criticism of the mayor for his storm preparations. Shutting down the subways makes sense, however. Even a brisk rain floods parts of the system, which is century old and looks it. And if the city didn’t announce the shutdown long in advance, New Yorkers would count on the lines running.

Same thing for the airlines canceling flights. Can you imagine the lawsuits if a plane flew through high winds and a passenger spilled coffee on herself? One shudders.

Meanwhile, we hear that Irene is the spawn of global warming. Sure, there hasn’t been a hurricane that hit us in years, and this one is not the Pinwheel of Death as hoped for by televisions journalists, but it is a hurricane, and hurricanes are storms, and Al Gore did promise that we would see more and stronger storms because of global warming. Therefore rampant, out of control global warming is real. Quod erat demonstrandum.

But I ask you: If global warming was responsible for the vicious Irene, was it also responsible for the many years of tropical quiescence? For those years when nothing happened? For the falls where the skies were clear, the temperature clement, the waters warm, and life good?

Why, if global warming is real, does it only cause bad things? Why not good ones, too?

Well, we know the answer. Listen: this storm can still cause a lot of trouble. So if you are in her path, don’t act stupidly. Stay home and keep the television off, lest you are needlessly panicked.

Update It is interesting to consider the earlier model runs showed Irene to be bigger than she turned out to be. These models were not predicting events many years into the future, just those for tomorrow. Our observations along Irene’s path are pretty good, not like the global temperature network, which is spotty at best. So even though our storm models aren’t perfected, surely our global climate models are.

Update Monday morning. I had to go to Taiwan television to see this report on Irene hype, on Next TV. One image showed a CNN reporter “battling” the breeze on the boardwalk, “Which is being breached!” The man is stuggles to stand, nearly falters, but recovers to describe the horror he sees. Meanwhile, in the background two gentlemen stroll past, hands in pockets, completely unconcerned.

Another is a clip of a weatherman in New York announcing that 1883 still stands as the last time a hurricane hit New York. “Really?” jumped in the female anchor, “Can’t we still say it was a hurricane? Are your sure we can’t say we battled it out…” etc., etc.

Hilarious.

The Increased And Increasing Chinese Military

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More on matters that don’t appear to be as urgent as they are.

From the DoD’s annual report on Chinese military capability, “In 2004, Hu Jintao articulated a mission statement for the armed forces titled, the ‘Historic Missions of the Armed Forces in the New Period of the New Century.’”

What’s mission number one? Defense of the motherland? Securing borders peacefully? Modernization of weaponry? Training of troops? None of these.

Try, “Provide an important guarantee of strength for the party to consolidate its ruling position.” Skeptics and appeasers will say he doesn’t mean what he says. The ghosts of Tiananmen will know the words are true.

Bullet number two: “Provide a strong security guarantee for safeguarding the period of strategic opportunity for national development.” Is that a long way to say lebensraum? And just what is the “period of strategic opportunity”? Does it have an expiration date?

World peace is on the list, but it doesn’t even place, coming in a distant fourth.

Defense Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun ritually condemned the DoD report, saying, “The report does not hold water as it severely distorted the facts.”

Regardless, it is clear that China’s military is growing. Is has reached adolescence, voraciously consuming budgets faster than teenagers eat pizzas.

The standard picture is to show spending as a percent of GDP:

Chinese military spending percent GDP

One difficulty is that this is a ratio, the denominator of which is the GDP itself, which in China is expanding rapidly. Notice that the 2011 figure is an estimate based on supposing a heavy increase in the Chinese economy.

This means that pictures which show spending as a percent of GDP in an economy that are bubble-like will tend to underplay the true amount of spending. Pictures like this can also mask increases in spending, as long as the increase in spending is at a lower rate of the increase in GDP—which is the case here.

We are told the military spending for 2011 will increase, but that it will increase at a slower rate than it did from 2009 to 2010.

As an amusing aside, the New York Times writes that this increase is a slow down in spending. Why? Probably because the Times is so used to writing that increases which aren’t accelerating are “decreasing” that it cannot think in other terms.

The second, and irremovable, problem is that the numerator uses the number provided by the Politburo. Everybody believes this to be an underestimate.

To help fix that, here’s another look, this time per capita (known) military spending :

Chinese military spending per capita

The increase—which is an increase and not a “slow down”—now appears to be an increase.

The denominator here is population, which is rigorously controlled by the Chinese one-child policy. For completeness, population is shown at the bottom of the post. The track is fairly smooth: the country is now only adding millions a year. Curiously, the deceleration appears to have stopped four years ago. A relaxation of the bureaucratic oversight of the one-child policy? Or just plain bad numbers?

Spending per capita increased in 2000 and again in 2005. It perhaps slowed in 2010, though this may reflect a change in accounting or the deceleration of population increase.

Anyway you slice it, China’s military is expanding rapidly. As reported last week, China is still conducting test flights of its prototype J-20 stealth fighter, is on the market for Soviet Russian T-50 fighters, and rolled out its newish aircraft carrier, which it will use to menace Taiwan and the Philippines.

The Philippines, incidentally, beefed up its naval presence recently, with a garage-sale purchase of an American Coast Guard cutter (the USGC Hamilton, as was). They did this because China claims its terroritorial [sic?] waters run right up the shores of the PI. President Aquino begs to differ.

We’ll do more on the DoD report another day, but for now, read this report on our potential non-sale of F-16s to Taiwan.

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Chinese population

Detecting Deceptive Opinion Spam

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Ever seen a review like this?

My husband and I satayed for two nights at the Hilton Chicago,and enjoyed every minute of it! The bedrooms are immaculate,and the linnens are very soft. We also appreciated the free wifi,as we could stay in touch with friends while staying in Chicago. The bathroom was quite spacious,and I loved the smell of the shampoo they provided-not like most hotel shampoos. Their service was amazing,and we absolutely loved the beautiful indoor pool. I would recommend staying here to anyone.

Your author has come across dozens that started like this one: with “My husband and I” or “My spouse and I”. Surfing over to Yelp and choosing San Francisco brings up another, “My husband stayed here for a little less than a week and were extremely pleased with the place…”

Turns out there’s a good reason for this similarity: many of these reviews are fake, put there by mercenaries, making as little as $5 for two, necessarily glowing, reviews. The $5 figure is from the New York Times, via A&LD. Bogus “five-star” ratings on sites like Amazon and TripAdvisor turn out to be a large problem.

The glowing notice above is known to be fake because it was solicited via a website that specializes in selling fake reviews (I have no idea whether the Yelp review is real or genuine). This solicitation was done as part of a study by Myle Ott and others at Cornell in an effort to develop an algorithm that can detect fakes.

Incidentally, Ott is a computer scientist, and those guys say “train algorithm” when statisticians say “fit model” or physicists say “build model.” All these terms mean exactly the same thing—though, admittedly “training an algorithm” sounds sexier than “fitting a model.” “Training” implies that “learning” can go on indefinitely, while “fitting” implies merely applying some formula. Computer scientists are winning the battle of terminology. They are also—justifiably—winning the battle over the philosophy of modeling, but that’s a story for another day.

Building the algorithm to determine fraudulent reviews is not simple; however, creating the database from which to fit the model is the real trick. One approach was to gather reviews which are too similar, vis à vis plagiarism. Another was to “ask participants to give both their true and untrue views on personal issues (e.g., their stance on the death penalty).” Everybody becomes their own control in this way.

Here, the authors did one better and solicited 400 fake reviews in the same way that fake reviews are solicited by actual websites. They also gathered 400 hoped-to-be-genuine reviews from TripAdvisor. In the end, they had 20 real and 20 fake reviews for 20 different hotels. These were used to fit their model—or train their algorithm, if you will.

One tidbit was the discovery that fake reviews are often written in a hurry. One “took just 5 seconds and contained 114 words.” This of course implies the text was prepared in advance and cut and pasted in. Reviews written by first-time users, or newly created users names, are also more likely to be fake. Sites like TripAdvisor can use these facts as pieces of information to flag a review as genuine or fake.

The models themselves were naive Bayes and support vector machines, both commonly used as classifiers. Classification is the meat and potatoes of statistics (I would say it is the sole reason for its existence; of that, more another time). Logistic regression is classification, as are discriminant analysis, so-called machine learning algorithms, and on and on.

Support vector machines are a kind of non-parametric discriminant analysis. Various combinations of functions of data are produced which spit out whether the given message is likely fake or likely real. If you want to be fancy, you say SVMs “find a high-dimensional separating hyperplane between two groups of data.”

The data is the content of the messages themselves: how long it took them to be written, the number of times the word “I” was used, and so on. For example, deceptive reviews used “experience”, “my husband”, “I”, “feel”, “business”, and “vacation” more than genuine ones.

They got about 90% accuracy on their test data, which is excellent. Especially considering that human readers do no better than 50%. Experience says that that high rate won’t be realized on new data. Why?

Well, the model was fit to the data at hand. If new data was exactly like the data at hand, then the new accuracy rate would be the same as the old. But the new data is never exactly like the old data: if it was, it would be a mere copy. It is the inevitable differences between the old and new that account for the decrease in performance.

This wisdom applies not just to Ott’s model, but to all statistical/probabilistic or computer science/fuzzy logic models. The models’ performance is always conditional on the data at hand.

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Ott has made his data publicly available. Do not download, however, unless you know how to read things like this, “!/.__The/DT ,/,__and/CC ,/,__and/CC ,/,__and/CC ,/,__and/CC ,/,__as/IN ./.__I/PRP ./.__The/DT ./.__Their/PRP$ ./…”