Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Robert M. Haralick
Intelligent Systems Laboratory
Department of Electrical Enginnering
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195
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position of being the physician in the court of Al-Fadhil,
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the vizier of Egypt under Saladin. And as well, he was the
m = 5.79767 × 10−10 × 302, 688, 500 = 0.175489 The current situation is one in which the skeptics can
hypothesize a protocol involving one or more prior exper-
Now the probability that we observe the pattern at least iments done on the sly, by which the small probability re-
once is 1−exp(−m) = 0.16095, a chance of approximately sults observed in the publicly declared experiment are ex-
one out of six times. This would certainly not be a rare pected, explainable without miracle, and therefore not sta-
event. tistically signficant. But the situation the skeptics describe
If the experiment is an honest experiment, meaning that is not consistent with the exprimenters repeatedly made as-
the character sequence and character relationships have sertions that there were no experiments on the sly and there
was no peeking ahead.
One argument counters the other. In this case, what is the
appropriate action for a scientist? What does a scientist do
when there occur inconsistencies between observations, or
between observations and theory? To discover the truth, the
scientist designs a new experiment, an experiment which is
more carefully controlled for extraneous effects, one which
is publicly open, an experiment in which the instrumenta-
tion is more accurate, a data analysis protocol in which the
statistics computed are more robust and have smaller ex-
pected variances etc. This is what is required here.
To help settle the controversy new experiments
are needed. A full statement of the protocols for
a new experiment can be found in the web site
http://www.george.ee.washington.edu. The experiment in
certain respects is patterned after that of Witztum et. al.[1]
to test the hypothesis that ELSs of appellations by which
famous rabbis are known and ELSs of their birth or death
dates are spatially closer together in the Torah text for more
rabbis than would be expected by chance. The statistical
analysis methodology is called the best star team methodol-
ogy and can also be found in the above mentioned website.
References