‘Did You Know’ Ad is Mind Boggling

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
Joined
Nov 27, 2006
Messages
4,646
I bumped into the extended version of the GM Volt “Did You Know” advertisement and promptly got sucked into the various nuggets of information, many of which revolve around technology and the Internet. I’m not sure how accurate the data is but some of it blows me away. Check it out below and discuss if it’s a bunch of hooey or a clever application of statistics.

See front page for video.
 
"what does this mean?" this means we shouldn't buy your crappy car even to support a system that depends on you. the system should be removed from you.
 
Thanks for posting that video, crazy how it seems, but that information is more than likely correct.
 
good commercial...for what I don't know :p

maybe GM should spend the time of analysis on nifty statistics instead developing cars that can compete with their overseas competitors...
 
conscript said:
maybe GM should spend the time of analysis on nifty statistics instead developing cars that can compete with their overseas competitors...
Click to expand...

lol - if it wasn't posted by the user "GMVolt" I would not have known it was a car ad. Heck, I still didn't believe that "GMVolt" was really about the Volt until I browsed the rest of the videos posted by that username.
 
Hyperian said:
"what does this mean?" this means we shouldn't buy your crappy car even to support a system that depends on you. the system should be removed from you.
Click to expand...

Seems a bit early to write the Volt off as a crappy car, don't ya think?

conscript said:
good commercial...for what I don't know :p

maybe GM should spend the time of analysis on nifty statistics instead developing cars that can compete with their overseas competitors...
Click to expand...

No kidding. I don't think it's a great commercial. It's an informative short film or music video, but I didn't see a single thing that would lead me to believe it's from GM, much less about the Volt.

Maybe that's coming up in part 2 or 3.
 
"Did you know the top 25% of India's population with the highest IQ is.... greater than the population of the US

Translation: India has more honors kids than America has kids"


My translation: They can't do math, 303M x 4 > India's population at last census.

My translation 2: Even if they did get the math right, you could say 25% of the top chicken eaters in India is greater than the population of the US (translation they fuck alot!).

My Translation 3: Being as their is neither a distribution of how those "intelligent people" are situated, nor how are populations explained you can't make the conclusion they have more honors students than America has students.


Also did not know there was an immediate demand for jobs in 2010...

Overall though, kind of neat video, but ummm yeah it was a Volt commercial? Isn't the #1 rule of commercials to at least mention the product? I would hardly call that a viral marketing campaign either...
 
This is just another "Underwear Goes Inside The Pants" knockoffs. Only rednecks are entertained by it.
 
Pretty neat video. Opens up some thoughts also.

sfsuphysics, that was a nice rant but you do know that alot isn't a word? It is "a lot"
LoL, just messing with you.......

Good Day
 
crocodolljr said:
It's not a car ad, just someone reposting a cool video. It started as way to get teachers in the US to start thinking about how to prepare students for the 21st Century. An older post of the same video on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY has 3 million+ views and a better description.

The older "2.0" version explains the video's purpose better at the end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, crocodolljr! I'll update the front page post with the correct. Bad GM for stealing someone else's idea and not give any credit in their comments.
 
How did they come up with 694,000 songs exactly? Census' are precise, "illegal" downloads are not.
 
going by those facts, you would think aliens looking at earth from space would literally see an exploding planet
 
Well this is a few years old. We currently do better vs India. No matter where I go I see a billion god damn cars with "my child is an honor student"... so I'm guess in response to this video we just started printed out bumper stickers and handing them out to parents. We now have 100% honor students. Honor student being defined as existence of a bumper sticker existing on a car. So I'm sure there are lots of kids in India, and they out number our kids 4 to 1, but they don't have the bumber stickers to prove anything.

Tho we shouldn't bring attention to this as India might decide to start printing bumper stickers too. We'll start a new cold war of sorts.
 
alg7_munif said:
694 000 songs were downloaded illegally?
Click to expand...

Going by those numbers... the video was what 5 minutes long? that's 1/12th of an hour, so in an hour 8.33 million songs are illegal downloaded, almost 200 million per day, 73 billion per year! Guess those rumors of Sony secretly tossing that slide in was true with that kind of logic! :D
 
What does it all mean? I think one thing it means is we should teach students a basic overall view like gradeschool currently is (1-12) then they should go straight into a job and learn what they need to there, rather than blindly guessing at what's going to be needed 5 or 10 years down the road (BS or PhD or the equivalent).
 
I don't see that part when the commercial reaches its orgasm and screams outload...SO MUCH FOR MENTAL MASTURBATION!!!!
 
crocodolljr said:
It's not a car ad, just someone reposting a cool video. It started as way to get teachers in the US to start thinking about how to prepare students for the 21st Century. An older post of the same video on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY has 3 million+ views and a better description.

The older "2.0" version explains the video's purpose better at the end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
Click to expand...

And in the News, thousands of teachers get Fired in America....
 
nilepez said:
Seems a bit early to write the Volt off as a crappy car, don't ya think?
Click to expand...
It's an American car, people will write it off as crap before they even know what it is. Meanwhile Buick is topping the reliability studies. No matter what American car manufacturers do they will never get past the unfair negative stereotype marketing has hammered into people.
 
Blown 89 said:
It's an American car, people will write it off as crap before they even know what it is. Meanwhile Buick is topping the reliability studies. No matter what American car manufacturers do they will never get past the unfair negative stereotype marketing has hammered into people.
Click to expand...

qft
 
Some interesting stuff, but also a lot of speculation and misleading or bs info.

Population numbers don't tell you anything about IQ distribution. It's been shown conclusively that things like education and diet (among others) influence IQ. Half of India probably doesn't have running water. What's more is "honor student" suggests a scholastic environment that doesn't even exist in rural/agrarian India. This is a country that still has a big problem with people throwing acid in womens' faces. Maybe fix your horrific misogyny problems, then work on IQ India.

"#1 Ranked Country in Broadband penetration is Bermuda" (36.4%, google it)

Translation: It's easier to wire a country with 20 square miles of land and 66,000 people than one with 3.7 million square miles? No way! Other countries in the top 10? Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Monaco. Rich+small = internet. Blows your mind, don't it?

"Years it took to reach a market of 50 million"

Except that the global population has steadily expanded, making 50 million a smaller and smaller slice every year. For example radio was invented early in the 20th century when the pop was about 1.8B then 50M is 1 in every 36 people on Earth. In 2008 50 million is 1 in 134.

"There are 540000 words in the English language...5x as many as during Shakespeare's time"

It isn't clear even to linguists how words should be properly counted. Webster's 3rd only has 54000 words if you group words along with their inflections/forms/tenses. Probably no one knows 540k distinct or "head" words nor would they even if that number existed. Linguists like Chomsky and Pinker lead one to believe the number of words a particular language has is partly biological (language is a brain function with hard parameters) and partly random cultural geography (words from adjacent societies tend to cross over). Based on that I would think we probably do have more words in english now- but 5x as many? half a million? That's bunk. My grade-school vocab tests would have had to have 5000 words each instead of 20.

"By 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain"

I have no idea how anyone could make such a claim. Are we to believe in 2013 a computer will be able to provide an insightful analysis of the history of Jazz music? That's part of the computational capability of the human brain. I know brains and computers both process information.. but apart from that they don't look or work anything alike and generally aren't supposed to. Some cognitive scientists say each neuron can be a simple processor, so a supercomputer may need 100 billion CPU cores plus tons of bandwidth connecting them all. After that it'd need an architectural design of commensurate complexity, ie software. Nothing like any of this exists in theory or practice.
 
That was a blatant rip off of the exact same thing that was posted on youtube at least a year ago, let me see if I can find that link...
 
Sate said:
"By 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain"

I have no idea how anyone could make such a claim. Are we to believe in 2013 a computer will be able to provide an insightful analysis of the history of Jazz music? That's part of the computational capability of the human brain. I know brains and computers both process information.. but apart from that they don't look or work anything alike and generally aren't supposed to. Some cognitive scientists say each neuron can be a simple processor, so a supercomputer may need 100 billion CPU cores plus tons of bandwidth connecting them all. After that it'd need an architectural design of commensurate complexity, ie software. Nothing like any of this exists in theory or practice.
Click to expand...


Although i see where you are coming from, it is projected that based on current progressions of the processing power of supercomputers that in the next few years one will exceed the calculations per second that the human brain is generally estimanted to have. The difference comes down to software. Think of it as running a modern computer on DOS, it is sure fast but doesnt have the programing to fully take advantage of it in the manner that you are thinking of.

If you are interested, might want to check out the book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology since i am fairly sure that is where they are pulling that statistic from. It is an interesting read (although quite long) and gives you something to think about.
 
Loki008 said:
Although i see where you are coming from, it is projected that based on current progressions of the processing power of supercomputers that in the next few years one will exceed the calculations per second that the human brain is generally estimanted to have. The difference comes down to software. Think of it as running a modern computer on DOS, it is sure fast but doesnt have the programing to fully take advantage of it in the manner that you are thinking of....
Click to expand...

Agreed, Loki. I just don't find the comparison meaningful. When it comes to the brain, the software is everything. Mice and humans have the same type of hardware, neurons are basically neurons. Whales and elephants have twice our hardware- 200 billion neurons. Perhaps the video should have compared computers to whales, which presumably have twice our "processing power".
As a geek, I readily agree the growth of CPU power over time is astonishing but the analogy tells one nothing about it.
 
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