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Live Forever
by Kalifer Deil

Science Articles

From the Freezer
Interstellar Travel
Mind Reading
Moving the Bar
An inflatable "rigid" space station
UFOs Hoaxes?
Economic Prediction and the Five Syndromes

Online Science Articles

From The Freezer

“From the Freezer -- Nanobots and Human Cell Repair” by Kalifer Deil

It is speculated by some nanobot enthusiasts and organizations that freezing Humans after death will enable them to be revived someday with nanobots. They envision nanobots repairing cells that have been damaged and ruptured by freezing then other nanobots repairing the damage that was the original cause of death. This is actually a much more complex operation than putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Lets look at what happens when an ice crystal has punctured a cell. For nanobots to get to a target site the human circulatory and lymphatic systems would have to have some integrity. This would be needed to provide pathways for the nanobots to get to the afflicted areas. The problem is that defrosting a body to that degree would allow punctured cells to empty their contents into the intercellular space or into one or the other of the circulatory systems. This would put most of this material beyond retrieval and therefore beyond the ability of nanobots to repair.

A more recent view of nanobots includes the molecular mechanism that makes up the workings of the cell and the natural machinery that we all possess for repair. Some have argued that by building on and augmenting this bio-based system we could enhance the ability of human self-repair. There is little doubt that this will happen and is already happening to some degree. The real argument is whether this will ever be sufficient to make up for the damage done to brain tissue by the current freezing process. In the process of thawing the damage multiplies rapidly since the body’s machinery isn’t really working yet. If you artificially start pumping blood multiple hemorrhages will quickly make a very bad condition much worse.

It would seem that the only way to treat frozen tissue would be in the frozen condition. But there is a problem. It is hard to conceive of nanobots that would be small enough, hardened enough, smart enough and strong enough to bore their way into the damaged area and make a repair without doing more damage in the process. In any case such nanobots would be in a far distant future and those that are frozen today need a different solution.

The real problem is the freezing process. A better method is needed for the freezing of the whole human body if one really desires to reanimate a person in his own flesh and blood. No matter what methodology is used for revival it will be necessary to freeze the body of the deceased while preserving cell integrity. The current technology is too destructive on large bodies but can work on smaller bodies like an insect, minnow or tiny rodent. They can be frozen in a more uniform way that can suppress ice crystal formation since their surface area to volume ratio is larger that that for larger animals.

It may be possible to develop better antifreeze like liquids that are compatible with blood and lymphatic fluids. Another possibility is to use strong magnetic fields to constrain the vibration degrees of freedom in a full sized body, reduce the temperature to near freezing, then release the magnetic fields. This would suddenly increase the vibration degrees of freedom causing the temperature to drop to below freezing suddenly and perhaps without the formation of destructive ice crystals. The defrosting process could perhaps be done with the careful application of microwave radiation.

This, of course, is all very speculative and many experiments need to be performed on large animals to develop better freezing and thawing techniques. Very little in the way of recent animal experiments have been done to develop and perfect suspended animation techniques. This may be due to the horrible human freezing experiments that Dr. Josef Mengele performed on inmates of Dachau during WWII. Single-handedly, he has probably set back this field of study by 50 years. There have been some minor experimentation on rats and guinea pigs and one recent experiment on a dog to study the effects of freezing for suspended animation. A least one cryonics firm is planning rabbit experiments to study this problem.

Another area of concern is what happens between dying and being processed for freezing. Ischemic damage (when the blood stops circulating) happens very quickly for brain cells. When these cells stop getting oxygen and ATP (Adenosine TriPhosphate, the fuel of the cell) and free radicals accumulate they become damaged very quickly. This damage can be reduced by the application of a drug protocol and quickly cooling the body after death. This is an area that has received a reasonable amount of research attention since it has application for surgery on the circulatory system. If someone dies in their sleep in the middle of the night it is probably too late to rescue their brain cells the following morning. The damage is likely beyond any repair mechanism that we can imagine at this time.

The only chance for revival for those that are being frozen today is to plan to just get their head frozen. If done properly, this will cut down on the damage to brain tissue due to freezing. The only practical revival would consist of slicing the frozen brain tissue, scanning it for neural bodies, axons, dendrites and synaptic junctions and emulating the neural connections in a computer designed for the purpose. This is far from simple but the technology for doing this appears to be within reach within the next 50 or so years. Damage on the molecular scale would be less important since it is believed by many neurobiologists that the morphology of the CNS (Central Nervous System) down to about 100nm is all that is necessary for functional replication. The measurements of synaptic junctions are likely to be one of the more salient pieces of information since their size determines the coupling weight between neurons. Clearly, at least the afore-mentioned morphological information needs to be preserved for functional replication and we may be close to being able to do this now. A few of the heads that are in liquid nitrogen in cryonics companies now, I believe, have a half a chance of resurrection by this means and probably only by this means in the next half century.

A virtual existence may not be too bad. In the beginning it may be a little bit like living in a video game since many items in this virtual universe may only be crudely generated at first. I suspect this phase will change very rapidly as graphics programmers themselves enter this environment. Current trends in graphics seem to indicate that we are quickly approaching computer generated actors that rival the real thing. I think the real risk is this may be even better than reality.


Interstellar Travel

“Interstellar Travel -- Are We Alone?” by Kalifer Deil

It has been said that Interstellar travel is impossible because the distances are just too great. The contention is that we are quarantined to our miniscule corner of the universe. Even at the speed of light we are talking about many years for a round trip. So let's be conservative about this and assume that it will take us one hundred years of travel to get to the nearest star. Such a ship will probably be within our capability to construct within a couple of hundred years. Also suppose that we can put people in a state of suspended animation or extremely low metabolism. That should also be attainable within a couple of hundred years as well. Would people volunteer for such a journey even if it was one way? No question, they would; I would. Would someone or some entity put up the money for such a trip. A company would get one hundred years of advertising from such an enterprise so maybe there will be a Virgin Spacelines of the future that will do it.

A much more interesting possibility is that flesh and blood people will not make this journey but rather people that have been resurrected in neural emulators. Radiation hardened emulators will not require the environmental support systems and amenities that normal humans require and are far more suitable for space travel. The emulators will likely have an android body to perform those tasks we would normally send a human to do. Power can be conserved by shutting down for years at a time. Travel times in thousands of years are now not out of the question since there will be little wear and tear of the spaceships internal systems coasting in deep interstellar space.

So, that brings us to the question; why haven't we been visited by little green men or bug eyed monsters? Perhaps we have. If so they have done a really good cleanup job after each visit. There doesn't appear to be a scrap of evidence in the hands of any university or credible source that would indicate that such a visit ever occurred. Maybe the government is holding something back but I suspect they aren't. There are several reasons for this. One, the secret is far too large to keep for any length of time and cleanups (like Roswell) require far too many people to hold the lid on for very long. Two, conspiracy theorists make far too much money from books and TV productions to come clean with the public. An exception is Erich Von Daniken (Chariots of the Gods) when caught red handed admitted to writing fantasy. Three, There is a large segment of the population that wants to believe that we have been and are now being visited by other beings. Some are even hoping that they will save us from our own poor performance at planet stewardship. I don't see any evidence that aliens are intervening in our current global warming scenario which will ultimately create planetary wide havoc.

So, what about those little balls of light in the night sky? Lets call them UOs rather than UFOs since we don't really know if they are flying. They are, for the most part, unidentified. Are there earthly ways to make such displays? One I can think of is using either UV or infrared lasers that are computer controlled. Using multiple beams of sufficient power that intersect at a point in space. A luminous ball can be created at the point of intersection. This can be made to appear to fly at any speed by merely shifting the intersection point. When I was in my early twenties and if lasers and portable computers had been around I probably would have done this. I did launch a balloon full on natural gas with a candle under it into the night sky over San Francisco Bay many years ago. The candle ignited the balloon and it exuded a billow of fire and descended into the water. A few people saw it, phoned the police and reported a UFO. There's a nearly infinite number of other ways to create bogus UFOs. However, like so many things that are fun, hoaxes are illegal.

This doesn't rule out that UOs are natural phenomena. Rare phenomena often times don't get scientific scrutiny since repeatability is the cornerstone of scientific research. An example of this is ball lighting. Only recently have they been able to create a small plasma ball in the laboratory but the circumstances were such that they still have not been able to study the phenomena in detail. The point is that nature has many surprises for us and in spite of the great progress science has made in the last two centuries there is much more to discover and understand in our own backyard. We don't have to give credit to Gods or space aliens just because we don't understand it.

This brings us to the point that there probably is no intelligent life of a space faring nature within at least a few hundred light years of us. If they were more advanced than us we surely would have been visited by now. If they were very advanced, say a few million years ahead of us, they probably would have spread throughout the Milky Way Galaxy and we would have been visited. They probably would have populated our planet in lieu of us. No, we are not them. Our DNA is too related to our ape cousins to consider that possibility. Hey, if I were those aliens I would at least have left a card.


Mind Reading

“Mind Reading via Muscle Electro-potentials” by Kalifer Deil

Abstract
The basic idea is most people think with a voice in their mind. This is a sub-audible voice that some cannot control (as in Turret’s syndrome) and the “mind” voice becomes audible, highly revealing and disturbing. What is interesting here is even a mind voice like a mind reviewing any physical action has a physiological effect that in most normal people is too small to be noticed. Imagine throwing a baseball. Although your arm doesn’t actually move to go through the motions it does on the neurological scale. Nerve impulses are sent down the arm just as if you were throwing the ball except they are well below the threshold of that required to actually excite the muscles into action. This is why it is often possible to improve one’s ability to play a sport or a musical instrument by just practicing the action in their mind without the actual physical action.

Taking this a step further it should be possible to monitor, using external sensors on the skin of the face and neck, activity associated with sub-audible speech. One would have to have the subject speak with this appliance on for sometime to calibrate the device but it should be as easy as single speaker speech recognition from that point on.

Such a device could have a number of applications outside of interrogation in the fields of psychiatry and medicine as well. People without vocal chord could possibly use such a device to regain speech as long as they controlled the on-off switch.

History
The origin of this idea actual came to me almost 50 years ago in a biology class in high school. The teacher showed a film of a baseball player with two electrodes attached from his arm through an amplifier to an oscilloscope. The baseball player then threw a ball and the scope simultaneous showed a burst of pulses. The next scene showed the baseball player just thinking about throwing the ball, again a burst of pulses. This time not as many pulses and, as a consequence, no movement of the arm. This prompted me to think about speech as being a muscle activity also, albeit more complex, but the same general principles should apply.

Applications of the principle of using externally accessible muscle electro-potentials have been used for excitation of computer controlled artificial limbs. Although present results have been crude the principle has been amply demonstrated.

Very exotic techniques have been developed to read excitations of single ganglia from external sensors but these sensors are bulky, expensive and likely unnecessary for the above purpose.

The Setup
The first setup is an experimental one. A flexible sensor grid is applied to the mouth, jaw and throat area of the subject. Each sensor is attached to a miniature high gain amplifier, fed to an analog to digital converter then to a computer. Less than 100 sensor-amplifier-A/D converter groups would probably be adequate. The subject (a voluntary one for this phase) would be instructed to read a text containing a training set for the speech recognition program. The input, instead of being audio, would be a set of varying firing potentials picked up by the sensors.


Phase 1: Audible Training – Using volunteers
1) Speaker speaks training set that the computer captures and files away.
2) The training set of files is repeatedly played to the recognition algorithm
until there is a high degree of match to the desired word set. This may have
to be done with several subjects to get the most universal set for initial training.
This becomes the base set of weights for Phase 2.

Phase 2: Inaudible Training – Using volunteers
1) Initialize algorithm with phase I weights.
2) Have volunteers read training set without speaking but vocalizing in their mind. This
becomes a new digital training set.
3) As before the training set is repeatedly played to the recognition algorithm until there
is a high degree of match to the desired word set. This becomes the base set of weights for
the recognition algorithm. An input to the algorithm is a level indicating whether it is
audible or sub-audible mode during training and sensing.

Phase 3: Trials – Using volunteers as bad actors
1) Initialize algorithm with phase 2 weights.
2) Question volunteers to get speech samples.
3) Train the algorithm on the speech samples
4) After the training see what the algorithm can pick up from sub-vocalized speech from the
volunteers and match with what they believe they thought at the time. If this proves to be
fairly close then we are ready for phase 4.

Phase 4: Interrogation of hostile subjects.
1) Initialize with phase 2 parameters
2) Question subject to get speech samples.
3) Train the algorithm on the speech samples
4) After the training question the subject on issues that he previously refused to provide
answers for. This should elicit responses that will provide information not otherwise
obtainable.

Setup – Production mode
The learning algorithms will quickly show which sensors are important and which ones don’t contribute to the outcome. The weights associated with inputs that are unimportant will (if filtered properly for mutual independence) have diminishingly small weights associated with them. It is probable that fewer than half that many sensors will be needed since there aren’t more than that many muscle groups involved in speech that can be accessed in the manner described.

The Computer Program
The computer program would have to perform the following functions:
Filtering function – Filter out 60 Hz and sensor cross correlated activity to get only local electrical activity.
Learning function – This can be an artificial neural net algorithms from which there are a large variety to choose, Fuzzy associative memories, stochastic adaptive filters, simulated annealing or some combination of these and other techniques.
Output function – Display output in text form and/or synthesize voice.
The program will have a learning or training mode which will determine the weights or parameters used within the algorithm and a feed forward mode when just responding to sensor input.

The above is just a suggested path for a researcher to follow with ninety-nine percent of the detail missing. I would be particularly interested to see if this could help people that have had their vocal cords compromised or removed due to cancer or some other affliction. There are hundreds of thousands of such cases. Such a device could be made cosmetically unobtrusive using a latex appliance colored to appropriate matching skin tones.

Well it look like this one has already been done by NASA. (see http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4795)

Moving the Bar

“Moving the Bar -- Under the Gaussian Curve” by Kalifer Deil

Most of us are familiar with the normal distribution or bell shaped curve that is used to describe the distribution of all manner of physical and social phenomena. For example, the height of men has an average of about 5’7” with most men falling in the range of 5’4” to 5’11”. In this case the bell shaped curve is centered on 5’7” falling off either way toward 5’4” and 5’11”. Now if the availability of growth hormone is made available on a prescription basis for children that are shorter than normal the distribution will get tighter toward 5’11” and the average will also move up to perhaps 5’8”. The introduction of the growth hormone, in effect, moves the bar compressing the distribution in the upward direction.

This same effect can be seen in law making as well. Human behavior can be constrained in the positive direction by the judicious application of regulations. Take recently passed smoking ordinances in many cities as an example. By putting cigarettes in locked displays out of easy reach of children (and adults for that matter) you will cut down on children stealing them from display racks and will require them to be much bolder in attempting to purchase them. The inconvenience will cause some (not all) children to smoke fewer cigarettes at a young age and thus reduce their likelihood of getting hooked on tobacco. This doesn’t mean that cigarettes will be unavailable to those that are determined to get them, it just means that fewer cigarettes will be available and that they may have a chance to wake up to the addiction and health dangers before full addiction takes place.

The principle here can be simply expressed as “You get what you allow”

Now lets go back to the height example again. Suppose growth hormone would be made available over the counter at you corner drug store (I know, there aren’t any corner drug stores). In this case a broad spectrum of boys would take it. Some would want to get on the basketball team. Others would want to be taller than 6 feet because they get the girls. What would happen in this case is the distribution would not get compressed but would be moved in the upward direction with the bulk of men eventually in the 5’9” to 6’3” range with the average in the 6’0” range.

In the cigarette case, the upfront display has the effect of society saying cigarettes are good as does movie actors, sports figures and cartoons (Joe Camel) smoking and setting a scene of apparent sophistication or camaraderie. These tend to move the distribution toward smoking. Elimination of cultural go signals will tend to push the entire distribution in the non-smoking direction.

Actually more than one principle is at work here. Cultural go signals can breed feedback signals in the peer group which will accelerate the process. Those that are not moved by the direct efforts of the cigarette company are often reached by their peers who in turn are reached by the company.

Similar arguments can be made for most any behavior good or bad that society would like to influence. The distribution associated with that behavior can be spread (increases standard deviation) or narrowed (decreased standard deviation) or moved left or right simply by societal reinforcements and constraints. This flies in the face of much liberal thinking that permissiveness breeds self control but I'm forced to the conclusion that self control only works for those that already have it.

The real problem is society must decide what it wants for an outcome and then do what it thinks is appropriate to get that result. I believe the harder problem will be for society to figure out what it wants for an outcome. Achieving any reasonable outcome becomes attainable if everyone agrees on what it should be.


An Inflatable "rigid" Space Station

The big question is how do you put a giant space station of the 2001-Space Odyssey variety into orbit. The short answer is make it a giant inner tube, inflate it in orbit, then give is some spin to create an artificial gravity. This short answer is far from an adequate answer. Running around inside an inner tube with poor structural integrity is fraught with many problems including not having the ability to sustain even a reasonable fraction of Earth's gravity inside the rim. So the question is how do you use the concept of inflation in orbit and have all the benefits of a rigid rotating station with artificial gravity in orbit.

First we take a lesson from steel belted radial tires. You would have steel wire annular rings embedded in the inflatable "inner-tube" at regular intervals. These annular rings will have a post on the inside diameter that protrudes from the skin that will accommodate cables that will go to a central hub. Steel wires can be pulled through the skin in the longitudinal direction after inflation giving strength in the other direction. These would be mainly on the circumference facing outward. This would all be done with the station in a very slow spin creating only a slight artificial gravity for stability.

We now have something that looks like a bicycle wheel. This isn't exactly what we want. We want to enter at the center and get to the rim by means of a tube of some sort. There can be more than one of these and they would likely be placed in such a way to balance the wheel. We don't want the center hub position to oscillate with the rotation of the station. This also means that these tubes should also be inflatable and reinforcable in a similar fashion to the outer "inner tube".

How do we connect these? You need to create rigid connection modules for these intersections. So here's the parts list for a rudimentary station.

1 Hub docking module
2 Rim connection modules
2 Inflatable connection tubes
2 Inflatable rim tubes
50 Spoke cables
40 Rim wires (20 longitudinal wires per rim tube)
50 Connection Tube wires (25 longitudinal wires per connection tube)

At his point we have a station with some structural integrity but it is far from being a rigid structure. If the inside of the inner tube is given a conductive surface we can apply carbon fiber sheets and electrostatically spray paint them onto the hull of the tubes with a binder resin. This will make the hull more rigid and give it much additional strength. This will also create a surface that can be "glued" to false flooring supports and wall cabinet supports. Power and signal cabling can be run under modular false flooring. The outer surface of the station can be covered with flexible photovoltaic cells. This won't be an ideal receiver of solar power but it will serve two purposes in addition to generating power, It will provide another layer of protection from solar radiation and also some protection against micro meteorites. In a few short years such flexible solar panels will be relatively inexpensive. Eventually the spoke section can also be covered with solar panels as well.

Windows? Probably not in the inflatable sections. Instead video cameras can be connected to the external wall and flat panel displays can be on the inside for a view. The video cameras would be fitted with automatic shutters that would be activated by direct sun light to protect them. You don't want to hurt the integrity of the hull by creating holes for windows. However, there may be port holes on the docking hub and the rim connection modules.

A 0.5g gravity station could be of modest size radius of 32 meters and make a complete rotation once per 50 seconds. This could become a good halfway station for moon travel where the gravity is 1/6 g. Such a station could be built today with less than 100 million dollars in custom materials and thrust into orbit within four or five payloads on the largest Proton class Russian rocket. NASA claims it would cost a trillion dollars to build a Space Odyssey style station and I have no doubt that that estimate is correct for NASA. The right outfit to do is, of course, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites Company. Paul Allen, time to step up to the plate, again!

Similar rotating sections like this station could be created for deep space travel to Mars and beyond. The primary negative for long space travel is bone loss and even a partial artificial gravity would mitigate this. That's why the Space Odyssey space ship also has the circular rotation section.

UFOs Hoaxes?

Some of the more popular UFO sightings seen by hundreds of people include lights in a large triangle formation or in a string formation. Much is made of the fact that the triangle seems to remain rigid with lights at each apex. They travel rather slow then seem to take off with amazing speed. I'm not saying that these are not alien vehicles but they can be easily made using very inexpensive materials.

Lets take the string of lights first since that is a bit simpler and the same building blocks can be used to make the triangle. Imagine a small thick translucent white balloon with colored LEDs inside controlled by a microprocessor. The microprocessor cycles through the colors and can also alter the brightness by controlling the duty cycle of the LEDs that are being pulsed at 1KHz or greater. Each balloon is rigidly supported under a small glider with a 36" wing span (that may or may not be microprocessor controlled). several of these are attached in a chain by nylon fishing leader which can be reeled in by tiny microprocessor controlled winch (fishing reel). This assembly is then towed by a larger Radio controlled glider style aircraft with electric motor driven ducted fan engines.

The radio controlled craft takes off with its ducklings in tow and all lights off. At some point the lights are turned on and the people on the ground see a string of equally spaced colored lights in the sky that seem to have an eerie iridescence. At another point in the travel the winches pull the lights together and at the same time make them dimmer giving the illusion that the lights have suddenly gone up in the sky at tremendous speed. If there is cloud cover then they can be cut off abruptly in the simulated travel. The unlighted craft with its ducklings can then return to base totally unnoticed.

The triangle is only slightly different. It uses the same gliders and microprocessors and radio controlled lead aircraft. The lead aircraft tows one glider that in turn tows two gliders. Note that the same winch can be used to haul in two gliders if both leaders are threaded through a screw eye. The other two "apex" gliders have a leader between them that is reeled to the same length as the leader to the head glider. Note that only one of these trailing gliders need a winch.

It is a little bit tricky getting the gliders to take off but once in the air the two trailing gliders steer apart until the leader between then is taunt, Now you have a triangle and you can turn on the lights. Again, the illusion of a quick escape can be attained by reeling in the leaders at the same time as dimming the LEDs. Also the illusion of the large triangle tilting and maneuvering is simple to attain since all the gliders can be microprocessor controlled to make a pitched turn. Material costs? Probably less than one thousand dollars.

Economic Prediction and the Five Syndromes:

There are several stock market pundits and economics that claim they predicted various economic downturns and upturns. The Stopped Clock Syndrome (SCS) is that a static prediction will always eventually come true. A stopped clock is right twice a day; likewise an economic bear will eventually predict a bear market and an economic bull will eventually predict a bull market. The upshot is never pay any attention to bears or bulls, or more generally never give credence to anyone that has a strong point of view. They will be right sometimes and those are the times they are going to remember and tell others about.

Who do you trust? Trust no one but listen to those that are analytical and data driven. The truth lies in accurate data from the correct data set if it can be discerned. We have added two qualifiers and we have hardly started. If the data is inaccurate or not the right data was collected then the conclusions can be false. Life and death military decisions often go awry due to either or both of these problems. Very bright and creative people continuously called upon to look at economic data and draw conclusions. The validity of those conclusions are usually limited to their particular area of expertise and the validity of the data they have access to. This leads to the Nobel Laureate Syndrome (NLS); an expert on one narrow area often assumes they are infallible not only in that area but in all other areas as well. Also be aware that Nobel Laureates are often scientists that just got lucky and are not necessarily better than the rest of the pack. The loudest are usually the most opinionated and as such should be taken with a grain of SCS salt. You should expect all predictions to come with a set of caveats since very little is unconditional, not even the proverbial death and taxes.

Does success engender failure? Sometimes it does. That would be the Beauty Parlor Syndrome (BPS). In this case the beautician does a beautiful job on first time customers but after the fish is landed does a lesser and lesser job on subsequent visits. This is also sometimes the case with “experts” that have made a name for themselves through hard work but are now coasting on their former success. They may land an important job in government or in a brokerage house as an analyst or they may use their former success to launch a consulting career or start their own firm. What is amazing is how long people like this can coast, sometimes for decades or until retirement. Saying they have BPS is sometimes being kind to these experts since their motivation can be less than pure.

This brings us to syndrome number four, the Fox in The Hen House Syndrome (FHHS). You might think that the SEC has this covered since someone that touts a particular stock must state whether they own it or not and those privy to inside information are not allowed to act upon it. This goes on all the time and the ones who get caught are usually caught because they got to greedy and caught the SEC’s attention (actually the SEC’s computer’s attention). There are also many quasi-legal ways to profit which is on the shady side but is done all the time. A Radio or TV talking head or through newsletters or email will state that he owns shares in xyz corporation which is now 18 and that he states is going to 30. Perhaps he bought it at 20 and wants to dump it. His pronouncement causes the stock to go to 22 at which point he sells. More likely he has a pile of xyz options with a strike price of 20 that he bought for $3.50 and ends up selling at $6.00 (when xyz stock reaches 22) for a 71% profit. This “pump and dump” scheme is often done with thinly traded stocks but if the person has a large enough audience it is done with blue chips as well. Even if SEC rules are violated if the person actually trading is off-shore then they may be beyond the reach of the SEC. There are at least a thousand schemes like this to profit by duping others and unfortunately most are legal especially if options are used since the tracking of options is not as automated as the stock tracking is. This finally has reached national attention since with CDOs banks and investment houses were duping each other until it all imploded causing a national crisis while making many traders very very rich.

Then there are experts that generally are well prepared with good answers but are asked questions that are outside of their preparation. This introduces syndrome number five the Homework Not Done Syndrome (HNDS). The economic landscape can change very quickly from day to day and sometimes hour to hour. One can barely track one small corner of the financial universe let alone track multiple areas simultaneously. Inevitably, interviewers ask them to make predictions outside their comfort zone where they are not up to date and many will go out on a limb to satisfy the interviewer. The viewer or listener is often not aware that this expert is not speaking to the interviewer like he would speak to a client with a well researched report.

There you have it SCS, NLS, BPS, FHHS and HNDS which leads to; trust no one, check everything, then proceed with great caution.

Copyright © 2003-2009 Kalifer Deil. All Rights Reserved.