An early invention by American social scientist Gerald DeGroot, demonstrated in Norway to obtain the backing from the Hanso Foundation for what eventually became the DHARMA Initiative. DeGroot's Skinneresque mind control experiments of the 1970s, a series of purposeless devices designed to test the subject's theological belief in technological principles, seem quaint and dated today. (Such as the abacus-like device above that controls the switches of a standard television.) Yet with Hanso's backing DeGroot built a series of test stations on a remote Pacific island, staffed by a small, quasi-Utopian community that was eventually wiped out by the island's Pitcairn-like indigenous inhabitants, whose existence did not turn up in Hanso's research. [via]