I Wish I Knew

The Taxonomy Fail Index

2010-09-13T23:36:35Z

Taxonomy fails irk me. Some might say disproportionately so. They might even have a point. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to at least try to get these sorts of things right, so I was pleased to Alex Wild, over at Myrmecos, taking the time to come up with a formula for figuring out just how wrong a taxonomy fail is. Of course it doesn’t stop people making the mistakes in the first place, but if we have a way of quickly figuring out who’s making the biggest blunders we can, at least, make an attempt to accurately target our … re-education attempts. He calls it the Taxonomy Fail Index, or TFI.

As an experiment, I ran my favourite taxonomy fail through it, and it turns out that calling penguins mammals has a TFI of about 53. That makes it about 53 times stupider than calling Sarah Palin a chimp, but still not quite as stupid as insisting that scale insects are beetles.

So there you go.

Bats are really loud!

2010-08-20T23:00:11Z

If you’re a human being, that’s probably something of a surprise, since the chances are that you can’t hear them at all. We all know they use sound for echolocation, but those sounds are simply too high-frequency for most humans to hear. You might be very lucky, particularly if you’re young, and just be able to pick out their squeaks right at the edge of your perception, but even then it’s so marginal that you’re only catching a tiny part of the sound intensity bats emit. It turns out that bats are some of the loudest animals on the planet, with some species able to emit sounds up to 130db, which is just about the threshold at which sounds become painful to humans and significantly louder than the inside of a nightclub or watching a jet take off from 100M.

I find it amazing that something can be so incredibly loud, and yet seem completely silent to me. It’s weird to think of those quiet summer evening I’ve spent watching them flit about overhead being set against a deafening crescendo of noise. Nature never ceases to amaze.

All of this, incidentally, came out of a piece by Ed Yong, at Not Exactly Rocket Science, about a species of bat that has evolved much quieter squeaks in order to sneak up on the moths it preys on. It’s fascinating; go read.

And if you’re interested in little-known bat trivia, did you know that they account for a quarter of all mammal species?

HTC Desire and Android battery issues

2010-06-16T17:45:37Z

By now, most people have noticed that I’ve switched from my venerable iPhone 3G to an HTC Desire. I’ve had it a little over a week and, on balance, I’m happy with it. I’m sort-of half-planning an iPhone/Android comparison piece from the perspective of a switcher, along with my version of what each of the platforms gets right, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but I just had to comment on this from Google:

When asked about Android’s weak battery life at the Google Zeitgeist forum, Google co-founder Larry Page said that if anyone is not getting a full day’s worth of battery, there’s “something wrong.” Page then went on to suggest it’s probably user habits and third-party apps causing battery woes. “When there is software running in the background, that just sort of exhausts the battery quickly,” said Page.
Eric Schmidt chimed in, “The primary consumer of the battery life on these phones is the transmit/receive circuit. So tuning that and obviously figuring out a way to not use too much of that extends your battery life…And people bring in applications that are not particularly smart about that.”

Perhaps on some Android phones they’re right, but on the Desire it’s absolutely not the case. HTC haven’t acknowledged it yet, but if you enable Flickr sync in their Sense UI, you’ll put the calendar into a state where it indefinitely holds a partial wake-lock, which prevents the phone going to sleep and reduces your battery life to 7-9 hours ‘standby’ (in my case.) This has been confirmed on multiple handsets on multiple carriers. So, yes, on the Desire, the primary consumer of battery life is an OS bug. Oops.

Quote from Andronica

Well, I guess Labour noticed the Lib Dems then

2012-02-25T03:29:55Z

I got this attack leaflet through my door yesterday:

I know it’s an election, and all parties do this sort of thing, but I really with they wouldn’t. Anneliese Dodds is a good candidate, and while I’m unlikely to vote for her, this sort of mud slinging only makes me less likely to.

Lobbying Transparency — Reading East

2010-04-24T11:08:37Z

A while ago, as part of a 38 Degrees campaign, I wrote the the four candidates for the Reading East constituency in the upcoming election, asking their opinions on improved lobbying transparency, and urging them to pledge support for a mandatory register of parliamentary lobbyists. This was in-part driven by my conviction that the recent Digital Economy Act was pushed through parliament largely due to intense lobbying from the music industry, and other “rights-holder” groups, of which we, the electorate, have no oversight, or even visibility. It was also in-part driven by my firmly held belief that secretive and unaccountable lobbying harms democracy and lowers confidence not just in our government, but in our system of government.

This is the mail I sent:

I am writing to ask you to pledge your support for real transparency in lobbying.
This is the first general election of my adult life in which I have been genuinely unsure of which candidate to vote for, so I am reaching out to you to help me make that decision by letting me know where you stand on issues important to me.
As a constituent, I would like to know that you are committed to greater transparency in politics and accountable decision-making. I’d like you to pledge support for a compulsory register of lobbyists.
I would also like to see your Party publicly commit to introducing a compulsory register of lobbyists straight away if they become the next government. Please sign the pledge for lobbying transparency at http://www.38degrees.org.uk/sign-the-lobbying-pledge
I look forward to your reply.
Yours,
William Goring

Since I thought their responses might be of interest to more people than just me, I thought I’d pop them up here for anyone interested to see. They’re listed below in the order in which they responded.

Anneliese Dodds – Labour

Dear William Goring,
Thank you very much for your email and for raising this issue with me.
In principle I support this- however I would be concerned to learn more about the detail.
Rather sadly, I know quite a bit about this issue as one of my PhD students works on the topic of the regulation of lobbying in the EU and elsewhere. There are some nations where very strict systems have been introduced, however in those cases many lobbyists simply fall ‘under the radar’ and do not participate in the regulatory system- making things even more opaque. Compulsory schemes are only effective if the sanctions and inspection regime is sufficiently stringent to force compliance.
Any system would need to strike a balance between (rightly) promoting transparency and accountability, but at the same time being flexible enough not to encourage ‘grey’ activity outside of the regulated arena.
Thanks again for getting in touch with me about this and all the best,
Anneliese

My response:

Annelise,
Thank you very much for your prompt and considered response. I’m very glad that this important issue is something you’ve given so much thought to.
The details of the recommendations 38 Degrees is asking you to pledge support for are readily available in the Public Administration Select Committee’s First Report of 2008-09 (http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmpubadm/36/3602.htm). There is further information available in the Fifth Report and Third Special Report of 2009-10.
I would guess from the cautious tone of your mail that this isn’t something you’re prepared to pledge support for at this time. However if I’m wrong, or if you have further comments, I’d be very pleased to hear them.
Also, I’ve asked the same question of the other Reading East candidates, hoping to collate the responses on my web site for all local constituents easy reference, would you be OK with my reproducing our exchanges that way?
Thank you very much for your time.
Will

Very quickly, she got back to me with:

Dear Will (if I may),
Thank you for your email, I do appreciate it.
To be completely honest with you yes, I would hope to have more time to consider this issue before pledging support for any specific approach to this problem. There are so many cases where regulatory responses have failed to eliminate the behaviour they were created to prevent, either because they were hastily put together, or because of a lack of consideration of unintended consequences. I am not in any way suggesting that this would be the case with the new regulatory regime you suggest below, but I would want to read it carefully to prevent against this.
I have been very concerned by the activities of some lobbyists (whilst certainly the UK picture is far brighter than in many other nations, that does not mean we do not have some severe problems, particularly with revolving doors), so I think there should be some kind of a public policy response put in place- I am just not really able to make a judgement right now about which one.
Yes, I would be very happy for you to put our exchanges on the website you mention, please do go ahead.
Thanks again and best wishes,
Anneliese
ps I do like your email footer- rather more interesting than mine ! :)

So – she’s not going to pledge support for a mandatory register at this time, which is a shame, but I find I can’t really fault her for wanting to give more thought to the issue, especially as she raises real concerns about practical applicability and enforceability.

Rob White – Green Party

Hello William,
I am happy to support your campaign and have signed the petition.
Fair is worth fighting for!
Best wishes
Rob White

A good, positive response. I’m a little concerned that he doesn’t give the impression of considering open lobbying a personal priority, but he does support it, and has signed the pledge, so no complaints.

I’ve emailed asking if he minds being included in this rundown, but so-far no response.

Gareth Epps – Liberal Democrats

William,
Thanks for getting in touch. As far as lobbying transparency is concerned, I have long supported a compulsory register and was, 10 years ago, one of a small group of people who campaigned and won the support of the Liberal Democrats for such a thing – as with so many things, we were the first political party to do so.
I would argue that self-regulation has not worked; there are too many loopholes within which unscrupulous individuals and companies can operate.
Please do get in touch if I can help further with this or any other matter.
Yours sincerely
Gareth Epps
Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary candidate for Reading East (and one of your local Katesgrove councillors)

That’s a great response; he’s been on-board with the idea for a long time, and actively pushing it within his party. Nevertheless, he doesn’t specifically mention the 38 Degrees pledge, so I followed up with a request for clarification:

Thanks for your prompt and positive response – I’m sure you’re extremely busy right now. :)
I’m extremely pleased to read that your opinions on lobbying align closely with my own, but you don’t mention whether you signed the pledge at 38 degrees; an oversight? Or is there something about the pledge you disagree with?
Also, I’m hoping to reproduce the correspondance I have with all the Reading East candidate on my website for easy reference by local constituents, is this something you’d be OK with?
Thank you again,
Will

It took a while (but given the circumstances, I’m not going to hold being busy against him,) but he did respond with the following:

Hi Will,
I’ve signed the pledge. Email correspondence is by its nature public so no problem there: what’s your website?
G

So there you have it. He’s signed the pledge, but since he’s supported a mandatory register for a long time it probably wasn’t even necessary. For my money the best of a good bunch of responses.

Rob Wilson – Conservative

I haven’t heard back from Rob Wilson yet. We’ll that’s not entirely true; I did receive a letter from him a few days after my mail but it wasn’t about transparency in lobbying; it was about the Digital Economy Act. Either it’s a second response to a mail I sent him a while ago on that subject (it did read very similarly to the first one, but in more election friendly language) or the email I sent him got misclassified, and the wrong standard response sent.

In support of the second hypothesis, both letters I’ve had from Mr Wilson have felt very much like form letters and have lacked the personal touch present in the correspondence with all of the other candidates. Of course, Mr Wilson is an MP, and one with above-average responsibilities, so it’s understandable if a little disappointing. My feeling is that when a constituency’s MP’s duties make him too busy to engage personally with his constituents, something has gone wrong with the system.

Software

2010-04-13T22:26:16Z

I’ve added a new page to the site, which you can find on the menu at the top. It’s a rundown of the publicly released software I’ve written; for now just a noddy python script for sending boxcar notification to an iPhone (which I wrote to let me know when um… long downloads have completed.) If sending push notifications from the command line is something you want to do, feel free to grab it; it might save you half an hour.

A potentially fatal mistake

2012-02-25T03:29:55Z

I know it must seem like I get a real kick out of spotting other’s taxonomic mistakes and pointing them out here, but really I’d be a much happier man if it wasn’t necessary. All it would take would be for journalists to double check their terms before going to press, or to make sure they got their pieces proof read by someone familiar with the subject. It’s the BBC’s turn again this time, and in the midst of what is, otherwise, an excellent piece about recent pioneering work on determining the colour of dinosaur feathers, by using an electron microscope to examine the shape and structure of fossilised melanosomes. There’s nothing at all wrong with most of the article. In fact, go and read it now; I’ll wait.

See? It’s all very interesting; well researched, and well written, and it avoids the two most grating errors science pieces in the mainstream media usually make; making it sound like this has overturned everything we’ve previously thought about the subject, and giving ‘equal time’ to some wacko who disagrees with the research. So, yes, it’s a great piece. With one small error:

A relatively benign mistake to make while sat at a desk in a nice comfortable office, but there are scenarios where you might want to be a little more careful in checking your definitions…

While it’s true that some theropods were small, the largest were the largest terrestrial carnivores ever known to have existed, and included the most famous of all dinosaurs; Tyrannosaurus rex (so you wouldn’t think it would be that hard to check the accuracy of the statement.)

What’s up with text-shadow rendering in Firefox 3.6?

2012-02-21T18:08:04Z

So, Firefox 3.6 is finally here, and on average it’s 20% faster than 3.5. It’s actually a really noticeable improvement for both rendering and scrolling around pages; I’d say it’s more or less on a par with Safari on most pages. I hear from Windows using friends that it’s similarly quicker on that platform too, approaching the speed of Chrome, in places. All of which makes this a little odd.

I noticed, not long after the upgrade that my blog (this page, unless you’re reading a syndicated copy,) was scrolling really, really slowly in Firefox, which it had never done before I upgraded. I checked it in Safari to reassure myself that it wasn’t something wrong with the site, and everything was fine; scrolling was smooth and responsive just like it has always been. I checked Firefox 3.5 on my macbook; same thing. I disabled all my firefox addons and tried again on the desktop: still painfully slow. So I re-enabled some of them and started messing around with firebug, disabling various style elements to see if I could figure out where the slowdown was coming from.

It didn’t take me long to find the culprit: shadows. I try to avoid using images in my pages as much as possible to improve page load speed, so I use box-shadows to give a bit of depth to the widget box-outs; they look even more flat and drab without them. I also find that a subtle text-shadow is a great way to increase text contrast without making the page harder on the eyes, which is a big deal for any light-on-dark display (at least until someone introduces a decent super-light websafe font,) so I make heavy use of that too. None of this has ever had any noticeable performance impact before, but here we are; with the new, optimised, gecko engine it renders like arse.

I thought perhaps there was something else about my CSS that was confusing the rendering engine — it’s hardly the most minimal or elegant set of style definitions in the world — so I knocked together this abuse of text-shadow to prove that it’s the problem. As expected, it renders fine in Safari and older Firefoxes, but incredibly slowly in Firefox 3.6, so it’s definitely something to do with the new browser.

Next check was to see if it affects FF3.6 on other platforms, so I fired up my Wintendo, upgraded Firefox and tried the page. No slowdown. I don’t know how representative that is though; that box is a quad-core 3GHz Nehalem with 6GB of RAM and a GTX295 in it; it’s got about twice the graphics oomph of my Mac (which is a 3GHz Core2 Duo with an 8800GS), and I don’t have a slower windows box to test on. So this is a bit inconclusive; I can’t really detmine whether the issue is confined to the Mac version of Firefox, or to Firefox on machines that can’t run Crysis at 60fps. But, honestly, I don’t think it matters.

Long story short; my site renders really slowly on the latest, greatest version of Firefox, which is an issue. I make no bones about the fact that I don’t give a monkey’s how it renders in IE, but I do like to make sure it gives a good experience in decent browsers, which by my definition means anything webkit or gecko based. Firefox is by far the most popular browser in that category, so I can’t just ignore this. The question is what to do?

I can sit around and hope that 3.61 fixes the problem, but that is basically just ignoring it, taking no responsibility, and means that my site sucks until someone else fixes their browser, which might never happen.

Or I can reskin the whole site such that it looks OK (or at least as OK as it looks now) without relying on shadows. The problem is, I’m not a web designer, so that’ll take me ages, and I only just got the place looking how I want with this design. It’ll also, inevitably, mean moving back towards the bad old way of doing things, using background PNGs to try to give the site any sense depth or character, and I really don’t want to do that; I want to be able to use stylesheets to define the style of my page, not rely on image-based workarounds. Admitting that I need those workarounds feels like giving up. Maybe the state of browser technology just isn’t up to that outlook yet.

Basically, I see no entirely satisfactory way out of this situation; I’m just going to have to decide which solution is the least unsatisfactory. I’m going to have to give it some thought.

Homeopaths admit more really is more

2009-12-24T21:07:10Z

Looks like a bunch of homeopathy supporters have got sick of not being taken seriously on the internet, and decided that the best way to gain the respect of the wider community is to spam wikipedia until the service is overloaded. I’m not sure whether the intent is just a DoS, or if they think people will just get so tired of reverting their edits that they just roll over and let them have their say. Either way, it’s a stupid plan; the absolute most they’ll achieve is that the pages they target will be locked until they themselves get bored and go away.

In any case, I wonder if the irony of the whole idea is lost on them? Surely the homeopathic way to do this would be to have one person say, very very quietly, what they want on the page, while in the same room as someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who is a Wikipedia user.

Hat tip to @xtaldave for the link.

A Venomous Dinosaur?

2010-08-27T16:08:26Z

Oh, oh, oh! This is an exciting one! Earlier this year, when the discovery that Komodo Dragons (Varanus komodoensis) are venomous was published, I idly wondered if any dinosaurs were as well. Komodo Dragons and dinosaurs are not closely related, so there was no reason to make that leap, beyond the fact that they are (or, in the case of dinosaurs, were) both large terrestrial reptiles, and that I want it to be true.

Well, it turns out I might yet be onto a winner with that one. A recent publication by Enpu Gong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences documents fossil evidence that Sinornithosaurus, a small Cretaceous theropod from what is now China, possessed a venomous bite. The venom gland itself, being soft tissue, has not been preserved, but the skull contains a cavity that Gong believes could have contained one. More convincingly, the animal had long, grooved upper teeth, like those used by extant rear-fanged snakes to inject venom into prey, with voids above them, which could have functioned as local reservoirs.

Not everybody’s convinced, and I’d categorise the evidence as ‘strongly suggestive’ rather than a slam-dunk, but it’s fascinating stuff and lends a big pile of credibility to an idea that I really want to be true.

Check out Ed Yong’s longer and better coverage, over at Not Exactly Rocket Science.