Irregular Shed

Fun with APIs

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:25:18 -0500

Part of the reason I’ve chosen Tumblr as the platform for my blog empire is because it’s achingly customisable. And - hurrah! - it has a good, well documented API for techie tinkerers. Having had a good look through it I’ve realised I can replicate the bits of Storytlr that I’m really going to miss with some not-so-hard scripts. The only fly in the ointment is that I’m going to have to use PHP or Python to do the scripting, which means I’ll have to host the scripts elsewhere.

I’m tempted to give Python a whirl and host the scripts on the Google App engine. It’s free, and has cron-like capabilities - both good as far as I’m concerned - and if it actually works out well, I could very well open it up for other Tumblr users to play with.

Obviously, whether or not I get beyond the planning stage is another thing altogether =)

VKendology: boozes plus bad maths

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:31:00 -0500

Preamble du jour

Anybody who knows me even the tiniest fraction knows I like maths and physics. I make no attempt to hide it (and why would I?); I’m very much an ‘out’ geek. This is the t-shirt I wore today. And anybody who has dipped into my posts online over the past, ooh, nearly five years knows how much I hate it when maths is used badly in PR campaigns disguised as research, so as to get free advertising for a client when lazy journalists churn the PR pieces to fill column inches.

The most egregious of them all, and the one that started me off on my quest against faux formulae for advertising, is what has ended up being known as Blue Monday. My feelings about “the officially most depressing day of the year” are very well known. The only good thing about this supposed formula is that, thanks to mutual feather ruffling, I’ve made a couple of allies in science: very occasionally the darling of the tank-top Dr Ben Goldacre, but much more frequently the very lovely Dr Petra Boynton.

Petra recently pointed me at a mathsy PR mess that she was concerned by. In football terms, it was very much a Division 1 relegation zone affair, for Global Brands’ unpleasant booze, Vodka Kick. It had passed me by completely, which is good as far as I’m concerned because it meant it had also passed by the Premiership and Championship quality news outlets, and had only been picked up by Division 1 news websites - local papers and lazy radio DJs, that sort of thing. Of course, I’m not the sort of person who finds getting arseholed on artificially flavoured, watered-down ethanol appealing, so it may have been all over whatever news source the proletariat follow…

Anyway, Petra had serious concerns about the research that was being presented by the PR company, and told me she was working through that side of things for her blog. Would I be interested in taking a look at maths to see how figures worked out? Why yes, of course I would! Her comrade Tristan O’Dwyer was also looking at the same PR piece for his blog, so the three of us started comparing notes to pick through the whole debacle, using our own unique super-powers to analyse what was going on. Me, I’ve been on maths detail, and that’s what I’ll concentrate on here, but first some background…

The promised background

To flog flavoured vodka drinks to twenty-somethings, Global Brands set up a competitiony thing on Facebook-type things to find a young, “fun-loving” maths or science student to research nights out, to produce a “scientific” “thesis” on what makes a night out “perfect”.

Obviously, with this all being in the name of PR, munters need not apply. They didn’t actually say that (althoughh kudos would be due if they were that honest), but the way the cards were played made this obvious. The winner would be a moderately attractive woman; not “out of your league” material as far as men would be concerned, and the sort of woman who looks like she could be in your group of friends if you’re a woman. It wouldn’t be a man because if they were good looking they’d end up making potential male customers feel inadequate. An ordinary looking man would work if they were a bit funny, but VK is a sophisticated drink as well as a fun-loving one, so being entertainingly funny wouldn’t work.

What a surprise it was, then, that this young lady won; seen here posing with a formula that is all her own work, honest. (More on that later…)

As with Petra, I’m not going to name her (it’s not hard to find, though) in case she realises the travesty of it all.

Now, as is traditional with these PR formulae, the formula that is presented is poorly rendered. I’ve taken it upon myself to try and improve the appearance by using OpenOffice.org Formula to get something a bit more likely to gain a grade C GCSE. Here’s what has been shown off by the PR gang:

Here, your Perfect Night Out (PNO) is equal to your attractiveness+spontaneity factors, multiplied by the sum of your number of friends factor, venue factor, timing factor and fun time factor, all multiplied by an “end of the night factor”.

The PR company say this is all the student’s own work, but I find that suspicious. As she’s a biology undergraduate I’d expect her to be able to write a formula accurately, and that means no multiplication symbols and single character variable names. PNO is PxNxO, and N is used on the right hand side.

Looking at the promotion’s webpage, we can see that the whole formula is based on subjective feelings from leading questions, and any attempt to use actual units (like those of time, or the number of people or places) are thrown out the window in favour of a numerical scale from 1 to 10. At least, that’s how it appears - in their calculator they have eight variables, compared to the seven in the formula. Also, their calculator just adds your numbers together giving a total out of 80, instead of multiplying three parts of it which should, using the scales suggested, be out of 16000. (Of course, we can’t know that this is the case because there’s no example figures shown in the description of the formula.)

However, Tristan obtained the ‘thesis’ written by the student from the PR company, and in the interest of peer review (and seeing as it had to, and I quote, stack up to academic scrutiny by Britain’s best brains), we’ve got it hosted here for all to see. I recommend you have a look at it before I start picking holes and showing how easy it is to have infinite fun!

Reading through the paper was interesting for me, from a forensic point of view. It looks an awful lot like there are two distinct writing styles in certain places that would suggest, to me (and this is only an opinion) that the bulk was written by one person and then someone else chimed in to expand. I won’t dwell on this though, there’s no physical (or electronic) proof, but certain sections show a woeful lack of understanding of fairly simple maths.

Outlined in the paper are formulae used as the foundation of the formula above. A couple of them have really basic, obvious flaws that I would expect anybody tasked to draw them up to spot before even committing them to paper; they’re listed below. For them to be the foundations of any research on any topic would be pointless, and we can only be glad that it’s for a pointless exercise like a perfect night out, and not for something important like, I dunno, the amount of gas required to inflate a car’s air bag. Once again, I’ve used OpenOffice.org Formula to render them accurately.

The number of friends to go out with

Here, N is the magic number that represents how you feel being with your friends. W_K is a weighting factor, provided as a black box that allows wiggle room (“Formula doesn’t work for you? Clearly you’ve misinterpreted your weighting factors!”). L_L is the lower limit of the number of friends you like to go out with, U_L is the upper limit, and F is the number of friends you’re with actually out with on this occasion.

Looks impressive doesn’t it? The problem is, if you only like going out with, say, three other people - no more and no less - then you end up dividing by zero, resulting in infinity. Hey presto, infinitely good night out! This happens whenever you have two identical limits, so my favourite result is infinite perfection by being a complete loner.

The timing formula

Here, T is a numeric representation of timing - as a factor, not as a time, so no units. W_T is a magical weighting factor, D is a day idealness factor (D=1 on your favourite day to go out, 0.5 for any other day). S_Diff is the difference between your ideal start time for a night out and the actual time you start, and F_Diff is the difference between finish time.

This formula doesn’t stand up to scrutiny for several reasons. Firstly, there’s no discussion in the report regarding the units of time; in science normally this is done in seconds, but given that there’s 0.25 added (“to allow for inaccuracies”) I suspect this should be in hours - 15 minutes sounds like a more realistic amount of wiggle room than 15 seconds or 250 milliseconds. However, elsewhere in the formulae minutes are used - so there’s no consistency.

Secondly, units need to be included in scientific formulae. 7 seconds +7 is meaningless, either both factors have the same unit or no units at all. Those 0.25 wiggles require a unit identical to those of the differences. If you add them in, and let’s (to keep a pretence of science) assume that we’re doing it all in seconds, then the bottom of the formula is in seconds squared (aka s²) - an acceleration! Given that both the weighting and day factor are purely numerical, it results in the Timing factor being in s^-2, which is nonsense.

Conclusion

An acre of bullshit, but with the occasional nice flourish (more so than from - gah! - Arnall). All the same, there’s a disturbing lack of science coming from a biology student. I do sincerely hope she recovers from this and has a good career.

An aside - why do PR companies inflict this sort of rubbish on us? Well, as another commentator has pointed out, by getting things like this into news and blogs, instead of as advertising, you probably pay less (although you have the gamble as to whether it gets picked up by anyone), and you don’t have to play by the ASA’s rules, so you can claim absolutely anything…

Change of theme

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:39:51 -0500

After realising how clean and customisable the Field Notes theme is on Tumblr, I’ve switched to that and started tinkering with it (increasing the content width, logo at the top, Disqus comments so far; background design to follow).

Fascinating? Not really. Just want to post something. I’ve got a bigger super-post to finish off, but want instant gratification…

Links for 2009-11-06 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

Google Code Blog: Introducing Closure Tools
Google have released their javascript development framework into the wild. Thanks Google! (Thoogle!)

Links for 2009-11-05 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

UDN - Three - DevelopmentKitGettingStarted
If I'm going to do anything with UDK, I'm going to have to keep this near. Where's the Hello World example?!

Links for 2009-11-04 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 PST

eric archer . net » mini space rockers
Going to have to make a few of these...

It's typical isn't it?

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:08:07 -0400

The theme that I found on Tumblr and decided to build my own theme off is a complete mess of poorly chosen and/or default id and class names and a spaghetti-like bundle of CSS. It’s going to take a while… at least I’ve got comments working though.

Here we go again

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 05:46:38 -0400

I found myself being a digital nomad once again. After Swurl shut down in the early part of 2009 I found a great replacement in the form of Storytlr. Things seemed to be good - nice European guys, invited over to the Google I/O conference in June where cool new features on the way - and then a bombshell was dropped in October.

Storytlr will be gone by the end of the year. Time to find yet another blog solution. I wasn’t really that happy using Blogger in conjunction with a full-featured aggregator because comments weren’t crossing over between the two, and I wanted to avoid running my own server as much as possible so that I don’t have to constantly worry about updating the code as security issues arise. I just don’t have enough hours in the day to spend time doing that.

Now, a few years ago I first came across Tumblr, and I quite liked it but didn’t think of it as much more than a novelty. More recently, a few people I follow on Twitter have been playing with it and appeared to be very happy with its capabilities - and ease of use figured highly - so I decided to look again.

I’ve liked what I’ve seen enough to use it as the basis for this latest iteration of my online presence. Where there’s features missing that I’d like, I’ve started building my own versions in things like Yahoo Pipes, and I’ve delved into the page template to start getting it to look how I’d like. There’s still some way to go (no comments yet, for example), but I understand much more about how it works than I have done with previous platforms I’ve built on.

So here we are - expect to see improvements over the next couple of weeks!

Just heading back from Barry Island. My first time. Disappointed that it wasn’t the armpit I...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:02:56 -0400

Just heading back from Barry Island. My first time. Disappointed that it wasn’t the armpit I was led to believe, actually very nice!

Pondering visiting Bath tomorrow

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 08:44:15 -0400

Pondering visiting Bath tomorrow

My back is rubbish. This is what happens when you try and get wishing wells through doors too small...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:00:07 -0400

My back is rubbish. This is what happens when you try and get wishing wells through doors too small for wishing wells to in through. Meh!

Vista reinstalled, now not on a shonky software RAID. Thanks Dell, you’ve made my day...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:37:49 -0400

Vista reinstalled, now not on a shonky software RAID. Thanks Dell, you’ve made my day “interesting”

Vista box hugely unstable. Had 3 BSODs in the past 24 hours. Trying to get the video I’ve been...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:02:37 -0400

Vista box hugely unstable. Had 3 BSODs in the past 24 hours. Trying to get the video I’ve been editing off before I kick it in the throat.

Taking the opportunity to learn Adobe Premiere a bit better. I only wish that the people who made...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:27:11 -0400

Taking the opportunity to learn Adobe Premiere a bit better. I only wish that the people who made the video I’m editing had done the same…

David “Moon Man” Tredinnick MP: tried to claim for homeopath intimate relationships...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:27:11 -0400

David “Moon Man” Tredinnick MP: tried to claim for homeopath intimate relationships course on expenses http://bit.ly/cahLK

Links for 2009-10-27 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

How to overlay images by using Greasemonkey
A nice intro to Greasemonkey coding from Hackaday

YouTube just said that, based on videos I’ve favourited, I might be interested in some...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:25:07 -0400

YouTube just said that, based on videos I’ve favourited, I might be interested in some propaganda piece from the BNP. Fuck you, YouTube.

//is.gd/4Eef5

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:25:07 -0400

//is.gd/4Eef5

Links for 2009-10-26 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Ultimate Htaccess Tutorial for .htaccess files
I bloody hate .htaccess files and regular expressions.

Liking CodeIgniter so far. Wish I could get happy with an IDE/editor though.

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:18:03 -0400

Liking CodeIgniter so far. Wish I could get happy with an IDE/editor though.

Super exciting keypad [Flickr]

Irregular Shed — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:49:22 PDT

Irregular Shed posted a photo:

For a project that will doubtless last forever, I've got this frankly ace membrane keypad. Eight lines will get used on my Arduino; four for polling and four for data. I could probably use a driver chip or something but - pfft - what's the point? =)

http://is.gd/4Csk4 I love that my Christian friends are there due to bacon =)

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 10:10:31 -0400

http://is.gd/4Csk4 I love that my Christian friends are there due to bacon =)

Investigating CodeIgniter

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:32:36 -0400

Investigating CodeIgniter

GEEKS! Don’t just chuckle at the GeoCities appearance of xkcd today. Check out the page source...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 06:53:08 -0400

GEEKS! Don’t just chuckle at the GeoCities appearance of xkcd today. Check out the page source for more geek lols!

Robot in action [Flickr]

Irregular Shed — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 03:18:19 PDT

Irregular Shed posted a video:

As my ridiculous voice mentions in the clip, I can't believe that there's a Go Compare advert running in the background. That'll be enough to turn this robot into a KILLING MACHINE.

//flic.kr/p/7a9Ckk

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:23:54 -0400

//flic.kr/p/7a9Ckk

This will be what ends up being my blog

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:03:56 -0400

It’ll take a while, but my blog will end up being here - on Tumblr. I’m knitting Yahoo! Pipes to assemble something close to what I had (and am losing) with Storytlr.

I for one welcome our new robot overlords [Flickr]

Irregular Shed — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:24:49 PDT

Irregular Shed posted a photo:

Jack and I made a robot today. The mouth lights are an Evil Mad Scientist Larson Scanner and, unlike the outside of the robot (covered in foil), the mouth is lined with silver card (bit less likely to cause a short circuit, resulting in artificial intelligence).

Links for 2009-10-23 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Creating a custom HTML theme | Tumblr
I guess, given the amount of capability it has together with its storage and stability as a company, Tumblr is where I'm heading to.

Links for 2009-10-21 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Spotify and AHK
Some work on fiddling with Spotify via AutoHotkey

Jack self-portrait [Flickr]

Irregular Shed — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:25:15 PDT

Irregular Shed posted a photo:

Jack painted a picture of himself for us this afternoon.

Delivery miles only [Flickr]

Irregular Shed — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 07:22:16 PDT

Irregular Shed posted a photo:

12 miles on the clock. So new it hurts! Never been in a car so new...