That doesn't seem to add up

Things that might be as wrong as racism

2011-04-07T00:24:00.004+01:00

In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin wrote:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla."

We now consider this to be not merely morally repugnant, but factually incorrect (and, yes, I did mean to put those two clauses in that order). However, when Darwin wrote this passage, such racist statements were commonplace. There was nothing even vaguely controversial about the idea that white men were better than Negroes. This poses an interesting question: what moral or political positions do we hold today that will, or might, be as utterly repugnant to future generations as Darwin's casual racism is to us? I can think of a few:

Patriotism

It is currently considered perfectly acceptable for Walmart to declare that they try to "Buy American", and for British politicians to claim that products made in this country should "proudly display the Union Flag". This is exactly as immoral as racism, for exactly the same reason. (Steve Landsburg has been pointing this out for a while - see, eg, this video). I can only hope that there will come a time in the future when such blatant tribalism: the utterly deplorable idea that I should care more about a complete stranger who happens to have been born on the right side of some arbitrary line, is considered every bit as heinous as the utterly deplorable idea that I should care more about some complete stranger who happens to have been born with the right colour skin.

Drugs

It is currently considered immoral to ingest certain substances. So much so that we have passed laws banning the ingestion of said substances. This strikes me as bizarre. It seems eminently likely that, at the very least, the substances which we consider it immoral to ingest will change over time.

Transplants

There are people who seriously suggest that it would be immoral to switch the law regarding transplantation from a default "no" to a default "yes". This is plainly ridiculous, as is the idea that a market in organs is immoral. However, I can actually imagine future generations going one step further, and being utterly horrified at the idea that we let people die from lack of transplants when there were perfectly good organs rotting away inside human carcasses: as if the dead people had some use for them! Compulsory post-mortem organ donation is certainly a plausible moral imperative.

Meat

We bring sentient beings into existence, feed them, house them, and kill them just in order to eat their dead bodies. I can easily see how a future society in which either meat has just dropped rapidly out of fashion, or in which meat production no longer requires the participation of sentient beings, might hold us to account.

Children

I am not the first person to have noticed that children are essentially treated as non-people in our society. I can easily imagine the way we allow parents to completely dictate their children's lives could be considered morally repugnant. Also relating to children: it seems quite plausible that our current attitude to Child Sexual Activity is somewhat misguided (see, eg Rind Et Al) - the very fact that I'm almost afraid to write that statement in public without a string of caveats should tell us, at least, that society's current attitudes to CSA are too emotional to be completely rational.

Other things

Almost all of the examples I've managed to come up with are examples in which I'm fairly sure that the current mainstream moral opinion is actually wrong, or at least in which I'm fairly sure it could be wrong. Clearly this is a failure of imagination on my part - there is almost certainly at least one thing that wouldn't even occur to me that will be seriously considered to be a moral issue in, say, 250 years' time - anyone have any ideas what it might be?

In Defence of Impossible Precision

2011-03-07T14:27:00.007Z

John Allen Paulos has quite a good column on innumeracy, first he asks readers to assess the following headlines:

1. After the Packers' Super Bowl victory, an exuberant Aaron Rogers Shook Hands with Everyone in the Stadium.
2. Experts Fear Total US Housing Costs (Rents plus Mortgage Payments) Will Top $2 Billion in 2011.
3. Only by Completely Eliminating Foreign Aid Can We Eliminate the Deficit.

What is wrong with them? Well, I don't expect anyone reading this not to have noticed that shaking 40,000 hands would take at least 10 hours, that $2 billion comes to about $10 per person or that Foreign Aid is such a tiny portion of the US deficit that even eliminating it entirely wouldn't make a big dent (this doesn't, of course, mean that it shouldn't be eliminated, only that if you're obsessed with the deficit, you have bigger fish to fry).

He then moves onto the following headline:

4. Number of Americans with Alzheimer's Believed to Be 5,451,213.

The supposed problem?

4. The problem here is that the number is ridiculously precise. Definitions of Alzheimer's vary and it's difficult to determine whether a single individual is suffering from it, much less whether five million plus are. Such impossible precision is common.

Well, yes, the number is ridiculously precise. No, no-one does think that we can measure the number of Americans with Alzheimer's to that degree of accuracy, but so what? If you do a survey of Americans, do some calculations, and your best estimate of the number of Americans with Alzheimer's comes out as 5,451,213, what number, exactly, does Paulos want you to report?

Assuming that you've done your sums correctly, 5,451,213 is an unbiased estimator of the number of Americans with Alzheimer's. Rounding your guess to 5.5 million does systematically worse than just reporting the estimator you got out of your calculations, so what exactly is the rationale behind it?

Yes, numbers like this should probably be reported along with some estimate of variance, and maybe it's a convention that we assume the number of signficant figures of a number to be a proxy for the size of its error bars, but it doesn't have to be that way: I look forward to a day when numbers like "5.5 million" get scoffed at by popular mathematics writers for being "overly round" or "not accurate enough".

Why aren't all journals open access?

2011-03-03T09:28:00.000Z

Here is the way the current system of academic publishing works, as far as I can tell: universities employ researchers who do original research, and produce journal papers; universities employ researchers who do peer-review, and make sure journal papers are up to standard; journals employ editors, who put the content together, and organise the referees; universities pay large amounts of money to journals in order to be allowed to read the articles.

Now, as you can see all of the money in the system comes from the universities. Universities pay the wages of the researchers and the reviewers directly, and they pay the wages of the editors indirectly (through journal subscriptions). So, here's an idea; why don't the universities club together to buy the journals, employ the editors directly, and publish all the content for free?

Note that buying the journals doesn't cost the universities (as a group) anything in the long-run, as the entire current value of the journal companies comes from the amount of money they expect to be paid in journal subscriptions by universities in the future. And there's no need for the journals to charge "submission fees", as those were all being paid by the universities in the first place: they can just come out of the communal pot.

So far as I can see, there is literally no downside to this - assuming coordination can be achieved, you have the same universities paying the same amount of money to the same people to produce the same articles, but the articles are now all available open-access. I admit that "assuming coordination can be achieved" is a fairly hefty assumption, but given the massive upsides, why isn't anyone at least suggesting this sort of approach?

There seems to be a general trend towards open-access publishing anyway, which is a Good Thing, but I don't undestand why this model isn't a strict Pareto improvement on the current system.

What should be in a maths class?

2011-02-15T12:26:00.005Z

I have recently (well, in the past two years) read two very interesting essays on the teaching of mathematics. At first glance, they seem to be almost diametrically opposed, but I tend to find myself agreeing, overall, with the thrust of both. The essays are Paul Lockhart's A Mathematician's Lament and Conrad Wolfram's TED talk on mathematical education. A couple of quotes from each which provide a brief summary.

From Wolfram's talk (trancript available here):

I want to see a completely renewed, changed math curriculum built from the ground up, based on computers being being there, computers that are now ubiquitous almost. calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a small number of years. Now I'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math, but what I am sure is it's the mainstream subject of the future.

From Lockhart's Lament:

The art is not in the “truth” but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant. Mathematics is the art of explanation. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity— to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs— you deny them mathematics itself. So no, I’m not complaining about the presence of facts and formulas in our mathematics classes, I’m complaining about the lack of mathematics in our mathematics classes.

So, Lockhart thinks we should be teaching mathematics as an art form, and Wolfram thinks we should be introducing more computers into mathematics lessons so that people can concentrate on doing the bits that are actually useful. Which of them is right? Well... both, but mostly Wolfram.

The question we have to ask ourselves before we can even begin to compare the two essays is why do we teach mathematics at all? So far as I can see, the only sensible justification for having mathematics as a subject that everyone in the world should be taught up to a relatively high level is because it's useful. You can't do physics, or engineering, or any sort of science, or do derivatives trading, or even decide which mortgage to get, without knowing quite a lot of mathematics. For this reason, everyone should be taught the basic mathematics that they need to know in order to do these things (or the basics they need to know in order to learn the specific maths they wnat to use).

Note that one corollary of this mode of thinking is that most of the mathematics you learn probably shouldn't be taught in a maths class. It's much easier to learn how to get from acceleration to speed than it is to learn how to differentiate a function. Yes, it is useful to then point out the possible generalisations (getting from acceleration to speed is the same as getting from jerk to acceleration) but I don't see any reason why these topics can't be introduced concretely. I personally have serious trouble doing any calculus that I can't do using physical intuition, and I think it's fair to say that I am an above-average student when it comes to learning maths. Calculus should be taught when you're doing engineering, statistics should be taught when you're analysing the results of experiments, graph theory should be taught when you're trying to solve scheduling problems.

Lockhart, on the other hand, seems to think that we should be learning mathematics because, essentially, mathematics is awesome. I happen to agree with him that mathematics is an exceptionally beautiful art form. I'm happy to sit back and bask in the glory of Cantor's diagonalisation argument, or the ingenuity of Karp's reductions between NP problems, but I'm not sure that I'm willing to contend that everyone should be forced to. Yes, if you want to be a mathematician you have to learn that mathematics is actually an art, but most people who study mathematics don't want to be mathematicians, and most people who study mathematics *shouldn't* want to be mathematicians. For these people, learning about the art of mathematics is little more than an intellectual curiosity, on a par with learning about Titian or Shakespeare.

In other words, Lockhart is right, inasmuch as we want people to study mathematics for it's own sake. Wolfram is right, inasmuch as we want people to study mathematics because it's useful.

Now, I happen to tend strongly towards the idea that the only things we should be teaching in schools are things which are potentially useful, but that obviously isn't the prevailing wisdom - everyone in this country is still forced to do an English Literature GCSE. Lockhart-style mathematics is a perfectly good substitute for art class, or critical theory. Wolfram's mathematics is a necessary prerequisite for doing just about anything else.

The Story of a Proof

2011-02-14T13:46:00.000Z

I started writing this blogpost about 6 months ago after reading an interesting post by RJ Lipton on why mathematicians prove things. I can't find that post any more (maybe it wasn't by RJ Lipton...?), but it was general speculation on why mathematicians are actually interested in formal proofs of their theorems.

A recent experience of mine in my own research seems particularly relevant here, and I'm going to try and explain what happened (this will, at the very least, satisfy my promise to Michael Brough at about the same time of getting some more serious mathematics into my blog). This is pretty much the first time I've ever tried to explain something technical in a non-technical setting, so let's see how it goes...
I have been working for a long time on the problem of determining the complexity of counting the number of homomorphisms between two graphs in modular counting classes. Although it isn't entirely the point of the story, I'll try to explain what this problem is.

An "homomorphism" between two objects is a map from one to the other that, in some sense, preserves their structure. An homomorphism that everyone who has studied any maths has seen would be the homomorphism from the integers into the integers modulo 2. The integers modulo 2 (which we will be talking about a lot in this post) is the set {0,1} with the following rules:

0 + 0 = 0, 1 + 0 = 1, 1 + 1 = 0;
0*0 = 0, 1*0 = 0, 1*1 = 1;

You can think of 0 as meaning "even" and 1 as meaning "odd" (check that these rules make sense with those meanings). Now an homomorphism from the integers into this set is "send the even integers to zero, send the odd integers to 1". The "structure" that is preserved by this homomorphism is addition and multiplication. What do I mean by "preserved"? I mean that if you first send the integers to {0,1} then add them together you get the same answer as if you add them together and send the answer to {0,1}. You can check that this is true by using the rules you already know for adding integers (the sum of two odd integers is even, for example). We'll just do one example to make it clear.

13 + 14 = 27

Let's see what our homomorphism does to this equation. 13 is sent to 1 and 14 is sent to 0, and 1 + 0 = 1. The homomorphism does indeed send 27 to 1, so we're ok.

Ok, so now you know what a homomorphism is, I'm going to confuse you by saying that that is entirely *not* the best way to think about graph homomorphism. The best way to think about graph homomorphism is the inspiration for another word we use for the same problem "H-colouring". Here, "H" is the graph that the homomorphism goes into (the graph we're colouring will usually be called G). To see the reason for this, let's look at what a homomorphism into a complete graph (a graph with all edges present) looks like. Such a homomorphism maps each vertex of G to some vertex of H, and does so in such a way that no two vertices of G which are adjacent are mapped to the same vertex of H. If we colour the vertices of H Red, Green and Blue, then we can think of an homomorphism into H as a way of colouring the vertices of G Red, Green and Blue so that no two vertices of the same colour are adjacent (see picture). In other words, every edge in G is taken to an edge in H (the "structure" we preserve is the edges of G).

More generally, we can think of graph homomorphism as a way of colouring the vertices of G with the vertices of H. The rule then becomes that you can only have Red vertices adjacent to Blue vertices if Red is adjacent to Blue in H. In this sense, H-colouring really is a generalisation of colouring - we're still colouring the vertices of G, it's just that the rules are now more complicated that just "don't put two vertices of the same colour next to each other".

Now, for any given graph G, a question we can sensibly ask is "how many H colourings are there?". Actually, I've been asking a slightly easier (?) question - "is the number of H colourings odd or even?". Now, we want to know how hard it is to decide if the number of H-colourings is odd or even for *any* G. Here's a warm-up question. If H is the triangle from the picture above (K_3 for the mathematicians) then is there any graph for which it's hard to decide whether the number of H-colourings is odd or even?

Answer - no. For any graph*, the number of colourings with K_3 is even. Let's look at why. Take a colouring of the graph. Let's say it colours some of the vertices Red and some of the vertices Green. Well then we can build another colouring by switching Red and Green. That is - we colour all of the vertices which are Red with Green, and all of the vertices which are Green with Red. This must still be a colouring, as there are no Reds next to Reds and no Greens next to Greens - this will still be true after we've switched them. So what? Well, given any colouring of G, we can find another colouring which just has Red and Green swapped. Importantly, if we swap Red and Green again, we get back to our original colouring. In other words, the colourings of G come in pairs. Well - if I can divide the colourings up into sets of size two with none left over, then there must be an even number of them (that's pretty much what "even" means).

So now we've learned a new trick for counting colourings. If there are two colours like Red and Green in the triangle which "look the same" as far as the graph is concerned then we know there are an even number of colourings that use these colours. This leads to an important insight - remember the rules for adding even and odd numbers? Even + odd = odd and even + even = even. Even behaves like 0. In other words, the total number of colourings, including those which use the vertices which we can "swap" is *the same* as the total number of colourings which don't use this vertices. If there are two vertices which we can "swap" the we might as well delete them before we count the colourings. (We call such a swap an "involution" of the graph - I figure I might as well say this now, as I'm probably going to use the word again later anyway, so you might as well know what it means)

Now we're getting to the theorem that I wanted to explain, (remember when I mentioned Lipton about 3 pages ago? I'm getting there.)

Consider the following process. You pick some vertices which you can "swap" without changing the structure of the graph, and you delete them. If there are any vertices in the new graph which you can swap, you delete them, and so on. Eventually, you'll get to a graph with no vertices which can be swapped (we'll count the graph with no vertices as a graph). We call a symmetry of the graph which just swaps pairs of vertices like this an "involution". Now, I have a theorem that says, essentially, that it doesn't matter in what order you do this process, you'll always get to the same place. Consider the graph below. You can start by swapping A and B, or you can start by just going all out and swapping A and F, B and E and C and D, to make the whole thing disappear. Notice that if you start by swapping A and B, you then swap E and F then C and D, again the whole thing disappearing.

Now. Why should this theorem be true? And why should I care? Well, it should be true for the following reason: remember that the process we're describing preserves the number of colourings modulo 2 for every graph G. So the number of ways of colouring any given graph with H is the same as the number of ways of colouring that same graph H after deleting vertices in the above manner. So imagine that the theorem wasn't true, then from some H you would get to two different involution-free graphs. Then you'd have two different graphs, H and H' with the property that for every single graph in the world the number of H-colourings of G was the same parity as the number of H' colourings of G. This is just too big a coincidence to be possible. It can't be true. Except... why not graph automorphisms are complicated, and besides, mathematicians prove things.

I did this nearly two years ago. It was fairly technical. I used something called Newman's Lemma and had to learn the theory of something called reduction systems. Basically, I worked out in great detail how to go from the graph you get by deleting one involution to the graph you get by deleting a different involution (it was actually slightly more complicated than that, but that's beside the point). Along the way, I had to use some non-trivial group theory, and a rather bizarre fact about the lowest common multiple of a set of odd numbers as well as some tedious case analysis on the lengths of paths in G. What I'm trying to get across is that, whilst it was technically correct, the ideas in this proof were a very long way from the idea I had for *why* the theorem should be true.

I was in quite a bizarre epistemic situation. I knew the theorem was true, and I also knew why. Unfortunately, the reason I knew it was true and the reason *why* it was true were not the same!

If you're attentive, you'll have noticed I used the past tense in that previous paragraph. That's because this story has a happy ending. A year or so later, I came across something called the Lovasz Vector of a graph (there is more than one thing called the Lovasz Vector of a graph, so don't worry if you think you've heard of it and don't understand the following sentence). Essentially, the Lovasze Vector of a graph H tells us the number of H colourings of every finite graph. There is a theorem in a book by Hell and Nesestril which says that two graphs which share the same Lovasz Vector are the same. Remember my intuitive reasoning for why my proof should be true? It would just be *silly* if there were two different H such that the number of H-colourings was the same for every single graph in the world. Well, here were Hell and Nesetril telling me that I was right!

There were a few details to iron out, but essentially the same proof as they give in their book tells us that if two graphs have no involutions and they have the same Lovasz Vector then they are the same. Note that this is *why* the reduction system I had on graphs just had to be confluent. Intuitively, there is no possible reason why two different graphs should have the same Lovasz Vector. I always knew it was why, and now I could prove it!

The new proof had a lot of other advantages over the old one (most notably, it works for any prime p, not just 2 (so if you have 3 vertices which "look the same" to the graph, and delete them, you get an analogous result)) but, more importantly, it is the right proof. The proof follows the intuition exactly, and once you've seen the new proof, you know that the theorem is true, and you also believe that it has to be true (the new proof also deleted about 12-15 pages from my thesis, but oh well...).

So, that's the story of my proof, and an attempt to give some idea of at least one reason why proofs in general are a good idea.

* there is actually one exception - see if you can where the exception hides itself in the argument given.

Writing Mathematics: Formalism obscures intuition?

2011-02-11T14:05:00.000Z

I have read quite a large percentage of the books that are currently widely available on the topic of writing mathematics, and several that aren't. I've also been involved in teaching the Mathematical Writing course run at the QMUL. There is one serious issue that I've encountered: the main problem seems to be that most people start with the assumption that you already know everything that you're going to write, and the basic structure of your proof, but don't know the best order to put the words on the paper. In my experience, this is far from true.

I'm currently writing up my thesis, and have several new ideas which I've never written down in complete formal detail before. This process is difficult. The ideas in are generally simple enough that I think I could explain them to reasonably bright 15 year old in about 10 minutes given a piece of paper, but sufficiently abstract that to write them down formally has involved pages of writing that even I barely understand. These are proofs that I can (and have) run through in the pub with non-experts on the back of a napkin, and they translate into 10 pages of symbols that even I can barely follow. (I'm working on a post containing an example, but it will require drawing some pictures, so I'll probably get round to it some time over the weekend).

It is all very well saying that one should write an informal verbal summary of what you are going to do before you do it, but when the formalism is so far removed from the key idea, this becomes difficult. Also, when you are writing a maths paper, you have to make damn sure that the "summary" is still technically accurate. There can be no hand-wavey 'look, it just works' and (importantly) no interaction with the audience - you dont' know if they 'get it', so you have to put down everything it might take for them to get it. In my experience, the heavy formalism has often meant that the proofs I write down end up so complicated that I'm not even sure I would 'get' them if I had to pick up the ideas directly from reading the papers. The formalism masks the intuition, and the intuition isn't quite formal enough to be appropriate for the paper.

This is an interesting topic. It's one that several people have no doubt spent a lot of time thinking about, but it's not one that seems to be discussed. Even in a mathematical writing course, the tendency is to focus on technicalities. To be fair, this is usually adequate for undergraduates, and you do need to get the technical stuff right even when writing down simple ideas, but this is something that needs addressing: exposition of mathematics is a difficult skill, and probably one that there's not enough focus on in training academics.

Maybe not everyone has this problem - maybe not everyone has elementary ideas which don't translate nicely into formalisms - maybe their ideas are inherently more technical, or maybe they're just better at finding formalisms than I am - but I do find it interesting that it's happened to me almost every time I've tried to write out a formal version of a proof that I've created myself.

PS - the vast majority of this post was written over a year ago - the posting of it was sparked by having a discussion with Andy in which he mentioned that he is currently having exactly the same problem, and by me finally figuring out how to access the drafts of my old posts...

Philosophy of Education

2011-02-11T00:02:00.004Z

I just came across this on Rosemary Bailey's website. While I think the ideals are nice, I think in practice I disagree with just about all of it:

My vision of a university was succintly described by David L. King, writing in The Times Higher on 9 April 2004. It is:

“the belief in a community of scholars and not a confederacy of self-seekers;
the idea of openness and not ownership;
the professor as a pursuer of truth and not an entrepreneur;
the student as an acolyte whose preferences are to be formed, not a consumer whose preferences are to be satisfied.”
I believe that university students should be able to be confident that they are being taught by people who are immersed in the subject in other ways than teaching. I collaborate with a range of scientists on the design of their experiments and the analysis of their data, so I teach Statistics. I still prove theorems in Combinatorics and Algebra, so I also teach those subjects.

I've no idea what a "confederacy of self-seekers" is, so I'm not going to address that point. I don't think anyone believes in a professor as an entrepreneur, one thing that I think people can sensibly expect professors to be, at least in the current system, is teachers. Incidentally, I happen to think that Rosemary is a very good teacher, and one who thinks a lot about doing the best for her students, so I hope she won't be offended by any of this.

The problem I have mostly is with the last point in the bulleted list: "the student as an acolyte whose preferences are to be formed, not a consumer whose preferences are to be satisfied.". Now, that might be a nice model for a university if the point of going to university was to learn about the subject you were studying. The problem is that for the vast majority of people who go to university currently this just isn't the case. They go because in order to get the better paid jobs you have to have a little piece of paper which said that you went to university. They go to university to get this piece of paper and, and I think this is the important part. This system is not the students' fault.

The students in our department are not there because they are particularly interested in mathematics and (and I think this is something that academics sometime struggle with, and I will almost certainly get round to making a separate post about this one day) the vast majority of them are not interested in pursuing a career in academia. The overwhelming majority of students are at university to get a degree because it will help them get a better job. And they are right. In the world we happen to live in people do need degrees to get good jobs, and universities are there to supply these degrees, and to make sure that the degrees are a useful signal of ability for employers.

It might be that the vision of the university described by David King is a good way to train people who want to obtain the sort of detailed knowledge of an academic subject one needs to do research, but it absolutely is not the case that 50% of the population want, or need to obtain that sort of detailed knowledge of any subject. So, while we have a system where something pushing 50% of young people go to university (and, remember, pay the fees that pay the salaries of the people who work at the university).

Most people are there to get a degree because getting a degree is necessary prerequisite to doing whatever it is they actually want to do. Like it or not, the job of the teaching staff in a university is to help them get that degree. If you don't like it, by all means do your best to change it, but while you're accepting money from the university as it exists now, I'm afraid I think you are morally obligated to teach in the way that is appropriate for the majority of students who are there now. More to the point, if you don't like the current system, you're going to have to figure out another way to pay for researchers - at the moment research is cross-subsidised by an awful lot of socially innefficient teaching.

I personally would love to live in a world where universities could all be like Cambridge and Oxford, and where the vast signalling game that is university education as it exists now didn't exist. I admit that this world would probably be a world in which less "blue skies" research got done, and I find it hard to believe that would be a particularly bad thing.

This post is getting long, and I'm not sure my thoughts on the last paragraph of Rosemary's statement are fully-formed, so I won't write much about that for now. I will however finish with one thought that I have on the issue: it would be a remarkable coincidence if the best teachers in the world also happened to be the people who were best at doing original research. I happen to think that I personally am quite a lot better at the former than the latter. I'm not going to give an example of someone whose abilities are skewed in the other direction, but I'm almost certain everyone who has studied or worked at a university already has one in mind.

Security Theatre

2011-02-10T12:45:00.003Z

Every week this term, on both Tuesdays and Thursdays, I teach a class in the Francis Bancroft building on our university campus. Twice so far this year (so that's 20% of the times I've been into the building), there has been a security guard on the door checking the ID of every person going in.

Now, whatever the merits of having someone check the ID of everyone entering a university building, whatever the point of this exercise is supposed to be, surely it is rendered *entirely* useless if you don't do it every day. If the purpose is to stop people stealing things (there are plenty of old computers which must be worth tens of pounds on the black market) then surely they'll just come in and steal them on the days when you don't do the checks. If the point is... well, I actually have no idea what else the point could be, it's a university campus, not a Government Intelligence building.

There can be literally no point whatsoever in having these security checks unless they're done regularly (in much the same way as there can be no point whatsoever having full-body scanners in airports unless you also perform cavity searches). Security which is this easy to circumvent is not security, it's theatre.

Ten Films in Ten Days

2011-02-08T23:42:00.007Z

I've recently taking to going to the cinema as a way to pass time during the day. When I tell some people that I like to go to the cinema alone, they look at me as if I have a third arm, but really, going to the cinema is a solitary activity: talking is actively frowned upon! Anyway, I found myself going quite a lot, and in order to amortize the cost, I decided to get myself a Cineworld Unlimited card. This card entitles the bearer to unlimited cinema, as one might expect, for only £13.50 a month. It therefore pays for itself if you go twice a month - I have regularly been going more than twice a week. Bargain.

One catch, you can only get one of these cards by signing up for a twelve-month contract, and I have almost no idea what I'll be doing in three months time, never mind twelve. I therefore made the completely rational and considered decision to get the card anyway, and let future me worry about paying for it. I then figured that: hey, I only need to go about 20 times and it's paid for the entire year. I then figured: hey, why not go 20 times in the first 20 days, then I'll have 345 days worth of free cinema!

Yes, I realise that this doesn't actually make any sense, I do understand the concept of sunk costs, but it sounded like it might be fun, and I'm all for fun. So, in the past 10 days I have been to the cinema 10 times, to see 10 different films. After each one I took brief notes: my reviews come after the fold, along with my reflections on the somewhat ridiculous project.

By the way, for those of you who know me, and know that I'm currently supposed to be writing my thesis, and are wondering what impact this has had on my progress, well I can say for certain that I've not made any less progress in the past 10 days that I did in the previous 10. For those of you who know me a little better, no, that isn't actually a trivial statement.

The Dilemma

I mostly chose this film because it was on at a convenient time (something of a theme through the rest of the week, and my interpretation of "convenient" might have started to get slightly broader). It was... ok. The only bits anyone actually laughed at were the slapstick, and I couldn't quite genuinely believe in some of the really stupid things Vince Vaughan's character did in the name of keeping the plot moving. His relationship with his girlfriend in particular just wasn't believable, and his reasons for lying to her remain utterly unfathomable.

Tangled (3D)

Standard Disney. There isn't really that much more to say. The wicked stepmother (not technically an accurate description, but I can't be bothered to think of a better one) reminded me of Ursula, the hero reminded me of any other Disney Hero, and Rapunzel reminded me of any other Disney Heroine. It was no Aladdin, but I would imagine that everyone's favourite Disney film is just whichever one they happened to see when they were at the age to appreciate it best. On the other hand, it was a lot more fun than Toy Story III.

One thing I did notice is that the only actual good 3D effects came in the adverts at the beginning. In particular, the advert for the 3D Panasonic TV looks awesome - why don't the people who make the films hire the people who do the adverts to do their effects for them?

Black Swan

Surreal ballet psycho-drama. Probably the best surreal ballet surreal ballet psycho-drama I've ever seen, but frankly a little too weird for my taste. Natalie Portman is good, but her character is the sort of part people play when the want to win an award, slightly crazy, which also sums up the rest of the film. Also, while I'm not capable of telling the difference, I can imagine real ballerinas being slightly chagrined at the idea that Portman could possibly be dancing well enough to get the lead part in Swan Lake - did she use a stunt double who could do ballet?

The King's Speech

Colin Firth goes all out to win an Oscar as King George VI, struggling to overcome his speech impediment. All I can say about this film is that you won't be disappointed if you go see it. On the other hand, I also doubt very much if you'll be pleasantly surprised. The best part about it, in my opinion, is the clever title. It's well-acted, well-scripted, and generally well put together drama. If you like this sort of thing, you'll like it. I'm gradually coming to realise that this sort of thing isn't really what I enjoy at the cinema.

Morning Glory

Relatively low budget Rom-Com in which Harrison Ford plays a grumpy old TV reporter who's forced to do breakfast television working for Rachel MacAdams as the bright-young-thing executive producer. Not the sort of thing I would ever admit to going to see normally, as a single heterosexual male, and, quite simply, by far the most fun I've had in the cinema in the entire 10 days! I'm not sure if this was just an exceptionally well-done romantic comedy, or if I just really enjoy romantic comedies, but it was light, funny, actually genuinely touching (I really did care what happened at the end... contrast this with the supposedly "sublime" Brighton Rock). The slapstick was funny, but didn't distract from the plot, and the characters were enormously believable.

Inasmuch as a film like this can be accused of having "themes", one of the big themes was "news vs. entertainment", with Harrison Ford's character constantly griping at having to do lowest-common-denominator stuff when he had won Pullitzers. Well, the feel-good ending (I don't think that counts as a spoiler) tried to convince us that "entertainment" has its place too. The film as a whole couldn't be a better poster-child for that.

The Mechanic

Mindless violence and action scenes courtesy of Jason Statham. One thing that did bother me was the complete lack of any sort of interesting plot. I know that having no sort of interesting plot is pretty much a cliché for this sort of film, but I generally enjoy the sort of ridiculously contrived plot twists that these films have to offer - this one didn't have any that I can even remember.

A Little Bit of Heaven

Another romantic comedy. There is pretty much nothing to this film, and for some reason, which I can't yet quantify (I'm clearly not quite ready to take over from Roger Ebert) I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as Morning Glory. Kate Hudson (who, incidentally, doesn't look at all like a Hollywood Actress to me - kudos) is lively enough as the main character. She is diagnosed with a terminal illness and then, for some utterly unfathomable reason, Whoopi Goldberg appears as God and grants her three wishes. The God bit really does feel as though it's bolted on to what would otherwise be a perfectly serviceable rom-com, which I think might have been part of what bothered me.

Brighton Rock

The posters claim this film is "wonderful" and "spellbinding", if I hadn't been sat in the middle of a row, I would have walked out halfway through. It's gruelling, depressing, and the characters just aren't interesting enough for it to be worth it. First there's Pinkie, who in the space of less than ten minutes (on-screen, but only a couple of days in his world) goes from being afraid to pull a knife on someone to beating the guy to death with his bare hands, for no apparent reason (I've no idea if Graham Green does this transition better in the book). Then there's his pathetic, whining, annoying little girlfriend who, frankly, needs to grow a pair - it's pretty hard to feel sorry for her when you can't possibly begin to empathise with her. There's also the girlfriend's boss who goes from being generally aloof to running around town doing whatever she can for the girl, again, I'm not quite sure why.

All in all, I don't think this film was well done, but I don't think this is it's major flaw. I think it's major flaw is that films like this just aren't fun. I once had a serious argument with a French teacher about a French film called La Vie de Jesus. She claimed the film had an important message to get across, I claimed that that was all very well, but it was so damned depressing that no-one would manage to watch the whole thing to find out what the message was. I'm not sure Brighton Rock has a serious message, but it certainly suffers from the latter problem. Do not watch.

How do you know?

About thirty seconds, ago, I was about to press post. I counted the films in my list, and noticed that I only had 9. I looked back at my notebook in which I've been keeping notes on the films I've seen, and found this entry for "How do you know?" (rom-com with Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson): "meh".

I think that pretty much sums it up. It was an entirely unmemorable but not at all unpleasant way to pass a couple of hours. Rudd is pretty good as the vaguely believable not-too-perfect male lead, and the whole thing has excellent production values, but, I managed to forget I'd seen it, and couldn't manage any more than "meh" even immediately after coming out - you can certainly afford to wait for the DVD.

The Fighter

My dad is down for two days, which is part of the reason I'm having a hiatus today (the other is that I've been doing "maths-busking" training all afternoon). He has his own Unlimited card, and had been warned in advance that he would be being dragged to see one of the films that I hadn't yet seen. In the end, time constraints meant that we chose to see "The Fighter" at the O2, despite dad's misgivings about watching a boxing film.

I'll leave the first part of the review to him "Well, I'm glad you made me go see that, it was one of the best films I've seen in ages". Later on "I even enjoyed the bits with the fighting". It's basically a character film, following the lives of two brothers. I'm not quite sure what the name is for the genre: filmed almost like a documentary, and based on a true story, but with actors playing the real people: maybe "reconstruction"? The characters were real. You actually care what happens to them. Christian Bale deserves to be nominated for whatever he got nominated for for this film, not only does the character he portrays have exactly the right mix of charisma and pathos for the "boxer turned crack addict" that he's supposed to be, as the end credits roll, we are shown a brief clip of the real Dicky Ward, and Bale has him down to a t.

The characters were very real and the story was inspiring. Definitely my second favourite of the films I've seen so far, but I'm willing to admit that by most people's standards, it would probably be rated as the best.

A few final thoughts

You may have noticed that I claimed earlier I'd be seeing 20 films in 20 days, and wondering why this post isn't entitled "20 films in 20 days: part 1". Well, I've revised my goal downwards - I still aim to have seen twenty by the end of the month, but once a day is going to start to get in the way of me having a life if I try to keep it up.

One thing I've learned from the past ten day is that whatever method I use to predict in advance which films I'll enjoy is currently seriously broken. There is no way I would have seen either The Fighter or Morning Glory if I hadn't been doing this, and they stand out as streets ahead of any of the films I actually did see.

I've also firmed up my belief (which I guess I already had) that I really shouldn't bother reading reviews of films before I go see them - the sort of things I enjoy at the cinema just aren't the sort of things people who are paid by the word to write about films claim to enjoy.

There are several films I like the look of coming out in the near future - I'm sure there will also be some excellent ones that I don't like the look of. Now to figure out how to get to see them.

Little Joys on the Tube

2011-02-08T23:05:00.004Z

Going the right way, even when the signs try to point you the wrong way (not acceptable at rush hour, but can save you a *lot* of time during the rest of the day).

Having a conversation, and then realising that you're providing amusement for everyone else on the carriage, as otherwise everyone just sits there in complete silence.

Finding exactly the right place to stand on the platform so that you don't have to walk at all when you get to your destination (and pondering where the optimal place to stand is when going to an unfamiliar destination station).

Waiting two minutes for the next train, and getting a seat instead of piling into a crowded carriage.

The sheer inanity of the announcements: "we're being held at a red signal", really? what colour do you use for "go"?

Instrumental Variables

2011-02-05T19:05:00.000Z

Marginal Revolution linked recently to this paper which claims that overuse of Instrumental Variables (IVs) in econometric studies has led to them being less useful. So far as I can tell, the argument given in the paper is exactly backwards... what am I missing?

For the uninitiated, an IV is a variable which is correlated with the thing we want to study but is unequivocally not caused by it. Let's say we want to study the effect of x on y, then an instrumental variable z is useful if its only effect on y is through its effect on x. To use the language of Pearl's causal graphs, this is equivalent to saying that every path in the causal graph from z to y passes through x.

For example, suppose we want to measure the effect of a change in the price of apple on the demand for apples. It may seem difficult to do this directly, as an increase in demand is likely to lead to an increase in supply, and so price is affected by demand. A potential instrumental variable is the weather. If the the weather is favourable for growing apples then more apples will end up being grown, and this is presumably independent of demand - the increase in apples will have a predictable increase in the supply (and therefore the price) and we can measure the effect on demand.

Now, the authors of this paper claim that:

A Tragedy of the Commons has led to overuse of instrumental variables anda depletion of the actual stock of valid instruments for all econometricians. Each time an instrumental variable is shown to work in one study, that result automatically generates a latent variable problem in every other study that has used or will use the same instrumental variables, or another correlated with it, in a similar context. We see no solution to this. Useful instrumental variables are, we fear, going the way of Atlantic Cod.

As I said, I think this is exactly backwards. It is not the fact that new papers are produced which use these instrumental variables in a new context which introduces the latency problem: it reveals a latency problem which already existed. The previous studies were already invalid. The new studies just reveal the fact.

E.g. Imagine that people buy more apples when they have high levels of vitamin D in their blood (because apples are a substitute for fish oil). Then you have to correct for the effect of the Sun on vitamin D levels when you're using the sun as a proxy for apple demand. The problem here though, is that the weather conditions already weren't a good IV for demand in apples. The fact that a new study appears to demonstrate this is not a "Tragedy of the Commons" in any meaningful sense - the study has not been made any worse, we've just found out that it was bad.

On the other hand, Alex Tabarrok, who is more of an economist than I am, appears to be taking the paper vaguely seriously, and not to have noticed this. As I said before: am I missing something?

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Super Saver Delivery - classic price discrimination?

2011-02-02T23:59:00.005Z

I've just ordered a book from Amazon. I selected the Super Saver Delivery option, and Amazon informed me that I should expect this book before February 9th. Now, I'm not exactly a stranger to ordering books from Amazon. I spent in the region of £500 last year, and I'm very nearly 100% confident that I will receive this book before the end of the week (that's February 5 for those who are keeping track). Why does Amazon do this? The two delivery options "Super Saver Delivery" and "Standard Delivery" are, as far as I can tell, completely indistinguishable in terms of service. The only difference being that one pays something in the region of £2 per order for the latter, and nothing at all for the former.

I can think of several reasons why they would exaggerate times: it's a pleasant surprise when your book arrives before it is supposed to (but then why not claim that all deliveries will take "up to 2 weeks"; it also covers them in case delivery takes longer than they might expect (but, again, why not give an even more exaggerated time). I can also think of reasons why they might want to introduce a "second-class" delivery service, in order to justify charging for their "first class" service (ie, the normal delivery rates that one would expect them to charge anyway). Similar to the way that second class customers on trains are deliberately inconvenienced in order to make first class more attractive. However I don't think this is what's going on here.

I think Amazon is indulging in some good old-fashioned price discrimination. As I said earlier, I'm a pretty regular customer; I order something on the order of £50 worth of books a month. As such, I know how long it takes for my books to be delivered, and I'm not even vaguely tempted to press the "standard delivery" option when it comes to the payment page. I'm exactly the sort of person who is most price-sensitive when it comes to deliveries, and I'm in a position to know that I can get the same service more cheaply.

Contrast Dear Aunt Doris, who orders a book off Amazon once a year for her nephew's Christmas present. She needs to get her delivery when she wants it, and she has no idea that "standard delivery" is the same as "super saver delivery". I mean, why would it be? That would just be crazy, surely? So Dear Aunt Doris pays the extra £2 for her one book a year, because she's not the sort of person who gets the chance to notice that she's paying for exactly the same service she could have gotten for free.

This is almost textbook price discrimination. You charge a lower price for the same service to those customers who are most likely to go look elsewhere, and most likely to be in a position to know exactly how much the service is worth. It's fun noticing phenomena you've read about in books in real life. I vaguely wonder if this theory of Amazon delivery pricing is testable (well, it obviously is if you work for Amazon...) but either way, I'm fairly confident it explains what's going on.

What I'm reading now

2011-02-02T00:40:00.004Z

Once upon a time, when the Sparknotes message boards still existed* they had one called "what we're reading now" where people were supposed to write ongoing reviews of the books they were currently reading. What always surprised me what the number of people who were reading one book at a time! So, here's a list of the books that I currently haven't finished, but do intend to finish (it's probably incomplete, as it only includes ones that are by the side of my bed right now).

A Week in December - Sebastian Faulks

One of those "small world" type novels, small snatches of the lives of a variety of people living in London in late 2007. Fairly well-observed, and it's probably going somewhere. I can't imagine feeling as much for the characters in this as I did for the characters in Birdsong, but you can't expect anyone to write Birdsong twice. One serious gripe: the kids have accounts on YourPlace where they get "jabbed" by their friends who can post messages on their "doormats"; there is a virtual world called Parallax where the inhabitants refer to the real word as TL and trade in Vajos; there's a major bank about to collapse called "Allied National" and the lead singer of Girls from Behind is one of the leads on a reality show called It's Madness. It's slightly jarring living in this parallel world... even Al Qaeda has been given a different name. This make suspension of disbelief slightly harder, and I've pretty much no idea why you would choose to do it.

The News Where You Are - Catherine O'Flynn

Another novel set in the modern world (for some reason that's the only sort of novel I've been able to get into lately). To be honest, I've only read the first dozen or so pages. Has a fairly light touch, and I think it'll be an easy-going distraction. I doubt very much it will be any more than that, but I'm willing to be surprised.

Bridge The Silver Way - David Silver

A collection of bridge stories. My favourite books of bridge stories are the Chthonic books by Daniel Kleinmann. Unfortunately, there are no more of them for me to read, so I'm trying some others. These are readable, but not spectacularly good. I wouldn't recommend them.

The Time Paradox - Philip Zimbardo

This has been in the pile for a while. It's a book about time by the guy who did the Stanford Prison Experiment, and who has since done a lot of work on the psychology of time. It seems interesting, and seems to agree with . I want to know the contents of this book, but for some reason am struggling to actually read it. Will get there eventually.

The 4-Hour Body - Tim Ferris

Having read the 4-hour work week, agreed with most of it and subsequently ignored the vast majority of its advice, I couldn't wait to get my hands on this one. Fully of various reasonably well-researched tips and tricks about diet, exercise, sleep, etc. A lot of the things in this actually seem more actionable without going to too much effort than those in his previous book. I'll no doubt be playing with a few of them over the next few months. If any of them seem interesting/worthwhile/dangerous I'll probably blog about them at some point.

God is Not Great - Christopher Hitchens

Got this for Christmas, have been dipping in and out of it recently. Hitchens intellect is scary, he's a proper old-school Oxford academic (I just looked up to check that he actually did go to Oxford - I've no idea if I'd ever known that for certain before, it just feels as though he did). It's fun to read just for the sheer amount of stuff the man knows - his impressive takedown of the idea that Kosher food laws are in some way hygiene-related is the last chapter I read. Basically, I'm just basking in erudition. I'm sure I'll learn a few things too.

Priceless - William Poundstone

Yet another popular book about behavioural psychology. Extremely well-written, refers to several experiments and theories that I've never heard of, and gives the best intuitive explanation of Prospect Theory I've ever seen. I have actually finished this book, but I keep dipping into it because it was, simply, the best book I've read on one of my favourite subjects. Well-written, well-explained, well-researched, the chapters are a nice length to dip in and out of. I'm trying to think of something I didn't like about this book, but I'm struggling. I sort of which I'd decided to give the books in this post star ratings, so I could give this 6 out of 5.

Causality - Judea Pearl

After I wrote my post on Simpson's Paradox on Less Wrong, I decided I really should learn more about the theory of causality that I casually reference at the end. Partly because I kinda feel I should, but also because it just seems awesome. It's actual mathematics though, not exactly bedtime reading, although it hasn't been too tough so far.

Expert Political Judgement - Philip Tetlock

Tetlock's study is pretty famous. He basically concludes that "foxes" do better at predicting political events than "hedgehogs". To quote wikipedia: foxes "draw on a wide variety of experiences and believe the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea" hedgehogs "view the world through the lens of a single defining idea". I'm not sure how much more there is to get out of reading the whole book than what I just wrote in the paragraph above, but I've started so I'll finish. I've also promised Jess a summary - does that count? Or do I need to do it more detail?

So, there you go. There are no doubt others lying around that aren't in this pile next to my laptop. The pile is usually about this big. I can't understand how some people can read one book at once - what do you do when you're not in the mood for that one? (I sometimes even struggle to decide on one book to take on the Tube...). If I remember, this may become an occasional series.

Some of my favourite quotes

2011-01-31T01:13:00.007Z

Here are a few of my favourite quotes I've collected over the years. Like all good quotes, I think they say something that can't easily be said by using more words. I'm sure there will be more when I remember them:

"If I'm selling to you, then I'll speak English. If you're selling to me dann muessen Sie Deutsch sprechen"

Willy Brandt

"If he knew, he's too evil to be Prime Minister, and if he didn't know, he's too stupid to be Prime Minister."

Nye Bevan on Anthony Eden, after Suez

"The Noah Principle: predicting rain doesn't count, building arks does."

Anon

"It's hard to make a man understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it"

Upton Sinclair

Dry February

2011-01-31T00:53:00.004Z

Over the past 24 hours I've taken the entirely arbitrary and capricious decision that I'm not going to drink any alcoholic drinks during February 2011. A long time ago someone asked me if I could stop drinking for a month, and my response ever since has been "yes, but I don't want to". Well, so much for that cliché, I'm not particularly sure I do want to, but I've decided to, and I'm now making a public commitment.

(I'll also be spending February getting back into the gym and the swimming pool properly for the first time in 6 months -the two are not entirely unrelated. You might also have observed that I've chosen the shortest month of the year for this particular experiment... coincidence? Well, I think so...)

Unfortunately, I don't think a public commitment is likely to actually stop me from drinking any alcohol at all in 2011 - I just don't mix with people who disapprove strongly enough of drinking alcohol (in fact, it's much more common for me to mix with people who disapprove of *not* drinking alcohol). Social opprobrium just won't do it.

So, I'm going to have my own personal little StickK contract (yes, for those in the know, that is a little bit like a "PIN number"). If I knowingly drink any alcoholic beverage between midnight tonight and midnight on February 28, 2011, I will donate £200 to... the Church of England.

I've been thinking for a while about which not-quite-worthy cause I could choose, and I think the C of E is probably a good compromise. If I say I'll give the money to the London Homeopathic Hospital (which was my first choice) then I'm pretty sure that I just won't do it even if I lose. On the other hand, while I pretty violently disagree with the C of E about just about everything, I'm at least willing to countenance the possibility that the marginal pound in their collection plates is a force for good.

So... why am I posting this? Partly because I want to get it out there. This is the sort of thing that isn't worth doing if you don't do it publicly, and partly (this is basically the same reason) because I want anyone who reads this and sees me in February to help enforce it. Seriously, you see me with a drink in my hand, you tell me there and then to get my chequebook out (I won't have it with me, but actually, I would guess it's possible to donate to the C of E online, so I might well be able to it instantly).

Why am I not taking a StickK contract out? Partly because I haven't quite figured out their business model - how do they make money if the users don't pay them any? Partly because I'm pretty sure one has no control over who the money goes to if you do lose. And partly because I want to see if it's necessary. If you have a blog, and if enough of your friends read it, does that replace the need for StickK?

Things they should teach in school part 2: Touch-typing

2011-01-17T01:06:00.003Z

I mean, really, this is a gimme isn't it? You spend 6 hours a day for at least 10 years going to a building where they are supposed to be teaching you basic life skills, and they don't even teach you how to use the single piece of equipment that you're going to spend more of your time using than any other (disclaimer, I just made that statistic up, but I can't even think of another candidate, so I'm going to go ahead and assert it as fact).

It took me about 10 hours to learn to touch type, very possibly less, and it must save me several hours a week in time spent not looking at the keyboard and, more importantly, not having to correct mistakes that I didn't notice because I was looking at the keyboard instead of the screen.

I propose that teaching kids to touch type would be more useful than literally everything that they learn in school after the age of eleven. Anyone got any counter examples?

Young Person's Railcard Oyster Discount just got better!

2011-01-07T15:35:00.000Z

My previous post on this question lamented the fact that lots of people don't seem to know that they can get discounts on travel on the London Underground network by loading their Young Persons Railcard onto their Oyster Card. Just take both railcard and Oyster card into any Tube station, and they'll do it for you. Well, now I'm lamenting it double, because things just got even better.

With absolutely no fanfare, TFL have extended the YPR discount to off-peak single fares, as well as the previous discount on the off-peak daily cap. See here for details. So now an off-peak zones 1-2 single will only cost you £1.25.

For those of you who are wondering, the off-peak daily cap applies as long as your first journey in the day came after 09.30. That is, you don't have to make all journeys in off-peak times in order for the off-peak cap to apply. For single fares, peak is 6.30-9.30 and 16.00-19.00. (For anyone who wants to stay out late, the "day" finishes at 04.30 the following morning).

For some reason, this seems to have been completely buried by TFL, I even had to edit the wikipedia page myself just now to contain the relevant information! My post, which comes from a relatively tiny blog is still in the top 10 hits on Google for "Young persons railcard oyster", for some reason. This information could be saving quite a lot of people quite a lot of money if they knew about it. Please tell your friends!

Advice to a First Year Me

2010-11-23T15:54:00.002Z

The first, and I think most important, thing that you need to know is that research is *hard*. Really, really hard. You've done an undergraduate degree already, and that probably wasn't hard. You probably sat in lectures following everything the lecturer said, and the longest you've ever been stuck on an exercise is probably measured in minutes, or at worst hours.

Research is not like that. You will spend months thinking about things and getting nowhere. You may think you've understood that, but read it again, and try to actually understand what it means, I do literally mean months, and I do literally mean nowhere.

Your progress will come in fits and starts, and the fits and starts will be separated by long periods of nothing. Months of nothing is hard work emotionally. Almost everyone I know who has done a PhD in maths has complained at some point about the long periods of nothing. This even includes those people who I actually have managed to give this advice to before they started, and it even includes myself, after having given out this advice. You will be depressed because you don't feel like you're achieving anything. Don't worry, this is normal!

The following is approximately a graph of my perceived progress so far in my PhD thesis. the time axis doesn't have a scale, but it is roughly linear, and spans 3 years. Note that the flat bits really are genuinely flat and, if I'm perfectly honest, the spikes probably aren't quite spiky enough.

Note that I'm *not* saying that the time spent doing nothing is literally wasted. Obviously you need to check which ways of proving something don't work before you can find the ones that do, and, perhaps more subtly, there are so many hidden connections buried in mathematics that any time at all spent reading any mathematics is quite likely to turn out to be useful to you one day (I'll have an example of this in another post I'm preparing for later in the week). But it sure doesn't feel like that when you're going through the periods of nothing.

You are now hitting your limits. You are going to be doing something that is genuinely hard work. This is going to feel like hard work. Be ready for it.

Report: To reduce immigration, you have to prevent people coming into the country

2010-11-18T16:53:00.002Z

The Migration Advisory Committee reported today, after having been tasked to determine:

at what levels should limits on Tier 1 and Tier 2 of the Points Based
System be set for their first full year of operation in 2011/12, in order to contribute to achieving the Government’s aim of reducing net migration to an annual level of tens of thousands by the end of this Parliament, and taking into account social and public service impacts as well as economic impacts?

Oddly enough, they seem to have decided that if we want to reduce the number of foreigners coming into the country, we need to reduce the number of foreigners coming into the country.

They weren't, of course, tasked to try and find out if reducing the number of foreigners coming into the country was a good idea. Mostly because it obviously isn't. Even if you are willing to ignore the benefits to the immigrants themselves. I mean, even David Cameron could work that out.

I've read the first twenty pages or so of the report, and some of the relevant data. I have a few comments below the fold. But just remember, this report was commissioned in order to decide how to reduce immigration. They decided it should be done by reducing immigration. They were not asked to decide whether reducing immigration is a good idea, mostly because they wouldn't have been able to pretend that it was.
The introduction is written by the chairman of the committee. As if in an attempt to demonstrate that he understands the meaning of the phrase non sequitir, he has this to say:

Until 1998 net annual migration (LTIM) was never above 80,000. Since 1998 it has never been below 140,000, and it has exceeded the 200,000 mark in three of those years. Therefore, the Government’s wish to limit net migration is wholly understandable

I'm not sure about you, but I have literally no idea where that "therefore" came from. Compare:

Until 1998 my annual salary was never above £80,000. Since 1998 it has never been below £140,000, and it has exceeded the £200,000 mark in three of those years. Therefore, my desire to limit my annual salary is wholly understandable.

Just because something is growing doesn't mean that reducing it is a good idea. We want to reduce something if we have *too much* of it. We would only want to limit immigration if immigration were bad thing. I know this report wasn't tasked to decide that question, but it has a few things to say about it anyway. Let's have a look at the next page:

non-EU Tier 1 and Tier 2 migrants, at present levels: have a small positive impact on GDP per head; do not increase inflationary pressure; contribute positively to net public finances; play a small but important part in the provision of education, health and social services; increase pressure in the housing market a little; and probably have little effect on crime and cohesion

Sounds terrible doesn't it. All those foreigners, coming over here, teaching our kids, paying their taxes, healing our sick! Taking our jobs! Except, wait... are they taking our jobs? Well.... no:

there is no quantitative evidence that foreign-born migrants are directly displacing resident workers

The summary section is chock full of reasons why we shouldn't want to reduce migration, and recommendations for how we can do so:

It is likely that Tier 1 and 2 migrants, on average, have a positive impact on GDP per-head

Tier 1 and Tier 2 migration is unlikely to reduce the employment of resident workers in the aggregate
Based on the available evidence it can be inferred that Tier 1 and Tier 2 migrants are highly likely, on average, to make a positive net fiscal contribution migrants, including Tier 1 and 2 migrants, help alleviate skill shortages in key public service occupations in areas such as health and education.

Well, you can see why you'd want less of those pesky Tier 1 and Tier 2 migrants around, can't you? But how are we going to get rid of them? Given that we've arbitrarily decided to keep out all of these useful, highly skilled people who want to come here and do important and worthwhile jobs, what could possibly the recommendation for how we keep them out?

On the basis of our numerous assumptions, for net LTIM to reach 50,000 by April 2015 requires that it falls at a rate of 36,500 per year from 2011/12 to 2014/15. The corresponding reductions that would need to come from Tier 1 plus Tier 2, in net migration terms, are in the range of 3,650 to 7,300 per year, with options A and B as the top and bottom ends of that range respectively.

Option A: Tier 1 and 2 main applicants make a combined contribution on behalf of all work-related migration: 20 per cent of the reduction in non-EU migration.

Option B: Tier 1 and 2 main applicants make a combined contribution in proportion to their actual share of IPS inflows: 10 per cent of the total reduction. This would additionally require that Tier 5 and permit-free employment also make a 10 per cent contribution to
reducing net migration, in proportion to their share of inflows.

In case you're not following, that recommendation amounts to saying, as I said earlier, that if we want to reduce migration, we need to let fewer migrants in, and then they divided 146,000 by 4. In the next few sections of the summary, they go on to do a bit more arithmetic, coming up with several recommendations which they then admit are entirely pointless because we can't control EU immigration anyway.

How is this worth a 250 page report? And why weren't they asked to report on the more sensible question of why on Earth we would want to reduce migration, given that it will have a negative impact on just about every measure of well-being you can imagine?

On the plus side, I honestly can't imagine how any sane person could read even the summary of this report and think that implementing its findings were a good idea. On the negative side, I think they're probably going to be implemented anyway.

University is not about learning

2010-11-17T18:10:00.001Z

With a generous hat tip to Robin Hanson for the title, and to just about every blog on the planet for the link, I'm going to quote the following paragraph from this article, from a man who writes other people's assignments for a living:

I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

Now, let's say university actually was about learning, let's say the reason that people got degrees was because they came out with useful skills at the end of them and let's say that unversity grades were good measure of people's skill at the subjects in which they get their degrees. Is it really likely that any one person could be good at all of those things? Good enough to get a high-level - graduate level, in fact - degree in all of those things?

No, university, like all places where people get educational labels, is a signalling game (I think Paul Graham is probably more accurate on what school is about). I've been meaning to write about this for a while, and might finally get round to it soon, but I just thought this quote was too much to pass up.

This blog post is not self-referential

2010-11-11T12:52:00.000Z

This sentence would like you to read the list of self-referential sentences which you can find here. This sentence would like to acknowledge that it was stolen from the aforementioned list of sentences, except it wasn't, so it can't. This one wasn't either. Exactly one of the final two sentences in this paragraph were stolen from that article. Thit sentence is not self-referential, because 'thit' is not a word.

If this sentence is false, then so is the Riemann Hypothesis. This sentence really likes that last one. The next sentence is false. The previous sentence is true. This is the sentence which asks "Were either of those previous two sentences self-referential?". This is the sentence after the previous one. I thought about writing this sentence, but then decided not to. Is this sentence self-referential? Is this one? This? ...?

This sentence is about the story "This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself", by David Moser. This one isn't about the David Moser story mentioned in the previous sentence. This sentence contains a hidden review of the aforementioned story. That last sentence didn't do what it said, but this one does, it's funny.

All self-referential sentences are just silly, including this one.

Turing Test

2010-11-04T16:22:00.000Z

Last Monday's XKCD

Randall Munroe seems to be under the impression that building spam bots which could fool a Turing Test would be cool because then you'd get fewer annoying comments on blogs. I can't help but feel that there might be some slightly more serious implications...

Rounding to the nearest penny

2010-11-02T21:44:00.001Z

Just seen this (linked from Marginal Revolution). A doughnut shop in the US is getting rid of pennies - and intends to round their customers' orders to the nearest penny (rather than taking the, presumably more popular route, of always rounding up). The bizarre part about this story is... why on Earth wouldn't they just change their prices so that they were all integer multiples of $0.05 in the first place?

Why aren't all journals open access?

2010-11-02T15:30:00.004Z

The Prisoners and the Chessboard Solution

2010-10-28T12:00:00.001+01:00

Two weeks ago, I posted the following puzzle:

So, the evil guy who kidnaps people and sets them bizarre mathematical tasks which they have to complete or be executed has kidnapped you and your friend Bob. He sets you the following bizarre mathematical task:

I will take you into a room in which there is a chessboard. There is a coin on every one of the squares of this chessboard, showing either heads or tails. I will then tell you which one of the squares has the key to the door of the prison under it. After this, you will be allowed to turn over exactly one of the 64 coins and then be escorted from the room.

Immediately after this, Bob will be brought in, and will be asked to find the key. If he can locate it you're both free to use it to unlock the prison and leave. If not, you'll both be eaten by rabid wildebeest.

You and Bob are free to discuss a strategy before you are taken into the room with the chessboard - what should you do?

Adrianna emailed me a (sort of) solution less than a few hours later. I've posted my solution (and hers) below the fold).
Here's what adrianna sent me:

in order to specify exactly the position you need 6 bits of information.
You can get one bit of information by having a region and if there are an even number of heads, assign it to zero, if there are an odd number, assign it to 1.
You could always assign it the value you wanted if there is at least one square outside the region that you can flip if it starts off being the value you want.

if you had two regions you could get two bits provided you had a square outside both, a square inside both and a square in each that was outside of the other.

For six regions (6 bits) you could make them all have te value you wanted if you had every combination of regions overlapping on a square. One square for region 1 only, one for 2 only, one for 3 only, one for 1+2, one for 1+3, one for 1+2+3 etc.

So you would need:
6 choose 1 + 6 choose 2 + ... + 6 choose 6 = 63 squares which leaves one to be outside all regions.

This idea works, and in fact, is not that hard to implement. I think for your 6 regions you can pick "black squares", "odd numbered rows", "odd numbered columns", "the top half of the board", "the left half of the board" and I'm not quite sure how you pick the other one, but I think it should be doable.

My solution is somewhat different, and requires thinking about the problem in a different way. You have 64 possible moves, and 64 possible messages that you want to send. This means you need to divide the possible arrangements of the board into 64 equivalence classes, such that every board is adjacent (ie, one coin-flip away from) a representative of each of the 64 equivalence classes.

When you think of the problem this way, if you're used to thinking about these sorts of problems, the idea of the 'Nim Sum' seems to jump out at you. For those who don't know, Nim Sum is a combinatorial game theorists way of writing 'bitwise XOR'. So, how does that idea help?

Well, we'll number the squares (in binary) and then we'll call the "state" of the board the Nim Sum of all the positions which contain a head. I claim that, whatever state you find the board in, you can leave it in any of the possible 64 states. Again, if you've ever played around with this sort of thing, this might appear obvious.

If you find the board in state x, and you want to leave it in state z, you simply flip the coin in square number x(+)z (where (+) means 'bitwise XOR', or Nim Sum). Why does this work? Well, we wanted to find a y so that x(+)y = z. Adding x to both sides, we get y = x(+)z. Essentially, the point here is that (+) is an involution on the set of binary integers, so x(+)x = 0.

If you want to think about this differently, just think that there are 64 things we can add to x, and each of them gives a different value (because if x(+)y = x(+)z then y = z by adding x to both sides), so each of the 64 different board states must be achievable.

No doubt there are other ways of looking at this problem. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are some interesting generalisations. For example, what if, instead of having a coin on each square, we have a six-sided dice? I think this is still do-able, although it's hard to explicitly generalise either of the ideas I've used above so that they work.

The next number in the sequence

2010-10-26T12:00:00.002+01:00

We'll start today's post with what I think is a relatively easy set of puzzles. What is the next number in each of the following sequences?

a. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

b. 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21

c. 8 8,000,000,000 8,000,000,008

d. 31 28 31 30 31 30 31 31 30 31

e. 3 1 4 1 5

f. 1 11 21 1112 3112 211312 312213 212223

g. 1 1 4 1 9 2 16 3 25 5 36 8 49 13

My Answers:

a. 13

b. 34

c. 8,000,000,080

d. 30

e. 9

f. 114213

g. 64

My reasons:

a. They are the natural numbers in increasing order.

b. They are fibonacci numbers.

c. They are the numbers in alphabetical order (in English).

d. They are the number of days in the months of the year.

e. They are the (decimal) digits of pi.

f. Each term describes the contents of the previous term. ie - the first term contains one 1, the second two 1s, the third one one and one two..

g. The odd terms are successive squares, the even terms successive fibonacci numbers.

We've recently been having an argument in the office about whether puzzles like this make sense. There is one sense in which they don't - there is some degree 13 polynomial which evaluates to 1 at 1, 2 at 2, 3 at 3 and 8,000,000,080 at 13, so arguably, that would be a valid answer to my sequence a. However, I think everyone can agree that that's just silly. The interesting question is *why* can we all agree that it's just silly?

When we were discussing this in the pub, Nev suggested that 16,000,000,008 was an equally valid answer to sequence c., presumably on the grounds that we have a fibonacci sequence which happens to begin 8, 8,000,000,000. This, however, feels fundamentally unsatisfactory - why choose those two numbers in particular to seed the sequence?

Another sequence with an alternative answer is e. You could argue that 1 is a valid continuation, with the sequence being, in fact, two interlocking sequences, one arithmetic sequence, one constant sequence - in fact, this was exactly the sort of description I claimed was right for problem g! However, this feels unsatisfactory here - why choose to start your arithmetic sequence at 3? Why choose the constant sequence 1?

I believe that the reason for our intuition that these are the "correct" answers to these sequence puzzles can be formalised, and it requires the notion of Kolmogorov Complexity. In essence, the "right" sequence is the one that can be expressed with the smallest description. Note that for certain definitions of "smallest", this does indeed make "the numbers in alphabetical order" a better answer than "a fibonacci-type sequence starting with 8, 8,000,000,000", and it does so for precisely the reason we would hope. To specify the starting numbers 8 and 8 billion you need to give 60 extra bits of information.

Another way to think about this is that the probability of picking this particular example given that the sequence is "a fibonacci-type sequence" is something like 1 in 16 quintillion. On the other hand, the probability of picking this particular sequence given that it is an "alphabetical order"-type sequene is pretty close to 1 - so unless "alphabetical order-type" sequences are somehow fundamentally 16 quintillion times more complicated than 'fibonacci-type" sequences, the given explanation is more satisfactory.

One problem with the notion of Kolmogorov Complexity is that it depends fairly heavily on which language (language meant in the formal sense here, although it applies in the less formal sense too) you use to encode the sequences. So, for example, for someone who has never spoken a word of English, the 'fibonacci' answer to sequence c. is likely to be the most parsimonious, and if we didn't use the decimal system, so had only ever seen pi written as 11.0010010000111111011010101, then "1" would probably seem like a good answer to sequence e.

So, I agree, these questions are fundamentally subjective - if I'd written this post in French, for examlpe, then sequence c. would read 100, 105, 150, 155, 152, 151, etc... However this doesn't mean that there isn't a 'right answer' for whatever encoding system we happen to be working in at the moment - and I think we generally do agree on which encoding system is sensible, especially if we happen to all be speaking the same language and all be competent mathematicians.

Finally, I'll leave you with a classic:

What is the next number in this sequence?

4, 2, 3, 4, 6, 2, 4, ?

Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma

2010-10-23T23:45:00.000+01:00

Just a little note to say that we're running an Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma competition in our department. If anyone is reading this, and would like to enter a strategy, they're more than welcome. I've already written a description of the tournament, which you can find here, so I'm not going to write it again.

Incidentally, while writing that website, I decided I should probably put something on my academic page, you can read what I decided to write here - I'll be updating it with a few bits and bobs that I've done over the past few years (mostly the outreach stuff I've done) as soon as I get back from Jamaica. If it looks familiar, that's because it looks exactly like Andy's academic homepage - thanks for the template Andy!

Toy Boat, Big Whip, Piano Panier

2010-10-20T03:02:00.001+01:00

I learned a long time ago that one of the hardest Tongue Twisters in the English language is "toy boat". If you're a native speaker and you don't trust me, try it - say "toy boat" quickly and repeatedly. If you're not a native speaker, go find one and get them to say it - you'll be pleasantly amused by their difficulty.

Other examples of this phenomenon in English are "big whip" and "unique New York", although this latter is far too contrived for my liking - the beauty of "toy boat" is that it's a phrase that you've undoubtedly said at some point in the past without realising it's potential for short-circuiting your voicebox.

Since I discovered this weird phenomenon - not just that "toy boat" makes for a ridiculously good tongue twister, but also that non-native speakers never seem to have any difficulty with it, I've been on the hunt for something similar in other languages. So far, I've found "piano panier". If you're a native French speaker, try it. If you're not (but speak good enough French to give it a go), just see how easy it is. I've yet to get any examples in other languages, but that's probably at least in part because I haven't asked enough people.

I'm also very intrigued as to why there is such a difference. Do our brains actually process speech in foreign languages fundamentally differently? Is it just that I pronounce "piano panier" so badly that I don't come across the same difficulty as a native speaker would? Are there any serious linguists out there who would be interested in studying this phenomenon?

Optical illusions

2010-10-18T20:21:00.000+01:00

The BBC has this article about optical illusions which we were discussing in the pub after the seminar today. I thought this would be a good chance to share one of my favourites. Have a look at the picture below:

The blue squares on the top in the left-hand picture are the same colour as the yellow squares on the top in the right-hand picture.
Don't believe me?

That grey line is the same colour all the way along. If you still don't believe me, use some sort of graphics programme and determine what the colours are for yourself.

I can't remember where I downloaded these pictures from, it was ages ago - if anyone knows who this illusion was made by, I'll put in link.

If you want some more illusions, have a look here I particularly recommend the break of the curveball and the color dove, but the whole site is full of pretty awesome stuff.

The Prisoners and the Chessboard

2010-10-14T18:06:00.000+01:00

There's a long tradition in mathematics of puzzles in which someone asks some prisoners to perform some bizarre task. Usually, if they can't complete the task, they are to be executed. Here is one of my favourite examples of the genre (which I only heard for the first time relatively recently).

So, the evil guy who kidnaps people and sets them bizarre mathematical tasks which they have to complete or be executed has kidnapped you and your friend Bob. He sets you the following bizarre mathematical task:

I will take you into a room in which there is a chessboard. There is a coin on every one of the squares of this chessboard, showing either heads or tails. I will then tell you which one of the squares has the key to the door of the prison under it. After this, you will be allowed to turn over exactly one of the 64 coins and then be escorted from the room.

Immediately after this, Bob will be brought in, and will be asked to find the key. If he can locate it you're both free to use it to unlock the prison and leave. If not, you'll both be eaten by rabid wildebeest.

You and Bob are free to discuss a strategy before you are taken into the room with the chessboard - what should you do?

Unit Fail in the Evening Standard

2010-09-29T00:57:00.000+01:00

From an article by Anthony Hilton in the Evening Standard today:

It is very difficult to believe that the capitalist system has been seriously improved by the arrival of computers able to trade in a microsecond and to exploit movements in share prices visible for just that amount of time.

It is even harder to believe that it will be improved further when the next generation of technology — including that of the stock exchange itself — will increase the available buying and selling speeds to milliseconds — millionths of a second.

Do they even employ any copy editors any more? And why would you pay this guy to comment on this sort of thing?

What is the most commonly Mispelt word on the internet?

2010-09-15T15:13:00.005+01:00

I've wondered about this before, and finally got around to doing some research last night. For a measure of how often a word is mispelled on the internet, let's use this: the ratio of the number of times the correct spelling appears to the number of times the misspelling appears. I'm not quite sure what to do if there is more than one common way in which a given word is misspelt - probably take the ratio of the correct spelling to the sum of the incorrect spellings.

Anyway, here's my first few attempts:

definitely: definately - 96,900,000: 13,500,000 = 7.18:1
separate: seperate - 172,000,000: 12,200,000 = 14.10:1
accommodation: accomodation 98,400,000: 12,600,000: 7.81:1

So, after my first few tries, the old perennial "definately" seemed to be doing well.

The two people I've discussed this with both suggested having a look at the number of hits for "teh" vs "the", which I did the ratios are:

the: teh - 11,910,000,000: 23,000,000 = 517.8:1

The most interesting thing about this fact is that "the" appears in more than 12 *billion" webpages. That means that there is now almost certainly more than two webpages in the google index for every person on Earth. The fact that "the" is so common makes it nearly impossible for the typos to overwhelm the people getting it right.

Anyway, the best I've been able to do so far is the following:

Gauge: guage - 33,100,000: 11,200,000 = 2.96:1

I got pretty excited by the number of hits for the word "miniscule", but it appears that the consensus is that that's an acceptable spelling these days, so you don't get points for that (I'm not quite sure what rules I'm using on what makes a spelling count as "acceptable", but I'm sure there are some).

Anyone beat 2.96?

EDIT (16/9)
As Adrianna points out, I had managed to fail to misspell two of the words in my original post - now corrected. She also suggests "occurring", as a candidate, which is a new clear winner:

Occurring: occuring/ocurring = 49,900,000:22,300,000+22,100,000 = 1.12:1

Notice that either of these individual misspellings would already have been winning on its own. Note also that for some reason this word is much more commonly misspelled than either "occurred" or "occurrence".
So - new challenge - can anyone get a ratio below 1?

Monty Hall, Monty Hell and Tuesday's Boy

2010-09-02T18:37:00.001+01:00

Consider the following problem (which I've quoted from the wikipedia page):

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Well. Is it?
The answer, which seems obvious to me, but which most people seem not to mention, is that there isn't enough information in the question for you to be able to answer it. This is discussed in detail at the wikipedia article I linked to above, but I thought I'd write about it myself, as I was reminded of it recently by the furore over the Tuesday Boy problem. This question, which was mentioned at a recent Gathering for Gardner is:

I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys?

Well. What is it?

I'm pretty sure the answer is, once more, that you haven't been given enough information. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the Monty Hall problem, most people will tell you something like "if you decide to stick with your original choice, you can only win if the door you chose first time had the car behind it, which happens with probability 1/3, so switching must win with probability 2/3". But it ain't necessarily so.

Imagine it's Monty's last day, and he has decided to make every effort to make sure you win a car. Imagine also that Monty gets to choose whether he offers you a switch or not. Now what are the possibilities? You could have picked the car first time, in which case Monty doesn't offer you a switch, or you could have picked a goat, in which case the only remaining door has the car behind it. If Monty's feeling generous (and he let's you know this beforehand) then you should definitely switch! You win the car every time!

Or imagine Monty is in a really bad mood - maybe one of the goats bit him when he was putting them behind the doors. Now, he will only offer you a switch if you've already chosen the car (this version is sometimes referred to as Monty Hell). If you choose to switch, you never win the car.

Or imagine Monty just likes his gameshows to be fair, so he wants "switch" and "stick" to both be equally good options. Now he offers you a switch exactly 1/2 the time when you've picked a goat, and exactly none of the time otherwise. It doesn't matter if you switch or stick, you win the car 1/2 of the time (1/3 of the time you picked a goat first time, and he offered you a switch, 1/3 of the time you picked a car first time and he offered you a switch, 1/3 of the time you picked a goat first time and he didn't offer you a switch, but you know you're not in this case, because you're being given the option).

In other words - the solution to the Monty Hall Problem as usually posed is "well, I don't know - which side of bed did Monty Hall get out of this morning?" If the hidden assumptions in the question are more clearly stated, the answer can be anything from "I stick" to "I switch" to "well it doesn't matter, does it? Why don't I just toss a coin?"

Now, let's have a look at the Tuesday Boy Problem. The standard answer goes something like this: there are 14 possible combinations of gender and birthday for each of the children. So there are 196 possible gender/birthday combinations for 2 children. Of these, 27 feature boys born on Tuesdays (14 + 14, minus the case where *both* are boys born on a Tuesday). Of these, 13 feature two boys (with the obvious notation (and no, I have no idea why I chose capital letters for boys and lower case letters for girls) MT TT WT ThT FT ST SuT TM TW TTh TF TS TSu) and 14 feature a boy and a girl (mT tT wT thT fT sT suT Tm Tt Tw Tth Tf Ts Tsu). So the answer is 13/27.

This is unambiguously the correct answer to some question related to the Tuesday Boy Problem. In fact, it's unambiguously the correct answer to the question Steve Landsburg posed today when he wrote about this problem:

We gather all those women in the world who have exactly two children, tell each of them to “go home unless you have a boy born on a Tuesday”, and select a woman randomly from those who remain. Assume that births are equally likely to occur on any day of the week, and that on any given day, boys and girls are equally likely.

However, I don't think it's unambiguously the correct answer to the version I stole from Alex Bellos. I think this for the same reason as I don't think "always switch" is the correct answer to the Monty Hall Problem. We don't have any idea why the woman chose to come up to us and say such a bizarre thing in the first place.

Imagine she used the following procedure: pick my oldest child, note their gender G and their birthday D, now walk up to the mathematicians and tell them "I have two children, one of who is of gender G and was born on day D". Now the probability that there are two children of gender G (two boys, in the case we happened to find ourselves in earlier) is clearly 1/2 - they are both the same iff the youngest child is the same gender as the oldest, which happens 1/2 the time (note that, for some reason, I'm happy to keep the independence assumption, while not happy to keep the others - if you like go through and replace all the children being born with coin flips).

Or she did the following: if at least one of my children is a boy, pick one of the boys at random, note his day of birth, D and go up to the mathematicians and say "I have two children, one of whom is a boy born on day D", otherwise, say nothing. Now, all the information we actually have is that at least one of the children is a boy... and we all know that this means the probability of them both being boys is 1/3.

The "standard" assumption is equivalent to the woman generating potential statements at random, and walking up to us and saying them if they are true. With this assumption, it is indeed true that 13/27 of the women who say "I have two children, one is a boy born on a Tuesday" have two boys. Personally though, I don't think this is a very sensible model for how people make conversation (even at maths conferences).

Finally, Peter Cameron originally posted the Tuesday Boy problem because he found the 13/27 answer "counterintuitive". I personally think this is because it *is* counter-intuitive. Intuitively, we have a model for how people generate statements, and in this model the "born on a Tuesday" part of the puzzle statement is indeed irrelevant. However, if you want to get an intuition for why extra information about one of the boys should move the probability of both being boys from 1/3 towards 1/2 in the standard model, consider the following version:

I have two children. One is a boy born at 21.03 on Monday 21 June 1982. What is the probability that I have two boys?

Well?

Asymmetric walking

2010-08-31T22:15:00.000+01:00

When I walk from Mile End Road to Sainsbury's, I almost always walk in through the front entrance. When I leave, I leave by the side entrance. This despite the fact that I walk past the side entrance on the way in.

When I walk into university, I usually do so via Mile End Road and the little bridge you can just about make out on the map. When I walk home from university, I do so via Hamlet's Way and (sometimes) the park.

View Larger Map
As you can see, there is little to choose between these two alternatives in terms of distance (actually, there's probably more to choose between them than I would have guessed - the park seems to win quite clearly) but it seems that there is a pretty regular bias that makes me choose one in one direction and one in the other. There are several other places where I've noticed this phenomenon.

Now, I know that there are lots of situations in which the fastest way from A to B is not the fastest way from B to A, even when walking, but I pretty sure this doesn't explain what's going on here. There's some sort of heuristic governing my decisions, and I can't quite work out what it is. It seems to be something like "if you know you need to turn, do so early". Why am I doing this? Does anyone else do the same thing? Have other, more bizarre heuristics?

Tube or False (or just nonsense)

2010-08-15T22:53:00.003+01:00

There is a new advertising campaign on the London Underground... I'm not entirely sure what it's advertising, as everyone who sees the posters is already on the Tube and presumably already aware that it exists. Anyway, the campaign is entitled Tube or False, and consists of 8 statements about the system for us to guess whether they are true or false.

One of these is:

Every week, our escalators travel the equivalent of 2 times round the world.

I'll post a spoiler under the fold, but pause for a second to decide if you think that's plausible.
Done that? Did you actually pause to decide if the statement was plausible? If so, did you notice that the statement is not only not plausible, it's entirely meaningless! Before we look at why, I'll quote the answer from the tfl website:

It's true…and it's easy to see why. There are now over 400 escalators on the network which run for 20 hours a day, 364 days a year - so you can imagine how they can achieve such great distances.

Presumably they got their numbers like this:
400 escalators x 20 hours x 1mph = 8000 miles/day x 7 days = 56000 miles

The Earth is roughly 24000 miles round, so this isn't far off. However, we should probably do a little bit of dimensional analysis. What are the units of our final answer? We have escalators x h x m/h, which is... erm... escalator-miles. I'm not actually a physicist, but I don't think "escalators" qualifies as a dimensionless quantity.

To see how absurd this number is, imagine that one day someone decides to come along and divide every escalator on the Tube into two pieces of exactly half the length (probably as part of a fiscal stimulus or something). Now we have 800 escalators, travelling at the same speed for the same amount of time, which will presumably go 5 times round the world - and yet nothing has changed!

In fact, if we're going to use this absurd method of measuring how far the escalators go, why limit ourselves to counting escalators? Why not measure individual steps? There's probably about 100 steps per escalator, so we could say that "every week the steps on our escalators travel the equivalent of about 200 times round the world". Why stop there? "The atoms in our escalators travel the equivalent of about one octillion times round the world".*

I guess 250 miles of track just doesn't sound impressive enough...

Incidentally, as I'm writing about TFL, and as Andy wasn't aware of it despite being one of about three people who regularly read this blog, I'm just going to take this opportunity to repeat the fact that you can get discounted fares when using your Oyster card if you have a Young Person's Railcard.

* I realise this number is probably several orders of magnitude out, but it makes the point, and I can't be bothered to get it right.

The Handshaking Lemma

2010-08-14T18:23:00.003+01:00

Professor Geoffrey Beattie of the University of Manchester has given us mathematical formula for the perfect handshake. For some reason, all of the articles which contain said formula seem to include it as a picture, rather than writing it out in words, so I'll do the same thing (mostly because I don't know how or if it's possible to get LaTeX to work in blogger... does wordpress do it?

Just in case you're wondering what all those symbols mean...

(e) is eye contact (1=none; 5=direct);
(ve) is verbal greeting (1=totally inappropriate; 5=totally appropriate);
(d) is Duchenne smile - smiling in eyes and mouth, plus symmetry on both sides of face, and slower offset (1=totally non-Duchenne smile (false smile); 5=totally Duchenne);
(cg) completeness of grip (1=very incomplete; 5=full);
(dr) is dryness of hand (1=damp; 5=dry);
(s) is strength (1= weak; 5=strong);
(p) is position of hand (1=back towards own body; 5=other person's bodily zone);
(vi) is vigour (1=too low/too high; 5=mid)
(t) is temperature of hands (1=too cold/too hot; 5=mid);
(te) is texture of hands (5=mid; 1=too rough/too smooth);
(c) is control (1=low; 5=high);
(du) is duration (1= brief; 5=long).

Obviously, this is silly. Firstly, it's not entirely clear how you are supposed to measure these things. Secondly, they're combined in ways that make absolutely no sense. Thirdly, the thing is just full of mathematical symbols that bear precisely no relation to whatever they're supposed to mean.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that most of these factors affect how pleasant it is to shake hands with someone, but writing down a string of symbols in no particular order doesn't help to illustrate this at all. It just helps to generate publicity for the company that commissioned the result (whose name I won't mention, just because I'm petty like that). There are a few problems with the definitions - what is the value of (d) if you fail to smile at all? is (t) entirely symmetric about mid? What exactly is "mid" anyway? Surely we have perfectly good units to measure temperature in already? Is it really a good thing to maximise (du)? Like... would a 1000 year handshake be better than a 5 second one?

But that's not the main thing that grates with this particular story - it's the fake 'mathsiness' of the formula.

Forget the fact that it would be much easier to renormalise the arbitrary scales we were using to avoid having to square everything before we enter it into the formula. Forget the fact that we don't even know what PH is supposed to be - is it a property we want to maximise? Something we want to get as close to 100 as possible?

Why is there square root sign around the whole thing? It may be a while since I did anything with numbers, but I'm pretty sure that the square root function is monotone. That is, if we're going to be maximising this quantity, it makes *absolutely no difference* if we take the square root first or not. But even that's not the most annoying bit, that has to be:

pi{(4<s>2)(4<p>2)}^2

What on Earth is that supposed to mean? And where the Hell did pi come from? One of the articles suggested that you could now optimise your handshake... if you have a maths degree. I assume this was supposed to be a joke, but I have two maths degrees, and am most of the way through a third, and I have no idea what 4<s> 2 is supposed to mean. Sure, it looks like maths, but then so does 4x6^2y+*7 if you don't know what you're talking about.

Now, I'm fully aware that these formulae aren't suppose to make sense, but they're still irritating. I mean, how hard would it be to write down something that was at least *meaningful*, if not actually sensible (well-researched is obviously too much to hope for).

A Tiling Problem

2010-08-11T16:32:00.000+01:00

A while ago, Andy and I were at a maths challenge. There were a few problems with the answers we'd been given to the questions. Andy has already documented one of them, I'm going to comment on the other.

Here's a tiling pattern (imagine, if you will, that it was drawn by someone more competent than me, so all three polygons are regular every time they occur):

Now imagine that we use this pattern to tile the entire plane - so that we can ignore what happens at the boundary. The question is: what is the ratio of hexagons to squares to triangles in the final tiling (actually, the question was "what is the ratio of squares to triangles?", but you might as well do all three). The answer is probably not what you think immediately.

The answers we were given to the problem said that the ratio was 1:1. This is quite a tempting answer the first time you see the pattern, as it looks like theres one triangle per "corner" of a hexagon and one square per "edge". It doesn't take long to see that this approach is wrong.

Here's the first method I tried to work out the right answer - look at what happens at the corners.

At each corner, there is 1 hexagon, 1 triangle and two squares. So the ratio of "hexagon vertices to square vertices to triangle vertices" must be 1:2:1. Fairly straighforward. Now, each hexagon has 6 vertices, each triangle has 3 vertices, and each square has 4, so the ratio of hexagons:squares:triangles must be 1/6:2/4:1/3, or 1:3:2, if you prefer integers.

It's relatively easy, but a bit more boring to perform a simliar analysis using the edges (a bit more boring because there are two "types" of edge, and you have to be a bit careful to figure out what ratio the types of edge occur in. You get the same answer.

I also had several other methods, all of which gave the same (I think you will now agree) correct answer.

When I pointed out that the answer to this question was wrong to the relevant person in a position of authority, she informed that it wasn't, because you can make a shape with squares, triangles and hexagons in the ratio 3:3:1 and use this to tile the plane. This is an interesting approach, and one that I wholeheartedly endorse - the only problem is that the only shape I can make with squares, triangle and hexagons in that arrangement which tiles the plane contains 1 hexagon, 2 triangles and 3 squares... I'll leave it as an exercise to check this pattern actually does tile the plane.

I'm not quite sure what the point of writing this post was - I think I just quite enjoyed the problem and wanted to share it. If there is one, it's probably something to do with using multiple approaches to increase your certainty in your answer, but I really quite like the vertex-based argument, so I don't think that can be it.

Not from The Onion

2010-08-06T12:20:00.000+01:00

Stolen directly from Marginal Revolution, but how can I not share this?

Japanese macaques will completely flip out when presented with flying squirrels, a new study in monkey-antagonism has found. The research could pave the way for advanced methods of enraging monkeys.

I'm not quite sure why Tyler didn't list it under "not from the Onion"

PS - I'll write the stuff about the inefficiency of queues when I get round to it - very possibly in the next week or so.

Queues

2010-07-29T00:16:00.002+01:00

I have two things to say about queues today. The second one is inspired by Steven Landsburg, and I was reminded of it by the fact that I spent 40 minutes of today standing in a queue to get on the London Eye. Time which was essentially deadweight loss to the world.

The first is simpler, and I was inspired to write it by AJ Jacobs. AJ Jacobs is the author of The Year of Living Biblically, and I'm currently reading his new book "My Experimental Life". He's one of those journalists, who does crazy things and writes about them (he claims because he has nothing interesting in his past to write about - although why he can't just make stuff up like everyone else, I don't know). Anyway, the chapter of the book I was just reading is called The Rationality Project. Jacobs, having read Predictably Irrational and Nudge (but no doubt not having actually read Tversky and Kahneman) decides to rid himself of all of his irrational biases. He fails in funny ways, of course, and has a few interesting things to say along the way.

Anyway, at the end of the chapter he has a few points to make. Things he does differently since spending a month trying to be as rational as possible. Some of these are sensible: "I read menus from the bottom up" (because they are designed to be read from the top down - and are carefully designed to 'nudge' you into buying whatever the restaurant wants you to buy that day); "I spend a few minutes each week reading Michelle Malkin's conservative musings" (because he disagrees strongly with Michell Malkin, and only reading things by people you agree with is a sure way never to change your mind).

The one that I take issue with is this: "I make a note every time I'm in a fast moving grocery line". Now, the idea behind this is obvious:

We all are predisposed to notice and remember the bad stuff... when we're on a checkout line behind an eighty-two year old man paying with a sack of pennies and nickels.

But it's a really, really bad example to choose of this particular phenomenon because we actually do spend more time in slow-moving queues than in fast-moving queues. This is obvious once you think about it: slow-moving queues move slower! So if all queues were the same length, but with random speeds (which were impossible to predict before you join) you would still spend most of your time in slow-moving queues. You're just as likely to choose a fast queue, but every time you do choose a fast queue, you get to the front of it quicker.

If you want to avoid believing in the signficance of random events, you should make a note of every time you take your umbrella out and it does rain (or choose not to take it and it doesn't). You should remember every time you have a really strong feeling that you're about to get a phonecall from your grandmother and then you don't, or every time you meet someone who doesn't share your birthday.

I said I had two things to say about queues, but it's late, and I've spent longer than I expected writing about that one. I'll do the other one tomorrow.

Things I wish I'd read earlier: I Pencil

2010-07-06T23:12:00.001+01:00

I'm going to start an occasional series in which I'll post links to several articles and books that I wish I'd read earlier (or if they're in copyright, links to somewhere you can buy them). Mostly because if you're reading this, and you haven't read them, you're probably going to enjoy them.

Also, I kind of plan to post something sometime about what I think they should teach in schools (and which parts of the current curriculum they could afford to miss out) and I think most of this belongs there.

I Pencil

I think by the time I finished school, I had just about heard of the Invisible Hand, but I'd never been taught about it, and didn't *really* understand what it meant. The genealogy of a pencil is an incredibly powerful illustration of what it means. I challenge anyone to read it and not be amazed by the power of the price system (why don't more people cite *that* as a proof of God's existence?). The fact that I can walk into a shop whenever I want a loaf of bread and be sure that I'll find one on a shelf really is a miracle - everyone should be reminded of that every now and then.

How not to draw a graph

2010-07-05T23:11:00.005+01:00

The Daily Mail had an article earlier this year reporting some research which stated that people are happy at the age of 15, gradually drop off in satisfaction until the age of 45, then get happier again until a peak at 74. There are a few potential problems I can see with the research (asking people to self-report on their happiness has always seemed pretty dodgy, and have they properly controlled for some years just being less happy than others?) But that's not the issue here. The issue is the "graph" they used to illustrate the research.

Let's have a look at it:

Yes, really. That is a genuine graph directly from the website (in fact, that picture is being hosted on their website, I couldn't be bothered to download it). Look at the scale... The horizontal axis doesn't have one! The distance from 15-40 is the same as the distance from 40-50! Why would anyone make the graph look like that? Would they really be unable to make the same point using a graph with sensible axes?

Let's have a look:

That doesn't really look any less impressive (apart from the fact that I drew it in about 10 minutes in GIMP, and the Daily Mail hires qualified graphics people), and the patterns are still pretty clear. The slight upward trend in the 40's starts before 46 (but that's also true on the Mail's original) and the *massive* peak at 74 does start to look a bit suspicious... could it be a small-numbers effect?

Why did the Mail choose to go with the inumerate version? Apart from the obvious, I genuinely can't see how theirs is better than mine on any dimension, and it's pretty obvious in which ways it's worse.

HT to Dave in the comments at BishopBlog

Non-news story of the week: Union demands higher pay for its members

2010-07-04T23:51:00.000+01:00

The National Union of Teachers has complained that teaching assistants have been used instead of teachers to look after classes full of kids. This has resulted in job opportunities for supply teachers (who are members of the National Union of Teachers) dropping significantly.

I can barely imagine a purer example of what unions are really all about: cartels formed by workers to artificially drive up wages. Using teaching assistants to look after a classroom is not only a Bad Thing, it is also illegal (presumably thanks to the efforts of organisations like the NUT). Unless teaching assistants are capable of looking after a classroom full of kids, why would anyone bother with a law like that?

Unions tend to put themselves forward as defending some sort of moral principle (even when they're supporting laws which ban people from hiring low-skilled workers). It can hardly be a coincidence that their moral principles always happen to coincide with the interests of their members...

'Minor Delays'

2010-07-03T00:50:00.000+01:00

I have spent a long time wondering exactly what is meant by 'minor delays' on the Tube. They have a fixed amount of track, and a fixed number of trains running on it. The only way for their to be delays is for the trains to slow down... how is it possible that 'a customer incident' which happened over an hour ago is still causing the trains to run slower?

I can just about see why there are delays at peak times (the trains run slower because they spend longer in each station) but how do 'delays' propogate through the system? I can see how there might be bunching, but 'delays' (or is that what they mean by delays?)?

Equal Prize Money at Wimbledon

2010-07-01T20:01:00.000+01:00

People have been going on (again) about equal prize money at Wimbledon. Lots of people have been saying (again) that it is right that pize money is now equal. Lots of people have then been responding (again) by saying that this is silly because the men play 5 sets while the women play only 3.

No-one seems to have noticed (again) that the prize money for the junior section is even less than the prize money for the women... how can this be fair? They play the same number of sets!

And the prize money for the World Tiddlywinks Championship (spot the familiar face, for those at QM...) is even lower!

In fact, the prize money for the annual 'working at MacDonalds for 40 hours a week' championship would barely pay for Andy Murray's chicken baguettes, and yet no tennis player would dream of playing 40 hours in the entire two weeks of Wimbledon - how can this be fair? The '5 sets' crowd seem to adhere to some bizarrely warped form of the Labour Theory of Value (inasmuch as they have any principle at all) - why not insist on equal prize money for burger flippers?

Seriously, how can anyone possibly imagine that the prize money for a tennis tournament is proportionate to the amount of work put in, or that the prize money for two entirely different tennis tournaments should necessarily be the same?

I am not an economist, so I don't want to try to explain how the prize money *is* determined. All I know is that neither the "equal prize money" crowd nor the "but they play 5 sets" crowd has captured the full story.

Bridge Probability

2010-06-23T11:14:00.000+01:00

I've been re-reading Victor Mollo's classic bridge book 'Card Play Technique: the art of being lucky'. I've come, once again, to the sections about probabilities that I just can't get my head round. Consider the following passage:

If the Ace of Clubs is right, all is well. If not, the contract will depend on guessing the diamonds. How then, should we set about it? The man in the street will draw trumps quickly, sway in his chair slowly and mutter something like: "Well, it's six of one and half a dozen of the other".
But is it?
To the expert there is a vital difference between the Club and the Diamond positions. The latter will be the subject of guesswork. The former lends itslef only to prayer. The Club must be played first, and the reason is that it will provide a clue to the Diamonds.
If East has the Ace of Clubs, West will be credited with the Ace of Diamonds.

There is similar reasoning throughout the book, just one hand later:

West has pleaded guilty to 7 points hearts and to the King of Diamonds: 10 in total. East has only 3. It is more likely that the defender's high-card strength will be divided between them 10-5 than 12-3. Therefore the best chance is to play East for the King of Clubs.

I just can't believe that this reasoning is valid. The deck doesn't know which cards we assign points to, so it is no more likely to put the Ace of Clubs in a different hand to the Ace of Diamonds than it is to put, say, the Three of Clubs in a different hand to the Ace of Diamonds. Similarly, while it is true that a 10-5 distribution is more likely, a priori, than a 12-3 distribution, surely this ceases to be the case when you've alread placed the remaining points 10-3 (assuming that the principle of Vacant Spaces doesn't come into play - ie, every player has followed with a small card to each of his partner's honours).

To repeat: the deck doesn't know which cards we assign points to!

Maybe this sort of reasoning is a useful shortcut to some valid reasoning, or maybe I'm missing something (I certainly hope so). Can anyone shed any light?

What's wrong with "sell"?

2010-06-22T22:44:00.000+01:00

There are a *lot* of adverts on the TV right now for services like MazumaMobile, mobilephoneXchange and various others. There is also CashMyGold and PostalGold and no doubt many others. These are all companies to which you can sell your goods. The one thing that all of their adverts have in common (apart from being insanely annoying) is that none of them use the word "sell". I really can't understand why.

The most commonly used wording seems to be informing people that they can "exchange" their goods for cash. We already have a perfectly good word which means almost exactly "exchange for cash". Why don't these adverts use it? Because it would remind people that there are various other routes through which they could sell their gold/old phone/whatever? Because the word "sell" is unsavoury?

NB - Mazuma goes even further, suggesting that they can 'magic' your phone into cash... imagine that!

Whacky Formula: The Happiest Day of the Year

2010-06-21T01:22:00.002+01:00

You might think that all the Irish people you saw smiling last Friday were just experiencing some good old-fashioned Schadenfreude at the abysmal perfomance of the England football team, but no, they'd probably been reading the Examiner. If they had, they'd've found out that Dr. Cliff Arnall has some 'research' explaining why June 18 is the happiest day of the year. He has a formula, in fact, for telling us exactly how happy every day of the year is.

The ex-Cardiff University lecturer’s complicated formula is: O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He.

My, that does look complicated... what on earth could it all mean? Luckily there's an explanation for the formula in the article (although no explanation for why (N x S) is in brackets. You can read it below the fold.

Put simply, a value for being outdoors (O) was added to nature (N) multiplied by social interaction (S), added to childhood summer memories (Cpm) divided by temperature (T), and added to holiday excitement (He)

Oh, right... that makes sense then. Or, erm... maybe it actually means absolutely nothing at all. Let's attempt to go through the equation bit by bit, and see how 'simple' it is.

Firstly, we'll try to figure out what we're doing with this formula. Are we maximising this quantity or are we minimising it? Outdoors is good, Nature is good, Social Interaction is good... we must be maximising.

Secondly, we'll try to work out the units. O is for outdoors. I've no idea what units we can measure 'Outdoors' in (or why anyone would choose to use an 'O' as a variable name) - perhaps we could measure it in time spent there? That kinda makes sense... maybe the units are time (of course, each of the terms in the sum must be the same units, as otherwise adding them together makes no sense).

Third, let's consider the next term in the sum: NS for Nature times Social Interaction. Wait... did that really say 'Nature x Social Interaction'? What on earth could that possibly mean? How does one multiply Nature by Social Interaction? In fact, how can one measure Nature? What units could you use? You might ask similar questions about Social Interaction... once you've managed to decide on units and measure them both, all you have to do is multiply them together. And remember that when we're done, this must all be measured in the same units as 'Outdoors' and 'Holiday excitement'.

Next we come to my favourite bit... Cpm/T. That's Cpm for 'childhood Summer memories' (no, I have no idea where that variable name comes from either) and T for temperature. Remember we decided we were probably maximising the quantity in the formula, since all the other things we've seen so far are the sorts of things that make people happy. Well, how do we maximise Cpm/T? That seems pretty simple... let T tend to zero!

Seriously. The formula suggests that colder days are happier - and apparently makes June 18 the Happiest Day of the Year. Arnall really doesn't put much effort into making this stuff up. He just decides on some quantities that he thinks might be relevant and writes down some suggestive variable names in an arbitrary order. He doesn't even bother to the formula internally consistent. How hard would it have been to write Cpm*T? Would that have looked less formula-y?

The final term is Holiday Excitement which, frankly, I can't be bothered to go into, apart from pointing out that He is a pointlessly confusing variable name for a 'scientific' formula.

Incidentally, in case this seems like you've heard it all before... you have. Last year the happiest day was June 19 (with exactly the same formula). In 2008 it was June 20 (I notice in that story that Arnall was already a 'former tutor at the University of Cardiff' two years ago. Presumably he hasn't managed to find himself a new post at a similarly respectable institution since, as that's still his qualification). In 2006 it was June 23, and in 2005 June 24 (I guess there was some actual news in 2007). Seriously, I hope they don't pay him to recycle this stuff every time... they could just copy last year's article.

Arnally pretty strongly suggests in the article that the formula always comes out to be the third Friday in June, which is slightly confusing, as I'm pretty sure it's impossible for the 23 to be the third Friday in any month, but maybe 2006 was special for some reason, or maybe he's just forgotten what he wrote 4 years ago. Also, I find it very hard to believe that either 'nature' or 'social interaction' is higher on a Friday than at the weekend, but then I'm not a 'former Cardiff University Tutor' (do I get to describe myself as 'Dr John Faben, former University of London Tutor if I do ever get round to finishing my thesis?)

I don't know why I bothered writing a post quite this long to dissect a formula that's quite so obviously inane publicity-seeking. Partly because it annoyed me, and partly because it's fun. But, just in case you missed it in all the excitement, remember this bit if you're ever tempted to take anything Cliff Arnall says seriously. In the formula, he divides by Temperature!

HT (as you might expect) to Ben Goldacre

Pinker vs. Greenfield: is facebook rotting your brain?

2010-06-20T15:29:00.000+01:00

I read two articles in the last week by leading intellectuals about what effect mass media have on the brain. One of them was Steven Pinker: Mind Over Mass Media. Pinker's conclusion:

The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

In a fairly scholarly article for Edge, Pinker cites evidence from cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience. He explains the bias that causes people to believe that mass media is damaging our brains:

As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings

He pithily ridicules the notion that "changing our brains" is a bad thing:

Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill the wiring of the brain changes; it's not as if the information is stored in the pancreas

The other article I read was an interview with Baroness Greenfield, with the headline Facebook Addicts Can't Relate, Greenfield is worried about the effect social media is having on a generation that is growing up with it as a regular means of communication:

If you are not rehearsing looking someone in the eye in three dimensions, but instead you have 900 friends on Facebook ... one does question what kind of relationship they might be having,

In defence of her position that facebook might be contributing to rising levels of ADD (how can a diagnosis that didn't exist 30 years ago be rising?) she cites... erm... some studies that haven't actually been done:

Perhaps it's mandating a shorter attention span. I'm not saying it is but I'm saying, 'Wouldn't it be worth exploring?'

Of course it would be worth exploring.. but what is the point in encouraging sensationalist and uninformed scare stories in the press until it has been explored? She also warns us (somewhat ungrammatically) to be careful before we ignore her non-argument:

We are being complacent in the extreme if you just dismiss me as a whingeing, middle-aged Luddite.

Indeed... I'm not quite sure on what planet 59 qualifies as 'middle-aged' (the average age is still less than 80). But she's right, it would be silly to dismiss her fears because of her age, or her lack of fluency with the relevant technology. Dismissing them because they have absolutely no evidence to support them on the other hand...

I'll let you draw your own conclusions on which of the two articles I was most impressed by.

Reasons to be a Republican

2010-06-18T11:15:00.000+01:00

Surely you can't give any sort of power, even figurehead-style can-only-use-it-in-an-emergency power to a guy who is capable of saying stuff like this:

Nature has been completely objectified — ‘She’ has become an ‘it’ — and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme
“It is no good just fixing the pump and not the well,” he said. Talk of an “environmental crisis” or of a “financial crisis” was actually describing “the outward consequences of a deep, inner crisis of the soul”.

Seriously. They guy picked Galileo as a general-purpose scapegoat for what's wrong with our world. Could he be less suitable to govern?

Conjunction Fallacy

2010-06-17T17:38:00.000+01:00

There's a sign that's just appeared in the changing rooms of Barts pool:

Please be aware that these areas are cleaned by male or female staff.

So not those hermaphrodite staff they use at Guy's and Thomas' then...

The "Forced to Deny" Files

2010-06-17T14:01:00.001+01:00

The Metro settles the eternal question: is there life after death?. There is, and you can even be forced to deny things there....

Russell Crowe has been forced to deny that he's not dead

In other words 'someone said Russel Crowe was dead, they were wrong'. Gotta love 'forced to deny'.

HT (as they say) to @andydrizen

The wisdom to accept the things I cannot change

2010-06-16T17:24:00.000+01:00

There are several 'life lessons' that I've picked up from playing bridge. Some of them are incredibly obvious in hindsight. Some of them less so. This is one of the more obvious in hindsight, but also one of the more important, so I think I'll start with it.

It is fairly common when playing bridge to reason thusly: in order to make this contract, I need West to hold the King of Diamonds. If West holds the King of Diamonds, then he can't hold the Ace of Spades. Therefore, I'll assume East holds the Ace of Spades and play accordingly (an example).

There are a surprising number of applications of this principle to real life.

In order for me to have any chance of getting this job, they would have to be willing to accept someone with my level of qualifications, so I will assume that they are willing to accept someone with my level of qualifications, and act accordingly.

In order for us to have any chance of treating the patient, they must have disease X rather than disease Y, as disease Y is untreatable, so I will assume that they have disease X, and act accordingly.

In order for their to be any chance of my making it on time for my very important meeting, there will need to be a train waiting at the station at the second I get there, so I will assume there will be such a train and act accordingly.

In order for there to be any chance of me going on a date with this girl, she would need to be the sort of girl who responds positively to my asking her out. Therefore, I'll assume that she will respond positively, and act accordingly.

There is apparently an old Yiddish Proverb which reads "if you've got nothing to lose, you can try everything". This is a specific case of the general principle at work here. The serenity prayer which I bastardised for the title of this post gets a bit closer "Through my efforts, I gain the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.", but doesn't seem to get the emphasis quite right.

There must be a proverb that sums up this insight... anyone?

Blogging vs. Talking

2010-06-15T22:27:00.000+01:00

There are several occasions when I've started writing a blog post about a story, realised halfway through that the point that I was trying to make was nonsense, and stopped. Note that if I was intending to write a blog post, this means that I had already thought about the issue for some fairly significant period of time. Somehow, writing it down allows me to see where I was going wrong.

I'm not sure if its writing things down, or just the process of articulating them that enables me to change my mind, however, I am fairly sure I change my mind about things less often in conversation than I do when writing blog posts about them. This can't be because I spend more time thinking about something before I say in than I do before I decide to blog about them: I write maybe 3 blog posts a week, I have several hundred conversations. I have a few explanations below the fold.

other people aren't as interested in what I'm talking about as I am, so they're less likely to spot the flaws in my arguments;
talking is faster than typing, there's less time to spot the flaw in my reasoning before I move onto the next topic IRL;
if I'm telling someone something, and I've already done a plausible superficial analysis, it's likely to be pretty convincing - once they agree with me, neither of us is likely to bother to change our minds (conformity and consistency biases at work);
it's much easier to check sources when writing a blog post than when having real-life conversations;
I actually do change my mind just as much IRL as I do when writing blog posts, but I don't keep a permanent record of those occasions, so they're less salient.

The other two reasons are more interesting, because they're almost contradictory.

there's less stigma associated with being wrong in real life than there is with being wrong in a blog post. IRL people are wrong all the time, and forget about the next day. Blog posts last forever. (so I'm more likely to put effort into noticing that I'm wrong if I'm writing a blog post)
it's harder to admit that you're wrong in real life than it is when writing a draft of a blog post - no-one ever gets to see your drafts folder, so I'm less likely to find reasons to change my mind IRL than I am when writing a draft of a blog post - no-one likes to look stupid.

Note that the general principle "writing stuff down helps you to clarify your thoughts about it" is one that every mathematician is fully aware of - you never really know if you've understood a proof before you've written it down (or, at the very least, explained it to someone else) apparently it applies more generally.

The Economist can't think of any good arguments against trading organs

2010-06-14T13:25:00.001+01:00

People have probably already seen the new posters for The Economist, frankly, I don't think any of the three issues they've picked are particularly interesting debates (should drugs be legalised, should prisoners be allowed to vote and should we allow trade in human organs). As far as I can see, all three are pretty much a slam dunk for the yes side. Anyway, it appears that, at least for the organ trading argument that the Economist agrees with me. Let's have a look at their 'against' arguments (you can see the poster here).

1. The British Medical Association says that allowing organs to be traded would put pressure on poorer people to sell.

Well.. yes, and allowing cars to be traded probably puts pressure on poorer people to sell. I have no idea why this is supposed to be a bad thing. Does the BMA have some reason to believe that poorer people would prefer having two functioning kidneys to money? That they should prefer this? Is there any particular reason we should believe the BMA is likely to have anything interesting to say about the question (they're medics, not economists or ethicists)

2. There are alternatives to a trade in organs. Countries in which people's consent to donating their organs is assumed unless they opt out have shorter waiting lists.

Again, I have no idea why anyone would think this was an argument against allowing a trade in organs. Countries in which a trade in organs is allowed (ie, Iran) have even shorter waiting lists (ie, they don't have any).

There are alternatives to most things, the question is which alternative is best. (I would think presumed consent is even more of a slam-dunk than allowing trade in organs, except there's remarkably little evidence that it actually increases donations).

3. Legalising the trade in organs would turn the human body into a commodity. That is taking free markets too far.

To paraphrase "If we legalised trade in organs, then trade in organs would be legal. This is bad. Ner ner ner ner". This just doesn't even begin to be an argument against anything.

I'm not very surprised that the Economist agrees with me about legalising trade in organs, but surely they could have tried a bit harder to come up with some argument against? Or is it just that there aren't any?

Inadvertent Accuracy

2010-06-08T22:06:00.000+01:00

Horrible article in the Telegraph, but with a great opening paragraph:

It is not necessary to be a conspiracy theorist to recognise that the General Medical Council's recent ruling to strike professors Andrew Wakefield and John Walker-Smith off the register had the fingerprints of the medical establishment all over it.

Well... no, it's not. The medical establishment has struck off a doctor who performed unethical experiments on kids then misreported the results to make money out of them. That's pretty much what the medical establishment is for. Of course, I'm not entirely sure that's what Le Fanu means...

Correlations vs. Causation.

2010-06-08T21:54:00.001+01:00

A while ago, I said I'd write a post with my favourite "things which are correlated". Well, now I've finally figured out how to do page-breaks, I guess it makes sense to write it now. Here are my favourites. Any suggestions as to why they might be correlated? (answers below the fold)

Countries which put Fluoride in the water have much higher cancer rates than countries which don't.
Schoolchildren's shoe size is very strongly correlated with their performance on spelling tests.
The number of shark attacks on a given day is strongly correlated with ice cream sales.
You are much more likely to wake up dehydrated if you sleep on a sofa than if you sleep on a bed.
The number of prostitutes working in a city is positively correlated with the number of policemen.

The answers are all fairly straightforward when you see them, but the first one, at least, has stumped many people I've shown it to:

Countries that put fluoride in their water are rich! It's only rich countries which can afford to put fluoride in the water, and in which people live long enough to get cancer.
Older children have bigger feet, and spell better.
Shark attacks tend to happen when people go to the beach.
I don't know about you, but I'm much less likely to sleep on a sofa sober than drunk.
Bigger cities have more prostitutes, and more police officers (there are lots of variations on this: dogs and fire hydrants... no doubt others).

Anyone got any others?

Druids Demonstrate Regression to the Mean perfectly

2010-06-02T10:55:00.000+01:00

I once heard of an experiment that a friend of mine (an anti-speed camera campaigner) used to do when he was giving a presentation. He would get everyone in the room to randomly generate a 2-digit number (not sure how, exactly, maybe he used to carry some sort of 10-sided dice with him). He would then give everyone who rolled more than 80 a big picture of a speed camera and got them to generate a second set of numbers. Lo and behold, only a small fraction (on average around 1/5) of those carrying speed camera signs had high levels of deaths. The speed cameras had worked!

This is the purest way I've ever seen to explain the phenomenon of 'regression to the mean'. It's a well-known phenomenon, and explains a lot of things, from why test scores at the worst schools tend to improve the next year, through why patients who visit a homeopath seem to feel better, to the Sports Illustrated Jinx.

However, the Austrian motorway authority seems never to have heard of it. They recently asked some druids to reduce the number of fatalities at a few accident blackspots by burying some magnetic slates. The results were a roaring success:

Austrian motorway authority ASFINAG said it was sceptical at first and kept the project a secret. But it went public after the druids’ efforts cut the number of deaths at the notorious crash site from six a year to zero in two years.

I don't think there's much more to say.

Why is the suicide rate so low at Foxconn.

2010-05-30T13:08:00.000+01:00

Foxconn is a chinese company that you may have heard a lot about recently. There has, according to the BBC been "a string" of suicides there recently. According to the Times there is a "spiralling suicide crisis". Reuters says there has been "a spate of employee deaths".

10 people have committed suicide this year at a particular Foxconn factory in China (where a lot of parts for the iphone are made, apparently, which I think is why this is supposed to be a news story). The factory employs 300,000 people. I make that a suicide rate of (approximately) 7 people per 100,000 per year. The suicide rate in China is about 13 people per 100,000 per year. In other words, working for Foxconn cuts your chance of committing suicide almost in half!

How is it possible for every single person everywhere in the world's media to have gotten this story exactly backwards? There are a lot of very clever people suggesting "explanations" for the suicide rate at Foxconn. Unfortunately, they're trying to explain why it's so high, when they should be doing the opposite! This should lead us to seriously doubt these people's 'explanations' when the phenomena they're describing happen to be real. If your theory can explain anything, it has no explanatory power at all.

However, I think the main story here is how this became a story. What is going on? Why did someone decide to report the suicide rate at Foxconn instead of, say, the suicide rate among Tesco employees (another company which employs around 300,000 people, at least in the UK). And how did no-one notice that what they were reporting was in no way interesting.

Deadweight Loss

2010-05-29T19:22:00.000+01:00

I'm currently reading Joel Waldfogel's book "Scroogenomics". In it, he expands on some of the points made in his classic research paper "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas". The basic premise is that people (especially distant relatives) don't know what you want as well as you do, so any gifts they buy you are less desirable to you than anything you could have bought yourself with the money. He has plenty of facts and figures to back up this eminently plausible theory, and I think a serious point to make.

However, he does have at least one minor slip. In describing what deadweight loss is, he says the following:

If a dollar disappears from my pocket and appears in yours, it's a loss to me, but it's not a deadweight loss to society. If you take my dollar and destroy it lightling your Cohiba, then it's a deadweight loss.

This isn't quite right, for the simple reason that dollars only have purely symbolic value. Burning a dollar bill is a genuine loss of $1 to the burner, but can't possibly make society as a whole worse off... you can't eat money. So who benefits? As the wikipedia article on burning money explains, everyone. Burning a banknote has a (very) slightly deflationary effect, so makes all of the money in everyone else's pocket worth slightly more.

I first encountered this idea in Steve Lansburg's excellent Armchair economist, and it seems to be pretty standard fayre in economics literature, so how did Waldfogel miss it? Or did he think that burning money seemed more wasteful than any other genuine example of a deadweight loss, so sacrificed accuracy for impact?

What exactly are confidence intervals?

2010-05-24T00:38:00.001+01:00

So, a friend (who would probably prefer to remain nameless) is currently looking for jobs in finance, and sent me some sample interview questions that they like to ask people. One of them is the following:

A drug trial gives the result that the drug works better than the
placebo, with 95% confidence. What exactly does this statement mean? What further assumptions are needed to be able to deduce that the probability of the drug working is actually 95%?

Now, I wasn't entirely sure I knew the answer to this question. I thought I did, but despite having studied rather a lot of statistics, I don't think anyone ever actually told me what a 95% confidence interval was, so I did what everyone does faced with such a situation, and checked the wikipedia article. Wikipedia is singularly confusing on the matter, but it gives the answer as roughly the following.
"The drug works better than the placebo with 95% confidence" means "if there were no difference, and I did the test lots of times I would expect to get these results less than 1 time in 20" or, more simply:

P(results|no difference) < 0.05

What we actually want is to make a statement about how likely there is to be a difference. In fact, according to the question, we want to be able to say:

P(no difference|results) < 0.05.

I have no idea how having the answer to one question is supposed to help us answer the other (we could apply Bayes theorem, but it's unlikely to give us the same value for both probabilities).

What is more surprising, though is that pretty much no-one acknowledges that there's a difference! People regularly say things along the lines of "there's a 95% chance that the drug is better than a placebo" (eg, this page which starts by saying that '"Significance level" is a misleading term that many researchers do not fully understand', and then goes on to say that a statement which is true with 95% significance 'has a 95% chance of being tru' - perfectly illustrating the confusion).

I've never really understood the difference between bayesian statistics and frequentist statistics before. Bayesians use something sensible called credible intervals, which *do* allow them to make statements like the one in the previous paragraph. I can't see why anyone would prefer the frequentist version, but I don't really know enough about it to have a properly informed opinion. Anyone?

My Favourite Limericks (of which precisely one is actually a limerick)

2010-05-20T02:19:00.007+01:00

Here's the actual limerick:

There was a young man from place B
Who satisfied Predicate P,
He performed action A,
In adjective way,
Resulting in Consequence C.

There was a young man of St Bees,
Who was stung on the arm by a wasp,
When asked "does it hurt?"
He replied, "Yes it does,
but I'm sure glad it wasn't a hornet.

There was a young man from Japan,
Whose limericks just wouldn't scan,
When he was asked why,
He said in reply,
"I'm not really sure but I think it might be because I always try to cram as many words into the last line as I possibly can".

There was a young man from Tyree,
Whose limericks stopped at line three,
A bit like this one.

There was a young man from Peru,
Whose limericks stopped at line two.

There was a young man from Verdun.

And then, of course, there's the one about the Emperor Nero.

Whilst I'm on this topic, if anyone knows where it is possible to get hold of a copy of The Oxford Book of Meta Limericks by Elliott Moreton and Carl Muckenhoupt, please let me know (I've tried abebooks, and amazon, which about exhausts my online book sources).

Update (21/05): a selection of poems from the book are available here, which just makes me want it more.... :(

I really love the 'copyright' one.

Wikipedia can't add up

2010-05-18T22:38:00.001+01:00

Have a look at this list of best-selling books. In particular, look at the Harry Potter books. There is one Harry Potter book in the list of best-selling books. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which has sold approximately 44 million copies. Harry Potter is also listed as the best-selling series of all time, with 400 million total copies sold.

In order to see why there is a problem with this, you just need to know that there are 7 Harry Potter books, and understand the Pigeonhole Principle.

There is a (sort of) explanation of the problem in the 'talk' page of the wikipedia article, but the inconsistency remains on the initial page. This actually highlights a fairly major problem with wikipedia's epistemology. The inconsistency has to remain because there's no 'credible source' for the figures for the other individual books. So even though everyone knows that the article is wrong, it can't be corrected because this would constitute 'original research'. Hmm... just how credible does a 'credible source' have to be? Will a mathematical proof do?

How to sample randomly

2010-05-18T22:21:00.000+01:00

I was once told that 'duration of unemployment' figures were collected in the following way: people were telephoned at random during the day. If they answered, they were asked if they were unemployed. If they said yes, they were asked for how long they had been unemployed. Before you read any further, can you see what is horribly, horribly wrong with this method of data collection? (There are several things wrong with it, but one of them renders it entirely useless)

Before I give you the answer, a brief detour. When I was at school, I did a piece of statistics coursework (I think it was for GCSE's) in which I compared the average sentence length in a French text to an English text. I can't remember exactly which texts I chose, I think it was newspapers of 'equivalent' quality, but that's largely irrelevant. In order to estimate the average length of sentences in each text, I adopted the following method: pick a word uniformly at random from the text and count the number of words in the sentence containing it.

I had collected around 100 sentence lengths before I noticed the utter ridiculousness of this method. In case anyone hasn't spotted it yet, this 'random sampling' is guaranteed to massively overestimate the average sentence length in any given document, as the probability of any given sentence being chosen is in direct proportion to its length.

Consider the following passage:

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog whilst the five boxing wizards jump quickly over my lovely sphinx of quartz. Jesus wept"

If we pick a few random words from this and compute the 'average' sentence length of the sentences that contain them, we're going to come up with something very close to 20 (if we pick every single word, we'll get 20.3333) The actual average sentence length is 12.

Now, if you didn't immediately spot that this was the key problem with the method of collecting unemployment data I mentioned in the first paragraph (there are problems with telephone polls in general, of course, but they are essentially insignificant compared to the problem with the sampling method), this should make you worry about how easy it is to slip *exceedingly* dodgy statistics past people who aren't paying attention. I'll post a few examples of my favourite 'correlated for spurious reasons' statistics in another post later this week.

As an aside - if you do actually collect the data in the way suggested, you can presumably still get some information about the distribution you're studying - what's your best estimator for the mean? And what assumptions do you have to make about how the data are distributed?

Why don't we sample more?

2010-05-15T11:40:00.002+01:00

Steve Landsburg recently blogged about a maths professor who weeds out 'unlucky' applicants by randomly rejecting half of the resumes he gets sent. Now, this is unusual, in that it is a random sampling method which significantly *reduces* the average quality of the applicant that gets hired.

There are a *lot* of situations in which random sampling would reduce workload whilst having no effect whatsoever on effectiveness. I'll start with one of the simplest and least controversial (and one that I have the most personal experience with). Students regularly submit 10 or more pieces of coursework for each course in a university semester. Every question is then marked, and the papers returned to the students. Assuming (which is probably not entirely accurate) that the courseworks are solely intended as a normative assessment of student performance, surely it would be massively more efficient to sample questions at random and mark those, rather than marking the entire paper. The expected mark for any given student is the same - only the variance goes up.

There are a few situations in which students suffer as a result of this. Say there's a pass mark of 40, and you have to pass every coursework, now someone who answers exactly 40% of the questions right in each coursework expects to fail (although they do expect to get an average mark of 40). Similarly, there are situations in which students benefit from this (pass mark of 40, answer exactly 39% of the questions correctly, you now have a non-zero chance of passing). On the whole, I would expect these things to cancel out, and that no one student knows their mark accurately enough to know whether they would benefit or lose out from this policy being enacted.

So why isn't this done more? I've heard from a few lecturers who've tried it, and it went down horribly with the students, who perceive it as 'unfair'. Apparently there were several comments along the lines of 'what if you only mark the questions I did badly?'. I guess this is some sort of loss aversion - it is quite obviously equally likely that we only mark the questions you did well!

Yvain has an article about a similar example from education - in which students are reluctant to guess answers to true/false questions with a penalty of 50% of a point for a wrong answer for some inexplicable reason. Again, random sampling is a massive net win.

Another example is public transport. No-one every pays to get on the 25 bus. This is because it is extremely rare for anyone to check whether you've paid or not and the penalties just aren't high enough to make it worthwhile paying given how rare the checks are. There are two obvious solutions to this problem: you could either do twice as many checks (thus requiring you to hire twice as many people to do the checking, and inconvenience twice as many people whilst checking) or you could double the fine. I've no idea why they don't take the second option.

How about voting? Instead of counting all of the votes in a general election, why not shake the votes up in a big bowl and count, say, the first 10,000 for any given seat? I can't be bothered to crunch the numbers, but I'm pretty sure the probability of error would be down below 1% - and errors would only occur in seats which were closely contested - where errors are not so important anyway, as the people obviously don't have a clear preference between the candidates.

Most of the examples I can think of exploit the same principle as the public transport idea above - when committing some transgression, your expected utility is the utility of cheating minus the disutility of punishment times the chance of getting caught. Since it's expensive to increase the chance of getting caught, there are a lot of situations in which I think it would be a net win to decrease this and increase the size of the punishment. Why not check half as many tax returns and double the fine for misfiling? Have half as many speed cameras and double the fine for speeding (speed cameras aren't expensive, so this might not be a net win)?

There are dozens of examples - and I don't think that the people in charge have sat down and done the relevant calculation in all cases. Are people just afraid of randomness? Afraid of seeming 'arbitrary'? Afraid of letting people 'get away with' committing crimes - assuming the only legitimate purpose of the criminal justice system is deterrence, this shouldn't be an issue. Maybe there's legitimate concerns that a 'random sampling' approach to some of these problems would be more subject to corruption - but we can just check a few of the samplers at random, and have massive fines for people doing it corruptly!

The law of large numbers is a powerful and important mathematical theorem. Why don't we exploit it better?

Lucozade Sport Lite: the Low Energy Energy Drink!

2010-05-14T02:32:00.000+01:00

I just saw an advert for Lucozade Sport Lite. Yes. Seriously. This is an energy drink which contains only 50 calories. But don't worry:

Lucozade Sport Lite contains electrolytes and fluid which help to keep you hydrated

Hmm... a fluid which helps keep you hydrated, I wonder what other things there might be that fit that description....

The website really is excellent though - it actually include a section entitled 'how do I use it?'. Erm... put it in your mouth and swallow?

Gladwell on probability

2010-05-12T18:13:00.001+01:00

There's quite a nice list of random quotes from Malcolm Gladwell in an interview for this Sunday's Observer.

However, one of them seems to show some misunderstanding of probability:

History suggests that there is almost exactly a 50% chance that any piece of information a spy gives you is true. We would be as well off getting rid of the secret service and flipping coins.

Now if the first part of this sentence is true (which I have no reason to doubt) the second part most definitely does not follow. This is (tangentially) related to a discussion that's been going on at Peter Cameron's blog about probability. Unless spies only ever make statements about things where your prior was already 50%, a 50% accuracy rate could be incredibly useful.

Eg, let's say we're trying to find out where a particular terrorist group has their headquarters. To start with, our probabilities are essentially uniformly distributed across the whole of the world. Our spy comes up to us and says 'the HQ is at number 32 Barkston Gardens, Earl's Court, London'. This information is far from useless - in fact, if we have more than one spy coincide on the same piece of information then we're in business, and can find the location pretty quickly.

Of course, I think Gladwell's '50%' is actually just a proxy for 'exactly as true as you'd expect if they were generating their statements at random', but that's not *quite* the same thing

Whacky World Cup Formula: Germany will win

2010-05-11T21:59:00.001+01:00

According to this article from the Telegraph (which, incidentally, is a carbon copy of the article in various other news sources from around the world - I assume it's lifted directly from a wire service, but who knows?) Germany are definitely going to win this year's world cup. How do we know this? Trigonometry!

The scientist has written a formula based on trigonometry which analyses all Germany's results from previous World Cups and predicts a winner for this year's tournament.

Having won the World Cup three times, in 1954, 1974 and 1990, Germany's average finishing place at previous tournaments is 3.7 and Prof Tolan says his formula shows this will be Germany's year to lift the trophy.

Unfortunately, Metin Tolan doesn't show his work, so we can't see quite how he came up with this ridiculous conclusion. It's hard to see why any team with an average finish of 3.7 (whatever that means) would expect to finish in position 1. It's also really, really hard to see how a formula which appears to be essentially some sort of regression/reformulation of the law of averages could be 'based on trigonometry'.

We do get some indication of his track record:

Prof Tolan already predicted Germany would win the last World Cup, which they hosted in 2006,

So he may be displaying a tiny bit of overconfidence in his predicition to say:

"Nobody can beat us this year and you can already put the champagne on ice."

However, my favourite part of the article is the end, in which Tolan demonstrates that he doesn't understand basic game theory or probability, with regard to penalty shoot-outs:

"The weakest kicker should take the first penalty, then the second-weakest and so on," he said. "Then you have the greatest chance of scoring as many goals as possible."

Now this is quite clearly the exact opposite of the truth. I can't even be bothered to crunch any numbers, because it only takes a few seconds of thought to see that if one side follows the good professor's advice whilst the other uses the more sensible plan of doing the exact opposite, the latter side will win before things have even gotten started - the better players on Tolan's team literally won't get a kick.

I'm not quite sure why people who seem to have perfectly respectable research careers get inolved in this sort of thing. I would suggest it was for the money, but he did the same thing 4 years ago... is it just that some people can't resist having their name in the paper?

What You Can't Say in Harvard

2010-05-04T18:08:00.003+01:00

Paul Graham is one of my new favourite authors, and What You Can't Say is one of my favourite among his essays*. He discusses the idea that there are almost certainly several things which happen to be true, but which we can't refer to in polite society. I want to write about recent example of the sort of topic that appears to be taboo in modern western academia. To quote Graham:

What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things people do say, and get in trouble for.

That seems like a perfect introduction for this story which, if it weren't true, would strike me as utterly implausible. A Harvard Law student wrote a perfectly reasonable email to a friend, about six months ago, in which she stated that she could not "absolutely rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent." She was roundly condemned by the Harvard Black Law Students Association, and the Dean of Harvard Law.

Now... I'm going to take a risk and say that I can't 'absolutely rule out' the possibility that African Americans are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than non-African Americans either (although Stephanie Grace is much better informed on this topic than I am). Presumably, though, there is no a priori reason to assume that the intelligence of the two groups is the same - African Americans, for example, are clearly genetically predisposed to run faster (I'll give anyone 50-1 on a white man winning Olympic gold before 2020!), why should intelligence have a smaller genetic component than running speed?

What is much more disturbing is the reaction from the Dean of Harvard Law:

I am writing this morning to address an email message in which one of our students suggested that black people are genetically inferior to white people.

Firstly, she doesn't appear to have read the email in question. The student actually suggested that she wasn't convinced either way by the evidence. Secondly, and more worryingly, the Dean of Harvard Law is equating 'more intelligent' with 'superior'. She seems to be worryingly close to implying that *if* it turned out that black people were genetically predisposed to be less intelligent than white people (which is it at least a logical possibility) then this would somehow vindicate racism. And even closer to implying that stupid people (who definitely *do* exist) are somehow less worthy than intelligent people.

It is very dangerous to attach moral weight to issues of scientific fact. There is always the danger that you might be wrong.This is an issue that Pinker comes back to again and again - there are a list of supposedly morally charged issues of scientific fact in the preface to "What's your Dangerous Idea?" If you are wrong about any of these issues, are you willing to bite the moral bullet?

Does the Dean of Harvard Law really believe that racism is wrong because race differences in intelligence are negligible? Or does she believe it is wrong because a person's worth isn't related to their intelligence, or any other trait they may have, but a fundamental part of being human?

This might just turn out to be another one of those cases where reality is the Least Convenient Possible World. I'm willing to countenance that possibility and still condemn racism. So is Stephanie Grace (I'm charitably assuming her apology is a political necessity, rather than a genuine retraction of her commitment to scientific integrity). Is Dean Minow?

* Although Why Nerds are Unpopular has some important insights, and contains several ideas which make you go 'I wish I'd thought of that first' - or, more precisely, that 'I wish I'd managed to formulate so clearly first':

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

The Great (Train) Toilet Conundrum

2010-04-28T11:12:00.001+01:00

I'm sure I'm not the first person to wonder about this, but why do they have three buttons to operate the door on a train toilet? There's an 'open door' button, a 'close door' button and a 'lock door' button. So... who exactly is there out there that wants to go inside the train toilet, close the door, but not lock it? I am struggling to think of a single scenario in which that particular option would be useful.

Presumably it would be just as easy to design the buttons so that the 'close' button also automatically locks the door, so someone, somewhere made a conscious decision not to do this. Any suggestions why?

Addendum (05/05): After dicussing this with Andy at lunch, we came up with one plausible(ish) explanation for why someone might decide to do this: if the button automatically locked the door, then pressing the button on the way out with have undesirable consequences. Of course, there are about a thousand ways these undesirable consequences could be avoided, and none of them seem as undesirable as the current worst-case scenario, but it is at least a plausible way in which someone might have stumbled across such crappy design.

Completely Inane Newspaper Stories Part IV: Dogs again

2010-04-26T15:45:00.000+01:00

According to this shocking piece in the Salisbury Journal:

POLICE in Ringwood are investigating the circumstances surrounding an injury to a dog’s nose.

Well, what more is there to say? You can read the article for yourself if you want more details. Do remember to read the comments (incidentally, this reminds of this recipe for salted water that Steve Landsburg linked to a couple of months ago (again, read the comments).

Forced to Deny

2010-03-20T15:54:00.003Z

The phrase "forced to deny" currently has 155 hits in the Google News search and just over 15 million hits on the web more generally. It's a massively overused cliched phrase, but that is by far the least worst thing about it: it is completely meaningless. Just look at it again, what does it actually say? It says that someone, somewhere, accused someone of something. How is that news? There was a minor variant of this in the John Terry story I wrote about yesterday (in which it was reported as news that John Terry was forced to take a breathalyser test after being in a traffic accident). Let's just take a few examples of the phrase from my Google News search, and look at what they actually say:

Sir Alex Ferguson forced to deny Red Knights claims he wants part of £1.5bn Manchester United takeover bid

Or, in other words, someone somewhere said that Alex Ferguson wants to join in the Red Knights attempt to buy out the Glazer's share in Manchester United. Alex Ferguson said he doesn't. There isn't really any evidence in the story that he does, apart from the fact that he used to be friends with some people who are involved. But he was 'forced to deny' claims, so apparently that's news.

That's from the Mail, as are most of the hits for 'forced to deny' in the first few pages of news, but then there's this from the Financial Times:

Allies of Gordon Brown were yesterday forced to deny that the UK prime minister "bullies" staff

Right. How does that say anything more than 'someone accused Gordon Brown of bullying staff'? What exactly does it mean to force someone to deny something? Is it enough to simply accuse them of it? Or do you have some evidence? Credibility? A column in a national newspaper?

There are plenty of others. The family of Samil Saheed 'forced to deny' that they were involved in his kidnapping. David Cameron's wife 'forced to deny' that she once voted Labour. And many more.

In almost all cases, the allegations that people have been 'forced to deny' have themselves been made by the newspapers. This is the media at it's worst. Not only do they report non-stories on flimsy evidence, they then report the fact that someone reported it!

Completely Inane Newspaper Stories Part III: John Terry didn't drink and drive

2010-03-19T11:06:00.001Z

I know I haven't done one of these for a while, and I know I said I'd avoid celebrity stories, but I just couldn't resist this: on the front page(!) of yesterday's Guardian, we had the following dramatic piece of news:

John Terry in more trouble after hitting Chelsea steward with car

Sounds pretty drastic, especially as it was considered important enough to make the front page of a generally reasonably respectable national newspaper. Let's look at some of the details:

"Terry was then questioned and breathalysed by police in the small hours after accidentally running over a Chelsea steward as he left Stamford Bridge."

Oh, so it was an accident, that's less exciting that it could have been. Presumably the steward is badly injured though? Or Terry drove off without trying to help him? Also, he was breathalysed: presumably the reason we are being told this is because he had been drinking and not, say, because police always breathalyse anyone that was involved in any sort of accident, especially if they're John Terry. Surely there must be *some* reason that this story is more interesting that, say the legal status of mephodrone, the entire Nigerian cabinet being sacked or how election campaigns are run. All of which were relegated to the inside of the paper. Well, let's look at some details:

"Terry and his wife Toni..., were oblivious to the accident until he was contacted by the club on returning home"

So, hardly a hit and run.

"Surrey police breathalysed the player, who was found to be within the legal alcohol limit... He hadn't had a single drop to drink"

So, not a drink driving incident (and the fact that he was forced to take a breathalsyer test is about as interesting as telling us that he was forced to give his name to the police, or that he was forced to turn the key in his ignition before car would start).

Rowley said: "Contrary to media reports I did not suffer a broken leg. It is badly bruised.

So, not even a broken bone. Surely there must be *some* reason that this story is news (and some justification for the claim that Terry is in "further trouble" - at least Terry must be to blame for the incident
, right. Well, I'll leave Rowley with the last word on that:

"It wasn't his fault at all, it was a complete accident."

So, a complete non-story, and it makes the front page of the Guardian. Bring back dog x-rays, all is forgiven.

QMUL sells quackery: The Correspondence

2010-03-12T15:56:00.001Z

Edit (Mar 13): Just got a very nice reply from Charlotte. Says she was busy last week, but would like to meet in person to discuss this at some point. I'll try to arrange a meeting for sometime next week and report back here.

I wrote about this at the weekend. QMUL sells homeopathy, and actively advertises it in the reception of the gym. I don't think they should, and would like to find out why they do.
So, on Monday, I sent the email below to Charlotte Kendrick, the manager of QMotion, who I was advised by Simon Levey was probably the person to contact about this. In retrospect, I regret the tone of the email. It is both unnecessarily confrontational and overbearingly condescending (as well as quite officious). I haven't yet had a reply, but I'm not altogether surprised. I've also sent the following message today, requesting a reply in slightly more temperate language:

Today's message:

Dear Charlotte,

I'd like to apologise for the tone of my last email: it was unnecessarily confrontational, especially as I have no idea how much involvement you personally had with the decision to allow homeopaths to use university facilities. However, this is an important issue that I feel quite strongly about, and I would appreciate a reply. If you're not the person I should be contacting about this, please let me know who is, and I'll start bothering them instead.

yours,
JOHN

Monday's (heat of the moment) message. Note the particularly cringe-y "I don't mean to be patronising" - it's almost completely impossible to either say or write those words without a. being patronising and b. sounding like a dick. (even if I did genuinely mean them).

Dear Charlotte,

I am a member of the QMotion gym, and a PhD student in the maths department at Queen Mary University. I was somewhat surprised, and frankly quite disappointed, when I noticed the other day that QMotion allows a homeopath to use their treatment rooms once a week, and actively advertises homeopathy as a 'safe and gentle form of complimentary (sic) medicine' which 'can be used to treat most diseases'. Homeopathy is an anti-scientific and ineffective medicine, which has been shown time and time again to perform no better than a placebo in randomised controlled trials (I'm more than willing to provide citations for this if you need them). I don't think that QMotion should be encouraging its use and I was told that you were probably the person to contact about this.

I suggest that the relationship between QMotion and Surrey Homeopathy for Health be ended as soon as possible, and if this is not to be done, would at least like an explanation as to why you (or whoever is in charge of these decisions) consider it appropriate to continue to associate the name of the Student Union (and by extension the University) with a treatment which has absolutely no credible theory to support it and no evidence whatever for its efficacy.

yours,
JOHN FABEN

PS - I don't mean to be patronising, but in my experience many people simply aren't aware of quite how ridiculous the rationale behind homeopathy is. In case you're one of those people, here's a good explanation (written by Matt Parker, who also works in the maths department) http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2010/01/homeopathy-by-the-mindboggling-numbers.html

PPS - I have already written about this on my blog (http://eucalculia.blogspot.com) and will probably post some/all of any reply you send me there. Hope you don't have a problem with this.

QMUL sells quackery

2010-03-06T17:43:00.000Z

Just noticed this one my way out of the gym today:

Homeopathy is a safe and natural form of complementary medicine, which has helped many people suffering from all varieties of ailments to regain and retain their health and wellbeing. The Homeopath will look at each patient individually in an attempt to discover the core reasons for their problem and choose specific remedies to change the soil within the person from which the disease stems.

Now, I'm not entirely sure who gets to decide what services are and aren't offered at QMotion - I imagine it's probably owned by the Students Union, and I'm currently trying to figure out who I should complain to. I don't see how the university can possibly justify advertising medicine which just doesn't work. I'm mostly too shocked about this to write anything particularly incisive right now (and anyone reading this is fully aware that homeopathy just doesn't work anyway), but I am genuinely going to try my best to figure out who I should complain to, and how to get these people out of the university-owned gym.

Incidentally, they claim to 'treat' IBS, hayfever, and a long list of other named diseases on the literature that's available inside the gym (and on this page, they appear to be specifically claiming to be able to cure them). I thought homeopaths were banned from claiming to cure specific diseases?

Bloody Mary at the SE Frisbee Regionals

2010-02-18T16:18:00.001Z

I played in the South Eastern University Regionals Ulitmate Fribsee tournament last weekend for the Queen Mary "Bloody Mary" team. I woke up on Monday morning more sore than I can ever remember being, but had a great time, and I've decided to write "the report" for the weekend. It's pretty long, so I've put most of it below the fold: if you don't want to read that far, here's a summary: we finished 10th, out of 23, after being seeded 23rd, with only 6 players, finished second in a 3 pint challenge, and partied at least as hard as any of the other teams. All in all, a pretty awesome weekend.

Incidentally, this is all pretty much steam-of-consciousness, and I can't be bothered to edit it, so please forgive any typos/spelling errors/factual inaccuracies/blatant lies. Names have *not* been changed to protect the innocent!

Click here to read the rest

So... where to start? I guess probably the story really starts on Friday afternoon, when we went for our final practice before the tournament. We were entering the South East University Regionals Ultimate Frisbee tournament. At this stage, it wasn't entirely clear who "we" was. A couple of my friend's were maybe's. The only definites so far were me, Rob, Jake, Andy, Dan and Lawrence, with Sytske planning to join us on the Sunday. This was the first training since we'd definitely decided to enter the tournament, and we started to talk tactics (and to speak Frisbee, which is very definitely a different language). We talked hucks, and long cuts, inside cuts, unders, grabs and dumps. We used an awful lot of words that I thought I knew what they meant. By the end of the weekend, I would understand most of them...

As we left Stepney Gardens, we started to try to figure out who was coming on Saturday. Chris would come if we needed him (but we were pretty sure we didn't), Charlie cancelled as we were walking home. We were pretty confident Matt was coming, and there was always Friedrich. We'd probably have about 8-9, maybe even 10. That was Friday.

Day 1

Saturday morning, I planned to get the train at 7.00 from Stepney Green, Rob had decreed that we needed to get the 8.03 train in order to be in Chichester in time for the 11.00 match (the journey takes 1.5 hours...). I got on the Tube slightly late, but still arrived at Victoria station with 20 minutes to spare. I wandered round, grabbing food from M&S, paying 30p to use the toilet (damned train stations) and finally came across Jake and Dan with about 5 minutes to go. There were 6 of us, but we were pretty sure someone else was coming (Rob was organising, and he'd gone off to get tickets). Rob came back with the tickets, and the bad news. We were going to be playing with 6 for the entire day (Ultimate Frisbess is 7-a-side), or at least the entire morning, as desperate efforts began to recruit a 7th for the afternoon's games.

Jake was introduced to the game of Mao on the way down. If you haven't heard of it, well, suffice it to say that I'm not going to explain the rules here. So, slightly distracted from the fact that we were going to have to play our first ever ultimate frisbee tournament with one player missing, we arrived in Chichester with an hour and a half to spare (as anyone who was paying attention in the last paragraph might have predicted). We wandered off in search of Wetherspoons, and breakfast. Once inside, Jake and Rob decided that a bit of Dutch Courage was necessary, both stocking up with a pint for the road, and then we headed off in search of the tournament.

We arrived at the Chichester SU with about 10 minutes to go before our first game. Rob headed off to the tournament organiser to get our registration pack, and was greeted with some slight wariness

"So is this your first tournament?"
"yes.... and we've only got 6, is that going to be ok"

The man's face was a picture, he mumbled something polite, and offered to explain to us how to fill in the Spirit Forms after the game, and sent us on our way, down to the bottom pitch, where we had been seeded 23rd (out of 23) due to our status as newcomers). Clearly he thought we were not there to take things seriously, and was not expecting great things...

I guess since I'm posting this on my blog, I should take a brief diversion to explain what a Spirit Form is. There is no referee in Ulimate Frisbee, with fouls being called by the players and "challenged" or not as necessary, so keeping things friendly is very important. One of the ways in which this is achieved is with "spirit" awards - you fill in a form saying how well your opponents did in various categories "knowledge of the rules", "team spirit", "sportmanship", etc. and the team which gets the best scores from their opponents at the end of the tournament wins a special "spirit of the game" award.

Anyway, we were about to start our first match. We headed down to pitch 8 (of 8) where we would be competing against Kent's second team. I have to be honest, I was somewhat apprehensive when we arrived, to find them all kitted out in matching uniforms, and practising what appeared to be well-rehearsed drills. Demonstrating excellent Spirit, the Kent captain (a girl universally referred to as "Irish", I don't remember her actual name) offered to start the game with 6. She had clearly come to the same conclusion as the tournament organiser: anyone who turns up to their first tournament with 6 players isn't going to be any good. Our tactics were fairly simple: make sure every pass goes through at least one of Rob and Jake when in attack (usually both, especially in the later games..), and play some sort of zone defence. After we'd scored the first 5 points, Kent finally decided to put their 7th player on the field. It didn't make much difference, and the game finished 13-1 (it was first to 13, or until the buzzer).

After each game, in another measure designed to encourage Spirit, the teams huddle up together, and each captain gives a speech, starting with the losing team. Irish was gracious in defeat, although I think she was still in shock, and wished us all the best for our next game, which was starting pretty much immediately, against Reading. Rob tried his best to hide his excitement at having actually won a game with only 6 players (and at the prospect that we might actually end up doing reasonably well in this tournament after all). The Reading game was a *much* more tightly fought affair, and for the first time, we really got to see Jake in action. In a pattern that we would see for the rest of the day, Rob would "huck" (throw it long) the disc up for Jake, who would run on into the endzone and catch it. Put like that, it sounds simple, but you have to bear in mind that in most of these cases Jake was surrounded by at least 3 defenders, each of whose sole aim was to prevent him catching it. This barely put him off his stride. We finally managed to come through this game, after sudden death finish when the buzzer went with the score 9-9, and win 10-9. The Reading captain was slightly less gracious in defeat, as you might expect: having just lost to a team with 6 players, they now weren't going to get another game that day (due to a quirk of the tourney schedule), whereas we were promised at least one more, a playoff for 9th place.

We headed back to the SU for lunch, which consisted of whatever we'd remembered to bring with us from home, plus crisps and oranges from the "goodie bag", and set up for our next game, against the might of "Thrown" (this was the first team we'd played with a silly name, which seems to be the norm among ultimate frisbee teams: we were "Bloody Mary", and was actually the team from Kings). They were, I think, better than either of the teams we'd played earlier. They were well-drilled, and several times just tore our 'zone' to pieces, scoring incredibly easily. The buzzer went with them leading 10-8. I think we all thought it was probably game over. The way the scoring works, they needed to get one more point, while we needed 3 in a row: that would mean stopping them from scoring 3 times running, and making sure we got the disc into the endzone each time. Well... I think you can guess the ending. 3 times we managed to defend, 3 time we stood at our end of the field, telling each other to give it our all for the last point of the day, 3 times Rob and Jake did their magic. For the last point, it honestly felt like the disc was in the air for an age before Jake rose up out of the sea of green shirts surrounding him to catch it, land in the endzone, and score us our third, hard-earned victory.

We were drained, and they were (understandably) disappointed, and I don't really remember any of the details of the captain's speeches, other than someone informing us that we had another game to play. So much for the last point of the day! We headed down to pitch 2 for an 8/9 game against Kent I. They, at least, were expecting us, as we'd played against their second team earlier in the day. We did manage to hold them to 7-6 at half-time, but it was frankly too much: we just couldn't run any more, the zone was easy to break down, and they were a pretty well-drilled team: the final score was 13-8, and we could finally rest, having worked our way up from 23rd to a pretty impressive 9th place!

Dan and Jake headed home to London for a friend's birthday, the rest of us headed back into the bar, set ourselves up on a sofa and started to wonder where we were going to spend the night. Just before we managed to get ourselves a beer, the tournament organiser grabbed us, and told us he'd show us where the accommodation was. We were taken off to the university gym (after a brief detour when we lost sight of our guide) where we grabbed some gym mats, set up camp, and got showered and dressed for the party.

Back in the bar, we did finally manage to get ourselves a pint this time (the first of many!) and began to feel the fact that we hadn't eaten pretty much all day: we asked for advice on where we should eat, and a very nice girl (whose name was very possibly vicky) from the Chichester team offered to show us the way to a Harvester where we could get some food: en route, she gave Andy her number, in case we got lost, and a challenge was born - for him to also get the number of her friend, Kim, who we would meet again later that night. I don't think Andy has spent much time away with university sports teams so he seemed slightly bemused, and a little excited by the challenge (which, incidentally, he was eventually to fulfil).

En route to dinner, Rob kept informing us that we should eat a lot of pasta, and also decided to take up water polo (which he'll be doing later tonight!). When we finally got to the pub, all thoughts of carb-loading were quickly put out of our heads by the Harvester menu. The only pasta they had was the singularly unappetising "simply pasta", and we all went for some combination of chicken, scampi, chips and sweetcorn (although no-one had all three!).

Finally, games over, appetites sated, clean and dry, we heade back to the student union, where the party would begin. To be honest, I don't remember too many details of what happened during the night. I know that Rob initiated a "three pint challenge": two players from each team were designated to drain a frisbee full (yes, it does hold three pints!) of beer through straws, we finished a respectable 2nd (it was my first ever three-pint challenge, I'm confident we'll do better next time!). I know that we chatted with the Kent team quite a bit (Irish kept exhorting them, and us to dance), and once again with Kim and Vicky. I know we drunkenly agreed to attend at least one future tournament (which Kent are organising on March 14: Rob, are we actually doing that?), and that I drank a *lot* of water to go with my (several) beers (did you know that drinking water between alcoholic drinks helps prevent dehydration?). I think it was at some point in all this when Andy managed to complete his challenge.

Finally, the party wound down: Kent left early (despite our protestations to two of their team that they should carry on partying and just spend the night in the gym) and we were thrown out of the SU Bar at the incredibly uncivilised hour of 12.30. Luckily, Kim and Vicky were on hand to inform us that there was an all night basketball tournament going on somewhere on campus, and lead the way down there (me and Kim swapping piggy backs on the way, with varying degrees of success). When we got there, we found several Chichester players and several others (including, I think, some from the team we were due to play the next day, Mohawk), and I saw Rob heading confidently up towards the registration desk to enter our team in the basketball (obviously we hadn't done enough running that day!). The basketball was, to say the least, not quite as successful as the frisbee. We lost to a team that was nominally the Chichester Univesity Women's team (although I'm pretty sure some of the guys that played them were very ineligible for the women's team), and finally (after a brief interlude in which Rob had an incredibly drunken phonecall with Kim, just to confirm that the number Andy had got was in fact genuine), it was off to bed.

Day 2.

We woke up ridiculously early, at 9.00. I was feeling surprisingly fresh (did you know that drinking water between alcoholic drinks helps prevent dehydration?) Rob, I think, was not feeling quite so good. Me, Andy and Lawrence headed off to Wetherspoons, Tesco, and in search of Sytske, Dan and Jake. Sytske finally managed to meet up with us just as we finished breakfast and we headed back to the pitches, carrying about half the pasta they had in Tesco, and getting slightly apprehensive that Dan and Jake still hadn't turned up.

Our game was due to start at 11.00. Dan and Jake *still* hadn't turned up. We started the game without them: Mohawk II was the team we were playing, and our tactics, such as they were, were to keep the score as low as possible until reinforcements arrived. As if playing with 6 hadn't been hard enough the day before, we were going to try with 5... We acquitted ourselves remarkably well: the score was 5-1 when Jake ran onto the pitch, worringly alone. Where was Dan? Well, I think Jake put it best: "Fucking Pussy wouldn't get out of bed". So we were to play with 6 again. To be honest, I think we were so relieved that Jake was finally here, that we hardly even registered the fact that we were not going to get the rest we'd been hoping. Jake's presence made all the difference. I don't remember the actual score, but we never looked back once he arrived: winning by 2 or 3 points in the end, and comfortably retaining our 9th seed, and guaranteeing ourselves a rematch against Kent I.

This time, they'd definitely seen us coming: there were several people crowded round both Rob and Jake every time they got the disk, they waltzed through our defences (we just didn't have the legs to keep up the "force" that we'd been playing so well the day before) and took the match comfortably. After the surprising success of the day before, and the thrills of the night out, Sunday was always going to be an anti-climax, and so it proved. Kent, once more, were impressed by our sheer staying power, but they had bigger fish to fry: if they could win 2 more games they'd qualify for 2nd division nationals (I have no idea if they actually managed this in the end: Rob?). We were battered, bruised, tired, and starting to feel a little down, but we still had one more match to play, HU?1, who were, at least, playing off a squad of 7 for the day.

Honestly, we didn't really want to play the game, but they were having none of our suggestions to shorten the match: it was a 9/10 playoff, and we were currently placed 9, so they had something to gain if they won, and weren't going to make things easy for us, so it was game on. Once again, the defence was solid, although once again, when they did manage to break us they scored with ease, and once again, we took the game down to the wire: the score was 9-8 to us when the buzzer went, meaning we only had to score one point, whereas they had to score two (although they had the disc). They scored the first point relatively easily, and we had a chance to take the game. We ran the disc up. Jake passed it to Sytske almost in the endzone. She caught it, and passed it to Andy who was in the endzone. Andy fumbled, but managed to hold onto it. We'd won, surely! No... it turns out that Sytske had passed the disc from inside the endzone, which is apparently against the rules, and Jake (in a good show of Spirit) informed the opposition of this, and we had to take it back to before she threw it. We couldn't do it a second time. They got the frisbee back, and we just didn't have the legs to stop them this time. It was all over, with a mildly disappointing defeat, but at least we didn't have to run any more.

We gathered our bags, and hobbled back to the train station. More Mao on the way home, more food devoured, but frankly everyone was too exhausted to do much. I finally left Rob and Jake on the District Line and Stepney Green, Rob was almost asleep and Jake looked about to join him. Weekend over, every now and then we'd have to remind ourselves that we finished 10th with only 6 players! More importantly though, I think we all had a pretty awesome time (even if we were a little down on the second day). I don't think I've ever felt as stiffand I for one, hope we manage to find another tournament somewhere, and keep the Bloody Mary team going (although I think we should probably take more than 6 players next time!)

PS - apparently playing Frisbee with 7 players is so hardcore that there's a special name for it: Iron Man. We need a name for playing an entire tournament with 6: "Stainless Steel Man"?

Circumlocutory Collocations: The Dot Matrix Train Describer Board

2010-02-12T01:37:00.010Z

The sign at Monument station on my way home last night said this:

Because of a failure the Dot Matrix Train Describer Board is showing incorrect information. Please check the front of the train for its correct destination.

This sign annoyed me for two reasons. First: "Because of a failure". That's right up there with "due to a delay, the train on platform 6 is running late". Thanks, but if you're just going to give a contentless explanation for the failure, why give any explanation at all?

Second, "Dot Matrix Train Describer Board". It genuinely took me a good few seconds to realise what the sign was talking about. I've simply never heard of a "Dot Matrix Train Describer Board" - and I'm not sure why I need to, surely they could have written the sign in English, rather than jargonese?

This sign was handwritten. Someone actually went to the trouble of writing out "Dot Matrix Train Describer Board" (I'm getting bored, and I've only had to type it). It's a sort of anti-nerdview. Whoever wrote the sign almost certainly wasn't aware that "Dot Matrix" refers simply to the fact that the board is pixellated, or that "Train Describer Board" is a horrible circumlocution. They probably thought Dot Matrix was a brand name (that's the only feasible reason I can think of why someone would bother to include it: feel free to suggest others).

The thing is, this must happen *all the time* - could TFL not have a generally accepted plain English phrase for referring to "Dot Matrix Train Describer Boards"? "Information Screens"? "Platform Displays"? Surely there's *something* better than "Dot Matrix Train Describer Board"?

We officially have a 2-tier legal system

2010-02-05T11:24:00.004Z

I find it somewhat difficult to believe that this is for real. Shamso Miah broke another man's jaw over a dispute in a bank queue. He was let off because...

Ms Booth told Miah that violence had to be taken seriously, but said she would suspend his prison sentence because he was a religious person and had not been in trouble before.

She added: "You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour."

I think I said this yesterday but: seriously? Compare "You are a freemason, and you know this is not acceptable behaviour", "You went to St Johns, and you know this is not acceptable behaviour"...

The "not been in trouble before" part is relevant, and is the *only* part of that sentence that is relevant. As far as I'm aware (from doing a little reading some while ago) religious conviction is essentially completely independent of propensity to commit crimes. Cherie Booth, presumably, has read some more recent research.

Irritating Quote of the Week

2010-02-04T15:19:00.005Z

From a really, really irritating Sensodyne advert, in which some pretty pictures demonstrate toothpaste sealing up holes in teeth, comes one of the most worryingly illiterate sentences I've heard in quite a long time:

We've clinically proven it works, but we really know it works because people keep coming back time and time again.

Seriously? They have the gall to put someone in a white coat in their advert then come out with such utter nonsense? I wish I had sensitive teeth so I could refuse to by Sensodyne on principal.

Just 4357 days later...

2010-02-02T15:51:00.002Z

The Lancet has finally admitted that the MMR "study" published by Andrew Wakefield is a load of bullcrap, and withdrawn it. I can't quite understand why this wasn't done, say, 4000 days ago, when everyone knew the study was a load of bull, and the wakefield had a vested interest in claiming that MMR was causing autism.

At the moment it's still available on the website. I wonder if they'll actually take it down, or at least put a flag saying "we no longer believe this, it was a load of crap, and we shouldn't have published it in the first place.

Bigot's rights!

2010-01-27T15:24:00.003Z

A 67 year old woman earned herself a visit from the police this week when she complained about a gay rights march in a letter to the Council. She was not happy that the march had been allowed to go ahead, and that:

"It is shameful that this small but vociferous lobby should be allowed such a display unwarranted by the minimal number of homosexuals."

Her letter was ridiculous, bigoted and mostly wrong, but it certainly wasn't "hate speech". It wasn''t even intended to be published: how could it possibly have been?

Police involvement in cases like this is frankly ridiculous (and slightly scary: any letter you send to the council might be forwarded to the police for censorship?). Free speech means the right to say things that we don't agree with. Bigots have rights too!

Shelley the Republican

2010-01-22T12:06:00.003Z

I just followed a link to this site from Ben Goldacre's miniblog. The particular page is so utterly ridiculous you can't help but think it has to be a parody (I'm not going to go into why it's wrong: morally, scientifically, historically, pretty much any sort of "ly" you can think of).

Then you read the rest of the site, and it's also so utterly ridiculous you think it has to be a parody. They have God's Hit List (which includes, vegetarians, Linux users and Barrack Obama, and gleefully declares "god won" every time someone on it has died), a problem page (which includes the helpful advice "sorry, you are going to hell" among other things) and quite an excellent bumper sticker page (Lost? GPS – God’s Plan of Salvation).the more I read, the more I'm convinced that it really can't possibly be for real. But there's still a lingering doubt somewhere in the back of my mind. Remember this interview? Randall Munroe once suggested the game 'make a YouTube comment so ridiculous people realise you have to be joking'. Is this it?

Unlike my previous favourite spoof website, there doesn't seem to be any little 'giveaways' hidden away. But it has to be a spoof. Doesn't it?

The Great Toilet Conundrum

2010-01-13T00:04:00.004Z

This is one of the enduring mysteries of the universe to me: why do we have separate male and female toilets? From an efficiency perspective it is clearly massively suboptimal. There is regularly an empty stall (or two) in the men's toilets while there is a queue for the ladies. Or both genders end up having to walk unnecessary distances to use the facilities (as actually happens in our maths building). One reason might be that women don't want to be in the same room as urinals, but that's easy to solve: just have a separate room for urinals.

I think this is a massive example of the grandfather fallacy. If we lived in a world in which there had never existed the sort of prudishness which makes separate male and female toilets a necessity (I mean, you get a lock on the stall door!), I don't think there would be any proponents whatever for a move to introduce them. As it is, there are a limited number of people who manage to come up with plausible-ish reasons to uphold the status quo whenever I bring the subject up, but I simply don't believe that any of those people would be campaigning for toilet segregation if we lived in a world in which integrated toilets were the norm.

And so it begins

2010-01-08T14:36:00.003Z

There's a massive poster right next to Stepney Green Tube station (so I have to walk past it pretty much every day). It has David Cameron's face and an utterly inane slogan:

We can't go on like this. I'll cut the deficit not the NHS.

Ok. So what public spending will you cut? Or which taxes will you raise? This is just silly. You can either claim that you will reduce the deficit by cutting the NHS, or you'll reduce the deficit despite not cutting the NHS, but to somehow imply that there's a choice between the two is ridiculous.

In order to cut the deficit you have to reduce spending, or increase taxes (of course, why you'd want to cut the deficit in the first place is a different question, but let's pretend that it's a sensible goal). If you're not going to reduce spending in the NHS, that means you have to either reduce spending by more somewhere else, or increase taxes by more. Does anyone actually believe that a slogan like this says anything at all? If so, I'm not sure they should be allowed to vote.

Zeus is a nincompoop

2010-01-04T18:46:00.004Z

If this was published in Ireland, I might have just committed a crime. According to a recent clarification of their blasphemy laws, someone would be guilty of blasphemy if:

"he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion."

This is seriously, seriously stupid. An Irish atheist society has challenged it in the obvious way, publishing quotes from Jesus, Mark Twain and Ian Paisley among others which could all be interpreted as blasphemous and criminal under the new interpretation of the law. In fact, if combined with this sort of decision to protect non-religions, or with the utterly nonsensical decision from Grainger vs. Nicholson than environmental beliefs should be protected under religious discrimination laws, it could make perfectly sensible, even morlally necessary decisions illegal.

It's a stupid law. I'm not sure if that qualifies as blasphemous

The Big Questions

2009-12-04T00:18:00.003Z

Stephen Landsburg's new book arrived this morning. So far, slightly disappointing if at least generally entertaining. He's definitely better at economics than philosophy. My favourite sentence thus far:

In one recent survey, 39% of New Yorkers said they would leave the city "if they could"! Every one of them was in New York on the day of the interview, so we know that at a minimum 39% of New Yorkers lie to pollsters.

Ok, that's two sentences, but it's classic Landsburg.

Why on earth did we watch Oceans 11 on TV?

2009-11-23T17:45:00.003Z

A couple of weeks ago, my flatmates and I watched Ocean's Eleven when it was on ITV1 (or whatever that channel is called these days. We noticed it was on later that night, decided we were going to watch it when it was on, and then sat through the whole film adverts and all. This was exceptionally bizarre behaviour, not because we didn't like the film (as far as I'm aware, we all do) but because I have Ocean's Eleven on DVD! As far as I can tell, watching a film on DVD is strictly preferable to watching it on TV - no adverts, you can pause it whenever you want, you get to decide the start time, you can always just come back to it later, etc. etc. I've genuinely been struggling to come up with a sensible explanation for our behaviour.

One possible idea is something about the power of trivial inconveniences - maybe it's just too much effort to go into my room, open the DVD box, switch the TV source to the X-box and press play. I'm not sure this holds much water though - we could easily have achieved all of these steps in the time it took for the first ad-break in the film. Although I guess that's what Yvain means by 'trivial' - the benefits of being able to pause a DVD are probably a lot smaller than the benefits of unrestricted access to google.

I don't really have any other explanations, apart from maybe some 'race memory' of when everyone used to watch TV at the same time, so we had something to talk about in the office (but people my age just don't do that - a significant fraction of us watch our favourite programmes online as soon as they've been shown in the US). So I'm still left with the puzzle. If watching Ocean's Eleven was the optimal use of our time that evening, and if watching a film on DVD is preferable to watching it on the TV, why on earth did we watch Oceans 11 on TV?

Ridiculous Laws being taken to their obvious conclusion part 3,298,674

2009-11-19T17:13:00.003Z

A judge has apparently decided that being really, really bad at leading murder investigations is not sufficient reason to prevent someone from being put in charge of murder investigations. At least not if they're really, really bad at their job because of "religious" reasons. A policeman is suing the department that fired him for proposing the use of psychics in investigations because, apparently, his belief in psychics is a religious belief:

Judge Peter Russell said that the case had merit because his Spiritualist views "have sufficient cogency, seriousness, cohesion and importance" to be covered by the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.

Maybe next time someone gets a question wrong in one of my probability classes, they should sue me because believing that all of the outcomes in the sample space are equally likely is part of their religion?

This is a problem I've mentioned before: it's very, very difficult to protect "genuine" religions from persecution without also protecting the religions which are even more obviously silly. Religious discrimination laws are a licence to believe whatever you like, and to claim legal protection for acting on that belief: essentially, a licence to do whatever you like at work, as long as you can convince enough other people that doing that thing is "holy". Silly laws lead to silly court cases like this.

Fermi-type questions

2009-11-12T16:50:00.004Z

Here are a few interesting Fermi-type questions I've been thinking about recently (and, in one case, on and off for about 3 years). These sorts of questions are almost always trivial if you are allowed to use Google, so if you want something interesting to think about, don't.

Are there more trains or stations on the underground? Almost everyone I ask this starts to answer with "there's obviously more..." and then can't decide which there's obviously more of! I think I know the answer, but I'm not entirely sure. They're certainly within an order of magnitude of each other.
How many pints of beer are drunk per year in the Square Mile? A friend of mine had this as an interview question, I'm still not sure what the best way of getting a reasonable estimate is, although I'm confident I could get within 1/2 orders of magnitude.
How many swimming pools full of water does an average person drink in their lifetime? (say, for example, that a swimming pool is 25m x 10m x 2m).
What is the highest number you could count to? (Assume you have to count out loud, and you have to count in English. Assume whatever you like about eating/sleeping/etc.)

Evidence Based Drug Policy, or "La la la, I can't hear you!"

2009-10-31T13:44:00.003Z

Professor David Nutt, a government drug policy advisor, has been 'asked to step down' following a terrible incident in which he advised the government on drugs policy.

Nutt published a piece of research (for some reason this isn't linked in either the Guardian or the BBC article.. could they not find it? Or is citing your sources frowned upon in newspaper reports?) stating (among other things) that alcohol is more harmful than cannabis, LSD or Ecstasy.

According to a letter from Alan Johnson to Nutt, this research could lead to a 'confusion between scientific advice and policy' and Nutt was asked to step down. Wait. Let's read that sentence again. 'confusion between scientific advice and policy'. What? Surely if your policy disagrees with the scientific advice, it's time to change your policy? This truly is politics at its worst.

At least Nutt isn't going quietly. Hopefully this will stir up some actual debate. Maybe people will even realise quite how ridiculous the current policy is.

The Formula for the Perfect Night Out: An attractive girl and some Vodka

2009-10-19T22:46:00.004+01:00

I haven't had a 'formula' story for a while. Actually, I don't think I've written anything for a while, but anyway, I recently came across this from the Yorkshire Evening Post (well, more specifically, from the advertising department of Vodka Kick, but it was printed in the YEP). Apparently, Phillippa Toon, the new expert 'VKendologist' has come up with the formula for the perfect night out.

What really impresses me about this story is not the total inanity of the formula (I'll get to that in a minute) but the sheer brazenness of the advertising campaign. They picked an attractive girl who happens to be studying science at university, appointed her a 'vkendologist' and then gave an exceedingly dodgy survey to lots of drunk people, before collating the answers to give a completely meaningless 'formula' (I'll get to that in a minute). They don't even try to pretend that the formula is useful - the text of the 'article' directly contradicts what the formula itself would predict, but it's accompanied by a picture of a pretty girl in a labcoat, so that qualifies it as 'science'.

Why do they print these things? Well, I know the answer to that, it's cheap copy for the newspapers, it's a few free drinks and some publicity for Ms. Toon and it's free advertising (which, incidentally, doesn't need to be checked by the ASA) for VK. Maybe the fact that they have had to use a student for this story is a good sign, indicating that real academics are less likely to put their name to this sort of thing than they used to be or (and I think this is more likely) maybe they just advertised the job of 'VKendologist' to students so they were more likely to find a girl who fit their profile (or whose profile fit their profile...).

As for the formula itself. Apparently:

(attractiveness + spontaneity) x (number of friends + venue + timing + the fun time) x (end of the evening factor)

You have no idea what any of that is supposed to mean, don't worry, we're given an explanation later. The fun time, for instance is translated as 'how much fun they have'. I assume this 'factor' in the equation came from the question from the survey:

What is the optimum time of fun on a night out? (For example 10pm to midnight)

So we're multiplying by a time period. I have literally no idea how we're supposed to do that. In fact, so far as I can work out the dimensions of this particular sum are "people + bar + period of time". I'm not sure what units we're supposed to measure 'venue' or 'attractiveness' or 'spontaneity' in - I'm also not quite sure whether being more or less spontaneous is supposed to be better.

In fact, I give up. This isn't even an attempt at a formula, it's an attempt to get the words 'VK' and 'perfect night out' into a newspaper accompanied by a picture of an attractive young woman. It's a total success. This is not entirely the fault of the VK advertising department, or of Phillippa Toon, or even of the Yorkshire Evening Post.

This is an excellent sentence (fragment)

2009-08-24T18:55:00.003+01:00

so the fourth Ackermann number is quite large.

From the wikipedia article on the Ackerman function. You really have to have a special interpretation of 'quite' for this sentence to be true.

I used to think Steven Colbert was a parody..

2009-08-17T22:01:00.002+01:00

This is possibly the scariest/funniest thing I've ever seen. This guy seems to be genuinely claiming that universal healthcare leads directly to terrorism. I thought that "evil and Orwellian" were going pretty far, but this is insane.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c-JEx-Kfvc#t=3m30s

This literally doesn't seem to add up

2009-08-11T00:11:00.003+01:00

How tall is Nelson's column? Apparently until recently, no-one knew the answer to this question.

I realise this is hardly news, as it happened about three years ago, but it's one of the most confusing things I've ever read, I genuinely have no idea how it could be true. Apparently, before someone got up there and measured it, we'd all been massively overestimating

To quote the story:

As part of the most thorough cleaning and restoration of the world-famous monument in its 163-year history, a laser survey was carried out to establish exactly how tall it was.
And the discovery which will render countless school textbooks out of date was that it measures 169ft from street level to the top of Nelson's hat - compared to an official height of 185ft.

I'm supposed to believe that the 'official height' was out by about 16 feet? That's 10% of the actual height. I could make an estimate that's within 10% of the actual height just by holding my finger up against it and squinting. Had no-one tried measuring the thing's shadow? Or dropping something off the top to see how long it took? Or counting how many of those ring-like things there are round the outside? Or giving a barometer to the janitor?

I genuinely find this utterly implausible, but no-one in any of the newspaper stories I can find from the time seems to have questioned it. Lazy reporting? Or am I over-estimating the numeracy of the nation?

Shops cut prices

2009-08-06T15:55:00.002+01:00

I'm not really sure if this qualifies as an inane newspaper article, but it was by far the most interesting thing on the Sun's news page today:

A NEW price war was hotting up last night after Britain's biggest pharmacy chain slashed the cost of a bottle of suncream to £1.

I can't really figure out why this is supposed to be news. Presumably it's some sort of 'credit crunch' story, but it seems more like good old-fashioned competition to me. I was surprised that Lloyd's is Britain's biggest pharmacy (do Boot's only operate in big cities?) but I don't have much more to say.

Even The Sun can get some things right

2009-08-06T15:38:00.004+01:00

There is new legislation in the offing regarding the regulation of complementary medicine. This is a bit like having legislation regarding the practice of sorcery: it just doesn't make any sense, and tends to encourage the view that 'alternative' medicine has some legitimacy.

Professor Ernst (whose book I still haven't gotten round to reading) is quoted in the Sun as saying:

If you regulate nonsense, it is still nonsense.

When even the Sun's columnists can make more sense on a topic than the government ministers in charge of it, I think it's time to be worried.

Government Advisors don't understand economics

2009-06-08T18:21:00.003+01:00

I'm slightly worried that anyone who reads this blog is going to start to think I get all my news from the Sun: actually I was pointed to this story by Ben Goldacre, but since he was just commenting on an article that appeared in the Sun, I think I'll quote it stight from the horse's as... mouth.

MORE than seven million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, Government advisors said today.

Now, I am not an economist, but there is one very simple principle that I have managed to gather from reading only the very basic popular economics literature: a transfer of wealth is not an economic cost.

If I steal £100 from you, I have not cost the economy £100 - you have £100 less, but I have £100 more, so the economy as a whole is just as rich: all it has lost is the opportunity cost of the time I spent stealing the money instead of doing something more productive (and of the time that you spend trying to prevent me from stealing money, etc.). I would have thought this was even more obvious in the case of downloading music: when a track is downloaded one person gets richer (they own a track they didn't own before) and no-one gets poorer; some people who might deserve to get richer don't, but this is not an immediate cost to the economy.

People downloading music without paying the artists might cost the artists the net retail value of the music (although this is debatable): it certainly doesn't cost the economy that much. Goldacre's article points out that the numbers involved are utterly implausible, and that in fact they have been misreported by a factor of 10, but that's not the point: the numbers are not just implausible they are irrelevant.

A proper cost-benefit analysis of internet piracy would take into account the pleasure that people get from listening to downloaded music as well as the cost of failing to incentivise musicians to make more: people who download music are people, and their economic gains are just as real as those of record companies.

Completely Inane Newspaper Stories Part II: Locker Spaniel!

2009-05-19T16:37:00.004+01:00

Sat in the café just up the road from our university having lunch today, I mentioned my quest for completely inane newspaper stories, which started at the end of last week with the classic story from the Sun (and the Metro) 'Dog Eat Dog', in which a dog swallowed a plastic toy. We came across a couple of contenders for the title of todays most pointless story, including 'some ducks went into a paddling pool' (that's pretty much all that story says). But there was a clear winner, especially given the context: Locker Spaniel

A NURSE was left stranded after her cocker spaniel ATE her car key.

Yes, the Sun had once again decided that the nation needed to know that.. erm... dogs sometimes swallow stuff they're not supposed to. If you read the article, you'll notice that in actual fact, the nurse wasn't even left stranded - she was in the house when the incident happened, and took the dog to the vet a few days later.. presumably she had a spare key. And this week's headline is way less snappy than last week's too.

What really amazes me about this story is that last week's gem was from Chesire, and this one is set in Leeds - so it isn't just some maverick vet who's sent himself up sending in mildly amusing xrays to the Sun: there are two separate incidents of someone thinking that their dog swallowing something they weren't supposed to is interesting enough to make national news!

Anyway - hopefully the next instalment will be non-dog related, but if these xrays keep on coming, who knows?

Completely Inane Newspaper Stories Part I: Dog Eat Dog

2009-05-10T00:59:00.004+01:00

When I came home after our university's Postgraduate Research Day (and the subsequent inevitable trip to the Senior Common Room Bar...) on Thursday night, I saw The Sun on the couch, open at the astounding headine: Dog Eats Dog.

What, you might ask, could the story be? Some new species of cannibal dog just been discovered in the Amazon? Maybe one of the 'dogs' is just a metaphor? Maybe both are? Maybe it's commentary on ruthlessness in the corporate world? No... to put it in the Sun's own words:

ALFIE the spaniel was sick as a dog after swallowing a toy pup.

Yes, that's right. Almost a full page in a national "newspaper" was devoted to the fact that a dog had swallowed a plastic toy. Now, I know that the Sun is not renowned for its in-depth coverage of topical issues, I know that it only requires a reading age of 3.5 weeks, or whatever it is, but seriously, how slow does a news day does it have to be for a dog's not-particularly-unusual eating habits to make the headlines? Yes, I know it makes for a nice headline, but so what? If they had a photograph of it, would they actually lead with 'Bear Shits in the Woods'? If I send them a video of myself pressing a shirt next week, will they run it with the caption 'Iron Man'?

I'm starting a new quest to find the most inane story I can in a national newspaper (I'm not yet sure whether to count The Metro, which, incidentally, also reported on Alfie's tragic mishap)

The worst thing about illegal drugs it that they're illegal

2009-05-07T00:45:00.002+01:00

No, seriously... According to this article, Portugal decriminalised all drugs about 8 years ago (how I didn't know this, I have no idea) and the results have been exactly what you would expect... less drug-related crime, fewer drug related deaths, more drug addicts seeking treatment and even reduced HIV infection rates:

"Judging by every meric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

Ok, so the Cato Institute might not exactly be the most unbiased source in the world on this topic, but the fact is that this is exactly what you would expect. Most of the problems related to illegal drugs can be traced back to the fact that they are illegal. I mean, if Ben Elton can figure it out, how difficult can it be?

Unfortunately, I can't see the Tory government that we're pretty much destined to have in the next couple of years following in the Portugese footsteps.

Young Person's Railcard Oyster Discount

2009-05-01T00:29:00.003+01:00

This should probably be my facebook status or something, rather than an entire blog post, but I was astounded to discover this week that it is possible to get a discount on (at least.. I haven't bothered to look up the details) off-peak day travelcards on Oyster with a young person's railcard. I have so far saved about £3 since I found this out less than three days ago. Ok, so it's not a massive amount of money, but it's certainly non-trivial. In order to get this discount, all you do is go into the ticket office of any Tube station with both cards, and they'll do it for you (the Oyster card has to be registered, but that's probably a good thing to do anyway).

Anyway, the reason I'm writing this as a blog post is because it made me think: what the Hell is the student union doing? Does everyone else in the world already know this, in which case how come I'm the last to find out? If not, why on Earth is QMSU (and the NUS, for that matter) not shouting it from the rooftops? This could be saving a lot of students fairly significant sums of money, and most of them (ok... some unacceptably high percentage of them) have no idea about it. Seriously, this is probably the one useful thing the student union could have done for me in my time at QMUL (apart from my Topshop discount...), and they haven't. What are these people there for?