accepting responsibility
Why is it that as soon as something goes wrong, someone high up in the company/government involved “accepts full responsibility” then expects everything to be okay?
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IPA talk 11/03/087pm, Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews. Dr Hans Blix “Time for a Revival of Disarmament?” Best quotations: |
back in St AndrewsI’m in St Andrews for most of this week working for CREEM, mainly finishing the coding that needs to be working in order to release Distance version 6. This constitutes debugging and testing the mrds engine (specifically my jobs involves the optimisation part of the code) which is written in R. In other St Andrews-based news, my next-door neighbour from hall, Fearghas will be on University Challenge on BBC2 on 30th July at 8pm. In other news I have become a YouGov pollster. YouGov are the people behind the stats that you might see in the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times, The Economist and Sky News (amongst others.) They have a nice incentive of somewhere between 50p and £2 per survey you complete and also prize surveys (which vary.) If you fancy it then you could click here to join YouGov then you can say that I referred you and I get some credit. Via Robert Scoble’s blog, scripting.com has an interesting take on how much Facebook is worth. Winer makes the observation that Facebook will soon be in the position that Google and Yahoo! are now in: to buy other companies. From there they need to make sure that what they do buy is inter-operable in an easy manner (he refers to Postel’s law) and stop people from having to put together their social network over and over. This reminded me that I used to use Orkut, so what made Facebook succeed where Orkut did not? I really don’t understand. There are direct analogies between different segments of Facebook and Orkut. You create a profile, add friends and join groups/communities. Those groups/communities have message boards and users may write “testimonials” which are roughly equivalent to the “wall” of Facebook. This leads me to believe that it was less features and more timing and promotion that lead Facebook to be way ahead of Orkut. Before they were bought up by Google, Orkut was inviation only (I got my invitation as a trade for a gmail invite.) This lead to an online community where everyone knew each other since invitations were given by other members. The neat side-effect of this was you could trace a path of people between you and any other member. This was cute but meant that the membership was made up of friends-of-friends-of engineers who worked for Orkut. Maybe this was the root of the problem. Maybe it was the purple colour scheme… |
another odd mapI quite like this odd map of the USA, however I worry that it is mainly because it makes the US look more like it does in Risk… |
election day (and the usual geekery)I just finished a big pile of note writing, so I’m going to take 5 and write a blog entry. It’s election day, and I realised when talking to Elle last night that you don’t really know who is going to be on the ballot until you get to the polling station. I mean sure they publish the list somewhere, but wouldn’t it be nice to have all of the information that you needed before hand and didn’t have to seek out the candidates policies, taking up your time. What I’m thinking is some kind of website (yeah, I’m a geek, I get that), which is a cross between an information resource; letting MPs/MSPs/councelors put up their manifestos and details, and the other half being a kind of “rate my MP” section, letting people give some feedback on what their representatives had done and how they had done it. It’s interesting that this hasn’t been done before. Of course there is They Work for You which I am a big fan of but it’s not quite what I’m thinking of. In other (more geeky) news there has been a massive storm across the blogosphere about a certain number, which is the crux of the anti-copying part of HD-DVDs. BoingBoing has some excellent coverage about how the digg community saw to is that the number was distributed. Also, Wired has a nice Photoshop piece. This is more for me so that I remember but there is a really cool project/dissertation LaTeX template at the Cambridge engineering department. Amaury gave me the link, I just don’t want to lose it! Finally, an entry by me wouldn’t be right without some linkage: ASCIIMaps- Google Maps in ASCII! GeekTool is a nice program to display things just on top of your wallpaper in OSX. Back to work! |
CheatNeutral MovieA while ago, I brought you CheatNeutral. Now they’ve made a movie which is brilliant! Check it out. |
frequencyI’m fed up of starting blog entries with apologies about how I’ve failed to blog in quite some time. Therefore I’m not going to apologise. What have I been up to recently? Well… I have had a reading week. This consisted of me going to London (for the General Secretaries interview), to Oxford (for general geek antics with Nick), to London (to see Elle and Ruth) then to Sheffield (for a holiday.) This was a lot of fun, although I neglected to do any work. This lead to me having the past few days as a catch up. This weekend is my last DF Committee meeting (OldNew changeover) and I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand I am going to miss DFs but on the other hand I think it will allow me to get more done in St Andrews and for C-Change (which I have neglected so far.) I think it will also be interesting to see who I keep in contact with. I’ve always, in some ways, seen the end of DFs as “the end” but instead I’m now seeing it as an opportunity to work out who out of my friends are going to remain that way and who I will drift away from. Also after the bad experience that was Althing 2006, I will be glad to see the back of DFs in many ways. So, my plans for the next few weeks: write my “Sampling Theory” report/practical/paper thing (which “conveniently” is related to Distance sampling), then start revising for my first set of finals (out of 4) which is currently scaring me a lot. Elle should be coming up in 12th week, which will be nice. Well, a blog post from me would not be complete without some links, and I have a lot, see this post for why this was a problem, although with Firefox 2.0 you can recover sessions, which is nice when everything crashes and you loose the 30 tabs you had open… So, to start with I have a nice article by Ben Goldacre (writer of the Guardian’s “Bad Science” column) on his blog about a Secondly I came across a Facebook group the other day about an economist called Arthur Pigou. then, when reading The Economist in Sheffield station I noticed that the Facebook group was mentioned, the article Pigou or NoPigou? is, of course, available online. Greg Mankiw’s blog has a better introduction (the example case being introducing Pigovian taxes on gasoline) in his Pigou Club manifesto. The gist of the argument is that government should introduce higher taxes on negative externalities (economics-speak for bad things that happen but don’t effect you in terms of market prices.) Radar Online have a funny and revealing article about Scientology in the framework of it being better value for money than going to a Broadway show. Although it is meant to be funny, it also comes across as slightly scary. At this point Firefox crashes but I restart the session and continue seamlessly. This is a Good ThingTM. Now for some smaller stories and sites that caught my eye: a nice demonstration in Washington where the protesters dressed up at the character “V” from V for Vendetta, a download for the school classic the periodic table song, online lecture videos, cities doing away with traffic signs and finally “the mother of all computer science cheat sheets” which looks pretty useful if you aren’t doing a CS degree. Finally, my tip for the week was given to me by my “Quantum Mechanics 1″ tutor. One of the joys of Google Books is that they have scanned a lot of books which are all searchable. “So what?” you say, “I knew that!” But, did you think of using that to search instead of using the index? I hadn’t (maybe I’m just stupid) and it’s a really useful way of getting information out of a book that would usually be very hard to find. The only problem that I have found is that the OCR that Google are using is not perfect. This leads to problems like the following. I am searching for the Horvitz-Thompson estimator in “Introduction to Distance Sampling”, now doing a search for “Horvitz-Thompson” yields no results however, when you search for just “Thompson” you get what you want, which is a little frustrating… Anyway, I hope this satisfies you all for a while… |
Leaving Oxford…I am merely an hour away from leaving Oxford, after having Saturday on the “young persons” panel for the interview of the Woodcraft General Secretary (needless to say, I felt rather old.) I’m currently looking out onto the rather nice view of Oriel College from Nick’s room on the island site. Yesterday was spent mostly at a cash and carry, eating a kilogram of jelly babies, wandering around Botley looking for cash machines and reading about the WKB method. The introduction (by Nick) of a 9am electromagnetism lecture was not a popular decision I’m going back to London soon to see a lecture by Sir Nicholas Stern which should be interesting… More updates soon! I promise! |
British test via SnowmailThe British Test =============== How British are you? Do you know what the other emergency number is, other than 999? No I don't either, but well that's a question you get asked when you apply to be British. How British are any of us? At seven! Not very in my case, and my roots go back to John of Gaunt, who was he when he was at home? Well anyway, I'm Anglo-Saxon and he came from Ghent, so I guess he wasn't British after all then, I may not be...am I Flemish? Crumbs what are any of us - human? Let's hope, at seven. Gotta run, 'cos i'm human, see you at seven 'cos you are too, otherwise you wouldn't be watching channel 4 news, though come to think of it people tell me their cats and dogs do.., barking, at seven, join me, best, Jon |
