Tag: technology

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Things 109: Jonathan’s Card, Dr Who Cats, Mix Shift Visualisation

Question – Nothing to Hide
As technology makes surveillance of many kinds ever easier, some people  are worried about Big Brother, two words which conveniently encompass the general idea that this would be bad, via Orwell’s 1984, which incidentally is one of those classics that you really should read if you haven’t yet as it is only becoming more relevant.

In response to this, others say “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear,” which is powerfully concise rebuttal to these vague fears.

I can think of some counterarguments to that, but they tend to be long, and as noted by The Brads, something that takes more than 140 characters to explain doesn’t generally spread. So: this week’s challenge is to come up with a counterargument for “nothing to hide” that is 140 characters long or fewer.

Link
A while ago, as an experiment, Jonathan Stark made his Starbucks card details public, so anyone could add credit and anyone could spend that credit. His page explaining this is here. (Note the caveat at the top – this no longer works).

Sam Odio found an easy way to transfer credit to his own Starbucks card, and I recommend reading his take on the idea (and his exploit) here.

If you don’t have time for that, you could just read this summary of the whole story over at Good, which lays out the whole strange tale.

Quote
Les Dawson:

“There is a remote tribe that worships the number zero. Is nothing sacred?”

Picture (via Jason)
Pure internet linkbait, but with an execution this good, it deserves to be: Dr Who cats.

Previous Puzzle
Last time I asked for ways to visualise data in such a way that mix shifts affecting conversion rate would be readily apparent.

Adam naturally had a full consultant’s answer, explaining how he would show the data different ways depending on the audience (sales director, website content manager, SEO manager…), and how he might talk through the component parts of the change in a sequence of slides, which is all very sensible. However, what I really want is something that I as an analyst can look at to apprehend the whole situation, ideally in a generic way, so any given shift becomes clear.

Simon described an interesting single-view answer, but in preparing this post I realised I needed to confirm some of its details with him, so that will have to wait for a later edition of Things.

On to my answer… the data set was as follows:

[before mix shift | after mix shift]:

Banjo section visits [10,000 | 20,000] – lots more traffic
Banjo section sales [100 | 220]
Banjo section conversion [1.0% | 1.1%] – conversion increases!

Gun section visits [1,000 | 1,000] – same traffic as ever
Gun section sales [100 | 110]
Gun section conversion [10% | 11%] – conversion increases!

Overall conversion before:
(100 + 100) / (10,000 + 1,000) = 1.82%
Overall conversion after:
(220 + 110) / (20,000 + 1,000) = 1.57% – overall conversion has decreased!

My solution looks like this:

This shows how the total visits and orders (black lines) are composed of the individual sections (red/gun and blue/banjo). While both the blue and red arrows get steeper (representing improved conversion, although it’s hard to see this on the red arrow), the angle of the black line decreases (representing the overall decrease in conversion), since the blue arrow became so much longer.

This pretty much works for the extreme example given. However, it has significant weaknesses as a general solution:

  • It doesn’t work as a trended view – conceivably it could be animated, but that seems like overkill
  • It’s hard to compare the angle of arrows when traffic changes significantly, as in the gun section above
  • It tends to encode all the interesting information into a narrow diagonal band of the chart.

Further improvements are of course welcome!

-Transmission Ends

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Things 58: Video Special

(Originally sent September 2009)

I’ve built up a backlog of interesting videos I think are worth sharing, so it’s time for a Video Special. Whenever someone links me to a video I always have two questions I want to know before committing to a click – how long is it, and do I need sound – so I include this information after each link. [In the blog version videos are embedded so you can see the run time; I’ll just note if you need sound – T.M. 7th August 2011]

Everything is amazing, nobody is happy
Standup Louis C. K. gets some great mileage out of how the incredible speed of technological change is still exceeded by the human capacity to adapt to and take for granted new concepts (sound is all you need):

Mad Skills
“A man who taught himself rock climbing and acrobatics to escape poverty in India” – most amazing climbing move features at 30s (no sound needed):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPN3gLVDsOY

 

The idea mill
Assuming I saw the same trigger video, this is the fastest turnaround from an individual’s creative work going viral to the same idea being used in an ad I’ve ever seen (sound optional for all of these):

9th April 2009: “Wolf vs Pig”, using a kind of meta-Stop Motion:

2nd July 2009, 84 days later: same concept used in an ad for the Olympus PEN:

A bit later (as it doesn’t seem to have been officially uploaded), the same thing again, this time for Land Rover:

 

Simplicity
I find this kind of video reassuring – a simple concept and attention to detail in the execution, rather than incredible extravagance, can still produce a really nice result (sound essential):

Teaser trailer
Christopher Nolan (Memento, Dark Knight) has a new film coming out next year. I think this is my favourite teaser trailer ever, for conveying just an atmosphere and a single fun idea (sound not essential but awesome):

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Things 106: Best at Chess, Art of Science, Crowdfunding

Tim Link – Competitive Sandwich Making
Last week Clare and I ran a game based on tessellating pieces of cheese to make the best sandwich for the Hide&Seek Sandpit event. You can read about it and see the photos on my project blog, Tower of the Octopus.

Puzzle
In a chess tournament in which anyone can use any means available to them to come up with their moves, who would win? Some possible answers to give an idea of what kind of thing I’m talking about here:

  • A high-ranking chess Grandmaster
  • A really good chess-playing supercomputer
  • A huge team of moderately skilled players with some method of combining their ideas
  • A moderately skilled player with access to a moderately good computer that can run some basic chess calculations

(I had wondered about this in an abstract way before, but recently found out that has actually been done. I’ll relate what happened in that event next week, but you could of course try to Google as well as guess the answer if you wanted).

Video
(Via Phil): Art out of Science:
(Two views of the same thing. If your browser is up to it, you could try watching both videos simultaneously – start the bottom one 20s after the top):

Links
Kickstarter is one of my favourite things on the internet: people with an idea for something get a platform from which to shout about it, and to collect pre-orders or donations from people that like the idea. If there’s enough interest, the project can go ahead, and everybody wins.

So far I’ve helped fund two comics, the Wormworld Saga app (which saw so much success the creator, Daniel Lieske, decided he could give up his day job), and I’m currently backing The Endangered Alphabets Project, which is the kind of thing I like to imagine in a vague way is going on in the world, but I now have the opportunity to facilitate it directly (also, it’s only just on track to hit target, so do go check it out).

You can follow Kickstarter on Twitter, or go to their home page and scroll to the bottom to sign up for the weekly newsletter which highlights the most interesting projects.

IndieGoGo is similar but for reasons I can’t really pin down doesn’t work as well for me.

Crowdfunder is a UK version which I don’t tend to find as inspiring, but would probably be the best one for someone in the UK to create a project with (since Kickstarter requires a US bank account).

Quote
Overheard in the maths common room when I was studying for my PhD at Royal Holloway:

But nobody knows what probability is! Probability is defined in terms of randomness, and randomness is defined in terms of probability!

Answers to Monty Hall and the Two Envelopes
Last week I asked about the Monty Hall problem, which I should have introduced before the Two Envelopes problem I set two weeks ago.

The Monty Hall problem has a nice Wikipedia page, the most helpful part of which is probably the decision tree showing all possible outcomes.

In brief, the answer is that you should switch after Monty shows you an incorrect door, but certain misguided instincts steer most people away from that choice. The Endowment Effect and Loss Aversion mean that regardless of probability, people fear they would regret “giving up” their first choice more than sticking with it if they end up losing.

The more subtle effect is an instinctive (or partially trained?) feeling that the choices of others have no effect on the probabilities of our own choices in these kind of contexts. This is true when the other person has just as much information as you, but that is not the case here – Monty knows where the car is, and uses that information to ensure that he always opens a door with a goat behind it. So he has more information than you, and when you see his choice you gain some information.

Or to give an answer that might go with the grain of instinct for some people, consider this: there is a 2/3 chance that the car is behind one of the doors you don’t pick. Monty shows you that it definitely isn’t behind one of them. So there’s still a 2/3 chance the car is behind the other one, and a 1/3 chance it’s behind the one you first chose.

As for the Two Envelopes, it turns out this is more difficult than I originally remembered. Again, there’s a great Wikipedia page on the subject, which has quite a lot of detail.

As Thomas noted, a key phrase missing from the subtly specious argument for swapping is “Without Loss of Generality” (WLOG), which one must always be careful to check whenever substituting a variable (in this case, the amount in the envelope) with a specific figure (£10 in the example I gave).

Is it true that the reasoning I gave based on having £10 in the envelope truly retains the generality of the problem – would the reasoning also hold for any other amount? In short, no. For example, there could be 1p in the envelope, or any odd number of pence, in which case we would have to conclude that we had the lesser envelope (although this still means you should swap). More dramatically (here we imagine the envelopes contain cheques, and that these cheques are totally reliable), your envelope could theoretically contain over half of all the money in the world, in which case you can be sure the other envelope contains less. More realistically, it could contain more than 1/3 the amount of money you expect the person filling the envelopes to be willing to give away, in which case you would strongly suspect the other envelope to contain the lesser amount.

If you’re interested, do read the full Wikipedia article, and meanwhile, remember to watch out for unjustifiable WLOGs.

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Curating Things: How I Find Interesting Stuff on the Internet

As you may have noticed, I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing Things a bit more than usual recently, so I’m using that as a tenuous cue to instead write a post about how I find interesting things on the internet for Things generally (because that’s the bit I have still been doing).

1) Basic Aggregation
We all come across interesting things on the internet one way or another. The most basic thing I do is aggregate things I think would be suitable for Things in a Google Doc. The theory is that I then review that document once a week and pick an interesting thing from each category to put in Things that week.

2) Google Reader Magic
I find a lot of stuff through my RSS subscriptions, which I follow in Google Reader. RSS is really great. Unfortunately most people can’t be doing with it, so they end up using things like Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr to do something similar, which is great in some ways and terrible in others. But that’s a post for another time.

Some RSS feeds, though, update far too frequently for me to follow. Examples of this include Boing Boing and FFFFOUND (sometimes NSFW). I put these in a folder called ‘overabundant’, and any time I check there may be several hundred unread items.

Google Reader lets you sort items newest first, oldest first, or by magic, which is to say, in decreasing order of how likely Google thinks you are to like them, based (presumably) on Google algorithmic magic leveraging the data from people that use Google Reader. In this way, I have Google do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of finding the most interesting stuff.

3) Twitter + IfTTT + Read It Later
As I mentioned a while ago, Read It Later is a really great service where a single click pushes any given web page to your ‘Read It Later’ list, which you can then return to when you have time from the same browser, another browser somewhere else, your smartphone, or your tablet. (Here’s their analysis on how they see this time-shifting happen by platform).

I follow some people on Twitter (including some Things recipients) that regularly post interesting links. I browse Twitter on my smartphone whenever I find myself in some kind of liminal time. So what I needed to do was find a way to pass links I find in Twitter over to Read It Later.

There’s probably a few ways to peel this potato, but I found a very easy solution in the form of If That Then This, a brilliant service which lets you glue different things together with a simple “If <x> Then <y>” structure. If I ‘favourite’ a tweet on Twitter, IfTTT looks for a link in the tweet and then puts that link into Read It Later. (I also use IfTTT to automatically cross-post my webcomic to Tumblr each week, among other things. It’s really great. You should put your email address down for an invite).

The really neat trick is that Read It Later pushes my saved content to my phone, so when I find myself in a slightly less liminal state (like travelling on the tube), I can read these articles even if I no longer have internet access.

Now, if I find an article to put on Things in this way, the process gets a bit ugly – I can tag it as ‘Things’ and then harvest it into the Google Doc later, or forward it to myself by email and capture it that way. Neither is great. But the overall advantage is that I get to read a lot of good, long articles, although I’m reading fewer books (so I’m cancelling my Wired subscription), and the Things category of ‘links’ now has a massive backlog, so I may have to change up the format a bit.

So there you have it. I’d be interested to know if you have any different methods of finding good stuff on the internet, or if you can see any clear improvements to the techniques I describe above.

(While on the subject, I suppose I should mention that I am on Twitter as @metatim, where I post links to stuff I do on the internet, including Things, and also including this very post).