By any rational measures it should have been awful - I had my wallet and my mobile phone nicked by someone on the tube, and struggled through Saturday with a mild hangover and a dodgy back.
But all that faded away. I had the lucky chance to work with James Adam (something I’ve been wanted to do since I employed him, and then left the company) and James Andrews on a very silly hack. And, then we won a prize for making the chap from O’Reilly laugh. Perfect.
Here’s what we did - we call it ’subterranean homesick news’:
Thanks to the BBC for letting us play with their video and subtitling data. Worth it just to see Bob getting all political again. We live in hope that one day we’ll see Bob Dylan signing on all BBC programmes.
Under what circumstances would it be acceptable for a Police Officer to make a V-sign at someone? And that’s not the worst of it.
Let me tell you what happened on my way home tonight.
I was waiting at the Bus Stop, just East of New Cross Station. As it happened, I’d been out for a drink and a friend of mine had stolen my lighter. I asked someone who was walking past for a light and he took pains to give me one - it was windy and it took longer than it should have, but there we go.
The chap had walked 5 yards past the bus stop when a Police car screamed to a halt beside him. Three officers jumped out. One of them asked me if he was with another person, to which I replied he wasn’t. They made him turn out his pockets and then let him get on his way. They got back in to the car.
I thought that they were supposed to fill out a form to tell him why he’d been stopped and searched, so I tapped on the window of the police car and asked, politely, why they hadn’t. “I gave him a choice,” the Policeman driving said, “either I could he could come down to Deptford station and fill in a form which would take 20 minutes or he could go on his way”. I asked the driver for his number, which he freely gave me - PL 197.
I let it go at that - I don’t know the intricacies of the law in this case. The Police car performed a U-turn in the road to head back West into London. As it passed the bus stop the policeman driving made a V-sign at me. A few minutes later the car passed again going east and they waved at me, rudely, from the car.
Needless to say, I called the Met hotline to complain. Let’s see what happens here - this isn’t right.
Some chap just turned up at my door, asking to read my gas meter. I’ve taken to asking these meter readers a few questions: who’s my gas supplier? what’s my account number? Not one of these questions could he answer though, bless him, he did guess at British Gas for my supplier. Wrong answer, of course.
He purported to work for Accuread, and his plastic ID looked plastic enough.
I’m not sure one can be too cynical about these things – perhaps he really did work for my gas supplier, perhaps he was from another gas company doing ‘market research’, most cynically, he didn’t work for a gas company at all.
If any of the latter answers are the case, then this is a serious matter. I’m wondering how to take it further.
I’ve sat through the required 100-hours of ‘input sessions’ (lessons); scraped through six hours of ‘class-work’ (lessons); my ‘elicitation’ (asking) skills have had the required ‘appropriacy’ (appropriateness); I’ve allowed students to ‘practise communicatively’ (speak); I’ve supplemented my lesson plans with ‘realia’ (props); I’ve ‘concept-checked’ (asked questions), ‘monitored’ (listened), and ‘facilitated’ (taught). By all accounts, I think, I deserve to pass.
Tomorrow, I have my final moderation interview (I’m sure there’s a less straightforward TEFL name for it). And, I fully intend to butcher my language in the way that they see fit.
“One final point”, we were taught (!) today in an lesson (!), “don’t use the word ‘teach’ in your interview, there are much more precise words like present or facilitate.” Give me strength!
What’s more, I intend, against all scientific advice, to talk about how carefully I matched my ‘class-work’ activities to individual students’ learning styles. I might even use the word ‘kinaesthetic’ if I’m feeling particularly ‘courageful’.
It’s ironic. I decided to leave the commercial world and try teaching to get away from this; to escape from the utter, utter nonsense that spews forth whenever business folk open their mouths. How disappointing to find not only the same paucity of speech but also the same pseudoscientific, cargo-culting crap in English teaching.
Must try not to lose my temper in the interview… must try not to lose my temper in the interview… must try not to lose my temper in the interview…
Extremely poor marks for Skype and Philips this year, a bit of advice for Virgin, and a surprisingly good experience returning something to Comet.
We wanted to buy the mother-in-law a simple-to-use Skype phone so that she can more cheaply call my various brothers- and sisters-in-law who are in far-flung places. BT’s overseas call charges are a scam.
We ordered a wireless phone from the Skype website. We were staying in Berlin and so we asked for it to be delivered to my brother-in-law’s address in Plymouth. Skype cancelled the order without informing me. Not only that, but when I found out and emailed them I received a canned response with a list of ‘some common reasons why orders are cancelled’. WTF?
I remained determined to reduce the mother-in-law’s phone bill. So, rushing to a nearby Comet store on Christmas Eve, I picked up a Philips Skype telephone. The box had a nice smiley person on it, and it oozed ease-of-use.
Cue two hours of trying to get the bloody thing installed and working on a windows PC – an install program that was bloody awful; settings that weren’t remembered between reboots; cryptic dialog boxes now appearing when the PC started up. At one point there were two boxes on the screen, one telling me to upgrade Skype to the latest version and the other telling me that if I did then the phone might stop working. Sigh.
Even when it did seem to be working the phone only intermittently showed the Skype contacts it was supposed to, and there was no way to call a number through Skype that hadn’t been entered into your computer’s contact list. Or at least, no way I could fathom out. Oh, and of course you only find this stuff out after you’ve left the phone to charge for ‘at least’ 24 hours.
Why do people put up with this crap? And why on earth does Skype give its seal-of-approval to such a piece of shite technology?
So, it went back to Comet. Ease-of-use my arse. To my complete surprise, the staff in Comet were really helpful and took the box back in good faith, crediting me back the full amount. Full marks there. I’ll shop there again because of it, and probably next time I’ll be shopping for a more expensive item.
There’s an example there that Virgin could learn from – be nice to people on the way out or they won’t come back. I bought Liz an iPhone for Christmas, and needed to transfer her number from Virgin to O2. However, Virgin provide no information on their website about how to leave their service, but plenty about how to switch from other suppliers to them. Nothing like being treated like an adult…
So, you’ve run out of ideas and have no good news to tell, but you want to push out a marketing release (it’s not by mishap I’m being scatological here). Hmm, well we could do a survey…
Oh yes, that’s a good idea. But, what happens when your survey, filled as it must be with leading questions and bound to give you the answers you want, doesn’t return the most flattering of results. Hmm, tricky.
What happens if only 40% of your survey respondents say that they ‘research products online more than half the time’, whatever that question means?
Well, if you start by saying that 65% of users fall into a ‘Social Researcher’ category then you can say 64% of them ‘research products online more than half the time’. That pesky 40% number is transformed, magically, into a clear majority. Breathe easy PR people, the press release, spun into a more positive light, can be released.
That may not be exactly what they did, but it’s common practice. Take note: if the ’social researcher’ category was defined post hoc, then this is a simple statistical fallacy - akin to the the sharpshooter fallacy.
Statistically, the numbers would be meaningless, but that’s not really the point, is it? And that’s just one example of what I thought to be misleading use of statistics in that press release. Please, Power Reviews, could you publish the complete research so I can reassure myself as to your methods and conclusions?
That aside, I dislike most the banality of this genre of press release. Power Reviews are certainly not alone in releasing this bland flavour of news - pay for a survey, scatter-spam the results, wait for coverage. It’s all a little bit patronising, really.
I’ll no doubt get accused of bias here since my old company, Reevoo, did a similar press release a few weeks ago. I’m not biased.
Guys, come on, since when does doing a simple survey constitute news? We’re all consumers, aren’t we? We all know whether we really use reviews to make purchases or not, don’t we? And so do your customers, yes?
And, for all the evidence that people are disposed to say that they used reviews to make their purchases, we don’t need to pretend that advertising doesn’t work. Do we?
I know you chaps have real data, about people’s real online behaviour, not about their opinion of what they were doing after the fact. How about publishing some of that?
Oh, and Journalists, when these press releases land on your desk, please scribble all over them and send them straight back. Don’t play their game and publish it.
I’m fed up with home delivery for things I’ve bought online – why can’t it be more like buying a pizza. Time for a bit of a moan, methinks.
Here’s how my local pizza shop works – I phone them up, they tell me how long until they can deliver it, then they deliver it. I’m always at home when they deliver because I phoned them up and they told me when they’d deliver it. It’s never more than an hour after I phone them that it turns up. The pizza box has the delivery driver’s mobile number on it, in case after he’s sped off I realise he’s forgotten something. It’s like magic.
Here’s how DHL works – they don’t tell me that they’re coming except through some cryptic code their deeply unusable order tracking page. A page, of course, that I have to make a point of remembering to visit.
They put a big note through my door telling me I was out. The note says “While you were out…” with ‘you’ printed in a big red italic font to make me feel special. The note itself is a masterclass in poor design. Attached to the note is a map to their local delivery centre, presumably in case that I forget what I paid them for and go and collect the parcel myself.
I phone them to arrange redelivery, hoping to speak to someone who might be able to get in touch with the van driver and tell him he missed me by two minutes and I’m at home now. No luck. Just an automated service that lets me get it redelivered tomorrow – not tomorrow morning or afternoon, but just some time tomorrow. It’s like… well, shite.
Of course DHL aren’t alone in this – I don’t think I’ve had a good online delivery experience. They all seem to be geared towards delivering to 9-5 businesses with receptionists or stockrooms to take delivery.
Update: oddly enough, I’ve just been searching their website and found a press release announcing their DHL@Home service which sounds like it’s just the job. The press release was written in April, and talks about all the things that pissed me off today. I wonder if the service actually exists, it didn’t for me, and now I know that they’re well aware of the problems I’ve mentioned.
I’ve been struggling to understand the A-level results, a provisional summary of which is published by the Joint Council of Qualifications. Naturally, it’s published in PDF format which is a very useful way of publishing data tables…
That aside, I can’t see how from the data presented one can conclude that the results represent a definitive improvement. I’m not suggesting there hasn’t been an improvement, but I don’t think the data show one.
What the data do show is that for each individual subject, the percentage of entrants achieving higher grades has improved.
A perfectly valid hypothesis would be that candidates were being more selective about the subjects they took and biasing their choices to those subjects in which they would perform better. Or the corollary of that, candidates were dropping subjects in which they couldn’t achieve a high grade.
Let’s take a couple of concrete examples: first, a high flying student is taking four A-levels and expects to achieve AAAB grades. By dropping the fourth subject, these statistics would show an ‘improvement’ though no change in the population’s ability has occurred. Equally, a lower-ranked student may be expecting to pass two A-levels and fail another. Again, by dropping the one she expects to fail the statistics would improve. Again, the population has become neither smarter nor thicker.
I’d suggest that to make sense of these results, we need them to be normalised against the number of A-levels taken, or some other weighting scheme that would remove these biases.
Certainly, the published results don’t justify the director of the JCQ’s conclusion that “the improvement of the results at A-level reflects how well students have done this year.”
Perhaps Dr Sinclair has some other results that do show this which he forgot to publish. Or perhaps he should go back to his school textbooks – I’m sure that they still teach about self-selection biases at A-level.
Wouldn’t it be a service if one of the journalists covering this today asked about this issue? I wouldn’t hold your breath, given that on breakfast time this morning one of them looked flustered on being told that 300 million divided by 300 was one million.
There’s been talk recently about the BBC’s problems with integrity – I heard one chap say that the current crop of BBC journalists are the best-trained they’ve ever been. But, their science and health coverage continues to be shamefully poor. Lets take today’s headline story – Alcohol link to bowel cancer risk.
Now, if you’d already read the Cancer Research UK you would be forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu.
The only piece of information the journalist has added was a quote from a chap at Alcohol Concern, the rest is copied almost directly from the press release. When I was at school, this was called ‘cheating’.
But, worse, the journalist seems to have made no effort to explain what the 10% increased risk actually means. Let me suggest two possible interpretations that any competent, numerate journalist might have considered and clarified on our behalf.
Let’s say my risk is 1 in 20. A 10% increase in risk could mean that that my chances of getting cancer moves to 1 in 18. In other words from 5% chance to 5.6% chance.
This is called the ratio of odds and it’s a common way for the media to misrepresent health statistics since it tends to give a bigger number to a smaller risk – 10% seems a lot scarier than .6% increase.
But, it could be that the 10% increase in risk mean that my chances go from 5% to 5.5%. This way of explaining things uses the ratio of rates.
Which is it? Well, thanks to the lazy BBC journalist, I can’t tell. To be fair, the press release doesn’t say anything about this either – but it’s the journalist’s job to investigate these things.
Also, note that I have no idea what the average and median alcohol consumption is – so can’t have any idea whether I’m in the 1 in 20 risk group, or given my alcohol consumption what my risk is.
Terrible journalism and what’s worse – deeply lazy.
More than 400 people will die this year because they need organ transplants.
Shame on you if you’re reading this blog and have not registered your intention to donate organs after your death on the NHS Organ Donor Register.
It’s the least you can do, and I can’t see how any ethical person could object to being on this register. Only 14 million people are on the register, even though opinion polls show that more than 80% of people support organ donation.
But there is more that you can do – if you write a blog then you should post about this today, and if you use facebook or twitter or other social network tools you should tell your friends about it there. Go on, do it now.
A couple of people have asked, after my last post about this, if I’m ill. I’m not – or at least I’m in no worse state than normal…