If you've been on Twitter for any length of time, you'll have seen dozens of plaintive requests like this. The same happens with missing people, lost dogs, and urgent political causes. Yes, it can be a little annoying to see the same thing again and again - but it's all for a good cause, right? Hmmm... I'm not so sure. The act of retweeting something important is often called "boosting the signal." In this case, the "signal" is the worthy cause, the "noise" is the trivial information…
Continue reading →
As regular readers know, we've installed solar panels on our house in Oxford. The panels were originally installed on 17th December 2013 - that's pretty close to the winter solstice, where the UK experiences the lowest hours of sunlight. Today is the summer solstice. Time for Druids to dance around Stonehenge as we celebrate the longest day of the year. And time for me to celebrate half a year of graphing my Solar Panels. So, what are the results? This year we've generated a whopping…
Continue reading →
If you ever listen to the wonderful More or Less podcast, you'll have heard the term "Zombie Statistic." It relates to stats which are factually incorrect - yet keep being circulated. Despite being disproved, they rear their ugly heads again and again. You probably know a few - men think about sex every 7 seconds, London is France's 6th biggest city, Christians are the most persecuted religion, etc. In technology circles, we have Zombie Ideas. Products so awful that they are rejected by users …
Continue reading →
Many years ago, as I was wandering around the Louvre, I came across a painting which bore an uncanny resemblance to me! Spooky, eh? Yeah, yeah, it's not the greatest likeness ever, but people who know me seem to think I look like the chap on the left. This got me thinking... Wouldn't it be great if when you entered an art gallery, a computer could tell you which painting you look most like? Well, I think it would be great. This is my blog, so what I say goes! Getting The Data I'm using …
Continue reading →
Humans are pretty spectacular at image recognition. We have a seemingly innate ability to look at an image and tell if it is that of a human face - even if it has been severely distorted. Occasionally though, the software in our brains is a little too eager to see a face. This phenomenon is called Pareidolia. It's what causes you to see dragons when you look at the clouds, and a smiling face when you see :-) Recently, I've been running facial recognition software on artworks held by…
Continue reading →
We moved house recently. It's always fun to see what choices the previous owners made - orange paint in the bedroom? Yeuch! While some choices are purely subjective - those light fittings? - other choices are simply illogical. Let's take water meters. Anyone in the UK can get a water meter fitted for free. The alternative is that the water company literally make up your bill! "Hmmmm, four bed house. Probably means kids. Lots of baths, I reckon. Bet their washing machine is ancient. Let's…
Continue reading →
Hanlon's Razor states, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." It would be nice to think that all mistakes and errors we encounter are just the result of bone-headedness. Sadly, that's not the case. Quite often malicious people deliberately try to trick you into taking actions you would normally have ignored. In usability, we call this a "Dark Pattern". A Dark Pattern is a type of user interface that appears to have been carefully crafted to trick users …
Continue reading →
