OKTrends has an amusing post, but what I like about it is that it’s consilient with the process I defined here. My idea was that songs that were rated 5 might be good, but might also just be violently weird to the reviewer. By the same logic, the same must be true of the 1s.…
Read More a dance to the music of confirmation biasVia Bruce Schneier’s, an interesting paper in PNAS on false positives and looking for terrorists. Even if the assumptions of profiling are valid, and the target-group really is more likely to be terrorists, it still isn’t a good policy. Because the inter-group difference in the proportion of terrorists is small relative to the absolute scarcity…
Read More three links about false positivesSo the England Zombies are looking more like Fast Zombies again. If I’ve bored you by talking up James Milner, I’d like to take this opportunity to claim my bragging rights. Here’s something interesting; back at the weekend, in the depths of self-loathing, the Obscurer published a table showing the teams with various statistics, including…
Read More fast zombies shoot!The Institute for Public Policy Research has issued a report on the correlates of BNP membership and support (pdf). Fascinatingly, they reckon that there is very little or no correlation between BNP support and key socio-economic indicators like GVA per capita, growth, unemployment, immigration, etc. It’s as if a typical BNP supporter was, well, a…
Read More IPPR: I agree with…Here’s something interesting. I grabbed the last 6 months’ worth of national opinion polls from Wellsy’s and graphed the Tory lead in percentage points. On the tiny chart below, you’ll observe that the mean is 10 points; the hatched area shows one standard deviation each side of the mean, and I’ve plotted a linear trend…
Read More science!Well, this is hardly surprising; the FBI was in the habit of pretending to be on a terrorism case every time they wanted telecoms traffic data. Their greed for call-detail records is truly impressive. Slurp! Unsurprisingly, the lust for CDRs and the telcos’ eagerness to shovel them in rapidly got the better of their communications…
Read More a single net of conspiracyQuite ridiculous microtale about the head of MI6’s wife being on Facebook. But what’s this, from Patrick Mercer MP? The Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, who chairs the counter-terrorism sub-committee, said the mistake had left the Sawers family “extremely vulnerable”. Referring to Miliband’s suggestion that the incident was not significant, Mercer said: “If that is the…
Read More did you know Twitter stimulates Shatner’s bassoon?Following on from the last post, we’re unlikely to have funding to dose every school kid in Britain with radioactive markers and fMRI-scan them a term later to see how their neurons are getting on any time soon, even if you could get that past the ethics committee and the Nuclear Dread. So unless someone…
Read More free our data, I supposeSo somebody reviewed 1,302 songs by the same number of bands, giving each one six words only. But how to centrifuge this toxic dump? Clearly there was no possibility of scraping the page and wget-ing the lot; Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is shit) applies to music as it does to few other things. I…
Read More in which we get down…to the unconscious!Manly-Warringah RLFC’s successful trip to the UK in the last few weeks, which saw them beat Leeds for the World Club Challenge, was assisted by an interesting piece of technology. All the players have been wearing networked GPS data loggers during the games, so Statto gets a live feed of data on precisely where they…
Read More Blogging Rugby League: while you’re playing it