Life and code.

OK, let’s just gather our breath for one second here. 100,000 people? That’s a lot. I wonder where it came from? According to Anthony Cox at Black Triangle, it comes from the Lancet, an established medical journal. So it must be true!!! Kill the Government!!!

Hmm. Let’s have a look at the report itself.

Findings We estimate that 98000 more deaths than expected (8000-194000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja …

So that’s a confidence interval of 8000 – 194000, which is quite a large gap. I make it 1.4 orders of magnitude! The figure of 98000 deaths could in fact be quite a lot lower (or indeed higher).

So there we are, another myth debunked by statistics.

It turns out the Michael Jackson was innocent after all.

Hmm, I don’t exactly believe that statement, but it’s certainly true that a jury has judged him not guilty of child molestation. Could this be because there was very little evidence against him, and that all the witnesses were there for the money? Probably.

It’s nice to know that being weird doesn’t make you a criminal. There’s hope for us yet 😉

I’m looking forward to the protests, and all the people who say “But he’s SO guilty!” I’m afraid bad publicity doesn’t make you a child molester.

I’ve always used Yahoo! Mail for all my email needs, but just lately they’ve decided to try and wind me up.

For some reason, every time I send an email I’m having to fill in one of those silly “Anti-spam” boxes on a web form, giving me a skewed picture with some letters hidden in it.

A little research has revealed some interesting points.

These little images are called CAPTCHAs (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart), and they are designed to differentiate between a human user of a web form and automated “bots.” They were developed by a team here.

There are several problems here, however, most notably with accessibility. They are incredibly difficult for a partially sighted person to use, and of course are impossible for a blind person using a braille terminal. They also take a whole load of time when I need to send lots of emails. The World Wide Web Consortium has published a document outlining some of the problems.

So aside from the fact that Yahoo! have just excluded a load of people from using their service, there’s also the fact that Captchas are becoming less secure. Already it is possible to generate OCR programs to decipher them, and so they are having to become more and more illegible to the average user. Perhaps the most interesting article I found about the issue was found here. The article describes how spammers have been offering free access to pornography in return for deciphering captchas. Thus they bypass the problem of readability by incorporating a human!

I’m going to write to Yahoo! to complain, as soon as I can actually find a contact email address; all I can get is this screen, which is completely useless as far as making an actualy complaint is concerned…

Well, it’s all over, another Labour victory for the UK. It was a slight surprise given all the media reporting and all the people I know voting for something else. Looking at the results, it doesn’t look as though anyone else had a real chance.
Locally, the Cambridge results were somewhat interesting, with a major shift from Labour to the Liberal Democrats this time around. This is likely to be due to the large student population in this area, to whom the Liberals particularly appealed.
This leads me to thoughts of what the local people may think. The student population is not around much more than half of the year, and virtually none of us will end up living with the results in Cambridge. We all move on in 3 years, and are given sheltered student accomodation and no need to face the wider world. If I were a Cambridge resident, would I want the student population swinging the vote?
What to do? It would be interesting to get some statistical analysis on what would change if the student votes had been counted at their homes rather than here. I think almost nothing would change at home. But what of Cambridge?

With the forthcoming UK election, I thought I’d add some comments to those already floating around the web.

My father is currently in soapbox mode, ranting every time the news comes on, which is always entertaining to watch, even if it hampers rational debate.

It’s struck me that the fundamental decision for most voters will be weather they can ever trust Tony Blair again, after the somewhat appalling PR handling of the Iraq war. The Labour party, however, are campaigning with the aim that people will be voting on their record with regard to the running of the country.
This is clearly not the daftest idea, as the whole point of an election is to see who you think would run the country best, and it’s becoming clear that Labour has delivered a booming economy with low unemployment, reducing crime (depending on who you talk to) and a respected position on the world stage. (Have you guessed where my sympathies lie?)
Unfortunately it’s more likely that people will be voting entirely on the issue of trust, which again is not a terrible position to take.
So do I trust our Prime Minister? Well I don’t believe he will always tell the truth, as the backtracking over top-up fees demonstrated, but I do trust him to run the country in a reasonable manner. Higher public spending is only possible with higher taxes, as a top-quality education has to be paid for by somebody. I’m happy to pay for things I use, and hence think that the NHS is worth the money.

We’ll just have to wait and see who the public choose.

Wiki:
A sort of online community scheme system device webpage which creates data and allows the whole community to edit it. Thus eventually an end product is produced which everyone is happy with. Examples include http://en.wikipedia.org .

In Cambridge I frequently get an opportunity to mull over the impact of evangelical Christianity. This sounds like a completely random statement, but it’s truth lies in the way the University Christian Union insists on forcing its agenda down everyone’s throats. I have a certain respect for them as a Christian myself, and a certain fear based on their sometimes-fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible as the literal word of God. (That’s a matter for another post). The issue I have is the way they consistently spread their propoganda throughout the University and the City, creating antipathy and anger wherever they go. This troubles me somewhat:

1. I don’t like the way they stir up trouble for Christians in Cambridge. This seems a crazy thing to say, but there’s times I’ve been sat with friends, listening to them decry the evangelism of the CU, while I’ve been too scared to reveal my own religion. Perhaps this is just a hatred of my own weak will, but there’s a definite anti-Christian feeling which is actually being propogated by the Christian Union!
2. The Bible calls upon us to evangelise as part of our lives. This troubles me again; I feel like I ought to be doing more, but am scared to be labelled as “another nutty Jesus-lover,” and tend to avoid the issue.

Thinking about this led me to thoughts about the historic implications of preaching. The original Saints and evangelists were all celebrated for their pious and learned nature. Nowadays we seem to be preached at by dogmatic buffoons who refuse to alter their teaching to the modern world. Should preaching be left to only those trained to do so? Perhaps in Cambridge, the answer is yes, except for the fact that those trained often seem scared to actually preach to people. One thing is certain, preaching should always be done in a way designed not to scare off the listeners.

Apologies for rambling…

I don’t mean to be anti-American at all, I’ve just come across both of these issues recently and thought I’d mention them. Doctor CBB at CodeBlueBlog produced the following article about breast cancer screening in Britain.

Having read this Blog for a while, I’ve realised how the author passionately believes in the US healthcare system, and thinks that the British nationalised system is a dismal failure.

Well perhaps it is, but I like it, and here’s why: in the US 16% of the population remain uninsured. (1999 data, the proportion has increased under the Bush administration). I’m assuming that you wouldn’t be kicked out of an ambulance if you weren’t insured, but what if you had cancer? Would you be thrown out of the hospital?

The NHS may have problems, but it remains free and accountable through the electorate. Perhaps we may not be able to vote with our feet as consumers, but we don’t have to pay for the privilege.

Reading http://www.fark.com I came across the folllowing news:

http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=1000639&tw=wn_wire_story

It’s nice to see that perhaps somebody will profit from the deaths of thousands.

To get information? What do they think we’re on. I don’t see how they can possibly have a legal leg to stand on here, none of the plaintiffs have any direct responsibility for the lack of earthquake warnings. Earthquake prediction is, and remains an incredibly tricky science, and how anyone can expect a scientific station in a different ocean to provide completely accurate tsunami prediction is beyond me.

Besides being an epic choral work by Copland, it’s the first post of this…