Author Archives

by

Terrorism, Muslims, and the Media

Dear Media,

I understand that the world is changing, we are in a 24 hour news cycle, and everything is 2.0 now. But during the period between when there is a tragic event, and when some information about it is known….you actually are allowed to shut your metaphorical mouth and say nothing.

Here, using the awesome power of Microsoft Word, I have put together a rough flowchart demonstrating what the sequence of events should be:

Image

(Of course, if it were an ideal world, step 1 wouldn’t occur in the first place!)

The key point I am trying to make is that between steps 2 and 3, you are under no obligation to report anything. If you absolutely must, you can repeat the most recent bit of news for people who have just tuned in or turned on or tapped in whatever kids do these days.

But please, I implore you, don’t fill the gap with empty, baseless speculation! Yes, a bomb is a terrible tragedy. And yes, a lot of scared people are looking for answers… but if you don’t know who set it off, or why, then don’t start trotting out tired old anti-Muslim sentiments. Why even mention Muslims? The vast majority are harmless, law-abiding individuals. Why not mention Jews? From 1980-2005 More terrorist acts in USA were committed in the name of Judaism than Islam.

The fact is that even mentioning Muslims in this context helps reinforce the confirmation bias that is already simmering in some people’s minds. I noted that the 7:30 Report, a show on ABC (an Australian public tv station, not the US one) had a segment reviewing the history of US terrorist attacks done in the name of Islam…they devoted much more than 6% of their time to that line of enquiry. I dread to think what the commercial networks are saying…

I am not a Muslim (in my mind every religion is as silly as the next…well, maybe some are a little sillier!). But I do hate the idea that any particular group of people is being tarred with a brush because of something that a small number of brainwashed people who claim to be in that group (but really aren’t) may or may not have done, especially when it is 15 times more likely that the act was committed by some other group, and especially when the insinuations being made are based on no absolutely no evidence but cultural/racial bias and stereotypes, and especially especially when the insinuations are being perpetuated by a publicly funded broadcaster in one of the most multicultural countries in the world!

To summarise, if you don’t have anything to say then just don’t say it.

Yours Sincerely,

An angry voice
Shouting at the clouds

by

Time zones and usability

Every so often I’ll stumble across a website that is referring to an event I’m interested in that occurs in the local time, and I’ll have to go through an annoying scramble to work out exactly what time zone they are in, what time zone I am in, and figure out the difference.

Kudos to http://www.funtrivia.com, whose website happened to be undergoing maintenance when I tried to visit them. They very kindly told me not only the start and end time of the maintenance but also the current time in their time zone:

Simple Usability improvement

They could have just shown the scheduled start and end times in CST, which would be mildly frustrating to users. They could have attempted to calculate the user’s time zone, but that would be complex, prone to error, and would have required additional development and testing (and thus cost). They’ve come up with a great balance.

by

Splashback

One of the great privileges of being a man, second only to escaping childbirth, is that we are able to urinate standing up. As someone who leans towards the OCD side of the hygiene scale, I pity anyone who has to sit on a public toilet any more than absolutely necessary!

I work in an office, and every so often I have to make an appointment with Dr John. On those occasions when I’m not the only visitor, I always cringe in fear of a dreaded sound. It’s not the squeaking of the door or the click of the latch. It’s not the  occasional pre-flush or the clatter of the seat dropping. It’s not the jingle of the belt, the bzzzzp of the zip, or the rustle of the pants coming down. It’s not even the auditory palette that accompanies polite, middle-aged posterior perflations…

No, I can handle all of those sounds with aplomb.

The one sound that haunts my darkest dreams defies onomatopoeic description. It is that strange hybrid combination of “plop” and “splash” that heralds the occurrence of a phenomenon colloquially known as “splashback”. Let me explain: when you drop a solid object into a liquid of low viscousity from a height, some of that liquid is going to splash, as demonstrated in this video of someone jumping into a swimming pool. It doesn’t take a physics degree to figure that out.

How anyone can stand to have urinary and fecal soup splashed all over their hindparts is beyond my comprehension. If you are one of those people, then this is a personal plea to you: please don’t subject others to the sound of splashback. Use toilet paper, eat more fibre, use a cork! I don’t care, just don’t make that sound!

by

82-year-old Australian entertainers living in Berkshire, London

I’ve seen several media reports lately of a recent arrest on suspicion of sexual offenses.

Let’s not jump to conclusions, it could be any 82-year-old Australian entertainer living in Berkshire, London.

It’s all a bit farcical really. It also raises several of questions for me:

  1. If the media aren’t allowed to name this person “for legal reasons”, why are they allowed to release so much information that it narrows down to just one person? Eventually a line is crossed where the person is identifiable, which defeats the purpose of the law.
  2. What if there are multiple 82-year-old Australian entertainers from Berkshire, and the wrong one gets vilified because everyone assumes the category is so specific that it could only be referring to a single person?
  3. What if the person is completely innocent? Named or not, there is now an 82-year-old Australian entertainer who has been permanently tarred with a tainted brush, even if he is innocent (as he must be presumed to be until found otherwise in a court of law). If he is guilty, let him be tarred with the brush after it is proven, not before. If an accused is believed to be at serious risk of committing further crimes…well that is what the bail system is for.

One of the issues with the type of crime in question is the extreme social hysteria towards it. For example, this article talks about at least one innnocent man who committed suicide on the mere accusation of looking at child pornography (when in fact he was innocent). Others have lost their jobs and/or wives. And the same thing could happen to any one of you innocent readers out there. Society needs to take a chill pill; we can still catch the monsters that ought to be punished, but we have to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
With the right approach we may even prevent some of the abuse from happening in the first place.

by

Facebook says: It’s ok to make fun of people with Down’s Syndrome.

I saw this on Facebook today.

Am I the only one offended by it?

Tag someone who is super special

“Tag someone who is super special”

 

I didn’t look at every person who was tagged, but the ones I did did not appear to have Down’s Syndrome.

I reported it to Facebook as “hate speech”, but I must have been wrong because they “carefully reviewed the photo you reported, but found it doesn’t violate our community standard on hate speech so we didn’t remove it.”

“[Facebook] carefully reviewed the photo you reported, but found it doesn’t violate our community standard on hate speech so we didn’t remove it”

by

IVRs

Have you ever called a company, and heard that dreaded response “For xxx, press 1…”? That is known as an IVR (Interactive Voice Response). From the company’s perspective, they are great because it reduces the number of people needed to answer phones. From the caller’s perspective, they can be a mixed blessing.

The thing that bugs me most about them is having to wait for all of the irrelevant options to be listed until I finally hear the option I want. Then you hear an option that might be the thing you are looking for, but it’s not quite, so you hold on for a little bit longer hoping that something better will come along…kind of like dating. And then sometimes you settle for an option, but it turns out not to be the right one for you but you can’t figure out a way to get out of it and go back to another option…also like dating. There is a well-documented way (pdf warning) to get an optimal result 37% of the time, however it only works if you know how many options there are. With an IVR you usually don’t know, so doing complex maths in your head while trying to also follow the options is probably not going to help much.

So how do you solve the problem? One method is to just push zero and hope that it will take you to an operator. There are also websites available that will assist you with getting direct to an operator. Other than that, all I can say is “suck it up, princess”. Unless…

I have seen that some companies have had the foresight to list the options on their website, for example Commonwealth Bank (disclaimer: I am not affiliated with them, am not endorsing them, and do not agree with their practise of paying obscene bonuses to executives during a financial crisis). This is great for callers, as you can navigate quickly and directly to where you want to go.

So why don’t more companies do this? I have worked in organisations with IVRs, but I have never had involvement in the implementation of one, so I can only speculate. I came up with 3 reaons (if you’re in the know let me know, as I’d be interested to learn more):

  1. They didn’t think of it. The least likely answer, but let’s not discount it.
  2. It is too hard, either for technical or business reasons. You wouldn’t think it would be hard, but working in IT. nothing surprises me! Costs of a small change can easily add up, when you factor in analysis, design, documentation, and testing. The people working on the IVR will typically be a completely different group of people to the ones maintaining the website, so that adds an additional layer of administrative effort.
  3. The company doesn’t want callers going directly to the wrong “real people”. IVRs will almost certainly have a path to an operator who will direct calls that don’t fit into any of the categories; if everyone did this it would eliminate the entire purpose of the IVR.

Whichever option you think is most likely will depend on how cynical you are, but if it annoys you enough you could always call and complain.

by

And so it begins…

So here I am, 15 years after they became popular, finally starting a blog.

Why? Well, I guess I’m just tired of people being tired of my opinions on everything.

If a central theme emerges from this blog, I imagine it will be along the lines of “people are idiots”. If the theme turns out to be something else later, such as “there is too much violence in boxing” or “advertising has become too commercial”, then I reserve the right to modify this post later to make it look like I knew what I was doing from the beginning.

“People are idiots” is a reasonably broad statement, and some people may even take offense . In fact, it is entirely possible that you have met one or two people who are not idiots. But if you get a large enough group of people together, one of them will eventually do something that seems stupid to the others. Most of the things that frustrate me in my life can be traced back to someone doing something idiotic. And I’m no exception; I know I’ve frustrated others by doing things that seem idiotic to them.

Why do people do stupid things? Well, there’s a whole variety of reasons. Over time this blog will address them all, and then some, offering some hopefully useful insights into human nature along the way.

So who am I?

I am a business analyst, so the ability to understand people and the kind of idiotic things that they (or more realistically, a small percentage of them) will do is very important for my job.

I love to learn new things, but I only enjoy learning the interesting stuff. I’m not too keen on furthering my formal education because that forces one to learn a bunch of boring bits as well. My preferred method is just to read a whole lot of stuff about a whole lot of topics and then forget most of the details. What remains in my head is mostly useless but often interesting.

About ten years ago, Ms Briggs and her daughter Ms Myers huddled together and whispered intensely; then they turned, pointed at me and proclaimed “ENFP!”.

Actually, I didn’t really have a conversation with two dead women. That was just a metaphor, simile, or aphorism (I never bothered to learn which was which except that it is definitely not an aphorism). It is true though that I was ENFP, though that may have changed in the intervening decade.

Lastly, the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument, which in spite of its name turns out not to be a Nazi torture device, says that I am blue and yellow. When I was put under pressure, I blue myself right off the chart! It also said I am very critical. I certainly agree to that; one of my strengths is my ability to find fault in everything (one of my weaknesses is in how I react to the faults that I find).

In conclusion, you will find two Cs and see one I.