If I could code I'd ... #1

If I could code I'd ...

Write a feature for a Twitter client that would block all tweets without a minimum, adjustable number of RTs from your timeline. Or, more sophisticated, less realistic version: that would block all tweets RTd less than a certain proportion of each tweeter's average number of RTs.

... but I can't.

Good TV is ruining good conversation

I've since subscribed to Netflix

Back when we still watched TV on televisions, at a time determined by the programme makers and the channel schedulers, we used to go into school or the office the next day and excitedly talk about the latest episode with our friends and colleagues, and then we'd have to wait a whole week to catch the next episode - or months even, if it was the end of a series.

Now that DVD boxsets and internet streaming have come along, we all watch TV at different times. And if you haven't yet seen what someone else has just seen, you either have no interest or you don't want to hear about it because you might watch it when you've done with whatever programme you're currently watching.

Also, as programmes now tend to last for about 60 episodes, all of which are available to us all at once after the programme has wrapped, once we've started something we tend not to watch or do much else until we're through gorging. So once you've established that your colleagues either aren't interested in what you're watching or don't want to hear about it, you've got nothing left to say to them because all you've done every evening for the past three weeks is watch bloody Dexter.

I've just finished watching Breaking Bad, which must have taken up about 50 hours of my life. In filmic terms that's 25 different opportunities to find something in common with people, or in book terms probably around 4 or 5. Instead, conversations have gone:

"Have you seen Breaking Bad?"
"No, I'm watching Game of Thrones."
"Oh."

Good TV is ruining good conversation.

Pillow Fight Day ... the cushiony cudgel of ick

Yesterday was Pillow Fight Day in London. I had heard that the Fight was going to be cancelled, with TimeOut reporting the Greater London Authority as saying that the majority of Trafalgar Square would be fenced off at the scheduled hour for some (in)conveniently timed maintenance. Nothing to do with the reported £2000 clean-up cost from last year, of course...

However, I happened to be heading towards the National Gallery at 2.55pm, and found the Pillow Fight very much about to be taking place. There must have been a few thousand more people than normal sardined into the Square, a good few hundred of them armed with pillows, with dozens more streaming in every second from every direction, and those not holding pillows craning for a better view from every pole, fence and statue pedestal:

The Pillow Fight crowd - the fighters themselves were left of picture

I immediately abandoned all hope of visiting the Gallery, but stood and watched until the countdown hit zero and the feathers began to fly.

As I then wandered off in search of something I could do without having to force my way through a whirling, pumelling throng, two thoughts struck me.

The first was: how many new pillows would have to be bought for the commercial benefit of the Fight to pay for the cost of the cleanup? The cheapest pillow on John Lewis's website is £6, but presumably they sell out of those pretty quickly, even if they do judiciously stock up with extras for PFD.

However, as I headed away from the Square with the fighting still going on, plenty of people were still making their way in the opposite direction clutching pillows, eager to get involved, and I noticed that at least a few of them were holding pillows that were clearly not newly bought, but rather were marbled with antiquating cartographies of sweat and drool stains. Which prompted thought two: how much human and microbiological gunk are these pillows saturated with - said gunk soon to be battered over the heads of strangers and blasted into the air? If this story in the DM is to be believed, rather a lot.

Come to think of it, I do have a bit of a sore throat this morning...

The problem with Room 101, and the (unwitting?) devilry of 1984

**Spoiler alert: This post gives away the climax of the book (and film) 1984.**

Photo by Tom Martin: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thedeplorableword/

What's the worst thing that could happen to you?

Have you thought of something? Good. Hold that thought.

I'm assuming if you've read this far beyond the spoiler alert, you've either read 1984 or never plan to. So:

In 1984, O'Brien says to Winston, who is at O'Brien's mercy in the bowels of the Ministry of Love:

"You asked me once what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal."

And as you'll remember if you've read 1984, the point of preparing The Worst Thing In The World for you is so that The Party can burrow right down to that deepest bit inside you and get you to betray the person you hold most dear in the world by pleading for the thing that is about to be inflicted on you, the thing that is your own personal Worst Thing In The World, to be inflicted on your loved one instead. The point being that thereafter you'll have no more reason - or insufficient self-respect - to resist The Party and their mind control.

My problem with this is as follows: it relies on the person who is being worn down being sufficiently imaginative for their worst fear to be all that bad. I'll expand:

(Actually, let me get something out of the way first: it's no good if the thing you fear most is something happening to your loved ones. If the thing you fear most is your beloved dying, The Party can't get you to betray your beloved by getting you to beg them to kill your beloved's beloved instead of yours, because your beloved's beloved is you (assuming that your love isn't unrequited), and so in betraying your beloved you'd actually be hurting yourself more than your beloved, unless you were absolutely 100% sure that your beloved's worst nightmare was also something terrible happening to her beloved (i.e. you), and nobody ever knows anyone else's mind to that extent (except The Party), and so you'd actually be doing your beloved a favour by betraying them, and so wouldn't actually be betraying them. So things happening to other people are off the table: if that was your Worst Thing In The World then The Party would just use your second Worst Thing instead, okay?)

Now, my worst fears (bearing in mind the above parenthesis) are spiders, followed by heights. And the thing about spiders is that a) they're not actually that scary and b) unless they're from Australia, they're not really capable of doing anything to you. If you were to threaten me with locking me away in a coffin full of spiders, I certainly wouldn't be very happy with you, but I like to think I could withstand your doing it if the alternative was betraying my sweetheart. Hell, the publicity-seeking-missiles that participate in Saturday night gross-out-a-thon I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here do that kind of thing just for cash and the lowest kind of fame every weekend, so I'm sure I could do it in order not to betray myself and the one I love.

Ditto heights: what is The Party going to do, strap me to Felix Baumgartner? I could live with that.
 
Unfortunately, 1984 itself presents a solution to this problem.

Here's the thing: spiders and heights are the things I'm most phobic about, but I'm not that phobic about them: I can and do overcome them. But there are certain things that are logically or rationally scarier and more unpleasant than spiders and heights, such as being brutally beaten or listening to Heart FM. Many of these I could voluntarily withstand as well - maybe even all of them, except one.

In 1984, the thing that Winston finds most unendurable is rats. Now, you might not find rats so scary. But in 1984, The Party's means of using rats against Winston is to put two big, starving, rotten, crazed, filthy, desperate, squirming, mad-bastard rats in a cage that fits over his head, such that the only way the rats can exit the cage is directly via Winston's face.

Yeah.

So the (unwitting?) devilry of 1984 is that, should any situation such as that described in its very pages ever come about, in which an all-powerful person or group is in a position to learn everyone's innermost thoughts and use them against them, anyone who has read 1984 is going to be unable to resist their tormentor, because they're going to have a vivid picture of this contraption involving starving rats and a metal cage and their head (Room 101 may as well just have been called the Rats Eating Your Face Room), whereas most people who haven't read 1984 are probably just going to have to hold a handful of worms or lick a foot and then be absolutely fine...

Except, of course, for those who've read this blog post.

Book review: Simulations, Jean Baudrillard, 1983

I bought Simulations mainly for its amazing lurid tech-noir cover:

And it's good that I wasn't so bothered about the contents, because the contents are about 80% gibberish, e.g.:

"Everywhere the disposition of force and forcing yield to dispositions of ambiance, with operationalization of the notions of need, perception, desire, etc. Generalized ecology, mystique of the "niche" and of the context, milieu-simulation right up to"Centres of Esthetic and Cultural Re-animation" foreseen in the VIIth plan (why not?) and Centre of Sexual Leisure, constructed in the form of a breast, that will offer a "superior euphoria due to a pulsating ambiance..."

Book review: Surfing the Zeitgeist, Gilbert Adair (1997)

In reviewing a book of cultural criticism, one aspires to at least equal the incisiveness and brilliance of the book itself. However, none of the items in Surfing the Zeitgeist, if I remember rightly, is anything so lowly as a mere review - they're all broader-reaching essays that comment on some aspect of culture, albeit in doing so they might praise or criticise some work or other.

Hence to equal or even approach the standard of StZ, I would need to scrape from my brain something that could reach beyond the covers of the book itself... And I cannot.

Fortunately, I don't really intend to criticise StZ, and so I have no need to prove myself better than it.

These essays were written between 1995 and 1997, and despite Adair's intention being to surf the zeitgeist, for the most part they've aged well. Few if any of the people of the 90s who are named don't remain immediately recollectable (or even still part of the zeitgeist) today - Arnold Schwarzennegger, Naomi Campbell, Martin Amis, Will Self, Danny Boyle - and many of the people from earlier times remain relevant, although I'm less qualified to judge those references.

Few of the essays struck me as essential, but one - "On actemes" - I was moved to attempt to find online (unsuccessfully) so that I might share it with the wider world. I would be grateful to have read StZ if only for having gained the notion of actemes - I won't steal Adair's thunder by explaining precisely what one is, but I will tease you by proposing a couple of modern candidates (time will tell): Bryan Cranston's goateed face; Chloe Moretz dropping the C-bomb.

However, only a few struck me as being not worthwhile. I said I wasn't going to criticise StZ, but I do have two small complaints, both of which arise from the origins of the essays as newspaper columns. First, as Adair himself acknowledges in - fittingly - one of the least worthwhile essays of the collection, newspaper columnists are under pressure to deliver insight with a regularity we have no right to demand of anyone: "Week after week, month after month, he must come up with a brand new tale to divert the Caliph", and therefore they can't help but fail occasionally. In this particular essay, Adair goes on to talk about ... sweets. In others he discusses the craftsmanship behind sporting equipment and, er, how he came to watch and quite like Groundhog Day.

My second (related) gripe is that newspaper columns are always the same length, and so an idea that might be diverting enough for 400 words has to be wearisomely dragged out for the full thousand or whatever. (See essays on pedantry, pop music, Wallace and Gromit.) Conversely, ideas that might have happily entertained one for a whole book must be lopped off at the knee.

In general I found at least one nugget of nourishment buried in each essay, and more often I found more than that. For a poor capstan-chained Scheherazade of a newspaper columnist, 40-odd nuggets of wisdom across 3 years is really quite impressive.

The Tea Incentive

I don't know about you, but when I lift the lid on a new box of tea, it feels a bit like opening a casket of treasure. All those little parcels of promised satisfaction, stacked all neat and tidy right up to the brim... It makes you want to give a last-sip-drained "Ahhh..." just thinking about it. Well, it does me.

Which is probably why I was so intrigued when I recently came across the concept of The Tea Incentive. (Those capitals are mine: I don't think anyone who actually uses TTI finds it quite worth proper-nounising or acronymising as I do.)

I was soldiering away at work, writing up a summary of a research paper, when I stumbled across TTI. The paper was O'Connor et al's 'Community pharmacists' attitudes toward palliative care: an Australian nationwide survey'. For the purposes of this blog, the important part of the paper is the following innocuous-looking line:

'The survey-packs were addressed to ‘The Community Pharmacist’ and included a cover letter, information sheet, the survey, a tea bag, and a reply-paid envelope.'

Excuse me? (*Splutter as though tea is going down the wrong way.*) A tea bag?

Could the glorious thing I suspected be true? No further explanation was given in the paper, so I immediately ceased summarising and Googled something like "tea bag incentive surveys". It turned out I was right, this was indeed A Thing.

Having since done some additional research (on my own dime), the origin of The Tea Incentive (I think I prefer the term in full, it has more grandeur) seems to be a 1996 study by one Anne-Wil Harzing, now Professor in International Management and Associate Dean of Research at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

The study in question was reported in the following paper 'Response rates in international mail surveys: results of a 22-country study'. This study was part of Professor Harzing's work towards her doctorate. She wanted to fill in some of the large gaps in our knowledge around what affects mail survey response rates, and carried out a number of different experiments.

The part we care about reads as follows:

'After considering a number of options, varying from money and electronic organisers to flower seeds, a small non-monetary incentive was included: a bag of Pickwick tea for one. This tea bag was attached to the cover letter next to a PS: "Why don't you take a short break, have a cup of tea and fill out the questionnaire right now, it will only take 10-15 minutes." This incentive was hypothesised to catch the addressee's attention, prevent the questionnaire from being thrown away immediately, bring the respondent in a pleasant mood and emphasise that it would not take too much time to fill out the questionnaire (just the time to drink a cup of tea).'

How lovely is that?! 'I need a favour, please, but here: have a cuppa on me.' It must have been like getting a warm smile through the mailbox.

Now, Professor Harzing wasn't trying to find out whether The Tea Incentive worked, so she didn't compare it with anything else. But if I was finding it in a paper from 2013, then clearly her idea must have caught on...

The next study I can find that adopted The Tea Incentive is reported in Brennan et al's 1998 paper 'The tea bag experiment: more evidence on incentives in mail surveys'. Unfortunately I don't have a subscription to the International Journal of Market Research, and the paper doesn't seem to be available for single purchase. However, the article abstract does tell us the following:

'This paper reports the results of a study which compared the effectiveness of a tea bag and a $1 coin as prepaid incentives in a mail survey of the general public. The tea bag had no effect on response rate but the dollar coin produced a significant increase in response of more than 7%, confiming the efficacy of this type of incentive.'

Is this the end for The Tea Incentive? Did O'Connor et al waste their time and their tea in their recent paper? Was Professor Harzing's pleasure package misbrewed?

Not so fast. Another paper by one of the authors of the Brennan et al paper - Gendall et al's 1998 'The effect of prepaid non-monetary incentives in mail surveys' - examined the use of tea bags, postage stamps, and small and large chocolate coins as survey incentives. They were obviously aware of the results of the Brennan et al paper, but said of their own study:

'However, these particular tea bags were of high quality and very attractive, as well as being convenient to use.'

One wonders what shabby, impossible-to-access tea bags were used in the Brennan et al paper.

Anyway, Gendall et al found that the stamps and small chocolate coins increased the response rate by around 4-5% relative to control, whereas the large coins and the very attractive tea bags had no effect. And only the small coins were cost-effective.

Foiled again?

Perhaps not: it turns out that the failure of the tea bags may have been purely the fault of men over the age of 55. Gendall et al don't go into statistical specifics, but they do say:

'Among respondents under 55, tea bags were the second most effective incentive after the gold coins but, as a result of the poor response to this incentive among older males, the tea bag treatment actually performed worse than the control among respondents over 55.'

Let me repeat that: 'the tea bag treatment actually performed worse than the control among [male] respondents over 55.'

What is it about tea bags that angers older males?!

Wait, perhaps I'm being too hasty. Perhaps the older males got so excited and distracted by the lovely free tea that they forgot all about the survey? Or perhaps a lot of them got chocolate from, say, some tea-dipped choccy digestives all over their fingers and then all over the survey, and then felt too embarrassed to return the survey all covered with gooey smudges?

Whatever the explanation for this age-and-gender anomaly, the overall picture now seems clear: everyone except perhaps men over 55 loves to get a free tea bag in the mail. Of course they do!

Strangely, all of these studies were conducted by Antipodeans (from a British perspective) - not the first people I think of when I think of tea drinkers.

Well, that's that. Someone put the kettle on - I think I hear the postman calling...



O'Connor M, Hewitt LY, Tuffin PH (2013) Community Pharmacists' Attitudes Toward Palliative Care: An Australian Nationwide Survey. J Palliat Med [Epub ahead of print] doi:10.1089/jpm.2013.0171.