tl;dr

A few random pics from the Comtex night out, 20th Feb 2009.

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Personal, Photos

I’m watching a meme get passed across various blogs (sniffyjenkins, secretdark, mayafish) linking to a website using pseudoscience hokum called “Colorgenics” to deduce personality traits based on which order you click some coloured cubes in.

Guys, this is nothing but the Forer effect. In 1948, a psychologist called Bertram R. Forer gave a class of his students a test and at the end gave them a tailored writeup of their psychological profile, asking them to rate it on a scale of 0-5 (with 5 being totally accurate). The average score was 4.26. Only afterward did he reveal that he had ignored the test results and given each member of the class the exact same profile, made up of empty statements culled from horoscope readings.

Let’s examine some of the Colorgenics results. Usefully, the URL of a test result set looks like this:

http://www.goldinuniverse.com/showprofile.asp?id=1/7/3/0/2/4/5/6/&name=PT%20Barnum

The numbers correspond to the order you clicked the coloured boxes in, so you can swap them around and quickly see the results of lots of different profiles. If you do so, you’ll quickly see the same paragraphs recurring. For example, 1/7/3/0/2/4/5/6 and 1/4/3/0/2/7/5/6 and 6/4/3/0/2/7/5/1/ are very different sets of answers, but they all say:

Being impulsive and irritable, your desires and needs are paramount. You do things with insufficient thought – with little regard to the consequences that may follow. As a consequence of this attitude, you may be experiencing stress and conflict.

This is classic Forer effect. It feels personal because it claims to have perceived a character flaw — “impulsive and irritable” — that you would like to keep hidden. But who can say that they haven’t, at some point in the recent history, acted impulsively or been irritable? It’s actually a universal truth. “You do things with insufficient thought with little regard to the consequences that may follow” is just “impulsive” written out again, with the extra wordiness acting to stress the point and lend the text an air of academic certainty. “[Y]ou may be experiencing stress and conflict” is another universal truth for pretty much anyone in the world. Even Tom Hanks alone on that island in Castaway was experiencing stress.

1/4/3/0/2/7/5/6 and 6/2/3/0/4/7/5/1 both finish with the paragraph

You would like to be respected and valued for yourself and this can only be achieved from within a close and harmonious relationship.

Again, if you consider this in isolation, it’s simply universally true of everyone. Everyone wants to be respected, and everyone fears that they aren’t. Everyone would like a close and harmonious relationship. Taken in isolation, these are simply pat truisms, not the dazzling insights they are presented as. I wouldn’t mind so much if the website was presented as a bit of fun, but dressed in all this hippy bullshit and selling something that sounds awfully like a pyramid scheme really gets my blood boiling.

If you’d like to know more, I highly recommend the excellent Richard Dawkins interviews Derren Brown YouTube videos. They discuss the Forer effect extensively, as Brown has used it as the cornerstone of several of his tricks.

Science

On Thursday I had sashimi for lunch.

I did not enjoy it, sadly. I haven’t eaten sashimi since an… incident… in 2004 that I am about to relate for you. Sadly, it seems I still cannot eat it, and hence perhaps this delicacy is lost to me forever.

How bad must an event be to cause such trauma? Read on.

In 2004 I presented a paper entitled The design, modeling and optimization of channel allocations for frequency hopping at the 4th IASTED international multi-conference on wireless and optical communications. Yes, really.  A quick ProTip: don’t ever fly across seven timezones for five days, sleep fans. If you study my pics you’ll come away with the idea that Banff has no people in it — because most of them were taken at 5am as I wandered the streets, wide awake and totally jetlagged.

Early in my stay, I and some of my colleagues ate out at a rather good Japanese restaurant, which was the first time I’d eaten any Japanese food more authentic than a Boots meal deal (I was complemented on my pronunciation though, having learnt some Japanese a few years beforehand; like a true tourist rube this made me feel very special). We returned there on our last night. Heartened by the first night, I got a bit more adventurous with the menu, and ordered a lot of different sashimi. And a lot of sake.

I liked most of the food, though I wasn’t so keen on some bits; the eel wasn’t that nice, and I particularly didn’t care for cod roe. For those who have never eaten it, this is a glistening sack of mucous that initially tastes of nothing in the mouth until you burst it. Then your find the oils inside, which taste so strongly of fish that the flavour is all the way past fish and into some strange æthereal realm of its own. More sake. I ate quite a bit of the roe, trying to decide if I liked it or not.

And some more sake. You may think you see where this is going, but believe me, it’s worse than you think.

I was stinkingly drunk by now so, naturally, we went to a bar, where I drank some silly amount of excellent Canadian single malt whisky. When we came out from the bar, I was having trouble seeing; I can remember standing on the street corner outside the door but that is the only memory I have for hours before or after that point. My ever-sympathetic colleagues asked me “where is your hotel?” and I apparently pointed in vaguely the right direction; this was enough for them to send me on my way. Bastards. Somehow, I beat the odds and made it to bed.

Now with the preamble done and the scene set; my story can start in earnest.

I wake up with the cold sweats around 6am, still dressed, with the worst hangover I have ever had. I lie very very still, trying to calm my nausea… and I burp fish. I rush to the toilet and am violently sick. I spend an hour or so very, very slowly packing, being sick a few more times and trying to keep some water down. I check out of the hotel and walk halfway into the town before collapsing onto a kerb where I sit for three hours with my head on my knees. Half a dozen friendly Canadians ask, annoyingly chirpily, if I need medical attention.

Eventually I trek back to my hotel where my transport awaits. I pass the next three hours on a crowded shuttle bus slowly winding through the Rockies. All the way, I taste fish.

At Calgary airport, I wait for two hours, then get on a plane. Next to me is someone else from the conference, an incredibly enthusiastic grad student at Cambridge doing something interesting with MIMO aerials. I can taste fish. The flight is ten hours. I manage, somehow, to keep the vomit down and some semblance of conversation with the guy. We talk about his life in Africa before he came to Cambridge on a student grant. I can taste fish.

Somewhere over Iceland, they serve a soggy, greasy airline croissant with cheese and bacon in it. It’s the first thing in 20 hours that hasn’t tasted of vomit or fish. It’s also the best thing I’ve ever tasted in my life, a Platonic ideal of taste, a plateau of flavour I have sought in vain to replicate since.

I land, and spend the usual hour retriving my luggage. There then follows a three hour train ride with three changes, followed by a taxi, then bed; nearly 7000 miles with the worst hangover of my life, every inch tasting of fish.

And that is why, I can now confirm, sashimi is still dead to me five years later.

Personal

Goozex is a new website — well, new to the UK anyway — offering online game trading service. So far, I’ve managed a two-for-one swap from it (I’ve traded in Gran Turismo 5: Prologue for the PS3 and received Dead Rising and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for 360, all for the sweet, sweet cost of £free).

EDIT: (adding this 28th April) — my initial good impressions have been reinforced. So far, I’ve disposed of a dozen older Xbox1, PS2, and Gamecube games through Goozex, and received several much newer Xbox360 and PS3 titles instead. I’m definitely impressed with this service. You get a much better deal than you would trading games in on the high street.

I recommend you check this out with all due haste. Here’s how it works.

You go on the site and register all the games you might want to get rid of, and all the games you want. You’re put into a queue and every game has a points value. The site constantly works to match games people want to trade with games people want, and every game you are looking for with people looking to trade games. When it finds a match, the point value of the game is deducted from the buyer’s account, added to the seller’s account, and the seller is given the address of the buyer. The seller bungs it in the post, and (hopefully soon) can use his points to buy a different game from someone else.

Goozex take a small fee (€1) from the seller for each transaction, but apart from that the only costs are your postage fees. As such, it seems to offer considerably better value than selling games on Ebay or trading them in at a high street store. All transactions are guaranteed by Goozex, so you are insured against games that don’t arrive and suchlike.

If you’re a gamer, I strongly encourage you to sign up and take a look. You will get one free game purchase and 100 points just for signing up, which is enough to buy any one of a number of older games for free.

(Disclosure: that’s a referral link and I will get a small number of points from Goozex when your first trade goes through. This doesn’t cost you anything, though.)

Games

One pound of smoked bacon, minced, formed into a patty, stuffed with mozzerlla, beer-battered and deep-fried: good grief. I have my doubts that it would be too salty… perhaps better made with a mix of smoked and unsmoked bacon. His battered jalapeños look very nice too.

(Thanks to Craig for the link, who has no blog for me to link to.)

Bacon, Food

Twitter today went nuclear under the weight of a little hack dubbed the “don’t click” attack:

For a better description of how the attack worked than I could hope to write, I recommend you read Daniel Sandler’s page or Mack Staples’s writeup, both of which are excellent.

In brief, though, it was a tiny, simple web page with a button labelled “Don’t Click!”; hidden from the user, but overlaid with that website, was the Twitter homepage, with a tweet pre-loaded containing the text “Don’t Click http://tinyurl.com/aaaaa”. If the user clicked the “Don’t Click!” button, the browser sent the click to the Twitter homepage instead, which would post a tweet from the user. The tinyurl.com address leads back to the “Don’t Click!” button page. In this manner, it spreads from one user to another much like a virus.

How it worked was pretty simple; what interested me was finding the source of the hack, so I pounded on the advanced search in Twitter.com for a while. The earliest use of it in English I could find was from user @sfnick and dated 10:03 am on the 11th of February, showing that this attack spread rapidly once it was translated into English. However, digging further showed that this has been spreading around in French-language tweets for several weeks — with the prefix text “Le Truc du Jour”.

Searching Twitter for that phrase turned up a different tinyurl.com address, presumably leading to a similar attack page (although it has been disabled now so I cannot check). Tracing that different tinyurl.com further back in time eventually led me to this search which shows where the attack came from:

I contend that the user @umoor is where this attack came from, firstly, because he has the first three tweets in Twitter’s search index with the string and secondly, because the attack is hosted on the domain “umoor.eu”. All three of those tweets have been deleted from his history — I believe this was him testing the functionality of the exploit.

Amazingly, within minutes, the attack had spread to four more users — none of whom seem to follow @umoor. I would like to know what attack vector the URL was delivered by; it’s possible that they were all following @umoor at the time. If I worked for Twitter now, I’d be making some graphs of how this exploit spread from person to person — there is some fascinating research there.

@umoor, however, didn’t write the exploit. The exploit was detailed in theoretical form in a blog post by James Padolsey on Jan 20th, ten days before the search results from @umoor. Comparing the source code of James Padolsey’s example and @umoor’s in-the-wild hack show they are largely identical in details such as the ordering of CSS elements and HTML indentation, strongly suggesting that @umoor essentially cut-and-pasted Padolsey’s example.

On the left, the exploit source code from umoor.eu; on the right, Padolsey's example. Click to enlarge.

Additionally, at the bottom of his exploit page, @umoor links to (and credits) this page on the French-language site korben.info, which contains source code identical to that used in @umoor’s page. It’s not clear whether the information went from Padolsey->Korben->umoor, or if @umoor is involved in the Korben page is some way. (Edit — see the comment below from Korben himself, which confirms that my first explanation was correct).

Either way, @umoor doesn’t deserve any credit for figuring out the attack, and should probably be criticised for making a large number of people panic that their Twitter account had been hacked.

Tech

You couldn’t make this up. Unless you are Andrew Wakefield of course. The Times reports:

THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.

However, our investigation, confirmed by evidence presented to the General Medical Council (GMC), reveals that: In most of the 12 cases, the children’s ailments as described in The Lancet were different from their hospital and GP records. Although the research paper claimed that problems came on within days of the jab, in only one case did medical records suggest this was true, and in many of the cases medical concerns had been raised before the children were vaccinated. Hospital pathologists, looking for inflammatory bowel disease, reported in the majority of cases that the gut was normal. This was then reviewed and the Lancet paper showed them as abnormal.

How serious was the impact this paper had? “Rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%”, notes the Times. The BBC also shows us with this chilling graphic:

Let’s not mince words. If these allegations are true, then it means Andrew Wakefield made stuff up, and children suffered and  — in two cases — died as a result. He should be struck off and face criminal charges.

Our nation, in which 29% of teachers believe Creationism should be taught in schools, needs to take a long, hard look at the appalling understanding of science amongst the general populace, and how vulnerable this makes them to manipulative snake-oil salesmen. Or to put it another way, as the awesome MissPrism said on her blog whilst writing about the legal troubles faced by Dr Ben Goldacre, “babies are not epidemiology qualifications“.

Edit — Richie has pointed me to an excellent post by Ben Goldacre, “The Media MMR Hoax“, where he analyses in much more detail how the public outcry started, and who started and propagated it.

Science

The cloud formations as I walked the dogs this morning were stunningly pretty. Sadly I didn’t have a real camera with me, so you’ll have to make do with an iPhone snapshot instead.

Personal, Photos

Oh my.

• two pounds of bacon, woven
• two pounds of sausage meat
• wrap bacon around sausage meat, roll into a sausage
• roast
• roll out a large sheet of croissant dough
• cover in scrambled egg
• cover in cheese
• place the bacon/meat… thing… in the center of the dough and roll up
• cook

The unholy result is the Bacon Wellington:

Edit from two hours later — god, this is making my hungry. This is the first one of these “stupid bacon creations” I’ve considered making. It’s the delicious looking croissant dough that keeps drawing me back.

Bacon, Food

@millarca pointed me to TweetStats, a site that can crunch your total Twitter history for statistical information. It can do bar graphs of when you post to Twitter (here’s mine) and a word cloud (here’s mine), but the cloud isn’t very pretty. Fortunately, they provide a link to transmits the raw text to Wordle, which made the picture you see above.

Seeing “New Blog Post” in such big letters there has encouraged me to decouple my blog and Twitter. Since I’ve started enjoying Twitter more for it’s own sake, I don’t want those notifications cluttering up my Twitter stream (which is already full enough of the crap I write), when they can be just as easily delivered to people who want to track my blog over RSS. Removing those words from the Wordle diagram gives (I claim) a more interesting picture:

Personal