funfair mirror trees

One of the trees in our garden has died.  It died last summer in the drought, but we gave it a year to prove to us it really was dead.  It is.  So we need to replace it.

I was wandering around the web, looking for trees, when I saw a picture of the type we wanted.  The page also included a helpful impression of its mature size.

6m high, 8m spread: too slim

And a very impressionistic impression it is too.  This graphic of a slim-looking tree is labelled as being 6m high, with an 8m spread.  It's actually broader than it is high! 

So I had a look at a few other tree graphics on the site.

10m high, 10m spread: too slim

20m high, 10m spread: too wide

It's the exact same graphic every time, with not a single one of them using the same scale for the height and spread!  Only the "human figure for scale" and the labels change.  Why go to the effort of including a graphic to show the mature tree size, then not bother to do it right?

The pictures should look something more like this:

height/spread ratios just right

Now it's clear we shouldn't plant our new tree too close to the fence.

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It truly is an excellent paper

A few days ago I received the following email (details redacted to protect the guilty):

This is from the editorial board office of Journal of [Totally Unrelated to My Research (TUMR). TUMR] is a peer-reviewed international research journal, devoted to supporting a global exchange of knowledge of [TUMR].
We found a paper you had published in “Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)”.
Title: An architecture for modelling emergence in CA-like systems
Author(s): Stepney Susan
It truly is an excellent paper that relates quite nicely to our journal.
To promote the communications of [TUMR] and broaden our journal’s global perspective, we cordially invite you to submit new research manuscripts to our journal before Nov. 29, 2012.
You can enjoy a registration discount if your paper is accepted.

The paper in question does exist. It is totally unrelated to the remit of the journal, however.

There are two big red flags in the email that there is something phishy.

First, no-one in the know says a paper has been

published in “Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)”

That rather unwieldy title is used only on the LNCS publisher Springer's website, from where I suspect it was copied verbatim.

Second, the claim that the paper "relates quite nicely to our journal" is not true, as could be spotted by glancing at the paper's content for a split second.

No-one did glance at it, however. This is just computer generated spam. I know what journal TUMR really is, so I can guess a crude bit of keyword matching glommed on to the word "architecture" or "engineering" in the abstract. These terms are used in the paper in a completely different context from that of TUMR.  Clearly the paper was found by a mindless web trawl.

The key phrase that flags what is really going on here is near the end of the email: "registration discount". TUMR is an Open Access journal, which means you have to pay to publish.  They are trying to flatter me into thinking that they like my work, in order to convince me that I should pay to publish in their journal.  Since they have clearly never even read my work, however, the result is not my feeling sufficiently flattered to publish, but sufficiently aggravated to blog. 

This approach is a distant cousin of the classic perfect prediction scam.  Spam a large population with a range of information (the classic example is stock market predictions).  It will be false for most targets, who will just bin it.  But, by chance alone, it will be true for some, who, not realising the extent of the scam, and the vast number of false hits, will be convinced by the truth of the claim in their case.  Here it is true for those few targets who will, by chance alone, have "an excellent paper that relates quite nicely to our journal".  The implication is that you have been carefully selected.  The actuality is somewhat different.

This is the first time I've seen the scam used in this way.  But I'm sure it won't be the last...

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still addicted

Yesterday I downloaded "Spooky Box", another new level for Cut the Rope.

Today I completed it, achieving another (temporary, until everyone else catches up) second place.

  I have been doing a few other things as well...

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better use seaweed

As Neils Bohr is alleged to have said, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”.

My smartphone has a weather app on it that gives a forecast of the next six days. I glance at it occasionally, but in September, we had our annual “Away Day” at work, which has a significant outdoor component. So I was watching the forecast quite carefully. It said it was going to be sunny. Great! Next day it was predicting cloud, then it changed back to sun, then to rain. Umm. Well, on the day it was fine, fortunately.

But all that made me a bit suspicious of the app. I know longer range forecasts are essentially useless, with the weather being a chaotic system, but I thought 4 or 5 days out was now in the bounds of possibility. So I’ve been keeping data from my app for the last month or so.

click to see the icons

Each strip of 6 icons represents the forecast for a given day: the item near the top the forecast six days in the future, the one at the bottom from just the day before. There’s a lot of variation.

Here’s a graph summarising the data.

click to see the scales

 For each day I’ve summarised the six icon strip with three numbers

1. #symbols (light green): the number of different forecasts given over the six days: a consistent forecast would use one symbol, with more symbols showing greater indecision. Over the 32 days of data collection, it managed the perfect “one symbol” 4 times (12.5%). 
2. #changes (mid green): the number of times the forecast changed its mind. This minimum possible value is #symbols – 1; a higher figure indicates vacillation. 
3. end game (dark green): the number of days the final symbol stayed constant. The maximum possible is six: a perfect six day forecast (managed 12.5% of the time); the least reliable is one day (managed 15 times, or 47% of the time.) 

Not very impressive. The same app also gives minimum and maximum temperature estimates, with similar meanderings.

I think I’ll go back to the trusty classic “Seaweed dry, sunny sky. Seaweed wet, rain you'll get.” We can add more states, with the well-known joke: “Seaweed gone: wind so strong!” And to bring it fully up to date we simply add: “raining seaweed, weird indeed”. 

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thank you for travelling

In the Good Old Days you travelled as a passenger on a British Rail train, and that was that. (These Good Old Days to which I refer were, of course, after the original Golden Age of Rail Travel.)

Then BR was privatised, and suddenly we were all "customers" of a variety of different franchises. Signs sprouted in stations, saying "Thank you for Choosing to Travel with XYZ franchise", as if we actually had any choice in the matter.  Franchises are mostly geographical with little overlap (except for a few main lines), so if I want to go from Cambridge to London, say, I don't exactly have a vast array of rail operators to choose from.

Anyhow, franchises don't last for ever, which leads to continual repainting of rolling stock in their new liveries, and a continual need to change those "thank you" signs to the new franchise name.  Evidently they got fed up with all that palaver at my local station, which has resulted in a sign that was mildly irritating becoming simply ridiculous.

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spring is late this year

Although autumn is early this year, it seems spring is late.

We chase the ducks off our garden pond, because we don't want them breeding.  We are surrounded by houses, and this is not a good environment to raise a brood of ducklings.

Despite our best efforts, we often get a batch each year.  This year, we thought we'd got away with it.  Then, this morning, I opened the curtains only to see, basking in the cool autumnal sunlight:

Not a sight I'm accustomed to seeing in the middle of October!  I suspect that it is much too late in the year for these little guys to have much hope of survival.  But we are no longer scaring this particular duck away.

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calling at...

Just as a train leaves a station, there is an announcment of where it is calling.  I suppose the announcement occurs at this point, rather than the more helpful just before the train leaves, to stop all the people who are on the wrong train piling off, and delaying it.

I was recently at a meeting in Bristol.  Returning to York, I boarded the Dundee service at Bristol Parkway.  As we left the station, there was a slight variation on the standard announcement

This service is the departure for Dundee, calling at ... just about everywhere you can think of.

causing much hilarity amongst the passengers.

I sympathise with the announcer.  The service was calling at: Cheltenham Spa, Birmingham New Street, Burton-on-Trent, Derby, Chesterfield, Sheffield, Wakefield Westgate, Leeds, York (yay!), Darlington, Durham, Newcastle, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Dunbar, Edinburgh, Haymarket, Inverkeithing, Markinch, Ladybank, Cupar, Leuchars, and Dundee. Phew! We would have been nearly at the next stop before the announcement was over!

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