Numerical value of ādonāt knowā
OUR item on impossible instructions in an online questionnaire for those who wanted to join the UK retail organisation The Cooperative (27 October) reminded John Gledhill of his struggles to answer the customer questionnaire on the photo-sharing website Photobucket.
One of the questions asked him to rank in order of preference ways of uploading images onto Photobucket, such as āfrom my mobileā, āfrom my PCā or āfrom Facebookā. You could rank each from 1 to 7 or put in ādonāt knowā. John duly put a ā1ā against āfrom my PCā, the only one he used, and put ādonāt knowā for all the rest.
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The questionnaire refused to let him do this. āYou cannot use the same ranking for more than one item,ā it told him sternly.
John hadnāt realised ādonāt knowā was a ranking. Where, he wondered does it fit into the continuum of ordinals? But he wanted to complete the questionnaire, so he left one ādonāt knowā in and arbitrarily re-ranked all the remaining answers from 3 to 7. This, he says, made the questionnaire āvery happyā.
He did point out in the final āAny other commentsā box that his answers to the question were meaningless, apart from the one ranked ā1ā and the single remaining ādonāt knowā. He suggested that they might wish to redesign the question.
āNo doubt they wonāt,ā he says, āand their analysts will dutifully feed my rankings into a spreadsheet and work out some meaningless average from it.ā
We can only hope that Photobucket wonāt be using statistics obtained in this way to determine its future strategies.
Domino sugar, according to the bag Alison Gibson picked up in Newtown, Pennsylvania, is ācarbon-freeā. So whatās left ā water?
THE headline on a recent press release raised Feedbackās eyebrows: āNaked Scientists Axed by BBC East.ā
Our eyebrows rose even further on reading this statement lower down the page: āā¦And Feedbackās postbag has been brimming over with messages of alarmā¦ā
It turns out the headline refers to the decision by the BBCās eastern region to its award-winning science programme The Naked Scientists after 10 years on air.
The press release was put out by The Naked Scientists team (). It calls for support for the programme and notes that its campaign, initiated on its Facebook page, has already garnered a flood of messages of support- including those messages of āalarmā sent not to us but to the BBC Radio 4 Feedback programme.
Apparently, BBC Eastās bosses donāt think The Naked Scientists fulfils the BBCās remit for local radio. Listeners campaigning to save the programme clearly disagree.
YOU may remember that there was an election in the US- how long ago it seems now! You may remember a statistician called Nate Silver, whose blog was taken up by and who accurately predicted the electoral college result in each state. You may remember howls of pre-emptive protest from those who wanted Mitt Romney to win. You may even remember Mitt Romney.
Among those howls of protest were complaints by, for example, conservative pundit Dean Chambers that and therefore must be wrong. So hereās a tip for statisticians: if you want to be taken seriously, eat more, cycle less and, if youāve got one, lose the moustache ā you know what they say about those. (We discard as an outlier the possibility- which we suspect would be equally unacceptable to Silverās detractors- that statisticians may be female.)
You might even contemplate some research on the correlation between appearance and acceptance using, er, statistics.
Fruitloopery in the garden centre
AT THE Summerhill Garden Centre in Basildon, Essex, UK, a cactus caught the eye of Freddy Heppell. The name alone was enough to attract his attention: a card on a stick announced that it was a āComputer Cactusā.
Freddy turned the card over and discovered the promise: āI protect you and your loved ones from radiation and full of oxygen your home.ā
Beginning to suspect that the people marketing this cactus might be adherents of a strange philosophy (known to Feedback as āfruitloopā), Freddy read on. Under the heading āPRODUCEā, he found the words āOxygen, Welfare, Lifeā. Under āREDUCEā, he found āNegative charges, radiation, magnetic wavesā. The text was summed up by the slogan āLife without radiationā. All that from a cactus!
Despite his scepticism, Freddy bought one. āIt doesnāt work,ā he reports.
FINALLY, Tim Hallās Facebook timeline told him, āTim Hall is at Aviemore and one other place.ā
Tim says he has no idea where the other place is and he doesnāt want to check in case the uncertainty collapses and he suddenly finds himself there.
