I joined Twitter today, as there's so much buzz about this. So selected a few feeds to follow, but I don't get it. Do I really want to know that Stephen fry has "rebooted the iPhone with v3.0 on. I'm sure it's a beta issue, seems ok again now. But went from 5% to 4% while charging". There must be more to this, but I can't see it yet.
I discovered Spotify a while ago - one of the new breed of legal music internet sites. You get to choose your own playlist and listen online - but no downloads available. Reading Sean Adams in the Sunday Times this week, he described the experience with online music sites - everything is available, so what do you choose?
Spotify doesn't quite offer everything yet, but its coverage is growing daily. Pandora used to offer a solution to this (before it limited its coverage to USA only) - the Music Genome Project. This fantastic project is seeking to categorise all music tracks to make it easy to automatically find music similar to tracks you know. While Pandora was available in the UK, I found some great new music by artists I had never heard of, just based on choosing a few of my favourite bands.
Now I have discovered last.fm, which goes some way to filling the void left by Pandora. last.fm will take a list of artists or sync up with the tracks you have been playing in iTunes etc, to find new music similar to the tracks you have chosen. And you can refine the selection by choosing the music you like or hate as it plays. It's close, but not quite the full nine yards ...
Unlike Pandora, the selections are purely based on comparisons with the music other people are playing. So, my selection makes me similar to a number of others, and I get recommended their music. This doesn't have the same power of search that the Music Genome Project had, in identifying all sorts of obscure tracks. Or maybe that's just my obscure music tastes! I don't really need to know that "Richard & Linda Thompson" has super-similarity with Richard Thompson - I want to find some similar music that would otherwie escape me. Perhaps we need the Muxic Genome transgenic project to use this data in other music systems.
I have been listening to More or Less for some time, one of the few programmes that challenges the use and abuse of statistics in politics and media. I tend to listen to the podcasts, so I have only just caught up with some of the broadcasts from January, and I'm joining a debate that has already run a number of rounds.
In a discussion of the current crisis in banking and bankers' bonuses, there was a claim that bankers are better rewarded by following the same strategy as everyone else in the bank, rather than trying to be different. The logic suggests that if one banker follows an alternative strategy (as described in the show), then he will be more successful than others (perhaps) 75% of the time and less successful 25% of the time. Assuming that the "normal" strategy is followed by all other bankers and this is successful only 50% of the time, then the alternative strategy will be less successful overall, as he will only generate personal success 75% of the times when the bank is successful overall (rather than 100% following the "normal" strategy).
But it struck me that this analysis is only looking at one aspect of the probability - the correlation between individual success and overall success. And, while it is true that the alternative strategy will only be partially correlated with bank success, while the normal strategy will be fully correlated with overall bank success, you also need to consider the quantity of bonus paid.
Claiming greater success for the "normal" strategy assumes that the same bonus is paid to all successful bankers when the bank does well – it does not account for the differential bonus that the most successful bankers will earn. For example, if the most successful banker earns twice the bonus of the others, then the alternative strategy will generate 50% more bonus on average.
The value of the alternative strategy depends on the level of extra bonus for the most successful people. At 1.33 (= 1/(75%)) times the average, the alternative strategy is equal to the other strategy, but for any more bonus, the alternative strategy is clearly superior. I have modelled this in a spreadsheet.
So the suggestion from the show is incorrect - there is an incentive for bankers to break from the "normal" strategy. The challenge for the banks is how much to reward the most successful with bonuses to encourage alternative strategies ... which seems to have been the cause of the problem as well ...
Apologies if this makes little sense - you probably need to hear the show to understand the argument. I have submitted this post to the radio show team for comment - we'll see what they make of it.
Can you have a regional world cup? The unrecognised regions of current states appear to think so - I read about the Viva World Cup in this week's Sunday Times' report of the defeat of Occitania by Samiland. Having failed to win the Viva world cup on home ground in 2006, Occitania declined to enter the 2008 finals in Sápmi (the indigenous area of northern Scandinavia we used to call Lapland).
With a total of twelve teams registering interest in the 2008 finals, seven were elimated by inability to find funding or sufficient players for the trip to Sápmi, and the hotly contested finals saw Padania (northern Italy) defeat Arameans Suryoye. Such is the success of this competition, that the Viva World Cup has now become an annual event, with the 2009 competition due to take place in Padania, then 2010 in Gozo and 2011 in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The cup is organised by N.F. Board (standing for New football, Nouvelle Fédération or Not FIFA, depending on who you ask). With a dozen European proto-nations claiming membership, the UK is poorly represented solely by Sealand, which has so far failed to produce a team for any competitive football match. After recent calamities in the various national teams' performances (rugby, cricket and soccer), surely this must be an opportunity for British football. With ten or so professional football clubs in the west of England now (depending on how you define that), and the area's history as an independent nation (pre-927), Wessex has a great claim to nation status and a fantastic opportunity to win the Viva World Cup for (or in spite of) the UK.
Holiday in France again, staying near one of the most beautiful castles at Chambourd. Swimming, wine and catching up the reading. Photos on picassa ... click the pic! 
Holiday reading included Birds without Wings
Hmm, offline for a long time, but I have been active in other areas. It has proved too difficult to keep information synchronised on this site, Facebook and Amazon, so all book reviews are now only on Amazon. Check out my book reviews on Amazon
