Brian Clegg's Blog, page 67

Would you trust TrustPilot?

 The other day, for complicated reasons, we got locked out of our house. Knowing it would be a bit of a rip-off, but needing help, we phoned a company with the website mylocksmithinswindon.co.uk on a Swindon number. They answered quickly and I agreed to go with a pretty hefty hourly rate, but no call-out charge. As it turned out, this 'local' firm appeared to be based in Birmingham, but they promised me the locksmith would arrive within the hour.

It was a nice sunny day and we didn't mind sitting out in the garden for the 2 hours it actually took. The person who came did a great job and got us inside in under 10 minutes. So a mixed effort, especially when the bill came and it turned out that the price quoted was without VAT, which I thought was illegal, or at least highly dubious, for a consumer quote.

Shortly after I got an email asking to review them on something called trustpilot.co.uk, which I thought was worthwhile. I gave them 3 stars out of five, pointing out the delay and the unexpected VAT, but balancing it with the good service.

A couple of weeks later, I got an email from trustpilot telling me that they needed me to scan my invoice to prove I was a customer before they would show my review. I couldn't be bothered, didn't know where the invoice was and anyway didn't want to reveal to TrustPilot some of the information on what should be a confidential document. I told them they weren't a proper review site if they put hurdles in the way of negative reviews like this. What's interesting is if you look at the review page for the company in question (which turns out to really be called rightio.co.uk) almost all the reviews are positive, but occasionally (before they delete them) you will see ones like mine which don't show the review but look like this:


So what it looks like is if you go to TrustPilot you will see overwhelmingly positive reviews, because as soon as someone posts a negative review the company can query it and TrustPilot puts ridiculous obstacles in the way of allowing a negative review through. Would you trust TrustPilot?

Mystery madness

For years I've struggled with finding a robust mechanism to make it possible to download ebooks from my website. Finally I've got something working*, and to celebrate this (and help parents get through the school holidays), I've reduced my ebook Organizing a Murder from £9.99 to £2.99 until the end of August.

This all started many years ago when I helped run a youth group. One of my contributions was to script mystery evenings where the young people had to solve murders or undertake treasure hunts. There were those 'murder mystery party' kits you could buy, but they were very expensive, and they involved role play for a specific number of players. I needed something without the complexity of role play and that could be played as an individual or teams.

Some of the mysteries/treasure hunts have found their way into this ebook - others were written specially for it. It was a pleasure to put together - very different from writing popular science.

There's a whole range in there (12 in all), some suitable for kids, others requiring adult levels of working out. They've been used in parties, dinner parties, team building exercises for business or just to kill a couple of hours when the kids are getting irritating. I've never been able to put the ebook on Kindle, because a requirement is that you can print out the pages, as there are clues, evidence and all sorts of bits and pieces in each mystery which are distributed around the location before the event to give a treasure hunt aspect, as well as the usual deduction.

You can find Organizing a Murder here on my newly expanded 'fiction' section on my website. These are some comments I've had from people who've bought it:

”This is a great book! I've used it to organise several kids parties and they loved it!” - Katherine Kelly, author of Red Rock"Plenty of choice, great to keep everyone occupied - thanks very much.""Great product!""Fantastically clearly set out and very easy to absorb. I'm really getting ahead with [the party] now, thanks to you!""Many thanks - delighted!""Wonderful, entertaining product.""Easy to use, great resource for all ages.""Wonderful book - many great ideas."* For those technically inclined who want to know how I'm doing it, my website is built with RapidWeaver. I was already using the PaySnap stack for taking payments, but I've added the RapidLink plugin which handles the downloads. Getting them to work together isn't documented, but is straightforward.

Not even once in a blue moon

I'm reissuing this post from way back in 2009, as the media, including the BBC (which ought to know better) have been going on about there being a blue moon last month. No, there wasn't. See below.
I've seen lots of Twittering over the last few days suggesting that there is going to be a blue moon tonight. Sorry, guys, there isn't.

Take it away Terry Moseley of the Irish Astronomical Association:

There has been a false idea circulating that this will be a 'Blue Moon' because it's the second Full Moon in a month! That erroneous description started when Sky & Telescope magazine wrongly interpreted an old New England Farmer's Almanac as calling the 2nd Full Moon in a month a 'Blue Moon'. They later admitted that they had got it wrong, and published a correction, but not everyone saw the retraction.

A 'Blue Moon' means a very rare and unpredictable event, and it arose after the great Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 blew so much fine volcanic ash into the upper atmosphere that for a while the moon did sometimes appear blue. But that was almost a one-off event, and so the term 'once in a blue moon' means 'hardly ever'. Whereas there are actually two full moons in the same month every few years or so!

So it's not going to be a 'Blue Moon', and in fact if anything, it will appear partly red!

Quick update after some comments on Facebook - I've checked in the OED, and they have a reference to 'blue moon' being used in this way in 1821, so the Krakatoa event isn't the origin of the term. It doesn't change the fact that tonight isn't a blue moon, though. 

Image from Wikipedia

Capital city value eating

I will never make a restaurant critic like my friend Matthew Fort (that's a terrible photo of him on the Guardian page, btw), in part because I have the kind of unsubtle tastes that mean that anything 'smothered in barbecue sauce' attracts my instant attention, but I just wanted to recommend two discoveries of American restaurants in capital cities that are well above the average TGI Friday/Hard Rock Cafe tourist food quality and yet not exorbitant despite being in high end locations.

In London, I have been highly impressed by Joe's Southern Kitchen and Bar in Covent Garden (apparently there is also now one in Kentish Town). Excellent chilli cup and great 'Southern fried bird'. The wings are great too. If you want to be more exotic there's blackened catfish fillet that took me back to New Orleans and an impressive sounding vegetable gumbo (not tried that). The ambiance is murky but fun and the music can be overloud (my 21-year-old daughter said this, so it's not just me being an old fogie), but a great meal right by one of London's top tourist destinations.


In Edinburgh, I ate last week at SYGN. Just off the West End of Princes Street, tucked away in a cobbled courtyard opposite a French restaurant that is straight out of Le Touquet, this is a very design-focussed and fresh environment - absolutely everything is branded. They have a great range of really interesting cocktails (plus some good non-alcoholic stuff: I recommend their homemade ginger beer). Their starters were absolutely outstanding: the best wings I can ever remember having and hand-made nachos with pulled pork that were stunning. It may be because we were so stuffed with these, but we found the mains fine but not quite as remarkable. Still well above average, though. All in all well worth a visit - you even get free use of a ping-pong table.

Neither venue is as cheap as McDonalds or even Five Guys - but comparable with the likes of TGI on price while streets ahead on the food.

Library heresy

Not your typical library
(John Rylands Library, Manchester)Libraries are a touchy subjects amongst us authors, especially at a time when they are endangered. We love our libraries and anyone who suggests closing them risks an authorial tarring and feathering.

Yet there comes a point with any technology and distribution method where there's a danger of clinging onto the past because it's what we grew up with, even if it's not right for the future. And I'm seriously wondering if the time has come to take the same attitude to libraries. Are we like the people who tried to cling on to gas lighting when it was obvious electricity was the way forward?

Let's start with the good things about libraries, particularly for authors:

Those who use libraries also buy more books than the average person - or so conventional wisdom has it. I haven't been able to find any good research to this effect (please let me know if you can point me to it). The closest I have come is this which is a) 3 years old, b) US, c) is a survey, not controlled research, d) says that library users buy on average 3.2 books a month but doesn't put it in context.In countries like the UK authors get a payment called PLR to compensate for library lending (other countries like the US don't).Libraries make books available to those who can't afford to buy them.Libraries are useful places for research/working quietly.Mobile libraries are a useful lifeline for old people in remote locations.On the downside:Fewer and fewer people use libraries.Libraries are not always convenient to get to.Libraries have become too 'everything for everyone' - they seem to have more other things than books these days.Libraries don't have the impact they used to.The majority of library users who borrow books only borrow fiction. Libraries are more about entertainment than education.I really think we ought to start from scratch. To say what we want libraries to do, and how they can best address those needs. It's highly likely that the current library structure is not the answer to addressing those needs. I am not saying we just get rid of libraries, but rather we see if a structure that was designed for a Victorian need could not be re-worked for the twenty-first century.
This would be a task that would take a working group some time, so there's no way I can reproduce the effort required in a blog post. But here's a few of the kind of things I would consider. Amongst the needs:Giving people access to books and getting them used to owning and buying books.Giving people access to information.Giving people somewhere quiet to study and access the internet.Giving old people in remote locations a focal point and access to books.At the moment spending on public libraries in the UK is about £1 billion (see this report). The temptation is always to cut this, especially where local authorities are squeezed and able to do so. This money should be spent effectively, and where possible there should be multiple use facilities, so that there isn't a double spend on infrastructure.
A few thoughts on these. £1 billion sounds a lot, but that's only around £17 per head. So we can't issue everyone with £100 of book tokens each year, much though I would love to. But I do think some of the budget should go to giving people a way to buy books at a discounted rate, because book buying gives the books a much greater personal value than just borrowing - ownership is powerful psychologically. 
Looking beyond access to books, increasingly, the traditional library building may not the best way to provide most of the needs. Perhaps we should get rid of our general purpose library buildings, keeping only specialists like the John Rylands above, re-investing the cash in library services, and finding ways to provide books more directly, plus giving access for information/study needs via other buildings (schools and universities spring to mind, but there are many other opportunities).
The worst possibility, though, is what we have at the moment - trying to prop up the Victorian system as funds reduce and not looking at ways to genuinely transform the library concept. 
I honestly think if the right people could be persuaded to take a step back and look creatively at the problem they could come up with something much better, yet not requiring vast amounts of extra funding. Don't we owe that to the public?

Playing the system

In my experience, people who understand numbers make better cheats than those who don't. Let me explain. I once did some creativity training for a company where certain managers had problems with the company's pay scheme. How much of a pay raise staff members got depended on a performance rating. And within each department, those ratings had to obey a particular normal distribution. However, some of the managers knew that this system would treat their staff unfairly. So they played the system.

They tweaked the ratings here and there so that they could allocate the money they wanted, rather than the amounts the system churned out from its rigid distribution.

All systems are open to a degree of honest playing (as opposed to out-and-out fraud). The most obvious example is tactical voting where individuals don't vote for their preferred candidate but for one who is more likely to keep a hated candidate out.

In their book, When to Rob a Bank , the Freakonomics people play around with the idea of being able to buy as many votes you like in an election (a bit like on X-Factor). They point out the negatives - people with lots of money could strongly influence the election, you could buy someone else's vote etc. - but also some of the positives. However, there's no doubt that the opportunity to a purchase a vote, even if it's a single one, really does open the door to playing the system.

I think that's interesting, because that's effectively what the Labour Party has done for its upcoming leadership election. By just paying £3 to become a 'registered supporter' you get a vote in the election. Usually this would be a little 'so what', but at the moment Jeremy Corbyn is looking as if he could have a chance of winning. Corbyn is an interesting candidate in that he is probably the most likeable individual with a genuine passion for his ideas. Yet if he won the leadership he would pretty much guarantee that Labour would lose the next general election, because his ideas are too radical for the country at large.

This being the case, if Conservative voters understood numbers, they would be signing up in their droves to become registered supporters so they could cast a vote for Corbyn. Just £3 for the opportunity to push the alternative party out of reach of government. Sounds attractive doesn't it? Admittedly they would have swallow their honesty and click Next on the agreement above, but they probably would be able to do that. Rather worryingly, the screen that follows says you are signing up for the chance to choose the Mayoral candidate for London, but I assume that's a technical blip (I've reported it and will let you know how Labour respond).



Of course, this could be really clever gamespersonship on the part of the Labour Party. If this happened they would swell their party funds with cash from Conservatives - if they had some way of knowing that Corbyn won't win the final vote, they too could be playing the system. But assuming that's not the case, Tories - who amongst you is a player?

P.S. I heard after I wrote this that the Daily Telegraph has apparently suggested something similar, but  I was not aware of that at the time of writing.

The plural of anecdote is not data

If scientists had mantras two would stand out:The plural of anecdote is not dataCorrelation is not causalityI'm sorry they're both negative - I'm sure it's not spiritually sound or something, but it does make them very valuable reminders of two key errors that crop up again and again in everyday life, and they are errors that even scientists can be prone to outside their field.
I point this out because I've been semi-swamped on Facebook and Twitter by people, often scientists or with a science background, sending me stories about the way a particular doctor had worked at the weekend, so the government is entirely wrong. (For non-UK readers, there is a spat between the government, who want hospitals to operate the same at weekends as on weekdays, and the medical profession who say things don't need to change.) Spot the error from above?
I'll come back to the weekends business in a moment, but let me illustrate why this is a terrible way of countering an argument. 
Let's say I was running a campaign to get rid of all out of work benefits. (Let's be clear: I don't want to do this, I'm pointing out the flaw in the doctors' campaign approach.) I could make an impassioned video saying that I have never claimed out of work benefits, so they clearly aren't needed. That's ludicrous, right? And equally it's ludicrous to use a video of someone saying 'I'm working at the weekend' to counter the suggestion that hospitals should operate the same way at weekends as they do on weekdays.
No one is suggesting that hospitals don't operate at weekend - but I don't think anyone would disagree that at the moment the weekend operation is pared down. And there are statistical implications from that.
The government has gone about this in an unnecessarily aggressive and stupid way, granted. But the medical profession don't make things better by using an argument with no scientific validity in response.

Research showed...

One of the themes I return to with regularity in Science for Life is the way that the media rarely distinguishes between quality of scientific sources. There is a huge difference between a Cochrane survey of all available research, or a large scale properly controlled trial and the type of 'study' where you choose 12 people who only ever buy Volkswagen Golfs and ask them what's the best family car. Yet the media just churn it all out with equal weight, telling us that 'a study has found...' or 'research shows...' They may give us a hint of a source, but that rarely gives enough information to be sure of the quality.

As a demonstration of this I did a bit of a butterfly on a wheel analysis of a story in today's papers. It tells us what the top ten things are that parents do to embarrass their children - things like dancing and trying to use yoof-speak. And according to my favourite newspaper, this is the result of 'research'.

So let's dig a little deeper. What's the source? According to the paper it is that highly respected research establishment Thorpe Park, the theme park in Surrey. Now in principle it is possible to obtain reasonable quality data at Thorpe Park if the the park undertook the survey properly, although immediately we have a problem because the group of people who attend Thorpe Park are self-selecting and may well not be typical of the population at large.

So how did Thorpe Park undertake the 'research'? Well, they didn't. It wasn't done at Thorpe Park at all - it was a poll taken for Thorpe Park by an online polling company. In a way this is a better situation, because online polling companies can address a wider section of the population, though of course they can only ever interact with people who have access to the internet - a much larger, but still self-selecting group. However, being professionals, pollsters can use statistics to at least try to correct for this.

That assumes, of course, that this was the right kind of poll. There are some online polling companies like YouGov that are pretty hot on getting their sample right and other good things, though even they have their limitations. But there are others who are essentially marketing organizations who are less worried about sampling and data quality and more interested in delivering useful messages for companies to use in their PR. Let's be clear - I am not saying these marketing-oriented pollsters make things up. They definitely don't. They pay out good money to people to take part in their polls. But in the end the aim of their polls is to gain publicity.

Not entirely surprisingly this poll was undertaken by a marketing-oriented pollster. According to its website "Our research enables brands to create unique data-led content – content that can be published and shared across multiple channels with a view to grabbing attention in a busy media landscape." What we don't know is what data the pollsters provided, because someone somewhere is certainly misinterpreting it. The newspaper says that the list of ways it gives for parents to embarrass their children is the 'top ten things' that parents do. This could only be discovered if respondents were given a simple text box and asked to type in the embarrassing things with no prompting. Actually what the poll did was to already decide what the top ten things were and got their respondents to mark those they considered the worst.

So was this 'research' in the scientific sense? Of course not. And I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill. It was just a fun story, put together so Thorpe Park had a reason for getting a press release into the news. But I really think that newspapers should use better language. Don't call something like this 'research' or a 'study'. Call it a fun poll or a straw poll or similar language that makes it clear that this is not real in any sense scientific. Otherwise, when they carry a story about 'research' on climate change or particle physics we might be inclined to be equally dismissive.

What is a fair review?

I've recently had a very mild case of being trolled when someone moaned about a review I wrote of a book called Chilled . Before anyone thinks I got too horrible in my opinion, I ought to point out that I gave the book four stars, was very positive about it and the publisher gave every evidence of being highly pleased with the review. But someone wasn't, as I received this tweet:






If this sounds rather confusing, I had said in my review:

There are comments on both the front and back covers by Tony Hawks. Now, my first inclination was to wonder what a pro skateboarder had to do with the science of cooling. But it turns out that this is Tony Hawks the comedian and raconteur. Ah, well, it's obvious what his connection is. Well, no, it isn't. Apparently he did a TV show and/or book where he went round Ireland with a fridge, and this is the only reason for having him along to give the book a puff. It seems, to say the least, a little tenuous.

A review, recently(Incidentally, I know the pro skateboarder is Tony Hawk, not Tony Hawks, but in my defence, I once briefly reviewed computer games for a living, and one was called Tony Hawk's Pro Skater or some such, so I've always considered it fair game to appear to get them confused. I thought it was, to quote, 'rather a good joke', and I was sorry it wasn't for my critic.)

I thought I'd explain a bit more. And we got into a 'discussion' about whether or not you have the right to say what you want on a review site.

The final riposte from my critic was that the freedom of the internet also allowed him to comment on 'unfair criticism like this.' And this is what got me thinking about what makes for a fair review. Was what I had written unfair criticism? Really?

If I had said something about the book that wasn't true, yes, it would have been unfair. But I honestly don't think the review was unfair - nor was there anything non-factual about my comment (okay, apart from the joke about Tony Hawk).

In the end it comes back to the reality that reviewing is a subjective art - it is a published opinion, not a scientific measurable fact. The review, including the (brief) moan about the puff on the jacket was my opinion. If someone doesn't like it, that's fine. Perhaps they should set up their own review site. But there really is no point arguing with a review simply because someone else doesn't like something you do.

Why do the powers that be hate the self-employed?

If I am honest, my first reaction to seeing this headline was to send it to the only actor I know, the magnificent Roger-Ashton Griffiths as a bit of a laugh. But behind it there is a serious issue. The point the judge was making was that, legally speaking, actors are not employees, but self-employed professionals, and as such are not protected by minimum wage legislation. The same argument would apply to writers, I'm sure.

Of course it's not always possible to apply a minimum wage approach to professional activities. If you look at writing a book and consider the advance as the 'wage', hardly anyone probably earns the minimum wage writing books. But then you can't really assign hours to the activity in the same way you would sitting at a desk at work. (Do I count the half hour I spent drinking my coffee before I got up this morning, thinking about how to re-arrange a chapter?) However, there are plenty of things that self-employed professionals like actors and writers do that are time-based and in those circumstances I see no reason why they shouldn't expect a minimum of the minimum wage out of it. (Please note, BBC*.)

This attitude to the self-employed seems to reflect the larger view of the government and the establishment that the self-employed don't really count. It's over 21 years since I was drawing a salary from a large company. Ever since then I've been paying my taxes and adding to the economy (including a fair amount of export revenue, as, for instance, my books with a US publisher bring money into the country). And yet whenever the government help business, they only target that assistance at businesses than employ more than one person. In fact in the recent budget there has been a significant assault on the income of many people in my position that could mean losing over £2,000 a year.

I really do think it's time they recognise the benefits that the self-employed bring to the country. As the nature of work has been changing over the last 40 years, more people than ever are now self-employed. But the government (and, it seems, judges) live in the past where the only employment was being a 'worker' in a large company. I'd have though the Conservatives more than most parties would recognise the positive contribution self-employment makes to the economy. But it seems we aren't there yet.

* This slightly snide remark is because most of the time the BBC expects me to turn up and do things for free. But I ought to qualify this that when I recently popped over to Oxford to record a short session with a professor of philosophy (the way you do), they did pay. So I forgive them for now.