Random Developments

Two weeks ago, I was introduced to Doctor Who, the classic (and traditionally low-budget) BBC sci-fi series. Yes, that’s right, I had never watched a single episode until now. And I started with the first episode of the new series, being shown now by ABC here in Australia.

I more or less knew what to expect from the series (from reading about it here and there on the net), and was not disappointed: it is very good! My feeling, though, is that you do have to know what to expect in order to like it straight away. Their budget is clearly much higher now than for the old series, and the special effects are definitely very good. Storylines are interesting as well; of the two I watched so far, “The End of the World” (the second one) was better, but both were good.

For those who, like me, are not familiar with the story (and history) of the series, which started in 1963, kuro5hin has published a timeline that makes up for very interesting reading. And I will be keeping an eye on the series from now on. In Australia, it is on ABC at 7:30pm every Saturday; next week’s episode is #3, “The Unquiet Dead”.

Well, it took me nine weeks, but I finally noticed that, if I wanted this little experiment to at least look scientific, there was something missing: a control group. Which, in this case, translates to a “pseudo-strategy” that would select random winners for all games. In this way, I’d be able to compare the results of my simple strategies to blind luck.

Fortunately, this little flaw is easy to fix. I wrote a program to randomly select eight results (”home” or “away”, with a 50-50 chance); ran it a few million times to ensure that I was indeed getting a random spread of results; and then ran it nine times and compared the results retroactively with the first nine rounds of matches. Then I ran it once more to generate results for this week.

The results were… interesting. When compared to the other three strategies, random tipping is achieving at least as many correct guesses as the worst-performing of the others, and is returning more money. Most of this is due to managing to get seven correct results in round 9, where most of those were upsets. So, it would seem that none of the other strategies is that much better, or even as good as, random guessing.

As for this week, we got mixed results: “money” and “home” got five correct guesses each (both had exact the same tips, by the way), and “ladder” and “random” got three each. This was the second week in a row when all three strategies, other than the control group, returned net financial losses.

And here are the numbers:

Links:

• Round 9 (previous)
• Round 11 (next)

Later this month, we’ll have the Oceania club championship, whose winner will then proceed to play in Tokyo in December at the FIFA Club World Championship. This title used to be decided in a single match between the South American and the European champions; I guess FIFA finally noticed that there is soccer in other parts of the world, as well.

The reason I mention it is that there is a fair chance of an Australian team going to Tokyo. The recently created Sydney FC won the national tournament (it was not the national championship, or A-League; that one will start in August) and will play in the Oceania competition; it will face Auckland City (New Zealand), Sobou FC (Papua New Guinea) and AS Pirae (Tahiti) in the first round. I honestly think it will go through and play one of the Asian, North American or African champions on the first round (the European and South American champions start on the second round).

The A-League is a new attempt to ignite interest in soccer in Australia, and qualifying for the world championship would be great for that. Doing well there would be even better (but less likely…).

I’ve attended today a seminar about the history of and the technology behind the new MSN Search. The speakers were Jim Walsh, Development Manager and Hugh Williams, Senior Software Design Engineer of MSN Search.

The first few minutes were mostly about the history of the service; up until 2002, Microsoft didn’t really care about search: the MSN home page had a search box that was only 10 characters wide, and they outsourced the service to Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo!). It was not until early 2003 that they decided to write their own search engine from scratch; they unveiled it in January, 2005.

About the technology, I think one of the interesting bits is that, like Google, they run the service on a large cluster of consumer-grade machines, with reliability created by software (but with the provision that software is also expected to fail every now and then). Unlike Google, however, they run the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003 on all boxes.

They also discussed their spam-prevention techniques for a while, without delving into too much detail. They claim that 15 to 20% of all web pages reached by their crawler are junk or spam (things that no user wants to see listed as search results, in short) and need to be discarded.

And a final interesting point is that approximately 10% of the search queries are misspelled (in the USA; less in some other countries, more in others). They have algorithms for dealing with that and will return results for the correct spelling if there are not enough data for the incorrect one. Very often, though, there are very good results for the misspellings, especially common ones (the example they used was Britney Spears, which is apparently written in many different ways by the users; curiously enough, that was the same example used by the Google engineers who were here last year).

I asked them about plans for indexing non-textual content; the response was that they are working on it, starting with images: their current image search technology is from a third-party and, in their words, “not very good”. Audio and video will come later.

Another disapointing week: four correct guesses for “money”, three for each of the others. There were lots of upsets this week, including Collingwood, who was (and still is) at the bottom of the ladder, beating West Coast, who was (and still is!) at the top. So much so that the average tipper scored 3.5 correct guesses (that is, less than 50%).

Speaking of money, all three returned net losses this week, but “home” still leads in the cumulative results. As a side note, I did some calculations and found out that, by doing exactly the opposite of the “money” strategy (that is, by selecting for each game the team that pays the most) I would have a better financial result that with any of the other strategies. However, this return comes mostly from the last two rounds ($49 out of a total of $51), which were full of upsets; it doesn’t look like a good long-term strategy.

The numbers:

Links:

• Round 8 (previous)
• Round 10 (next)

A long time ago, I wrote that I had found out about Bloglines and that I thought it was a very good RSS reader. I wish to retract that statement.

Since then, I’ve been using Bloglines as my only reader, and I like it: it has a reasonably good interface, it is fast, and it keeps track of blogs all the time, so you don’t miss posts from feeds with frequent updates. All of that is good. However, a few weeks ago it decided to stop updating one of my own feeds (yes, I subscribe to my own blogs). I contacted their support team, and they told me the feed was not valid and pointed me to an online validator. I went there, fixed the error it pointed out (an invalid character), made sure it validated and waited for Bloglines to pick it up. And waited. And waited.

It hasn’t picked up on it yet. It’s been two months since it last showed new items. Even though their robot is still checking for updates to the RSS feed every few hours, and downloading it when it’s modified. That despite I having contacted Bloglines again; they never gave a definite answer.

Meanwhile, I noticed other people on the blogosphere complaining that Bloglines would every now and then “skip” articles. So, today I downloaded RSS Reader, imported my list of feeds, waited for it to update all of them and, what do you know? Bloglines is dropping articles left and right! I didn’t do a thorough check, but on a quick sample I noticed several missing articles.

Needless to say, I’m not coming back. I will certainly miss the ability of checking my feeds from different computers, but I can live with that (I haven’t found any other usable online reader, but I’m accepting suggestions). And I would no longer recommend using Bloglines, as you will probably not be seeing all articles in the feeds you subscribe to.

[Update 24.05.2005: A Bloglines employee left a comment on this entry and I sent him more information regarding the problem.]

[Update II 26.05.2005: Mark, it seems e-mails are not getting through to you, even though they are handed over to your servers; if you see this entry, please look at the comment I added.]

The University of Melbourne is promoting a super-heroes conference next month. No actual super-heroes are expected to attend, though; they will be merely talking about heroes:

Superheroes and supervillains — whether human or god, born or created, product of nature or creature of science — they have existed as cultural icons for centuries. Why have they endured? How have they transformed over the decades? What is their cultural or mythic function? Where does the hero end and the superhero begin?

This interdisciplinary conference will address the varying roles, identities, and social functions that these enduring beings serve. A diversity of approaches will be undertaken including: historical approaches; censorship codes; industry and franchise differentiation (e.g. DC vs. Marvel Comics); [...]

The conference, called Holy Men in Tights, will be held between 9th-12th June and does include a fancy dress ball, where attendants are invited to dress as their favourite heroes or villains.

Is it just me, or does Zaphod Beeblebrox look remarkably (almost eerily) similar to Richard Branson?

Well, following a week with excelent results, this last weekend was terrible: four correct guesses for “ladder” and “home”, and three for “money”. The average tipper scored either 4.3 or 4.4 hits, depending on whom you ask, so my results were not exactly that bad, but they were disappointing nonetheless. There were so many “easy” games this week that I honestly expected better results on all strategies.

Interestingly, since “home” got right some rather unexpected results, it has actually made money this week, and cumulatively it is now returning more than “ladder”; “money” continues with a net loss, and sinking quickly. Always remembering that financial results are fictitious: no money is actually changing hands.

With 14 rounds left, these are the results:

Links:

• Round 7 (previous)
• Round 9 (next)

It’s true, you can find anything on Google these days. Even UFOs.

From the Google Sightseeing weblog.

Remarkably good results this week: “money” got seven matches right (it missed, and did so spectacularly, the Lions-Bulldogs match), “home” got six and “ladder” got five. One interesting fact is that the bookies were giving a 50% chance on either result on the Geelong-St. Kilda game; my “tie-break” method in the money strategy was to go for the home team, Geelong (now, would someone tell me just why Geelong was the home team at the Telstra Dome? Geelong is at least 60km farther away from the Dome than St. Kilda!); Geelong won.

Financially, all three strategies were well into positive territory this week, with “ladder” doing the best of all due to, in large part, the strangely skewed odds payed for the already mentioned Lions-Bulldogs game. After seven (of 22) rounds, “money” is still returning a net loss, but the others have reasonable gains.

In any case, here are the numbers:

Links:

• Round 6 (previous)
• Round 8 (next)

Google is launching a new product called Web Accelerator. It tries to speed up the online experience of users by doing local caching, using proxies (hosted by Google), pre-fetching certain pages so that they are available more quickly and fetching only parts of a page if it changed only slightly since the last time you saw it.

I still don’t know exactly what to think of it. There are obvious privacy concerns for its users: you might have a single company knowing what you search, what you surf, who are your friends (Orkut), what is in your mailbox (Gmail) and so on. Then, again, you can simply choose not to use it.

There’s also the issue of what will be like for those on the other side of it, the web content producers (that is, anyone with a web page; me, for example). Will Google proxies act effectively as an anonymiser? Will the pre-fetch increase the load in some sites? Or will caching reduce the number of registered pageviews? Can you prevent some pages from being cached? It is not clear at this point, and their page with information for webmasters is very, very information poor.

I don’t know why, but I don’t really like this product that much. I doesn’t seem to “match” the other services Google provides; it looks like a different class of product, one that is not very much “like” them. It’s just a feeling, though.

As a disclaimer, I haven’t used the product. The description makes it look like it could make my net bandwidth usage increase (mainly by pre-fetching pages I end up not visiting), and my ADSL plan still has a limited traffic allowance. When that changes, I may give it a go.

As I work, the movie “Contact” is playing on a 24-inch LCD screen a few meters away; yes, it makes it a little harder to concentrate, but I’ve watched the film enough times that I actually remember most of the dialogues word by word.

I think it’s a great movie, and a very good adaptation of the book. Even the parts that are different are quite nicely done, and usually for a good reason (I still wish they had made Dr. Arroway meet the rich guy (Hadden) in Babylon, though). The terrorist act is much more spectacular in the movie than in the book, if my memory serves me right.

One thing that does bother me, though, is one part of the Congressional enquiry in which the “prosecutor” argues that it would be possible to fake a signal from Vega using a satellite. It isn’t. If there were only one place receiving the transmission, yes, it might be possible; but you can’t shadow Vega from being seen from anywhere everywhere on Earth with one satellite, or even with a large network of them. And you can’t predict all the listening locations; even if you use one satellite for every large radiotelescope out there, there would be smaller antennas being used, or even being built after the message started, that would be pointing to Vega and getting nothing. And Dr. Arroway should know that.

Or am I wrong? I would actually like to be, but I don’t think I am.

A group at the MIT is promoting the first (and, possibly, the last — you only need one) Time Traveller Convention. It will be next Friday, in the East Campus Courtyard (42°21′36.025″N, 71°05′16.332″W).

Even if you can’t attend, you can help by publicising it and making sure that people from the future, when time travel is invented, know about it so that they can attend.

Why do you need my help?

We need you to help PUBLICIZE the event so that future time travelers will know about the convention and attend. This web page is insufficient; in less than a year it will be taken down when I graduate, and futhermore, the World Wide Web is unlikely to remain in its present form permanently. We need volunteers to publish the details of the convention in enduring forms, so that the time travelers of future millennia will be aware of the convention. This convention can never be forgotten! We need publicity in MAJOR outlets, not just Internet news. Think New York Times, Washington Post, books, that sort of thing. If you have any strings, please pull them.

Great idea, I’d love to help! What should I do?

Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.

You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.

Closer to home, and with apparent official support, the City of Perth has appointed Forrest Place (31°57′7″S, 115°51′32″E) at noon (GMT+8) on March 31st, 2005 as Destination Day, a reunion place (and time) for all future time travellers. It is a little disheartening, though, that the day has passed with no visible tourists from the future.

Results this week were fairly similar to last week’s: 6 correct guesses for “money”, 5 for each of the others. The cumulative results continue to be above 50% and inching upwards, but still nothing that can convince me this is not just a coincidence.

Here are the numbers:

I’m still not convinced you can actually make money in the long term with any of these strategies. While both “ladder” and “home” are still well into positive territory, both derive most of their gains from one single round (round 3 for ladder, round 4 for home). Of course, we still have 16 rounds to go, so there’s plenty of time for me to be convinced in either direction.

Links:

• Round 5 (previous)
• Round 7 (next)