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Ramblings.2010.02.08 – It’s not cool

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.08, 2010

Polemic time again. One facet of advertising which profoundly annoys me (and there are many facets of advertising which profoundly annoy me) are adverts where the advertisers act as if the thing they wish were happening were actually happening. ‘Oh, I wish people were so excited by our new range of loo scrubbers that they held celebratory parties in the street and in years to come related with teary eyes to their grandchildren the magical day when the new Bigger Better Bog Brush bounded into their lives!’ is what I imagine they say in their trendy Soho offices. And so in a masterstroke of public wankery they shoot an advert where people are giving up their first-born children for a chance to own one of their poxy new products.

Don’t get me wrong, passion about what you’re selling is entirely admirable, and it’s right that some pride in your products should come across in an advert; my problem is when advertisers try to shoe-horn in an emotional response to a product where no such response previously existed. It’s not sexy just because you tell me it is.

I won’t reveal which major technology company a while ago sent me an advert for an upcoming developer’s conference on the use of their technologies which had the following strap-line:

Get ready. It’s almost here. The free techie party that everyone talks about and no one misses because hey, you do not want to miss out on this kind of learning and fun!

Wow, that’s some pretty bold claims; ‘no one misses’ it, apparently. It’s a ‘party’ of ‘learning and fun’[1].

Let’s be honest, no one will find a programming conference on Delphi unnamed coding tool fun, unless they’re an imbecile. However, despite the patent lack of fun, many people might yet be interested in attending; on the more visceral end of the scale, those whose livelihoods depend on advance use of these technologies will be very interested to learn of a (free, by the way) conference on how better to use them, on the other hand the basic satisfaction of intellectual curiosity is something which many people actively seek. It’s rather churlish to describe such pursuits as ‘fun’ – is watching the news ‘fun’?; reading a history book?; engaging in a robust debate on religion? No, I would argue, it’s not ‘fun’, but it doesn’t have to be – it’s enough to be intellectually stimulated and emerge from the experience more knowledgable and mentally enriched.

By all means advertise in passionate terms what this conference will provide, but be honest – don’t try to pretend it’s going to be a rip-roaring ride of fun, it’s insulting to the intelligence.

In a similar vein, though with a very different agenda, a few years ago the UK government (I would guess through it’s touchy-feely ‘DirectGov’ money sink nebulous concept – don’t get me started on the execrable  ‘I’d Go Direct Guv’ advert) launched an advertising campaign to convince teenagers that unprotected sex is irresponsible and likely to fuck up your life (which I think few would disagree with). Now they could have chosen a number of approaches to achieve this aim; perhaps they could have used a stern authority figure to proclaim the dangers of ‘going commando into the pink jungle’, or they could have used talking heads of those of their peers who have met with the nasty consequences of ‘riding the Indian train‘ as a shock cautionary tale of the dangers. But no, they made a series of adverts which depicted what the government dearly wished were true; they had a bunch of teenagers acting like unprotected sex was uncool, and you’d be ostracised if you dared go in unsheathed:

Haha, they’ve put him in goal because he didn’t use a condom – it’s funny cos it’s not true[2]. Now while there are a great number of teenagers who do know the dangers of unprotected sex and would always use a condom, they are not who this advert is aimed at. The people it’s aimed at would, by definition, never be having that conversation. Does the government really think that those teenagers will see that advert and think ‘God, that must be what everyone else at school is really thinking, I’d better start using a condom – I don’t want to play in goal!’[3]. Very few people are that stupid or gullible. It’s not cool just because you tell me it is.

Till tomorrow, I hope.

Mark

  1. I’m somehow reminded of the Complaints department of The Sirius Cybernetics Corporation – ‘Share and Enjoy!’ [↩]
  2. There is a joke in there somewhere about David Seamen but I can’t find it at the moment [↩]
  3. Releasing their inner Seamen if you will (found it!). [↩]
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Ramblings.2010.02.05 – How journalism works [1]

Filed Under: How the news works, Ramblings
Feb.05, 2010

Start of an occasinoal series of posts about how journalism seems to work in the 21st Century. Inspired in no little part by Private Eye, Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe and Anton Vowl’s Enemies of reason.

BBC News provides an RSS feed so that readers can stay up to date with their stories. All well and good. But very often the short link title is very different to the published headline and both are often different to the actual content of the article.

Take the following story:

Pupils forced to listen to Mozart

So the article’s lead paragraph heavily implies that playing classical music is a more effective deterrent to classroom disruption than not playing it, yet the actual article doesn’t back this up in the slightest. An executive summary of the article might more accurately be

Excentric headteacher with an obsession with William Blake poetry has slightly new idea for discipline at his school.

The RSS link title is even more misleading -

‘How Mozart is the ultimate deterrent for naughty pupils’

‘Ultimate deterrent’! ‘ULTIMATE’! ‘DETERRENT’! That means it’s the bee’s knees, the dog’s bollocks of ‘deterrents’. But notice how both quoted words are never vindicated in the actual answer; there’s no mention of any other forms of discipline for comparison, not even by inference. We’re not told that this school has found a marked improvement in classroom behviour, nor is the school compared to similar schools with a different discipline policy.

There’s also no concrete evidence to back-up the ‘deterrent’ angle. We can I’m sure agree that the style of discipline is unusual and seems well thought out and, actually, quite a good idea (I think the aim of making detention a way to try to instill the joy of learning is an extremely admirable one) – but it can only be a ‘deterrent’ if it has been shown to actively make kids more reluctant to risk a trip to detention. This, of course, is what the BBC is trying to make us think in the way the article is couched. We’re supposed to imagine these kids so abhored at the idea of listening to Classical music (to rhyme with ear-rape) that they’ll do anything to avoid the horror of The Magic Flute, even if it means behaving in class!

But there is nothing in the artical that suggests anything of the kind. No statistics of ‘repeat offenders’ as we might call them, showing how the figure has gone down since the introduction of the policy, no soundbites from pupils saying how they ‘hate dis classical shit, innit?’. Nothing. As I said, you could replace the entire article with one sentence:

Excentric headteacher with an obsession with William Blake poetry has slightly new idea for discipline at his school.

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Ramblings.2010.02.04 – Wallet entropy

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.04, 2010

Sometimes I think about things too much.

In my head there’s the concept of wallet entropy which is a measure of how fragmented the currency in your wallet currently is. So if you’ve just touched down in a foreign country and all your currency is in a small number of large denominations then you have very low wallet entropy, and of course a high wallet entropy results from an excess of shrapnel[1].

Money transactions are, naturally, entropy transforming properties (though unlike thermodynamic entropy there is no energy gradient to traverse. That would be fun – a wallet which gave off heat when you combined five 20p pieces into a £1 coin…). For example, you are buying lunch and the total comes to £3.64 – you pay with a £5 note. Now the most efficient change you could be given is a £1 coin, a 20p coin, a 10p coin a 5p coin and a 1p coin. Your wallet entropy has just sky-rocketed!

A wallet exothermic process (so to speak) would be one where, for instance, you paid for goods totalling £5.10 with a £10 and a 10p piece, to be given a £5 note as change.

Some transactions maintain entropy whilst nevertheless changing the wallet’s value. If you give a £1 coin and get a 50p coin back then your wallet entropy has remained constant.

For me, the entropy seems to be cyclic – sometimes I’m working hard to get my entropy up (because I know I’ll need change for car parking for example), other times getting it down to avoid my wallet becomming too bloated to fit nicely in my pocket.

I suspect there is actually a wallet entropy equilibrium which I am constantly circling wherein you have enough entropy for small payments where notes aren’t accepted but not so much that your wallet becomes unusable.

In fact that’s probably a universal property – if you have lots of change in your wallet and you’re at a shop where they’re low on change, you are likely to pay in smaller denominations (and so, more coins) to equalise the entropy between the two of you as much as possible.

Till tomorrow, I hope.

Mark

  1. This might just be a British English expression for the lowest coin denominations like 1p and 2p pieces. [↩]
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Ramblings.2010.02.03 – No laughing matter

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.03, 2010

Hmm, yesterday’s post strikes me as a little bit dry and, well, boring. I’ll try and make this one more interesting. Though I won’t promise anything.

Let’s talk about awkward comedies. There has been a trend in recent years towards more realistically written and shot comedies (The Office being the genre’s seminal and still in my opinion greatest example) where we are encouraged to laugh at the characters’ awkward and embarrassing predicaments.

A classic example is from the first episode of season two of The Office, where David Brent uses the welcome meeting for the new staff from Swindon as a chance to show off his comedy skills:

Many people I’ve spoken to site that scene as a major reason why they don’t like The Office. Or, if they enjoyed season one, why season two for them went too far with the ‘cringe-factor’. I personally find it hilarious and I’ve been trying to work out why that might be; why does a scene which others can barely watch due to the discomfort it induces in them become one of my favourite scenes in modern comedy?

For a start there’s the contrast between Brent’s over-confidence and arrogance in the lead up to the show meeting and the train-wreck of his actual routine . There’s a wry pleasure in seeing someone’s arrogant pride become their downfall – we observe that they had it coming, and it, in a way, serves them right. In real life this is often, and rightly, a guilty pleasure – laughing at other people’s misfortune[1] – but in fiction we can with clear conscience indulge in a bit of schadenfreude knowing no one’s ego has actually been wounded.

There’s also the fact that Brent’s downfall is so over-the-top, so complete, that most people can say to themselves ‘I might have been in some embarrassing situations, but never as bad as that!’. It’s a common feature of Gervais and Merchant’s writing – running with an idea far longer than anyone would in real life. In Extras, there are frequently scenes where Andy or Maggie make a slip up in conversation and say the wrong thing, accidentally or unwittingly. We’ve all been there. But where in real life one would normally appologise, have a quick laugh and move on (or just ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen. But still just move on with the conversation), in Extras they continue digging themselves into a hole trying to undo the dammage, but of course making it far, far worse:

I think that’s where a lot of the humour from this style of comedy comes from. If you’re watching a traditional sitcom then the whole setup is already so absurd and unreal that to get a laugh requires turning that notch up even higher – think of Basil Faulty; John Cleese’s performance is at it’s ground state so over-the-top that he needs to shout EVEN LOUDER and move his arms around EVEN WIDER as the episode progresses and the situations intensify.

In The Office, by contrast, the ground state is so close to normality it is very easy to mistake it at casual glance with a documentary, and so the writers and actors only need to add a small amount of caricature, push it just a bit far over the line of reality, for it to be funny.

I read somewhere that most humour is the release of realising that what appears to be something serious or scary is actually just benign and you were actually worried over something harmless. I believe that what goes on in my head when I see, for example, the famous ‘Brent dance’ scene and David starts his horrendous ‘dance’ is an initial feeling of empathic horror with the other characters – ‘Oh god, that would be awful to watch. Where do you look, what can you say?’ – but that is almost immediately replaced by a feeling of relief when my brain realises that it’s not really happening and I’m not really there. This relief is what causes me to laugh.

Hmm, I’m always crap at coming up with conclusions. I just sort of type what comes into my head. Then get bored. Then try to wrap it up. And fail. In any case I’ve tried to convey some of why I find The Office and its ilk hilarious and I would like to think it’s changed some people’s opinions, though in reality you probably hate it more than ever now I’ve made you sit through two clips. Oh well.

Till tomorrow, I hope.

Mark

  1. ‘Happiness at the misfortune of others. That is German!’ – Avenue Q, Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx [↩]
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Ramblings.2010.02.02 – You have 1 new message!

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.02, 2010

So it’s day two. And I’m back. So this project has lasted longer than any diet I’ve ever tried…

I mentioned yesterday my hypothesis about the time distribution of SMS message replies, and to prove that my mind turns the trivialist of matters into mathematical models here is the expansion of that idea.

Let’s say that at 12:00 you send a text message to a good friend; not a deep and meaningful ‘we need to talk’ message, just a genial ‘how’s your day?’, ‘fancy a pint later?’, ‘Do you realise you had asparagus in your teeth when I saw you yesterday but it was funnier to not mention it at the time?’ or some such. The sort of text that you would expect a relatively quick reply to. Now at 12:10 let’s say you send another message of a similar nature to a different friend, before the first friend had replied to the first message. At 12:15 your phone makes that little Pavlovian jingle to indicate you have a message. Before you read it (and assuming it’s a reply from one of the two previously mentioned friends), which of the two do you think it is most likely to have come from?

My hypothesis says that it is much more likely to come from the second friend than the first friend.

To explore this idea lets make some assumptions to make it easier to reason about the situation. Let us assume that the messages sent are such that the receiver would be highly likely to reply ‘as soon as they are able’ – it’s not a message that requires a lot of time to consider and reply to, it doesn’t require the receiver to do a lot of work before replying for example.

We also assume that the receiver is ‘predictably lazy’ – when they receive a message they may wait a while before replying due to procrastination tendancies, but they will still reply as soon as they ‘get round to it’ – we assume they won’t reply at some random time that afternoon determined by little more than whimsy.

In that case we assume the only reason that a reply is not received ‘instantly’ (minus the time needed to receive, absorb, and construct a reply) is that the receiver is currently unable to reply for some reason – they are in a lecture, at work, walking home from town, performing some street theatre or whatever – or are being lazy.

I put it that the probability distribution of a reply diminishes over time – in the first minute we might reasonably expect a noticable probability of a reply, there is less reason to assume a reply will come in the 17th minute – if they haven’t replied in 16 minutes, why should we suppose they would reply in 17? The longer a reply doesn’t come the more we must assume there is a reason they are not replying sooner (being in a lecture, laziness) and so the less we should expect a reply the next second, or the next minute.

In the example above therefore, at 12:15 it has been only 5 mintues since you sent a message to friend two, but 15 since you sent one to friend one. Therefore, by this hypothesis, you must assume there is a greater chance of friend two having replied.

I have personal anecdotal evidence in support of this theory, though of course I’m more than likely to suffer from confirmation bias. If I could be bothered, or if the results would actually have any kind of bearing on my, or anyone else’s life I might conduct a more formal experiment. But, you know, meh.

Till tomorrow, I hope.

Mark

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Ramblings.2010.02.01 – First post, first and second order games

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.01, 2010

OK so today’s date is an almost pseudo-palindromic date (in fact is if you write it year/day/month. Which no one would do) so today is the day I start an attempt to write something every day.

OK, the more accurate reason is I saw the fabulous Richard Herring’s provocative Hitler Moustache tour yesterday at the York City Screen and have been inspired by his ‘Warming Up’ blog (almost a blog post a day for now a good number of years) to finally do something about my frustrated desire to do some writing. The argument goes; if you write something – anything – every day then your creative writing virtual muscles will be exercised (virtually) and eventually, if you’re lucky, some of your literary turd will smell sufficiently of roses to be remotely palatable to others.

I have often been accused of thinking too much about stuff, in the sense that I over-analyse otherwise sub-trivial situations as if I were writing a fucking Phd in how people respond to text messages (I do have a working hypothesis about the time distribution of replies to SMS messages. Maybe I’ll expand on it tomorrow). To try to bleed this socially bad blood out of my system (for some reason friends don’t often appreciate an analytical approach to emotional issues. Can’t imagine why), I shall attempt to use this outlet as a digital leach, sucking out my overly rationalist and pragmatic thoughts, and having it’s distended body tossed onto the giant waste bin of the internet daily.

Some of what I write may be the start of more developed and cogent articles, when extracted from this stream of consiousness and cleaned up (some might say in the manner of Gilbert’s Darwinian man[1]), it might not. Who can tell.

Today I want to talk about what I want to call meta-games, but which Wikipedia (source of all lazy research) tells me is a term already in use for a different phenomenon, so which I will grudgingly name second-order games[2].

By my definition, a first-order game is just a simple game, what we normally understand to be a game. There are rules governing what is allowed and what isn’t, and a procedure for working through the rules to a conclusion where (normally) one person or team has come out on top. Snakes and ladders is a first-order game – each player rolls the die in a round robin sequence and must move their counter exactly the number of squares indicated by the roll. If the counter ends up on the start of a snake or a ladder then said long thin article is followed to its conclusion. The first player to reach the final square wins. So far nothing controversial or, indeed, interesting.

A second order game contains a first order game inside it, normally a very simple, boring and possibly deterministic one (a deterministic game is one whose outcome is not affected by any action of the player, either through skill – choosing the right card to play – or luck – rolling the right number. The outcome is unchangable from the opening state), but a ‘game-on-top-of-the-game’, or ‘meta-game’ (damn Wikipedia!) on top of it.

Take poker (all versions). The first order game involves dealing out some cards to each player (or the table) in a certain pattern, possibly allowing the player a choice in whether to accept the given cards or change some of them (draw poker), and then determining which player has the strongest hand, defined by the total ordering of possible poker hands. This is a very boring game.

Take Texas hold-em; each player is given two cards, and five community cards are dealt face up on the table. The winner is the person with the best hand. There is no scope for player skill (you can’t swap cards strategically) or luck (other than the luck of the shuffle – but that is determined before the game starts). Without the betting element of the game, each hand would proceed determinstically and without much interest – either you win or you lose, and you have no control over that.

What makes poker an interesting and compelling game is the betting. But the betting has nothing to do with how the basic, first-order game plays out. The betting is a second order game – you have some chips, and at each stage of the game you make a strategic decision on how many of your chips to bet that you have the best evenutal hand. You can bluff people into believing you have a better hand than you actually do, you can limp along acting as if you have an OK hand when you actually have an amazing hand, or you can bet inadvisably and end up with no chips.

Deal or no deal is another example of a second-order game. The first-order game in this case is, in effect, selecting one box from 22 at random to start with, then choosing an ordering of the remaining 21 boxes to open, and then finally ignoring all that and taking the money in the box you chose to begin with anyway. Ignoring any bollocks about ‘feeling’ where the £250,000 box is, this is a game even preschool kids would quickly find boring. No matter what order you open the boxes the sum you end up with will always be effectively random.

The interesting aspect (if like me you do believe the show has some interest) is the second-order game with the banker. The banker is in a way wagering on the outcome of the first-order game at the prescribed offer-making occasions. From the contestant’s point of view, the second-order game is deciding when the optimal time to accept the offer is, or whether to hold-out until the end and take your fate with their box. This involves a more or less mathematical assesment of the likely return from the remaining boxes in relation to the amount offered, as well as personal considerations of the very real amount of money being offered. One might calculate the expectation on the remaining boxes, or assess the risk of taking out all the remaining strong boxes in the next round of elimination, or realise that £20,000 is serious money in most everybody’s books and shuld not be ignored. Or appeal to hand-wavy, ridiculous ‘feelings’ about where the money is, or false probablistic reasoning that a large amount is somehow ‘due’.

Whatever method you use to determine when to accept a deal and when to reject it (‘I’m ready for the question, Noel’), it’s this process that provides the interesting game.

I don’t at present see how this classification achieves anything other than to prick my intellectual curiosity. But maybe you found it interesting. Who can tell.

Well, you can I suppose, but you may not, at this stage, exist.

Till tomorrow, I hope.

Mark

  1. ‘Darwinian man, though well behaved, at best is only a monkey shaved’ – Princess Ida, Act II, W.S. Gilbert [↩]
  2. Computer scientists have an *obsession* about the Greek prefix ‘meta-’. Seriously. They’ll use it whenever they possible or conceivably can. [↩]
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