Songs I've found in 2011 (though some are older...and I've found more)

1: Bombay Bicycle Club - Shuffle



2: Lucy Rose - Middle of the Bed



3: Lisa Hannigan - I Don't Know



4: Johnny Flynn and Laura Marling - The Water



5: Deportees - Islands and Shores

Procrastination

I find it easiest to procrastinate when I either have too little or a lot to do! I have a report to hand in tomorrow morning, but that is the last thing my mind wants to focus on and I am much more concerned about other things going on, which involve decision making, something which is very difficult and therefore very worrying indeed! So to fight the conflict I am procrastinating!

Had the first project meeting today, didn't go great, but not terribly badly either. It's very difficult to articulate ideas, especially when they are abstract ones. We also probably didn't go to the meeting with the clearest ideas of what we wanted to do, or even what kind of things are possible in a 4 month time scale. But it was productive and we have a much clearer idea of how the system repsonds both biologically and computationally. Literature you've read is also suprisingly difficult to remember in that kind of situation, despite having re-read it before going in! But we got some direction and need to start bringing together our ideas into a plan. A plan to test the relative successfulness of having repellent pheromones in addition to attractive ones, and how the system behaves according to what mechanisms(or rules) are used to control repellent (and attractive pheremones) for Pharaoh ants!

In reality these are pesky little critters, which are incredibly small and live in large spread out colonies which often inhabit places where humans live, particularly hospitals and scavenge their landscape for whatever food they can find! What makes this especially pertinant, yeah I went there!, is that they can also chew through things like sterilised hospital equipment, so the ability to manage them effectively is important. Currently they are managed by laying out food which contains a slow acting posion to kill off as many as possible. This type of ant is highly mobile and if scared can quickly move to a new area and repopulate a colony. Perhaps a better understanding of there pheremone mechanisms and dynamics in the world can provide answers to the how they could/should be controlled.

Also I've basically finished my website! It's very basic, but I wouldn't mind some feedback if you have the time - http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~sb992/

2011 begins!

I've somehow neglected my blog for a little while, but have found a bit of time and will to update.

Firstly I guess I need to tie up some loose ends from the previous Xfactor type blog. I haven't performed analysis on any data collected after my previous post and may not till some time in the future if at all.

 In the end Matt Cardle won the Xfactor, with Rebecca Ferguson coming second, One Direction were runners up and Cher Lloyd came fourth. These are also the top four artists who were still in the competition when the graph was produced, however not in the order they placed by the end of the competition. Of course it is difficult and unwise to draw conclusions when only one piece of data has been analysed, though this is an interesting result. Comparing it against the actual votes the acts were recieving at the time which was between weeks 7 and 8, the proportions do not really align, though it is noted the graph I produced was the sum of everything previous, even if this sum was taken I don't think they'd compare that well. I conclude that facebook may not necessarily be a good substitue for determining the outcome of a public vote. Although this conclusion fails the new rule for science journalism, I support the scientific paradigm - more research (and in my case data as a must) needed to better answer the question!


But asides from that what have I been up to?

~I've got back from the winter holidays and sat some exams, which didn't go great in all honesty, but could've been worse I guess. Will have to wait till the results come back!

~I've been using C++ to create a program which performs a random iterated algorithm, on an Iterated function system of a finite number of contracting affine transformations. If that means nothing to you, I'll suffice to say I've been making fractals and if that means nothing to you I'll redirect you to here. I may post some images when the assessment is completed.

~I've been reading up on algorithmic processes and the biology and experimentation on ants! I am planning on doing some research and developing algorithms for ants to produce biological knowledge(and potentially computational knowledge also, everythings interdisciplinary nowadays).

~I've been learning to use HTML and CSS to build my own website to advertise myself to potential PhD supervisors and job opportunites. W3 schools has been an excellent resource to this end!

~I've been looking for the above mentioned PhD positions and job opportunites, though I'm finding it very difficult to narrrow down on anything. There are so many fascinating things I'm interested in and to choose a PhD is to define an interest for 3 years, which still feels like a massive amount of time to me! It makes it even more difficult to know that funding deadlines are very near and that there is less cash in the pot, and hence more competition for places, due to the economic climate.

~& finally I've been eating a lot of chocolate as I got a lot for Christmas! Yummy!

Can the Xfactor result be predicted from social network activity?

Or specifically can facebook be used a tool for prediction and if so, is it effective?
Click the image to see it in full, sorry it takes up so much space!

I've used a similar technique to that I used for the elections earlier this year (see link on the right), rushing round facebook pages and noting down the amount of users that are fans of each of the artists. I thought I'd start off highlighting all those who made it to the final 16(who are all abreviated to their first four letters). On the left are those still in the competition, and on the right those who have been eliminated. Note I have taken a log scale of the number of fans so that comparisons can be made, as the range of data was large (cher had 1,101,203; whereas poor john only had  6325). What do we see?

• Cher's fanpage is vastly higher than that of any other contestant (and is in fact more than a 1/3 of the size of mentor Cheryl's fanpage). Why?
• Of the contestants still battling it out Katie has the fewest fans, even lower than some of those evicted, is this why she has been in the sing-off so often?
• Diva Fever and Aiden have more fans than some of those still in the competition. Did people only start to miss these acts once they'd left? Should they have stayed in for longer?

I wish I'd started collecting data earlier as the systems dynamics could have been analysed and attributed to real life events and would perhaps be able to make some comments or conclusions.
I plan to collect more data on those still in the competition up till it's finished and posting it here, but at a first impression of facebook data it looks like Cher Lloyd has the Xfactor in the bag.


NOTE: It must be noted also that not all people vote and it may be that only a few people(in relation to total fans) are dictating the decisions of the competition, that people may be fan of more than one contestant and that people can vote tactically - by not voting, voting for a contestant who isn't their favourite, or by voting for several contestants. Age structure probably plays a part in the voting system. Conclusions taken from the figure do not take these factors into account.

Climate Change: is it? Part 1.

Despite the huge amount of funds, science and political/social movements, there are still so called 'climate deniers' around; probably the most famous of whom is Jeremy Clarkson. There skepticism was pushed under the carpet by many, until last years 'climategate scandal' when University of East Anglia emails were hacked and leaked on the internet. Not so bad, until it was found these emails showed that data used in papers that predict some aspects of climate change and in turn used to push government and organistaional policy and spending were of poor standard, used questionable methods and were stored in an unorganised way. This scandal has got climate scientists quaking in their boots as organisations, mostly US, employ people to meticulously look through climate research and try to unroot and disprove it.

Standards of climate research through data collections, simulations and interepatations has obviously had to increase and many of those working in the area have had to be more careful in what they both say and write to avoid being put in a compromising position or being taken the wrong way.

Climate is defined as the average weather conditions for a region over a reasonable time period. Hardly a robust at all. But it is easy to see that skeptics with logical arguements are not argueing that climate does not change- because invariablly it does;  it doesn't take a human lifetime to see one winter is different to the next.  Rather they are more concerned with the qualitative and quantitive results about future climate predictions - especially with the well known unreliability of weather predictions (though they are usually fairly accurate most of the time!) and whether human life and its activities are a big enough force to change the course of nature itself.

So what makes this area so controversial? Two major reasons I think:

1. Price - To revert anthropogenic climate change as models predict will require a lot of money and policy change and is time, money, effort best spent in this area?

"oh hard times,
for the prize, yes the prize,
i thought i knew
oh it's the price we gotta pay
and all the games we gotta play
makes me wonder if it's worth it to carry on" The Price by Twisted Sister.

"There are no solutions...there are only tradeoffs" Thomas Sowell, Economist.

2. Complexity - Earth Systems Science isn't easy, especially when it's spatio-temporal bounds are large (variations over time and space differ widely).

To put it simply:

"You never really know what you can't really see" Relief by Cold War Kids.

Or the more complex version:

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." Donald Rumsfeld, previous US Defense Secretary.

An equilibrium of empty bellies

"Raise wages? Can it be done? They are fixed by cast-iron laws at the lowest indispensible figure - just the bare minimum so that workers can feed on dry bread and produce children. If wages drop too low the workers die, and the demand for more men raises them again. If they go too high there's too much labour available, and they come down again. It is an equilibrium of empty bellies, a life-sentance in the prison of hunger." Souvarine the mechanic, in Germinal by Emile Zola.

Things may have improved an awful lot for the ordinary worker since the days of Germinal's deep, profiteering grey mines but are the hands that feed us really so cold and brutal?  Businesses want profit and what is outlined above makes straight forward fast talking money making sense, especially in a recession fuelled climate such as today, or that in Germinal itself. But it is business without emotion and without care; so how does it arise in human culture? Fortunately in todays world there are trade unions, a generally more open culture and (apparently) more accountable represenatitives of the people.

But the idea of a ruthless business model is far from stagnant. I watched the film Moon, which incidentally has a fantastic soundtrack by Clint Mansell, this morning in which a man; Sam, has a 3 year contract performing lunar work before being promised a return to Earth. The company decides it's too expensive to repeatedly send workers to and from the moon, have Sam cloned hundreds of times and set them to work one at a time for 3 year contracts before killing each and repeating the process. I think it can be agreed the ethics are questionable even if those maltreated are 'only' clones. Of course you don't have to look as far as sci-fi for examples. The Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Mexico mining disaster and of course the most recent failing of the banks are all prime examples of where often profit comes before safety - whether that be personal, personel, environmental or social! What is the best way of turning this way of thinking on its head?

Cities, culture and a circuit

I am in York. It is a big city. It is an old city. It is a Yorkshire city; and I'm damn proud of that, though I have little reason to be. What suprises me most is how different the populations make up is to that of Leeds. There are old people. There are children. There are very few people from ethnic minorities. Not all takeaway delivery people are from ethnic backgrounds. There are very few people who speak in a foreign language. It is all rather strange and surreal to me at the moment. I'm not used to it yet, but I will have to. It is a beautiful city with elegant old buildings, thatched cottages, hugging streets and  protective stone walls. There are so many nooks and crannies still undiscovered and waiting to be explored. But it is no Leeds and Leeds I sincerley miss.

I have no job, so there is nothing for me to do except absorb culture; reading books, listening to music watching DVD's and playing computer games as well as adding to my collections of all. I have bought 3 books on the subject of mathematical/theoretical biology/ecology which is what my next year will rigourously consist of. I have had lots of fun playing with the house DAB radio and picking up new music, my favourite channels being BBC 6 music and BBC Asian Network, ironically the two stations that were nearly slayed by the BBC a while back. Steam has provided a free game - Alien Swarm which is quite fun, though I always find it weird playing 3rd person shooters from a ceiling perspective and I have also engrossed myself with Civilisation IV and Plants vs. Zombies. As a house we've been watching a whole lot of DVD's and I have ordered two more - Shine, about a musician who has a musical breakdown which I saw on the TV a while back and loved and Into The Wild, which I have heard good things about!

I plan to have an adventure myself next week; on the basis of the book I've just read - Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, about a violinist who left glouster walked to and worked in London on a construction site till the job ended and decided to spend his moeny on a boat to Spain which he walked across making a living from his playing and the generosity of the local people. Providing it's nice I'll set off in the morning with a packed lunch and walk somewhere fun about 20/25 miles away before catching a train home. That's the plan at least.