Year: 2014

Oh Man. Twenty Years. Where The Hell Did That Go?

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 29/08/2014

It has come to my attention that the third Manics album, The Holy Bible, was released twenty years ago today, on the 29th of August 1994. I have a clear memory of catching the bus into Southport, as a spotty 16 year old, to go and buy it from Our Price.

It was the first CD that I ever bought with my own money.

Of course I’d bought records before — so, so many embarrassing records ** — and cassettes, but I’d come to the party with CDs somewhat late. I’d only just got my first CD player the week before (a reward from my parents for doing well in my GCSEs) and The Holy Bible was the third CD in my collection, joining Definitely Maybe and His n Hers, which had both been given to me.

They were soon to be joined by hundreds more, the proceeds of my first job washing dishes at the Cathay Garden, but The Holy Bible was the one I played to death. I can still remember almost all of the lyrics, and I could probably quote you any of those little snippets of speech that play at the start of most tracks (“I wonder who you think you are? You damn well think you’re god or something? God give life and god taketh it away. Not you. I think you are the devil itself…”, “I eat too much to die, and not enough to stay alive; I’m piggy in the middle…”) For a while it was the default disc that I left in the player — this being a time when you had to get up and walk across the room, pick something out of a case and physically swap the disc if you wanted to listen to something else — and because I used it as my alarm, the opening riff of Yes still engages some kind of Pavlovian response that makes me think I should get out of bed and go and study A-Level Maths…

But now twenty years have passed and my copy of The Holy Bible is gathering dust in my parents’ house, and I’m on the other side of the world carrying round a small rectangular device that can store several thousand songs and fits in my pocket. Every now and again I experience a pang of nostalgia for mid nineties indie. I recently chucked everything I have from 1994 and 1995 back onto my pocket sized magical music device and have been enjoying rediscovering the delights of many forgotten and not so forgotten indie bands (…Gene, the Bluetones, Sleeper, Suede, The Wannadies…) I wonder what happened to all of them?

Now they’re as far in the past as Glam Rock was when I was listening to britpop. Oh man. Twenty years. This is what it feels like to get old, isn’t it?

** For reasons lost to history, the first record I ever owned was Chas n Dave’s 1987 Tottenham Hotspur FA Cup song, Hot Shot Tottenham. To this day I have no idea what possessed the nine year old me to want to own this 7 inch single — I am not and have never been a Spurs fan; I was a (clearly somewhat confused) Everton supporter even then. Perhaps I just really liked the song…

Tags 1994, britpop, manics, music, nostalgia, the holy bible

Australia Melbourne Politics

I Am So Angry I Made A Sign

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 17/03/2014

I Am So Angry I Made A Sign

We heard them before we saw them.

We were cutting through Parliament Gardens on our way to the city when we heard the muffled sound of a loudspeaker.

“Is that the Grand Prix?” I wondered aloud to Sal. A reasonable assumption I thought, given that the bee swarm like buzz of the cars whizzing around Albert Park had been clearly audible across much of inner Melbourne for the last few days. But as we turned the corner into Spring Street and saw crowds of photographers on the steps of the Parliament building and the police holding the traffic at bay, it was clear that some kind of protest was taking place on Bourke Street.

It wasn’t immediately obvious what the focus of the protest was: I could see signs attacking brown coal and promoting solar power but mixed in were some asking us to “Save Australia Post” and, quite wonderfully, “Stop Being Awful”. (Although no Down With This Sort Of Thing, sadly).

Stop Being Awful

As we walked down Bourke Street it became clear that the crowds were heading straight for us, so we ducked back onto the steps of the Palace Theatre to let them pass.

Teh internets tell me this was the #MarchInMarch. How have I not heard of this before? It seems you can turn up and march for whatever you like, and thousands of Melbournians young and old had chosen to do just that.

Despite the disparate causes, there were some common themes.

People before Profits. Gina Rinehart. Tony Abbott.

I can’t imagine that the “save our posties” guys, or the small group rather bizarrely asking for adoption to be made harder (no, me neither), or the “solar power” crew would necessarily hold the same views on everything, but everyone in that crowd could agree that Tony Abbott is a massive dick. If it’s possible to take a positive out of a negative, then the one thing you can say about last year’s election result is that at least it’s given us something we can all focus on. In many ways he is our George Bush. And I can’t quite imagine Malcolm Turnbull evoking the same sort of collective anger.

I Am So Angry I Made Another Sign

After a few more minutes of watching, we somehow made our way across to the other side of Bourke Street (it’s a bit like crossing the road in Thailand–you’ve just got to go for it…) and found a table at the Mess Hall, where we sipped lattes and perused the brunch menu while the crowds of thousands continued to stream past outside.

“What did you do in the revolution, daddy?”

“Er, well, I kind of missed it. But I did have the most delightful free range organic scrambled eggs on sourdough while it was happening outside…”

Tags march, melbourne, protest

Media Shoddy Journalism

Oh FFS, Not Again: The Economist Worldwide Cost of Living Index is Not a Cost of Living Index

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 05/03/2014

So every six months it seems The Age re-runs what is essentially the same story as the latest incarnation of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living Index is released.

In the most recent of these, they lead with a typically startling claim:

It’s cheaper to live in Copenhagen, Hong Kong or New York City than it is to reside in Sydney or Melbourne, according to the Worldwide Cost of Living Index compiled by the The Economist’s intelligence unit.

Really? But hang on a minute, what’s this:

Sydney ranked fifth and Melbourne equal sixth on the list, released on Tuesday, US-time. That was actually a drop of two ranks for each city since the last survey was released last year.

…

Jon Copestake, the editor of the index, said a recent decline in the Australian dollar meant that Australian cities in 2014 offered slightly better value for money, resulting in their slight drop in rankings.

“The long-term rise of the Australian dollar, which has doubled in value in the last decade, has fallen back lately, with a corresponding decline in relative prices,” he said.

Well that’s interesting: why would the recent drop in the Aussie dollar make Melbourne and Sydney slightly better value places to live? If I live in Melbourne and earn money in local currency, then why would a fall in the value of the Aussie dollar make it cheaper to live here? Wouldn’t a weaker dollar make it more expensive in some respects, pushing up the price of imported goods, for example?

Maybe it’s because (as I wrote back in 2011) The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living Index is not really a cost of living index at all. As the report itself says:

The Worldwide Cost of Living survey enables human resources line managers and expatriate executives to compare the cost of living in over 130 cities in nearly 90 countries and calculate fair compensation policies for relocating employees.

Everything is converted back into US Dollars. Any movement in the position of Australian cities is almost entirely a result of exchange rate fluctuations. As the Aussie dollar got stronger, those cities rocketed up the list. And now that the Aussie has weakened they are slowly falling back.

It’s really a cost of relocating from the US and paying for things with US dollars survey. Which is perfectly fine if you use it for the purpose it is intended to be used for, but you can’t take the information in the report and try to draw conclusions for people who already live in those cities and earn money in local currency.

I don’t doubt that Sydney and Melbourne belong somewhere high up on a list of expensive cities in the world, but I strongly suspect that their average wages would also put them pretty high up on a list of the richest cities in the world.

And if you don’t look at the cost of living as a proportion of average wages then your results are utterly meaningless.

Media Shoddy Journalism Technology teh internets

Modern Life Is Not Rubbish

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 07/02/2014

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

So wrote the late great Douglas Adams, in (according to teh internets) The Salmon of Doubt.

It’s one of those great quotes to remember if you ever hear or read someone lazily complaining about technology ruining everything that was great about life (or, heaven forbid, catch yourself starting to think that way…)

Today’s Age has one such example: “Stop filming with your smart phone and start living”

The writer offers a varied list of complaints about how people today are doing it wrong, with all this technology they are carrying around allowing them to do stuff like film gigs, or have fictional relationships with Scarlett Johansson. Even, gosh, not talk to strangers in cafes:

Today, I watch as people sit in cafes alone, with headphones plugged in, eyes fixed on a scrolling personal tablet or phone screen, cocooned from their surrounds and people next to them. They’re chatting online to people they’ve never met in person.

Yeah. Because before smartphones I couldn’t stop talking to strangers whenever I was in a cafe on my own.

At least I’m not staring at strangers eating their lunch. Maybe you’re the weirdo in this scenario…

I was going to write more about this, but as with most things in life, there’s an XKCD comic for that. It makes the point far, far better than I ever could:

Media Shoddy Journalism

China Eastern Airlines Passenger Eats For Free For A Year? I Call Bullsh…

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 05/02/2014

So there’s this story doing the rounds. It tells of an enterprising guy in China who supposedly managed to eat for free for the best part of a year, purely by purchasing a first class ticket, which he then used to access the airline lounge. Once he’d finished eating for free in the lounge, he simply cancelled and rebooked his fully refundable ticket for the following day, and then repeated the exercise 299 times. When the airline found out, he cancelled the ticket and got a full refund.

Now we all like a story of the little guy finding a loophole to get one over the big corporation, but there’s something about this story that just doesn’t ring true for me.

It’s certainly been reported uncritically by churnalists worldwide with column inches to fill and pageviews to generate.

But let’s think about it for a moment. This guy can’t afford to pay for food, but he does supposedly have enough disposable income for a first class plane ticket (even if he gets the money back at the end, he still had to have enough spare cash to have the cost of the ticket tied up for the best part of a year).

And what about getting to the airport? Wouldn’t the cost of transport or parking outweigh the benefits of the free food?

Even assuming our hero works at the airport, or lives nearby, then he’d still have to check in every day and then proceed through security (as far as I can tell from this website, all of the lounges at Xi’an Airport are airside).

I’m not a fan of clearing airport security at the best of times. Is it really worth going through all that hassle every day just for a free feed?

And we’re supposed to believe that he got away with this 300 times? Don’t you think the staff at the check-in desk and at the lounge might have started to recognise him long before his three hundredth attempt?

As far as I can tell the story was first reported in the media in Kwong Wah Yit Poh, a Malaysian Chinese newspaper, from there it was picked up by News Limited, and from there, it spread like wildfire, each report gleefully repeating the same information without a moment’s thought to the fact that none of it stands up to even the most basic scrutiny.

I call urban legend. Total and utter made up rubbish.

It. Did. Not. Happen.

(I did eventually manage to find one other website out there calling this one out: this post on Shanghaiist suggesting that someone in China simply made it up…)

Tags churnalism

Shoddy Journalism

Lies, Damned Lies, and Sloppy Data Journalism

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 04/02/2014

Flicking through The Age as I chewed on my lunchtime sandwich yesterday, this article, about car thefts in Victoria, caught my eye:

It’s more interesting for what it doesn’t say than for what it does. It quickly skips right over what to me would be the most interesting part of the story:

While total thefts hit a 10-year low of 9624 in the 2012-13 financial year, the number of cars fewer than five years old being stolen hit an eight-year high

If ever you wanted an illustration that good news does not sell papers, then here it is.

Who cares about the good news that car thefts are at an all time low, when there’s a scare story about thieves breaking into houses to steal car keys to write instead?

To be fair, the online version of the article does include this graph (not shown by default, but it’s there if you bother to click through to it) showing the downward trend in car thefts over the last ten years:

It’s even more significant in real terms if you consider that the total number of vehicles on the road has increased over that time (the ABS recorded an 11% increase in vehicles registered in Victoria since 2008 alone). So at a time when we have more vehicles on the road than ever before, we also have a massive decrease in the numbers of thefts.

This raises some interesting questions: Why has this happened? Has there been a change in police policy? Is it a societal change? Are thieves just stealing other things instead? Are modern cars getting harder to steal (unless you’ve managed to nick the keys)?

But instead of asking any of those questions, the Age chooses to build an article around the fact that in the last twelve months the number of cars under five years old that were stolen rose by… wait for it… 53:

While it certainly looks like thefts of newer cars — after falling for a number of years — seem to be trending up again (from 6.6% of all thefts in 2003-04 to 11%) that’s still only a slighter bigger proportion of a much smaller total.

(I did wonder if this could be explained due to a change in the proportion of newer cars out there. The article doesn’t mention it, but these stats are clearly pretty meaningless without that information, but I checked, and according to figures in table nine in this annual report from the ABS, and the corresponding tables from previous years, the number of registered vehicles under five years old looks to have remained pretty constant over the last few years, at about 30% of all registered vehicles.)

On the other hand, elsewhere in the article, we have gems like this:

Thefts of Subarus (390), Hyundais (365), Volkswagens (92), BMWs (166) and Suzukis (82) hit a 10-year high in the 2012-13 financial year, with police data showing late-model Hyundais and Volkswagens were targeted more frequently than earlier models.

Holdens were the most targeted make, with 2295 reported stolen.

The most targeted make? Isn’t it also possible that, as Holden was Australia’s best selling brand of car for many years, there’s simply more of them to steal?

And are late model Hyundais and VWs “targeted more frequently” because more of them have been sold in the last few years?

Well, here’s some more ABS statistics to shed some light on it:

I couldn’t find figures for Victoria alone, so we’ll have to make do with these Australia-wide ones, but with a 98% increase in the number of VWs and a 32% increase in Hyundais on the roads over the last five years, it’s hardly surprising that thefts of “late models” are at all time highs. They didn’t sell anywhere near as many of those cars 5 years ago as they do today. There’s many, many more “late models” of those on the roads than older ones.

Look! Here’s a chart that shows how Jaguars are massively more secure cars than Holdens…

Just kidding. Of course it doesn’t show that at all, but unless you give me these figures as a proportion of the number of each make that are out in the wild, then the entire chart is just as meaningless.

Only then can we see which ones are “targeted” (if any). For example, I wonder why — based on those Australia wide stats — Toyotas only come in third on the thefts list when there appear to be more of them than any other car?

As it stands, The Age, all you’ve really demonstrated is that broadly speaking if there are more of a particular type of car on the roads, then more of them get stolen.

Next week in The Age’s Data Journalism column, a series of graphs exploring the defecatory habits of large furry mammals, and a companion piece on papal religious persuasion through the ages.

UPDATE (5/02): I was joking about the whole bears/pope thing, but imagine my amusement over lunch today when I found the next article from The Age’s Data Journalism unit. ~~A massive free ad for trendsmap~~ Ground-breaking research across a two page spread revealed that people in Melbourne quite like sport and shopping but hate commuting. Wow. Just wow.

Tags data journalism, the age

Apple Technology

9 Things That Annoy Me About My iPhone

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 17/01/2014

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of my iPhone and iPad. As anyone who knows me will tell you, one or other of these devices is rarely far from my hands. Who could have imagined even ten years ago that we’d soon be carrying round massively-powerful, pocket-sized, portable computers with access to all the world’s information.

But in the spirit of first world problems that doesn’t mean I think they’re perfect. For the most part, they are extremely well designed, which is perhaps what makes all those slightly dubious design decisions all the more baffling. How could they get so many things so perfectly right and some other things so very wrong?

And because everything on the internet is now legally required to be written in list form, here are nine of my favourites…

The Massive Onscreen Volume Thing

So I’m watching a bit of video and I decide to adjust the volume.

No, that’s fine Apple, I didn’t really want to see what was happening in the middle of the screen anyway. I’m sure that bit’s not important.

The Really Obtrusive Battery Warning

You know what would be a good idea when my iPhone is about to run out of battery?

How about a massive modal warning dialog that has to be dismissed before you can do anything else with the phone. It’s ok, I didn’t really want to end that call…

They Don’t Even Apply Their Own Design Principles Consistently

Ever tried deleting a single text message in iOS7? In most cases to delete things in lists you are supposed to swipe one way or the other. In Messages for example, you can delete all the messages from a single contact by swiping left on that contact’s messages in the main screen, which reveals a delete button.

So why doesn’t this work for individual text messages? It is literally one screen away and they implemented deleting in an entirely different way. Swiping left when you are looking at individual messages just reveals the message timestamp where the delete button should be. I was so stuck I had to Google to find the answer and it turns out it’s: long hold on the text message; select More from the context menu; check the messages you want to delete; click the trashcan.

Because that’s intuitive.

They Still Haven’t Fixed Maps

Seriously, it’s been well over a year since they unleashed their half baked Maps on the world, and they still haven’t fixed it.

Look. Here’s an entirely fictitious train station that is as of today still apparently located somewhere in the backstreets of Fitzroy…

It wouldn’t matter too much, because you can always use Google Maps. Oh, except…

You Can’t Change Your Default Apps

I know letting users choose how to use something isn’t really the Apple way, but every time I click on a link in Mail and accidentally end up in Safari or click an address and find myself in Apple Maps I wish it wasn’t…

Your Calendar Appointments Can Start At All Of The Minutes

But then on the other hand some features are flexible to the point of being ridiculous. Like the fact that you can schedule a meeting down to the exact minute.

Because people do that.

Just as well we didn’t exclude the all important “my meetings all start at 13:38” use case. It’s not as if catering for an edge case makes it massively more cumbersome for the vast majority of people to pick sensible times from the time picker tool.

(If you really must cater for those exact minute appointments, why not have the time picker default to 5 or 15 minute blocks and add a toggle somewhere to turn on all of the minutes if you really need them?)

You Can’t Delete Their Apps

Stocks. Apple Maps. Game Center. Compass. Weather. Reminders.

I don’t need them. Why can’t I get rid of them?

iTunes

It’s not really a design problem with my iPhone, but I couldn’t write this list without mentioning the steaming turd that is iTunes. I’m a simple guy, with pretty simple requirements. I really don’t need it to do much: put files onto my iPhone and take them off again and that’s about it, but somehow it regularly fails to accomplish even this simple task.

And I’m sure there is some magic combination of phone and computer settings for Podcasts that will make it not screw up the apparently simple task of remembering which ones I’ve listened to regardless of which device I listened to them on, but I’ve given up trying to work out what it is. I’ve implemented the workaround of manually deleting anything I’ve already listened to on my phone from the computer before I sync otherwise iTunes just keeps copying it back across…

But If There’s Just One Thing That Gets Me Every Time, It’s This…

When I got my first iPod, almost 10 years ago, it was the attention to detail in the design that won me over. I can’t help thinking that maybe things have changed in that department.

And if there’s one feature that perfectly sums this up, it’s this: iOS 7 added a cute little animated graphic equaliser that identifies the current track.

But you know what? It. Doesn’t. Move. In. Time. With. The. Music.

Why would you do this, Apple, why??

Tags apple, iphone, technology