We went to Trooping the Colour at Buckingham Palace today for the Queen’s Official Birthday and saw the Queen leaving Buckingham Palace.
Interestingly enough, it isn’t the queen’s real birthday though.
Archive for category Uncategorized
photo: loop_oh
European and local elections are tomorrow - please make sure you vote! The strength of our democracy is built upon participation and it’s your chance to have a say. It’s quite shocking just how low the turnout for European elections typically are, especially as over the last few years power has been moving from Westminster to Brussels - the European Constitution/Lisbon treaty being one example.
I think it’s especially important that people vote because the EU elections work on proportional representation which means it’s a lot easier for smaller, minority views to get represented.
Now, many people have told me that they aren’t interested in politics at all - they don’t know who to vote for. I recommend taking a short 5 minute test over at Euprofiler.eu. It takes only 5 minutes - answer a couple of questions and it’ll tell you how the views of the major parties align with your views.
Is it independent?
The EU Profiler is an academic project, unaffiliated with any party, candidate, government or branch of the EU. It has been entirely funded by the three consortium institutions - the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RCAS), part of the European University Institute (EUI); Kieskompas and the NCCR Democracy (University of Zurich/Zentrum für Demokratie Aarau)/Politools network.
The tool was designed in such a way as to allow complete impartiality. Information was gathered by respected experts in European politics and at no point were political parties in a position to influence the composition of either the tool itself or the information provided by it.
Exams & Blogging
May 2
photo: mao_lini
So the first batch of summer exams at university are over. One of my comprehensive summer exam questions involved calculating the CO2 footprint of a Google search. By a stroke of chance, I happened to have blogged about that exact topic just a couple of months ago and made my own calculations. So it really does seem like being a blogger can really help you out in places you really never would have expected it to.
And in another example, last November I wrote about how I used my blog statistics page as a MSN Messenger service status page. Whenever I’ve had issues accessing the MSN/Windows Live Messenger service, Microsoft’s official status page has never had any useful information. Yet on my blog, I often immediately see increases in traffic in the order of 10x-15x on certain pages. That signals to me that there is a service outage for everybody — as opposed to a network connection problem on my end. I’ve toyed with the idea of creating my own “unofficial service status page” which would be automatically generated using some statistical techniques (to determine whether there are irregular service problems) and geolocation (to determine exactly where people are finding problems connecting from i.e. whether it’s a worldwide issue). Alas, I’ve never had the time to put this together properly.
So anyway, blogging is really rewarding and it really can help you gain insights which you just wouldn’t have otherwise.
Anyhow, I’ve decided that this blog needs a bit of a change as I feel it’s identity and purpose has changed a lot over recent times. Long time readers will be used to articles about programming, economics & current affairs and science. But more recently, I feel the blog has changed pace - focusing more on how to get the best out of technology and communications technology. This was a result from the fantastic feedback on these posts.
I’ve tried to reconcile the two visions of what the blog should be about but I feel that it’s best the blog is split into two:
- A consumer-focused technology and communications blog
- A possibly more technical blog with random experiments, bits of science and economics and thoughts on life.
So you’ll be seeing a couple of changes - hopefully improvements - round here in the coming weeks. Thank you so much for your support with the blog and I hope you’ll enjoy the new blogs!
photo: wili_hybrid
New Scientist reports this week that a new tool developed at HP Labs could potentially predict the popularity of a web page in 30 days time. Essentially they say that by looking at the rate at which a web page picks up views in the first few days can predict the subsequent popularity of the page 90% of the time. It doesn’t seem too radical an idea - after all the pages which are more popular in the first few days are likely to get bookmarked more, linked to more, higher place on Google, etc.
The research focused around the sites Digg and YouTube so it would be interesting to see how it could be applied to other sites. You can download the paper online at arXiv.org.
On a similar note, I’ve found that I’ve been able to get some incredibly stunning useful information from the popularity of webpages on my site. For example, one of my posts about MSN Messenger downtime gets a lot of hits whenever MSN Messenger goes down. When the number of visitors for that page is significantly above normal, I know that MSN is actually down. If the number of visitors is normal, it’s typically just an issue with my connection or my local server. In fact, I’ve found this method much more reliable than using Microsoft’s own service status page for the Messenger service. Similarly, I found a huge spike in the number of visitors to my post on the possibility of VAT cuts straight after the recent pre-budget report. If only there was a way of exposing these statistics in a useful way!