Tag: rubbish

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BBC Headline #6

BBC Headline from the iPhone app today:

Motorists warned of ice ‘hazard’

Problems with this headline are:

Quotation in Headline
No Shit Sherlock

Quotation in Headline
Normally the weasels at the BBC use a quotation so they can state anything they want in the headline. Get some whacko to spout off: “them there aliens have stolen my memory and taken body probe photos for their files” and you can use it in your headline. You don’t really have to ask someone outside the office. Just ask the journalist next to you and claim them as a “source”. Now in this case the word HAZARD is in quotations. Does that mean that the conditions aren’t really hazardous? Or does it mean that the level of hazardness is open to some form of personal interpretation? Is ice on the roads considered a hazard or not? What knobs they are – these headline writers.

No Shit Sherlock
We have had snow reports for about a week now and the Met Office were lovely and accurate (or rather chaos didn’t interfere!). We have known it was going to be cold. You only have to look out of the window to see snow and frozen paths. Isn’t it a bit obvious that the roads might be icy too? My car shows me the outside temperature when I have the electrics turned on. Could the negative sign before the numbers mean something important? How about that funny snowflake symbol I see on the dashboard whenever it’s really cold? I hate how much the obvious needs to be stated to make people think.

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BBC Headline #5

BBC Headline from the website taken today:

Lagging pupils “don’t catch up”

This headline is lacking and, to be honest, the whole article is shocking. Headline problems are:

Quotation in Headline
No Shit Sherlock
Problematic Assumptions

Quotation in Headline
As long as someone wrote it or said it you can include it as a quotation in any headline or article. Say what you want. There’s always some nutter willing to give their opinion to give your leading headline some weight. “Crystal energies healed me” or “watch out for 23 December 2012! Those Mayans knew a thing or two”.

No Shit Sherlock
Pupils who are lagging behind in their work and understanding don’t then go on to catch up. Really! I need a whole BBC Headline to know this? How about “Some schools do really well!” or “Pupils getting better grades” or “Some schools not as good as others!”. There’s a distribution of schools or pupils, you can’t measure everyone and have everyone above average.

Problematic Assumptions
The biggest issue with the article and what the headline implies is that the bottom few pupils as measured by some arbitrary government test do not proceed to do well as measured by some other government arbitrary process. Have these people never heard of the Gaussian Distribution (the bell curve or normal distribution)? Some pupils will always be behind the others and will probably continue to be behind. Elsewhere in the article it is claimed that the top performers go on to get good grades later on. Holy Cow! This curve needs to be explained to them.

This is a graph of the Gaussian Distribution as everyone sees it:

Bell Curve

The Gaussian Distribution as the government sees it (blue version):

Bollocks curve

No one is allowed to fail or fall behind or not be clever or be too far from the mean.

 

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BBC Headline #3

Today’s (this isn’t going to be daily) rubbish BBC Headline taken from the iPhone app is:

Labour ‘should alter cuts stance’

This headline suffers the following afflictions:

Quotation in Headline
Wrong Story Implied

Quotation in Headline
As said before, you can write anything you want in a headline if someone has said it! Just ask a chiropractor about curing colic!

Wrong Story Implied
When you go and read the story you find that it’s actually a quotation from a shadow minister attacking his leadership about their stance on attacking the government (which is the job of the opposition). The real story is probably about the breaking ranks of the shadow cabinet and that a senior member of the Labour Party has spoken “off message”.

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Mobile Phones

I have owned a number of mobile phones and most of them were rubbish. Going to give you a rundown of them from the earliest.
Phone number 1 – sometime in 1999 or so:
Brick
The Ericsson A1018

The order of the next few phones is not remembered easily. But here goes:
O2 X1

The next was:
A200

then:
Nokia 3210

And then the nifty fold-out keyboard:

Nokia 6280 Nokia 6230

Then we get to the first smart phone:

Nokia N70

Then the brilliant and pretty usable N95, it was the last Nokia I owned that worked well:

Nokia N95

Then the big memory but pretty useless N97:

Nokia N97

Finally, a phone that works. The iPhone 4. Until then the iPhone specification was pretty rubbish. It took a lot of soul searching to convince myself that selling out to the walled garden of Apple was worth it. However, I have to say that the iPhone is brilliant. It works!

iPhone 4

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Tesco are rubbish

I had to take a toy back to Tesco as I had found it 20% cheaper at Argos and Tesco say you can just change your mind and return an item. So I checked the T&Cs at the back of the catalogue and took the required items back to Tesco Grove Green.

  • The product with original packaging
  • The order confirmation email

from the catalogue

My wife had ordered the toy and paid using her card but she was out that day but the catalogue and email said the card wasn’t necessary.

I go to Tesco and hand back the toy and show the email.

Do you have the card used to pay for the toy?

No, was my reply. The instructions in the catalogue say you don’t have to bring it back with you.

It will say somewhere in the email that you need to bring the card. You always need the payment card when you return items.

After looking through the email, I suggest that the person serving me have a look as it says exactly the same as the catalogue: just bring the product and the email confirmation. Could I possibly have the returned money as a giftcard?

yes, but only this once and as a goodwill gesture.

My problem with this is that if the return instructions had said I needed the payment card then I would have taken it. Why was I made to feel like an idiot when I was following instructions from Tesco.
The person serving me refused after that point to look at me. I was trying to point out that perhaps she could talk to someone senior about the fact that the emails and catalogue are wrong. I tried to say this in as helpful manner as possible but obviously failed.

Tesco: you have messed up.

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Women and their stuff

A few years ago I was getting fed up having to dust around all the toiletries on the top of the chest of drawers (dresser if I had one). So I suggested to my wife that we get some convenient boxes for the stuff and then I can dust the boxes easily. Agreement was forthcoming.

Since that time I have one box and Bev has two. In the picture you can see a can of deodorant on top of my box on the right and a room temperature sensor as my 10 week old son still sleeps in the bedroom with us. On top of my wife’s two boxes is stuff. I have no idea what is in the boxes, I don’t ask. I also know that there is a drawer of more stuff under the bed. My wife has informed me that she cleared out the drawer a year ago and now what you see is all there is. Women and their stuff!

Stuff
Stuff
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