Serendipity Book

Extreme Complexity

  Ferrari F1 Steering Wheel 2004 
  Originally uploaded by ed100.

This is the steering wheel from a 2004 Ferrari F1 car as featured in the Flickr pages of Ed over at Influx Insights. Speaks volumes about what is wrong with F1.

Leaked segmentation of mobile customers

Great find by Iain Tait.

The Register (a legendary geek news site) have found themselves in possession of some unintentionally funny pen portraits which have allegedly been prepared for Phones4U.

Firstly, is it just me or did those photos get sourced from the pages of MySpace and Flickr?

Secondly, am I alone in suspecting that some of the descriptions of the segments might represent a quite spectacular leap beyond the facts garnered from their analysis? (e.g. The Flashing Blades who "enjoy taking risks and the odd street fight")

Whilst I'm all for adding colour to pen portraits these are probably stretching the data and consumer observations a bit too far in the name of making them more interesting.

Based on the fact that the report contains credit rating information about each of the segments I imagine it came from a direct marketing consultancy.

Hyde Park Solar Shuttle

Somehow I managed to miss the arrival of the stunning Solarshuttle on the Serpentine at Hyde Park last summer. Luckily it's still there.

Zoho Polls

Zoho, the Indian software company who have released an impressive suite of web-based work productivity applications in direct competition with Microsoft's Office, have just added yet another free application to their offering: a simple online polling tool.

"With Zoho Polls, you can create online polls (public / private) and share with your friends and colleagues to get their opinion. You can create a poll to either vote or to rate a set of options. Create a voting poll when the user needs to select one option from a set of items."

On the one hand applications like this are obviously just a bit of fun and provide no threat to the established market research industry. However, on the other hand, as companies and individuals continue to find cheaper and faster ways to collect survey information the value of the premium that is paid for professional research is being eroded.

I'm convinced that unless the industry can provide a simple and easily understood proxy for sample quality then the uninformed majority will eventually believe that a poll collected for free on a website using software like Zoho is just as valid as one collected by MORI, TNS or GFK/NOP.

I'd argue that it is already the case that most members of the public have been trained by the media to focus on sample size as the only criteria for judging sample quality. The concept of sampling error is ignored by all but the best publications.

The New York TImes is one of the few publications that thankfully continue to insist on reporting sampling error and providing commentary on survey quality. Take a look at this extract from their opinion poll style guide:

Articles about the findings of a public opinion poll should name the person or group who conducted it, name the sponsor and, if necessary, explain the sponsor’s interest in the subject of the poll. The article should also give the number of people surveyed, the dates of the survey and the procedures used (whether interviews were conducted by mail, by telephone or in person). If the poll studied some group other than the general population — registered voters, say, or married adults — the report should say how the respondents were chosen.

The article should give the probable margin of sampling error for a sample of the size used in the poll, and to aid comprehension it should be explained in a sentence like this: The margin of sampling error for a sample of this size is plus or minus five percentage points, so differences of less than that amount are statistically insignificant. Both the poll’s findings and the margin of error should be rounded to the nearest whole percentage point because results rendered to the tenth of a point suggest an impossible degree of precision.

The terms opinion poll, poll, survey, opinion sample and cross section should be limited to scientific soundings of opinion. They should not be applied to roundups of comment or interviews of people in the street. Indeed, extensive articles of that kind should include a cautionary note that the interviews are not a scientific sampling and that only limited conclusions can be drawn from them.

If only the British press still acted in this way.

Classic Whose Line is it Anyway?

Some light relief ... a classic Whose Line is it Anyway? Sound Effects skit ...

Tax Freedom Day

April 30th marks Tax Freedom day in the United States, the date when the average American stops working for the government and starts working for themselves.

According to the Adam Smith Institute we don't get ours in the UK until 1st June!

Tax Freedom Day is calculated by taking the UK's net national income and calculating how much of that is taken away in taxes. These taxes include not just income tax, but VAT, inheritance tax, stamp duty, car and fuel taxes, excise taxes on alcohol and cigarettes, taxes on companies and employment, and many more. For technical stuff about how Tax Freedom Day is calculated click here.
Tax Freedom Day varies around the country for a description of why and how much, click here.

Ah well, we still get better holidays.

Holiday coming up

It's been 18 months since we last had a proper holiday. It was a truly great holiday though.

My caffeine consumption is now at an all time high but thankfully we go away again this Friday.

So glad I have a British holiday allowance and not an American one. I really don't know how people manage on 10 days plus Bank Holidays.

Easter at Syon House

Often gazed at Syon House from across the river at Kew but had never been before. Still didn't make it into the house this time but the grounds were wonderful. We'll be back.

As we now we appear to have finally emerged from the British winter I'll be getting my camera out
a little more often. Not a fan of artificial light y'see.

The Shrinking Cadbury's Creme Egg

The Cadbury's Creme Egg is not what it once was:

From Conan. Video on YouTube here. 100,000 views and rising. Maybe Cadbury's should have come up with a better answer than "The size hasn't changed - you've just grown up!".

SideTrack: Zoetrope ads in tube tunnels

CNET reports on an interesting if extremely low-tech attempt by a company called SideTrack Technologies to install ads in tube tunnels. Imagine a zoetrope in a straight line and you get the idea.

From CNET: "More and more rail systems are installing advertisements in tunnels. Ads from Canada's SideTrack Technologies are based on motion picture technology, so that riders see a "movie" of a long chain of still images as their train goes by. In order to install the still images for the ads, workers must move swiftly, as they can only work when the subway systems are nonoperational, usually at night. SideTrack will soon launch new digital ads in subway tunnels that allow for multiple ad campaigns to run without having to send workers into tunnels to change out still images."

More images and video on the SideTrack site here.