Sorry I couldn’t resist that. As someone who actually works with statistics, I can confirm almost any statistics you examine in detail turn out to be based on spurious data.

The Bad Science article was particularly effective in uncovering the mythical nature of the doubling (1.4 rounded down to 1 and 1.9 rounded up to 2). Ben Goldacre even managed to explain the impact of clustering in comprehensible terms. Wow.

Rounding formed the basis of the oldest forms of computer crime (Round the results of millions of money calulations down and you can amass and, obviously, remove the invisible money that results. 100,000,000 times .5p is half a million pounds. Nowadays, the banks are wise to it of course – they keep the invisible money themselves)

Statistics are used to support almost any argument. This is not a fault in the statistical procedures. (I am prepared to take their value as given, insofar as I will never understand half of them.) The problem comes from the way statistics are embedded in social relations. Pure research for its own sake is rare. Who would pay for it? So any published statistics are created for some purpose – to direct the use of resources, to evaluate the success of a policy, and so on.

The “so on” includes influencing public opinion. The media are not interested in publishing dull statistics but they are very keen on inflaming public opinion. We have an infinte appetite for hearing that the young people are behaing worse than in the past, so how could a newspaper resist a headline grabbing statistic that involves youth, drugs and things getting worse?

Many thanks to Ben Goldacre for paying attention to a use of statistics and for having the wit to ask the rare questions – what are these numbers? what do they mean? who collected them?

Very good point in post in the entry below about tutorials for beginners that leap from “Hello, world” to how you programme the space shuttle.

It is almost impossible to find an introductory book for “idiots” or “dummies” that doesn’t do this. There are books that promise you can learn to use SQL, PHP AND Apache in 24 hours. I don’t know how much of a moron this makes me. I can’t even read a couple of thousand pages of a novel in 24 hours , let alone read a couple of thousand pages of a book that’s too heavy to lift while actually writing and running the code.

If the Trades Descriptions Act covered these books they would have to be titled “Learn enough of x to be reasonably confident, if you have access to good internet forums and a few mates who know all about x, over the course of 6 months solid effort. Oh, and by the way, you had better be really good with computers to start with”

This would probably shift a few less books. However, when you did the introductory bit that lets you write “My first x application” and display your own name onscreen, then wondered if your book had been sold with a dozen missing chapters because the next page says “Now code the operating software to control a nuclear reactor” you would at least be prepared for it to take some effort.

http://www.bunchball.com/

http://www.krugle.com/

 

That Ruby on Rails introduction below is probably one of the worst introductory sentences imaginable. Could anyone read it and bring themselves to read on?

It’s impossible to write about computers without using technical terms but technical terms are not the same as jargon. And there is almost never a good excuse for using the bastardised version of the English language that has become pretty well standard in business.

Business language exists to allow people to say nothing while emitting possibly thousands of words. It has evolved so that consultants can produce content-free reports that still justify generous consultancy fees by their volume. This involves using words like “leveraged” that look like they mean something technical and precise but have no meaning when you get closer.

The average consultancy document is an alchemical spell. It changes words into gold. Therefore it must be composed in an arcane language that can’t be understood by mere mortals. No one ever reads more than a pargraph of the things but that paragraph must be incomprehensible enough to show that the writer has the magic power to write nonsense. (After wearing a suit with conviction) this counts for more than almost every other human skill. Just try getting a business loan or government grant without one.

Maybe .net accidentally got one of their consultants to write the Ruby on Rails tutorial.

It is coming thick and fast today. Obviously this latest issue of .net is either suffering from too many pages and not enough content or it is actually an April Fool. Not only is the ruby on rails tutorial torturous to the point of unreadability but they follow this up with a tutorial on PHPizabi.

This time, the writing is perfectly readable and the tutorial follows reasonable step by step processes. However, it takes it to the level of idiocy. It runs from page 95 – 99 and is about four pages longer than it should be. The opening part of the tutorial is about how easy PHPizabi is to use and set up, yet it takes more tutorials than the impenetrable Ruby on Rails… What lunacy is this?

Page 1 is dedicated to unzipping the software and FTPing to your webspace. A whole page and 9 steps. If you use something other than the WinXP inbuilt zip handling or you use your own FTP client this whole page is pointless. Even if you are the three people in the world who use this set up, the article is pointless unless your level of IT literacy is incredibly low – if it is, why on Earth are you setting up your own social networking / dating site?

It continues in this vein. Each step is so simplistic you have to question the target audiences ability to actually read what is displayed on the screen. It is surrounded by “TOP TIP” boxes with things like this:

If you’re on an earlier version of Windows, you won’t be able to automatically extract the zip archive PHPizabi arrives in. Try PowerArchiver from www.powerarchiver.com. It also supports GZIP and RAR formats.

Good information but, I suspect, some what redundant for anyone other than a hermit who has been in his cave since 1994.

The next top tip is brilliant:

Parts of the current version of PHPizabi are encrypted using ionCube, a PHP encoding and decoding system. You may need specific server side support for ionCube, or perform some additional installation stages. Check out tinyurl.com/pzhtf

Amazing. People who need to be taught in NINE stages how to unzip an archive are also assumed to be able to determine the requirements for installation of this. Wow.

Honestly, I can only assume that this issue was one big April Fools joke, or that it is a bit of a quiet period and they were struggling for things to write tutorials about. Any sane human being would have swapped the Ruby torture-tutorial for the PHPizabi nonsense in a heartbeat. Maybe the editor has been on holiday?

Well, after the last rant I thought I would check up the useage of the term leverage. In that rant I mentioned how .net had used the phrase “We’ll leverage Rails to generate our application directory…” in a tutorial.

I had a moment of doubt about the term – maybe it had been used properly. Off to the internet I did go. The wonders of Dictionary.com came to my assistance and defined the word as:

1. 1. The action of a lever.
   2. The mechanical advantage of a lever.
2. Positional advantage; power to act effectively: “started his… career with far more social leverage than his father had enjoyed” (Doris Kearns Goodwin).
3. The use of credit or borrowed funds to improve one’s speculative capacity and increase the rate of return from an investment, as in buying securities on margin.

Now, correct me if I am wrong but none of them are appropriate for the word being utilised as it was. Is there a reason why the sentence couldnt have read “We’ll use Rails to generate our application directory…” or is that not Web 2.0 enough for .net magazine?

Well, it is a new month now so obviously more rants are required 🙂

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I actually quite like .net magazine and think it really is a worthwhile read. I even subscribe to it! So please take my complaints with that in mind.

Following on from our previous rant, it seems things have not improved this month. In fact, I suspect a lot of the articles are in fact “Aprils Fools” – only slightly late.

The cover disk still claims it offers tools worth “over £140” – however I would be hard pushed to value the software anywhere near that level for insurance purposes… I suspect this is something that will never, ever go away with regards to computer magazines and their cover disks. Personally I would be happier if they dropped the magazine price by a pound and sacked the cover disk. I may be in the minority though 🙂

Anyway, the main thing I want to complain about is the bloody “Ruby on Rails” tutorial. If you have the magazine it is on pages 82 – 89 and is, simply put, the single worst tutorial I have ever come across in my life.

It is not just badly written, but this is a tutorial which appears to be aimed at getting novices up to speed with the rails development framework and help them produce an application.

You can tell it is going to be bad. This is the first paragraph:

Ruby on Rails (RoR) is an open source framework for the rapid development, testing and deployment of agile database-backed web applications. It is the marriage of Ruby, which is an elegant and powerful scripting language, and several classic programming design patterns. The result is a full-stack framework designed around the Model-View-Controller ( MVC) design pattern, which means you can use Ruby in all tiers of your application.

Now, I am not imagining things am I? Was that even in English? I cant help but get the feeling that the author (I will not name him, you can find it in the magazine) knows less about Ruby / Rails than he is letting on and has resorted to printing marketing blurbs from 37Signals.

Normally, .net tutorials are well written, informative and easy to follow. The Ruby on Rails article is none of that. While it is possible that if you follow the tutorial from start to finish you will have a working Ruby application, this is far from likely. The whole thing jumps from stage to stage, and of course suffers from the common computer tutorial problem of starting out for dummies then you turn the page and are expected to code the Hubble space telescope.

Every few sentence contain phrases like “We’ll leverage Rails to generate our application directory…” Seriously. It actually uses phrases like this as though they mean something. It is the worst abuse of the English language I have seen in (non-PR related) published material in a long time. The rest of the tutorial suffers from a combination of assumptions and “terminology gaffes.”

In parts, it seems to assume no prior knowledge at all, then jumps to startling difficult concepts which are hardly explained. The “migrations” are brought from no where and then readers are expected to start generating them. The section reads:

For our lightweight message board application, we need to generate two database tables: one for the discussion threads and another for posts left by users. To begin using migrations, run the migration generator for both by typing: (code)

Now, oddly, the only earlier reference to the word migration is about migrating data from one system to another (the examples give are MySQL to PostgreSQL). It is amazing. This happens repeatedly.

In essence, I suspect that even if you followed the tutorial line by line you would not end up with any better idea on how to use Ruby on Rails to develop web applications. I know I didnt.