Chris Worfolk's Blog

Earlier this month saw the 2017 AGM of West Yorkshire Humanists. It was a changing of the guard as Moz, our chair for almost the past decade, stepped down to let the younger dynamic young go-getters take over.

Laurence and Chris H were elected as joint chairs.

We then followed this with a group discussion on “should Humanism be political”. It seemed very apt given the same day was the General Election. Finally, we headed over to The George for some drinks.

Earlier this month, Kerny turned one. We celebrated with a picnic at Tetley Green.

Missing out on the latest Venla pictures? You probably need to follow me on Instagram. For those of you who are not down with the kids, here are some photos…

Venla learnt to wave last month. SHe’s enjoying it.

In May, we went back to Leeds SOUP to report on the progress at Anxiety Leeds. Venla screamed her head off last time, so this time I took her up to the front to give the talk with me. She seemed much happier in the limelight.

We went for a walk along the canal and let Venla sit in the grass. She was not sure about it at first but got used to it after a while.

You know Oreo’s? The biscuit that nobody likes because once you take the cream away from them they are just this really dry, flavourless biscuit? Well, turns out they are incredibly chocolatey in the right hands. This was shortly before Venla sent my cocktail glass smashing to the ground.

Last month, we had a bake sale at Sky to support International Day Against Homophobia. The crowning jewel of the sale was this…

…which was self-described by the bake-sale team as “the gayest cake in the world”. It was also delicious.

Baby food pouches come with a variety of ingredients and flavours listed on the front. But there are often not as accurate a one might hope. With these pouches, for example, it turns out that a significant percentage of each of them is apples.

Not just a little bit of apple. In the case of the Heinz baby pouch, most of it is apples. But Ella’s Kitchen does make the grade. Their banana baby pouch is made of just one thing: bananas. How crazy is that? Apparently, far more crazy than it should be.

Watch the video. You get to hear the amusing baby screams.

But, if you’re at work, here are the stats:

Venla seems to enjoy music and has lots of fun kicking her piano. So, I decided to take the next logical step and get her a xylophone.

Technically, it’s a glockenspiel. But it seems to me that the skills ought to be transferable if she wants to expand to actually playing xylophone in later life.

She still has a lot to learn. For example, how to use the mallet to hit the keys, rather than putting it in her mouth.

AppSpotr is a cloud-based service that allows you to make your own apps for iOS and Android.

I had a very brief play around with it so I won’t pretend this is anything like an in-depth review. It allows you to create apps using a drag-and-drop editor. You can add a number of different pages to the app, the basic ones are free and then there is a monthly price for the rest of them.

So, for example, if you want to add a form to capture people’s details, that costs $5 per month. Or the enhanced content pages which you need to add videos costs $1 per month.

It seems like a useful service if you are, for example, a restaurant or hotel that needs a little app with a simple menu and some content pages. But, for anything more advanced, it probably will not provide you with what you need. There is no logical, for example, it is just a list of pages.

You also need a developer account with whatever platform you want to publish to.

A lot of my cooking revolves around main courses. It is easy to slip into this pattern: I only do a three-course meal once or twice per week. Therefore, a lot of the starter, lunch and dessert recipes get forgotten about.

However, I have been making a conscious effort to expand this. Adding some new canapes to my repertoire seemed a good direction to go.

A lot of the recipes in this book were too fiddly for me to bother. However, there are some firm favours. The Asian pork balls, for example. And the mini-burgers were not that difficult either.

Pancetta and tomato with basil pesto crostini, and a citrus avocado puree crostino.

Filo tartlets with beef.

All in all, I’ll give this the thumbs up. It has provided me with some great little recipes.

As the smoke cleared on the terrible incident in Manchester and we were able to clear our heads, I began to reflect on the wider implications of what had happened. While such incidents are a tragedy that we would all would rather not have happened, it does provide us opportunities to study aspects of human behaviour we may not always have access to.

Take the adage, “all publicity is good publicity”, for example. It is often debated. Islam is the fastest growing religion in America since 9-11. Over a 6-week period, United Airlines share price actually went up after they got caught smashing up passengers luggage. So I wondered how this event would affect Ariana Grande’s record sales.

Hypthesis

If all publicity is good publicity, we should see Ariana Grande’s record sales increase. This is because the event would cue people to think of her. This would then remind them that they liked her music and go listen to her. Just like it being Friday cues people to go listen to Rebecca Black (sans the good music), as Johan Burger points out in his book Contagious.

So, I devised a very rudimentary experiment. I took the top five Ariana Grande songs on Spotify and recorded the number of listens they had. I then went back five days later and recorded the numbers again. To give us some control data to compare against, I also recorded the numbers for two similar artists: Bridget Mendler and Selena Gomez.

Results

The average increase in the number of listens for Ariana Grande was 2.70%. This compares to 3.29% for Bridget Mendler and 28.06% for Selena Gomez. However, as there is such a huge outlier for Gomez, it may make sense to remove that, it comes down to 6.13%.

Discussion

Initial results would indicate that the incident has not had a positive impact on Ariana Grande’s record sales. If anything, it has had a negative impact.

However, there are some huge caveats to the whole experiment that mean we cannot draw any firm conclusions from it. First, we’re looking at a really small sample size. I only included two other comparison artists and Gomez has two large outliers in her results.

Doing a percentage increase comparison makes sense because this accounts for the popularity of the artist. A simple numbers game would not make sense because bigger artists are likely to increase much faster than smaller artists. However, the percentages are not perfect either.

For one, assuming we buy into the snowball effect, even in percentage terms, larger artists should grow faster than smaller artists. Grande has the biggest following of the three so we might expect her numbers to be bigger.

Nor does it take into account other factors such as the age of the song. A newly released hit, for example, it likely to grow in listens far quicker than an old classic because the existing listens on a new song will be far lower. Then there are other factors at work. Some of the songs are collaborations with other artists, for example.

All of this means that the results here are a very rough estimate.

Conclusion

Terrorism appears to have had a negative effect on Ariana Grande’s record sales. This refutes the adage that “all publicity is good publicity”.

There are a number of reasons this could be the case. First, the negative associations of the incident may be reflecting on Grande herself. Even though it is in no way her fault, we’ll be unable to avoid forming some association. Dan Ariely discusses this in his book Predictably Irrational. People blame weather presenters for bad weather.

Second, people may feel it was now inappropriate to listen to Grande or that doing so was tactless in the light of what had happened.

Or, it could be a statistical anomaly introduced by a small sample size and fundamental flaws in the experiment’s methodological design, and that it is not representative of the wider pattern.

Footnotes

Image courtesy of Melissa Rose via Wikimedia Commons.

Recently, I wanted to pass a random number into a unit test. Sounds simple, right? It probably would be if I wasn’t writing it in Java.

The problem is that the class expected a BigDecimal. But the random utils returns a string. And you can’t convert a string to a BigDecimal. So I had to convert it to a Long, and then convert that to a BigDecimal. Here is the code I ended up with:

BigDecimal pageNumber = BigDecimal.valueOf(Long.valueOf(RandomStringUtils.randomNumeric(1)));

Which started me wondering: how many ways to represent a number are there in Java? So, I looked it up. And came up with this list:

1. AtomicInteger
2. AtomicLong
3. BigDecimal
4. BigInteger
5. Byte
6. double
7. Double
8. float
9. Float
10. int
11. Integer
12. long
13. Long
14. short
15. Short

Some of these are understandable. It makes sense to have separate storage for decimals and integers, for example. But do we really need a short and a Short? And a total of 15 different types of number? It’s madness.

It wouldn’t be so bad if you could just compare the two of them. Or pass in a number to a function. But it is a strongly typed language. Which means a world of pain when people use different types.

But that is what you get for trying to use a proper language, I guess.