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Day out at Watson's Bay
- 27 May 2012
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One of those brilliant crisp but sunny Autumn days. Caught the bus, then ferry. Fish and chips in the park, ice cream, then back home. Lots of fun.
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Labor, what's with the kid gloves?
- 26 May 2012
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The Australian Labor Party needs to grow a pair and get serious here. This is a political party whose internal bastardry is legendary, yet they can't seem to use the same kind of RealPolitik tactics outside.
The largest newspaper publisher in the country is openly hostile to them, yet they continue to talk to News Corp journalists expecting to get a fair run. They should simply refuse to speak to them, answer their questions, take their calls.

A group of mining billionaires spends millions on a campaign that brings down the party's leader and drags polls down to appalling levels. Does the party add them to a shitlist of people who never get a thing from the government in future? Nope, instead it changes immigration rules to suit the oligarchs. Does it think Clive, Twiggy and Gina are suddenly going to start supporting them?

I'm gobsmacked at how gutless these guys are, and how they're unwilling to use the same tactics the Tories are using against them. Tactics they're all familiar with from student politics and factional battles. It's just bizarre.
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Who are Doctors for the Family? Let's crowdsource it!
- 16 May 2012
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Last Sunday, Mother's Day no less, an organisation calling itself Doctors for the Family had their submission to the Senate Committee on Marriage Equality published with all kinds of unsubstantiated claims about gay marriage harming children. Using their clinical qualifications to justify this kind of bigotry is pretty slimy.
I think it's pretty important that any doctors working on me or my family's health base their clinical decisions on evidence and not superstition. So I've taken the list of signatories to the submission and started digging out contact details for them. There's a fair chunk of overlap with another very similar pop-up organisation, Medicine with Morality, and their submission to a Legislative Review of Human Cloning law. That's a good starting point.

Interestingly the previous submission included addresses, but this current one hides them. I think if you're going to use your professional qualifications to justify bigotry and superstition, you need to stand behind that with your full professional identification.

What I need is your help to trawl through, then double-check, the full list. Already we've discovered that one of the doctors on the list works at my family's medical practice. Scary.
To get involved, jump on Google Docs and request edit access, then start looking up details. Try to be pretty certain you've got the right doctor. Some of the East Asian names are pretty common and so we can't be too certain, so best to leave them unless you have some corroborating evidence. To be clear, we're after the professional address of these doctors, not any private address details. The aim here is to allow people to make an informed choice of doctor.

Once complete, I'll publish the full list and knock up some visualisations to map where these doctors are and definitively answer the question: Who are Doctors for the Family?
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I'm a convert to recruitment screen questions
- 15 May 2012
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I'm currently recruiting for a position in my team and the company uses one of those hideous Web 1.0 HR systems. One of its features is to set screening questions that you can use to rule out candidates who aren't worth wasting your time over. Because I'm distrustful of automation in such a human process, I set all my questions to optional so that none of the candidates is automatically screened out. However seeing some of the answers come in, I think next time I might raise the bar a little.
The position is for a data analyst who can primarily build automated reports and dashboards. I've had a few candidates apply with answers like this:

1. Rate your experience building automatically-updating dashboards in Excel.

Expert
Proficient
X Minimal

2. Have you used any web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture or WebTrends?

Yes
X No

3. Have you used any visualisation tools like Tableau or Spotfire?

Yes
X No

4. Rate your experience with SQL

Expert
Proficient
X Minimal

5. Describe your experience with an online marketing campaign and the insights that you provided?

n/a

I now see that I don't even need to open the CV attached to these applications. If you haven't got anything I've asked for, why bother applying?
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Driving for data nerds
- 7 May 2012
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For our shiny new car, I bought a device that allows you to read data from the car's internal data bus over Bluetooth to my phone. $21 from Hong Kong. You plug the thing in and pair it with your phone, then find an app to read and display the data. I chose Torque for my Android phone.
Right away, you've got an amazing set of data about what's going on inside your car. Incredible how much data they generate, really. While I'm not a car nerd, I do appreciate an interesting data set.

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Do English Premier League wages translate into points?
- 4 May 2012
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Click through to view in Tableau PublicClick through to see in Tableau PublicRandom thing inspired by this discussion on Quora which references this blog post which has a table showing wages vs League points in the EPL. Excel scatter plots are weird so I thought I'd try it in Tableau Public. Below is my experiment with the data. Best viewed in Tableau Public itself rather than these static images.

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Do_English_Premier_League_wage.zip (23 KB)
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Why you don't put any old random JavaScript on your site
- 20 Apr 2012
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Ouch. I presume this was from malware JavaScript, but it could be their server was pwned. Bad guys these days make no visible change for ordinary visitors, but for crawlers and then when they get into the search engine index, they flick you to the spam sale site. Nasty.
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On the anatomy of thrift
- 5 Apr 2012
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This beautiful series of instructional web videos teaches how to butcher pigs in a relaxed and fun hipster style. These guys would undoubtedly ride fixies and use Macs. Or at least their customers would. Very instructive on the finer points, and done with loving care.
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Nice work Google
- 31 Mar 2012
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For the record, those devices are:
- Acer Iconia A500 Android tablet
- Samsung Galaxy SII
- HTC Desire
- Logitech Revue (Google TV)
You'd think they could make it work on at last one of them if they're gonna make that claim!
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Nice_work_Google.zip (717 KB)
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Holiday beard begone
- 11 Mar 2012
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As mentioned, I start my new job at Vodafone tomorrow. To make the morning a bit easier, I shaved off my holiday beard tonight. Here's the before/after shots.
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