Category Archives: My research

Daylight savings referendum

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A somewhat agitated and embarrassed part of my brain is now telling me: “Voting! That means you, Dave, you prat.”

On May 16 we will have the right obligation to vote for or against daylight savings in Western Australia. I see both side of the argument, but on balance I’m happy with it. It does remain slightly hotter later in the day, and of course it’s darker in the early morning. However, I’m not up that early, and I’ll cope with an extra degree C if it means I don’t cycle home in the dark, and that we’re not left three hours behind the rest of the country. Doubtless others will disagree, and an overall “yes” result is hardly in the bag.

The trial process has been a little cynical in its implementation. This will be the fourth referendum on the same issue, and one gets the distinct impression that the pro-daylight savings forces are grudgingly putting a democratic spin on what some may believe to the inevitable march of progress.

For my own part, I’ll be happy if I make it to the polling booth, unlike the state election last year on September 6. I can tell you that date because it’s written on a letter I received from the WAEC entitled “Apparent Failure to Vote Notice”. I’m not in the least bit proud of this, especially since I was and still am a supporter of compulsory voting. However, it allows me to confirm that a penalty of $20 does indeed apply for not voting (not $50 or $120, as I’ve heard other people mention), unless you have a “valid and sufficient reason”. I figured that “I forgot because my brain was full of software engineering research” was probably not on the list of acceptable excuses, and paid my debt to democracy via B-Pay. (I’d been finishing off a paper for submission to the 2009 International Conference on Software Engineering that day, which was unfortunately later rejected as most submissions to the ICSE are.)

I’ve set my phone’s alarm to spring into action this time around, in case my brain doesn’t.

WAEC - Apparent Failure to Vote Notice

Corporate websites

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Trawling through the sites of three hundred or so ICT companies gives you a new perspective of capitalism. It’s a perspective I could have done without.

It’s not the graphics-heavy sites, or the menus that pop up in inconvenient places, or the occasional horrifying overuse of flash. It’s the way in which corporate PR people stretch the laws of reality trying to make their firm stand out in the crowd while simultaneously studiously avoiding any reference to what it actually does. How do they manage it? The amount of effort that designers of ICT websites go to in pursuit of this infuriating paradox must be extraordinary.

To give you some context, I’m building a list of companies to contact regarding a software engineering industry survey. The companies should therefore be involved, in some small way at least, in software engineering. The list I’m working from is a list of ICT companies, many of whom merely supply software or provide other support services.

Do you think you can tell, just from looking at a company’s website, whether they make software or not? The very companies whose core business created the “information superhighway” seem pathologically unable to inform us of such fundamental facts. Some sites, it should be noted, are very well done and tell you exactly what you need to know. Others – often the ones with sleeker graphics – try exceedingly hard to tell you nothing at all, using terms like “innovation”, “solution”, “dynamic” and “changing environments”. They might indeed provide the most innovative solutions of anyone in dynamically changing environments, but what do they do? They seem to imply that if you don’t understand what they’re talking about you don’t deserve to be viewing their site.

When statistics attack

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I swear stats is trying to kill me. I’ve redesigned my experiment so that it’s a nice elegant “two-factor repeated measures” flavour. I won’t trouble you with exactly what that means, or exactly what the nine separate hypotheses I’m testing are. What I will trouble you with, for it’s certainly been troubling me, is this:

To analyse the data I will collect I need to use a stats test, which broadly speaking is a factory that converts numbers into truth (or lies if you’re not careful).

Jim, Mr Stats, has a stats handbook that tells you how to do this. It has a nifty little flowchart at the beginning that you can trace through to work out which of the several dozen different kinds of stats tests you need to use. Easy enough, I think to myself as my fingers follow the little arrows across the page. And where do I end up? At a little box that states helpfully: “It may be possible to devise an ad hoc statistical test for the design under consideration.”

That’s right – with my new, improved, elegant design, the Oracle of Statistics reckons it may be possible, with not so much as a hint as to how one might actually go about it.

Not to be defeated, however, I turn to the Oracle of Everything – Google – with which I stumble upon something called Factorial Logistic Regression. I certainly won’t trouble you with what this means, not because I don’t want to but because I currently have no idea myself. Neither of my two supervisors – one of whom is Jim Himself – does either.

My only hope appears to lie in a library book entitled Regression Modeling Strategies. So the campaign continues…

How does this experiment work?

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Statistics. It all seems to easy until you have to do it.

No worries Dave, I confidently assured myself as I fitted the last details of my delicate experimental design into place, all set to be unleashed on as many undergraduates as I had chocolate to bribe. Now all I have to do is plug in the stats terminology and I’ll… oh shit.

As a research student, you know you’re onto a “winning” idea when you have to write a Python script just to work out what factors your experiment is testing. Somewhat like realising, after you’ve found the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything, that you didn’t know what the question was.