Status-Q

On Monday I met the guys behind Codility – quite an interesting system designed to help with the recruitment of software developers.

Basically, it lets you set simple programming tasks for developers, which they can perform online and in the language of their or your choice, and then sends you a report of how their code performed against a variety of edge cases, for large datasets, etc. If you’re a programmer, try out the demo – I found it quite fun!

I think there is real value in this in a couple of areas, beyond its obvious use to those hiring developers. Firstly, as a way for teachers of programming to set coursework. And secondly as something that would give recruitment agencies a bit more credibility when they’re bombarding me with spam. I would be much more likely to look at their candidates if I knew they had gone through a preliminary level of filtering, especially if they had completed tasks in more than one programming language.

Anyway, very nicely done – worth checking out.

Michael reveals The Great Dried Fruit Conspiracy.

Long-time readers may remember a post from a couple of years ago about Keith Loutit’s photos of Singapore, cunningly taken to make the city look like a model:

Well, as tends to happen in the digital world, what was a still image yesterday is a video today. Sam O’Hare has done a day in the life of New York City using a similar technique. Worth playing in full-screen HD if your connection will allow it.

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare.

More information about how he made it here.

Rose’s second novel, The Counterfeit Guest, comes out in standard paperback today.

It was launched a year ago, but these books come out first as a hardback and a ‘trade paperback’ – a large paperback almost as big as the hardback, sold chiefly in airports. Today, however, you can get a standard-sized, easy-to-read copy for the first time. I much prefer these, actually, to their bigger brothers.

You can buy it from Amazon UK here.

Of course, the really exciting event for us comes at the end of this month when The Mistaken Wife hits the streets.

More info on Rose’s books at RoseMelikan.com.

I launched a new web site on Sunday, which has the potential to transform your marketing materials. It turns any ordinary idea, product or service into an award-winning idea, product or service! Just like that! Visit Awardify.com, the internet’s premier award-granting service! OK, in case you’re wondering, this was partly to make people think more about meaningless marketing phrases, and partly to experiment with how quickly and easily I could something like this using Drupal!

BestCourse4Me.com is a very interesting site which has just been launched by my friends Ros & Steve Edwards. It lets you compare different UK degrees and universities to see what their graduates actually went on to do afterwards, with the aim of allowing students – for example those from poorer backgrounds who may not get much support from their schools or parents – to make more informed choices about whether to do a degree, and if so, which one.

So, for example, you can find out that, six months after graduation, Computer Scientists are paid more than Architects or Lawyers – hurrah! – but they’re more than twice as likely to be unemployed. On the other hand, over 8% of Law graduates are soon afterwards employed as ‘Sales Assistants and Retail Cashiers’ – that’s nearly as many as for History! Oxford graduates earn a bit more than Cambridge graduates, at least initially, but then I guess they need some kind of compensation.

The site raises lots of questions – but that’s a good thing – even if all it does is start discussions about what’s behind the numbers. For example, Oxford graduates earn less and are much more likely to be unemployed than graduates of the Open University, which might be surprising if you didn’t know that OU graduates are generally quite a bit older and often employed at the time they take their degrees. Even the numbers I quoted above need some interpretation. They refer to a point six months after graduation. So law graduates may be employed as cashiers, and earning less than their hacker contemporaries, but that is massively skewed by the fact that 6 months after graduation, lawyers are still qualifying – perhaps they’re paying their way with an evening job, or perhaps they didn’t get a place at law school and have a temporary job until next year.

The site could be a valuable educational experience in itself on how to interpret statistics. I hope that kids get that kind of education before looking at it. Otherwise they might become computer scientists under the mistaken impression that it’s a better-paid profession than law. Trust me…

My friend and colleague Garry has become something of a poster child for the project, as he has achieved an impressive career path from a rather disadvantaged background – so much so that he appeared in The Sun today – see the section on the right-hand side of this page.

This means that he has added to his list of achievements perhaps the greatest accomplishment yet: to appear in the Sun and yet emerge with your dignity intact!

The House of Commons report into the Evidence Check on Homeopathy has now been published and sounds most encouraging.

We conclude that placebos should not be routinely prescribed on the NHS. The funding of homeopathic hospitals—hospitals that specialise in the administration of placebos—should not continue, and NHS doctors should not refer patients to homeopaths.

Lots more good stuff summarised on Andy Lewis’s site.

Lovely walk this morning around Landwade. No, I didn’t know where Landwade was, either.

Photos here, trail and photos here.