More Comics

As I haven't been slacking off this week (lots of work and house sorting stuff) I haven't had the time to think about doing long interesting blog posts. So to keep things ticking over I thought you might like a couple more comics.

Firstly in relation to a previous post on the combination of a knife and fork we have...

And for completeness here is the other Dilbert strip that I have framed on my study wall

Normal service will hopefully resume soon!

Slacking Off

Whilst I would never readily admit to slacking off, both of the following cartoons have applied to me in the past -- and for most scientists you can easily replace compiling with running experiment.

I'm not sure if one is funnier than the other although I do have a framed copy of the Dilbert strip on my study wall.

Evicting the Squatters

Well today was eviction day. You may remember that we had squatters (i.e. wasps building a nest in a bird box) in the garden. When they were minding their own business I wasn't too bothered by them. On Saturday, however, I was cutting the grass when one of them launched an unprovoked attack leaving me with a very sore arm.

So I called the council on Monday to arrange for them to be moved and I was told no problem they will be shifted on Wednesday. Well the guy just came. He spent longer suiting up than he did destroying the nest. In fact he was so fast I didn't have the chance to take a photo to accompany this post. Hopefully we won't have any more problems, although apparently if they come back and start nesting again this year then the council will send someone out free of charge to have a second go -- hopefully that won't be necessary!

I-Plate Update

Well it's been over three days since I fitted the I-Plate to my phone socket and I thought I'd give you all an update. Before fitting the I-Plate I did a number of tests of the speed of my broadband using the Broadband Speed Checker (I did try embedding the speed checker in this post but for some reason it wouldn't work even when I followed the instructions, ah well worth a try). Whilst the numbers varied a bit they were always around the 5200 Kbps mark. Adding the I-Plate didn't seem to make any difference although the instructions did say that it might take 48 hours before any improvement.

So I've just tested it again and I'm now getting around 6200 Kbps -- an improvement of 1 Mbps! Given that I'm on an "up to" 8Mbps service and was told by BT that the most my line would actually support was 6Mbps I'm quite impressed. Added to the speed improvement the broadband has been very reliable since I added the I-Plate -- no slow downs requiring me to re-boot the router and no disconnections. All-in-all I'm extremely impressed by such a small piece of kit that only cost me £1.20!

Too Many Mammals!

Disclaimer: No mammals were hurt in the writing of this blog post!

For quite a while I've been looking for the opportunity to have a little fun with the papers I write at work. They usually have very boring titles and the content is often not of interest to anyone outside the small research community that attends the conference. So the chance to brighten up a paper was not to be missed.

I did some work late last year with three colleagues on improving the diversity of the output of automatic term recognition systems -- sounds boring right? Basically we were applying a re-ranking approach to a list of terms so that the top x terms were more diverse than before (clear as mud I know). Anyway, we were using a corpus of Wikipedia documents about wildlife so many of the terms were the names of animals, birds, fish etc. In the first version of the software the list seemed to be heavily weighted towards whales and so I was going to be really controversial and suggest that there were Too Many Whales. Unfortunately after some fine tuning of the baseline things settled down a bit and so the paper title became Too Many Mammals -- to be completely truthful it became Too Many Mammals: Improving the Diversity of Automatically Recognized Terms, which will be presented at RANLP in September.

I'm still aiming to improve on this as I know that it is nowhere near as good as the classic paper on the Big Bang Theory by Alpher, Bethe and Gamow or the fantastic question answering paper A Sys Called Quanda.

Fitting the I-Plate

Well my I-Plate arrived today so I now have a slightly fatter phone socket. It took me longer to find a suitable screw driver than it did to fit it!

As yet I'm not seeing any really speed difference but the instructions do say that it can take up to 48 hours for any improvements to be noticed so I'll check again after the weekend and let you know.

Would You Like Faster Broadband?

Ever since we moved house the broadband hasn't been as reliable as I would like. Periodically it has dropped so low I would have been better off on dial-up! Now I don't know what the problem is but I would like to find a solution.

It turns out that one common cause of slow broadband is noise on the line caused by a redundant part of the phone cable (for those in the know it is the bell wire that is the culprit). BT sell something they call the I-Plate (what is with the fascination of adding I to the beginning of product names?) that is supposed to filter out this noise. Apparently they have been selling the I-Plate for over a year but I've never heard of it before.

The I-Plate can only be fitted to certain types of phone socket (for those who like product codes then it's the NTE5 type master socket) that look like the one in the picture.

What is interesting is that as of July they started to make them available to BT Total Broadband customers (which includes me) for just the price of the P&P -- at the current moment that is just £1.20. If you qualify you can request yours through this short questionnaire, if not then you can buy one direct from BT through their online shop.

So given I have the right kind of phone socket and am a BT Total Broadband customer I've ordered mine and I'll let you know if it makes any difference once it has arrived.