Recent Posts

5476

Clipboard Help+Spell / Re: Clipboard Help+Spell: Tips and Tricks

« Last post by IainB on March 11, 2012, 12:28 AM »

What do I need to do to get CHS to give priority to images when I take a Copy of mixed text and image?
I tried selecting the "Prefer Graphic Image over Text" in the Options box, but it didn't seem to make any difference.
Not sure what I am doing wrong.

5477

Screenshot Captor / Re: screen capture secure-eBook and print

« Last post by IainB on March 10, 2012, 03:45 PM »

Does any of this ignore the fact the creator of the ebook specifically did not want any hardcopy generated from it...or am I missing something here?

-40hz (March 10, 2012, 11:46 AM)

Yes, it does seem to be "ignoring" it to some extent.
Looks like there is a restriction placed on the user so that the document can only be accessed through the executable and viewed through Adobe Reader.

5478

Living Room / Re: Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by IainB on March 10, 2012, 03:28 PM »

As a possible solution to ALL CAPS accidents...

...
Tip - dispatching the CapsLock gremlin with Microsoft's remapkey.exe http://tips4laptopus...ck-gremlin-with.html
It refers to the Microsoft remapkey.exe utility.
...

-IainB (August 24, 2008, 03:22 AM)

Other keyboard mapping fixes are useful, but redundant if you use remapkey.exe, which works fine in Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Win7-64 Home Premium.

5479

General Software Discussion / Re: Why 24-bit/192kHz music files make no sense - and may be bad for you!

« Last post by IainB on March 10, 2012, 02:55 PM »

@xtabber: What you wrote is interesting. Thanks.

I use Mp3Tag to edit tags.  Among other things, it lets me export and import tags to and from text files. I often find it faster to export a lot of tags and edit them in a text editor, then re-import them. That also makes it easy to re-use tags from one rip to another of the same material, or copy them from other versions of the same works (particularly useful for classical music).

-xtabber (March 10, 2012, 12:58 PM)

I use DrTag. I had tried Mp3Tag a few years back, found it wanting and so discarded it, but after what you wrote I am trialling it again. It looks like it may have been considerably improved.

5480

Living Room / Re: Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by IainB on March 09, 2012, 07:45 PM »

It's not a smart-alecky comment at all. tranglos was addressing the underlying logic and philosophical argument being made. You're discussing realpolitik - which we all can appreciate is often different from what the law may actually say - even when it isn't flying directly in the face of it.
...
Naive and high-flown arguments? I should say so...
But they aren't the ones being made by tranglos.

-40hz (March 09, 2012, 06:16 PM)

Oh, sorry, I was not intending to suggest that it was a "smart-alecky" comment. I never for a moment thought it was. It made a very good set of points. I absolutely agree with the sentiments expressed by @tranglos in that statement, and someone probably had to speak those sentiments at some stage, as a moral/ethical principle or standpoint at least.

What I was referring to was the truth of the statement in the full quote. It has three parts:

• 1. There is no one right that trumps all other rights, not the free speech, not the freedom of assembly, not even the right to life. (A general but absolute statement, probably true - certainly as a principle to be upheld in a free democracy - with inherent and commonly understood assumptions in terms of the existing laws of the land.)
• 2. So why would property and copyright be the only rights to which there are no exceptions? (A question as to why the converse/contradiction of the 1st statement could be true in the single case of property and copyright.)
• 3. When put like this, the position is untenable. (Therefore, the converse/contradiction of the 1st statement could not be tenable or true by implication.)

-tranglos (March 09, 2012, 02:08 PM)

There is the important third part of the statement, which refers to and follows on from the first and second:

When put like this, the position is untenable.

-tranglos (March 09, 2012, 02:08 PM)

You see, clearly it is tenable - or at least it seems to be in practice - because this "untenable" situation has become and/or is still becoming enshrined in law. I think I gave a reasonable and brief explanation to the question:

So why would property and copyright be the only rights to which there are no exceptions?

Why? Because the people pushing for this apparent contradiction want it and can achieve it if they push hard enough and "donate" enough to lawmakers/senators (QED) to do it.
Every day probably sees yet "another brick in the wall".
If it wasn't tenable, then it wouldn't/couldn't be happening, so the 3rd statement by @tranglos is invalid.

So, it is tenable in fact - and thus it would be a kind of "magical thinking" to believe that it is not.
It is probably a safe assumption that the majority of people reading the three parts of that statement quoted would nod their heads sagely up and down in agreement (I did anyway), certain of its truth.
But if you pause to look at it skeptically and ask "Is that really true? How is it substantiated?", then you can fairly quickly establish that it probably isn't true - though we would perhaps all like it to be.

How did it get to be so? By lawmakers and elected representatives being lobbied/"persuaded" by a powerful minority group to structure/restructure laws that enable the thing to be tenable (legal), even though the lawmakers/reps. would have probably understood full well that it went against the wishes and/or the best interests of the majority of the people (Joe Public) in the "free and democratic" system.
In such a system as this, of course, the wishes and/or the best interests of the majority of the people in this matter would seem to matter not one jot, and to have been pushed up where the sun don't shine.

5481

General Software Discussion / Re: Why 24-bit/192kHz music files make no sense - and may be bad for you!

« Last post by IainB on March 09, 2012, 05:01 PM »

But at least with lossless formats all the music is there to begin with.

-40hz (March 09, 2012, 10:41 AM)

I'm not sure whether that is true.
I could be wrong, of course, but I think I recall reading somewhere that, if you ripped your music from CDs, then it was a rip of sampled music, where the loss from sampling was inaudible/undetectable by the human ear.
That is, the analogue copy is apparently the only copy that could actually contain all the music and thus be the closet approach to the original sound.

5482

Living Room / Re: Why I Pirate - An Open Letter to Content Creators

« Last post by IainB on March 09, 2012, 04:27 PM »

There is no one right that trumps all other rights, not the free speech, not the freedom of assembly, not even the right to life. So why would property and copyright be the only rights to which there are no exceptions? When put like this, the position is untenable.

-tranglos (March 09, 2012, 02:08 PM)

Very good point, nicely argued. Well done, tranglos!  

-40hz (March 09, 2012, 02:13 PM)

Well, it sounds great when put like that, but it would seem to be just a high-sounding opinion naively flying in the face of what is apparently a quite different reality in practice. The reality being that under US law, the rights to some kinds of property seem to take priority/precedence - almost like an ideological god-objective in their own right.

Copyright is property, and the copyright owners have that right sanctioned in law, and because they are corporate legal persons with apparently greater democratic/lobby rights than public persons (QED), then their acknowledged statistically artificial claims (QED) to monetary loss from copyright infringement are regarded as truthful reasons to justify treating copyright infringement as a major felony - with punishments that seem to be sometimes far in excess of the sort of punishments meted out to people for having committed arguably more serious crimes - e.g., such as (say), large-scale banking or corporate fraud against the public, enslavement or killing someone.

At that point - having the status of a major felony -  no matter how harmless to other people this arguably victimless crime might be - the right to life and protection of life apparently takes a back seat.

Don't believe that? Look at the exemplary dotcom raid.

Don't think that the right to life can be that easily superseded?
Try these:

• Handcuffed girl tasered, now in coma. Police cleared of wrongdoing
• Death In The Devil's Chair: Florida Man's Pepper Spray Death Raises Questions About Jail Abuse
• New Orleans Police Kill Unarmed Man During Pot Raid

If you can read up on those links and watch the videos without it turning your stomach or making your blood boil, then you could well be insensate.
The real criminals here could arguably be the lawmakers, judiciary and the state police - all there for your legal protection. Oopsy-daisy, we just made it legal to kill, and then did kill another innocent civilian for some apparently farking minor or non-offence. All correct and necessary in the execution of duty. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind. One less "felon" to worry about.

OK, let's revisit this statement:

There is no one right that trumps all other rights, not the free speech, not the freedom of assembly, not even the right to life. So why would property and copyright be the only rights to which there are no exceptions? When put like this, the position is untenable.

Yeah, right.

5483

General Software Discussion / Re: Why 24-bit/192kHz music files make no sense - and may be bad for you!

« Last post by IainB on March 09, 2012, 05:13 AM »

one think I am picking up from this is that I probably should re-encode all my CDs - that it is likely that the ogg encoder I used in 2000 could have been of lower quality than the one I could use now (although it was not the one in ffmpeg). And I have much better processing power now so it should be less painful.
Who am I kidding, this would take months - there's between 300 and 500 CDs in that basement, if not more :S

-iphigenie (March 09, 2012, 03:51 AM)

That sort of tedium would be makework akin to sharpening a mountain of pencils.       

5484

General Software Discussion / Re: Why 24-bit/192kHz music files make no sense - and may be bad for you!

« Last post by IainB on March 08, 2012, 05:21 AM »

IainB...you're using the numbers 128, 192 in reference to your mp3 files...are you sure you mean kHz?  Don't those refer to the kbps of the mp3?  kHz is a whole other thing.  Personally, I can totally tell the difference between 128 kbps vs. the higher bitrates like 192, or even 320.  I'm betting most of your mp3s are 44.1 kHz and 128 kbps.

-superboyac (March 07, 2012, 09:27 AM)

Yes, UR quite right - I am confusing the two (kHz and bps). My apologies. I know the difference as well. Stupid of me. Ahem...something I was drinking at the time...I slept like a log last night and felt rather thick-headed on waking this morning.     
I think I must have gone hastily through the whole of the post with the misconception of confusing bps with kHz - except, I think, when I mentioned the 8kHz tone that I can hear.

Also, though I used to be a bit of an audiophile (I even used to build my own pre-amp and amp), my hearing might now be shot, compared to yours. Nowadays, I rather suspect that I only imagine that I can tell the difference between 128 kbps vs. the higher bitrates like 192 or 320, and so am not really sure whether it's a true perception - whereas you are sure, it seems.

Yes, my mp3s are of course likely to be mostly 44.1 kHz and 128 kbps.

5485

Official Announcements / Re: I want to try an experiment on the site for March 2012

« Last post by IainB on March 07, 2012, 11:16 PM »

@TaoPhoenix: Thanks for your comment. I think I understand what you were getting at now!

As an addition to my comment above about a "hypothesis, under Metric #5, is suggested widening the user audience by (say) catering for blind or poor-sighted people by:

...enabling ARIA technology (Accessible Rich Internet Applications markup) in the website.

Just by chance I came across something else for widening audience participation today: http://www.odiogo.com/
Might be worth considering.

5486

Living Room / Re: Sorry, This Post Has Been Censored

« Last post by IainB on March 07, 2012, 05:43 AM »

Coincidentally, this interesting post from The Centre for the Study of Innovative Freedom:
Copyright is Unconstitutional: Update

5487

General Software Discussion / Re: Request for information about DonationCoder

« Last post by IainB on March 07, 2012, 04:56 AM »

Is it my imagination, or is @db90h making all kinds of insinuations here?
What brought this on?

Enquiring minds need to know.

5488

General Software Discussion / Re: Why 24-bit/192kHz music files make no sense - and may be bad for you!

« Last post by IainB on March 07, 2012, 04:45 AM »

Thanks for this @40hz. V interesting post and links.
It is in line with and updates my research from some years ago, providing some new material - so I have learned some new things.

Nowadays I usually listen to all my music via headphones on my laptop, from mp3's at 128kHz. I had always been skeptical of the need for using 192kHz and considered it to be inefficient in space terms and with no perceptible benefit in my case.

I guess the important variable in all of this is really your native hearing faculties, which tend to deteriorate with age and you tend to also gradually lose your pitch sense. That means the requirement for high fidelity that you might have had drops off with age. Fortunately, I used to  use earplugs when I went to noisy places - e.g., discos or pop music concerts - so my hearing is still pretty acute, but I can't really hear bats squeaking anymore, though I can still hear around 8kHz tones quite clearly in the upper registers, and bass always gets through (can be uncomfortable).

5489

Living Room / Re: Sorry, This Post Has Been Censored

« Last post by IainB on March 06, 2012, 11:57 PM »

A superb FREE film - Sita Sings the Blues - that @Renegade pointed to:

I found this: http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/
While reading this: http://mimiandeunice.com/
Mimi and Eunice is hilarious, so I figured I'd download the "Sita Sings the Blues" movie. (Still downloading -- very much looking forward to it, and too impatient to wait, watch, then post! )
But, check this from the site:

You don't need my permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix Sita Sings the Blues. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom.

You can read more at both those sites. If you're mildly interested in copyright and all that wonderfulness, check it out.

-Renegade (July 02, 2011, 07:40 AM)

I watched the film with my daughter Lily. We loved it and have had repeat viewings. It seems the film is in a semi-autobiographical meta-context (if that makes sense?) of the film's creator (Nina Paley), but is also an accurate animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana, set to the beautiful 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw.

The other day we were browsing the website and reading all about and watching the YouTube videos about the copyright hassles that the producer (Nina Paley) went through. It seems that those beautiful 1920's jazz vocals are bound up in almost eternal copyright, due to the media-making lobby's successful attempts in getting the coverage of the copyright legislation extended indefinitely by incremental steps. The songs are a veritable treasure of human creativity locked up by a seemingly greedy, Dog-in-the-manger media group, and could well have never seen the light of day again if it had not been for Nina Paley's persistence.

I think this sort of thing (copyright hassles) could be a typical aspect - part and parcel - of the media-rights commercial lobby's strategy that seems to be driving a lot of the censorship that has been going on (the subject of this thread).
That this has more recently become a more public concern is only because it happened to rise to public awareness and there was an "Internet protest". The SOPA legislation was like a Trojan Horse that got belatedly spotted by an otherwise generally unsuspecting public.

So, I think that what I said above was/is probably true:

...that makes me wonder if that Internet censorship is not just a single narrow aspect of a much larger overall strategy of state censorship in the US, driven presumably by commercial interests rather than by genuine state security interests.

-IainB (March 01, 2012, 05:37 PM)

If it is true, then it could indicate that the corporate lobby groups are now effectively the real de facto lawmakers, and the Senate/Judiciary are now the administrators/bureaucrats who are paid to rubber-stamp and enact the new "laws". Presumably, this would make the State Legislature the puppets of the relatively few corporate legal Persons, enacting laws in the interests of those Persons and often against the interests of the many public persons - which would seem to run contrary to (or in breach of) the democratic process and even the duty of government to protect the people.

I could be wrong in this, of course - e.g., if I do not understand the system very well and the system is just fine.

5490

Living Room / Re: More Complete Patent Insanity (Warning -- You may vomit)

« Last post by IainB on March 06, 2012, 07:38 PM »

That's the way it's done today.
...

So it goes. 

-40hz (March 06, 2012, 02:40 PM)

Wow. A succinct précis of foreign policy.
My favourite précis of US foreign policy is Randy Newman's song "Political Science" (Lyrics - "Let's drop the Big One now.")   

5491

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Hard Disk Sentinel PRO - Mini-Review

« Last post by IainB on March 06, 2012, 01:15 AM »

The developer (Janos) at Hard Disk Sentinel sent me a link to some cases of problems discovered using HDS.

They are under under Support -> Knowledge base -> Hard disk cases, here: http://www.hdsentine.../hard_disk_cases.php
I had asked him to send me some details and he has just now put up these cases on the Support pages of their website.

I think I shall send him my contribution.

5492

Living Room / Re: The conflict of interest that is Google

« Last post by IainB on March 05, 2012, 09:39 PM »

Basically, I think I am just too darned tired to understand any of what the heck you guys are talking about.    

-J-Mac (March 05, 2012, 09:09 PM)

I don't blame you.
I don't understand what the heck I'm talking about half the time either!    

Oh, and BTW - looks like Google is ending the whole "Knol" thing, unfortunately. You probably know that but I just found out.  

-J-Mac (March 05, 2012, 09:09 PM)

Yes. I was annoyed when I read that Google intended to close the Knol service. (I believed in Google, dammit!)      
And migrating a Knol to Annotum (the recommended migration site) does not work properly, causing me to lose roughly 80% of the knol content.
Ah well. Once bitten, twice shy.

That Ahamkara concept, by the way - that is a surprisingly useful concept. It is wisdom/knowledge that can help to explain a lot of our previously inexplicable irrational behaviours. It comes from the 3,000 year-old (or so) Vedic religious philosophy, and has been absorbed into the much younger Hindu religious philosophy.
When I discovered that Ahamkara was a theory which was supported by evidence and experience of irrational human behaviour (my own included!), I was bowled over. I haven't been able to refute it by rational argument or from experience, yet (though I keep trying).

I would recommend that you persevere and have a read of the Bhagavad Gita, even if it does send you to sleep. It's very interesting.

5493

Living Room / Re: More Complete Patent Insanity (Warning -- You may vomit)

« Last post by IainB on March 05, 2012, 09:00 PM »

Wait a minute ... Prius is/means mad in latin?!?  Oh I'll have a ball with that!

-Stoic Joker (March 05, 2012, 07:14 PM)

Sorry to disappoint. Prius means "prior to" or "before."

-40hz (March 05, 2012, 07:22 PM)

All those proud Prius owners can now heave a sigh of relief?       

5494

Living Room / Re: The conflict of interest that is Google

« Last post by IainB on March 05, 2012, 08:43 PM »

That all sounds real good and benign until you start factoring in other very serious items.  
...

-CodeTRUCKER (March 05, 2012, 05:28 PM)

+1 from me for pretty much all that you wrote there CodeTRUCKER.    

When I read this bit though, I have to say that it rather felt like I was playing verbal "Twister":    

Keep in mind it is only the ability of a deceiver in using the lie to keep the deceived believing the deceiver is to be trusted which allows the deceiver to deceive the deceived with the lie.  Once the truth is known by the deceived the power of the deceiver and the lie is nullified and the deceiver loses any credibility.  In other words, a lie only has power while the deceiver can keep the deceived believing the deceiver is to be trusted.  Google succeeds in continuing to keep the "searcher"  believing "Google is your friend."

-CodeTRUCKER (March 05, 2012, 05:28 PM)

If you don't mind I would rephrase and augment it thus:

We all generally tend by nature to be credulous (willing to believe or trust too readily, especially without proper or adequate evidence), and tend to believe what we are told to believe or what we want to believe (confirmation bias) - often despite any inherent irrationality in the belief or any evidence which might contradict it.

This generalisation can be substantiated by, for example, the 2008/9 statistics/estimates which apparently showed that, out of the Earth's global population of 6 billion, 1.6 billion were Islamists, and 1.4 billion were RC/Christian. That's an estimted 50% of the world's population (us) that are apparently gullible/irrational enough to believe in an unsubstantiated myth - an invisible, omnipotent and omnipresent friend.

Additionally, Vedic philosophy teaches us that, once swallowed, we can tend to cling onto a belief because of Ahamkara. It becomes conjoined with our ego, and we have to defend it. Sometimes we will defend or enforce the belief with our lives, and even with lives of others. (QED.)

The evidence would seem to be that various unscrupulous people, religious leaders, governments and commercial organisations have taken advantage of human gullibility in order to deceive, trick, manipulate and control them for at least 2,000 years - and they continue to do so to the present day.

Therefore, if Google has indeed been guilty of deceiving us and breaching our trust - because, dammit, we believed in Google - then the scale of that deception is relatively insignificant when compared to the scale of that deceived 50% and in the historical context.
And it serves the purpose of oiling the wheels and feeding the demand for the economic machine.
And that is apparently a sufficiently "worthy cause" in a Capitalist economy for such deception to be allowed (if it wasn't, then Google and similar would probably already have been stopped dead in their tracks). Any deception could arguably be "for the greater good".

That's why I wrote:

Is it justified to criticise Google for what it does or the way it does what it does?
As the marketing speak would put it, "It's all a matter of perception".

In addition to its indisputably generally positive contribution to the Internet and the economy, Google is also relatively harmless, and, if you don't like it, then there is (so far) nothing stopping you from getting out of its clutches by closing your Google account and boycotting its services - unlike the EU or Islamism, where you are not allowed to leave once you have become a member (in fact the punishment for apostasy in Islam is death).

Regardless, Google is probably still perceived as a "friend" by the uncritical and credulous majority.
So we should stop griping and thank our lucky stars. You've never had it so good.    

5495

Living Room / Re: More Complete Patent Insanity (Warning -- You may vomit)

« Last post by IainB on March 05, 2012, 05:00 PM »

I personally suspect the reason the U.S. government is allowing this to continue - and ...

-40hz (March 05, 2012, 02:49 PM)

+ 1 from me for what you wrote.

I suspect that a great majority of people would share those sentiments, but would probably feel impotent to do anything about it because the collaboration between government and the corporations (common vested interests) has already successfully created an impenetrable and self-sustaining wall of law built in such a way as to prevent anyone from dismantling the wall. This presumably is to "secure" the future economic dominance of the US and US corporations in the ongoing economic wars.
I think it's akin to a form of economic hegemony.
After the Philippines (a case of economic colonisation), the US doesn't "colonise" other territories anymore, but it sure seems to exercise an economic and political command and control system over them when it wants to.

5496

Living Room / Re: The conflict of interest that is Google

« Last post by IainB on March 05, 2012, 04:23 PM »

Is it justified to criticise Google for what it does or the way it does what it does?
As the marketing speak would put it, "It's all a matter of perception".

One perception here:
Looks like Du Pont was originally a gunpowder manufacturer (that was interesting - I never knew that) and then diversified into all sorts of fields, and sought to grow as a corporation, through acquisition and expansion. The objective would have been to fulfil its charter to make profits for its shareholders. Looks like it was probably a well-run psychopathic corporation - true to its business model. Then a bit of antitrust bother. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind. (Well, you can' t always get away with monopoly all of the time, but you have to try, don't you?)
Think of all the employment that resulted (and still continues) from Du Pont's operations as the corporation grew.
An enormous wealth-creating economic engine.
A great corporation.

As an experiment, re-run the above but substituting "IBM" for "Du Pont". Same model, different products/services. Antitrust bother in the early '80s (IBM was forced to sell their Commercial Bureau Services arm, which was bought up by CDC).
Another great corporation.

Then repeat that with "Google", or the name of whatever other major corporation you care to think of.
Try "Monsanto" - I think that fits it too. Monsanto might have studiously avoided the antitrust hurdle so far (has it?), but anyway it's GM technology probably takes it perilously close to the line (it's patenting food on a global scale, for goodness' sake). One day the legislators might wake up to that fact - if Monsanto's lawyers/lobbyists forget to fund them enough to stay asleep.

Define "Conflict of interest" and see if it really applies to Google. You will probably arrive at the conclusion that there is none in Google. It is probably just another well-run psychopathic corporation - true to its business model.
A great company.
But there's maybe a small difference with the "Do no evil" statement. That flies right in the face of what a well-run psychopathic corporation should be doing - treating it's adverse effects as externalities, for society to deal with. If anything, it is that statement that is a conflict of interest in this context.
No problem, the statement can always be quietly removed/forgotten by the Board, after the phantasising idiot who pronounced it has died/retired/been paid off. It's probably not a legal requirement anyway (is it?) - it's an ambiguous and morally high-sounding PR statement ("spin"), and has no real meaning and certainly no binding value. It's become a cliché. It's probably just a comforter for suckers like us. Regardless, you can rest assured that the corporation will justify whatever it wants to justify as being "Not evil".

So, stop griping about them and just accept those adds in the searches and support the economic engine and all that employment. The adverts are harmless, and a good thing, because they can generate consumption by those with the propensity to pay. And if you are lucky enough to have the propensity to pay, then it's only because of the economic engine that you are a part of.

5497

Official Announcements / Re: I want to try an experiment on the site for March 2012

« Last post by IainB on March 05, 2012, 08:11 AM »

So I take it no one liked my "Ad Page" idea in either of it's forms.

-TaoPhoenix (March 05, 2012, 06:19 AM)

No, that's not true in my case. I didn't dislike the idea in either form, but it didn't seem that you were all that serious about it...      (Sorry.)
And in any event, your idea(s) didn't really seem to encourage the unabandonment of "the one month ad experiment".
I had thought the idea of this experiment could potentially realise some concrete and useful information/knowledge if it were implemented, and that just might lead to change for the better (which I am all in favour of). I was expecting it to go ahead until mouser indicated that he thought it might be:

...just doing random things that have little chance of providing some useful insight...

If the experiment were implemented as "random", then any change action arising from its outcome could likely be random too. That's not so good:

"Action which is not based on sound theory or "best"/good practice is irrational by definition." (WE Deming)

Thus, I figured that thinking about how to build a sturdy hypothesis for the experiment might be more immediately useful (right now) than innovative ideas - e.g., like yours.

5498

General Review Discussion / Re: Quick Review: Collusion - Firefox "tracking" add-on

« Last post by IainB on March 04, 2012, 11:05 PM »

Yes, I can imagine there would be a lot of clicking if you don't use things like Ghostery, AdBlock+, NoScript.
Even so, this map (below) is what I have after 24 hrs or so.
Quite a bit of tracking is still getting through, it seems.

5499

Post New Requests Here / Re: Flexible Fictional Timeline organisation tool

« Last post by IainB on March 04, 2012, 10:01 PM »

I'm not sure, but you could probably find this in Scrivener (seems to provide a superb authoring/writing toolset), or possibly even Pathagoras.

Failing those, consider setting up your main character as a Facebook person and building their timeline in Facebook. You might lose privacy for your fictional character though...   
You could even advertise it, maybe, once the timeline was sufficiently developed.
Who knows? You might get followers who wanted to watch as your character and/or story developed.

5500

Official Announcements / Re: I want to try an experiment on the site for March 2012

« Last post by IainB on March 04, 2012, 09:31 PM »

When is that (basic curiosity) not a good reason for running an experiment?

well said -- i agree completely.
what i meant to say was: let me not waste the patience of our visitors and members by just doing random things that have little chance of providing some useful insight; let me wait until i have some experiment that is more interesting.

-mouser (March 02, 2012, 03:50 AM)

Well, off the top of my head, and just as a suggestion, and in the hope that this may be of help/use...and without wishing to teach my grandmother to suck eggs....    
(These are not my opinions; it is mostly drawn from past marketing experience and training.)

It probably wouldn't be so "random" (as you say), if you published a more clearly defined hypothesis that you wanted to test in the experiment.
If you defined the experiment as a pragmatic piece of test marketing (market research) - which is arguably an accurate description of what it is likely to be - then, the possible objectives could reasonably include (and taken from the above thread) items as follows. These are merely suggestions that you might consider - I do not know whether these objectives are what you intended, I am just supposing:

Objectives:

• To enable the introduction of advertising into the DCF (DC Forum) as a test trial of them as a possible revenue-generating tool.
• To base the trial results on feedback from the users, regarding their experience of the trial and on the statistical analysis of the usage/traffic of the DCF during the trial. (This will necessitate unambiguous user feedback and clearly defined and measurable performance data.)
• To publish the analysis of the results and the conclusions that can be drawn from them, as a project on the DCF, for users to study and comment on if they wish.
• To provide the users with the ability to disable the advertising (which would be enabled by default) during the trial, if they wanted to (if they didn't have AdBlock+ or similar add-ons).
• To provide the users with the ability to enable the advertising during the trial, if they wanted to (if they did have AdBlock+ or similar add-ons).
• To gather feedback from the users - at the end of the trial and/or during it - about their experience of using the DCF during the experiment.

From these objectives, you could work backwards to a hypothesis something along these lines (say):
Hypothesis:

To identify whether there is an optimal level of:
(a) advertising acceptance of the DCF user community during the trial, coupled with
(b) user experience/satisfaction of using the DCF, during the trial.

(What you seem to have in this discussion thread so far is a collection of feedback and opinion as to what you stated as being your intention, together with some self-prediction of user experience/expectation. This is arguably of little use for testing the above hypothesis.)
What this hypothesis would probably necessitate is at least five objective metrics, for the trial to be of any real/valid use:

Metric #1 - User population(members of the trial group). (Mandatory.)

If this is a trial marketing exercise, then you do not want to include respondents who are not part of the trial market group.
Thus, when users enter the site, they could be asked whether they agree to being part of the trial at the outset.
If they said "No", then the default advertising would be disabled. These users would then be filtered OUT of the trial for that and all subsequent visits - unless (say) they decided to become part of the trial at a later stage (so you could leave them the option to join the trial at a later stage).
You could also leave them the option to trigger their leaving the trial group at a later stage (to avoid unannounced abandonment by members of the group - which could render the data meaningless).

Metric # 2 - User lifespan  (Probably mandatory.)

The length of time during the trial that the user stayed as a member of the trial group.
This could be used as a weighting factor for some of the results.

Metric #3 - Acceptance: (Mandatory.)

Measured by the users either:
(a) leaving the default advertising enabled (in those cases where they do not have AdBlock+ or similar), or
(b) disabling AdBlock+ (in those cases where they do have AdBlock+ or similar).

Issues to resolve:
(i) How to determine automatically and with certainty whether a user has visibility of the advertising at the client, or is blocking them at the client.
(ii) If visibility cannot be determined, then how reliable (percentage) is the compliant user confirmation that they have disabled as per (b).

The implication here might be that the accuracy of this metric will be dependent on the compliance reliability of the user.
This also assumes that when users enter the site, they are made aware of the trial and the need to (a) or (b).

Metric #4 - traffic/performance data (Mandatory.)

I  assume that you will be able to monitor and gather this data for each session from the point where a user enters, peruses/actions DCF discussion threads, and then exits/drops out of the DCF. This may imply the use of cookies, and the user agreeing up front (as above) to being a member of the trial group, gaining visibility of the advertising and accepting cookies from the site.

Metric #5 - statistical analysis of user feedback/experience (Highly desirable.)

For feedback to have statistical veracity or reliability, you will generally need as large an amount of data as you can get hold of:
(a) A large population to survey: in this case a few hundred (say?) might suffice. Having (say) 10% of 20 people state the view that "such-and-such" carries no statistical relevance and would only be of any use if you were (say) trying to kid yourself or substantiate the fallacy of the appeal to the consensus - e.g., similar to the "97% of climate scientists agree that..." kind of logical fallacy of the appeal to the consensus.
You will need to determine/estimate your total max possible population to be surveyed ("X"), and determine the actual population to be surveyed ("Y") - i.e., those users who opt-in to the trial. You will only know "Y" on a suck-it-and-see basis - i.e., after you actually start/finish the trial.

To increase the probability of having as large a population as possible in "Y", you could:
(i) Before the trial, request and encourage co-operation from all DCF members (maybe offer some kind of an incentive or reward?). This is your main and potentially "captive" audience.
(ii) Before the trial, request/encourage co-operation from other audiences - e.g., (say) from users of other blogs/forums - to enter into the trial.
(iii) Before the trial, update those features of the website that might attract members of a population that might formerly have been unable to access/use your site for whatever reason - e.g., say, blind or poor-sighted people, by enabling ARIA technology (Accessible Rich Internet Applications markup) in the website.

(b) At least 60% response rate from that population: this is a general rule-of-thumb used in statistical census-taking in New Zealand and the UK. For your purposes, you might have to put up with less, but, as it diminishes, the reliability/veracity of your statistical analysis diminishes quite rapidly - as per (a). Reliability/veracity can be described as a function of total population size and response rate.

Method of collecting feedback and making an analysis:

To improve the feasibility and use of the feedback in analysis, it is probably useful to ensure that there is a questionnaire which asks specific closed (but not loaded) questions, designed to elicit specific objective responses on matters that you have identified as being important to assess for the purposes of the trial and in testing the hypothesis.
Some of the questions may need to be antithetical to cancel out "faking" in the responses.
Where a question may necessarily and unavoidably be likely to provide a subjective response, then the Kepner-Tegoe approach can be useful in averaging out bias in the population of responses. That could probably involve (say) using some importance or weighting factor to multiply each response by, and then taking the average of the results. (That is, not all responses to some questions would necessarily carry equal weight.)
Avoid mixing up the objective response data with the subjective.