In Edward Tufte’s dry-sounding but classic book on data presentation, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (which is actually very readable), he draws up a table of the ‘Graphical Sophistication’ of 15 international news publications (see page 83). Der Spiegel and The Economist do well, as do two Japanese papers, Asahi and Akahata. The New York Times comes about half-way down the list. I was reminded of this earlier when I saw this graphic in the NYT, which accompanies a story on the decline of marriage amongst middle-aged men. Although even I could spot some lessons from Tufte’s book which could improve it, it’s heartening to see that grown-up statistics and presentation are nevertheless alive. One of Tufte’s core rules is to ‘Maximize the data-ink ratio, within reason’. This graphic is a good example.

Imagine an auction with these rules:

• There are 20 people in a room, who can’t communicate.

• They are bidding on £10 provided by the auctioneer.

• They each have to put a sealed bid in.

• Each one has to pay the amount they bid to the auctioneer whether they win or not.

• The winner gets the £10.

The real puzzle is, what’s your strategy as a bidder? And just to complicate things, consider this: bidding £11 may not be a dumb thing to do. It turns out that the auctioneer often makes a lot of money first time round.

Kung Fu Hustle is a 30s Gangster Comic Book Kung-Fu Chinese Western for the CGI generation. Wild Wild West meets Sin City meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit.  This film draws on so many styles and genres that Stephen Chow (writer/director) must have been reading too much of The Big Book of Movie History; it’s set somewhere that just shouldn’t exist. There’s a rip-off of The Shining at one point that doesn’t work at all.

Nevertheless, it is a lot of good silly fun - although, considering this, it is strikingly violent. Once you get past the fact that it doesn’t really make a lot of sense, the plot is simple to follow, there are some funny bits, and some good shots and set pieces with silly sound effects, including Matrix moves #49, #21, and #8. An enjoyable film, but not a classic.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis basically states that there is a relationship between the language that a person uses and the way they think about the world. Although it’s controversial, many linguists believe there is at least some truth in it: as Wikipedia says, ‘The opposite extreme—that language does not influence thought at all—is also widely considered to be false’. The theory has implications, such as that the value of improving one’s vocabulary or learning another language are even greater than they would be otherwise.

Hannah Parker has posted a picture of us (the IBM Hursley bloggers) down the pub. That’s yours truly looking stupid in the huge Aussie hat.

(note: Hannah’s blog is accessible only from inside the IBM network, but the picture is on Flickr)

Max Fischer is a precocious boy at Rushmore school, more adult than some of his teachers (Brian Cox has a small part as the headmaster, and is superb as always). He gets into a spat with Herman Blume (Bill Murray), a local businessman who takes an interest in the school, and who steals his intended girlfriend, Miss Cross, a junior school teacher.

This film is weird, sure. Max Fischer is a chamelonic character and is totally unpredictable. Also, Max isn’t the only adult in a child’s body: his protegee, Dirk Calloway, appears to be even further beyond his years. Like Wes Anderson’s later film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (in which Bill Murray also stars), there was an undercurrent of a joke I just didn’t get. But unlike that film, this film was funny. Not laugh-out-loud, sure. But I got to the end feeling pleased I’d watched it. The choppiness of the plot doesn’t seem to matter anymore by then, and the knots on the love stories are nicely tied. For a film like this, that’s all one can ask for.

Giffen Good. A Giffen good is a good whereby an increased price means increased demand. Cheap essential foods are sometimes asserted to be Giffen goods, as if the price increases, people can afford less of the pricier foods, and must eat more cheap staples. See this Wikipedia article for more information, as well as the related concept of a Veblen Good. Giffen goods are controversial, and some economists don’t believe they exist.

IBM has just announced that it has acquired Webify, a provider of ‘Service-oriented Business Applications’, which are SOA assets designed specifically for certain markets, such as insurance and healthcare. It will become part of the IBM WebSphere organisation. It remains to be seen exactly how Webify’s products will integrate into the IBM product line, but they sound like they will be a useful addition to IBM’s SOA vision, and I look forward to working with our new colleagues from Webify.

Lengthy and vacuous job titles are increasingly common in many organisations. It’s not uncommon to see ‘User experience practice leader’, ‘Technical data specialist’, ‘Revenue protection officer’, ‘PBT supplier’, ‘Guide planner’, ‘Authorising supplier manager’, or ‘Integrating management expert’. They probably make sense to people in that organisation, but to everyone else they seem like goobledygook.

(Note: I made most of those up - only one of those titles is real - guess which? However, they all use widespread vocabulary, so hopefully they seem familiar.)

I went to the Straight 8 film showings at the Vue in Leicester Square with Lizzie last night. We saw the film that Dave, Felicity, and Twm had put together - ‘Metro-polis’ - as well as plenty of others. For those that aren’t familiar with it, Straight 8 is a film competition based around shooting onto a reel of 8mm film about 3 minutes in length. The entrants are not allowed to develop the film, so no editing is possible.