Formula for failure

If N is the number of column inches, R is the relevance to current news obsessions, I is the importance of the academic whose name is attached to the press release and ∂ is a greek character that I introduced to make the whole thing look like it came from a university rather than the desk of a public relations consultant, then the formula for press coverage of a made-up scientific formula is too depressing to invent.

I’ve just been at the British Science Festival where journalist, author and enemy of chiropractors everywhere Simon Singh presented Why Journalists Love Stupid Equations and Other Problems in the Media. If you have been under a rock and so missed the stupid equation trend, over at Apathy Sketchpad there’s a collection of the Telegraph’s miserable Formula For stories. Also, the same blog’s collection of PR-concocted science from the Mail, and then there’s the Sun story on the formula which tells us if a boob line is too low – which, as Ben Goldacre points out, doesn’t even work. Idiots. You can read more detail about what Singh had to say here.

I declare an interest: a few years ago I was called in by a PR company to work out why the newspapers had stopped printing stories for their price comparison web site client. The answer: because all they did was make up increasingly asinine formulae for the tabloids, freesheets and women’s magazines. At the time they were desperately pushing the formula for a perfect bargain (I’m not making this up), which had half a dozen variables to consider, and eventually gave a number between 100 and 700 which you had to compare to a table of results. You were meant to use this calculation while staring into a shop window FFS, and they couldn’t even be bothered to (or didn’t know how to) make it come out as a percentage.

I suggested to Singh that naming the PR companies who rely on this guff might act as a deterrent. “Problem is, if you name them, then people who want to get in the papers are going to say, fantastic, we should go to that PR company,” he pointed out.

Like an internet survey of 23 people, or a the story of how some type of vegetable will save your from cancer, the fake formula offends me because it is cynical lowest-common-denominator PR. It offends me because as journalists we all know this is crap – but we publish it anyway. And it offends me because we assume this is all the science that readers can tolerate without their heads exploding while they’re reading the paper.

[Via http://talknormal.co.uk]

The Implementation of Hash Maps and Interview Madness

I recently had a telephone interview for a Java position which was going well until they asked the first technical question – “How do you implement a hash map?”

My first thought was that it was a very mean question to ask a Java applicant as you never need to implement your own hash map, rather using Java’s implementation of a HashMap.  My second thought was “Whooopeee – I’ve done this stuff in a C++ module at Uni a few years back”.  I then launched into a rambling explanation of hash functions and ways to deal with collisions.  I wasn’t prepared for that question and the fact I was trying to dredge up memories from a few years ago left me less coherent than I would like.  The voices at the other end of the telephone seemed a little confused and after a couple more questions about my answer, I finally gave up and asked them what they were looking for.  Their answer: a collection of key value pairs.

Well, yup – that’s what a hash map is and if they had asked for a definition, that is what I would have provided.  While they thought they were sliding into the interview the easy way, I had jumped into the technical deep end and splashed around until ultimately drowning on the easiest of questions…

Which leads me straight into one of my pet hates – technical vocabulary!  The amount of technical jargon that is thrown around in interviews is astounding, yet so often the terms are really general whilst the person using it is thinking of something specific.  One example that springs to mind is “Agile” – a term used to describe a group of different software methodologies, yet you can be sure the person using it is thinking purely of the methodology they use.  Half the time people aren’t even using the terms correctly anyway.

I once went for an interview and was immediately given a 22 page technical quiz to complete.  One page consisted purely of acronyms that I had to expand (Oh wow, I know what JMS stands for, I must be a real good programmer).  The rest of the questions consisted mainly of definitions and other “book knowledge” questions.  I was really disappointed not to find a single question where you had to think about a problem and solve it (even in pseudocode).  To make things even better, I could hear the interviewer & friend talking about me just outside the paper thin walls of the interview room.  I was ready to walk out of there right then but for the sake of politeness (and pride – I didn’t want them to think their quiz had got the better of me), I completed the interview.

This last interview has helped me realise I am sabotaging myself.  I am so nervous during the interview that I am always looking for the trick or diving into the technical deep end without covering the Oh-Duh! stuff, which just might happen to be what they are looking for.  I can clearly imagine the discussion on my last interview “Oh my word! She didn’t even know what a HashMap was! …And she calls herself a developer! *tut.tut* …the candidates these days!”

[Via http://geekrambles.wordpress.com]