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The Statistician is a Slut

11 December, 2009 in Data Analytics, Rant | 12 comments

I was watching the late night news when a program that is shown at an earlier time The 7pm Project came on. I usually don’t watch at that time as I am watching the ABC news. This was on the Friday, 4th December.

Dr Karl was being interviewed about his science. There was an item regarding how all of mankind had originated from the east coast of Africa. At the end they were discussing the analysis of the data. Out of blue Dr Karl says, “Statisticians are the sluts of the maths world” as quoted by Adam Spencer. I have gone back to the original clip online but the segment has been cut out. I wonder why?

So there I was sitting, thinking I am a slut of the maths world. Hmmm. My sister would be laughing her head off if she heard anybody call me a slut! Something I cannot imagine, I don’t think anybody can. Making love with maths. :-|

What is a slut? A floozy. I remember when I was young, being crazy in nightclubs and friends calling me a floozy, “go on, flitter away”.  What was I doing? Going around and saying “hello” to all my friends in all areas of the club. Nothing wrong with that, I had a wide variety of friends with all different backgrounds.

If this is the case, that I can take my maths where ever I like, where people from all different disciplines know that I will understand them, know what they are trying to do with the numbers and they will understand my analysis. Then I don’t mind being called a slut of the maths world, not many people can say that they can understand maths which ever way you look at it.

So Adam, you are just jealous that I can take my maths to any discipline, whether corporate or research and any industry. Yes, I am a slut of the maths world but I am proud of being able to understand the numbers, interpret so people can understand and use the analysis in the manner required. 8)

 

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Our Sick Hospitals

24 November, 2009 in Rant

We are very lucky here in Australia, we experience some of the best rates of public health care in the world. But we have a very sick public hospital system.

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“OPEN FORUM, Australia’s most diverse online think-tank, is the discussion forum of choice for Aussie thinkers from all sides of the fence. An independent, non-profit, collaborative think-tank, provides a platform for focused dialogue on Australian public policy and social issues.”

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Our Temperamental Computers

17 November, 2009 in Rant | 23 comments

You know the feeling, you are staring at the computer and it won’t do what you want it to do. You want to pick the monitor up, shake it and say “Wake up to yourself. You are supposed to make my life easier!”

After my experience with Customer Service Experience Part 2, I was ready to get onto the web site to load my diagrams onto my post, Operations Dashboard for a Matrix Organisation, I needed to change them quickly as I did not believe the ones on the post were correct. I was already having problems with the yellow in diagram 3 but diagram 6 was fine the yellow was perfect. I load the new diagrams up and the yellow has turned into a dirty green! It was yellow, it is yellow in power point, it is yellow when I change to GIF file but when I load it up it is dirty green! Why? :-(

After fidgeting around a bit, I look up support forum, it says delete these files under /include/js. I am a bit wary of deleting files from the server, don’t know what I’m doing. So I delete some files, website still works, ok, load diagrams, still dirty green! I go and delete all the files and you know what is going to happen now, I lost my website after not having for the past 36 hours, just all this script :-x . Luckily for me there is an upgrade on the server so all I have to do is patch my wordpress, phew! Ok, it has to work now. Nope. Still dirty green. Defrag and clean my computer. Five hours later (yeah, hadn’t done it for a while), still dirty green. Ok, I’ll try and save under another directory, it’s finally yellow. YEAH! But not the same tone as diagram 2 and all the diagrams have changed size :-( . Who cares, I’ve had it.

The next day I have one more go at it and for the first time diagram 3 has the same tone yellow as diagram 2 but diagram 6 could not get there. But why? I had not done anything different, it just decided to behave for diagram 3, only.

Why do these things happen? I mean I had been working on my website for 4 months and then all of a sudden it decides to have a complex problem. Diagram 3 which has never been the right tone of yellow is now perfect and not for diagram 6 which was the right tone before all of this! 

Do I have all this bad feng shui around me at the moment that it is also affecting my computer? Or was I just being too fussy about my yellow?

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Customer Service Experience Part 2

17 November, 2009 in Rant | No comments

With the world growing smaller and smaller and with the mobility of our labour force we are using services that are not in the same country that we reside in and without the expected results.

I have had a recent problem with my web site. And of course my host is not in Australia. I found that with customer service it is better to avoid talking to customer service reps (After Sales Service…) so it is much easier to use email as you will get an answer you can follow and also avoiding accents, I am slightly tonal deaf so I have trouble understanding sometimes.

I could not get access to my website. My mistake I actually rang the help desk, ha! I hung up feeling without any satisfaction from their answer. It was, “We can see it, so it must be your ISP”. I fiddle around with the computer and find something called trace route, this looks good. It shows that it gets all the way out of Australia and into the secondary country then to the host and then times out and goes somewhere else.

I send these details to help desk to generate a ticket number. I get a reply, “we can see it and says that it is going through our server, please print the error message you are receiving”. I mean you know the error message you get from IE, “Internet Explorer cannot access the page”! I send and get no reply. I speak to my ISP and send another note with another trace route attached. No response. I go next door as they have a different ISP and cannot access website and send another note. After my initial call, 8 notes and 20 hours later, I received a response “due to the complexity of the problem, it has been relayed to our advance technically team”. Another 5 hours later, “Service will return to normal as soon as possible. Unfortunately, we are unable to give a specific time frame for this resolution… Due to history of this ticket we are offering you the opportunity to be called directly…”

Over 36 hours later I finally have access to my website. I do take up their offer of a phone call because I want to understand what happened so it does not occur again. The customer service rep starts going through all the times and the notes I had sent to them. What is the point of that? I know what I sent to them and when, I had a very frustrating day trying to get through to them. Then he says it was a server issue. I know that, I knew from the beginning. But what was the issue? He starts again, repeating details I already knew and already repeated. He would not stop. I had to rudely interrupt him as I did not want to hear the same thing again. I asked him what was the issue with the server? He starts repeating again. “There was an issue with the server”. Yeah, but what? “There was an issue with the server”.

What is the point of offering a customer a call when they are just going to irritate the customer by telling them that they had a frustrating day and no answer to the question asked?

And then, “Is there anything else I can help you with, ma’am?” No.

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Stating the Obvious

8 October, 2009 in Rant | No comments

What is it with junk mail and spamming? They fill our mail boxes full of rubbish, they may think it is not rubbish but with the amount we receive daily it all becomes rubbish as there is so much to sort through.

Our poor letter boxes sitting outside our homes or stacked up in towers in front of an apartment blocks. These letter box droppers continually ram paper into the boxes to the extent the letter box looks like it has bitten off more than it can chew so you have dig through the mail to find your the real stuff, usually bills :-| . Or when you see the letter box droppers walking along streets with terraces and their tiny front porches or gardens not even bothering to put the junk into the box but just to walk pass and throw it into their areas which becomes rubbish.

My letter box in the past 2 days, this would be a smaller sample than any other week as we are currently in school holidays. Two department store catalogues, 5 menus, 4 real estate pamphlets, 2 cleaning services, 1 medical centre, 1 hotel, and the local paper, approximately weighing 250gms. I am not working so I have no use for any, other than the local paper. I am one apartment in 2 blocks with over 200 mailboxes, there are also another 4 smaller blocks in the area. How much paper is that just for one area in a suburb? My suburb is high density living, we are looking at lots of letter boxes. How many trees and how much of that goes into the recycle bin?

Since I have been networking I have been able to avoid spammers. Then I started blogging. Initially it was only a few a week and I could handle it, then I added a plug-in into the site to filter the spam but it made it worse I was receiving about 20 a day. I unplugged the plug-in and the spamming slowed again but not back at the levels it was at in the beginning. This continues for a couple of weeks, there are always 2 common links and email. But then it starts getting worse. So I decide to blacklist these sites and email addresses, the ones I had received that day. As I was doing this I was hit by a bot, I had heard about bots some sort of spamming thing. Then I see email coming in, over 30 spam’s all containing more than 2 different URL’s and 1 email address, not one word made any sense, all just gibberish, all received in less than a minute.

Find another plug-in, quickly. Oh… Is that why you have to put in a code for comments? To stop bots. In the time it took me to install the plug-in I received another 15 emails. Majority of all spamming starts at 10pm Sydney time and continues through the morning but then stops and starts up again at 10pm. I had caught this bot at 11pm, imagine what I would have woken up to if I did not put the plug-in. Computer time, bandwidth, generation of email accounts, URL’s, power, time retrieving and deleting and now additional plug-ins to protect yourself from spam. What do spammers expect to achieve?

This junk that fills our letter/mail boxes must employee many people, letter box droppers, printers, marketing, designers of all sorts from graphic to web and writers. We have a businesses based on annoying people. The return must be beneficial to these companies otherwise it would not be done. But what a waste of resources and the carbon footprint left from these activities.

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After Sales Service…

22 August, 2009 in Rant | 6 comments

What has happened to Customer service? Has it disappeared forever? Is it because we rely so much on companies for their services that they can treat their customers with no respect?

I am adverse at using customer service centre for any issues. When you get to the point of needing to use customer service it is a problem you cannot solve by yourself so you want help. But they will give you more anxiety than the initial problem. I have not had one positive customer service experience in the recent past.

Is there anybody real out there? Companies are using computer generated questionnaires to try and solve our problems. You answer a series of questions, “yes”, “no”, “I don’t know”, “when”, “what date”, “what time”…..and the list goes on. You submit your questionnaire. “Was this helpful?” No. Can I write a comment? No. You get a reply that the questionnaire needed more details. You re-do your questionnaire and re-submit. You get a reply saying the issue has been cleared but it has not. Re-do questionnaire, re-submit and still no resolution. “Was this helpful?” No, Can I write a comment? No.

Companies have one contact phone number then you have to speak to a computer for the service you require. “What was it you said”, “I did not understand you”, “Please repeat again”, “What is your inquiry?” When you finally get through to a person, they cannot solve the problem and pass you onto somebody else. This is maybe due to miscommunication or the computer directing to the wrong service area. Recently, after the computer had connected me to a person, I was transferred to 4 customer service reps. After explaining the problem on all 4 occasions, the last one wanted to transfer me back to the first one. This occurred in a single call.

This rant was not generated by the previous issues. It was a bank. Human error that could not be explained which in turn caused a chain reaction in my accounts within the bank. You have one end of the bank kow-towing for their error and the other end chasing you being extremely rude asking why automatic payments have not been made!

We would all like to leave our service providers. But we cannot as we are all so time poor. It costs us financially and mentally to transfer their income. Something is wrong!

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