Got Code got prize

Tonight Andy Bulka (our software architect) and I went to the “ICT Panorama” event at the University of Melbourne Computer Science and Software Engineering Department.

Each year, 4th year students in the department are divided into teams who work on innovative projects for “real world” clients.  Austhink Software was assigned a team, code-named “Got Code.”  Over the past 6 months or so the team has been working on a “Web 2.0″ version of Rationale.  This consisted of a simple Flash version of the product (“Rationale Lite”) and an associated Flickr-type website for sharing Rationale maps, called Bickr.  A nice feature is that in Bickr you can edit maps online using Bickr (imagine if, in Flickr, you could edit an image using a stripped-down Photoshop). 

Other projects included a 3D Tetris, a neural-networks based system for predicting foreign exchange rates, and a system for playing a kind of ping-pong (using a real table) with a remote opponent. 

At the ICT Panorama event, all the teams display their projects.  They are judged not only on the quality of their work but also on how professionally they present it.  Three judges observe all projects, without giving away to the teams that they are judges.

A prize is awarded to the best project.  Got Code won…  Congratulations to the team, but also to Andy who managed them pretty closely.

We’ll be making Rationale Lite and/or Bickr available just as soon as we feasibly can. 

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Rationale for Rationale now officially available

Oxford Journals has published my The Rationale for Rationale in Law, Probability and Risk.

They’ve sent me is a link to an online pdf version. Judging by the page numbering and the citation (see below) it seems this is an digital- or online-only issue.

A good feature of the new system is that the papers are freely available to all.

The full citation is:

The rationale for RationaleTM, Tim van Gelder, Law, Probability and Risk 2007; doi: 10.1093/lpr/mgm032

“doi” is Digital Object Identifier – a kind of unique “name tag” for a digital object. In theory, as long as you have such a tag, and the International DOI Foundation is still going, you’ll always be able to locate the corresponding object.

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On Buying Cheese

The current issue of Choice Magazine (the Australian “Consumer Reports”) has a report on cheddar cheese.

They had five experts blindly rate 28 cheddar cheeses, ranging from your cloth- or wax-wrapped special deli cheddar at $50+ dollars per kilo down to the supermarket brands, sometimes less than $10 per kilo.

Eyeballing the results table, it seemed that price wasn’t a reliable guide to quality – some good cheeses were quite cheap and vice versa.

In the results table, they listed overall quality (score out of 20) and price per kg. They didn’t offer a “value for money” rating, so I copied the table into Excel and had it compute “value for money” as quality divided by price.

Now that the data was in Excel, we could probe a little further.

Turns out the correlation between quality and price was -.05. In other words, the quality of the cheese you buy, on average, has virtually nothing to do with price. If anything, as you go up in price, it gets worse.

Consequently, the correlation between quality and value for money was abysmal: -.8. In other words, on average, the more you pay, the more you’re getting ripped off.

Some cheeses had long names with lots of fancy-sounding words, such as “Devondale Special Reserve Premium Aged Vintage.” That must be a good cheese, right?

I used Excel to count the characters in a cheese’s name. Running the correlations showed that length of name bears little if any relation to price, quality, or value for money.

Conclusions: buying cheddar cheese is a lottery. If you haven’t tasted the cheeses, and are just trying to guess which ones are good, ignore price and fancy names; these have nothing to do with quality. If you want value for money, go for the cheaper cheese.

In short: when buying cheddar cheese in Australia, it just isn’t true that “you get what you pay for.”

PS – the cheese I’ll buy: South Cape Vintage Black Label. Nearly the top in quality, but only $15 a kilo.

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