Are you mad, sir?

18 November 2012

Even if you haven’t heard of Jon Ronson, you have probably heard of one of his books. He wrote The Men Who Stare At Goats, which has been made into a film starring George Clooney. I have just finished reading a more recent, if lesser known book by Ronson: The Psychopath Test. It is an [...]

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Mixed prediction results: Cup 0, RBA 1

6 November 2012

With Green Moon winning the Melbourne Cup, Fiorente in second place and Jakkalberry in third, none of the Mule’s tips even rated a place. That leaves a tipping record of one for three, and I am sure it will only get worse if I keep up this “analysis” in years to come. Fortunately, many of my [...]

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Mule bites horse

4 November 2012

The Melbourne Cup is almost here again, which means that it is time for the Mule to perform some utterly bogus analysis with which to predict a winner. So here goes. Once again, I will look to past winners as a guide. Picking on those characteristics readily available from a Google search, I have focused [...]

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John Graunt and the Birth of Medical Statistics

20 October 2012

Dr John Carmody of the Department of Physiology at the University of Sydney, recently appeared on the ABC Radio National program, Occams Razor, speaking about John Graunt, a man many years ahead of his time. For those of you preferring the written to the auditory format, he has kindly provided his talk as a guest [...]

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Space Oddity

16 October 2012

Just when I was reflecting that a post on the Mule was long overdue and I really should get on to writing something, guest poster James Glover has come to the rescue to share his reflections in a guest post on space jumping. You may have seen media reports of “Fearless” Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian, [...]

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What is Tony talking about?

17 September 2012

I first experimented with word clouds several years ago and used them to visualise the speeches of Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull. I have now learned from the Fell Stats blog (via R-Bloggers) that there is an R package for generating word clouds.  The package makes use of tm, a text mining package for R, which I have been [...]

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Empire Games

16 August 2012

Many readers have been expecting me to post a follow-up to my Olympic analysis of four years ago. I was in fact expecting it myself and even started collecting data, but somehow it has not happened. Fortunately, regular contributor (and some time beer coaster calculator), James Glover has stepped into the void. It’s at about [...]

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Trust

12 August 2012

During the week I attended a farewell function for a retiring colleague. The turnout was impressive, a sign of deep respect earned over a career at the bank spanning more than forty years. In the speeches, a recurring theme was trust. The primary business of a bank is lending money, which exposes the bank to [...]

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Image searches

12 July 2012

This week’s edition of Media Watch, “Pixelating protects identity? Think again“, examines the threat image search engines pose to anonymity. Drop a disguised photo into Google images and the chances are you will find the original in the search results. Intrigued, I thought I would try it out. The pixellated the photo of Tom Waits [...]

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Online music renaissance in Australia

10 July 2012

A year or so ago, I complained about the dearth of music streaming services available. A couple of months ago, Spotify launched their service in Australia. Now, five long years after they started blocking Australian users from their service, Pandora has finally re-emerged in Australia. In his email to Australians who signed up for the [...]

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