When you think about it, the pretext of Desert Island Discs is pretty strange. I’ve never been able to figure out how it works.

Is the idea that you’re on a ship that’s sunk and you’ve escaped with six records, a book, and some random luxury item? Or are you victim of a harsh but bizarrely genteel pogrom, summoned to Broadcasting House and processed by Kirsty Young before being handed your requested records and then forcibly, irreversibly deported from civilisation?

Neither scenario strikes me as particularly credible, and this is probably why I often wonder about changes to the Desert Island Discs setup. Except the changes that come to mind always make it less feasible and more ridiculous.

People that know me in real life have probably heard me pitching the idea of Desert Island Desert Island Discs, a show in which the budding castaway has to choose six episodes of Desert Island Discs to preserve their sanity in future exile. I don’t know which six I’d choose but among them would be Sir Digby Jones and his selection of motivational power ballads.

Fun fact: this man, Gordon Ramsay, Michael Howard and Tessa Sanderson all chose Bryan Adams' "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)" on Desert Island Discs

But Desert Island Desert Island Discs has a flaw. A few years into its life a new controller would inevitably arrive at Radio 4 and say, “we need to go deeper”. Desert Island Desert Island Desert Island Discs would be born. Not long afterwards the audience will demand another layer – Desert Island Desert Island Desert Island Desert Island Discs. And when would the madness end?

No, Desert Island Desert Island Discs is a dangerous path to take. So instead I’ve got another proposition for Radio 4 – Desert Island Noise.

The setup for Desert Island Noise is quite simple. You are being banished to a desert island (shipwreck or pogrom, whichever floats your boat). You have been given a digital music player and some speakers. The music player has a single audio file on it. That audio file is precisely one second long. That is all you have to listen to, for the rest of your life, on this island. Hence the name, Desert Island Noise.

It’s harsh and unfair, like a gameshow designed by a psychopathic computer, but it would be interesting, don’t you think? Maybe Sir Digby Jones would take a 1-second wav of someone saying his name approvingly (“Digby!”). Maybe Andy McNab would have a burst of gunfire or the last shriek of a vanquished adversary. And god only knows what Benny Hill would have chosen. Well, I’d want to find out anyway.

Should Desert Island Noise be made? And if it was, and you were on it, what noise would you choose?

The Moral Maze is a Radio 4 discussion programme where the week’s big news stories are pondered and pontificated upon by a panel of self-righteous pundits. Michael Buerk hosts, with Michael Portillo and Melanie Phillips as the principal guests, so it’s fair to say that it’s not exactly a home for left-leaning socially-liberal views.

Although it’s not among my favourite programmes, The Moral Maze provokes the same horrified fascination for me as Any Answers (a topic for another blog post). I won’t go out of my way to listen to it, but if it comes on while I’m washing up it usually sucks me in. It’s smug, overweening, and bursting with a sense of its own preponderance. I guess that’s why it’s so hard for me to turn it off.

Unfortunately not everyone feels as I do about The Moral Maze. That’s fair enough – Radio 4 discussion shows can be sleep-inducing at the best of times. So I’ve been thinking, how could The Moral Maze broaden its appeal? How could its matronly agonising be introduced to a younger, hipper audience?

Yes, you’ve guessed it. By turning it into a computer game.

The Moral Maze – The Game

Title screen from the Moral Maze

So it’s a one or two player game in which you can play as either Phillips or Portillo. Buerk is kind of like the Dungeon Master, looking down from above while you explore the now physically tangible Moral Maze encountering the various moral tropes that listeners will find very familiar indeed:

• Single mothers
• Women wearing burkas
• Unemployed people
• Drunkards
• Libyan rebels
• Nurses
• People who are on strike

…you get the general idea. These are the lost souls of The Moral Maze, staggering about in limbo until you emerge from the darkness wielding the sword of middle-class righteousness, ready to end their misery with your well-enunciated diatribe. Here’s how it works.

People in glass houses

Each time you come across one of these moral tropes you have three options: Embrace, Spurn or Equivocate. Here’s Melanie Phillips encountering a single mother.

Melanie Phillips encounters a single mum. What do you think she will choose?

As you’d expect, we’re going to choose Spurn here.

Judgement is given. The single mother has been Spurned

Each choice changes your hit points and rectitude. Seems easy, doesn’t it? And at first, it is. The moral tropes are pretty straightforward and it’s simple to decide whether to Embrace or Spurn them.

But as you proceed through The Moral Maze – The Game things get a bit more tricky. You started out condemning Muslims and embracing policemen; but what will you say about a Muslim policeman? You didn’t like people going on strike, and you didn’t like gay people; but here’s a gay Thatcherite, sticking it to the unions! What now?

No prizes for hand-wringing in The Moral Maze

Each judgement contributes to an increasingly complex moral framework of your own construction, leaving you at greater risk of contradicting one of your earlier judgements. This affects your hit points and rectitude, and too many mistakes will lead to defeat.

Someone in a burka waves a Women's Institute flag. What to do?

When things get tricky you have a weapon up your sleeve – Equivocation. Often encountered on the radio show, equivocation is a tactic used by Moral Maze panel members who either can’t form an opinion or don’t feel brave enough to voice their views on air. A couple of minutes of intelligent-sounding but ultimately wooly waffle, and you’re done. But you can’t use it too often in the game – it weakens your character considerably.

End game, and bonus levels

So let’s say you’ve battled your way through the Moral Maze, casting judgements on its hapless stereotypes in an impressively consistent manner. The dope-smoking, lesbian, Muslim small business owner who didn’t support the Iraq war but wants Top Gear taken off air? You didn’t break a sweat. The slutwalking Catholic nurse who lets her children play violent video games but campaigns against pornography and votes for the Green Party? A cinch. But now comes the hard part – the end of game boss.

The end of game boss - Michael Buerk

An enraged Michael Buerk descends from his lofty throne to do battle with you. To defeat him you have to… well, I haven’t worked that bit out yet. I guess there would be a fighting mode with shuriken stars and nunchuks and so on, with lots of blood. It’d be pretty spectacular anyway.

If you win against Buerk you beat the game, and see a completion sequence in which all the previous panellists of the Moral Maze, along with the hapless tropes you embraced along the way, parade past a giant effigy of whichever character you were playing. A bonus level is unlocked in which you can navigate the Moral Maze as Michael Buerk. What a twist!

My final pitch

The Moral Maze – The Game would bring the nation’s top radio discussion programme to a wider audience, especially if it was released on iPhone, Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. But it would also encourage the nation’s youth to ponder the moral dilemmas that plague our confusing modern world and bring about a more judgemental society.

And I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s just what we all need.

There seem to be a lot of “UX ninjas” about these days. Are you one? Here’s a handy flowchart to help you find out:

Apologies in advance.

OK, you’re right, I do need more sleep.

Soaring westwards high above the Baltic sea yesterday, befuddled by sleeplessness and exhaustion after an intense working week in St Petersburg, I was examining the clouds from my window seat and struggling to stay awake when another airliner suddenly appeared in the sky, bearing down on us.

It was approaching our own plane from the right, at a slightly lower altitude, and within two seconds it had vanished under our wing and out of sight, passing us at a distance of between 500 and 1,000 feet. No-one else seemed to notice it. Five seconds later the cabin started to rock as its wake hit our fuselage. The shaking was nothing serious – just some mild turbulence – and stopped after ten seconds or so. Then it was all over.

When you see an airliner travelling at full speed, you’re usually in one of two locations. You might be on the ground looking up, gazing at distant planes crawling across the sky. Or else you’re actually inside the plane, looking out as the clouds slide by. Either way you don’t get a clear visual sense of how fast these things are travelling, so to see one zipping by at cruising altitude was a pretty interesting experience. It was easily the fastest thing I’ve ever seen.

Funnily enough, it wasn’t as scary as it might sound. It was obvious at first glance that the plane’s trajectory would take it underneath us. There was a tense few seconds between seeing the plane and feeling the shockwave hit – how powerful would it be? – but when the rocking started it was obvious that the plane could handle it.

While writing this post I’ve been searching Youtube for near-miss videos, and haven’t found any examples where the planes come as close as these two did. Maybe it’s normal, but I’ve never seen it happen at high altitude – only when planes are in holding patterns over airports. Has anyone else seen planes come that close, at that speed? Is it an everyday thing? Or should we all have been more alarmed?

Yesterday I wrote about this Twitter-based hedge fund, and connected it to the broader area of large-scale online analytics being used to anticipate real-world events. And today Google has announced a new tool, Google Correlate, which has been built to do just that.

When I was dabbling in this area with search data and unemployment statistics I was using Google Insights, which made the process pretty long-winded – it produced a lot of messy data which only became useful after a few hours of macro-writing in Excel. So it was encouraging to read, in Google’s official post about Correlate, that:

[T]ools… such as Google Trends or Google Insights for Search weren’t designed with this type of research in mind. Those systems allow you to enter a search term and see the trend; but researchers told us they want to enter the trend of some real world activity and see which search terms best match that trend… This is now possible with Google Correlate, which we’re launching today on Google Labs.

I’m looking forward to giving Google Correlate a try, from what I’ve read it seems like it still only represents the tip of a very big iceberg, a glimpse through a keyhole into a big world of data that only Google is allowed to explore. Hopefully I’m wrong and it does go deeper than that though. I’ll post more about it when I’ve had a chance to look around…

Using online analytics and social media trends to predict real-world events is nothing new. Twitter’s been used to predict box-office sales (story link, detailed paper) and Google search data has been telling us about future flu epidemics for a while now.

Even I got in the act, demonstrating back in 2009 that Google Insights could anticipate changes in UK unemployment figures.

UK unemployment rate charted against search volumes for 24 related keywords, from January 2004 to April 2009 Sources: Office for National Statistics, Google Insights

Maybe I should have followed through with that idea, because there’s now a hedge fund that bases its investment decisions on data from Twitter. It’s called Derwent Capital Markets, it opened for business last week, and if its managers end up making a mint there might well be a new bandwagon in town.

So how do you run a hedge fund based on tweets? From what I understand of Derwent’s methodology, their algorithms measure the “calmness” of the Twittersphere – presumably based on sentiment analysis, which I’m a bit skeptical about. This is used to estimate the volatility of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index, with a three-day time lag.

This leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Does a non-calm day of Twitter conversations always correspond to a drop in the DJIA, or just volatility? Are they trying to predict metrics like trade volume and so on as well as broader day-to-day movements in the overall index? And are they ranking Twitter users based on credibility, or are spam bots equal to financial journalists, economists, and prominent investors?

Obviously algorithmic hedge funds aren’t about to disclose their inner workings so questions like this will have to remain unanswered for now. But what of the other, larger, question – isn’t the whole idea just, well, a bit… silly?

I can see why people might react in this way, and even I feel a bit skeptical about something describing itself as a “social media-based hedge fund” and that apparently pulls data only from Twitter, when there are lots of other sources that could be tapped. But it would be wrong to dismiss the basic concept.

Our everyday activities – web searches, page views, purchases, things we say on open social networks – leave a trail of data behind, which we tend to see as ephemeral or throwaway. We severely underestimate the value of this data but Google doesn’t, Facebook doesn’t, and we shouldn’t either. This data becomes even more valuable when aggregated across entire countries, continents, or the planet as a whole. In fact, it could be argued that the predictive potential of aggregated global real-time data has yet to be fully imagined, let alone realised.

The biggest problem with this resource is that we don’t really know how to exploit it yet. Things like Google Flu Trends or this Twitter-based hedge fund may be crude and experimental, and will definitely look even more so in five years time. Along the way there will be hype, bandwagonism, maybe even a stock market bubble, resulting from the application of real-time data to real-world problems.

But we need to make a start somewhere, and as silly as a Twitter-based hedge fund might sound, it’s as good a place to begin as any.

One of LinkedIn’s strengths is its “how you’re connected” feature, which shows how you’re linked to second degree contacts. Seeing who you have in common with someone helps you understand who they are, what they’re like, and whether it’s worth getting to know them. It’s often more informative than the blurbs people write about themselves.

"Any friend of Joe's is a friend of mine"

But this LinkedIn feature is becoming less useful due to an insidious form of network pollution. Like coastal erosion, this network pollution is a slow process that’s barely noticeable from one day to the next, but could be hugely damaging in the longer term. And I think I know who’s responsible for this network pollution – recruiters.

Before I continue, I should say that this isn’t an anti-recruiter rant. Recruiters may be responsible for this network pollution, but the blame lies with LinkedIn, and I’ll talk more about this later. Building a big contact list is essential to a recruiter’s job and they can’t be expected not to do this. But this is what’s weakening the value of LinkedIn’s “how you’re connected” feature, and quite possibly its network as a whole.

If you’re a LinkedIn user, you’re not just a person – you’re a “node”, which is a fancy way of saying that you can connect people to one another. If one of your contacts finds another one of your contacts on LinkedIn, you will be the node that connects them. And as a connecting node, your usefulness comes from the quality of your relationships with those two individuals. If the person searching knows that you’re picky about who you connect with (which you clearly are, only highly discerning people read this blog after all), your connection to that person is itself a notable endorsement.

If you were Marlo, you'd probably be more interested in people you knew through Prop Joe than through McNulty

Not every “node” on LinkedIn is as discerning and useful as you are, though. Some nodes are far more promiscuous, connecting to lots of people they’ve never met, let alone worked with, and the more promiscuous someone is the less useful they become as a LinkedIn node. This is where recruiters come in. They hoover up connections, which means that you often find your second degree contacts are connected to you through recruiters. But as connecting nodes, the recruiters aren’t all that useful because they’re not very choosy about who they connect with.

Bubbles pollutes Marlo's network because he knows so many people. Now everyone's a second degree contact

OK, maybe I’m stretching the analogy by comparing Bubbles to a recruiter, so I’ll drop it now. The general principle is that, if you’re connected to more than a couple of recruiters, searching LinkedIn will turn up more and more people who are second degree contacts, but that you only know through recruiters. The value of someone being a second degree contact slowly declines, because when a recruiter is the common contact you learn nothing more meaningful than that you both once looked for a job, or once tried to hire people.

It’s like sharing a mild dislike of rain – common ground, yes, but not very meaningful. This is what I mean by “network pollution”. The value or interestingness of the network is dropping because of recruiters and other “super-nodes” who are turning nearly everybody into your second degree contacts.

LinkedIn isn’t the only service susceptible to this kind of network pollution. Twitter will sometimes recommend another user to you because you have a “follow” in common. And if that “follow” is, say, your best friend, that’s good grounds for a recommendation. But if the common follow is Stephen Fry, Barack Obama, or any other celebrity account with millions of followers, that’s pretty useless. If Last.fm recommended someone to you because you both listened to the Beatles, that would be pretty useless too (which is why music recommendation algorithms are hard to get right). All social networks have to deal with problems like this where “super-nodes” undermine the value of recommendations based on shared connections.

So as I said earlier, this is a LinkedIn issue and not the fault of recruiters who are simply trying to do their jobs. Recruiters will continue to add connections, other people will continue to accept them, and the usefulness of “how you’re connected” will continue to drop. It’s not a very serious problem right now, but LinkedIn needs to think of how it can design for this aspect of its social graph, which is something it seems to take pretty seriously – and rightly so.

Last weekend I went to London Zoo for the first time. The thing I liked most – apart from the animals obviously – was the Penguin Pool.

You can tell from the typeface that it's going to be good

The Penguin Pool was created in the 1930s by Berthold Lubetkin and Ove Arup. It’s a masterpiece of modernist architecture, but the penguins don’t live there any more. They were evicted in 2004 amid concerns that waddling around on reinforced concrete was hurting their joints.

To be fair it doesn't look like an ideal penguin habitat

I was transfixed by the Penguin Pool. The intensity of light, the curved white space, the bold double helix in the centre: I didn’t know what to do with the space, but I had a strong urge to go in there and use it somehow. Obviously the penguins didn’t feel the same way. I guess me and penguins don’t see eye to eye on everything after all.

It's not easy to burrow in concrete

JG Ballard’s landscapes of broken suburban landscapes being reappropriated by nature came to mind when I gazed into the Penguin Pool. Crystal-shelled armadillos crawling along the floors of long-empty swimming pools, that sort of thing.

Sometimes architecture serves a purpose, sometimes it doesn’t. Like the brutalist Elephant House, another listed structure at London Zoo that no longer houses its original tenants, the Penguin Pool failed to accommodate the needs of penguins just as Le Corbusier’s grand aesthetic failed to address the problems of human cities.

But this doesn’t detract from the beauty and impact these works can retain. For me, the Penguin Pool’s only failing is that the creatures it was really designed for just haven’t been invented yet.

I use a plugin called Now Reading Reloaded for the Library section of this site, and very good it is too.

Unfortunately the developer behind the plugin doesn’t have time to maintain it any more. This means that some things have started to break in newer versions of WordPress, particularly the way the plugin works with page titles. If you’re using Now Reading Reloaded and the title of a book isn’t showing up in your <title> tag, this post should help you fix it.

The problem is with the file now-reading.php, which you’ll find in the plugin folder. Open this file in a text editor and find the function called nr_page_title(). It starts with the following line:

function nr_page_title( $title ) {

This is the function that tells WordPress what to put in the page title, and if you’re having the problem I was having this is where the blame probably lies. To solve the problem you’ll need to replace this function with the one that appears below.

function nr_page_title( $title ) {
    global $wp, $wp_query, $wpdb;
    $wp->parse_request();

    $title = '';

    if ( get_query_var('now_reading_library') )
        $title = 'Library';

    if ( get_query_var('now_reading_tag') )
        $title = 'Books tagged with “' . htmlentities(get_query_var('now_reading_tag'), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8') . '”';

	if ( get_query_var('now_reading_author') ) {
		$author = $wpdb->escape(urldecode(get_query_var('now_reading_author')));
        $author = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT b_author FROM {$wpdb->prefix}now_reading WHERE b_nice_author = '$author'");
		$title = 'Books by ' . $author;
	}

    if ( get_query_var('now_reading_search') )
        $title = 'Library Search';

	if ( get_query_var('now_reading_title') ) {
        $esc_nice_title = $wpdb->escape(urldecode(get_query_var('now_reading_title')));
        $book = get_book($wpdb->get_var("SELECT b_id FROM {$wpdb->prefix}now_reading WHERE b_nice_title = '$esc_nice_title'"));
		$title = $book->title . ' by ' . $book->author;
	}

    if ( !empty($title) ) {
        $title = apply_filters('now_reading_page_title', $title);
        $separator = apply_filters('now_reading_page_title_separator', ' » ');
        return $title.$separator;
    }
    return '';

}

Copy this function and paste it into now-reading.php. To be on the safe side, take a backup of now-reading.php before you do this. Make sure you paste over the entire function – no more, no less.

If all goes well your page titles should now work if you’re using WordPress 3.0 and above (and if you aren’t, you need to update WordPress right now). If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.

Note: I was only able to find this fix by reviewing the code of Now Watching, an actively maintained fork of Now Reading Reloaded which handles movies instead of books. The author of Now Watching is Zack Ajmal and he deserves more credit than I do for this fix!