Categories
psychology

Fun with puzzles

Today is R’s birthday. Happy bday R & thanks for everything!
However, this particular factum has nothing to do with the remainder of this blog post. A few days ago I was busy typing away at an interesting computer problem using python (thanks brian) when I clicked the button at the wrong time and ended up in the middle of one of those online IQ test things. I did the test while continuing to work on my little computer programme and got a nice high mark. I don’t know about anyone else in computing but there are more challenges than braincells out there so I needed an ego boost, as usual 🙂
Then I got sent a report about my mark and I realised that I hadn’t actually gotten anything wrong, I’d just been taking my time, which I knew anyway. So just to prove to myself that these things are a gross simplification of the multi-faceted thing we circularly perceive as intelligence I resat a subtley different test and duly improved my score to something ridiculous (170+). Everyone’s cogs are grooved, worn and turn in a different manner, especially those whose cogs are always turning. Therefore it’s nonsense to put any kind of store in such a result except to acknowledge that they point towards a situational intelligence that, when taken within in its proper context, correctly predict that the person will perform well at certain intelligence tests on a certain day of the week. As useful as that, wow!Jayz, I need to invent auto-punctuation. Seriously though, a highly intelligent and witty colleague once remarked that many of the PhD’s she’d met “couldn’t find their arse with a map”. The cult of the IQ is extremely damaging in moderns society as we’ve had studies which are both revisionist and reductionist in their attempts to attribute high IQ scores on famous thinkers througout history. Thus retrofitting IQ to achievement. An example is Catherine Cox’s 1926 publication on 300 emminent thinkers throughout history. The secondary research might be meticulous but the rationale is flawed. This book and others such as the Bell Curve and “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” have arguably contributed to a complete misunderstanding of what intelligence is, how it manifests itself and more importantly, the possible intellectual differences between different racial groups and cultures. Even a cursory examination of most so-called intelligence tests reveal a marked bias towards the kind of mathematical/verbal questions that are affected by the level of schooling attained. It’s no surprise that if your socio-economic group doesn’t enable you to pursue academic success, you won’t score well on a test which directly and indirectly measures it.
Anyways, this got me thinking about a fairer test of intelligence beyond the semi-conscious ingrained insights of a engineer to a spatial/verbal/logical problem. I couldn’t think of any which just goes to show that these tests are rubbish 🙂
Failing that, here’s a fascinating puzzle that was created by an esteemed german physicist with even dafter hair than me. Followers of sudoku (cheers richard) which actually closely resembles the classic sudoku hard puzzle in that it’s best solved (in my opinion anyways) by viewing the solution space as a matrix. This is a complex way of saying, imagine the houses and their occupants and write down what you know about each under the relevant headings til a solution is reached. Like the Sudoku puzzle you have to make a number of logical inferences based on positions/duplications/etc.

There are 5 houses in 5 different colors
In each house lives a person with a different nationality
These 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar or drink the same drink.
Here’s the question: Who owns the fish?
1. The Brit lives in a red house
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets
3. The Dane drinks tea
4. The green house is on the left of the white house
5. The green house owner drinks coffee
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill
8. The man living in the house right in the middle drinks milk
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house
10. The man who smokes Blend lives next door to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next door to the man who smokes Dunhill
12. The owner who smokes Blue Master drinks beer
13. The German smokes Prince
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house
15. The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water
With these 15 clues the problem is solvable.

Categories
technology

You’ve got to hand it to Ire-com

As the co-owner of one of those telecomms providers saying their call charges are lower than eircom’s basic rate I’m amused at their latest advertisements. I’m sure you’ve heard them. The ones that say that there are lots of providers who provide a basic rate cheaper than eircom’s but most eircom customers aren’t paying a basic rate anyway or words to that effect. It’s a bit cheeky. Ask yourself the following none-too-subtle questions.

  • Is it reasonable to tell customers that your basic rates are substantially higher than the competition’s but still persist with offering those rates?
  • If you have a monopoly of residential and business customers does it make the previous situation less reasonable? Would this undermine your credibility when talking about customer satisfaction?
  • Would a reasonable consumer determine that they were being convinced to stay wiht the incumbent operator through tariff savings schemes while steep (punitive?) charges were still enforced for calls made outside the terms of the low-tariff plan?

Here’s the defintion of anti-competitive and monopolistic practices (which are outlawed by the EC). The reader can draw their own conclusions and I’ll draw mine!

“Anti-competitive business practices (including improper exploitation of customers or exclusion of competitors) in which a dominant firm may engage in order to maintain or increase its position on the market. Competition law prohibits such behaviour, as it damages true competition between firms, exploits consumers, and makes it unnecessary for the dominant undertaking to compete with other firms on the merits. Article 82 of the EC Treaty lists some examples of abuse, namely unfair pricing, restriction of production output and imposing discriminatory or unnecessary terms in dealings with trading partners.”

From reading the following very entertaining piece contrasting the US Sharman Act Section 2 versus the EC Treaty Article 82 it does appear that the behavior is fine from a US perspective but within the ECJ’s jurisdiction, perhaps more questionable, especially if unnecessary barriers are put in place to prevent the consumer from fairly moving to a new telecomms service provider. Generally if you try to get an Esat-BT a/c moved to a new house without an Eircom line, Esat will ask you to ask Eircom to install a line. Eircom will refuse unless you become an Eircom line-rental customer first. Is this reasonable? Under EU law, as there are arguably numerous other mechanisms for Eircom to charge for the line installation service (Esat or the consumer themselves) it would appear to be an anti-competitive practice. It constitutes behavior which makes the process of using telecommunications services from a provider other than the incumbent more difficult. Hence, it’s anti-competitive. That’s not what’s gotten my goat!
When we offer the FreeSpeech service to customers we have to get an original eircom bill from them in order to transfer the customer from Eircom to an outsourced MCI CPS service. A copy of the bill won’t do despite the fact that Eircom can easily check the validity of the bill and also the validity of the appended signature. It appears Eircom don’t trust us to look after the customer’s best interests which, if you think about it, is very funny indeed.

Categories
Gaisan News

GFree v Skype

We’re not a major multinational organisation like Google but that doesn’t mean we don’t deliver high quality hardware and software. For the business community we can see several clear advantages of FreeSpeech (GFree) against Skype based on the following comments from Networking Pipeline.

“1. Skype for Business still doesn’t provide centralized reporting, so business won’t be able to monitor how users spend Skype credits. There’s no way to monitor or prevent, for example, users from calling 900 numbers and the like.
2. Skype for Business doesn’t provide hunt groups where multiple extensions ring when a phone is dialed. Skype was expected to deliver that function in this release.
3. Call transfers still aren’t provided.
4. There’s no attendant or IVR function, which would redirect calls to other Skype numbers based on user selection. Many IVR functions can be provided through a Web page, but that won’t help users who might be calling in from the PSTN.
5. Calls are still encrypted, preventing businesses from ensuring that employees aren’t passing information that might violate regulatory restrictions.
6. Forget about E-911 compliance. There is none.”

So what can a business customer expect from our GFree package?

  • Centralised reporting as standard with statistics analysis a call/user level
  • Hunt groups and Virtual PBX functionality where required
  • Call Transfers available as standard
  • Auto-attendant and IVR as standard
  • Intra-business call’s aren’t encrypted. Logging software available on request
  • Each box is managed. We know where your calls originated from and we can prove it using timestamped & hashed CDRs. Generally we’d manage the phones and the UPS aswell using a secure VPN connection. It’s not quite E.911 compliance yet but we feel it comfortably meets the Irish Data Protection Act requirements

Skype is a great technology but it has its place.

Categories
Gaisan News

Gaisan FreeSpeech is ready to go

Gaisan is ready to launch our new VoIP Service for the South East. I’ll be providing blog readers with regular feedback about our progress.
Getting the quality just right has involved testing at least 30 different models of Customer Premises equipment from phones, wireless phones to VoIP gateways. We’re finally there with a range of services and equipment to suit every business and residential customer. For more information check out Gaisan FreeSpeech

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