Archive for category Opinions

In February, we arrived in Bulgaria, excited to be in a land filled with snow, and ready for an adventure and learning how to ski! On our way from the airport to our Ski Resort, we were a bit disappointed by the amount of snow we saw on the roads, but a 3 hour drive took us further into the mountains and the snow was thicker and just what we expected.

On our first day, we were up at the crack of dawn to get kitted up with our ski equipment and to take the gondola to the top of the mountain. The views from the Gondola were picturesque, and we were able to relax for 30 minutes on our way up.

We went straight into lessons. Unfortunately our group of 7 was split as Jason has already skied and he went into an intermediate group. The rest of us sat in a beginner group. I think the scariest thing was worrying about not being able to stop! The first morning for us beginners was pretty tiring, having to walk up the slope, then ski slowly down, and repeat until your legs ached. But it was all worth it when you learn how to stop and turn!

In the meantime, while the beginners were learning how to stop, Jason went higher up the mountain and did some of the bigger ski runs, and generally had a lot more fun skiing down the whole mountain!

The first few days we spent learning the basics of skiing, how to stop, turn and slow down, and just getting used to the feel of the slopes. Oh, and trying as much as possible not to fall. On our 3^rd day we finally managed to ski down the slopes in one go. It was a bit tough in some areas as there was a fresh fall of snow earlier, and without speed (us newbie’s were skiing very slowly) we got caught, and had to trudge our way down. Having said that, it felt amazing having accomplished it, and we were ready for bigger and better slopes!

The next few days we spent practicing in the mornings, and skiing down different slopes in the afternoons, trying out the different slopes, and generally having loads of fun. We had a few adventures with people falling, and some scarily steep slopes, but we got through it all, and became “certified skiers”!

The food on the mountain wasn’t so great – but you were so hungry you would eat anything. The food at the base of the mountain was excellent. We found a couple of local restaurants who did some amazing food, from Moussaka to Baklava, and a list of things I can’t even pronounce. But we ate very well, and went to bed fairly early in the evenings after gruelling days on the slopes.

We spent a little time wandering the streets of Bansko – a beautiful area. It is situated below the highest part of the Pirin Mountain, and has breathtaking views. It has some beautiful buildings and a lot of historical and cultural monuments.

A definite must for skiing enthusiasts, just try and avoid the European School holidays, as this makes it extremely busy on the slopes

Cake Club was a roller coaster ride of unexpected triumphs, unforeseen trouncings and – let’s be honest – a winner that nobody could have predicted.  If Nick’s win – after having to be persuaded to take part at all – taught us anything it is that in the topsy-turvy world of Cake Club, appearances and prejudice count for very little in the face of the wild whimsy of fate.  Or does it? Maybe Cake Club is a numbers game; maybe the results are predetermined by the influence of factors which are quite readily observed and quantified.  Only one type of person can help unravel such mysterious conundra – a statistician!

Sadly, we don’t have one of those on the staff so you’ll have to make do with me.  And I haven’t been in a statistics lecture for the fat end of a decade.

The first thing to do was obtain the data.  Obviously my memory is perfect in every way but, as it happens, I wasn’t present for every round so I just needed to double-check.  I had a look on this blog but sadly certain people have been less than rigorous about publishing up-to-the-minute status updates with regard to cake club concoctions and results so there were still some gaps, hem hem.  I did what I usually do in such situations and whinged at some volume to nobody in particular until I got some attention.  Luckily for all within earshot, Louise told me she had all the Cake Club emails saved in her outbox and promised to email them over once she had done some actual work, thanks Carl; shut up now.

The emails were a massive boon and I quickly decided on a strategy for recording the data, keying in names and departments into a big spreadsheet.  Here are the distributions by department:

Interesting what a disproportionate slice is given over to Marketing, given that only one of them actually got to the final.  This is, as any Liberal Democrat will tell you, a failing of the tournament system.

However, backslapping was not on my agenda.  I was interested in something far more interesting: the perfect Cake Club recipe!  I went back to the spreadsheet and created eight columns which contained 1 and 0 for ‘yes’ and ‘no’.  The first column recorded whether that cake won or not and the remaining seven recorded attributes of the cake.  The attributes ranged from ingredients (chocolate, fruit) through style (sponge, pie) to presentation (individual servings, sandwich).  I felt fully confident that I could seive out the statistically most successful cake and, with this information, travel back in time a fortnight and make sure that I won the final!

Here are the distributions of the various attributes.  Remember, there were 30 cakes in the tournament total:

Two thirds were sponge!  And over half had chocolate in!  But did popularity among bakers curry favour with the voters, or was it a recipe for disaster?  The proof is in the pudding.  I set up a more complex calculation, looking at the percentage of times a particular attribute won on occasions where it was used.  With such a small sample size (only three cakes in some cases) the results weren’t ever going to be accurate but I reckoned I could make some sort of rough comparison.

If an attribute had no effect we could assume it would win  exactly 50% of the time (as you can only either win or lose you have a 50% chance of either, assuming it’s random) so I subtracted 50% from each result to see which ones affected the score negatively (winning less often than 50% of the time) and which affected the score positively (winning more than 50% of the time).  The results are intriguing:

Notice that the best-performing ingredient, nuts, is one of the least common and chocolate, by far the favoured flavour, makes a rather poor showing, doing worse than random.  People are indifferent about pies but sponge sandwiches are the way forward and despite the time and effort it takes a pretty special person to make a success out of cupcakes, almond mice etc.

It seems that the best possible cake is one in a sandwich format, with sponge and nuts – weirdly, this describes precisely the cake I made in the semi final!  If someone in Marketing had made it, that would have made it a statistical dead cert to win any heat.  However, individual serving cakes made by a salesperson with fresh fruit and chocolate .. well .. sorry, Stew; I guess the numbers were against you!

The eagle eyed among you will notice that in the departmental section of the graph I’ve sneaked in a line for baker gender.  Very, very interesting to see that not only did no girls make the final, being female actually counts against you generally; nearly a 10% skew towards miserable failure for anyone who actually follows a recipe and cleans up after baking – let that be a lesson to you, girls!

There’s been a lot of smack talk and scandal in Cake Club this inaugural year and it was good to get some real numbers down.  Finding out that blokes really are 8.33% better at baking was just the icing on the cake! Hope you enjoyed seeing some hard facts.  All I can say is, next year you’d better watch out for nut sponges made by men from Marketing.

Oh, and if you can spot all the cake-related puns in this post… you need a hobby.  Baking, perhaps.

Spring has sprung, and for some of us in the Asia Pacific region, we have just experienced Chinese New Year here in Singapore. For some, it may be the first experience, and for others, you may be veterans of the Singapore customs, but in either case, it is full of festivities.  

The Chinese year follows the lunar calendar, and is called the Lunar New Year, as it starts at the beginning of the Lunar calendar, which is also the spring season. This is the most important festival of the Chinese calendar, and is full of many traditions which are centuries old. It lasts for 15 days.

The tradition starts about a month before, where people will clean their houses to sweep away any ill-fortune, and welcoming good luck and fortune into the home. Decorations are put up, and these are very symbolic, often depicting words such as “happiness”, “wealth” and “longevity” with the colour red being in abundance. People will also buy new clothes and get their hair cut, so everything is fresh and new for the New Year. Red is a prominent colour at this time, as it represents joy, virtue, truth and sincerity.

This is a time for families, where you reconnect with family and friends that you may not have seen for a while, as well as forgetting any issues that may have occurred in the past year. The festival starts with New Years Eve, where families will get together over a feast for dinner. This dinner is full of symbolic meaning. Dumplings imply wealth as they are shaped like ancient gold coins. Jiu (hard liquor) is drunk to symbolise longevity.

In the morning, children will greet their parents by wishing them a healthy and happy new year, and they will receive money in red packets. These packets, or envelopes symbolise wealth and luck, and are handed out to the younger generation by parents, grandparents, and even neighbours and friends.

The Lion and Dragon Dances are extremely popular. It is believed that the beating of the drums and the face of the lion or dragon will scare away the bad spirits. So if you have been hearing drums around lately, you can be rest assured that the evil spirits are sure to have been scared away.

[image courtesy of davidezartz on flickr]

If, like me, you braved the cold, wet and windy weather over the last couple of days, you’ll be forgiven for raising one eyebrow at the latest reports that Spring is here already, 11 days early.

The study found that four out of five animals and plants are breeding earlier because of changes in UK weather patterns.

I’m sure those animals will have a better nose for recognising gradual changes in weather so I won’t argue with them.

The reason I thought this was interesting is because in my blog post earlier this month, I said I hoped that climate change experts would make predictions and conclusions about climate change with significant forethought so that mistakes like those surrounding the melting of the snow on the Himalayan mountains wouldn’t occur again.

So I was really pleased to hear an interview with climate change expert Dr Stephen Thackeray, a biologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Lancaster, who had the presence of thought to acknowledge other factors before suggesting that earlier Springs are a result of rising global temperatures.

He said: “There appears to be large-scale patterns in accelerating change across terrestrial ecosystems. This may suggest large-scale drive like climate change is responsible for the changes in the data.

But it’s early days yet to say climate change is responsible for these changes.”

Let’s hope this attitude will continue in the future. If so, we might get fewer stories like this, which suggested that faith in climate change experts has diminished recently because of misleading climate change predictions. Fingers crossed, anyway.