OK, so O2 mobile phone company, you just lost my business for life. Just spent 45 minutes on hold on a premium rate number (0844, 5p/minute). When I got through, I said "I've been on hold for 45 minutes, and my battery will go at some point, so if you can just give me my PAC number a.s.a.p, that'd be much appreciated". The response, "It'll take as long as it takes" and she then ploughed through an interminable tedious written script. In the end, I had to ask for the PAC at least four times before they actually gave it to me.
I can't understand the mentality of a company that wants to make this process so time consuming and irritating. If a customer is asking for a PAC number, they've already decided to leave you. All you can achieve by making the process long winded and irritating is to ensure you never ever get them back. Why on earth is it not possible to request your PAC online !!!
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Plymouth University - Top 300, Worldwide
Plymouth just broke into the Top 300 of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. It's also 53rd among young universities (under 50 years old), see Times Higher 100 under 50.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Student feedback
So, first course taught at Plymouth seems to have gone down well with the students. Maximum scores across the board, no negative comments, and some really nice positive comments.
- FANTASTIC LECTURES!
- It was actually Andy wills who taught us, he was BRILLIANT! Really inspiring and enthusiastic about his topic which was engaging and inspiring
- Probably my favourite lecturer of my whole uni experience.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Top 30
To my amazement, I'm currently in the world Top 30 categorisation researchers (from a list of over 4000 authors). Nice way to end the week :-)
Incidentally, the metric is number of ISI indexed articles on the topic categorization and in the research area psychology, experimental. 31-may-2013.
Incidentally, the metric is number of ISI indexed articles on the topic categorization and in the research area psychology, experimental. 31-may-2013.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Parallel computing in R
R is a free, general purpose programming language that is particularly popular for data processing and analysis (www.r-project.org). I've been using it today for Monte Carlo simulations and, having tried to optimize my code (x3 speed increase) and moved the script from my laptop to my workstation (x2 speed increase), each simulation was still going to take a few hours, and I had a lot of them to do.
That's when I decided I was going to learn how to use the snowfall package for R. This allows one to spread computations across multiple computers or, more relevant in my case, across the 8 threads of the processor in my machine. It's fairly easy to use; it took about an hour to modify my code - and I'm sure it'd take much less time now I know how. Snowfall gave close to a further x8 speed increase for the Monte Carlo simulations.
You can find a good introduction to snowfall here
www.imbi.uni-freiburg.de/parallel/
I didn't bother with the SSH stuff mentioned in this guide and it worked just fine for me. Basically, just install the snowfall package:
library( snowfall )
, set up a cluster using sfInit,
sfInit( parallel=TRUE, cpus=8, type="SOCK" )
, use sfLapply to do anything you would do with lapply, but across all threads,
store <- sfLapply(1:10000, awoneit, numcat = ncat, nitems = nitms, np = nppts))
and finally simply the list back to a numeric vector to make calculation of means etc easy:
store <- simplify2array(store)
store <- as.numeric(store)
Close the cluster using:
sfStop()
That's when I decided I was going to learn how to use the snowfall package for R. This allows one to spread computations across multiple computers or, more relevant in my case, across the 8 threads of the processor in my machine. It's fairly easy to use; it took about an hour to modify my code - and I'm sure it'd take much less time now I know how. Snowfall gave close to a further x8 speed increase for the Monte Carlo simulations.
You can find a good introduction to snowfall here
www.imbi.uni-freiburg.de/parallel/
I didn't bother with the SSH stuff mentioned in this guide and it worked just fine for me. Basically, just install the snowfall package:
library( snowfall )
, set up a cluster using sfInit,
sfInit( parallel=TRUE, cpus=8, type="SOCK" )
, use sfLapply to do anything you would do with lapply, but across all threads,
store <- sfLapply(1:10000, awoneit, numcat = ncat, nitems = nitms, np = nppts))
and finally simply the list back to a numeric vector to make calculation of means etc easy:
store <- simplify2array(store)
store <- as.numeric(store)
Close the cluster using:
sfStop()
Friday, October 19, 2012
Rustling University - Interview Training
Dear Professor Turtle,
Thank you for the opportunity to participate in our online interview training. I can think of no other opportunity where I could have learned that the statement "everyone should be treated equally" was false. Apparently, by treating everyone equally, I would not provide audio format materials to a blind person. I had previously believed that equally and identically were not synonymous; now I know better.
Fortunately, I see that, as Dean of FANAS, you are making strenuous efforts to stamp out equality wherever it occurs, and I just wanted to say ... keep up the good work!
Your humble servant
Dr. David Pressed
Faculty of Non-aligned Subjects
Rustling University
Thank you for the opportunity to participate in our online interview training. I can think of no other opportunity where I could have learned that the statement "everyone should be treated equally" was false. Apparently, by treating everyone equally, I would not provide audio format materials to a blind person. I had previously believed that equally and identically were not synonymous; now I know better.
Fortunately, I see that, as Dean of FANAS, you are making strenuous efforts to stamp out equality wherever it occurs, and I just wanted to say ... keep up the good work!
Your humble servant
Dr. David Pressed
Faculty of Non-aligned Subjects
Rustling University
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