How do people tweet their Roll Up the Rim wins? They exaggerate (Update)

UPDATE:I had planned to make this a two-part series, with the mathematical details in the second part. Instead I'm going to turn the whole thing into a paper. I'll post more when the paper is written. Original post follows.

Canadians love them some Roll Up the Rim, the annual Tim Hortons coffee contest. They also love to tweet about it. And if ever there was a great experiment to see how people perceive -- and report -- random events, Roll Up the Rim and Twitter are it: known odds, random selection, and mass participation.

Last year around this time, I wrote a quick program that accessed Twitter's API, and extracted all available public tweets with the hashtag "#rolluptherim" (thanks twitter4j). I gathered 876 tweets covering Friday, March 18, to Wednesday, March 23, 2011. They were then promptly stored and forgotten about until a couple of weeks ago, when Roll Up the Rim began again in earnest.

So what do people tweet about, when they tweet #rolluptherim? For one thing, they tweet about their success rates: of the 876, I extracted 387 tweets containing something like "1/8", "3 for 10", and so on.

[source]

So here's my question: how do people report their own success?

Semi-Hiatus

This is probably the most brutal semester of my academic career so far, so I'll be posting at reduced frequency until mid-April or so. I've got lots of stuff to talk about (Korea trip, thoughts about the BIRS workshop, my upcoming sabbatical) but no time to write.

The university at night

The university is a different place at night, as the boisterous crowds of the daytime give way to a very different quietness and studiousness.

Looking up at the few remaining lights from professors' offices, and the desks in the library where students are poring over books, I wonder what they're working on; I always imagine great research breakthroughs come after dark.

Another reason to delete conference spam

If you're like me, you get an immense amount of conference spam, even for conferences that are not remotely in your area of interest. (This morning I got a message inviting me to an international geography and geology conference. All right then.)

According to a new report, conference invites are now being used to infect victims' computers with malware. It works like this: the attacker takes the PDF Call for Papers for a legitimate conference, infects the PDF with malware, and spams it to various targets as a conference invitation (with the malicious PDF as an attachment). The targets open the PDF and get infected.

So far, the affected conferences include ISSNIP, an IEEE-sponsored conference on sensor networks; but the malware version of the CfP may have only targeted one particular defense contractor.

(Previously in our irregular series on academic spam: 1, 2)

BIRS ... brrrrr

This week I'm at a workshop on Interactive Information Theory at the Banff International Research Station (BIRS). More or less, interactive information theory is what happens when transmitter and receiver are allowed to go back and forth. This includes things like feedback capacity, interactive function computation, secret key exchange, and so on.

It's been an outstanding workshop so far and I'll blog more about it later. But it's been very cold. (Not to complain. I grew up in Edmonton so this is like coming home for me.)

We just took the group photo, below, so you can play "name that information theorist". (I'm in the yellow parka and grey hat on the right hand side.) Weather conditions when the photo was taken: light snow, -30C.

An odds start for the new year

What's going to happen in 2012? I like odds better than predictions, because future events are inherently uncertain. Here are the odds I would give on events in 2012, if I were a betting man. Add yours in the comments.

(Odds are of the form against-for, e.g. 10-1 is 10 to 1 against, 1-10 is 10 to 1 for. Rely on them at your own risk.)

End-of-year roundup

A few end-of-year items:

• I was in York (that's York, UK) a couple of weeks ago to attend Bionetics. I presented the following paper, in which we move beyond analysis of active transport molecular communication, and get into channel design:

• N. Farsad, A. W. Eckford, and S. Hiyama, "Channel design and optimization of active transport molecular communication," in Proc. 6th International ICST Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems, York, UK, 2011. [PDF]

• Early in the new year I'll be attending this workshop at BIRS. It looks even more tempting than the January skiing in Banff, and I'll try to blog about it if I find the time.

• The EE program proposal, part of York's rapid engineering expansion, is grinding away -- it's about to go up for approval by the School of Engineering. Meanwhile, here's our first job ad. We're focusing on electronics, power, and medical devices in this round, but we plan to add signal processing and communications spots later (and maybe now, if we get a truly outstanding candidate). Tell your friends!

Happy holidays / Joyeux fêtes, and I'll see you in 2012.