When signs go bad #6
[via Photobasement.com]
Add comment May 13th, 2008
10 examples of scientific jargon… and what they really mean in plain English
There’s nothing like a robust piece of scientific research to inform public opinion. But who says scientific papers have to be, uh scientific…?
- Typical results are shown
- The best results are shown
- Three samples were chosen for further study
The others didn’t make sense, so we ignored them - The second sample was not used
I dropped it on the floor - Results obtained with the second sample must be interpreted with caution
I dropped it on the floor but managed to scoop most of it up - Correct within an order of magnitude
Incorrect - Much additional work will be required
This paper isn’t very good, but neither is anyone else’s - A line of best fit was drawn using least-squares regression
I drew it by hand - A non-linear relationship was found
I drew it by hand and I didn’t use a ruler - Stringent controls were implemented
My advisor was watching - I thank X for assistance with the experiments and Y for useful discussions on the interpretation of the data
X did the experiment and Y explained it to me
[Via Scientific Blogging]
1 comment April 29th, 2008
It’s official: the UK can’t spell for toffee
We’re a nation of bad spellers, apparantly apparently.
40% of British adults can’t spell ‘questionnaire’, 38% can’t manage ‘accommodate’ and 20% don’t know the correct spelling of ‘embarrass’, reports the Metro newspaper.
But despite the clear evidence to the contrary, 76% of the 2,5000 people questioned thought their spelling skills were ‘excellent’ or ‘good’.
Nothing overly surprising about the news that we’re rubbish spellers you might think; word processors and email programs with built-in spellcheckers have meant that modern day workers just need to get close to the right spelling, and the computer makes it right.
However, there is one rather surprising part of this story. “Two thirds… blamed their inability to get words right on mobile phone predictive text.” Really? Predictive text teaches me to spell - it won’t let me have a word unless it’s 100% right. Did they perhaps mean to blame non-predictive text spelling instead?
1 comment April 24th, 2008
Hibernating blog
This will be my last post for a few months, as I’m going travelling to Central America in a couple of weeks time.
When I come back I’ll be busy setting up some new projects so I may be too busy to start posting straight away, but hopefully by around March or April things will have calmed down enough to renew hookjab blogging duties.
Thanks for dropping by to read Hookjab over the last year or so, and hopefully see you again the other side of the winter hibernation!
Milly xx
4 comments November 16th, 2007
You’re all nerds and geeks! (otherwise known as ‘how to insult your clients and customers in a press release’)
We got an interesting press release from the University of the West of England (UWE) last week. (Emphasis added by me)
Subject line: Employers flock to support UWE’s geeks
First paragraph: Regional technology firms are queuing up to offer support to students on the University of the West of England’s BSc Computer Systems Integration course. The course which by admission of Directors, Dr Rob Williams and Craig Duffy, is suited to ‘techno nerds’, is a popular springboard into lucrative and fulfilling work in the technology and computing industries.
Firstly, geek. I know a lot of web designers and developers who have reclaimed ‘geek’, taking it away from the ‘generic insults for kid with glasses’ context and moved it into the ‘I work with computers, and therefore I’m cleverer and better paid than you’ context. But it only really works in a strictly wry, self-referential way; don’t you have to be a geek to be able to call geek?
As for techno nerd – well, since there have been no attempts to rescue ‘nerd’ from its derogatory connotations of obsessive friendless losers, that just seems plain rude to me. And it’s all a bit too 80s. Seriously, who says ‘techno’? ‘Computer nerd’ ‘IT nerd’ ‘Web nerd’ or even ‘Technology nerd’ would have been more appropriate, surely. It’s not that the course directors have to be cool with the kids’ new street slang, daddio, it’s just that I’d expect them to be aware of how their industry is currently described.
The PR team that wrote this press release have insulted the students, they’ve insulted the companies that want to work with those students (as presumably they’re full of geeks and techno nerds too), and they’ve insulted the course, by stereotyping it as the kind of course that only losers would do.
What a bunch of dweebs.
Add comment November 12th, 2007
How the BBC has discouraged me from ever filling in a website feedback form again
I went to the BBC news website this afternoon, to be greeted by this chipper message:
“Wow!” I thought. “The BBC need me to help them keep their finger on the pulse! Of course I have 5 minutes for them. Although I do want to know what the Queen and Jordan (aka Katie Price, not the country) have in common.*” Exactly whose pulse the Beeb are trying to check wasn’t clear, but could it maybe perhaps maybe have anything to do with selling their soul to advertisers? In any case, I emphatically click ‘yes’.
What is the contry of my residence? I click on the UK.
Oh noes! Only international visitors can waste time filling in the survey. Game over. And yet, I still need to click the ‘finish’ button. Where might that take me?
…to another useless screen. My input has been greatly appreciated. Oh that’s nice. Of course it would’ve been nicer to have a link back to the news website which I was trying to visit in the first place, or even – gosh, this is crazytalk mind – to be told that I wasn’t eligible to fill in the survey four screens ago.
*Turns out they’re both considered extremely glamorous, but in very different ways.
4 comments November 6th, 2007
Is it Christmas?
I found this today (24 October) in Morrisons. Is it christmas?
5 comments October 24th, 2007
Click here! Click here! Click here!
Everyone knows that you shouldn’t ever hyperlink the words ‘click here’, right? Well that’s all wrong, believes Brian Clark of Copyblogger. As he explains,
“I’ve always been a big proponent of having actionable anchor text for links when I really want someone to click. From a copywriting standpoint, it’s a no brainer—it’s been proven time and time again that if you want someone to do something, you’ll get better results if you tell them exactly what to do.”
But although that attitude implies that Brian thinks his readers are thick, in his opinion it’s actually the desire to hyperlink with anything other than ‘click here’ that demonstrates stupidity:
“Another reader once chastised me for wasting anchor text with the words “click here,” even though my primary goal for the link was to get people to click (shocking, I know). This is when I first realized that Google is truly making people retarded. Somehow, this person no longer saw links as navigation for actual people to use; they only exist to pass on “juice” according to an algorithm that no one fully understands.”
Brian quotes some statistics from an experiment on a marketing newsletter which tested different click words. It seems to back up his theory: linking the words ‘Click to continue’ improved the click-through rate by 8.53%, ‘Continue to article’ improved the rate by 3.3%, and ‘Read more’ decreased the rate by 1.8%.
However, there are three major flaws in his argument.
Firstly, the statistics quoted are meaningless are we have no idea how many people took part in the experiment, how many times it was conducted or what kind of control they used. And 87% of scientists agree that without this information your stats are useless.
Secondly, the purpose of links is not simply to lead people to somewhere else. Readers scan pages online, looking for keywords. Since links are almost invariably highlighted in a different colour and/or underlined, making key phrases and words links helps readers find what they need.
Thirdly, as Brian acknowledges, links make Googlejuice. And what, exactly, is so wrong with writing copy that benefits both readers and search engines? So what if your click-through rate to another page on your website is down by 1.8% because you don’t link with the phrase ‘click here’. Boo hoo. Your Google rank for that page will be higher, and your readers will find it much faster. I think that’s more than a fair trade-off.
In conclusion, the only time you should really have to link the word ‘click’ is if your design is so utterly confusing that you have a button that doesn’t look like it will link anywhere, and you need to actually tell people to use it. Copywriters don’t work in a vacuum. It’s not crazy to think that we should work with rather than against web designers and web developers to produce readable, effective websites.
2 comments October 22nd, 2007
When signs go bad #5
A disturbing sign found in the window of a shoe shop in Newcastle.
2 comments October 9th, 2007