WolframAlpha

For the PRO version of the desktop WolframAlpha, there is a charge $6.99 per month (on a month by month basis) and I'm not sure whether the quote is for United States or Australian dollars. However, the mobile version of WolframAlpha seems to offer some, perhaps all, of the features of the desktop PRO version for a one-off cost of A$4.99. Whether it's totally equivalent to the PRO version or not I'm not sure but it certainly provides the step-by-step solutions that the former offers.

Anyway, I've made the mobile purchase and am experimenting with it. I tried the step-by-step solution to integrating ln(x^2+1) and it's displayed in the mobile app but I can't see how to copy it. Screenshots can of course be taken and this is what I've done below. The result is OK I guess.

Sway

Another spinoff of installing Windows 10 on VirtualBox was the discovery of Microsoft's Sway, described by Wikipedia as follows:

Office Sway is a presentation program and is part of the Microsoft Office family of products. Generally released by Microsoft in August 2015, Sway allows users who have a Microsoft account to combine text and media to create a presentable website. Users can pull content locally from the device in use, or from internet sources such as Bing, Facebook, OneDrive, and YouTube. Sways are stored on Microsoft's servers and are tied to the user's Microsoft account. They can be viewed and edited from any web browser with a web app available in Office Online. They can also be accessed using apps for Windows 10 and iOS. Additional apps are currently in development for Android and Windows Phone.

Sway is only available within Windows or iOS, so I have installed it on my iPad after discovering it on my Windows 10 installation and wondering what it was all about. Here is my first effort at creating a Sway presentation:

From Evernote to OneNote

With Evernote's decision to limit free accounts to access from only two devices, I decided it was time to abandon a platform that I'd been using almost from its inception. I'm sure I'll have lots of company. There's something very annoying about crippling a service that was formerly provided for free and increasing the price of the paid service options. 

I opted for OneNote over Google Keep (although I plan to test out the latter in the near future) and then investigated whether it was possible to migrate notes from Evernote to the OneNote. It turns out that is possible but the tool provided by Microsoft only works with Windows. I discovered that it was possible to run Windows 10 with no product key under VirtualBox, so I downloaded and installed it. 

I then downloaded Evernote for Windows, synched all my notes, downloaded the migration tool and moved all my notebooks, notes and tags across to OneNote. It turns out that I had 2001 notes. The migration is proceeding as I write and the whole process has proved relatively painless, with the major difficulty proving to be the download of the 4Gb ISO file. The downloaded failed two times but succeeded on the third attempt.

So as well as successively moving all my Evernote notes to OneNote, I now have an installation of Windows 10 on VirtualBox as well as the latest version of Ubuntu.

Precariat

When the Bilderberg Group listed precariat as one of their ten items for discussion at their 2016 meeting, many outsiders (and nearly everybody on the planet is an outsider) would have reached for their electronic or physical dictionaries to look up the meaning of this word. I know I did.

Well it turns out that precariat is a portmanteau formed by merging precarious with proletariat. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article:

In sociology and economics, the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which is a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the Precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive "unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings". Specifically, it is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.

 A recent article (June 8th 2016) in QUARTZ included this description:

The "precariat" is a term popularised by British economist Guy Standing, describing a growing class of people who feel insecure in their jobs, communities, and life in general. They are… 

… the perpetual part-timers, the minimum-wagers, the temporary foreign workers, the grey-market domestics paid in cash … the techno-impoverished whose piecemeal work has no office and no end, the seniors who struggle with dwindling benefits, the indigenous people who are kept outside, the single mothers without support, the cash labourers who have no savings, the generation for whom a pension and a retirement is neither available nor desired. 

This marginalised group—“alienated, anomic, anxious, and angry,” according to Standing—is fuelling the rise of populist politicians like Donald Trump in the US and similar rabble rousers in Europe and beyond. (Discussing this group alongside the middle class, which isn’t doing great either, is telling.) The resulting turmoil in politics, markets, and economics is a factor in nearly all of the Bilderberg meeting’s other agenda items.

The word isn't recognised by Blogger's spell checker but it is certain to become better known now that the global elite are discussing it and, by whatever name this category of people may be called, it is growing rapidly in size. Here is Amazon's review of Guy Standing's book:

Described by Noam Chomsky as 'a very important book', Guy Standing's The Precariat has achieved cult status as the first account of this emerging class of people, facing lives of insecurity, moving in and out of jobs that give little meaning to their lives. 

Guy Standing warns that the rapid growth of the precariat is producing instabilities in society. It is a dangerous class because it is internally divided, leading to the villainisation of migrants and other vulnerable groups. And, lacking agency, its members may be susceptible to the siren calls of political extremism. He argues for a new politics, in which redistribution and income security are reconfigured and in which the fears and aspirations of the precariat are made central to a progressive strategy. 

Since first publication of this book in 2011, the precariat has become an ever more significant global phenomenon, highly visible in the Occupy movement and in protest movements around the world. 

In a new preface Guy Standing discusses such developments - are they indicative of the emergence of a new collective spirit, or do they simply reveal the growing size and growing anger of this new class?

Native German Words That English Uses

Today I came across a German word, Gegenschein, that I'd not heard of before. It means "a faint, elliptical patch of light in the night sky that appears opposite the sun, being a reflection of sunlight by meteoric material in space". In German, the word Gegenschein means counterglow (gegen meaning against and Schein means light). It reminded me of other words rather more common German words that have found their way into English unchanged. Here are some that I remember:

• Schadenfreude: delight in another's misfortune (Schaden means harm and Freude means joy)
• Weltanschauung: a comprehensive view or personal philosophy of human life and the universe (Weltan means world and Anschauung means view)
• Zugzwang: a position in which one player can move only with loss or severe disadvantage (Zug means pull or tug, Zwang means force, compulsion)
• Weltschmerz: sadness or melancholy at the evils of the world; world-weariness (literally world pain)
• Zeitgeist: the spirit, attitude, or general outlook of a specific time or period, esp as it is reflected in literature, philosophy, etc. (Zeit means time and Geist means spirit)
• Wanderlust: a great desire to travel and rove about (literally wander desire)
• Ersatz: used as an adjective meaning "made in imitation of some natural or genuine product; artificial" from ersetzen to substitute. It should be noted that the German word has a neutral connotation, e.g. Ersatzrad simply means "spare wheel" (not an inferior one).
• Gestalt: a perceptual pattern or structure possessing qualities as a whole that cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts (from Old High German stellen to shape).
• Leitmotif: in music, a recurring short melodic phrase or theme used, especially in Wagnerian music dramas, to suggest a character, thing, etc.; an often repeated word, phrase, image, or theme in a literary work (from leitmotiv leading motif).

That's probably enough for now, although there are many more.

Pareto Chart

While working my way through a text book on Business Statistics using Excel, I came across reference to a Pareto chart and needed to do a little investigating to find out what it was. Here is the definition from Wikipedia:

A Pareto chart, named after Vilfredo Pareto, is a type of chart that contains both bars and a line graph, where individual values are represented in descending order by bars, and the cumulative total is represented by the line. 

The left vertical axis is the frequency of occurrence, but it can alternatively represent cost or another important unit of measure. The right vertical axis is the cumulative percentage of the total number of occurrences, total cost, or total of the particular unit of measure. Because the reasons are in decreasing order, the cumulative function is a concave function. To take the example below, in order to lower the amount of late arrivals by 78%, it is sufficient to solve the first three issues 

The purpose of the Pareto chart is to highlight the most important among a (typically large) set of factors. In quality control, it often represents the most common sources of defects, the highest occurring type of defect, or the most frequent reasons for customer complaints, and so on. Wilkinson (2006) devised an algorithm for producing statistically based acceptance limits (similar to confidence intervals) for each bar in the Pareto chart.

These charts can be generated by simple spreadsheet programs, such as Apache OpenOffice/LibreOffice Calc and Microsoft Excel, visualisation tools such as Tableau Software, specialised statistical software tools, and online quality charts generators. The Pareto chart is one of the seven basic tools of quality control.

The next issue was to check how to generate a Pareto chart in Excel. I thought that there might be a magic button but you have to do it all yourself. Here's what I ended up with:

I did get some help in doing this and here is a link to a very useful website that outlines step-by-step how to create a Pareto chart. There are some excellent tutorials available on this site.

Remembering PIN Numbers

Here is what's recommended by some banks as an aid to remembering a PIN number. Let's say your PIN is 1537. Make a grid of letters as shown below and decide on a word with the same number of letters as the PIN. For example, choose SHOP and then be careful to assign the number 1 to S, 5 to H, 3 to O and 7 to P. Thereafter, assign random numbers to the remaining letters.

All that is needed to retrieve the PIN then is to refer to the card. Of course, the relevant letters and numbers are not marked in red as they are here and so if the card falls into the wrong hands, it's not of any use.

An alternative is the PINFRUIT method in which letters, specifically consonants, are assigned to the numerals 0 to 9.

In this case, 1537 could be encoded as the words dolly mug with the associated image as shown below:

The image of Dolly Parton on a mug should be sufficient to recall the PIN number once the phrase dolly mug is retrieved. Of course, the PINFRUIT system takes a little getting used to but once mastered, it is easy to apply to any set of numbers that one encounters.

One can take this a step further and assign images to all number pairs between 00 and 99. In this system, the number pairs have preassigned words as shown below:

In this system, 1537 would correspond to towel hammock and so an image of a towel resting on a hammock should be sufficient to retrieve the PIN. 

If one intends to use the PINFRUIT system on a long term basis, then it's probably better to follow the latter system so that words don't have to be made up on the fly. A memory palace can then be populated with the images of words drawn from the 00 to 99 grid and applied to any number of numerals. 

For example, suppose one needs to remember the number 9948621987363. Firstly, divide the number into pairs moving right to left. The result is:

09 94 86 21 98 73 63

It is vital for numbers with an odd number of digits that the pairing process proceeds from right to left so that a leading zero can be applied. Referring to the 00-99 grid, the following words are generated from these number pairs:

soup - eyebrow - fish - hand - buff - comb - jam

A story or synthesised image can be then be generated for this sequence of words. For example, the following synthesised image works from the inside out:

It doesn't matter how odd the image is that is generated. In fact, the odder it is, the easier it will be to remember it.