Things you don’t realise you have until they’re gone – being part of a larger effort, working with dedicated and banterous people.

All sorts of metaphors that come to mind right now seem rubbish and not quite accurate (calcium deposits on teeth, anyone?), so I’ll just leave it there, but suffice it to say a light, well aimed punch would be enough to send me into a ball of tears right now.

Nouse web was in a strong position when I received it a year ago, and I’m happy to have pushed it further (hopefully in the right direction), and am equally pleased to see Andrew stepping up now to push it further again.

Each techie has a unique skill-set and background; mine, Chris’ and Andrew’s are all different and having seen Andrew effortlessly trump me on aesthetics a few times already, I’m looking forward to seeing what his unique flavour will bring to the mix.

Thanks to Team Web, past and present. Sara and Nanki are the real unsung heroes of Nouse – their anonymity to work ratio in getting articles online is staggering. The power houses that are Sport and Arts deserve special mention, but that must not detract from the huge amount of work done by all sections and their writers. It is testament to your articles that such a vibrant community has built up around the site.

Thanks to everyone for commenting. As with my realisation earlier on leaving the office, you the commenters are part of what I am attached to. You provide insight and clarification, zeal. Many won’t need telling, but to our more passive readers, do consider using it.

Thanks to Charlotte and Laura for putting up with me and for all the great work you do. Thanks again to Chris for helping out many times over the year, both pointing out problems and patiently helping when I was out of my depth.

Finally, here are the top 10 most visited articles this term. There were about 600 articles published this term – that’s too much for a basic Facebook stats lookup, but hopefully I’ll find out and add a comment for that later.

10. 2,348 pageviews,  66 comments Roses 2010: Friday – As it happened
09. 2,469 pageviews,  27 comments Derwent and Alcuin paired in College Cup group stages
08. 2,545 pageviews,  74 comments York Hornets win BCA Midlands competition
07. 2,628 pageviews,   8 comments Roses 2010 LIVE: Sunday
06. 2,704 pageviews, 117 comments YUSU website unable to cope with demand for ‘SinneD’
05. 2,718 pageviews,  40 comments Big D ‘SinneD’ promo video launched
04. 3,299 pageviews,  26 comments University of York ranked ninth in The Times Good University Guide
03. 3,518 pageviews, 118 comments Hockey Club fined following initiation video
02. 3,547 pageviews,  76 comments Roses 2010 Saturday – How it happened
01. 7,026 pageviews, 162 comments Top 50 short-list announced

And with that, here’s goodbye.

Entrants may entry as many categories as they wish, with a maximum of two entries per category, in the following:

• Landscape
• Sport
• Abstract
• Portraits
• Nature

Entrants should send a high-resolution version of their photographs to photo-competition@nouse.co.uk, or alternatively leave them in the ‘Nouse’ post box at Vanbrugh porters. The competition is open from now, to any York staff member or student, and closes at 9.00am on Friday Week 8 (June 18th). Any entries received after this date will be dismissed.

Prizes:

Any competition entrant will receive a 15% discount at York Digital Image from now until the end of the competition – quote “Nouse photo competition”

The winner of each category will receive a £20 voucher for anything (prints etc.) from York Digital Image.

The winner of the overall competition will receive an A1 Block Print (24” x 36”) of their work.

The winning photographs will be published in a spread in the final edition of Nouse, on Tuesday of Week 9. Please note that by entering the competition you give permission for Nouse to print your photograph then, and in the future if necessary.

Any questions please don’t hesitate to email editor@nouse.co.uk – good luck!

Before I get into that, I’m going to quickly plug a few things that you might not be aware about if you’re not a frequent Nouse visitor, but otherwise feel free to gloss over them.

Mobile site

If you’re a mobile phone user, you’ll be delighted to know that Nouse has it’s own mobile website! Of particular interest is m.nouse.co.uk/recent-comments/ which will give you a clean breakdown of the 10 latest comments on the site – great if you want to keep track of discussion while on the move.

Recent Comments

It may not be obvious, but that Recent Comments title in the footer also serves as a link. If you’re at your desk and would like to check up on recent discussion, this page lists the 30 most recent comments for you, with the ability to quickly show contents of any comment by clicking on the plus sign next to it.

Mini sites

Whenever an event is on such as Roses, you’ll have noticed a link in the navigation bar allowing easy access to our mini-site for that event, but what about after the event? If you’d like to visit any mini-site from the past, check out the mini-sites link in the About section of the footer.

Search bar

A minor change, we’ve recently restyled the search bar, moving it higher up on the page. More importantly, the search provider was changed to Google, allowing in many cases much more useful results – try it out now to get a blast from the past!

Live blog

A live blog allows updates to be streamed directly into your browser, without needing to refresh the page, and is useful for describing large events such as the Roses tournament or YUSU elections. Most recently, we’ve added a comments tab to the mix, allowing comments to slide onto the page in a very similar way to authors’ updates.

Which brings us back to the present…

Facebook recommend

The recommend button under the title is as easy as it looks – simply click on it and your Facebook feed will show that you recommended the article, and provides a link for your friends to visit it. Change your mind, and all you need do is click the button again to remove the recommendation (go ahead and try it out on this blog entry as a test). If you’re not logged in when clicking the button, Facebook will offer a login page for you to quickly log in with.

So that’s our latest change and a short list of other useful features in case you’d missed them. Remember, these features are all written for you, so if there’s anything you think the site is missing or which could be changed, send us an email to tech@nouse.co.uk with the suggestion. Credits to Andrew Fairbairn for developing the Mobile site and Live blog update.

Well I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add in a few old nuggets, so here are a couple from last year to go out on:

News scroller

The scroller in the News section of the front page is interesting for one reason and one reason only – it can go back indefinitely all the way to the very first Nouse articles (trying clicking the right arrow a lot of times to test it).

News random archives

Tucked in at the bottom of the News page is a box listing a few articles taken randomly from the archives. Not very interesting technologically, but vast amounts of procrastination possibilities there.

York restaurant map

Among many cool features developed by former Technical Director Chris Northwood is a map of York with Nouse restaurant reviews pinned to it – useful if you have a high end mobile phone and need to chow down fast.

That’s all, stay tuned for more updates as they happen!

Significantly, exactly 75% of all those presented with one of the designs (the new header design above) found that they preferred it. Reasons given ranged from “gr8!!!!” to “I really like the colour black and the colour white”.

This higher contrasting of text and background colour will be incrementally rolled out across the rest of the site over the next two months, subject to more user experience tests. We will also be seeking to establish contact with other media outlets, most notably the York Vision, with a view to increasing consistency across both sites.

“I really like the colour black and the colour white”

Test subject #2

Not only is this change preferred by the majority of our users, it is also a boon for accessibility on the site (see here for a page developed by Microsoft experts on the subject). The changes will greatly enhance user experience for poor-sighted people such as the over-60s, enabling grad students at York to better interact with the rest of the community on York Nouse.

As could be expected, the list is dominated by elections-related articles. The only exceptions being number 9, which went online during the elections period, and number 5, which happens to rank highly for the Google search “modafinil”.

A special mention goes to the Off the Record blog page, which although not a specific article, shows the most recent blog post and got 3,496 hits in total.

10. 1,958 pageviews,  41 comments Hutchings and Ngwena joint favourites
09. 1,974 pageviews,  51 comments Ngwena and Humphrys face reprimand
08. 2,038 pageviews, 185 comments Presidential Debate Live
07. 2,062 pageviews, 164 comments Hustings Live – Wednesday
06. 2,107 pageviews,  73 comments YUSU bans Women’s Officer candidates from campaigning
05. 2,661 pageviews,  16 comments Modafinil: the new wonder drug?
04. 2,663 pageviews,  56 comments Let the mudslinging and the conspiracies commence
03. 2,687 pageviews,  92 comments Where the real power lies?
02. 2,765 pageviews, 200 comments Hustings Live – Tuesday
01. 8,149 pageviews, 120 comments Elections Night – Tim Ngwena re-elected president

Have a good holiday and check back occasionally for new articles and discussion!

This post is a couple of days late, since the elections were on Saturday, but well, I felt I should get to grips with the theory before making any bold statements. So for the past two days I’ve been solidly on Wikipedia learning about standard error and margin of error, testing values and looking up probabilities on the normal distribution tables.

Just when I’d more or less grokked it, I thought it might be wise to Google the “poll margin of error” to make sure I was definitely doing it right. Google Suggest offers the option of adding “calculator” to the end of my query, so I do. Then I realise I’ve just spent hours learning the theory behind this neat and easy to use calculator. Fail

So, onto the post, shall we?

The question I’m going to answer may have crossed your mind recently:
“How likely is it for the exit poll to predict the wrong candidate?”

Here’s an appropriate snippet from the exit poll release:

Random sample of votes from first 24 hours of voting

The 24 hour thing complicates life because the first 24 hour votes may not be representative of the other voting days.

In a previous draft of this post I went into mind numbing detail explaining how to discern and proportionally apply the difference in voting patterns before and after the 24 hour period. After all of that, I ended on a sentence that pretty much said: “I currently don’t know the change in voting patterns, so I’ll assume it to be 0 for the rest of the post”.

Right, job’s a good’un.

Next up, inputted into our statistical equations, if we were getting really serious we’d want to know the population size from which the sample was taken, that is, how many votes were cast in total in the 24 hour period for each position. However, this theoretically shouldn’t affect the value of the equations if we’re using the right methods. The statistical calculator assumes a multiplication factor of 1.0 and the one I worked out was 0.94, so that’s good enough for me.

Now we enter the part which used to be littered with calculation print-outs, equations and useful numbers, but we don’t need that anymore thanks to the calculator.

The next bit of useful info from the exit poll data is the sample size used, which is 100.

To give a sense of scale, my estimated number of presidential votes on the first day was 1773. In general, the larger the sample size in relation to the total vote count, the more accurate the poll.

The sample size isn’t the whole story, because in STV some votes can get discarded along the way. In this case, we had 40 votes to Hutchings, 34 to Ngwena, and 26 discarded.

Now we have that, we can enter it into the calculator, obtaining a standard deviation of 0.59. The calculator looks this up in the normal distribution for us and returns a value of 55.5 percent. If I’ve interpreted the calculator correctly, this value applies to the range outside the two votes (outside 54% and 46%), so there is 55.5% chance that the value falls outside that range.

If that doesn’t mean anything to you then that’s fine because it doesn’t mean much to me either, so I’ll have a go at rewording it. In doing so, I will have to take the assumption we can apply the same analysis about the 46% mark as the calculator did about the 50% mark. Though this is not strictly true, they’re close enough for that to work.

Now the rewording: If Ngwena’s vote goes more than 4% in the right direction away from the predicted vote, he has a chance at winning. This tells us that 55% was our lower bound of confidence on Hutchings winning. Now, if we take the two tails of the distribution on either side of that, and only look at one of them, we get the probability that the poll was in fact incorrect and should have shown a Ngwena win.

This is 27.8%, giving another interesting stat.

(The reason this is an approximation is because one of the sides of the distribution will actually be a tiny bit smaller than the other)

Lastly, we do a bit of retro-analysis:
“How likely is it for Ngwena to have won by as much as he did, just going by the exit poll?”

Ngwena actually won by 58% to 42%, which is a complete reversal from what the poll predicted, so the probability will be even smaller.

(Another assumption here is that the ratio of discounted votes remained the same in the real election as it was in our approximated poll)

58% against 42% is a 16% difference between candidates, which is double the 8% difference found in the poll, so I’m able (I think…) to simply multiply our standard deviation value by 2 (0.59 times 2 is 1.18).

As noted earlier, this is all assuming the Monday votes are representative of those on later days, which could very well not be the case. In fact, judging by these stats I’m pretty certain the voting patterns did change over the different days. Approximately 90% certain in fact

In truth, randomly sampling a poll for which you have all the data is very much an exercise in pointlessness. Nonetheless, some info is better than none, and it keeps tensions at nerve-breaking peaks, so all in all I’m still in favour of having exit polls.

I’d really like to suggest that the union draw the sample from the entire data set though, it doesn’t really serve anyone to do it this way. In fact I can’t help but feel a niggle of doubt when confronted with a stat that says there is a 90% probability that this outcome shouldn’t have been predicted by the poll, and pulling the sample representatively will help to quell any accuracy doubts in future years.

If someone at Nouse remembers I think it’d be a swell idea for us to release an accuracy value along with the exit poll release next year too.

Well that’s it folks, hope you found this as much fun as I did, lol. If you’re a bit of a mathematician and think I did something wrong, please use the comment box!

Attached to that preamble, I invite any unfortunate souls who missed it to check out the YSTV recordings which are now present on the YSTV site (of course), and our own election candidates page.

Now, for the statistically hungry, I have good news: you broke a record!

The comment count on our live blog for tonight’s Hustings is currently sitting at 195, which hands down beats previous articles.

You might have guessed this already, or possibly don’t care very much, or perhaps both, so I now hastily change tack and re-theme this post with a list of our most commented-on articles:

Top ten most commented articles on Nouse:

195 – Hustings Live – Tuesday

173 – Welfare issues at the centre of recent UGM motions

166 – Pirate Scott defies odds and sweeps to presidentia…

149 – Anti-BNP rally held in York

115 – ISA President accused of imposing ‘biased’ penalti…

101 – Anti-BNP campaign provokes battle over legality of…

95 – Controversial Gaza UGM Motion narrowly passes desp…

92 – YUSU criticised over decision to remove charity fr…

92 – Where the real power lies?

85 – Tim Ngwena wins 2009/10 YUSU Presidency – How it h…

I’ll admit to a bit of luxurious disappointment that we didn’t break the 200 barrier outright, but am heartened there are still big events ahead in the coming days and we could just make it still.

And lastly, budged along to the bottom of the post, I end on a grand finale of raw numbers for you to explode in ecstacy over.

This funny looking picture shows the number of open connections to the website. Normally, the website receives its traffic spread out all over the space-time continuum, so open connections at any time tend to be never more than 4 or so.

The liveblog changes that by keeping the connection open until you close the page, so you see above, we had roughly 40 people connected at any one time.

The interesting thing, and I’m rediscovering this here, is that on conferring with our Google Analytics stats, the average time spent on each visit to the page was no more than 5 minutes, meaning those 40 people were continually changing at quite a high rate (one every seven seconds).

One last gobsmacker of a statistic before I really must go:

Since the liveblog received 1,500 pageviews, it follows that a whopping 7,500 minutes of your time was spent on that page.

Well done to Charlotte, Laura, and Victoria for blogging, and Nousies Hannah, Hannah, and Camilla for mining quotations.

At time of writing I’ve still got a few things to finish off, like adding author photos for our beautiful writers, but am pleasantly interrupted from all this by an email from Nouse Web Developer Andrew Fairbairn.

It’s done. Culminating months of hard work and overcoming of technical hurdles by Andrew, I’m incredibly excited to introduce to you Nouse‘s very own mobile website!

The new site can be found at m.nouse.co.uk and will work on both computer and mobile – though obviously it’s been designed and optimised for the mobile.

We hope you like it and find it useful, but if you happen to cast a critique-al eye at it and find something amiss, we have surely obviated the need for a frown to cross your face.

In other words, please send your feedback to mobile@nouse.co.uk

Although we could automate feedback by writing programs to send ourselves mail, we’ve tried it and it’s not quite the same, so we gladly await yours instead.

As you can tell from the paragraph(s) above, I’ve gradually slipped back into nerd mode, and so I’ll take that as my cue to stop talking.

Feel free to end here with a massive grin on your face and, of course, go on the mobile site!