Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

Science in London: The 2018/19 scientific society talks in London blog post

Wednesday, 25 December 2019

Blog stats for this blog part 10 (25 December 2019)

tl;dr version
I've been blogging at Google's Blogger for over 10 years now and Blogger records over 2.9m visits for this Stuff that occurs to me blog, but Google Analytics tends to be vastly more conservative and suggests it's nearer ~700,000 visitors and ~800,000 visits (ie each person visiting slightly more than one page). In 2019 I've had about 13,000 visitors here, quite a big drop from when I was posting about three or four times as many posts on this blog. I'm blogging more elsewhere (How to Do Various Techy Things had 149,000 visitors this year for example).


Every year I post the blog stats for this blog, and this is my tenth year of doing so (previous years at the end). I do it in case other people might be nosey :)

There seems to be a correlation between the number of posts I write on this blog and its visitors / pageviews, apart from an odd blip in December 2016. I don't have a posting schedule, as the title of this blog suggests I literally only post 'Stuff that occurs to me', as and when it occurs. As I blog a lot elsewhere too this site has diminished somewhat.

Index
  • Table 1: Blog posts per year, by year (= how many blog posts have I written each year?)
  • Fig 1: Blogger's 'all time view' for this site
  • Table 2: Blog stats, by month, for 2019 (= how many people visited this blog, per month, this year?)
  • Table 3: Annual and lifetime views of this blog (= how many people visited this blog each year and the overall total?)
  • Fig 2: Google Analytics 'all time view' for this site
  • Fig 3: The most popular posts on this blog, all time, Blogger stats
  • Particular features of this blog
  • All previous annual stats overview posts, by year

Table 1: Blog posts per year, by year

2009 (45)
2010 (77)
2011 (89)
2012 (141)
2013 (141)
2014 (100)
2015 (50)
2016 (40)
2017 (45)
2018 (30)
2019 (33)

Fig 1: Blogger's 'all time view' for this site 
 Fig 1: Blogger stats 'all time view'. All time views as of today is 2,971,921

I briefly switched off this blog in Dec 2016 as I seemed to be getting a suspiciously high number of visits from Russia (I assumed bots) and January is still showing unusually high numbers. You can see the December blip in the all-time view from Blogger above (Fig 1). 

The most interesting thing about the stats for me is always the vast difference between Blogger's pageviews (1st column in Table 2) and Google Analytics' (3rd column in Table 2). This is generally understood to be because Blogger counts every 'hit' including Google's indexing crawlers and not just real people. I've also included the number of people visiting each month (2nd column), to my knowledge Blogger doesn't provide that info. Odd because Blogger 'is' Google. See explanation below for what numbers in brackets  mean.

Table 2: Blog stats, by month, for 2019
Month              Pageviews (Blogger)      Visitors (Google)         Page views (Google)
January (7) 10,665 1,312 1,508
February (0)   9,494 1,121 1,306
March (2)   9,455 1,041 1,207
April (4) 10,058   928 1,005
May (3) 10,720 1,105 1,247
June (0)   9,401 1,113 1,252
July (3)   9,851 1,246`̉ 1,395
August (1) 11,108 1,237 1,436
September (2)   9,115 1,086 1,283
October (4) 11,891 1,212 1,490
November (4) 13,338 1,053 1,254
December (3)   8,235..    963 1,339
Total (33)        115,096..                          13,316                           15,722

Table 2 info
Figures in brackets next to the month are the number of blog posts published that month.


Table 3: Annual and lifetime views of this blog

Year              Pageviews (Blogger)      Visitors (Google) Page views(Google)
2010 (77) 23,351     9,630*   18,958*
2011 (89) 65,972   22,343   40,263
2012 (141) 187,506   57,040   77,869
2013 (141) 553,064 136,941 164,352
2014 (100) 779,632 199,217 226,419
2015 (50) 498,355 113,129 130,115
2016 (40) 379,613   66,614   77,092
2017 (45) 202,609   42,090   46,179
2018 (29) 141,815   20,725   24,044
2019 (33) 123,331   13,316   15,722
Lifetime      2,955,248                            681,045                 821,013
                    2,971,857*                          680,073^               824,140^^

Table 3 info
Figures in brackets next to the year are the number of blog posts published that year.
*I began counting stats on Google Analytics in April 2010. Blogger began its own stats system in July 2010.
*, ^ and ^^ are counts of everything in the columns above done in different ways hence a slight disparity.

Fig 2: Google Analytics 'all time view'.

 Fig 2: Google Analytics' 'all time view'.


 Fig 3. Most visited posts for this blog (for all time) 
Fig 3: The most popular posts on this blog
 
Features of my blog to take into account
Or, mitigating circumstances / excuses ;)
  • People find my posts almost entirely through search engine results (I don't promote my blog heavily on social media, though I do mention it fairly regularly)
  • The most popular posts here are about how to do something, often on Twitter - the answer to people's question(s) can usually be found within the first summary, or tl;dr, paragraph or the title, with the rest of the post containing supplemental information. This means that I have a VERY high bounce rate (91%) - people arrive, see the answer, leave. If this were a sales website that would be disastrous but as a largely 'how to' info blog that's OK. 
  • My blog is about many different things and therefore unfocused.
  • I don't have a regular posting schedule and literally post stuff as it occurs to me, which is appropriate given the name of the blog. Sometimes two posts in a day, sometimes nothing for weeks.
  • I have several other blogs including a dedicated 'howto' blog where I post most of my instructional posts. I also have one for stuff near Blackheath, one to collect recipes that weren't too disastrous), not to mention work blogs - so I am rather spreading myself thinly and this is reflected in fewer posts here and consquently fewer visits/-ors.

Previous posts about this blog's stats




    Posted by Jo at 01:47 0 comments
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    Sunday, 15 December 2019

    "Book Keengwe" regularly sends me what appears to be academic spam emails about computing education

    I've not managed to make sense of this one yet. It appears that there really is someone at North Dakota called [Redacted] or [Redacted] Keengwe who does write academic books but I'd be surprised if they're the author of these emails, as they seem pretty spammy. Possibly 'Book Keengwe' is misusing the real person's name and the university name to spam anyone with an academic email address so I've let the university know, though I realise there's probably not much they can do. The emails all come from a Gmail account rather than the UND address, so a little suspicious perhaps.

    Because I wasn't initially certain that they were spam I'd replied to a few of them, initially to explain that "I have no competence in this area and assume these emails have been sent in error, Jo", in response to a request about 'Handbook of Research on Online Pedagogical Models for Mathematics Teacher Education' (I think that reply was sent last year).

    More recently in November 2019 I replied more tersely "Please do not send these requests to me. I am deleting them unread and have no interest or expertise in this area. I have previously told you this but it seems to have not made a difference." in response to a request about a "Book on Innovations in Non-Traditional Educational Practices - Proposals Due Dec. 1, 2019". I was assured in a reply that would be the last I'd hear of it. Hmm.

    At this point I set things up so that anything from this email address would be deleted before coming to my mailbox. This works well on my computer... but annoyingly not on my iPhone, so I spotted another one this morning, reproduced below with the subject 'Equity in Computer Science - Final Call for Chapter Proposals - Due Dec 23, 2019'. This entire blog post (and my contacting the U of N Dakota) is my response to that ;)

    I'd also previously contacted my employer's IT helpdesk and JISC (who host academic email addresses) and asked them to stop this spam ('Handbook of Research on Integrating Computer Science and Computational Thinking in K-12 Education') from reaching any other academic address but alas they can't as we've all moved on to Office 365 so Microsoft are now in charge of what's spam. So I'm publishing this blog post in case anyone else is searching for Book Keengwe-related information.

    While I do work in computing education I'm an administrator not an academic so unsuitable as an author, and I'm certainly not going to ping out manuscripts to people with no information about how royalties, if any, would be shared. There was a PDF attached with the email but I've deleted it unread in case it was iffy.





    Text (names redacted)

    CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS
    Proposal Submission Deadline: December 23, 2019

    Handbook of Research on Equity in Computer Science in P-16 Education

    A book edited by: [Redacted], University of North Dakota, USA & [Redacted] Montclair State University, USA.

    INTRODUCTION
    The growing trend for high-quality computer science (CS) in school curricula has drawn attention in U.S. classrooms. With an increasingly information-based and global society, CS education coupled with computational thinking (CT) has become an integral part of an experience for all students, given that these foundational concepts and skills intersect cross-disciplinarily with a set of mental competencies that are relevant in their daily lives and work. While many agree that these concepts should be taught in schools, there are systematic inequities that exist to prevent students from accessing related CS or CT skills. Therefore, this handbook will highlight relevant issues, perspectives, and challenges in P-16 environments that relate to the inequities that students face in accessing CS or CT and methods for challenging these inequities in hopes to achieve the CSforAll movement.

    OBJECTIVE OF THE BOOK
    The chapters will highlight the issues, perspectives, and challenges faced in P-16 environments (i.e. gender and racial imbalances of students in CS classes; population of growing CS teachers who are predominantly white and male; what and who are the high-school gate keepers of CS courses; teacher preparation or lack of faculty expertise; professional development programs; and college admission criteria for CS programs). Book will also explore the challenges and policies that are created to limit access, and thus, reinforce systems of power and privilege.

    Suggested themes include, but are not limited to the following: CS/CT Definitions—for who/whom is it intended for; CS Standards; CS/CT Access—what are the implications and limitations across P-16; CS courses & AP Testing: Current Numbers; Teacher Preparation in CS: Preservice and Inservice programs; Evaluation and assessment of CS/CT; and Suggestions and strategies for challenging existing notions.

    SUBMISSION PROCEDURE
    Potential contributors are invited to submit 1-2 pages chapter proposal (or full chapter draft) outlining the proposed topic and/or issue to be discussed on or December 23, 2019. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by January 5, 2020 about the status of their proposals and will be sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected on or before March 15, 2020. All chapters will undergo double-blind review and returned to authors with suggestions for improvement. Revisions are expected by April 15, 2020. Final Materials are expected by May 1, 2019.

    Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document) to:
    [Redacted, but name and affiliation used is a real person, but a different non-academic email address is given]

    -------

    Edit 15 July 2021

    Grrrr. While my laptop sweeps these spam messages straight into the bin my phone doesn't and I spotted another of these coming in yesterday. I replied expressing my irritation at my request to be left in peace being ignored. Below is the redacted text and images in case anyone else is wondering about the messages they're receiving and searches for them.



    Call for Chapters: Handbook of Research on Digital-Based Assessment and Innovative Practices in Education. To Propose a chapter for this book, click here:
    https://[REDACTED]/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/[REDACTED]

    Important Dates:
    Chapter Proposals Due: September 30, 2021
    Full Chapters Due: February 2, 2021

    Also, I need a couple more proposals for this book…

    Handbook of Research on Promoting Global Citizenship Education

    To Propose a chapter for this book, click here:
    https://[REDACTED]/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/[REDACTED]
     

    Please share with colleagues who might be interested in contributing to the book project (s).

    If you have any questions, contact me

    at [REDACTED]
     
    [REDACTED]
    Professor.

    -------


    EDIT 26 August 2021

    Gnnnn. Another spam email. This time I'm not bothering to redact names (just the links). I've also forwarded this to University of North Dakota, maybe they can have a word.



    -------- Forwarded Message --------

    Subject: Chapter Proposals Due August 30/September 30
    Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2021 12:10:22 -0500
    From: book keengwe <editedbook.keengwe@gmail.com>
    To: book keengwe <editedbook.keengwe@gmail.com>


    Hello,

    Please consider submitting a chapter proposal towards my current books to be published by IGI Global Publishers.

     

    Chapter Proposals Due: August 30, 2021

    Handbook of Research on Promoting Global Citizenship Education 

    To Propose a chapter for this book, click here:

    https://[REDACTED]/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/[REDACTED]

     

    Chapter Proposals Due: September 30, 2021

    Handbook of Research on Digital-Based Assessment and Innovative Practices in Education. 
    To Propose a chapter for this book, click here:

    https://[REDACTED]/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/[REDACTED]

     

    Please share with colleagues who might be interested in contributing to the book project (s).

     

    Please let me know if you require additional details. 

     

    Thanks,

    Professor Keengwe

    ------------------------------------------
    Sagini Keengwe, Ph.D.
    Professor,
    College of Education & Human Development
    University of North Dakota
    231 Centennial Drive Box 7189
    Grand Forks, ND 58202-7189
    https://und.edu/directory/jared.keengwe

    Posted by Jo at 10:41 0 comments
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    Wednesday, 4 December 2019

    What Doctors Don't Tell You magazine returns as Get Well magazine in UK shops

    tl;dr: I've asked Sainsbury's why they've started selling Get Well magazine (also known as What Doctors Don't Tell You and WDDTY) again, having previously stopped selling it, and their spokesperson said -
    “We stock over 700 different publications and, with the exception of explicit material, we do not routinely make a judgement on content.

    We are however aware of the concerns around this magazine so have taken the decision to review whether we will continue to stock it.”
     Of course they could decide that their review has convinced them to continue to stock it...

    It seems I've not written on this blog about What Doctors Don't Tell You aka WDDTY aka Get Well (its new branding) magazine since 2014. Around that time (2012-2014) the magazine was on sale in a number of UK supermarkets before the efforts of doctors, scientists, activists and skeptics got it largely removed, though it crept back in a few places.

    Concerns about the content of and advice given in the magazine had done the rounds in mainstream and social media / blogs. Tom Whipple reported in The Times (Oct 2013) that there had been a "Call to ban magazine for scaremongering". Dr Margaret McCartney tore strips off it ("ridiculously alarmist") in an exchange with one of the editors, Lynne McTaggart, and umpired by Dr Mark Porter on Inside Health (Oct 2012). A big chunk of the advertising within the magazine was found to be in breach of the Advertising Standards Authority's codes.

    The best place to get an overview of the catalogue of the various magazine articles considered problematic is on Josephine Jones' blog: "WDDTY: My master list" which links most of the mainstream articles and blogs, and gives a timeline of events.

    Earlier this year the magazine sent an email to subscribers highlighting that they were rebranding the version of the magazine on sale in UK stores as 'Get Well' though keeping the 'What Doctors Don't Tell You' branded version for subscribers.

    The magazine now seems to have reappeared in Sainsbury's and concerns were immediately raised about that and about one article in particular called 'Reversing Autism' which is a story of one woman and her autistic son. There has been an emerging Twitter campaign to ask @Sainsbury's to remove the magazine from its shelves and shops. I contacted their press team, explained I was going to write about the magazine's reappearance there and asked if they'd be happy to explain why they decided to start stocking it again. The quote above was the reply. I hope they will decide to stop stocking it but have spotted the ambiguity in the spokesperson's quote.

    I have not seen the magazine myself 'in the wild' for a number of years but have no reason to doubt everyone on Twitter who's saying it's reappeared.

    My favourite of WDDTY's errors
    On 1 July 2014 the magazine editors wrote a Facebook post about several of the people who'd written or complained about the magazine and they somehow managed to include me in this. Amusingly there were a number of errors in there (my name spelled wrongly, they said I worked for someone I'd never heard of, my efforts to get them to correct this went nowhere) but more interesting was the tiny error they made about how many people followed Simon Singh on Twitter.

    Here's what the post said "Their numbers aren’t large (there’re only about 80 of them in total), and they aren’t well followed ... Simon Singh, just 44 actively following him..."

    Here's a screenshot of his Twitter profile from 2014.

    As of 2014 Simon was following 44 people and had 54.1k followers.

    They'd simply got it the wrong way around, an easy thing to fix. Everyone pointed this error out assuming that the 'cognitive typo' as I called it would be quietly fixed and we'd move on.

    In an unusual scene in the Facebook comment thread they instead offered this clarification - "Just to set the record straight.Simon Singh has had 54k people over the years who have, at some point, tuned into his Tweets. But the actual number of people who are actively following him at this time are, as I said, 44." 

    This is just not true.




    Posted by Jo at 00:18 1 comments
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    Thursday, 21 November 2019

    There's apparently a complaint in with the Australian Commonwealth Ombudsman about the NHMRC's Homeopathy report

    Update 4 Dec 2019: I've received a holding letter from the Ombudsman while they consider my request.


    Well this'll be confusing :) The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) released a report on homeopathy in 2015 pointing out that it's not much cop and shouldn't be recommended as a treatment. Lots of homeopaths were very cross about that and apparently three homeopathy-supporting societies* put in a complaint to the Commonwealth Ombudsman the following year, in August 2016, saying that the NHMRC had done wrong.

    It's now November 2019 (three years and three months on) and to my knowledge the Commonwealth Ombudsman has not produced a verdict (or indeed a peep) about the apparent complaint.

    In April 2017 Edzard Ernst reported on an article in What Doctors Don't Tell You which said that a complaint had been submitted. The Australian Skeptics society tried (in May 2017 and August 2017) to find out if there really had been a submission to the Commonwealth Ombudsman and were told by a source in August there that there was no record of submission.

    A news article from ECHAMP on 22 January 2019 said that the Commonwealth Ombudsman's verdict was imminent. Still no sign of it though.

    I've emailed the Commonwealth Ombudsman (copy below) to see if I can find out any other information. I'm not an Australian citizen so they might just ignore me, or they might be unable to tell me anything about an ongoing investigation. It's also possible that I've phrased things in the wrong way and I need to get better at FOIA requests!

    *The Australian Homeopathy Association, Complementary Medicines Australia and the Australian Traditional Medicine Society. According to the Homeopathy Research Institute these three bodies used some of the HRI's own analysis of the NHMRC 2015 report. The HRI wrote about the complaint to the Commonwealth Ombudsman but the other three organisations appear to have been rather quiet about it.


    Dear Commonwealth Ombudsmen and Ombudswomen :-)

    I am writing to you under the FOIA scheme to find out about the existence and status of a complaint apparently made by homeopathy societies to you in 2016 about the conduct of and report from the NHMRC. Please note that I am not an Australian citizen (I'm British) so I'm not sure if you will be able to respond to me but if so please let me know if there's a charge, I will be happy to contribute. My questions are in red.

    The reason that I am asking if any complaint has been made is because the existence of this submission from homeopathic societies has been called into question by the Australian Skeptics who could find no record of it (in April 2017). They also reported (in August 2017) that it appears that no submission was received by you, so its status is a bit of a mystery!

    On the Homeopathy Research Institute's (HRI) page (below) they claim in the first paragraph that the Commonwealth Ombudsman is in receipt of a complaint submission from the CMA, AHA and ATMS August 2016. 1. Please can you confirm if you have received a complaint document from those organisations relating to the NHMRC?

    The second paragraph implies that you made an initial assessment of their complaint and found that it was of sufficient merit to warrant an investigation. 2. Please could you confirm that you (a) made this assessment of its merit and (b) found that it warranted further investigation.

    3. Could you also confirm if an investigation was launched and what meetings (dates) were set up and with whom (organisations).


    Source / Linked PDF for Executive Summary

     A news article from 22 January 2019, from European Coalition on Homeopathic & Anthroposophic Medicinal Products (ECHAMP) indicated that your verdict on this report was 'imminent'. 4. Are you preparing a verdict on any complaint you've received from these homeopathy societies?

    Source


    5. If so, will such a verdict be made public, and when?

    Thank you very much
    Jo Brodie






    Posted by Jo at 23:44 0 comments
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    Wednesday, 13 November 2019

    I don't think Argos is giving away free Black Friday vouchers today with "shopgift.win"

    I've just seen a Facebook post suggesting that Argos is giving away a voucher today only as special deal. The link / URL / address is a little unusual in that it contains argos•co•uk but also has shopgift•win at the end of it, as part of the same link.

    argos•co•uk•shopgift•win as opposed to argos•co•uk/shopgift•win

    This made me a bit suspicious so I did a WHOIS search to find out a bit more by pasting the full link here http://whois.domaintools.com/

    It returned this page http://whois.domaintools.com/shopgift.win telling me that the domain was registered 3 days ago. It also made it very clear (look at the lack of argos in that link) what the domain actually was. So I don't think it's really from Argos. 

    Firefox also helpfully greys out bits of addresses to highlight what's the domain and what might not be.

    shopgift•win is in black text, it's not really argos.co.uk

    argos.co.uk is in black
    In taking the next screenshot of the anonymised post on Facebook I also spotted the little info 'i' icon beween the red logos and the grey panel at the bottom, on the right...


    ... clicking on that tells me the same thing as above (useful info from Facebook which is a plus)


    The voucher page asks questions and invites you to share a Facebook link - I'd recommend ignoring it. As I didn't find any other information about it on Google, Argos' page or on social media I thought I'd write this up in case anyone else was wondering if it was real and searched, as I did. I'm not exactly sure what the purpose of this is other than to get a link shared and perhaps access Facebook information.




    Posted by Jo at 14:29 0 comments
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