Bullseye! Mark Rober’s intelligent dart board

A dart in the Bullseye — Bullseye *Image by* Tim Bastian from Pixabay

Mark Rober, an engineer and YouTuber who worked for NASA, has created a dartboard that jumps in front of your dart to land you the best score. Throw a dart at his board and infra-red motion capture cameras track its path, and, software (and some maths) predicts where it will land. Motors then move the dartboard into a better position to up the score in real time!

To track the dart Mark used a motion-capture system with six cameras that respond to infrared instead of light (this let the cameras follow the movement of just the dart, which had a special infrared reflecting surface, and not all the other stuff in the room that would distract a light-sensing camera). He used Matlab to program the maths needed to calculate (very quickly!), from the parabolic path the dart was flying in, where it was about to land, so that the dart board could be moved into place and meet it. The movement of the darts board was controlled by fishing wire (literally) and small motors to pull the board left, right, up or down under the control of an Arduino.

Possibly the most ridiculously over-engineered thing but a lot of fun, even if a bullseye isn’t the highest possible score on a dart board (hitting the bullseye gives you 50 points but landing your dart in the triple 20 segment gives you 60!)

See the board in action in his YouTube video [EXTERNAL]

– Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

Watch…

Mark Rober’s video of his Automatic Bullseye, moving dartboard [EXTERNAL]

Related Magazines …

Issue 28 – Cunning Computational Contraptions

An earlier version of this post originally appeared both on this blog and on the back page of issue 28 of the CS4FN magazine, Cunning Computational Contraptions, a fun look at the history of computational devices which you can download as a PDF from the link below.

This issue of the magazine contains articles about automata, core rope memory (used by NASA in the Moon landings), Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (never built) and Difference Engine made of cog wheels and levers, mercury delay lines, standardising the size of machine parts, Mary Coombs and the Lyons tea shop computer, computers made of marbles, i-Ching and binary, Ada Lovelace and music, a computer made of custard, a way of sorting wood samples with index cards and how to work out your own programming origin story….

Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).

Find out about some of the rather surprising things computer scientists have got up to when they're in a playful mood.

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

A Sea Hero Quest to understand our navigation skills

A lego minifigure hiking with map and compass — Image by Andrew Martin from Pixabay

Video games can be a very successful way to do citizen science, getting ordinary people involved in research. Sea Hero Quest is an extremely successful example. It involves a boy setting out on a sea quest to recover his father’s memories, lost when he suffers from dementia. The hundreds of thousands of people joining the quest have helped researchers better understand our ability to navigate.

The Sea Hero Quest project was led by Deutsche Telecom, working with both universities and Alzheimer’s Research UK. The first mass-market game of its kind, it has allowed researchers to explore navigation and related cognitive abilities of people throughout their lives. The game has 75 levels, each with different kinds of task in different environments, and has been played by millions of people around the world for over a 100 years of combined game time. The amount of data collected is vast and would have taken researchers centuries to collect by traditional means, if possible at all.

For example, an international team including researchers from UCL, the University of Lyon and the University of Münster used the game to explore how the place people grew up affects their ability to navigate. As well as more general data from around 400,000 people across the world, they also used the data specifically from people who had completed all levels of the game. This amounted to around ten thousand adults of all ages.

They found that people are best at navigating in situations similar to where they grew up (where they lived at the time of playing the game had no effect). So, for example, people who grew up in an American grid-like city such as Chicago, were better at navigating in grid-based levels. Those who grew up in cities such as Prague in Europe, where the streets are more wiggly and chaotically laid out, were better at levels needing similar navigation skills. Throughout, the researchers found that those that grew up in the countryside were better at navigating overall as well as specifically in more unstructured environments.

Sea Hero Quest shows that games designers, if they can create fun but serious games, can help us all help researchers…It is often said that playing video games is bad for growing brains but it also shows that the way we design our cities affects the way we think and can be bad for our brains!

Magazines …

Issue 29 – Diversity

Front cover of CS4FN issue 29 - Diversity in Computing

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Robert Weitbrecht and his telecommunication device for the deaf

Robert Weitbrecht was born deaf. He went on to become an award winning electronics scientist who invented the acoustic coupler (or modem) and a teletypewriter (or teleprinter) system allowing the deaf to communicate via a normal phone call.

A modem telephone: the telephone slots into a teletypewriter here with screen rather than printer. — A telephone modem: Image by Juan Russo from Pixabay

If you grew up in the UK in the 1970s with any interest in football, then you may think of teleprinters fondly. It was the way that you found out about the football results at the final whistle, watching for your team’s result on the final score TV programme. Reporters at football grounds across the country, typed in the results which then appeared to the nation one at a time as a teleprinter slowly typed results at the bottom of the screen.

Teleprinters were a natural, if gradual, development from the telegraph and Morse code. Over time a different simpler binary based code was developed. Then by attaching a keyboard and creating a device to convert key presses into the binary code to be sent down the wire you code type messages instead of tap out a code. Anyone could now do it, so typists replaced Morse code specialists. The teleprinter was born. In parallel, of course, the telephone was invented allowing people to talk to each other by converting the sound of someone speaking into an electrical signal that was then converted back into sound at the other end. Then you didn’t even need to type, never mind tap, to communicate over long distances. Telephone lines took over. However, typed messages still had their uses as the football results example showed.

Another advantage of the teletypewriter/teleprinter approach over the phone, was that it could be used by deaf people. However, teleprinters originally worked over separate networks, as the phone network was built to take analogue voice data and the companies controlling them across the world generally didn’t allow others to mess with their hardware. You couldn’t replace the phone handsets with your own device that just created electrical pulses to send directly over the phone line. Phone lines were for talking over via one of their phone company’s handsets. However, phone lines were universal so if you were deaf you really needed to be able to communicate over the phone not use some special network that no one else had. But how could that work, at a time when you couldn’t replace the phone handset with a different device?

Robert Weitbrecht solved the problem after being prompted to do so by deaf orthodontist, James Marsters. He created an acoustic coupler – a device that converted between sound and electrical signals – that could be used with a normal phone. It suppressed echoes, which improved the sound quality. Using old, discarded teletypewriters he created a usable system Slot the phone mouthpiece and ear piece into the device and the machine “talked” over the phone in an R2D2 like language of beeps to other machines like it. It turned the electrical signals from a teletypewriter into beeps that could be sent down a phone line via its mouthpiece. It also decoded beeps when received via the phone earpiece in the electrical form needed by the teleprinter. You typed at one end, and what you typed came out on the teleprinter at the other (and vice versa). Deaf and hard of hearing people could now communicate with each other over a normal phone line and normal phones! The idea of Telecommunications Device for the Deaf that worked with normal phones was born. However, they still were not strictly legal in the US so James Marsters and others lobbied Washington to allow such devices.

The idea (and legalisation) of acoustic couplers, however, then inspired others to develop similar modems for other purposes and in particular to allow computers to communicate via the telephone network using dial-up modems. You no longer needed special physical networks for computers to link to each other, they could just talk over the phone! Dial-up bulletin boards were an early application where you could dial up a computer and leave messages that others could dial up to read there via their computers…and from that idea ultimately emerged the idea of chat rooms, social networks and the myriad other ways we now do group communication by typing.

The first ever (long distance) phone call between two deaf people (Robert Weitbrecht and James Marsters) using a teletypewriter / teleprinter was:

“Are you printing now? Let’s quit for now and gloat over the success.”

Yes, let’s.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

Magazines …

Issue 29 – Diversity

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Debugging your sandwich maker

A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, made with Skippy peanut butter and Welch’s grape jelly on white bread by Evan-Amos, under a CC0 licence via Wikimedia

Do you know how to make a sandwich? More importantly do you know how to write down a set of precise, detailed instructions that could tell someone else how to make a sandwich? I’m sure you think you could, but after watching this video below you might feel less sure.

This video has been used in some classrooms as a fun way of talking about how precise and correct an algorithm needs to be in order to run a program correctly. Josh, the dad in the video, asks his children (Johnna and Evan) to write out some instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly (jam) sandwich. They all speak the same language (English) so the instructions don’t have to be converted into machine language for the computer (dad) to run the program and make the sandwich, but as you’ll soon see, it’s harder than his children think. They do get there in the end though… kind of.

See if you can write your own set of instructions and then get someone to follow them exactly.

Incidentally, the image used to illustrate this article has been “…assessed under the valued image criteria and is considered the most valued image on Commons within the scope: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. You can see its nomination here.” Only the best peanut pics on this site! You can see all the images that didn’t win here.

Watch …

Make a sandwich [EXTERNAL]

Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Making mistakes creatively – putting error messages to good use

Flower bed with Oops! 404 Weeding Error written over it — Kew Gardens‘ 404 error page (click here to see it) says “*Oops! 404 error. We’ve been doing a bit of website weeding. The content on this page has been uprooted and planted elsewhere. Please keep digging*.” The page helpfully links to other pages on their site. Flowers Image by 👀 Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay with writing added by CS4FN.

Have you ever seen a website say “404 – page not found” or something very similar? This can happen if a page has since been moved or deleted, or if you’ve typed the address wrongly so the page can’t be loaded. Most of the time the error messages are fairly dull – some of them might even be slightly useful and point you to the homepage or let you search the website to try and find the page you were looking for.

Sometimes organisations make a bit of an effort and produce an error message that is also entertaining, though, adding delight to the user experience design. For example Kew Gardens keeps the ‘garden’ theme going in its message, and Innocent Drinks has a whole page describing previous errors that the company has made. Lego‘s 404 not found page has a picture of a minifigure dressed as a construction worker who’s looking a bit worried and the page says “We’ll try not to lose our head over this, but if we do… we’ll put it back on.”

‘404’ has become the universal language of ‘something that is not found or cannot be found’. If you are ever in a computer science department that happens to have a Room 404 there’s a very high chance that someone will have jokingly added a post-it note saying “Room not found”.

Incidentally if you were to search on Google Maps for CS4FN’s building (the Peter Landin teaching rooms, originally called the Bancroft Road Teaching Rooms) you’d find that someone has changed our address to 404 Bancroft Road (click the link to see if it hasn’t been changed back since). We’re not sure who did it or why but we’re fairly sure a computer scientist in the department was behind it.

Why “404”?

There may be different reasons that a website can’t load a page and sometimes it can be helpful to know why. You might be reassured to know that the problem isn’t anything to do with you, and to be told that the server that is hosting the pages is busy or down for maintenance and you should come back later. Rather helpfully there is a list of agreed “server response codes” so that whenever a page won’t load a differently numbered message appears depending on the reason.

There are quite a lot of these messages and they all have three digits. If the digit starts with the number 4 then it means that the problem may have come from the user (such as you typing in a web address wrongly so being given the 404 message). If it starts with the number 5 it means a problem on the server’s side and it’s not probably going to be able to show you pages because of a fault. You might also have seen “Error 503 – Service unavailable” – that’s usually a temporary fault just try again later.

Making 404 pages more useful

In 2012 a group of organisations that helps raise awareness about missing children encouraged companies to add some helpful information to their 404 pages so that every time someone landed on their ‘wrong’ page they’d be shown a name and photograph and any relevant information about someone the police and emergency services were trying to locate, and who to call if they knew who they were. What a great idea!

– Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).

Subscribe to be notified whenever we publish a new post to the CS4FN blog.

This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

You wouldn’t fall for that, would you?

A barometer from 1810. — Wheel Barometer, also known as Banjo Barometer, Barnasconi, Leeds, c. 1810 – Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago), via Wikimedia Commons under a CC0 licence.

There’s an old science joke about a physics professor who gives, as weekend homework, the task to use a barometer* to measure the height of the physics building. Back in class on Monday the professor invites the students to share their working. The class discuss how they measured the pressure at the base of the building, climbed to the top and measured it again then used a mathematical formula to work out the height. One of the students admitted that he’d saved a bit of time, measurements and calculations by simply knocking on the door of the janitor’s office and saying “If you will tell me the height of this building, I will give you this beautiful barometer.“

Social engineering

One of the simplest and often quickest ways to ‘hack’ into someone’s account doesn’t involve any hacking (or cracking) at all. People lose lots of money, time and anxious sleep to mistakes made because they were distracted and fell for something which was cleverly designed to fool them. Most cyberattacks happen not because someone guessed a password but because someone willingly handed it over.

Phishing attempts can involve little more than making a fake website look like a real one and hoping people don’t notice that the address doesn’t look right. Someone clicks on the link, perhaps in an email or a text message telling them that there’s something wrong with their account that they need to deal with urgently, and enters their email address and password – handing their account details to the scammer. Worse, when people re-use an email address with the same password on multiple sites the scammers suddenly have access to a great deal more of their private information and perhaps even access to their money (e.g. if they have stored payment details with their account).

Back in the 1980s ‘Claire’ managed to hack into a computer network with incredible ease as her son explained in a series of posts. Claire, known as someone who was ‘good with computers’, was invited to a meeting by the CEO of a company that made security systems. She visited his office, taking the lift all the way up to the penthouse office, where he offered her “an eye-watering sum” if she was able to break into his system within a week.

Offer accepted she took the lift all the way down to the building’s basement where the computer lab was. She found a stack of papers and stood outside the lab door looking busy and needing to get on with her work but struggling to get in with all the papers. One of the lab technicians helps her into the room (how kind! she’s ever so grateful!) where she makes her way to an unused computer, sits down and calls out “What’s today’s password?”. And someone tells her. It took her less than 20 minutes!

It is easy to be tricked

I (PC) was at a workshop about security. As part of it we were shown a website that could tell you how safe your password was. It gave an estimate of how long any password could be cracked in. If you typed in 1234 then it would tell you that was cracked in fractions of seconds. A word in any dictionary (even a Tolkien one) likewise. Longer passwords would take longer than shorter ones. Mix in capitals and it would take longer still, and so on. Everyone was told to type in their passwords to find out how good they were at thinking up a password. Virtually everyone did so and many found out that their passwords were not very good… others celebrated the fact that they were good at choosing a password. However, perhaps it didn’t matter either way! Everyone who typed in an actual password had just given away their password to a website that may or may not have been secure…

Never give up your password to anyone and certainly not to a computer program. Don’t even tell others the rules you use to create one!

How easy are you to scam?

Try Google’s phishing quiz and see how you do.

How do you decide a website is safe? You do not judge it by looking at the website itself. You look elsewhere to a trusted source and find information that way! Either way do not ever enter personal data and passwords into a source unless you are absolutely sure.

You can also try Take Five‘s quiz to see how ‘Scamsceptible’ (susceptible to scams) you are based on how well you slept last night and if you have lots of things on your mind distracting you. Take Five is a campaign to encourage people to pause (and take five minutes) when they get a message they’re not sure about and double-check that it’s genuine.

– Jo Brodie and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).

Subscribe to be notified whenever we publish a new post to the CS4FN blog.

This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Always check the text before sending to print!

One of our tasks here at CS4FN is to proofread our magazines before we put them in the post and send them out to our subscribers. We’re not just checking for spelling (although obviously we check for that too) but we need to make sure that any links will be clickable for the online version of the magazine, that images don’t hide any text, that the text makes sense and that we’ve not used a long complicated word or phrase when a more quotidian* one would do. In short we want you to be able to read, understand and interact with the magazine whether you’re holding it in your hands or turning the pages with a finger-press or mouse-click. And hopefully enjoy it!

Last week we posted about That Time When I Did Not Proofread a change I made to the list of names and addresses to post the magazine to. Today’s post involves a couple of ridiculous examples where people haven’t paid much attention to what a computer is sending to a printer.

Mislabelled jeans

Image credit: “broken counterfeit jeans” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Ben.

Our first example is this pair of probably counterfeit jeans spotted at a market in Thailand. The label is supposed to have a logo on it and it’s likely that the stallholder has an Excel spreadsheet or similar with information about the logos and which labels to print them on.

Unfortunately a bug has meant that instead of printing the actual logo the printer has instead printed the instructions and so the logo, in red at the bottom, is now just this line of code

=IIf(Label="","RMA","?")

Most people’s favourite example of this sort of thing is the cake baked to wish someone’s Aunt Elsa a happy birthday. It didn’t quite go to plan.

But before we meet the cake let’s have a brief detour into how text on a computer can be formatted. If I want to make a word italicised or have it stand out in bold I can do this very easily by selecting the word and pressing an i for italic or b for bold button. On a web page this puts a tiny invisible bit of code on either side of the word, it’s not difficult to see how it works.

One way to write this is to put an < em > code around a word I want to italicise (’em’ for emphasise). Note that I have to write it as < space em space > because if I write it without the spaces then your browser will assume that I want to italicise whatever comes next. I can write it correctly in the display box below though as the browser now knows that I just want to show the bit of code and not run it.

<em>italic</em>

The first < em > means “make everything after this italic” and the final < em > means “end the italic command”.

Ditto for bold.

<strong>bold</strong>

This is HTML or HyperText Markup Language and is one of the tools web designers use to make text on web pages work. HTML code can also be used to add non-standard characters like é or ç to the text too.

This cake takes the biscuit

There are printers that use edible-ink to print text or photographs onto icing to decorate a cake. The intended birthday-cake message was written using Microsoft Word and had a variety of headings, bold words, non-standard characters and so on. Word ‘coded’ these using its own proprietary add-ons for HTML (these are normally invisible and you’d never notice) but unfortunately the printer struggled to make sense of the instructions, as you can see in this image of the cake. Presumably the cake tasted just as delicious either way.

It might seem quite surprising that the bakery didn’t check the message before printing or, once they’d seen the output, consider re-printing and covering up the odd message. However, as the (probably slightly stressed) owner said “We just cut and paste from the email to the program we use for printing the edible images, we are usually in such a hurry that we really don’t have time to check. And if we do the customers yell at us for bothering them.“

But sometimes it can be really, really important to check and double-check before pressing that OK button. Here’s a story about how a full stop (when used as a decimal point) could be the difference between getting the right dose of medicine versus a dangerous overdose.

Much ado about nothing

Find out more and come to our birthday party!

If you’re in London on Tuesday 6th May you can come to Queen Mary University of London to hear its author (and CS4FN’s co-founder) Paul Curzon give a lecture on The illusion of Good Software Design at CS4FN’s 20th birthday celebration – free! The event is aimed at 11+ (and adults) and features some table magic too. Get yourself a ticket and come along.

There will be cake but we promise to proofread any printed icing first!

The illusion of good software design

CS4FN 20th Birthday Event

*quotidian means ordinary, everyday, mundane

Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Super-plant supercapacitors

Aloe vera plant — Image by Marco from Pixabay

There are a whole range of plants that have been called superfoods for their amazing claimed health benefits because of the nutrients they contain. But plants can have other super powers too. For example, some are better at absorbing Carbon Dioxide to help with climate change, others provide medicines, or can strip our pollutants out of the air or soil. But one, Aloe Vera, is a super-plant in a new way. It can now store electricity that could be used to power portable devices – by plugging them into the plant.

Capacitors are one of the basic electronic components, like resistors and transistors, that electronic circuits are built from. They act a bit like a tiny battery, building up charge on a pair of surfaces with an insulator between so that charge cannot move directly from one to the other. Electrons build up on one plate, storing energy. When the capacitor is discharged that energy is released. They have a variety of uses including evening out power supplies. A supercapacitor is just a capacitor that can store a lot more energy so is a little like a tiny rechargeable battery, though releases the energy faster and can be charged and discharged many more times.

Various teams around the world have explored the use of aloe vera in supercapacitors. A team of researchers, led by Yang Zhao from Beijing Institute of Technology, has succeeded in creating a supercapacitor made completely from materials extracted from the plant (apart from one gold wire). The parts were made by heating a part of the leaf of the plant, and by freezing its juice. The advantage of this is that the supercapacitor is biodegradable unlike traditional ones made from oil-based synthetic materials. It also makes them biocompatible in that they can be inserted into aloe vera and similar plants without doing them harm and potentially make use of electricity generated by the plant. Her team has inserted these tiny capacitors inside other plants including cacti and aloe vera plants to show this idea works in principle.

So plants can be superheroes and aloe vera more than most: it looks nice on your window cill, you can make soap from it, it supposedly has medicinal value, it is being used in research to remove pollutants from the air and soon it could provide you with electricity too. So next time you are lost in a cactus filled wilderness make sure you have aloe vera capacitors with you so you can charge your gadgets while waiting to be rescued.

Magazines …

Issue 29 – Diversity

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

The wrong trousers? Not any more!

A metal figure sitting on the floor head down — Image by kalhh from Pixabay

Inspired by the Wallace & Gromit film ‘The Wrong Trousers’, Johnathan Rossiter of the University of Bristol builds robotic trousers. We could all need them as we get older.

Think of a robot and you probably think of something metal: something solid and hard. But a new generation of robot researchers are exploring soft robotics: robots made of materials that are squishy. When it comes to wearable robots, being soft is obviously a plus. That is the idea behind Jonathan’s work. He is building trousers to help people stand and walk.

Being unable to get out of an armchair without help can be devastating to a person’s life. There are many conditions like arthritis and multiple sclerosis, never mind just plain old age, that make standing up difficult. It gets to us all eventually and having difficulty moving around makes life hard and can lead to isolation and loneliness. The less you move about, the harder it gets to do, because your muscles get weaker, so it becomes a vicious circle. Soft robotic trousers may be able to break the cycle.

We are used to the idea of walking sticks, frames, wheelchairs and mobility scooters to help people get around. Robotic clothes may be next. Early versions of Jonathan’s trousers include tubes like a string of sausages that when pumped full of air become more solid, shortening as they bulge
out, so straightening the leg. Experiments have shown that inflating trousers fitted with them, can make a robot wearing them stand. The problem is that you need to carry gas canisters around, and put up with the psshhht! sound whenever you stand!

The team have more futuristic (and quieter) ideas though. They are working on designs
based on ‘electroactive polymers’. These are fabrics that change when electricity
is applied. One group that can be made into trousers, a bit like lycra tights, silently shrink with an electric current: exactly what you need for robotic trousers. To make it work you need a computer control system that shrinks and expands them in the right places at the right time to move the leg
wearing them. You also need to be able to store enough energy in a light enough way that the trousers can be used without frequent recharging.

It’s still early days, but one day they hope to build a working system that really can help older people stand. Jonathan promises he will eventually build the right trousers.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London (from the archive)

More on …

The rise of the robots [PORTAL]

Related Magazine …

Issue 25 – Technology worn out (and about)

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

Language-mangling rude word filters

A large green plastic barrel with thick walls in a garden, against an outdoor wall and next to a wooden fence with foliage growing on it. This is used to store rainwater and has a capacity of about 200 litres. — “Rainwater tank, about 200 litres” by Jeuwre, available under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence, via Wikimedia.

What we have here on the right is a water butt also known as a rainwater tank. These are large containers which collect rainwater so are an environmentally friendly way for people to save water so that they can water the plants in their garden during a dryer season. A very clever idea and totally inoffensive.

Context is everything

However… the word ‘butt’ can also refer to your bottom. Well not your bottom of course, I wouldn’t be so rude as to make any comment about your own bottom, I mean bottoms in general.

In the United States a less polite word for bottom is ‘ass’ (which also means ‘donkey’ in the UK) but there are times when saying or writing the word ‘ass’ wouldn’t be so polite and for those situations you might use another word, like butt.

Well that’s probably just making it worse

In an effort to make online communications politer people have tried a variety of tactics. Sometimes a word is on a banned list so if you were to type it into your message it wouldn’t send and you have to come up with a different way of saying it. Or your system could use regular expressions (‘regex’) to find all instances of a word or phrase in published text and replace it with something deemed more appropriate and less offensive.

If you were to replace all instances of ‘ass’ with ‘butt’ in a piece of text you’d increase the politeness of your communication, but you wouldn’t necessarily increase its readability. It’s a clbuttic mistake, produce by a software filter that’s a little too broad in its reach. In that last sentence you can see what happens when I replace the ‘ass’ in classic with ‘butt’ – absolute gibberish.

Of course, people noticed

If you had to write, politely, about clothing you might prefer to put ‘trousers’ rather than ‘pants’ (in the US meaning, rather than underwear) but you might be a bit irritated if your other article on housing referenced ‘occutrousers’ rather than ‘occupants’…

My favourite (real-world) example of this silliness was when a newspaper article referenced the fact that a historical American president had been ‘buttbuttinated’ instead of ‘assassinated’.

Although that really happened and a few other pages on the internet were filled with nonsense words* people did notice pretty quickly (I mean you would, wouldn’t you?!) and rapidly solved it by tweaking their filters to make sure that unwanted words that are found within a word were left alone, and perhaps they did a bit of proofreading to double-check too.

[*mostly it’s now articles like this drawing attention to the problem!]

I’ve made this mistake too

I wish I’d done a bit of proofreading when I did what I thought was a clever ‘find and replace’. A couple of thousand schools and home educators in the UK receive free copies of our printed CS4FN magazine (if your school would like to sign up…) and I keep all the addresses stored in a password-protected spreadsheet with different columns for the name, lines of the address, post code etc.

One day I had the brilliant idea of tidying up the ‘Country’ column in my database so that if someone had typed ‘UK’ it would now say ‘United Kingdom’.

Unfortunately I did this as a ‘global’ (across the entire spreadsheet) find and replace instead of specifying more clearly what should be changed. I didn’t realise until a few magazines came back as undeliverable because the address made absolutely no sense. If your teacher’s name was Luke or your school name or address had a ‘Duke’ in it I had now managed to turn these into “LUnited Kingdome” or “DUnited Kingdome”.

Oops!

The makers of Trivial Pursuit apparently globally replaced all occurrences of “km” to “kilometres” leading to, for example, a question about film star Hugh Jackilometresan.

Oops! again.

– Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

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Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

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