Gaming Idol With Dialers

By | November 22, 2011
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If you’re wondering why Sanjaya Malakar has done surprisingly well in American Idol, here’s one possible answer: dialers.

Dialers are pieces of software usually stealthily installed on a victim’s computer to automatically dial expensive premium telephone numbers. The victim only finds out when they receive their phone bill. In this case, the dialer, openly available on a reputable download site, is a voluntary install designed to automate the voting process in Idol:

Sanjaya War Dialer uses your computers modem to automatically dial the American Idol voting number over and over and over again until you tell it to stop. Automatically cast hundreds or even thousands of votes for Sanjaya with the click of a button. Make Sanjaya win and help us ruin American Idol.

The Sanjaya War Dialer has its own MySpace page where users report on their votes — 600 a hour, for some. The show’s producers are aware of this, and have been lopping off blocks of votes if they seem to be coming from power dialers, as they call them, for several weeks.

Gaming the system by voting for inferior contestants is not new. Vote for the Worst claims to have been around since 2004. And DialIdol.com offers dialers for other shows, including Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, Canadian Idol and Celebrity Duets. DialIdol isn’t so much about gaming the system as predicting who will be voted off by seeing which hotlines are busiest.

Should we be surprised by this? No. It’s not easy to tell how many people are using these dialers, and it would need to be a lot to make it work. But we shouldn’t underestimate the number of people willing to do this, either for fun or because they have money riding on it. And of course they may not need to vote – they only need to stop other people from voting for other contestants. Do we believe American Idol when it talks of 35 million votes? That’s a lot of phone lines.

I would say this: Any kind of voting technology that isn’t transparent and clear is likely to be manipulated, either by smart hackers with something to gain, or by those arranging the voting.

(My colleague Carl Bialik talks about voting and power dialers in his blog a couple of days back. Thanks to Handoko for the Twitter tip.)

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Europe’s Top-heavy Leagues

By | November 22, 2011
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Lg-spain Spanish Primera Liga (48%)
Lg-bundesliga German Bundesliga (54%)
Lg-epl2 English Premier League (47%)
Lg-france French Ligue 1 (47%)
Lg-greece Greek Ethniki Katigoria (6%)
Lg-holland Dutch Eredivisie (25%)
Lg-italy Italy Serie A (24%)

Lg-champ English Championship (29%)
Lg-scot Scottish Premier League (29%

This doesn’t have a lot to do with technology, but it’s an excuse to play around with sparklines, Edward Tufte’s approach to feeding data into text in the form of small data-rich graphics. And they might tell us a bit about soccer, competitiveness and which country is the powerhouse of Europe. (These ones are done with Bissantz’ excellent Office plugin.)

What started me off here was the comment on the BBC website that English soccer, while strong at the top (Man U, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal), drops alarmingly in quality. Is there really no competition in the English Premier League? The absence of English clubs in the final 4 of the UEFA Cup would seem to indicate it’s true.

But I thought another way of exploring it would be to grab the points gathered by each team in each of the main European leagues, and then plot them as a simple sparkline, each bar indicating the points one by each club in the table. The steepness and evenness of the sparkline gradient should give a pretty clear impression of which leagues are split between great clubs and the mediocre rest.

Visually, Spain is clearly the most competitive league (with the exception of England’s second league, the Championship, which has an impressively smooth gradient.) The German Bundesliga comes second, with the English Premier League third. All the others, frankly, look too top heavy to be regarded as having any depth (Italy doesn’t really count as it’s in such a mess at the moment.)

The figures in brackets show how many points the bottom club has as a percentage of the top club, a figure that’s not particularly useful as, for example in Greece, the bottom club Ionikos doesn’t seem to has won only two games in 26.

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Clock Shock

By | November 22, 2011
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Clocky1

For those of you who can’t get out of bed in the morning, the alarm clock that outwits you is finally here. I mentioned Clocky in a WSJ column more than a year ago in talking about the problems of ignored alarms:

Efforts to overcome this problem have been inventive, but rarely successful, says Gauri Nanda, a 26-year-old graduate student in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. “Just last week a man told me he currently uses three alarm clocks and then asks his friends to hide them,” she says. Ms. Nanda’s solution: an alarm clock called Clocky equipped with outsize wheels and shockproof covering (early prototypes are wrapped in brown shag), that goes off and then, when its snooze button is pressed, skedaddles across the room and hides, requiring owners to get out of bed and find it. By the time they have, the thinking goes, Clocky has done its job because they’re out of bed and wide awake, if a little frustrated.

Gauri tells me the clock is now out and about, although it’s dropped the shaggy pile in favor of robust rubber and plastic, leaping off your nightstand and running erratically around the room making an annoying, R2D2–like noise. (see a video here.)

 I think it’s a great idea, although it’s not the only annoying alarm clock on the market. Uberreview lists some others, including:

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