LinLog

Slashdot recently ran a story on why so many tech workers dislike their jobs.  The article links to a survey by TinyPulse, a company that measures employee engagement.  The thrust of the article was that people in IT are less happy and engaged in their jobs than their fellow employees in other departments. 

The article itself was somewhat interesting.  They showed a number of graphs that showed IT pros reporting reduced engagement as compared to people in other departments.  However, in looking at the graphs and the numbers, I got the distinct impression that somebody at TinyPulse was trying to pump up business by manufacturing a crisis.  For example, consider this screenshow of the graph (captured 2015-09-21):

This is the first graph in the article and the way it's shown is literally straight out How to Lie with Statistics.  No, seriously - read the book.  One of the ways to lie that it discusses is to use a bar graph with a discontinuous scale.  In this case, the horizantal axis appears to start at about 17%, which is why the bar on the right is about three times as tall as the one on the left, even though it only represents a 3% difference.

To their credit, TinyPulse didn't do that with any of the other graphs in the report, so maybe it was just a garden-variety screw-up.  It fould just be that somebody pushed the wrong button in the graph-generation tool and the result got pushed out.  Who knows?  You'd think a company that does statistics as part of its core business would be a little more careful, but hey, things like that happen.

The problem is that when you notice something like that, it immediately puts you on your guard and makes you suspicious of the rest of the data. Of course, that's assuming you know to look for it, which most people probably don't.  And that's the beauty of lying with statistics - you don't have to actually lie.  Why risk an out-and-out lie when you can just be careful in your presentation and trust that the vast majority of the people will draw the conclusion you want them to draw rathen than the one that's actually supported by the presented data?

Just a quick note on a small customization to Tiny Tiny RSS.  If you're not aware of TT-RSS, it's the online RSS aggregator that I switched to after Google Reader closed down.  It's got all the features I care about, has a fairly nice web UI and there are mobile apps and mobile-web front-ends available.  And despite what it says in the official system requirements about needing a dedicated server, it works perfectly on my el cheapo shared hosting account - wasn't even hard to set up.

Anyway, I recently switched the configuration for the web viewer from the "default" theme to the "night" theme, which is a white-on-black color scheme.  I decided to try that because it matches better with a lot of the development tools I'm using (Komodo IDE, Visual Studio, command prompts - all light text on dark backgrounds).  The only problem is that, unlike the default theme, which shows headlines of posts you've read in a different color, the night theme doesn't visually differentiate read and unread posts.

Fortunately, this is easy to fix.  You can just open up the preferences and there's an option to customize your stylesheet.  To change the highlight color, copy something like the following into the custom CSS box.

body#ttrssMain .hl .hlTitle a {
    color: #878787;  /* A slightly darker gray to use for "read" posts. */
}

body#ttrssMain .hl.active .hlTitle a,
body#ttrssMain .hl.Unread .hlTitle a {
    color: #CCC;  /* Normal headline color for the "night" theme. */
}

Note to self: when getting regular expression warnings from JSHint, remember the inline option for disabling them.

/*jshint regexp: false */

This is useful for adding to the top of a function definition when you want to use "unsafe" regular expressions.  Apparently the idea is that using an unescaped "." in your regular expressions can match more data than you intend and potentially lead to bad validation and insecure applications.  So it's actually a good thing that JSHint check for this.

On the other hand, in my case the regex in question was just a simple extraction of the extension from a file name.  Since I was comparing the result to a white-list and substituting a known default if it wasn't found, there wasn't really any serious risk.  I just wanted JSHint to shut up.