Negative Feedback

Tag: fail

  • Calendar syncing with iPhone, Mac and Google Calendar?

    During dinner with a geeky couple the other day, I mentioned my lack of calendar syncing with Google Calendar. I had tried to do this many times before but never got it working well. They professed total amazement, as they claimed it had been a total breeze to set up. Turns out we probably have different use cases and different expectations.

    When you think about the personal information you typically want to have synced on your devices, many people will think of the functionality Microsoft Outlook:
    • Mail
    • Contacts
    • Calendar
    • To-dos/tasks
    I currently have basic syncing set up between my iPhone and my Mac, but no syncing with any stuff from my work computer. I am not happy with this, but I am looking for a solution, and that solution seems to be Google.
    Mail is really a breeze if you keep all of it on servers and simply access everything with IMAP. Contacts are synced pretty easily on the Mac with Address Book’s support for syncing with Google Contacts. Infuriatingly, there is no standard support for To-dos on the iPhone, so that’s not going to happen. The thing that remains is calendar support. This seems like it should work, but there are some problems.

    The big problem appears to be that I have multiple calendars (10) set up in iCal. My workflow so far this morning has been as follows:
    • In iCal, select each calendar one by one and export to a .ics file
    • In Google calendar, create a calendar with that name one by one
    • One by one, import the .ics file to the calendar with the corresponding name
    • Add the gmail account, wait for syncing and then select all the calendars as “delegates”
    Note: These calendars show up as totally different calendars, so I would have to delete my current calendars on my actual mac, and the new ones appear in this strange nested directory structure as shown in the picture below (the “On my Mac” calendars are the original ones, and the grey ones under “Deligates” are the mac ones):

    That’s it for the iCal setup. Not entirely transparent, but at least I can see all my calendars and access them with sync. So far, so good.
    Now for the iPhone. No joy.
    I have tried both the gmail account and using the exchange support of gmail. Neither of them allow me to see all my calendars on the iPhone. I only see what is known as the primary calendar, which means I now have two choices:
    • Combine all of the calendars into one calendar, which means I lose fine-grained control of what stuff to share with my wife and other people (does she want to see all my appointments with students, do my students want to see all my appointments with my wife?)
    • Undo all the work I’ve done this morning and go back to syncing my phone and my mac using iTunes, and forget about having access to my calendars online.
    So now I am frustrated. Regardless of where the blame lies (many people have pointed out that this is really an iPhone problem), if I can’t access all my calendars on my iPhone it’s basically game over for the whole idea.

  • Don’t trust science, look for evidence.

    My wife has the flu (along with several other people I know), so it’s time for the usual recommendations from her mother to use a lot of vitamin C. Bad Science has fanned the flames of my natural combative streak, so I went out and tried to find a good study for the Vitamin C thing. I found this, and sent it on to the mother-in-law (who hasn’t replied yet). I also posted it in reply to a friend on Facebook’s status about dosing up on vit. C. Not long after that, a friend of hers replies with this link — implying, of course, that anyone can prove anything by linking to stuff on the Internet.

    So, of course, I reply, mentioning the number of people involved in the trials I had quoted, the significance of the results etc, which are all in the article and their links, while the other link has some hand-wavey trials with very little real evidence. And while I was posting this reply (which I’ll quote, because I’m lazy):
    “Your point was quite clear, which is why I had to reply: It’s very popular at the moment to roll one’s eyes and point to all the contradictory evidence on the internet, typically ending in “so in the end we don’t know as much as we think” equivocation of the options. The reality is that in many cases we do know quite well what is happening (as in the case with Vit. C), and the underlying meme that science is always to be taken with a pinch of salt is damaging to proper understanding of scientific method and results.

    This story repeats itself so many times that people become less likely to investigate the real results themselves (note that I’m not saying we should just trust scientists, we should be capable of understanding and evaluating the results). This goes for antiretrovirals, vaccines and many other treatments that have been shown to work, but are being used less than they should be because of general public distrust.”

    Of course, I can think of many other examples: Cell phones and/or their towers causing cancer (which is silly even on the face of it considering the power of the transmitters, but has also been pretty solidly disproved by long studies of cancer incidence), stuff in plastic water bottles causing cancer, overhead power lines, induction stoves causing sterility (same argument as with the cell phones). I think there is a general distrust of science, perhaps because people trusted science so much in the past and have become disillusioned.
    So here’s the thing: science isn’t really a trust thing. The whole point of science is that the evidence should be so overwhelming when you make a positive statement that it cannot be avoided. In fact, many scientists would say that no hypothesis can ever be proved, we can just fail to disprove it after trying very hard. Reading popular media summaries of scientific work makes this difficult because headlines like “Scientists do many tests and find insufficient evidence to disprove this hypothesis” don’t really sell papers. It also doesn’t gel well with the way people talk and think in general. The problem is that most of our decisions every day are made in extremely unscientific ways, including a wide array of effects that mean we can’t even reason accurately about our own experience. Trust is a proxy for research. If someone I trust a lot (or a source I trust a lot) says something, I am unlikely to repeat their experiments and likely to take them at their word. If I know something about the field in question, I can also interrogate my understanding of the situation to see if the results are consistent with other things I know to be true. In an ideal world, we would all be repeating all the experiments to make sure they work. In reality, we lack the time, skills and funds to do so, so trust is necessary.
    Where does this leave us? We need to base our trust on good, objective measures. In science, this means being able to look at the results and weigh the evidence, not the authors or publishers. It means checking consistency of theories and avoiding repeating claims that have poor statistical significance. It means doing real science, and not cargo cult science. More on that later.