So long and thanks for all the fish

Execution

2011-12-21T17:12:00.000Z

I heard the news that police are considering the use of rubber bullets and potentially considering lethal rounds in the case of rioters who are instigating arson attacks.

I had said it before and I will say it again. If a 2 year trial looking at evidence with an intelligent judge, intelligent lawyers and a fair jury is not deemed to be reliable enough to support capital punishment then how do we expect a policement in the heat of a riot to make sensible judgements as to who is either going to commit a crime with potentially fatal consequences or has just done so. At what point does the policemen decide to kill?

Even the Stokewell incident should prove that with survellance and intelligence and undercover support there is still room to shoot the innocent guy.

The other (almost commical notion) was that police with rubber bullets would be allowed to shoot at children and aim for the belt buckle. Again, in the heat of a riot one has to wonder whether the accuracy will be there to enable them to reliably hit. The consequences of a miss are fatal (probably more so on a child).

Take that 'police permitted to shoot rubber bullets and lethal rounds at rioters' headline and then imagine it in a Syrian newspaper about their government. Shock horror, human rights, etc etc. On man's rioter is another man's protestor.

FSA

2011-12-19T20:31:00.000Z

I was disappointed to hear that the FSA has now woken up and come up with some new regulations. The idea is simple, start getting the banks to do rigorous checks on income and loan amounts and only lend x times salary.

My heart sank. This was not the reason we had a banking crisis. But now even more people will be locked out of the housing market. Finally some intelligence from radio 4 this morning. Pointing out what we all knew. The bank will happily tell you no for a mortgage and then you will find yourself paying more for rent. It is just not going to work.

One interviewee pointed out rightly that if you pay into a mortgage then at the end you have an asset. Even if the property price does not rise significantly. You still have the asset. But in rent of course, while it may be a little cheaper than the mortgage at the end of the 25 years (equiv to mortgage) you have zip. And the difference between the mortgage payment and the rent even if saved and invested would not return anything like the bulk of the asset you have in the mortgage.

I wonder how long this will last. The pressure in the pressure cooker just got turned up. There seems to be a trend of utter denial going on out there. Less of a bubble about to burst, more perhaps that the floor underneath us is about to collapse.

Transport Hmmmmm

2011-10-17T21:02:00.000+01:00

I am quite glad to have moved down to south London. Once I got over the mental block of crossing the river I found that I was quite relieved to be able to avoid the tube. I have been on the tube system now for over 15 years and I had not realised how bad it had got. On the whole I have spent time on the District line which I had down to a fine art and managed to get a seat at Mile End every day. Then I moved to Wapping where I had the misfortune to have to take the Jubilee line. I now have the luck to be able to travel on overground to Victoria.

The first benefit is that it is so much nicer to be able to work on the train (albeit 10 to 15 min journey). I have a phone signal and I can get through most of my email by the time I arrive. It is also nice to be able to see the world and get fresh air.

But I have noticed two pieces of clear evidence that the tube system is basically about to break. The first is the Jubilee line. Already running at way over capacity during rush hour it is going to have to face the Olympics. It will simply melt down. The image to the world will be very poor. The stations are impressive but the line simply cannot cope with the volumes. Add to that signal and train failures and you get massive issues on a weekly basis.

The second clear sign is Victoria station. On a daily basis the gates to the tube are shut with queues blocking most exits from the station. The tube station cannot cope with the volumes.

Neither line appears to have any plans for remediation (that I am aware of). Station upgrades are nearly all cosmetic. The economy does not appear to have the appetite for big projects still and it is clear that even if major projects were to be initiated they will not be completed until post critical meltdown.

There is no room on the roads. London is going to face difficult times. Rents continue to rise, property prices are growing (today announced average 450K) still. Unemployment is rising. Transport is a misery, traffic is now a nightmare with regular gridlocks. My trip from South London to Tower Bridge (probably a matter of 5 miles max) took 2 hours by car a few weeks ago.

Maybe this is the signal to start evening out and finding other areas of the country to populate. Rather than a minimal attempt to move gov jobs out of London, perhaps there should be a proper attempt to move business to other parts of the country.

Architect

2011-10-11T20:08:00.002+01:00

A friend of mine asked me to provide some advice to an IT architect that had just got into the 'business'. I wrote an email to the guy and my friend suggested it was quite good and I should publish it. So here it is.

I am not sure I can talk much about what it is to be an architect as I have never really architected anything at any point in my career. I have spent most of my career being a bridge between business and technology. The ability to be able to interpret from both sides to the other is key. Get that skill down and you will be successful. Many projects fail because business and technology are like oil and water.

I have had a number of good architects work for me over the years and I give them the same advice each time. Get out! Architecture is largely technology dependant and changes year after year. So your knowledge of any given architecture and approaches (TOGAF etc) can only be as long as the longevity of the architecture or approach itself. This means that architects have a difficult career. They have to learn and relearn all the time. The trouble is that new architects leave university every day and they know their stuff and the latest tech well, are twice as energetic and work for half the money.

So there are very few old architects out there and I could probably pick only a handful who have gone on to be head of their profession in a company. You are speaking to two (Wayne and Jerry) and I could pick two or three more in IBM and Cap Gem etc. But they are few and far between.

So what to do?

1) Learn how to best use technology to solve business problems. Less worry about what the tech is (in detail). Leave that to suppliers.

2) Know enough to spot bul***t from suppliers. Knowing enough to spot problems early.

3) Leadership. Business needs to be led. Understand the difference between management and leadership and you will do well.

4) Structure. The key word for me was 'enough'. Each situation and client is different. Taking methodologies and blindly applying them causes huge issues. The ability to gauge a client and understand the level of structure and formality needed is vital. To much (applying TOGAF to an SME) or to little (free for all in a corporation) will mean failure.

5) Understand business cases and TCO. So few architects do. It leads to massive overspend and wastage. There is always a tendency to try and save money only to find that you end up adding to cost as old stuff is never switched off. SOA can be one of those traps. Integration layers another.

6) Cost of change. As per 5. Everyone underestimates the cost of change. Its not the costs of the licenses that gets you, its the overheads of change such as test etc. It is never calculated well and drives huge cost into the org.

7) Test costs. Look at initial test costs and then the incremental ones. Regression testing is a huge burden and costs a lot. The more features one adds to systems after initial build means that regression burden just grows and grows. Get whole life testing costs sorted (automation).

IT outsourcing is hard. You cannot expect to just throw the IT needs over the wall to a supplier and expect it to work. Most of the challenges come from poor contracts. A useful skill is to learn contracts. So many times they are left to people who have no clue about what they are buying.

Learn to read them and ensure that the supplier delivers what they are contractually required to do. So often the answers are in the contract to solve the issues.

Suppliers are £ led. Only £ led and any other motivation is just sales nonsense. They are there to deliver but not at the expense of the profit. So you need to work with them to ensure that they make their £ and deliver. That’s the hard one as they regularly under bid and try to cut back on quality to meet the £ and the delivery.

Thats about it. If you can do that intuitively then you will go far.

All in it together

2011-10-03T21:14:00.000+01:00

I am not sure I like the rallying cry of an old Etonian. When times are hard what is not needed is some posh bloke to remind everyone one we will ride out the storm together. Really? Is that the school of team work that gave us 'we are all in it together'. With some of us in it deeper than the rest. Some of us will be riding it out in our mortgage free living with second homes abroad. And some of us won't. Some of us will have no jobs and no way for our kids to own their own home for at least a decade. And some of us won't. Some of our businesses can issue bonds to help get through the credit crunch. And some of us can't.

Beer

2011-09-27T21:12:00.002+01:00

I only had one beer tonight. Its not my fault they served it in two glases.

Scrutiny. Really

2011-09-21T21:27:00.000+01:00

I just had the first experience of a local authority scrutiny committee. These committees are the elected few's opportunity to ask searching questions of the officials. Faced with both the majority party and the opposition I was expecting so cut and thrust.

Sadly, I now know why so much goes wrong in gov and local gov. Hardly any questions at all (and there were some really obvious ones to ask) were asked and the ones that were asked were poorly thought through and cheap attempts and point scoring.

50%

2011-09-19T20:09:00.000+01:00

Lots of coverage today about the 50% tax rate. The headlines full of the debate about taxing the super wealthy. I am not one to shy away from paying tax. Fair share and all that. Some good points were made. The argument that if tax rates were reduced then more money would be recovered was rightly debunked. The idea that the super rich would bring their money back on shore for a 10% reduction seems unlikely when they can continue to enjoy far lower rates overall where it is now.

But the issue for me is that the 50% tax rate is not for the super rich. It starts at income rates of £150K. Now I am not in any way saying that people who earn well should not pay but people who earn at that level are far far far from super rich. They are people in upper management and senior management right across the country. They have a good living but they are not millionaires. They are not profiting from the misery of others and I doubt very much that they have accountants helping them to avoid the tax.

So perhaps it is time to look at how to tax wealth (real wealth) and stop categorising those who do well with the same people who are earning multi millions and even billions.

What to make of the evidence

2011-09-14T20:37:00.000+01:00

I was intrigued by the stories in the standard today. A story on the economy (surprise) had a quote from the PM regarding the 2.5 million unemployed. He said they would do everything they could to get people back into work but he warned that increased spending was not the answer. But surely that is the key issue. He is right in some ways, increased gov spending is not the answer. But the issue is that due to uncertainty of gov income (tax take), little or no growth, large debt to be repaid (and large interest payments) and low inflation meaning that debt is not reducing in real terms in any meaningful way means that he is right maybe to not spend money he does not have.

The trouble is, whats is good for the goose is good for the gander. People also have the same issue. Uncertainty of income (potential unemployment), little or no growth (no wage rises and increased cost of living), debt from the credit boom and no real reduction in debt from inflation means that people have the same attitude. They don't want to spend. Same again for companies. So where will growth come from. Its more proof that it is the money flow that keeps things working. If gov won't spend then they need to ask themselves why would anyone else?

The article also raised some interesting thoughts. I have no idea if the mechanisms being used are going to be effective. But one of the ideas gov has is to increase the retirement age (through pension fiddling). So what will that do? Well, seems to me that if unemployment is high especially youth unemployment and businesses are struggling then the longer the older section of the population stays in jobs the less opportunities for the young and the higher the ongoing costs of the companies who employ them.

At the same time tax take will reduce and the benefits costs will rise. The number in employment to pay for the unemployed seems likely to shrink increasing the burden.

Surely the idea is to make money flow. Make people retire earlier would be more cost effective to make up pension gaps for a short period (a few years) thus reducing company wage bills and enabling them to take on younger cheaper staff who need the opportunities.

I just don't get it. What am I missing?

Later in the paper is evidence of my speculation a about property cost reductions never reducing. The article is about Hampstead and the fact that a number of independent retailers are going to close because revenues have dropped but rents have not. They quote the rent for £70k and the business rates on the property were £38K. Come on guys. Go with the trend.

The only way it seems to sort this mess out is surely to make everything relative and not somethings relative and others absolute. Tax must be made relative. Property costs to. If the economy drops business rates must adjust downwards.

Prediction revisited

2011-08-30T17:40:00.001+01:00

Some time back I wrote a bit on the economic prospects of the UK following the gov savings. I have been thinking about where we are lately. I did write one update (5-months-on-and-we-have-not-even.html) which seemed to validate my original. Ok, so I have to admit that none of the predictions were that hard to imagine. But they still stand and I wonder whether they are going to get better or worse.

I have covered most of the Gov stuff in previous posts. One thing is clear. They have only started to stop spending and signs are that things underlying what looks to be not too bad on the surface are far from rosey. For a start, my business is tanking. But thats not the point of this blog. But it is a good indicator of things to come.

A number of indicators have struck me over the last few weeks. The first is that there is clear evidence that gov savings have been approached in the wrong way. Rather than looking at transforming to make their 33% in 14/15 they have split it into 3 and look to make 12% each year. Year 1, remove all contractors (mostly done), stop all projects (mostly done). For many of the leadership, the first 12% is delivered. Job done and time to go get your promotion off the back of it. But next year the next new leader has to make the next 12% without any staff. The prediction of the loss of many permanent staff has started. Offering voluntary redundancies has seen many of the more able staff jump ship leaving the rest to pick up the slack. Not a good position and morale across the board is at all time low (fact).

The last 12% seems very unpleasant as there will be no where to go other than redundancies of vast numbers of civil servants. But as there seems to be little or no progress on transformation there seems little hope. One thing is clear, the civil service has not changed (the one thing that was needed) and lots of people's lives will be left in a mess.

The housing market is now starting to look bizarre. One of my predictions was that the gap between rich and poor would grow. So I think this is one of the more interesting points. Lets look at London to start with. The market is stagnant or dropping for the majority of the bottom end of the market. However, there is still some strength in the million pound plus bracket. But not for long. The rot is spreading and those sitting comfortably will soon be suffering and only the real upper end of the market will maintain value. One of the results of the sales problem is that demand for rental is now at stupid levels and property owners are cashing in. Landlords rents are rising and rising. It is now widely reported that even renting in London is going beyond the reach of the poorer people and even the normally ok professionals in work are going to struggle to pay the rents. This means that the bottom end of the market will be forced into sharing.

This to me is very worrying. There are multiple parts to worry about. The first is that rents at the current levels will greatly diminish the available money to spend on food and drink, clothes etc. We are starting to see reports of retail slow down. The rich who own the properties will be making a good return (well beyond mortgage costs) while the renters, refused access to a mortgage will see their disposal income drop and ability to save for the huge deposits greatly reduced. Its a simple vicious circle down.

So what else? Well, discussions with my commercial office landlord reported an interesting position. Many of his tenants are going out of business (me included sort of) and leaving. He is unusual as he is not an investment company (he just lets out unused floors in the building his charity owns). But his office is not unique and nor will his position be unique. What we also suffer is the costs of business rates. Whether we make money or not, rates must be paid. They were about £1K per month at my place and rising. A level that simply cannot be justified or afforded for many in this climate. So we move out and save that cost and the council gets nothing. Why nothing? Well commercial landlords will not reduce their rents. Simple as that. They will prefer to leave them all empty for years and wait for times to improve. So offices and more importantly shops will remain empty. So the council will get next to nothing for empty properties. High streets will look empty and the remaining survivors will not get the levels of custom. Rates and commercial rents never go down and do not parallel the position of the economy. Its just untenable.

I recall (an anecdote) the story of my barber who worked alone (had been there for 30 years) and his landlord has just upped his rent to £17k per year. Imagine the number of haircuts he has to do before he even pays his rent. Then there are utilities and rates and insurance on top. All of which only go up regardless of the state of the economy. He was to be forced out.

Any prices that only go up and never down to track an economic climate are fatal. Anything that does not react to supply and demand simply breaks the model. And when the model breaks, we find ourselves where we are today.

So, in summary, retail spend dropping, rents going up, availability of mortgages dropping, commercial property prices only going up, utilities going up, unemployment rising, government spending dropping further, private sector unable to absorb the fall out. With certain parts of the machine stuck in only upward pricing and not able to react to the rising and falling economy will lead to misery.

I think we are not far off a tipping point. I give it 12 months (next financial year) before the misery really starts to kick in in an unavoidably public manner. The chancellor's view that they are helping the property market by holding interest rates down is only helpful if you have a mortgage!

Back to the future

2011-08-13T11:09:00.001+01:00

Every day I seem to get linked and connected to the various wise gurus talking about technology. What's in, what's out, what's new, what's now legacy and of course the compulsory criticism of whatever is in place and whoever put it there. There seems to now be an industry of writers who all know what is wrong and what is right.

I am firmly in the IT is a tool camp. It is there to do something. What I see today is that it has become bling. It is no longer there to achieve something, the focus seems to be all about the IT and not about the outcomes. It seems to matter little what the IT is trying to achieve and more about how it is achieving it. This inevitably leads to the arms race of the how.

Looking back we see the client server revolution, WWW, then we started to see web services, Enterprise Architecture, SOA, Web 2.0, virtualisation and now of course Cloud. All fully marketed, all set to change the world, all set to reduce costs, improve productivity blah blah blah.

But go back in time thousands of years and give a caveman a new cloud based email solution via a smart phone. Will he catch more wildebeest? Nope. He will simply use the smart phone to beat his next meal to death with, and even then the tool would be the wrong tool.

How many more cavemen do we have to give these tools to before we realise that unless there is a use for them then they will simply be the wrong tool in the wrong hands and used for the wrong job. Trouble is, the snake oil salesman from the IT world do somehow manage to convince caveman that it is the right tool for the job leaving poor old caveman hungry and confused as to why it now takes an hour to beat to death his rabbit dinner instead of 1 blow with his old tool the rock. And now he has to share any lunch he does manage to catch.

One can take these analogies too far, and I often do.

So why do we do this to ourselves. Well, poor old caveman does not know any better. We all know that before caveman can use his smartphone he will need some cultural change. He could use the smart phone to learn about farming, predict the weather, learn about health and treatment of sickness. He could use it to learn how to trap animals instead of chase them. The outcome he would be aiming for is a healthier environment to bring up his family with lower risk of death and an improved source of food.

But to even achieve that, caveman would need to understand how his world could be transformed and there would need to be a desire to do this. Even this understanding needs to be doen through education.

And this is where I think IT is today. Yes, its easy to pick a few examples out there where IT has transformed and visions are in place and culture has changed. But it is only in a small set of highly over publicised cases.

The emphasis has to move away from the tool. Yes, we need to keep modernising and innovating our tools but when the actual modernising of the tool becomes the outcome and not the transformation the modern tools should bring then what we see is a highly costly change of tool sets with little or no return on that investment.

Its a riot

2011-08-12T21:54:00.000+01:00

I don't know what to make of the recent riots. Its a hard one. I think the riots represent something other than the issue of lawlessness, looting and violence. It seems to be a worrying change in fundamental ethics. Let's not worry too much about how it was organised (which it was) but more on the point that the general opinion I saw in interviews was that there was an understood consequence to being caught, a view of probability of being caught and a relatively clear view of the benefits that could be obtained by the crimes they were going to commit.

The idea of this calculation is worrying. It says that right or wrong was no longer a sense of ethics and morality but one of risk management.

Depression, who knew?

2011-08-12T15:46:00.001+01:00

I have not written for a while and when I do I normally write about philosophical issues, news, technology, government etc but I never write about me an my life. Strange given the original purpose of a blog was to capture and share things that occur in one's life. So I thought I would try and have a go at writing some things down on a area of my life which affects large numbers of people today.

For some time now I have been depressed. Its a strange term as in some respects it has been trivialised by over use and mixed up with concepts of sadness. Yes, depressed people can be very sad but sadness is not depression. It is an illness, let's not kid ourselves. The documented symptoms of someone with depression are (not an exhaustive list):

Feeling sad, anxious or bored
Low energy, feeling tired or fatigued
Under- or over-sleeping, or waking frequently during the night
Poor concentration, thinking slowed down
Loss of interest in hobbies, family or social life
Low self-esteem and feelings of guilt
Aches and pains with no physical basis, e.g. chest/head/tummy pain associated with anxiety or stress
Loss of interest in living, thinking about death, suicidal thoughts

I suffer from most of these. I have studied the illness for a long time as this is not the first time this has happened. I consider myself lucky in that I am very self-reflective and able to watch myself in terms of depression and know what to do about it. It is rather like someone who knows they are susceptible to skin cancer checks their skin for abnormalities. Not everyone is so lucky.

If you are lucky enough to have never suffered from depression then the symptoms may look understandable but all the documentation I have seen on the illness does not properly communicate how it feels to be depressed. If you are not depressed you will probably think you have experienced those symptoms at some point. But on the surface all of the above can have other causes and what is hard to portray is the underlying feeling of depression. The above are all external manifestations of the issue but they miss out one important one which only the sufferer feels and it is one of the most horrible feelings I have ever experienced.

Let me try and articulate this in another way. Depression is not the collection of symptoms. You are not depressed because you feel sad and cannot sleep. Depression is the thing that causes all of the above. Your depression CAUSES the sleep loss, the sadness and so on, you are not categorised as depressed because you feel all of the above things, it is not a collective terms for a set of the issues above. One is not depressed about something. One is simply depressed.

Depression is a 'thing' in its own right. There is also no parallel. You cannot say depression is exactly like xyx because there is no feeling like depression. Different people feel it in different ways. So what is it like for me? On a bad day the inside of my head feels like it is overheating, it actually feels like my brain is aching and it is horrible. I can no more escape that feeling than one can escape a headache (without medication). But it lasts for weeks and eventually it drives you mad. No matter what you do, where you go, whether you exercise, meet people, watch a fun movie the pressure and noise in one's head is maddeningly inescapable. It is an itch you cannot scratch. I have even tried to shut down my nervous system with alcohol to escape it eventually but even that does not work. This is almost certainly the chemical imbalance aspects of what is happening. What this imbalance is it not clear however the treatment is often dealing with serotonin levels. But as one site says nicely, treating a headache with aspirin does not mean you have an aspirin deficiency! What is real for me is a clear physical manifestation of fuzziness in my head. And the 5HTP (natural remedy) restores serotonin levels in one's brain. And it works and removes the physical feelings I get in my head.

That feeling is hard to deal with trust me. I have thought a lot about what the cause and effects are to try and understand which is which. It is not sadness. I cannot speak for others but my depression manifests itself as an utter hopelessness and a complete loss or meaning to anything. That is not a philosophical meaning, it is a manifestation of depression. It is not that I have thought about it and decided that things have no meaning. They just don't. In fact what is worse is that you KNOW that it is not true but the feeling is unshiftable. This is why there is sadness. An one learns to cover up the external symptoms (not appearing sad) in public and when with friends and it is hard work. Why cover up? Well, there is nothing that can be said and if someone has not dealt with depression they tend to use techniques to cheer people up or tell them that it will all be ok. Trouble is it won't because 'it' is hopeless and meaningless to a depressed person, there is no beginning or end, just depression. We do not need cheering up as such because we are not conventionally sad. And in the end you just avoid friends and family because its too hard to put on a brave face.

Depression is debilitating. There are many days I would just like to lie in bed and stare at the wall as anything else seems like a waste of time. It stops you from doing anything! It stops you wanting to do anything. Its not that you want to go out and do something but can't. It just removes any desire at all. It strips and removes the motivation for EVERYTHING.

Many years ago a friend caught us by surprise by committing suicide and had no external indications that anything was wrong. So I did what I normally do which is look into the subject and try better to understand what might have happened. Again, I am lucky because although I have had bad thoughts I have never acted on them because I am able to almost watch myself and tell myself that I am having issues and I know where to get help. But this is not the case for many. The one thing that took me years to understand until I too suffered from depressive episodes was the advice that went as follows:

People who commit suicide do not want to die, they just do not know how to live.

Having suffered from depression I know what that means. If you look at what I have experienced above it might give you a clue. If one is stripped of all meaning and motivation it is easy to see how small a step it is to not see any reasons to live and depression is so debilitating and unpleasant that it in itself can drive one over the edge.

Emotions also become magnified. Sadness being the one most people recognised. It is hard to control one's emotions when depressed. This leads to things in one's daily life that would normally have little impact becoming major events. It may be one of the reasons depression causes suicide. People see friends, family etc committing suicide after what appears to be relatively minor (even major) events (death, breakdowns of marriages, loss of children) which, even in the seriously bad events, we would consider that people should be able to cope with. But witness those events through the eyes of someone depressed and minor emotional events can be massively magnified. Major events that many cope with ok when magnified can be shattering and not survivable by someone with depression. It is important to understand this concept.

Another feeling I get which apparently is common is that problems have no end. Problems that, when you are not depressed will be experienced and then dealt with and put behind you do not work like that when I am depressed. Problems become cumulative as if there is no closure. For example, you have an argument with your partner. Normally you would make up and get on with your life. When you are depressed the emotions and the feelings do not go away. So the next issue you experience then layers on top of those negative feelings and as you progress through your life they build and build and build and they give one the perception that life is an overwhelmingly negative experience when in fact most of the issues are in the past and done and dusted. So for a depressed person the even trivial issues can create bizarre overreactions which are hard for others to understand. Why did he blow up and break down when the he broke a glass? Because it is not just a glass he is reacting to. Its the glass, the x, the Y, the Z the A etc etc that goes all the way back probably to the trigger point of the depression. This accumulation of negative state can make the world seem an awful place. It becomes impossible to differentiate a negative events in terms of scale to the point where even positive events or experiences are seen from a perspective of massive accumulated negative position that nothing positive seems to have any real value. I am not sure if any of the above will make sense to people reading this.

The final point I would like to make is how disconnected one feels from the world. When depressed all the senses seem dulled and everything that occurs around you is like a dull documentary which just runs and runs and runs. The issue of meaning and motivations stripped out means that it really is like watching paint dry. One even looks at friends and family as something odd. Not quite real.

There are many discussed causes for depression. Mine comes and goes. I rely upon 5HTP (a mild and natural and unprescribed) anti-depressant with few side effects which really does work. But now and again (it happened this week) something will happen that will simply hit you physically. My depression (head fuzziness) hit me during an event again like a tidal wave. It was such an instantaneous effect that I actually witnessed it happen and I just felt utterly crushed. It was very strange. If you have every feinted then you will remember the very odd feeling one gets as you actually feel the blood drain from your head before you pass out. It was a mental version of that. It caught me by surprise big time.

I sit here today writing this, not because it is a cry for help or anything (it isn't) but more about a recording of how it is to be depressed as in future it will be a good reminder if it occurs again in the future that it is manageable. I am lucky to have some good help (my psychologist I see now and again) and the internet.

I also write it because it because I know others who suffer too and hopefully it will strike a chord. Finally, I hope it will help people who read this better understand the issue so that they may guard against it themselves (nobody thinks they are susceptible until it hits them out of the blue) and their friends and families.

There is plenty of good information on the web on the subject. Most people try and deal with it alone, some do ok, some end up dead. We have campaigns on the TV about recognising stroke, skin cancer, heart disease, how to handle heart attacks etc. Depression is dangerous and while it is seen as a weakness (especially in men) then people will not willingly seek help.

So anyone out there reading this, it is not a weakness, it is an illness. Go get help, don't try and deal with it alone. Despite the fact that I am mid episode at the moment, my analytical brain knows that it will pass and things will get back to normal and am able to ignore the hopelessness like you might know that a migraine will pass eventually. For those who know someone who might be depressed, read the web. They do not need to be cheered up, it won't be ok in the future. What exasperates the situation for a depressed person is the feeling of isolation. Being told to cheer up just demonstrates to the ill person that people do not understand what they are going through and in some ways actually emphasises the feeling of isolation.

So what can be done? Well, read the web. There are loads of good techniques out there. Type depression into google and hey presto, all you need to know. I am pleased I understand depression as I have been able to coach 2 people into how to recognise it and deal with it when they were having hard times. Avoidance is much easier than cure (like all illness). This is why I have tried to articulate the feelings associated with it rather than the symptoms. If you start to feel like any of the above then it is much easier to sort it out earlier than later. Trust me on that one!

So a note to future me. Read your own blog, take your own advice! Lol. Yer right. When have I listened to anyone? :->

Adverts

2011-07-01T17:01:00.000+01:00

I am not one of the people on the plannet who are bothered by adverts. Provided they are not invasive or try and trick me (i.e. hidden ads or ads posing as computer messages or notifications) then I do not mind. They are a mild distraction at best. For many years I have thought that I would like to see adverts for products and services that I don't know about and would like to use.

So it does not bother me that much that things like my interests are used to help filter ads. But I have to say that I am frustrated by the poor use of the data that they do have access to. I used to hate Google because every entry one put in would return page after page of kelkoo links which were simply middlemen to other people's sites.

I noted today that facebook are heading the same way. I did express an interest in poetry in my facebook profile. So was annoyed not to see ads for poetry course, or poetry books but one generic recruitment site which simply used the term poet? look for poet jobs here.

The worst crime is not the use of my data, the crime is the completely wasted opportunities that this rubbish technology provides for both the advertiser and the consumer.

Wrong answer

2011-06-11T21:56:00.000+01:00

I especially liked the reporting on the exams with erroneous questions. Many arrogant reporters and commentators all smugly criticising the exam writers. One of the exams, a biology multichoice was reported as having 'all the wrong answers'. I doubt it. Not ALL the wrong answers. Obviously they meant that it did not have the right answer. I doubt they had the answer 'Only Fools and Horses' for example although clearly that should be included in the set of wrong answers.

AI

2011-05-28T12:30:00.000+01:00

I consider myself to be privileged in some ways as I have been around at a time which has seen computers become mainstream and watched technology change the home and the world from the days where I played tennis on my ZX81 all the way to what we see today.

Now I am no guru at all. I did study AI at university back in 1994. At the time the technology did not match the dreams. But times have moved on. If you look back what you can see is a few trends. All of the trends have one meta trend in common. Abstraction.

Hardware performance grew and grew until you did not have to programme in machine code. The hardware coped with more and more of the functions you needed (from basic adders to the graphics cards which now do most of the complex work for you).

OS went the same way. The OS was fairly basic at first and over time (and enabled by improvements at the hardware level) the OS has abstracted away from hardware control to something like Apple's tiger where the experience of the user is one that requires almost no technical knowledge at all. Same for the UI. You no longer operate a computer, you carry out tasks. I am not sure if I could pick a time when this occurred but it was relatively recently. It is the reason why Microsoft will ultimately go down if they do not catch up with this trend.

The internet went the same way. From hard coded HTML all the way up to modern content management and various SAAS offerings like Facebook, Google etc etc.

So the trend will continue but there is only so much more that can be done. Nobody operates a computer any more.

What is needed to progress now is real intelligence. We now have platforms that basically allow the human to carryout the tasks they need to do but the common thing is that we are still alone. The computer adds little to help us. What is needed in the next leap forward is genuine intelligence. Proactive help (not a little paperclip with a search tool linking to a forum). This is hard. The functionality in most apps is now well beyond the ability of the user. The future of computers is not for AI to carry out the simple tasks but to get the computer to intelligently carry out the enhancements that you want.

What do I mean? Well, take a simple office based process. I want to create a doc and send it out. Today, even if I try and use a template, I will be wrestling with the package and then have to try and distribute to a mail merge list via email. Its hard. But I know what the outcome I want is. So intelligent systems will need to understand the outcome and carryout/support your attempts to achieve that outcome.

The trouble with AI at the moment is that it is too focused on human replication. Rather than trying to replicate human ability more focus should be put on making the computer systems intelligent.

20ms

2011-05-28T12:10:00.001+01:00

I like the Visa ad played on Moneybox on radio 4. Visa boasted that they process transactions in 20ms which is 7 times faster than their competition. Well I'm convinced. Who would want to have to wait for 0.14 seconds for a transaction to go through when they could wait 20ms with Visa. If they could now tackle the queues for the checkouts where i have to wait on average 10 mins I would be very grateful.

Today in the news

2011-05-16T19:04:00.000+01:00

It is not often that I bother to pick up a newspaper these days. Maybe because I am becoming more and more allergic to the rubbish. I am struggling to understand whether my disdain is due to either the incredible stupidity of the people in the news or the incredibly stupid coverage of a sensible story. Either way the outcome is the same.

I did pick up Evening Standard today for some reason. Old habit I think rather than desire to read it. I skimmed through (only 4 stops on the tube) and managed to remind myself why I don't bother any more

News of a bomb threat in London seemed to bring out the worst in reporting today. "The threat was for a bomb to explode in London today, but the exact time or place was not specified". What a great line to put into a commuting paper. Londoners have lived through so many bomb threats and real bombs that I doubt many really give a hoot any more. As I read this I headed down into London Bridge tube without even a second thought.

My favorite story goes to page 2 and the TfL story. "TfL pays £2 to Tube customers hit by disruption". One assumed they did not mean in total, but each. This was duly cleared up though in the article.
1700 passengers had to be led along darkened tunnels (their words) from stranded Jubilee line trains on April 19th. I wondered whether they darkened the tunnels on purpose. The complaint seems to be that most people only got £2 compensation. Boo hoo. Get over it or go live in the country. Or Farnborough or in fact most other places in the country where you do not have the convenience of being able to travel between 2 streets which are virtually next to each other by tube.
The prize in this story goes to 'Susie Stonham, 35 who works in a photography studio'. She is quoted as saying "I had to spend more than £20 getting a taxi. I'm glad that TfL acknowledged what happened by giving me compensation but it's not enough. What I went through was my worst nightmare"

Really Susie love? Get a life hon. If your worst nightmare is getting stuck for a few hours on a broken down tube and being led to safety along a tunnel followed by a £20 taxi fare is your worst nightmare then you need to get out a bit more. What about gang rape followed by torture and decapitation? What about flesh eating disease? Your whole family dying of dirty bomb radiation induced cancer?

Next on the list of 'why give these people air time' is Chris Huhne. He and his family are going through a particularly difficult time due to divorce and he is now under investigation for asking his wife to put points from a speeding offence on her license. Something is not quite right here. Let me explain.

"Mr Huhne, 56, strongly denies that his now estranged wife Vicky Pryce, who he left for a bisexual aide, was wrongly named as the driver for a speeding offence so that he did not lose his license."

Apart from the oooo errr misses of what a bisexual aid is it seems a little odd that such a claim has been made. It was also not clear who had made the claim against him. If the accusation is true then how could that have occurred without her knowledge? When you get a speeding offence they ask you to send in your license to be marked up with the points? Did he send her license off without her knowing and open the mail on the way back? How would she not notice?

This is a high risk story if it was leaked by her. She has a high profile career in government and whatever is proved about what happened (nobody is denying the offence so the points went somewhere) there is going to be mud sticking to both parties.

Finally, the story about the footballers lover who is complaining in the press how unfair it is that she is named as the lover of a footballer who has the money and has put in place a super injunction. She says "I know what I did was wrong but he's the one with the wife and children - he's the cheater". A fact she was not aware of when she played her part in this episode? It was all ok apparently when she thought he would leave the wife and kids to be with her. So many levels of wrong I just can't be bothered to write about them

So I will refrain from picking up the ES again for a while. Its a bit like drinking too much. You say never again but it only lasts as long as the memory of the last hangover. Picking up the ES turned out to be my worst nightmare. Eh Susie dear!

Bet

2011-05-03T17:03:00.000+01:00

Bored waiting for my last appointment I downloaded a new iPhone app. Roulette. Turns out to be quite a boring game when played without anything real at stake. Not a surprise revelation. But the bit that got me thinking was around my selection. What drove me to pick the numbers I selected each time.

The first point that struck me was why I ever put more than one chip down. I know there are well documented strategies for the game to maximise the chances and lowering wasted chips. But I know about none of these strategies.

What appears to be happening is a complexity issue about odds and their interaction. My betting is therefore linked to my ability to understand odds and nothing to do with the odds themselves. I put down my first chip on a junction of 4 numbers. I went to put down a second chip and suddenly it occurred to me, what does it mean to put down a second chip?

I put the first chip down largely at random. Its a game of chance with one chip going down. Let's pretend the odds of winning vs the reward are proportional. In such a case there is no difference as to where you put your first chip. It is when I put the second chip down that it becomes interesting. Why would I place a second chip at all? Given in a single chip bet I can get odds from anywhere from 50/50 (red/black, even/odd) all the way to the 1 in 36 (is this right) for a single number selection it appears I have a wide range of options. In fact I can get odds of 1:1 by putting a chip on red and black but due to the green 0 I would eventually lose. But let's ignore the 0 and green for now.

So the second chip down says that I do not actually believe the first one will win. Its a strange thought. I put down a chip anywhere and then a second one because there is a risk the first one will not come home. All I am doing is altering the odds and returns. But in fact if I wanted to alter my odds I could do so by changing the position of 1 chip (2 chips on single numbers or 1 chip on the border of 2 numbers would be the same thing). If I wanted to get higher rewards from 2 chips then I could just put 2 chips on the same 2 number border. I can see I may be confusing people by now.

What I am saying is that there is a wide range of odds available to a single ship bet that are not improved by a 2 chip bet. Yet I would be staggered if I EVER saw (I have been to casinos) someone just put down one chip or 2 chips (or more) on the same place each spin. We seem to be programmed to feel that putting chips down on multiple numbers is somehow increasing our chances. All it does in increase the complexity of the calculations. And I think this is the key. I understand the odds of winning with one chip. The odds of winning with 2 or 3 or 4 chips in different places is incalculable in my head. Psychologically this is interesting. It says to me that in the presence of uncertainty I become and optimist. In the absence of knowledge my brain tells me that my odds, in the case of uncertainty of reality, are actually greater than they are.

This has been stated before as to why people bet on the lottery (odds are so incomprehensible that people bet anyway) but I did not realise it until I thought thought through the roulette experience that it is because we are naturally optimistic.

What would drive such behaviours? I suspect I will need to read up on various academic specialisms to get the right answer but I think there are probably some easy answers.

The first would be that as a species we live in constant incalculable situations. If we were pessimistic in the presence of incalculable odds or uncertainty we would never get out of bed in the morning. We could never function effectively. As animals we would not have the mental rational capabilities to deal with abstracts like odds and even though we do now, we struggle.

We seem to deal with uncertainty optimistically in all aspects in our lives. Only when we start to understand risk do we become pessimistic. So when we play roulette, we place multiple bets because we FEEL better, we feel more lucky and optimistic because what we are doing is now incalculable and uncertain vs placing one chip bets only.

Apple rocks

2011-05-03T14:17:00.000+01:00

The Imac finally died a week ago. All backed up on the time machine so no real issue. But it would not boot. I tried everything but nothing would get me past the main startup screen before it shutdown on its own. I tried every startup keyboard combination known on the web but nothing.

So I looked around. A few Mac repairers with bad reviews so it was off to the Apple store in regent st. They allow you to book a session at the genius bar. I have to say I was a little nervous as there was no mention of cost. Turns out it is free. Rather than charging you for the investigation they sit with you for free and attempt to get your problem resolved. Turns out the hard drive is dead. They will be replacing it (out of warranty so at cost) but it seemed like a good deal.

The guy helping (name unpronounceable) was excellent. No sales pitch to buy a new MAC (a problem with some of the Mac repair companies). He actually stated what I already was thinking. If all you do on your MAC is browse the web, watch videos, email etc then the machine you have will do fine and there is no point spending good money on a new one which won't do anything your existing one already does well. Good advice.

I expect the MAC back in 5-10 days with a new hard drive in and then an evening of restoring the data from time machine. Money well spent I think.

Guilty

2011-04-05T17:24:00.000+01:00

I may have misunderstood. I am sure I heard that the education secretary is going to try and make it a criminal offense to make false accusations against teachers. Now I totally and 100% am behind the fact that spurious accusations against people (especially ones of inappropriate behaviors towards minors or violence of any kind) causes mud to stick. No smoke without fire people say. False accusations blight lives.
But think about it. What is a false accusation and what are the effects of such things. There are the obvious occasions where a young person, after making such an accusation has admitted it to be false as a way to get at an adult in authority (teacher etc). The second type of course, where the young person never admits it is when a jury finds the adult not guilty. If a jury finds him or her not guilty then by definition this must be a false accusation. This is a terrible position. No longer is a jury finding a person not guilty but its immediate effect is to find the person making the accusation guilty (it now being a criminal offense). How can the two not co-exist by definition.

The danger now then is that with the prospect of being a criminal if you make an accusation (false or otherwise) you may either not make the accusation in case you are not believed and prosecuted or worse, having made a false accusation never want to admit it for fear of being prosecuted. What kind of pressure will young people be under in court. Deals done? Say its false accusation and we will not prosecute. You can hear the deals being done as I write.

This is a terrible step backwards and I see no good coming of it. If an accusation is made then the matter must be dealt with justly. By all means keep the name of the accused private and undisclosed until the trial. But to put mechanisms in place that will certainly influence justice to this extent is madness. Even the outcome does not justify the means. Young people with criminal records does not stop the 'no smoke without fire' brigade. The teacher is no less labeled.

No good can come of this

Prison

2011-02-09T20:07:00.000Z

There is a lot of talk about whether prisoners should be allowed to vote. I would have thought that a sensible solution is simply to allow any prisoner to vote if the full end of his term is due to end in the parliament that is being voted on. You should not get a vote if you are in prison but if you are to be let out then you should have the chance to select who will be in government when you get out.

Copy

2011-02-09T20:04:00.000Z

My company is about to change direction and supply its software in more standard licensing models rather than SAAS. I have never had to worry about copy protection but given the value of the software it is important that it does not find its way cracked onto a Russian web site.

We have managed, relatively straight forwardly to protect against copying when being installed on conventional systems but was staggered that there is nothing that can be done when installing into VMWare.

The problem is simple, you can install into a VMWare machine and activate the software with the right license codes. Then simply clone or shut down the VMWare and copy the file. Then run it as many times and as many machines as you want.

VMWare turns out to be a very efficient tool for software theft.

Its a shame that they have done nothing to sort this. A big shame.

Innovation vs anti innovation

2011-01-28T19:19:00.003Z

Few things surprise me any more. But today, I experienced something that made me sick to my stomach. It mad me deeply sad with the state of the world. In one word. Adobe.

My company is a purveyor of fine innovative solutions to certain gov IT problems. We have found a simple way to deliver, encrypted, a pre-filled form that only the end user can open, complete and return (encrypted). It could enable us to deliver and put online large swathes of government transactions in an easy and convenient form which is ridiculously secure (see previous post).

We encrypt PDFs. We sold this to a gov dept. They love it. Then we hit a snag. In Adobe reader it will allow you to open the pdf and complete the form but Adobe have locked down the reader so that all you can do is print the form out. In theory, the PDF standard should allow you to just save the form pdf with the data entered and it would re encrypt with the original key and could be sent back.

But Adobe have locked that bit of functionality down so that you cannot save the form to send back. You can, if you either pay 360 pounds for an Adobe Acrobat license per end user receiving the form or purchase (at the sender end) a Adobe enterprise xyz server. Well just buy the license I hear you say! I would but for 2 reasons. They license is on a per user basis and although technically (according to Adobe) we would only need 1 user license unfortunately they only sell in a minimum of 1000 users. That sadly means that the license to do this is 45K pounds. But they offered a discount. Nice of them. 29k pounds. But, then they rang again and said there is 20% maintenance cost. Which is compulsory for 1 year.

Nice.

Luckily, where ever there is a greedy corporation trying to exploit people there is an innovator. We found another PDF reader that does allow you to save and send back encrypted. And its free (even for commercial use). So you would think that was that for Adobe.

But no. Gov comes to the rescue. Their clever people think that end users will have adobe reader and (although the reader is not a standard tool) that we should make it work with Adobe. At a cost of a minimum of an extra 65K pounds of tax payers money.

The good news is we have found a way to do it without PDFs involved at all. But only time will tell if Gov will wake up to the fact that this is pure profiteering by Adobe.

As I said, I felt sick to my stomach. I hang my head in shame that I belong to an industry where greedy corporations can needlessly lock down open standard tools in order to extract cash for no extra value. I hang my head further in shame in gov supporting such practices.

Security people

2011-01-28T18:56:00.002Z

There is something odd about most security people. A lifetime of trying to find faults in everything does that to a person (although it is natural to woman so why are their so few women in IT security).

We demonstrated a new product this week to a government department. They current send some paperwork out via post and want to go electronic. We demonstrated the system to them. I pointed out the encryption we use (AES 256) means that there is very little chance of it being cracked. But gov security guy insisted that we use a cracking tool to prove it. Put this in perspective. We were being asked to demonstrate this in a 2 hour meeting.

They sat down, we talked. We then fired up the password cracking tool in screen. We set the password length and let it go. After about 10 mins it had tried about 45,000 passwords. The trouble was the combinations it had left to try was 4.5 times 10 to the power 98.

Thats 4.5 with 98 0s after. Lets try this in Excel.

So 4.5E+98

The most powerful supercomputer on the planet today can achieve 1000 million tries per second.

That works out at around 1.43E+82 years to crack.

Now I have to say the odds were against it being cracked but one must remember that it could get it first time. So I was a little nervous. I am not that lucky, but I am that unlucky.

But the funny thing was that the security guy kept asking if we had any faster computers or quicker software. All I could say was 10 to the power 98!

Security people. Got to love em

My thought for the new year

2011-01-01T17:27:00.001Z

I am not a consumer. I consume, but I am not a 'consumer'. Please stop treating me as a consumer first and human being second.

Christmas Reading

2011-01-01T17:11:00.002Z

I managed to get the opportunity to have the brain cool down from work and other stresses for a whole day over the XMAS period and managed to read a few books.

The first one, a present, was Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Superb. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book. When I read it I thought, hmm, I bet this is one of those books that has complex hidden meanings. But Hemingway himself said

"No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things"

How right he was. Its just a very enjoyable read and you get the sense that you can pick what it represents for yourself. No hidden meaning that only academics will spot. Its also short and you can read it in a few hours. Its a good book for a train journey or a flight.

The second book I have read is by Mark Fisher entitled Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative. Heavy? Yes. Very. But it sets out clearly what is wrong with society and capitalism. The thing that got me most about his theories is that it answered something I already knew but could not articulate. Simply put, that we live in a world of systems that none of us can change, that do not work as they should and there is no responsibility to be found in the subjects that we regularly talk about. By this I mean things like 'banking' 'corporate' 'capitalism'. These systems have no voice, are not human and cannot take responsibility. They are a consequence of the way the world works and not the cause.

He describes these systems with a wonderful analogy of the dreaded call center. You have to explain your problem over and over to different people who have no power to change anything and there is nobody in charge. It is the hopelessness of being caught in a system that does not work and there is nobody to do anything about it.

The reason I liked it most is because it beautifully describes the problem we have with IT in government. If you read this book you will understand why government is as it is today, why it does not work, why it can never work, and why there is nobody that can change it.

We have let ourselves pass through a one way door and found ourselves in a hellish place with only further one way doors ahead. And you just know that what lies beyond is worse.

Standard, evenin standard!

2010-12-01T20:27:00.002Z

I have not read the standard for some time. I note a few interesting things in the paper today.

The front page has an article on the snow.

"The M3 was closed in both directions after a body was found close to junction two at Lyne near Virginia Water. Police are investigating whether the victim had been caught in the severe weather. There were reports of shops running out of milk"

Awful news. Running out of milk!

Then later in the paper. Some woman called Deborah Collcutt was trying out pound saver instead of her normal Waitrose. She reviews the savings and the various good deals. She points out the various deals that should be avoided. My favourite was

"Maxwell House - life's too short for instant coffee"

Is their a quicker type of coffee?

5 months on and we have not even reached the starting line

2010-10-15T16:39:00.002+01:00

Back in May I wrote a blog entry on the future issues we face as a result of the spending review (savings). I thought it worth revisiting to see where we have got to.

I said

1) That it would be hard to get rid of enough staff to make a difference to the savings in the timescales and that the costs would outweigh the benefits. I mean for the in year savings.

Sure enough, nothing other than natural wastage has been applied.

2) "Well its going to be the private sector. Yep, government savings will be made at the expense of the private sector. Projects will have to be stopped, consultants fired, pencil orders cancelled."

Projects have all but been stopped. The majority of the consultants fired. Spend is tightly controlled over 20k.

3) That binning all the contractors will leave the civil service without the ability to change.

They are currently struggling to even specify the savings with any degree of accuracy let alone go on to deliver the projects required to make the savings.

4) Contracts will have to be broken

Well they have not reached that stage yet but it is still coming. What we have seen is diabolical behavior and treatment of some suppliers. A number of smaller consultancies are now very close to going bust. We are talking months.

5) The flow I said would be:

Government puts too many people into the public sector
Banks take too much risk and put economy into a spin
Government bails out banks to prevent economy meltdown
Failing economy lowers tax revenues gov debt gets out of control
Banks stop lending (take lower risk)
Gov starts to fail (go bust) so stops spending violently
Big gov suppliers take the hit but shed employees
Small go suppliers go bust
Both lead to higher unemployment, higher welfare bills, lower tax revenues
Private sector still suffering from recession cannot absorb Gov fallout
Spending in retail slows and retail suffers
Recession kicks in.

I think we are at the point in red. The housing market is slowing. The lack of confidence may means it starts to fail quicker as we go into next year.

6) Finally I talk about the middle getting poorer and the poor getting very poor.

This is clearly starting to be seen. Benefits will be cut. The jobs that are available are already at significantly lower rates than they were as businesses take advantage of the change in labour market. The wealthy however, are not being hit proportionately and will largely ride out the storm.

The gap, between rich and poor will grow.

While the opinion seems to be that the markets like the brutal approach to debt reduction I am just not sure whether this is going to work. While massive operations to save the life of the patient may be needed, the long term recovery of the patient may be hampered by the brutality of the surgery itself. The scars may never heal.

The next phase of savings will accelerate this problem.

Execution

2010-09-29T01:18:00.002+01:00

You could not have missed the news of Teresa Lewis who was executed a week or so ago.

"A good and decent person is about to lose her life because of a system that is broken," said attorney James E. Rocap III, who represents Lewis.

A strange comment to make and one that confuses the situation for the debate around the use of capital punishment. She was clearly not a good and decent person. Her crime? She was involved directly in the killing of her husband and her stepson. That fact appears to remain undisputed. She hired two men to murder. On the night of the murder she unlocked the mobile home door, provided the shotguns and ammo she had bought and locked the dog up to avoid it getting involved.

I am not a supporter of capital punishment. In this case the two men involved were given life sentences and only Lewis was executed. The debate appears to be around whose idea it was; who led the plot. The argument centering around the fact that she only had an IQ of 72 and was led to this (persuaded) by the men.

It is almost impossible to understand what the judge's thought processes were, or that of the appeal judges. But it certainly appears strange from the outside. Certainly a problem of consistency. And that is why capital punishment should not be used. Inconsistency means doubt. Inconsistency means some people die, some don't. Strange when this is supposed to be about justice.

But two innocent people were murdered. They were given no right of appeal. They were given no clemency. They have no right of parole. Nothing that happens after their murders will bring them back, will undo that tragedy. So what is the point of killing further? Punishment? An eye for an eye? One person loses their life so you lose yours? Again, inconsistent. If you are found guilty of car theft the justice system does not take your car. If you are found guilty of rape, the criminal is not sexually abused. In fact the criminal is protected from harm and has rights.

Capital punishment is a mistake that cannot be undone. It is never clear cut, it never brings back the dead and often destroys more lives and families than may otherwise be the case. Justice is not perfect but we should strive ideally for a consistent application of punishment and capital punishment is anything but consistent.

Formation flying

2010-09-05T09:04:00.002+01:00

Another quiet morning on the river having coffee. Very peaceful. I did note a surprising thing this morning though. As I sat watching a set of Canada Geese randomly paddling around on the edge of the river they suddenly all lined up into the same direction and into formation. Then all in unison all took off in normal geese V formation.

I knew geese flew in V but had no idea they lined up first on the water to take off in that way. Very impressed.

Science

2010-08-27T16:55:00.002+01:00

A fascinating article in Prospect this month. Science's dead end. The basic point of the article is simply that we are facing the law of diminishing returns in science. Think about it. Newton, bright as he was, required only the apple to fall to work out gravity. He was of course wrong but the point was that he was able to match observations with his theories. Several hundred years on we have come a long way. But each step takes more and more money and more and more effort.

The article outlines some interesting stats. The journal of Biological Chemistry published 12,000 pages in 1980. In 2009 it published 97,000 pages. The answers we search for are harder and harder to find and the knowledge required to undertake that search becomes harder and harder. Each step requires more and more smart and educated people and the discoveries become less and less useful.

This is not to say that new big discoveries will not emerge (specifically we refer to science here and not technology) as that will be as closed minded as it comes. But those discoveries will have incrementally less and less relevance. Physics is already there. It has theories (string theory) which, while interesting, are largely untestable.

Its worth reading the article in full if you get a chance to pick up a copy.

Fail

2010-08-26T18:08:00.004+01:00

Its not often I respond to someone else's blog in my own. But this time I am forced to because his web site does not work (will not take comments).

GSCE results

A debate as old as exams themselves. Should you vary the scoring so that a % get As or leave as absolute and risk lots of As.

The first model risks someone who effectively scores, say, 80% getting a B when the following year they would get an A.

The second model though allows for variations in the difficulty of papers.

Would you deal with the scoring manipulation on a class by class basis, school by school, town by town, region by region or nationally?

What is clear is that in both models there are winners and losers.

Another point surely is that the result is not the exam result for GCSEs but an overall mark including course work. I would have thought that if I have an A* at the end it is not just down to an easy exam? Surely I must have done well for the 2 year course.

The media always make a play for this. I have to say I detest it. I think those who do well always get the negative feedback. Exams are too easy, dumbing down, change the marking scheme. What about all those who don't do well. Ah, yes, that's the schools fault or the parents fault. They cannot have it both ways.

I had terrible o-level results and we were the last year before GCSEs. So the blame was that they made the exams harder to make GCSEs look good the next year.

Maybe. Or it could be because I was a lazy bugger who did not do the work and had the attention span of a goldfish. When it came down to it I did not know the answers to the questions on the day. It was material covered in the 2 years ahead of my exam and I did not know it.

My fault.

So well done to all those who pulled their finger out this year and did well in their exams. Don't listen to the media or the negative so and so's who put your hard work down.

Thinking

2010-08-22T10:55:00.002+01:00

I remember early in my blogging that I wrote some god awful stuff, and many will say I still do (there, saved you the bother of adding a comment). But my motivation for starting was to help improve my writing skills and to help me slow down and structure my thoughts in ways that other people could understand. That is not to say that they are ground breaking thoughts but simply that I regularly failed to communicate even simple ideas to people. I still do fail in this way and the fault is all mine.

But in the same way that my early scrawling on ethics were amateurish and poorly structured (as I found out when I went to study it properly) my thoughts on thinking are probably the same when compared to formal psychology.

Over the last few weeks I have been lucky enough to get onto a project that could make a real difference. But the project is complex and has significant hurdles to overcome. What is nagging at me is that some of the people on the project have not stopped to think through what it is they are doing or why. They clearly believe that the vision they have is a good one but seem unable or unwilling to think through the what the project is trying to achieve. Action certainly do speak louder than words but action without thought is surely going to lead to change but possibly not improvement.

The reason I bring this up now is because I noted a parallel at a social event I was at. I rarely discuss religion with people for two reasons. The first is that it is an intensely private matter, the second is that many of the people who are religious have not thought through their beliefs.

That is not to say that there is or is not a god, or that religion is good or bad (although I do have my own views on the matter) but simply that people seem unwilling to think these things through. The few times I have been pressed to discuss religion with a few people who are (I normally refuse and get pushed to discuss) it nearly always turns out the other person gets offended. Not because I am rude or my views offensive, just that they have probably not rationalized their beliefs and when they do they run into difficulties. By this I mean that even the concept of unifying rational thought vs belief is hard even before you worry about what those beliefs might be.

The same reaction is happening on the project. They have their beliefs but have a blind spot to thinking about what they believe in. Because its hard. Yes we could think about stuff forever and never start (true of many projects and ideas) but that is not what I am proposing. I am saying that we need to get over the blind spot. People need to be more accepting of thinking through what is being done. Its like science. If we see that thinking something through and finding the idea is poor as a failure then we will never start. Success if science is about truth. It is as valuable to prove something as it is to disprove it. There is no such thing as a failed experiment.

Joke

2010-08-19T20:58:00.001+01:00

I saw this and have to say it appealed to me

What is red and invisible?
no tomatoes

Milk

2010-08-19T13:59:00.003+01:00

Government guy walks into shop to buy milk.

Gov: "I'd like some milk please"

Shopkeeper hands over a pint of milk.

Gov: "no no, this won't do. I'm fed up with buying milk by the pint. I always end up wasting some of it. What I want is to buy milk in 1/2 pint units"

Shopkeeper: "but nobody sells in 1/2 pint units. To do that I will have to repackage the milk, work out the pricing and that will cost me money"

Gov: "Yes but it will be less wasteful"

Shopkeeper disappears out the back of the shop and 20 mins later (having missed and annoyed a number of his other customers) he returns with a newly packaged 1/2 pint of milk.

Gov: "That's excellent. I'll take 2 please"

Congrats

2010-08-18T16:33:00.002+01:00

As a purveyor of fine web sites :-> I understand the challenges of competing with the big guys. Google maps is one of my favorite sites (when I cannot get onto google earth). I was one of those guys who could easily amuse himself (stop it!) by picking up an atlas and flicking through the pages.

So for me, google maps is not just a practical tool but a sad way to pass time. I think there is a little of that in all blokes. Who has not looked up their house on the satellite view on google earth? Very very few of you I suspect.

What is more amazing given how good Google maps and Google earth is given they are free (sort of, ignoring the adverts which I always do) is that our old friend www.streetmap.co.uk is still going.

It must be like trying to sell inferior fruit from a crappy stall outside a supermarket who permanently give away fruit and veg for nothing.

Streetmap was a leader in their time and I have no doubt how the CEO felt the day he saw Google launch their offering. But the fact that they are still going deserves a prize for stubbornness in the face of impossible odds. The King Canute of web sites.

All change please

2010-08-10T21:36:00.002+01:00

I wonder sometimes whether change is good. We are starting to see the next round of transformational thinking in Gov IT. But the journey may not be worth it. The mentality that says what we have does not work so lets change it always perplexes me.

Any model can be done badly, any model well. So if you have a model in place and it is working badly then rather than looking at why it does not work and fixing it, change it. Seems daft to me.

If you can't make what you have work, then don't expect the new model to work either. The problem is not the model. Activity is not a substitute for thinking.

RAG Status

2010-08-08T20:42:00.002+01:00

If ever there was a reason to rethink pedestrian crossings it was this. I had just crossed the road outside Bow Rd Tube and had managed about 10m along the pavement when I head the screech of brakes and turned in time to see a bloke in his go faster Toyota twat plow into a Chinese girl. Mounted the bonnet and bounced her off the windscreen.

Managed to get to her immediately to keep her still and stop the Toyota driver reversing over he legs. She just kept crying and in between she kept saying 'green light' 'green light' over and over again.

Bow Rd crossing has seen has more than its fair share of incidents. Having lived there for over 12 years I know the dangers. Its a long straight rd with 30mph limit and 2 lanes in each direction. Sadly the drivers morning and evening treat it like a motorway. Probably 3 or 4 crossings per week cars will go through the lights when the go red and it is double that number when they rush straight through the flashing amber at the end of the crossing period.

Now I can make no judgment as I cannot say that I actually saw that the guy ran the flashing amber. But it strikes me that when lying on the tarmac with both legs broken and head having just cracked the windscreen of the car you don't rationally think of an alibi as to why it was not your fault. She was not thinking after the fact in hospital whether she crossed on green.

So here's what I suspect was happening. The Toyota (Asian kid with girlfriend in front seat and mate on back) was driving as they do down Bow Rd like a boy racer. Both his car and a white van braked hard as they went through the crossing in each lane. Neither was accelerating having stopped at the lights, they were already going and were doing about 30. Girl sees the green (not flashing) man and starts to dash across the road. I suspect that as she starts the green man starts to flash and the red light turns to flashing amber. The rest is, as they say, history.

It occurs to me that some changes to the lights might help. The whole idea of a flashing Amber (go if clear/pedestrians have finished crossing) is madness when you think about it. People do not think twice about going through amber flashing lights. Nobody goes through amber lights if they are not clear but the point is that a pedestrian can start crossing on green and be only 1m from the edge when the green man starts to flash. For 2 lane roads it leads to one lane sometimes moving on before they can see the pedestrian.

Mixing cars and people is just not sensible. At all. Think about it, we do not do the reverse. We do not have a flashing amber at the start of the lights sequences where the pedestrian is allowed to cross if the road looks clear of cars!

Why not have the lights changed as follows.

Traffic lights turn Red
Wait 3 seconds
Green man shows for (variable but say) 10 seconds (long enough to cross, so depends upon road)
Green man goes out and red man (do not cross) come on 10 seconds. Note that the red man time is long enough for a crossing to deal with the person starting on green and getting 1 step in.
THEN
the Amber traffic light flashes
Then Green traffic light.

The difference is that the Amber light does not start to flash UNTIL the red man has been showing for long enough for the person to make a crossing.

Yes, it means crossings will take longer and traffic will be a little slower. People may be kept and extra minute on their journey.

I reckon that Chines girl would agree that less accidents is worth a minute or two extra on your car journey.

Risk

2010-06-25T21:30:00.002+01:00

There are some interesting behaviours that emerge from government and I have been trying to consider what the causes of these are.

Fear of failure seems to play a key role in the cost of government. Especially IT. As an SME I know the problems of dealing with government. It is interesting that government, a trillion dollar organization, has to protect itself from SMEs and their potential failure. They use the tier 1 suppliers to achieve this (force you into a subcontract position).

This is madness. It is the tier 1 suppliers that the government needs protecting from and I need not go into the examples of staggering failure here.

So why is this. Well government hates failure, ministers hate failure. Everyone hates failure. But government thinking appears to go like this.

1) IT projects fail.
2) We need major contractual protection and guarantees
3) These make contracting with SMEs impossible so only major supplier can be dealt with

But it is the major supplier failures that gov tries to protect themselves against that pushes the smaller suppliers out the market.

Something has to change. Government needs to start thinking differently and the media should help. Some things go wrong. We don't want them to, most are avoidable but that's life. If the media overreacts then the government and ministers layer on extra protection. This is a vicious circle.

It will be interesting to see if government actually starts to change off the back of these economic difficulties.

Question the unquestionable

2010-06-23T13:33:00.003+01:00

Deep in the bowels of the government savings programme I am starting to see the first wall that government is going to hit on its marathon journey to rid itself of the deficit. Savings is all the focus now. Everything is about the bottom line, sofas are being decushioned looking for spare change, matresses ripped open looking for that bunch of fivers someone may have hidden down there years ago.

Papers are being written, savings ideas generated, finger in the air numbers being fed into the machine. But numbers gain a life of their own. When they are born and find their way onto paper they can become fact. The rush for ideas is incredible.

But in the haste, good old fashioned thinking seems to have gone out of the window. Pointing out the king has no clothes regarding numbers makes you as popular as burning the flag of St George on St Georges day.

But burn I must.

The activity (and boy is there a lot of activity) going on at the moment is all about writing papers with the word radical in it as if salami slicing an organisation or its services using the word radical is somehow going to make all the difference. It ain't. The words 'think the unthinkable' makes it in regulalry as does the word 'transformation'. All good stuff. But no content. 'We should seek radical solutions to transform and think the unthinkable' they all cry (or write). So what? Who is doing the thinking? Nobody really. 'We will save £20 gzillion pounds in the next 4 years by radically transforming the way we work'. Really? How?

Of course, money will be saved. No doubt. But the consequnces will be far worse due to lack of thinking.

So how should it proceed? That is hard. What we need is a radical approach to transforming the services provided. LOL. Only kidding.

While government goes out and tries to find solutions to problems they have yet to understand they should be looking at it from a different angle. The issue is that the right questions are not being asked. Stop looking for answers and start looking at the questions.

Where do you start? Well, for most of us we earn an amount of money each month and we decide, based upon that, how much we want to spend on housing, on clothes etc etc. Few (but not none) start by deciding upon their lifestyle and then worry about how they will fund it. Yes they can borrow but not forever. Of course they have the bankruptcy option but that is no good for Gov (or is it?). They lose credit worthiness for a few years and then start again.

Gov of course decided what it wants to do and then worries about the money.

Question 1.
How much money has the government got/want to raise from taxes?

Question 2.
With that money, what services can it afford to offer?

And these questions are the key to the approach to savings. we are currently running around with a view to seeing how much we could shave off of service provision. Savings must be reworked along the lines of:

1) We will spend this much money on IT. What can we get for it?
2) We will spend this much money on estates. If thats not enough, how do we accomodate our staff?
3) We will spend this much money on people. What can we do with this many people.

etc etc.

There is of course a balance between each of those to be looked at. But its an approach that will work from top to bottom.

1) We have this much money what services should gov supply. How much will we spend on delivering each of those.
2) For that money, what do we get?

It works all the way down the line.

1) I have £100 for departmental stationary. How best to spend it. If we cant buy pencils why not ban use of paper? etc.

If they continue to look at it the other way around savings will not be achieved and worse still, the services will suffer (as well).

Here we go again

2010-06-04T17:38:00.002+01:00

One has to respect the government position around no knee jerk reactions to change gun laws. But one doubts that this sensible position will result in consistent behaviours. Dunblane was a tragedy. As a result our olympic sports team are unable to practice in this country. We are not talking casual ownership of Semiautomatic miltiary pistols. We are talking sporting pistols. Banned. Successfully prevented legal and genuine owners from owning guns. Not stopped the illegal gun ownership one bit.

So now we have a fruit cake go mad with a legit shotgun. We can debate the ins and out of why he was allowed one and largely that is of little interest to me. You will never be able to assess/predict future mental health and instability. On on that basis ALL guns should be banned as ANYONE can go nuts.

But that's not my concern either. What the outcome will be is that the laws on guns are tight enough and they will argue that shotguns in the hands of registered users do not pose a threat to society. So why treat shotguns differently to hand guns. There is ZERO difference. Both could be used for large scale massacre. So why draw the line here.

Let's see if either shotguns are banned (wrong answer) or if they apply the same sense to handguns and lighten the legislation so that our real legal sports shooters can once again practice their sport.

Whatever you do. Be consistent.

The future may not be bright but its getting clearer

2010-05-28T12:59:00.003+01:00

More clarity is starting to emerge around the savings now. In some respects this is a help, not because the outcome will be pretty but because at least you can do something about it if you know.

What is emerging is that the ability to make £6 billion savings almost overnight will and can only happen one way. We talk about saving 6 billion and it is important to understand what this actually means in practice.

Government budgets will have been set sometime back against a set of needs to deliver a set of outcomes. So the costs of IT, staff, buildings etc. Those budgets would have been agreed. Now 6 billion will need to be removed from the budgets overnight. As you can imagine, the government departments are not sitting on 6 billion in unallocated cash. So to make a saving, they have to stop spending. Obvious right?

So how do you stop spending overnight? Well, its like being asked to realise the equity out of your house overnight. Its almost impossible and if you do manage it the equity realisation will be so expensive that you dont actually get the money you need due to the urgency of the process.

In gov terms they simply cannot get rid of staff to make those kinds of sums for a number of reasons:

1) That staff reductions at the lower pay grade levels would have to be vast to make any impact on the 6 billion. Then you are left with no staff to delivery any services or support the frotn line protected staff.
2) The time needed to get rid of staff and the costs of the process can eat up so much of the savings that any in year (which is what they want in the 6 billion) will be eaten up.
3) Ridding yourself of middle and senior management leaves government with few people with the skills to manage things ongoing or more importantly make the major savings decisions.

So if its not staff where will the savings come from?

Well its going to be the private sector. Yep, government savings will be made at the expense of the private sector. Projects will have to be stopped, consultants fired, pencil orders cancelled.

Now you may not think this is such a bad thing. But this is only because the media has done such a good job af demonising contractors, consultants and major suppliers. But not all government suppliers are poor, not all contractors are bad and expensive. See the link here? For every bad contractor or consultant there is a civil servant overseeing them and hiring them.

So you bin all of these. So who implements the changes needed to deliver the major savings? Not the civil servants, they are the ones who hire the experts in the first place and its not because the civil servants are lazy, its because they do not have the change skills in the quantities or levels required.

So where next? Well the liklihood is that contracts willstart to be binned. Notice periods and termination agreements will not be honoured. They have no choice. Nobody signs contracts that allow one party to walk away half way through delivery free. And that is exactly what gov will have to do.

The effects of all of this will be dire. Businesses will go bust, individuals will lose jobs. The flow down is going to be significant. The argument I have now heard is that the suppliers will roll over and just take it as they see things in the long term and want to do business later when things improve. Thats great if you are one of the major suppliers with deep pockets. But the SMEs will simply not survive. The major suppliers will simply bin their employees to protect costs.

Its an interesting flow.

Government puts too many people into the public sector
Banks take too much risk and put economy into a spin
Government bails out banks to prevent economy meltdown
Failing economy lowers tax revenues gov debt gets out of control
Banks stop lending (take lower risk)
Gov starts to fail (go bust) so stops spending violently
Big gov suppliers take the hit but shed employees
Small go suppliers go bust
Both lead to higher unemployment, higher welfare bills, lower tax revenues
Private sector still suffering from recession cannot absorb Gov fallout
Spending in retail slows and retail suffers
Recession kicks in.

This all from the first £6 billion. The next £156 is going to cause utter carnage.

Brown was right. Taking £6 billion out of the economy is going to be catastrophic.

So what can we all do about this? It all seems a bit negative. Well it is. The bigger worry is that this is going to cause some real social issues. The first is that crime will rise as times get more difficult at a time when government is less equipped to deal with it. The second is that we will see a widening now of the gap between rich and poor both in terms of levels and quantity. There will be even fewer massively rich people and even more poor. More of the middle will head south than north. If you are well off today your life will get better, if not expect it to get worse. The question will be how quickly this will happen. If it happens too quickly and the gap gets too wide then we can expect more problems than just an increase in crime.

If we add in EU issues then we could start to see more inwardly protectionist lines start to emerge and trade slow.

Well it is going to have to get worse before it gets better. We have to hit rock bottom and we are a long way from what is going to be a very deep bottom. There is no stopping this process now. But if you understand it you can prepare for it.

So still no positives? Its hard to see them from this view point I have to admit.

What is required to get through this is a fundemental shift in culture and expectation. The days of constant growth and prosperity could never last so what is needed is actually to reset ones mind and expectations. A level of culture change the likes of which we have not seen since the last world war. When people fought for freedom, hardship was a price that everyone agreed was a worthwhile price. People pulled together, community spirit grew and people got by on nothing. Poor and rich alike made sacrafices.

The challenge for the UK is to now find what the rallying cry will be to start that change.

Surviving this next downturn will not be about money, it will not be about business, it will not even be about jobs. It will be about successful culture change. And if the UK can be the first to recognise this and get it under way we will be the first to get back to something like a more stable and sustainable way of life.

Saving integrity

2010-05-24T19:54:00.004+01:00

It begins. 6 billion to save. 156 billion to go.

Like the lottery, these numbers are hard to comprehend. I am lucky enough to work in government at one of the most interesting times I can remember. I am lucky enough to be involved in the savings and there are a number of very surprising things that have emerged.

1) The majority of civil servants have no idea about what is about to hit them. This is part of the problem and why we are where we are. They just don't understand.

2) The public have no idea about what is about to hit government and then them.

It seems the reaper has arrived an nobody knows they are dead. THE SALMON MOUSSE!

The politicians knew what was coming. We knew the politicians knew what coming.

But, like the car industry, if you shut a factory or a quango, then all their suppliers and their suppliers and all the staff and all the shops that sell to those people suffer. This is the same as government.

I supply government and I have just had to let 3 of my 4 staff go. They will find other work, they are the lucky ones. The company is unlikely to survive but you never know.

Taking 6 billion out of the economy overnight is going to cause a nightmare. Imagine when we try and take the remaining 156 million.

But it is not a bad thing. Despite the catastrophic losses of everything I am in some ways a happy victim. I am lucky and I was not in debt so I can just (if it comes to it) just walk away. So why am I not devastated?

Well, its simple. This was avoidable. The politicians made poor policy choices and the civil service badly implemented them. They have been trying to make savings over the last 8 years that I have been in government and the civil service has resisted and squirmed and avoided the savings in pure Sir Humphrey ways.

This was avoidable and a long time coming.

My only worry now is that a lot of innocent people will suffer and those who could have prevented this are now still in power and will not suffer as others will. Many good people will have their lives changed because of all of this.

So fingers crossed that this time the savings will do the job and transform the way government services are delivered.

I am skeptical. I hope my losses are not in vain, but somehow I doubt it.

Good buy

2010-05-18T19:18:00.002+01:00

Watching one of my favorite programs tonight made me laugh. The antiques roadshow is a great show with lots of interesting objects presented.

One particular lady turns up with a dear horn sewing case. She tells the tale that her (now) husband bought it for her as a present. He paid 35 pounds. He asked her how that sum compared to her weekly wages. She was on 9 pounds per week. So about 1 months salary was the cost of this box.

He them valued it today at about 1000 pounds. She said that it was therefore a good investment.

Not really love. Proportionally its worth less today than it was when you bought it 50 years ago!

Thanks Apple

2010-05-10T17:43:00.002+01:00

I am rarely the first to get a piece of technology. Rare as in never. I got out of that race a long time back and I now pick my technology very carefully.

It was about time I got a new phone as my old 950i is really on its last legs after a good 2 years of solid use. It was an AWFUL operating system but it did its job when you got used to it.

I love my MAC book air. I think the UI is fantastic and the hardware is light, relatively strong and fairly reliable. On that basis I opted for the iPhone this time around. The 16Gig S version. I don't own a single MP3 so I am not sure why I would need the 32 Gig (but could not bring myself to buy the 8 Gig, work that one out!).

Setting it up should have been child's play. But here is the issue. You must have internet access to get your phone to work. They don't tell you that on the box. This would not normally be a problem but it was today. I don't yet have broad band in my flat (it gets fitted tomorrow). My laptop uses a USB 3G dongle to get my access. My MAC Book air only has one USB port and that is used for the 3G card.

So imagine my reaction when starting up the iphone it says connect to the laptop to talk to itunes to register phone. BUGGER. I cant have internet on if the iphone is connected and I cannot connect the iphone unless I use the USB port. Check mate.

So off to the local cafe for use of their wireless internet connection. Connected to internet, connected the iphone, itunes connected to the web and hey presto the whole lot springs into life. Very frustrating though because it appears the only reason it forces you to do this is to register and activate the phone. They should just let you use the phone and perhaps, if they have to, force you to do the registration (here's a clever idea) via the iphone's internet connection!

Surely apple should have an app for that!

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis

2010-05-09T19:16:00.001+01:00

The clock ticks on post election. They say a week is a long time in politics. Imagine how long it is at the moment.

What is fascinating at the moment is nothing appears to be what it seems. On the one hand, the Lib Dems appear to be the only party that has a strong probability of being part of a new government. On the one hand they work with the Tories and if that fails they join Labour. One might imagine that this is useful position to be in (if you are a Lib Dem). But the stakes are high and the only bet is 'all in'.

We have already seen Tory positioning. One frightfully gallant chap from the conservatives who was lined up to be Minister for Education has already declared that he would gladly give up his position to a Lib Dem. You can hear the squeaky wheels of the Trojan Horse being wheeled into the Lib Dem camp as we speak. Who the hell, in this great big mess would want education. It is one of those positions that you can only fail at. If the kids succeed, its because exams are getting easier, if the kids fail its because of your policy. The money is going to run out, things are going to get difficult and education issues won't be seen for a decade or more. Its a safe position to give to the Lib Dems. If, by a miracle, they do very little and succeed in Education, the Tories win. If they fail the Lib Dems lose.

Expand that now to the whole of government. The claim has been made that whoever wins will not get back in for a generation (30 years). I think this is nonsense and underestimates the political elite's ability to spread the blame and spin the truth. And nobody has a memory, when it comes to voting for 30 years. Or we would not have that many Tory votes this time around.

The Hung Parliament is probably the best thing that could have happened. hard decisions will be made, perhaps now with the sharp edges rounded off as collaboration and compromise is now required. We will also see, when times are hard, the blame game shifting to one of 'was not us gov, it was the Lib Dems'. With no clear party in control the benefit is that the difficulties this country will face will have a shared blame position. No single party will be held accountable.

Pick a number

2010-05-05T21:17:00.002+01:00

I am no sociologist. So this may be utter nonsense. The issue of poverty discussed below and the median measure got me thinking on how there could possibly ever be a fair society. I have written before that the world is aligned to certain human attributes around success and failure.

In the good old days, the fittest and the strongest would survive. But what drives us since we left the caves. It may be that the rich appear to have the power but this seems to me an effect and not a cause. Ignoring the lucky (lotteries etc) and those who inherit (which is luck of birth) then what is the attribute that defines the pecking order these days (is it more than one attribute?).

Hard to tell. Its not just intelligence. There are lots of smart people and that is rarely enough in its own right to lead to riches. But lack of intelligence does seem to be a hindrance (there are few dumb rich people). Risk taking? Yep, must be an attribute of the successful, but there are lots of poor risk takers (and dead ones).

But its not important to find what the attribute is. And this is the key point. Whatever the attribute is in any society and at any point in time there will be a spread in the population from those who have none of that (those) attribute(s) to those who have the perfect amount.

There will always be an imbalance, there will always be a pecking order and their will always be inequality.

Seems a bit of a hopeless situation then? Not really. While success is based upon the individual's human attributes we will always have a range of winners and losers. For the good of society we need to ensure that we are able to find a way to narrow the range of the top to bottom. We see the effects of wealth from the richest to the poorest where it gets out of hand and the few have all the money. Off with their heads! And money is the one thing we focus on. The successful have to give to the less successful. This causes tensions and in fact has negative effects as in extreme it removes the motivation to be successful (why bother if nobody else has to).

If money is the effect of a natural range of attributes then surely we should be looking at what these are and how the gap can be lessened. We cannot go on only focusing on the money. Education is bound to be part of this but there is no major link between a good education and an excellent education (again, a bad education is a hindrance).

More thinking must be put into this area. No matter what the attributes are, finding a way to link success and reward to performance (which provide motivation) coupled with opportunity (so anyone can make it) and balanced with a narrow range from top to bottom will go a long way to producing a fairer society. Fairer, but not equal. Equal is impossible and detrimental. We will always need competition.

Poverty rules

2010-05-05T20:57:00.002+01:00

I have touched on the subject of poverty before. There are rules for what poverty means. One definition is anyone who earns less that 60% of the median income of household headed by someone of working age.

So the question that crossed my mind was would there always be poverty and what did that mean.

Well firstly, its a relative issue. If the lowest earner in the UK was a millionaire and the median was a billionaire then the millionaire would be deemed to be in poverty. So what we generally consider to be poor and the term poverty are two different things. But poverty is also a cultural issue. What one person considers poor may not be the same as another culture. If poor means lack of money then certain cultures will be deemed poor but this is not the same as we think about it. Poor must be set in context. Someone who lives in a tribal community in a rain forest may have no cash but they are happy and healthy but have no money. So poverty must only have relevance where money itself has meaning. Obvious right? To be poor must mean that you have no way to access finances needed to achieve a lifestyle relative to the culture you live in.

This is why when we think of poor people in the UK they seem to have money, food, free health care etc. Then we look at starving Africans and consider them poor. And yet there is a huge gap in access to everything poor have in the UK.

But back to the maths. So if you earn 60% or less of the median income you are considered to be in poverty. The stats say that this is 23% of the working population. The interesting thing about the median is that it is not skewed by the billionaires. The median will be the middle earning if we lined up all the earnings in a row. This is where imaging this gets tough. What is it to have nobody in poverty. What it will mean is that majority of the people have to earn a very similar amount. The tighter the grouping the less will fall into poverty.

Its an interesting by product in that if everyone earned the same then there would be no poverty technically. But if we all earned two pounds per hour then we would consider ourselves poor.

The reality seems to be that the measure is one simply used to compare countries and not one that is of practical use to determine quality of life which I would have thought is the most important. Quality of life has meaning and could encompass a wider set of values than just money. Culture, education, health, money and relationships must all contribute to a good life. A one dimensional view does not seem to cut the mustard as they say

Elect for a new approach

2010-05-03T21:19:00.002+01:00

As its election time I thought I would have a go at coming up with a different approach to the first past the post system. The main issue at stake (as I understand it) is that the party in government may actually have less votes than the party in opposition. This seem ludicrous. By the time you take the % of people who can vote and then the % of people who do vote, then the % of the people who actually voted for Labour you end up with a government who only gained 22% of the votes. In this election this situation may become worse.

So what could we do about it?

The first thing I would do is to have the party in government the only who gains the most votes. We would still have constituencies. Here's how it would work.

We would have approximately 300 evenly sized constituencies. It actually does not matter if they are even by population or area. Its not that important.

People would make 2 votes at election time. The first vote would be for the party you want to govern. Simple. Which ever party gets the votes gets the job. The winning party would then put in place 300 MPs. One into each constituency. The voters would have no say in these. But there would be one representing you.

The second vote is for a person (although their party alliance can be publicly known). That person (there would be 300 of them) would be the opposition (you would need to do a preference order in case your first choice ended up being in power).

So you would have an MP representative of government in your constituency guaranteed. This is unlike today. If your MP of choice does not make it into government then you do not actually have a voice IN government, only in opposition.

This method would leave you with an opposition MP in each constituency and the opposition would be at a local level on local issues as well as in parliament.

When the government wants to pass a bill then they will nearly always have a majority but never have control of more than 300 MPs (50% of them). So they will have to compromise somewhat.

It is a balance of both true majority vote government as well as effective opposition.

Terminal Velocity - Be my guest

2010-04-27T15:37:00.002+01:00

I was enjoying a quiet drink by myself (sad yes I know) in a club at the top of the Center Point building. Two guys walked past where I was sitting on the top floor (32 stories). One asked if you would survive if you tried to jump off with a parachute. The other guy (one of those sporty types) said that you could base jump from that height as you would have your drone chute in your hand. He rightly pointed out that landing would be problematic.

So far so good.

But he then went on to say that you would probably survive without a chute as you are not high enough to reach terminal velocity. At this point I nearly spat out my drink.

So either

1) he thinks terminal velocity means the speed you reach before a landing becomes terminal or
2) he does understand what terminal velocity is (and he is right, you would not reach it at that height) but is a complete idiot.

Either way, jumping from the 32 floor onto the street without a parachute is unlikely to end in survival. But what do I know, I'm not a sporty type.

Poirot would be proud

2010-04-23T15:13:00.002+01:00

The Belgians are going to lead the way (not something you hear everyday) by making a law to ban the Burka. Rather than taking on the Muslim community directly they are banning any clothing that prevents identification.

Brilliant move. The first nation to ban gloves.

What?

Yep, fingerprints are used as a means of identifying people (police use it regularly I hear). So no gloves as they cover us and prevent identification.

But that's ridiculous I hear you say! They would not ban gloves because if you needed to identify someone you just ask them to remove their gloves.

Bing!

So why, when you want to identify a lady in a Burka (as you do) can you not just ask for it to be removed. There are very few times when you would doubt the identity of the lady under the Burka (by this I mean that there are few times when you would need formal identification of the type that has to go beyond trusting the said lady not just to declare her identity).

Test pilots wanted

2010-04-19T21:37:00.003+01:00

Its been an interesting week or so in news coverage. A mix of politics and natural disaster. And of course the volcano eruption in Iceland. One of the interesting news lines was the KLM plane that was sent up to test the impact ash has on the engines. Go Dutch! And they did. They shared the risk (or not as the case may be). A few days later the Germans sent up a plane and then BA. Why? God knows. Given that the air ways would not be opened up just to one airline why would:

1) one take the risk (is this an interesting sign of desperation and business impact)
2) having sent up one plane from KLM 2 other plans were put at risk.

Its not as if there is huge variation in engine technology to the point that one Boeing would be safe and an airbus would not.

It was interesting to see that the navy is sending out two ships and an aircraft carrier to ferry people across the channel. Can you imagine the cost of such an exercise! Unimaginable. That's what happens when politicians get involved. Why would you do this. Surely you would send across empty chunnel car trains (you know the ones you drive on at one end and off the other). You could fill one of those trains with hundreds and hundreds of people for the 30 min or so crossing. You must be able to get stacks of people back that way at far cheaper rate than using an aircraft carrier.

Nice one!

Enforced holidays

2010-04-01T16:01:00.002+01:00

One would think now that with all of the economy in the state it is there could be a new approach to the whole bank holiday thing. At a busy time I am now faced with 4 whole days off in a row. Not a good time. Yes, one can argue that all work and no play blah blah blah but actually being forced off work at a bad time does not lead to relaxation but piles the work and the worry up either side of the days off.

We should change for a new model. A simple change to the law would mean that people should be given the bank holidays to take at their leisure. I.e. legal holiday time. It can't be rocket science to protect employer abuse (lowering standard holiday entitlement to include the free days). Much nicer. It would also mean that lots of us could take time off when it is not so busy, holiday spending and demand would be smoothed and the costs lowered.

I would prefer also to take my bank hols when the weather is better. Why do we have to take our bank holidays all at the same time? A smaller step from complete freedom would be to allow an employee to take off the appropriate number of bank hol Mondays and Fridays as they prefer.

I don't see any downside and in hard times the flexibility would be welcomed by a lot of people.

A nice diversion

2010-03-27T08:15:00.003Z

I have not written much lately, not felt like it. I met up with a friend though the other morning. We talked about various things. One thing that was going on in my friend's life is the loss of a close relative and it is sometimes hard to make sense of the justice and fairness of such losses.

I do like to read poetry and another friend had just bought me a book on contemporary poems. I liked this one as, although it provides no answers to the above questions, it does provide a nice way of looking at it.

Its called 'Inside our dreams' by Jeanne Willis

Where do people go to when they die?
Somewhere down below or in the sky?
'I can't be sure,' said Grandad, 'but it seems
They simply set up home inside our dreams.'

i-con

2010-01-28T17:02:00.003Z

Given the state of my mobile phone I thought I would venture in to town and look at the new i-phones. Very nice they are too. But I have a bit of an issue taking a contract of 18 months (or 24 which was the other option) for a phone that delicate. No problem, you can get extended warranty for the second year at 59 pounds. Seems a bit steep. Or you can buy Vodafone insurance at 12.99 per month.

My understanding of insurance is that you pay an amount of money to hedge the risk of losing or breaking the phone (or car or house). But on a contract of 2 years that's 311 pounds in total. About the costs of buying a new phone (and in 2 years about the cost of buying 2 phones I expect).

They must think the risk of having to replace your phone is certainty and you will basically buy a new phone if you take the insurance.

Well worth it.

Pay

2010-01-10T12:25:00.002Z

The times has an interesting article today about an electrician who works for a council earning 124,000 pounds in pay and bonuses. Although the small print says that this was made up of overtime, stand by allowances and back dated pay (conveniently they do not state how much was back dated pay). Shocking? Not really. What is worrying about this article is the comparison yet again to the pay of ministers, the PM and MPs. "By contrast, a minister of state such as Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister, earns 106,136 pounds per year.

What is it about the comparison to what minister's earn? This electrician has clearly worked hard, probably well qualified and has only claimed money legitimately due to him (let's not talk about MP expenses). Why is there this belief that ministers and the PM should be the most highly paid people in the country. Even if not in comparison to the private sector, there is nearly always this view that nobody in the public sector should be paid more than the PM. The PM runs the country? Probably but not in reality. They are under serious pressure and constant scrutiny but they are politicians. While the day rate may not be fantastic one has to consider the 'package'. The directorships, consultancy that follow office, the after dinner circuit, the books, the interviews etc etc. I bet when the electrician is not being offered chairmanship of ICI, paid stacks of cash as a non-exec on numerous boards or has a pension that will allow him to lead as comfortable life as the PM will have.

It takes no qualifications to be a minister or an MP. Just an interest and dedication to run the country. You do not do it for the money and the benefits are far more wide reaching than immediate enrichment. The majority of MPs cannot be sacked in between elections and even if you are a poor performer, if you are in a safe seat you will not lose your job.

So lets please stop comparing everyone's pay to ministers. If the market rate for an electrician is 124,000 per year (given what I have paid for electricians and skilled tradesmen this does not seem massive if one considers it to be about 70-80 pounds per hour) then Ms Jowell has a choice, she can stay as minister for the Olympics or leave, train as an electrician and earn more money. But let's not create an artificial ceiling based upon politicians. The market is open and working relatively well. Supply and demand dictates the wages. Interfere with that at your peril.

Books, there must be another way

2010-01-09T16:35:00.002Z

The internet has been a revolution in the media world and one which has caused numerous problems for the publishers of media. The internet is a brilliant opportunity to sell digital media. A golden opportunity for publishers. No more printing or making physical cds and dvds etc. Costs fall, profits grow. But it is a well understood double edged sword. The easier it is to distribute to your customers, the easier it is for them to distribute to their friends. Nobody has cracked this yet, especially for music it seems for a number of reasons.

1) Any attempt to encrypt files will be defeated. By definition a file that is encrypted is decryptable and so unless you don't want anybody to decrypt it then this just won't work.
2) Restrict the format. Make it so that only your player (hardware and software) will run the music. Proprietary formats never work because somebody inevitable creates a converter or a good chunk of your customer base cannot read the files (so won't buy the music).
3) Charge enough to cover the copying. I.e. put the price of music up so that the losses due to the copying are already taken into account. This makes the legitimate customer base pay for the crime rather than the publisher. This is not an attractive model.

Its a tough nut to crack. Books are about to go the same way. How does the publisher protect the rights for ebooks? Its a similar problem and one that will have no more success than the music industry.

What is needed is a change in thinking. The issue can be boiled down to how does an author (music or books) get paid for the work in an electronic world when the connection between the physical (paper, vinyl, cd etc) and the content is broken.

It is worth looking at the role of the publisher at this stage. I suspect that the reason we have publishers is that before electronic media came along, the costs of making and distributing content (music or books) was quite high and beyond the purse of the average writer or singer (band). This led to a selection process where a judgment is made by the publishers on whether to invest the money or not.

This seems a superfluous process now. Let the audience do the selecting. I am already, when I want to listen to music, or want to read a book capable of selecting from millions of titles. I have no major issue finding a book I can enjoy or that is useful (and I do not believe that argument that this is because publishers have already thinned out the bad). I have seen lots of terrible books all with publishers who have 'selected' them. Existence does not equate to quality today.

We are already seeing various self publishing sites for music and will start to see the same for books. This can only be a step forward.

The question remains then on how to get people to pay for the content they appreciate. One way of achieving this is to make the content so cheap balanced with mechanisms to make catching of fraud high with big penalties.

Crime will follow where something that has value can be sold. The criminals will simply balance the money they make with the likelihood of being caught and the penalty when they have been caught. Make the value of the item so small that the crime does not pay. But how will this help the authors. Simple, you sell more. As costs of books go up I am more discerning about what I buy.

I go onto Amazon looking for books on a particular philosophical topic. Normally there are lots of books, some good, some bad but it is hard to tell. If the book is available second hand for a pound or two I would take the chance and purchase it. If the book is 10 pounds then I would want to read it first to see if it was useful. We are prepared to take a lot more risks and lower our standards if the consequence of a bad choice is low.

So the model has to be to move the cost of music down to 10p a track and books down below the 1 pound mark. Books that sell for 10 or more may panic over the losses but I suspect that people would buy far more books than they normally would do if the costs were low.

What evidence do I have for this? Only personal unfortunately. Anecdotally when I was younger I was into music (records at the time). I could buy a new album for 10-15 pounds or so at the time or I could go to my second hand music store where I could buy records for 50p or 1 pound each. I had a huge music collection as instead of just buying my favorite band that had just been on TV I would buy a far wider range of bands. Some I liked and some I did not. But my music horizons were widened.

Google itself has done a great thing in digitizing a stack of books. But given the issues they have faced which is that they have upset a lot of publishers and authors over IPR issues they have locked up the content and face the same problem as the authors themselves. They have to protect the value invested in digitization and so strangely you can only view the books online. Which is no good at all to anyone.

It has to be the only viable model. Take away the value of the goods, you take away the crime.

Personal responsibilty vs person responsible

2010-01-09T16:08:00.003Z

Snow always brings out the best and the worst in people. What I noted this year was that the level of whingers is on the up. Blame the authorities (whoever they are) find out who is responsible for not clearing the roads, for not gritting, for now cleaning the pavements for not salting the shopping center and have have them thrown in jail! Schools are closed, people cannot drive to work, shops are not being refilled! How will people survive without their tinned salmon now the shops have run out!

Its enough to make your blood boil. Where is the personal responsibility? Outsourced. We now expect our routines (whatever it is we do) to carry on regardless of what nature throws at us. We buy houses next to big rivers, enjoy the beauty of the scenery year after year and then blame the authority when a flood ruins your 2 billion pound per sq millimeter original wood flooring. We build houses on volcanoes, skyscrapers and wood shack houses in earthquake zones. We live in a world where we are no longer prepared to take personal responsibility for what we do, or more importantly, what is done to us.

Snow comes every year almost. If not for weeks, at least somewhere in the uk will have light dusting. Its winter, it snows. Pipes freeze, electricity cables fail, heating oil cannot get through, roads don't get cleared. But how many of the whingers have studded tires at home? I would bet none. How may have alternative fuel heaters on standby. I would be none.

Its time people started taking personal responsibility. If the pavement is not cleared, pick up a shovel and clear a bit. Buy some salt and salt your pavement.

We have outsourced our personal responsibility. If the community pulled together and helped clear the roads of snow then the roads would be cleared and pavements would be passable (Or just buy decent boots). But we have the local council to do that for us. What else do we pay them for? Rubbish. Just because we have the authority to do (or fail to do) things does not give us the right, when things go wrong to do nothing.

But the award for staggering stupidity goes to the guy on TV today. They were talking about the announcement by the water authorities not to walk on ice. Then they switch to this guy who had just walked out onto the ice to the middle of the lake and back. They asked him what he thought of the advice. He said they were just out to spoil the fun and that he had waled out to the middle and back and did not go through.

Well that's OK then.

Beware of golf balls

2010-01-04T20:26:00.002Z

I was somewhat amused by a signpost I saw today as I walked along a river next to a golf course. It said "Beware of golf balls". I assume they do not mean standing on one.

A golf ball (which is about the same size as a golf ball) travels at up to 180mph after initial hit and around 72mph on its way down after reaching its peak height.

Just how on earth do they expect us to beware!

AI EI O

2010-01-02T17:48:00.002Z

Old McITGuy had a server farm AI, EI, O (that's artificial Intelligence, Enterprise Integration and Oracle).

Ok, that was awful and no I am not drunk (yet). I was reading a good book on AI though on the possibility of intelligent computers. I have covered a bit of this in the Turing Test before in this blog. The book made quite a good point and one which I agree with.

The book was drawing the parallel between artificial flight and artificial intelligence. Basically early designs for flight were taken from birds which meant early flying machines were based on men with wings attached or machines that flapped. Neither worked for what are now well understood reasons (weight and volume blah blah blah). The point they make is that we compare AI to human intelligence and only in terms of a general interaction when it comes to the Turing test. I.e. the idea that if you cannot tell whether you are talking (typing into a terminal) to a computer or another human responding on the terminal then the computer would pass as intelligent.

The AI guys in the book say that it is the wrong target. Humans do some things very well and other things very badly. You can imagine the new IBM launch of its new super computer that could pass as human intelligence. Congratulations, you have now got a $1 billion dollar machine that cannot do long division in its head. But it can walk to the shops, get there and wonder what it came in for.

They have a point, so the focus is on improving the best bits about Human intelligence. No bird can fly at 45,000 feet for 10 hours. Inventing a bird like machine would have be genius but ultimately useless unless you need to land in trees and crap on people's heads.

But it struck me that the whole AI thing is doomed to failure for one main reason. I have always believed that we cannot define intelligence and therefore could never measure it. The book did not state that but the example they gave showed the issue. IBM's Deep Blue (I think that was its name) beat the Chess Grand Master but many critics state it was just a machine and was not intelligent. BUT, if my dog were to beat the Chess Grand Master, he would be considered an intelligent dog, no question.

The point is that we automatically have a 'yer but' filter. It does not matter what a machine does, it is a machine and it could do everything a human can do and do it a million times better and faster and people would still claim it not to be intelligent but just a machine. In other words many people find it hard to attach the label intelligent to anything artificial.

Until we get over that hurdle, we may never finish the race.

New Year, New Beginnings

2010-01-02T17:11:00.002Z

Happy New Year.

This year is going to be better than last year. Last year was hard going in just about every respect for me and so I have made a resolution to try and slow life down a bit and go for quality and not quantity.

It made me think of one of my favorite poems. Its by W. H. Davies (1871, 1940). Its called Leisure.

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

I think the poem says it all really.

A cracker of a question

2009-12-26T15:27:00.004Z

Festive greetings to all. This year's Christmas crackers had the traditional jokes and trivia questions. This year they also had a question to put to the dinner party. The one that struck me this year was this.

"If you could be anybody else for a day, who would you be?"

We thought about this for some time. Before reading on, think about who you would be.

So what's the catch. The interesting thing is that when most people are asked they sought to pick someone rich, or famous, or a political leader. Somebody that represents something that they may be able to be (rich, famous, genius, talented etc etc).

This took me sort of by surprise. I had picked either a starving African or someone living in a war zone (Somalia, Afghanistan etc etc). I thought that being someone who is or would appear to one to be 'better' or 'better off' would be the wrong way around. Given that the desire to be someone rich or famous must be somewhat driven out of envy surely it would leave one living the remaining days of your life knowing what you would never have.

On the other hand, living a day in the life of a famine victim would no doubt change one's life for the better and leave you living the remainder of your life knowing how lucky one is to have anything at all. A day in their shoes would be an education beyond comparison.

Contract negotiations

2009-12-10T09:47:00.001Z

To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.

Sun Tzu

Tube lines

2009-12-10T09:43:00.002Z

It always makes me chuckle when I listen to tube announcements.

"Passengers are reminded to use all available doors when boarding the train"

Absurd. Surely it is quicker to just use one and get on the train than run up and down trying to use ALL available doors.

"Passengers are reminded to keep all their belongings with them when traveling by tube"

Really? I would struggle I have to admit. I own quite a lot of stuff and some of it, my sofa for example, is quite heavy.

The sceptic's round

2009-11-27T14:14:00.003Z

Another day, another go at the sceptic. I have covered scepticism enough in my blog for you to already know what it is. Let's use the argument from ignorance

I do not know that I am not living in the matrix
If I do not know I am not living in the matrix I do not know anything
Therefore I do not know anything

There are large numbers of arguments for an against that deductive argument (it is valid by the way). I have touched on some before.

The normal sceptic position is that any claim to know something cannot be true because it could be the matrix giving you that information and therefore it is not reality and therefore false.

Last night I was thinking there is a type of knowledge though that does not suffer from the sceptic objection (I think).

I am sitting in the pub, the sceptic would say it is not a real pub but the matrix and I could not know otherwise. I will give him that one for now.

All the guys in the pub take turns to buy the drinks until only I am left.

I know it is my round (or if it was a mate's turn I know its his round). Regardless of whether I am in the matrix or not I know its his round. So I do know something.

So I know something, the conclusion of the argument is false.

True or False

2009-11-27T13:59:00.002Z

I managed to get back to uni and Philosophy studies last night for the first time in many many weeks. I have to say that these moments are a light in an otherwise dark world for me at the moment. It always gives me great pleasure to spend just a few hours thinking about thinking.

Last night's lecture on apriori justification was fascinating and got me thinking. The discussion was around whether apriori knowledge is defeasible. It is somewhat like science. If a theory in science is not falsifiable then it is considered not to be a valid theory. Same for apriori knowledge. If it not possible to falsify a piece of apriori belief then where does it stand in the scheme of things epistemically?

So here is the problem. Lets look at a scientific theory. If it is only a good theory if it is falsifiable then we have a paradox. The falsification argument is used against the creationists who relentlessly adjust their theory to accommodate all evidence against it. Fair enough.

But if a theory is falsifiable (and it being defeasible is a condition of it being a valid theory) then we have an issue. For it to be possible to be defeasible requires a scenario which would actually make it false. Be clear here, I am not saying we know what that is, just that there must something out there that makes it false. See where this is going? Yep, if there is something out there that would make this false then it is already false. I.e. by nature of it being a theory, if making it a worthwhile theory includes the rule it must be falsifiable then it is already false. We may not know what makes it false but it is nevertheless false.

So by definition all theories are wrong. If they are not then it is only because they are not defeasible and therefore not theories that deserve the claim to scientific credibility.

Apology not accepted

2009-11-23T12:36:00.001Z

The times this weekend had an interesting column by Professor Anthony Grayling. He was writing about apologies and what they mean. He observed that an effective apology is one shows true regret not just for the consequences of ones actions but also the motivation for those actions. An apology that is only made due to being caught is a hollow one.

This is an interesting point and it occurred to me that gratitude works in a slightly different way. To show that you are truly sorry you must be sorry for the consequences of your actions (a first order event) and also that you are sorry for having done something which you recognize as bad (a second order event).

But gratitude appears only to work at a first order level. When I thank you for, say, helping me lift something I am only grateful for the action and consequences. We have little concern of whether the action or help was motivated by the right intentions. Why is this? Why do we only care about intentions and motivations when things go wrong?

That said, it is not uncommon to thanks someone who is incapable of helping but is not in a position to fulfill their intention. For example, I ask you for help lifting something and the response is yes, I would love to but my back will not allow it. In that case the normal polite response is to thank the helper anyway. I.e. we recognize their motivation and desire to help even if it cannot be fulfilled.

This appears to contradict my earlier claim that we are not concerned with their motivations for helping, only the consequences. Their seems to be an order of precedent appearing in the way these things work.

1) If you do good and help me (actually perform the action) I will thank you for your first order event and leave it at that.
2) If you are unable to help but willing only then will I look at your second order motivation to do good and help and recognize that (and thank you).

But apologies do seem to work this way. One does not tend to have a second chance at apologizing. If an apology is deemed hollow then a repeat of the apology tends not to be accepted. You have to get it right first time. You have to show regret for the second order event as well as the first order event whereas in gratitude you accept the first order thanks and leave it at that.

This fits nicely with the views outlined in Plato's Republic. There was a debate about the being good and bad. A bad person does not want to get caught at being bad and the best way to do this is to appear good while achieving your evil aims. In fact the better you are at being bad, the more good you appear. So the really bad people in the world can appear to be really really good. Why does this work? Well we do not look into the second order motivations behind good actions. We take them at face value. We do not tend to question the moral character of the people who do us good. But we do for the people who do bad.

And so the truly bad amongst us rise to power all the while appearing to do good and achieving their terrible aims.

Maybe we should rebalance the world and start looking more carefully at the motivations of the good for it is there that the bad men hide.

Planned if you do, planned if you don't

2009-11-22T14:42:00.002Z

The newspapers today are full of opinion about a set of leaked documents regarding the Iraq war. All guns blazing for Blair. It raises an interesting dilemma for politicians and the media. In the article in the Telegraph the government comes under heavy criticism for denying they were planning to invade Iraq as early as 2002. Later in the article they accuse the government of not having any plans for the rebuilding of the nation post arrival and defeat of Baghdad.

If we take what the media are saying at face value then the government looks like it cannot win. Let's all be sensible and assume that our defense department has plans for many occasions, all theoretical. Not unreasonable to assume that high probability targets have more advanced and detailed plans than others. On that basis we would assume that theoretical plans for invading Zimbabwe are available. This must be the case as the PM will want to know, when deciding what to do about this or that dictator, what the options are. One assumes that one does not decide to go to war and then worry about plans and chances of success. One would hope.

So the media accusation that Blair told parliament that there were no plans to invade Iraq is not really a surprise. It depends what you mean by plans. On the one hand you can have plans (in the strict sense of the word) but have no 'intention' of using them. This may have been the case for Blair. The question could legitimately have been asked about 'plans' and not intentions and it is the PM's right to interpret the question and answer about 'intentions'.

The second aspect of this is also a bit strange. Lets assume Blair did have the 'intention' to invade Iraq (for whatever reason) when asked the question. This question was raised some time prior to the actual invasion in PM question time. How should he respond? It would seem bloody foolish to answer anything other than no unless you assume that Iraq cannot pick up PM question time on the parliament channel.

I think Blair, while guilty of many many things in this event, is clean in his handling of these questions.

What is worrying is the lack of plans for the rebuilding of Iraq after victory. Maybe something for the defense dept to worry about for the future. Clearly a need for end to end life-cycle of a war and not just the military bit is needed. If the plans for the economy were carried out in the same theoretical way as the military plans then maybe things would turn out differently.

For a start military campaigns of any type are tightly financially controlled. Can you imagine the effect on the ground.

Commander: "Emergency, we need 2 choppers to airlift out wounded and an apache to take out the two tanks pinning us down on the ridge".

Controller: "No problem commander, just complete the business case documentation and submit to central command, copy twice to the treasury and only after sign off from the health and safety officer"

But there may be some advantages to financial controls. Now wars are not about territory (nobody wins resources of enough value to cover the costs these days) but about ideology (although prevention of resource control by perceived enemies and keeping open free trade is noted) or trade. One can start to see the costs of war (especially under end to end planning) starting to look ridiculous. The idea that we go to war over right or wrong is long gone, the world simply is not that black and white.

Eventually the cost benefits of war will be such that negotiation and sanctions will be more likely. As the bean counters arm themselves with the latest versions of Excel and supercomputers to model the effects of global price rises in corn the battles will be fought in the grey rooms of the accountants. Lives will be lost still, but mostly from the stresses on middle age accountants.

Making a meal of things

2009-11-21T22:06:00.002Z

Is it just me or is the concept of a main course turning into a meat choice plus a set of sides. It seems to be an increasing trend in some restaurants to offer some kind of main part of a dish (duck, beef etc etc) with some form of sauce and then say 'would you like sides, your main course does not come with vegetables'.

Please stop.

First, pass the post

2009-09-28T13:24:00.002+01:00

It cannot escaped the notice of most people that the post is in meltdown at the moment. From a citizen point of view it shows how much we have come to NOT rely on the post. I for one had not noticed the strike so much because all I see is a lower amount of junk mail and a lower amount of bills (all paid electronically anyway). So no real big deal. I suspect that I am not typical in that respect but I am certainly not unique.

What is having an effect is the lack of post on businesses. As a Luddite I still pay many of my bills by post and most of my suppliers still bill me by post. But I do not know what I have not received. So I have received a number of invoices very late. I have been a good chap and paid them immediately, by cheque by post. But what is surprising is the complete lack of understanding from suppliers. I have now had two threats to cut off my services. Ouch! Both times I have explained the situation, both times I have pointed out the invoices were late, postal strikes etc and both times was told tough.

Come on suppliers, wake up. We all have cash flow issues caused by the strikes (well I haven't but many have). Its like a chain in a housing transaction. You all need to work together and be patient or the chain breaks down.

It is an interesting measure of your suppliers. When times are hard the crap floats to the top. Just remember those suppliers and when the time is right move from the rubbish ones and reward the patient ones. When the going gets tough, those who are your partners and those who are your suppliers really stick out.

Any volunteers?

2009-09-28T13:23:00.000+01:00

Exciting times are here again. The build up to the next election is always an interesting time to look at politics and more importantly politicians. No shit. But this election will be interesting because it will show whether the politicians have really grasped the second order questions rather than the first order ones. We are all familiar with the parties extolling their various policies. In the good ol days (that never really existed) the party would lay out its vision and what it wanted for the country and, more importantly how it would achieve it. The people would trust the chaps at the top to be good chaps who would stand by their policies and their vision.

But today, we are not so lucky. Its not that people do not trust their politicians, its that they do not trust the idea of politicians. The whole concept is damaged even if the individuals are trusted (many are not). The brand is damaged and anyone using that brand is damaged automatically by it. The dilemma they face is simple. The mechanisms available to the politician to put this right are the very things that people do not trust. It is like the sceptic. The sceptic says that we can know nothing. You cannot engage the sceptic because to do so requires the use of knowledge to argue the case. Crudely, it is like trying to argue the case with someone who makes the case that all arguments are invalid. You have to use ‘arguments’ to engage him and by doing so you lose because his position is all arguments are invalid. The politician faces the same problem. The tools at their disposal to rebuild the brand of politician are the very things people do not trust buy and put forward by the very people who are not believed.

On the face of it, impossible to get out of. Well, not entirely but it will require some ingenious thinking and some foresight by a collective group of people who are able to see past the short term issues. I suspect this is not the parties we see today.

There are ways out. The first one requires that someone not just stand for policies but for the second order issue of standing for politics. Not just one party, but all parties. This seems unlikely to be successful as it is the job of opposition to undermine and challenge the government. For one party to take the right stance will need support from all parties. Given that any of them agree to what is needed to be done, they will disagree on how it is to be done and the divide will undermine the outcome.

What do I mean by this? Irrespective of the policies and ‘vision’ for this country, what is needed is the vision for politics. Someone needs to stand for rebuilding the brand. Both parties need to do this. To achieve this they will not be able to function as they do today. The change in culture cannot happen from within and it will take independent external help. It cannot be done by politicians for the very reasons above. So who? There are some candidates. There are enough international bodies out there. Those who go into old dictatorships and try and put in place the skeleton of new democracy. There are international arbitrators who successfully work with the warring parties to bring peace. And finally there is the people who are governed.

What is needed is a set of rules that dictate the framework within which politicians can work that sit outside of the control of the politicians that run the country (and the administrators). The US realised this and managed it. That is not to say that the US is not subject to the nonsense we suffer with our politicians but there are things that can be learned.

A constitution that
is not drawn up by politicians.
is not changeable without referendum.
contains the basic rules on rights as well as the controls on power.
is run and controlled by a new democratic framework which must be allegiance free to any country ruling party. Whose sole purpose is to protect the constitution and run the referendums.
must be voted in by the majority of the voting population and not the majority of the people that voted.
reports and answers to only the people and the crown (strengthens the role of the monarchy and more importantly provides a modern real purpose.)

Someone who controls what it is to be a politician and what politics is. Split the governance of the system from the governance of the country.

Any volunteers?

First mover

2009-09-04T17:46:00.002+01:00

I was considering the difficulty of SME growth the other day. For the majority of IT it is very hard to break into the market. That is not to say impossible but very difficult. It led me to think how many of the really big successful companies have been around since the beginning and how many resulted from newish startups. It is hard to judge on a general note but what is clear is that once a particular IT 'function' is dominated it is hard to take market share. Why? I am no MBA but it strikes me that first mover really does take all if they play their cards right.

Look at the main functions. In terms of operating system the biggest and market dominator is Microsoft. Many OSs have gone and many have gone and none have dented MS significantly. They were the first main stream commercial OS for computers (ignoring the home computer market). If linux has showed one thing it is that first mover is almost impossible to remove.

IBM, again, around since the beginning of computing. IT services though is easier to compete against (EDS, Cap Gem etc) but still, IBM is significantly successful.

Oracle is leading the DB market and was there in the beginning.

So what is the trick to topple the corporations? Competing on product is hard. The cost of R&D is high and new products are either niche (so do not ever get to take on the big market shares by definition) or innovative versions of what the big guys produce in which case it is almost impossible to prevent them provding a similiar innovation into their product set making your obsolete and you unviable.

Dell got into the market not with their product quality or innovation but by simply (in my view) being able to produce at costs no other corp could reach from their bloated starting point.

If any of this has merit then it goes to show how bad Yahoo was. As one of the leading search engines it is incredible that it lost out to Google whose product was simply more innovative. Why could Yahoo not innovative to maintain market share? Who knows.

So how do you topple the giants? Views welcome. It cannot be through product. The giants are easily capable of copying anything you produce. Even if you have a patent if they want to copy it you then have to take them to court for YEARS and you will run out of money before you win and even if you win you lose as they will be out there and you will have been too busy fighting court cases.

The way to beat them must be the Dell approach. The big guys are simply not light enough to change fast. If you want to succeed you have to change either the way the product is delivered (so price) in ways that the corp guys cannot reduce to in time to compete (hard with their buying power) or change the market. If you cannot produce a product on equal terms with the corps then change the market so the customer base wants something different to what the corps supply and that you do. Fashion works this way. Don't copy Prada, produce something and change the fashion so yours is in and theirs is out.

Macs are doing that in my view. People like the interface. People no longer want what MS offers. By this I mean it is a technical product and Macs are a fashion lifestyle thing. MS will simply not be able to become a lifestyle product and for that reason MS will start to lose market share to Mac quite rapidly. Macs now produce things to be seen with. MS copy them but nobody will ever consider it cool to have the latest OS or software. Same for hardware. Nobody wants a clunky old black box. They want a cool looking device. Image and fashion. Company's no longer focus on product benefit, they change the fashion, they alter demand to the product they offer.

Web sites now need to do the same thing. web sites such as facebook are popular but they are not lifestyle. Not in a positive way. It did not change fashion or demand, it was simply first in. Future success will come from changing demand to position your product rather than changing your product to fit demand.

It will be interesting to see if any web sites will give this a go.

Bleeding edge

2009-09-02T18:47:00.003+01:00

The race for the next big thing is on. Google has the edge on maps and search at the moment. Facebook is a novelty that has had its day. The novelty is wearing off and they do not know how to make money out of it. History shows that sites that do not know how to turn visits into revenue do not last the course. Twitter likewise offers little value but at least it now appears to be free. So again, how to make the money? Its days will be numbered and the fad will fade when people realize how little of interest is out there.

Humbug I hear you say. Yes I am always negative about these things because I think the world is lacking truly useful things on the web. Shopping is done. I buy my books online, my food shopping, my travel and my holidays. Useful because it reduces the human interaction overhead. It rarely saves me money (interesting how a visit to a travel agent is now the way to get cheaper travel). The middlemen fad will not last. I did my 'compare the market' the 'confused etc' and various money supermarkets. All produced quotes well over the price of the elephant.co.uk renewal price, including elephant.co.uk. Its not a surprise that the cost of such sites is paid for by, you guessed it, higher prices. But they will never gain control of the user experience enough to dominate a market.

What surprises me is because of this I am moving away from technology and not towards it except where it does truly add value to my life. So where are the real solutions out there. The ones that do not connect me to people I don't want to be connected to, the ones that do not show me who my friends used to be, the ones that ensure that I can write snippets of crap like school kids passing notes in class, these all do nothing for me except fill in a bit of space in my life that could be used doing something useful.

I wonder if the answer lies in consolidating our position. We have a lot of technology now. Take the bandwidth into the house. My bandwidth has increased almost in proportion to the amount my interest in what is delivered across it has dropped.

What I need is
1) A simple way to alarm my flat so I can see what is happening in a secure way while away.
2) Proper and easy video conf with people in high quality that does not require a degree in computing to operate. I have neither a beard or a tweed jacket with arm pads and do not want to learn anything about ports, bandwidth, add ins, dlls etc.

I want things integrated and easy to use.

The next revolution will be usability and that requires no new technology just the world to slow down and focus on quality rather than a quest for novelty.

The prize for the worlds worst weather forecast.

2009-08-23T16:30:00.003+01:00

It must go to Radio 4 this week.

"The weather in some places will be sunny, and others will have showers"

Very useful.

A close runner up to the BBC some years ago who, as the web started to emerge (bbc.co.uk), used to say less and less about the future weather and just state what the weather WAS and refer to their site for forecasts. On several occasions their description of the day's weather was wrong.

Amsterdam

2009-08-16T21:36:00.002+01:00

I have never been to such a binary city as Amsterdam. The city is architecturally beautiful with the canals and the houses. In fact one of the more picturesque cities I have been to. But the other side is as grotesque as the city is beautiful. With such liberal views comes a complete lack of restraint. A misunderstanding of liberalism comes to the surface in Amsterdam. People who believe that liberal tolerance and freedom means anything goes, any behavior regardless of its effects on others arrive in their droves.

The policy on drugs does not mean it has to be flaunted in the public eye. Its ok to smoke pot and their are 'coffee houses' where people can go. It is controlled and their is safety advice (and in fact they advise you not to smoke it if you have never experienced it or it will make you sick). It is mostly done in private and somewhat tastefully. But not for the visitors who think anything goes. The same goes for alcohol. The streets are full of stag events. Not just one or two, but full. Drunk, pissing in the streets, throwing up everywhere stag events. The hen groups were not much better.

A wonderful city brought to its knees by abuses of the very freedoms and tolerance that the Dutch nation prides itself on.

Tri maths

2009-07-29T21:49:00.002+01:00

To say I struggle with maths is an understatement but that is not to say that I do not appreciate the problems and puzzles that maths works to solve. On that basis I was reading an interesting book on Philosophy of Maths. I was following a particular line of argument when they were explaining some theory or other using triangles. The theory they were talking about is not relevant here but what got me was when they described starting with a triangle, draw a line to divide the triangle down the middle. This was easy to follow and then they started talking about the 3 triangles.

What 3 triangles? Divide a triangle in two so where is the 3rd triangle. Of course it was obvious (I am slow). The original triangle and the two internal triangles. That makes 3 right? Obvious really.

But it struck me what this means for numbers. I have one thing, I divide it in two and get 3 things. Not conventional maths. 1/2 is 0.5. So where am I going wrong. Well it must be to do with how we treat numbers rather than values. Is the comparison of dividing a triangle down the middle to result in 3 triangles with dividing 1 by 2 and getting 0.5

More brain power is needed on this. But there seems to be a difference between 1 thing and the value of 1. Triangles are 'things' We have one triangle (1 thing) and then divide it and have 3 things. This is actually comparable to dividing 1 by 2. You end up with two halves (2 things) and arguably the original 1. So you have 3 identifiable things.

If this were right then we could also look at subtraction. If you have the divided triangle (3 things) and take away one of the triangles completely you have only 1 thing. Only 1 triangle is left. So equate that to the numbers. You have 1, you divide by 2 to get the 3 things. Take away on of the halves and you get 1 thing left, a half.

So the treatment of 'things' that can be counted is different to numbers and their values.

Good Death Bad Death

2009-07-26T18:34:00.002+01:00

The papers seem to be full of statistics about people's views on the right to die. According to the press the majority of people polled thought that people should be allowed to end their life early. But the question is actually not about the right to commit suicide but the right to assist someone without fear of prosecution.

In recent poll 85% supported the right to assisted suicide for specific circumstances and 13% for a blanket right. But be clear, it is not a discussion about the right to commit suicide but the right to assist someone to commit suicide.

What is interesting is the parallel subject of the death penalty. We currently do not support the right to assist someone to commit suicide. The reasons are fairly clear and that is the chances of abuse are non zero. There are safeguards that can be put in place but they are not fool proof. We avoid the death penalty because the loss of one innocent life at the hands of the justice system is seen as too high a price to pay for the benefits execution gives society in terms of deterrents and cost savings of holding prisoners for life.

The argument often goes that although there may appear to be absolute certainty in some cases and some crimes so horrific that there are a few who believe the person does not deserve the death penalty the issue is not those cases. The issue is that the cases are not black and white. There are no clear lines but a gradual grey scale of crimes. The killer who commits horrific crimes but who is mentally ill. Or who appears to be mentally ill, or who appears to have self defense arguments (battered wives). There are no clean lines. So we reject the death penalty in exchange for possibly not giving what certain criminals clearly and inarguably deserve.

So is the right to assist someone to commit suicide really parallel. Let's try and compare the circumstances.

1) If the death penalty was in place the decision would be long drawn out and based upon a legal process of jury and judge. The right to die argument has no such process in place.

2) The death penalty is carried out by the state. The right to assist suicide does not appear to dictate such restrictions. The current proposals vary but they could be in the hands of the individual (helping grandma drop the toaster into the bath), the medical profession, the private sector and the government. There is no understanding how the process would be regulated.

3) The execution of a prisoner, I would guess, is rarely done at the prisoner's request. They have no choice but to be put to death. For assisted suicides it is not clear how to determine whether the patient really wants to die. That is not to say there are not cases which appear clear via the media but for every clear case there are probably dozens of less clear cut cases.

There is no clear answer to these questions. What if the patient changes their mind? At what stage would you try to reverse the process? Is it restricted to only terminally ill patients? How long do you have to be terminally ill before you are allowed to commit suicide? If I someone has 2 years left to live when should they be allowed to die? Who makes that decision? Is it really for those with no hope? If I need a heart transplant in the next 2 years and will live in pain all that time should I be allowed to terminate my life to avoid the pain in exchange for the slim chance of getting a replacement heart match and potentially living in pain for the rest of one's life.

Who gets to decide what quality of life is worth preserving? Who decides what level of mental illness is allowed before the decision to commit suicide is taken away? What level of dementia?

There are lots of difficult grey area questions that simply cannot be answered in generality. Not that they cannot be answered its just that any answer is specific to each case and ultimately is only the opinion of one person. Without a universality to the answers each case must be dealt with specifically and by the right process and people. Neither the process or people to undertake this has been defined.

Another angle worth considering is not just the right to suicide or even the right to assist suicide but the right to prevent it. If you have one terminally ill patient and two children, one wants to assist, the other wants to prevent how is this to be dealt with. Down to the wishes of the terminally ill? Ok if they are fully aware but what about if their wishes are doubted.

The argument would seem to lend itself to the fact that the patient's will to die must be beyond reasonable doubt. But that level of evidence was deemed not good enough to execute someone for crimes.

We need certainty and in this world certainty is just not available and on that basis it would seem the right to assist suicide should not be permitted.

I would add as one final argument that the discussion of animals and pets often comes up. This is a grossly flawed argument. Euthanasia is different. That is about putting those suffering out of their misery. We put down dogs if the quality of life would appear to be too poor and the animal would suffer. I have heard several times in the media "I would not allow my dog to suffer this much (referring to a terminally ill relative) and it would be put to sleep.

But that is surely a very different argument. Are we proposing to move from voluntary suicide to killing the suffering (irrespective of their views)? This a is huge step beyond assisted suicide. It is impossible to go down this route due to the problem of marginal cases. Try and define what an animal is. If you base it on intelligence then you will find animals with clearly more intelligence than say mentally ill children. So are we saying it is ok to put mentally ill children out of their misery if they are suffering?

This is an impossibly hard set of questions to deal with and so the only way to err is to not go down this route at all. No death penalty, no assisted suicide.

Pronounce this!

2009-07-19T18:06:00.002+01:00

Here is an interesting experiment you can do on yourself. I woke this morning and was (for some unknown reason) thinking about thinking. I was wondering which parts of the brain deal with thought. What I mean by this is how could you isolate the parts of the brain that deal with thinking. Pick a word. I was thinking about the word 'Harrow'. Try saying, only in your head the word Harrow. No problem right? Sounds fine. Now put your tongue flat on the bottom of your mouth (tip of tongue pressed against your bottom teeth). Now try and think the word 'Harrow' again.

Stunning. Your mind is unable to pronounce the word in your head (I get hawwow)! I am sure this is a well documented phenomenon but I have not seen it before. If you think about what this means. The thought processes that go on in your head must be directly connected to the speech controls. So you do not think words (cannot) that you cannot say. Your physical limitations of your mouth dictate the thinkable words. What is more worrying is that your mind cannot think a word correctly if it detects ahead of time that it would be prevented from saying it correctly due to the tongue being out of position.

It will take some working out. Your mind is hearing (it seems) what WOULD come out if you were to attempt to say the word, even if the speaking is not actualized. What this means to me is that your mind hears the output of your brain of what would be said if you were to actualize it (i.e. go on to speak it).

Weird.

Back to uncertainty

2009-07-06T19:00:00.003+01:00

Following on from the post about Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb I thought I would outline an interesting section to do with project success and failure.

Taleb outlines the life expectancy profiles from life insurance tables.

A newborn female in the developed world is expected to live to around 79.
When she reaches 79 her life expectancy is another 10 years
At 90, she should live another 4.7 years
At 100 she has about 2.5 years
At 119, about 9 months.

He outlines that life expectancy is subject to mild randomness. It is not scalable since the older we get the less likely we are to live.

For projects though he states the opposite is the case. Projects are a scalable

If a project is expected to end in 79 days, on the 79th day if it has not ended it will another 25 days to complete.

If on the 90th day of the project, it has not completed it will have about 58 days to go.

On the 100th day it will have another 89 days to go.

On the 119th it will have another 149 days to go.

On the 600th day of the project it will need an extra 1590 days.

It would be interesting to measure Government IT projects in this way. At what point does one pull the plug?

IT Rocks

2009-07-06T18:43:00.002+01:00

One of the main challenges I like about Philosophy is to try and make it relevant to everyday life. So where does the Myth of Sisyphus sit in the real world? Well, I talked a bit about the meaning of life to you personally but there are less deep questions that this applies to.

The world of IT has increased its pace year on year. One regularly hears the statement that change is the norm. What does this mean? There are two challenges. The first one is how does one keep up with the latest technology? The relentless quest for change and renewal means that your average expert of any technology will be out of date within 3 to 5 years. The second challenge is the that IT is now BAU. It is not groundbreaking, it does not 'save lives' and the outcome of most IT projects is to keep up and not get ahead.

This leads to enormous pressure on your IT department? How do you motivate people to keep on building, learning and delivering when the outcome is largely meaningless and any positives quickly become out of date as the 'next new thing' invalidates everything you have accomplished.

How do you keep people rolling that rock up the hill?

Learning the lesson outlined in the Sisyphus blog entry we must look at how to get the IT department to be valued on things other than the explicit outcomes of the IT project. They should look less at the shiny new technology and more on the process. Take pride in the way something was delivered and not what was delivered. If change is the norm then focus on how agile the department can be and the staff within it.

They must understand their reason for being and be rewarded on that basis. Otherwise morale will suffer.

As always, this is easy to say but hard to implement. Getting staff rewarded and appreciated in this way requires a huge leap for the average HR department. Satisfaction must come from a different place for both staff and employer. If you want change, projects WILL go wrong. Do not focus on when things go wrong but how well people react to these challenges.

Give your staff meaning and you will have a satisfied and happy staff.

Sisyphus

2009-07-05T16:18:00.002+01:00

For those not familiar with the myth of Sisyphus it is a simple tale of a guy who, to cut a long story short, annoys the gods. His punishment is to spend eternity pushing a rock up a hill. Before it reaches the top it rolls back down and Sisyphus must start the task again. The concept of his punishment is eternal labor pursuing a pointless and unaccomplishable task.

So what was his punishment? Traditional interpretations seem to revolve around the eternal labor. To be a punishment one must be able to determine the negative and that negative must be one which is wholly different from normality. To look at our everyday lives mankind struggles on day by day completing hard labor of some form or other, whether mental of physical. Sisyphus is aware if his fate. He sees eternity ahead of him and understands the futility of his work. He is aware of the meaning his life has (or rather does not have). By contrast mankind tends not to understand its end goals, has little or no clue what meaning their life has (or does not have). Sisyphus had everything he needed to be happy, or at least, had no less than the rest of us to be happy. So his punishment is not the eternity of fruitless labor, but his inability to understand that his life is no worse than it was.

All pretty deep stuff. But think about what this means to you. While most of us don't have the joy of rolling rocks up hills, we work in similarly pointless projects or jobs where little of any consequence is actually accomplished. When that job is done we look to the next bigger job that will always seem to be more satisfying, better paid (although we don't have time to spend it), accomplish more (will make a difference). But the grass is rarely greener. We face a new rock, another hill.

So like Sisyphus, to avoid a life of punishment through eternal (or at least life long) labor we need to understand the value of what we do. Not in terms of the rock we roll but why we roll the rock. If we understand that then we can see that happiness does not come from the size of the rock or the size of the hill. Accepting the futility of rock rolling and being happy anyway is the only way to avoid the punishment of Sisyphus.

Part 1 - Black Swans

2009-06-22T16:41:00.002+01:00

For those who are not familiar with the idea behind 'Black Swan' I will explain. It is a simple idea all about induction. Imagine someone were to ask the question "what colour are swans?" If you have ever only experienced white swans then you would say all swans were white. You would base this on your experience. The key here is that no matter how many white swans you see it will not confirm the fact that all swans are white. Even if you studied swans all your life and never see anything other than a white swan you cannot confirm the fact. It only takes 1 black swan to destroy the entire proposition that all swans are white. If you were to believe this fact (all swans are white) then then seeing a black swan would be earth shattering (not really but you get the point). Your whole perspective would be overturned.

Induction is a tricky thing. Yet we rely upon it everyday. In the book Taleb takes this basic issue of the 'Black Swan' and outlines mankind's inability to deal with uncertainty. It is human nature to think inductively, to base their future on what has occurred in the past. Because of this we only predict things (even then inaccurately) based upon a set of experiences we have had. Most of these experiences do not include 'Black Swan' type events. We have never seen a black swan therefore all swans are and will be white.

It is this blindness to uncertainty (the fact that we cannot know the future based upon the past) that permeates every aspects of our lives. Black swans affect us in the form of stock market crashes, natural disasters and in many more subtle ways (terrorism).

Taleb talks at length about our predictions. He really has it in for statisticians and economists who regularly provide predictive models all of which affect policy in government, banking, medicine and in fact just about everything.

The key things I took away from this book when it comes to prediction was

1) The people who predict rarely look back at past predictions and test their accuracy. They simply update their predictions ignoring the the fact that the methods that produced the previous ones are the same as they use for the modern predictions and see no difficulty in this.
2) Understand the error rate. If you are going to predict then understand the error margins. The further out the bigger the effect of the error rendering the far out predictions to be useless. If you do not understand this then don't predict.
3) Silent evidence. Predictions and past performance favours only the winners.

What do I mean by 3. He shows that winners are not necessarily winners because of what they have done or proved. There is a famous approach to marketing stocks. Send 1000 people a marketing letter predicting which way the stock market will go, up or down. The following week do the same thing but for each 50% send 50% up and 50% down. After a number of weeks one or two of the recipients will be amazed that your company will have predicted every rise and fall of the market over a long period (too long to be deemed to be lucky).

In fact many of the winners we see today fall foul of the silent evidence. You only get to see the miraculous winner and not the other 999 losers. The losers are never seen.

If you can grasp these simple points then next time the trending graph goes up in a supplier presentation think about what they are saying.

I had one such presentation the other day. They predicted the rise costs of IT. The fact that all their previous predictions have been wildly out did not stop them. Or even stir them to say 'watch out may be inaccurate'. They followed up with an interesting set of stats.

We have 800 users of this IT system. Here are 5 of them that made a good (but not great saving). The question should be "but what about the other 795?" Yes it is cynical to make such a statement (they could not fit them on) but the fact is that if 800 people made that saving you would want to make such a claim.

So next time the graph goes up,

1) ask the relevant questions
2) ensure that you ask about the silent evidence

Look at these things through more sceptical eyes and it is almost funny quite how bad some suppliers can be.

Black Swan

2009-06-18T08:23:00.002+01:00

I was recommended this book by a rather clever fellow so I thought I would give it a go and see if this was the source of all his wisdom. It was not. But it is still an excellent book and worthy of a few blog entries to help distill my thoughts about it.

So head to the library or the book store and pick up a copy of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. If you are uncertain about whether to buy this book or not, then buy it and he will tell you all about uncertainty.

Modern Loos

2009-06-15T20:18:00.002+01:00

It is rare that I am concerned about the practical things in life. The newly refurbished toilets at our office though have 'solved' a set of problems that really just did not need solving.

There used to be taps. You could get cold water and hot water. These were not the most useful in the world as you could either have cold or very hot but not warm (and nobody puts the plug in even if there were plugs to wash ones hands). The world solved this problem with the mixer tap. You could get hot, cold or warm to your liking. The newly fitted 'hygienic' taps unfortunately take us a step back. They are automatic (good as you no longer have to touch them) but only produce warm water. No choice. No option to have cold (itself a strange climate change option, if you are happy to wash hands in water requiring no energy).

I quite like, after a long grimy day in London, to be able to splash some cold water on ones face to freshen up. No longer an option (perhaps I should buy bottled water instead). This brings me on to the second gripe.

We used to have those blue and white hand towels (you know the ones. they were either tied in so tight you could not get your hands in to dry them or the time between pull downs was so long you had to use the wet bit of the towel from the last guy). But when they worked they worked well. They allowed you to dry your face. The new drier is a cheap copy of the Dyson turbo jet skin remover blaster. You stick your hands in between two high powered jets of air and it blasts the water off rather than dries. They work rather well. However, you try getting your head in one to dry your face! I am not saying that the standard hot air driers are any better (who wants to swivel the nozzle upwards to blast dusty hot air on ones face and look like a dog with its head out of a car window on the M1).

A true modernization that has taken a perfectly workable solution and replaced it with a high tech set that does less than the old solution (albeit faster) at a higher price.

Stop the world I want to get off.

Thank you Mr Ed

2009-06-09T13:09:00.002+01:00

I sometimes think that a country run by Mr Ed (the horse) would be a better place to live. One would imagine that MPs and Ministers saying anything at the moment would be risky and that they should say as little as possible.

I had one of those warm feelings listening to Radio 4 this morning. Not one of those nice warm feelings of a cup of coco on a cold day but the warm feeling you get when your pet puppy decided its time to have a pee on your lap. That moment of disbelief and disgust followed by the need for a shower.

This morning Ed Milliband was being interviewed. As usual the topic of Gordon Brown came up. Ed was very supportive. The whole of the Labour party was right behind Gordon, there were no contenders for leader and no vacancy. He went on to point out that they had no intention of triggering an election and a catastrophic loss to the Tories who he thought had no idea how to lead the country out of these difficult issues.

Bravo Ed.

Let's just run that again in slow motion. You do not want to change leader as it would trigger an election and nobody would vote for them and would vote for the Tories.

Even slower,
You know that the people of this country do not want you as government and you do not want to go to the vote as you would lose.

And even slower
Knowing the population does not want you to govern them anymore, you want to avoid giving them the power to do what you and they know they want. I.e. ignore democracy. You do not think democracy is worth it if it means people vote the wrong way.

And in detail. Everyone will vote for the Tories. Ed does not think they are good (they are not Labour). Ed knows better than the whole population so lets not let them have a vote. What do the population know after all.

Ed, FUCK YOU.

Blugger this!

2009-06-08T16:55:00.000+01:00

I just added Adsense (google) to my page as a way of generating revenue from my wisdom (said in jest). I put on the adsense through the sign up process and then I get an email that says I must verify and they will decide whether I can have this (they asked for god sake). Then (and this is great) they start advertising on my blog (even though I may not be allowed an account to earn revenue I am allowed to show their adverts).

Then Google writes to me and says my blog is a spam blog and will be deleted in 20 days unless I go through a further review process.

And the templates for the ads clash with the sites own standard supplied template.

They must spend tens of dollars on building this stuff. No wonder they are profitable. They save a fortune on competent developers.

This won't hurt. Much.

2009-06-08T16:28:00.002+01:00

1 hour 30 mins to my first exam. Not first exam ever. The first exam for over 10 years and the first piece of hand written work I will have had to do since I left school at 16 22 years ago. My biggest worry is not about the content (although that does worry me) but the fact I will need to write solidly for 2 hours. And then again tomorrow and again the day after.

I can type extremely fast, I do not have to worry about spelling and if I want to change my argument or text I can do so easily. Typing at the speed of thought is useful. I can write at the speed of continental drift and my writing does look like it was done in one of the consequential earthquakes to continental drift.

So why the hell do they force us to write by hand. Ignore the stamina, what are they actually testing. Surely our ability to make philosophical arguments. But hand written ones mean that we have to get the structure right first time.

Its a real shame they still live in the dark ages. Its just not well thought through. And that is a big disappointment for a leading Philosophy department.

Apology not accepted

2009-05-12T20:39:00.002+01:00

It never ceases to amaze me how stupid politicians seem to think the public is. Cameron played a blinder today though by forcing all Tories who have claims that 'smell bad' even to repay the money. Go Cameron. A great political move. If Labour follows suit them are damned, if they do not, they are damned. Inspired move.

But can we actual apologise for long term unethical behaviour? Where does character flaw kick in. Either the MP's who made iffy claims did not realise that it was unethical (you're fired) or they did realise and did it anyway (you're fired).

What we need is resignations, quickly and a lot of them. If nobody resigns over this then our parliament is fundamentally broken. If you can be caught doing near corruption, trying to prevent its exposure (freedom of information) and then defend the activity even though at the same time apologizing then its game over.

Time for a change.

Hollow Men

2009-05-10T22:15:00.002+01:00

One of the key questions that arises from Hollow Man and in fact many tales involving the invisible man is to do with morals. If you could not be caught would you act morally?

Our politicians have answered that very question. The argument over MP's expenses has been bounced around by the MP's themselves. Answers along the lines of

1) Yes but look at the levels of corruption in other countries. We are not like that.
2) We have done nothing wrong, we have acted within the rules.

The first just distracts the debate. The levels of torture is higher in many other countries so a little bit here is OK. A defense I would like to try if I ever get charged with tax fraud.

But it is the second answer I find the most staggering. The MP's taking this line are mixing up what is right and wrong and following the rules and not following the rules. Just because they follow the rules does not make what they do right. It just makes the rules immoral.

If the rules are immoral then it is not as if they had no choice. They could choose as many did not to claim.

It is not just the claiming that is immoral, it is their inability to understand that these claims, even within the rules, were wrong and to do nothing about them. To argue otherwise is unacceptable.

For that reason, and that reason alone, those MP's caught up in this row should resign.

Hollow Man

2009-05-05T18:31:00.002+01:00

The film Hollow Man was on last night. After the scene where they make Kevin Bacon invisible he wakes up and shouts at the other scientists to turn down the lights. The scientist says that it is because his eye lids are transparent to light.

But surely so are his retinas. In other words a consequence of becoming invisible (totally) is to go blind. What fun would that be?

Moral die lemma

2009-04-22T21:22:00.003+01:00

Walking to work over the last week has been surreal. The Tamils are protesting in Parliament Square about the genocide in their country. They have been there for days. Every day hundreds of disinterested workers wander past in a way that only the British could. Even I find myself grumbling at the sheer inconvenience of having to walk around the protesters. Meanwhile 15m away in a tent a young man is on hunger strike dying. But for god sake I have to walk around these people to get to the station at night.

What have we all come to?

But as with all moral issues, things are not that clear. Our immoral attitudes to their plight is sad. But think about what is being done. I see the right to protest as a fundamental right in the UK. I do not condone violent protests or civil unrest. So what to think about the hunger strike? It is suicide. It is also blackmail. The government is being told do as we ask or we will kill ourselves. This is a seriously tricky moral position. The government does not give in to terrorism on principle. Until the IRA of course. So should the government listen to these people? For sure but the move to hunger strike cannot be strengthening their position.

What a world we live in.

Green Olympics

2009-02-20T15:44:00.002Z

I have a fine view of the Olympic stadium from my flat. The towering iron work of the main stadium is going up and the concrete being poured as we speak. It will certainly be impressive and bring a big boost to the area in terms of regeneration of a run down area.

But is this really the right thing to be doing. Given the debate about carbon footprints and the destruction of the planet is changing the hosting of the Olympics every four years a good idea. Why don't we all pitch in for 2017 and build a massive stadium and all surrounding paraphernalia back in Greece (where it originated) and then every year from then on reuse. I am sure that there will be arguments about financial benefit but think of it this way. Once the infrastructure is built then it only takes money to maintain and that could come from contributions every four years. Given the billions and billions of savings that would be made that money could be put towards simply upgrading infrastructure in a host company. How would that work.

Every 4 years a country is picked to be the host of the Olympics. They pick a site in their country where they would have built the stadium and then spend, say 1 billion, regenerating that area. They then move all their people to the Olympics who host the games at the Greek stadium and facilities under their badge.

It has to been greener and far less wasteful than what we do today. The Greeks may do well out of this but they would also pay for all the maintenance etc in between while the host country 'hires' the facilities for the games they are the hosts of.

It must be greener.

Scepticism

2009-02-14T20:29:00.002Z

Scepticism is defined generally as the denial that knowledge or rational belief is possible. For those of you not familiar with the more formal aspects scepticism you can see examples of it in action in films like the Matrix. Neo had no way in his original life to know whether what he experienced was real or a computer generated interaction with his brain. Other famous examples of this type are the 'brain in a vat' (you are held by aliens and your brain is put in a vat and fed computer generated input for your senses) and Descartes demon (early Matrix).

Scepticism seems unbeatable. If we are unable to answer scepticism it undermines the world to the point where we cannot know anything at all. But we do seem to operate on a day to day basis so how do we answer scepticism?

There have been a number of attempts. One is to not start down that road. I.e. avoid the argument. Someone outlined a method to me to achieve this which leaves me unconvinced. They talk about context sensitivity of language. While we are familiar with the context sensitivity of terms like here, there, I etc (we are able to understand that if someone says "it is cold here" that they mean the location they are in and not necessarily the location the listener is in).
It is argued that other words are context sensitive and one of those is the term 'know'. They argue that two versions of 'do you know that the table in front of you is there?' can be read in different contexts to mean different things. In a sceptical way (academic) it means different to our ordinary experience context.

I am sceptical about this argument.

I have a different option. Sceptical arguments are nearly always used to test or criticize other philosophical positions. If every sceptical argument is unbeatable it undermines most other arguments. One way around this is to examine what claim a sceptical argument is actually making.

Traditional interpretation is the definition above. But this claim makes no sense. A sceptical argument undermines everything it is applied to but adds no value. It is not a counter argument. It just debunks.

I think that we can get around this because if we look at the sceptical claim differently we can work around it. Rather than stating that the sceptical claim is about how knowledge is not possible I would claim that the sceptical argument is about proof. The sceptic is actually saying not that knowledge is not possible but that the ability to prove knowledge is not possible.

This is a subtly different definition of scepticism but one that is still as powerful as the original but one that does not undermine the existence of knowledge. We can see that the ability to prove a belief or prove knowledge does not undermine knowledge itself. We can know that there is a table in front of me but I may not be able to prove it.

The next stage would be to look at what provability means for knowledge. If we define knowledge as true justified belief then can we still make a claim to knowledge that is unprovable. Godel had proved that there are things that are true and unprovable (See Godel numbers). So it seems that provability is not only not necessary for truth in all cases but in many cases proof is simply not possible.

So we can easily dispatch scepticism in this way.

Wealth. Mind the gap.

2009-02-14T20:12:00.002Z

The concept of wealth redistribution is one that EVERYONE supports. I can hear the grumbling about such a claim here. The question is a complex one. It has a lot to do with the gap that exists in the society you are in, your position specifically in society, your own level of wealth relative to the society you are in and how the obtained level of wealth was attained

Let us start with some extreme examples as they prove the original statement.

1) You live in a society where there exists one family who has 99% of the wealth in the country while everyone else starves. Surely you would not find this a just and fair society and would not be overly concerned (i.e. would support) the redistribution of wealth.

2) You work hard all your life and build up a good pension through your own hard work and frugal life style. You worked hard every day and weekends to build up a good retirement pot and one day the government in your society decides that your pension pot should be redistributed to people who have not saved and spent every penny they earned as they have no pension. Your wealth is redistributed.

I suspect the majority would support wealth distribution in example 1 but not in example 2. Both occur in societies across the world to some extent at some times. Certain extreme examples have left those with wealth having more than their money taken away. They lose their lives.

Where is the right line? It is a hard balance. But what is clear is that nobody likes extremes. People who make too much money in too easy a way at the negative cost to others tends to put us close to that line. This is why the banking problems have caused so much attention. We were all happy for the bankers to make their billions as they spent it on expensive properties and goods and the money flowed. But now it has proven to be a house of cards we are not so keen and are looking for 'wealth distribution'. Our consistency in thinking here is very poor and shows a strong connection to our personal situation.

But the government needs to remember. Wealth redistribution only works if their is wealth to redistribute. Governments do not generate wealth. Business generates wealth, moving money generates wealth and for that we need not only banks but successful banks. And for that we need successful bankers. Successful bankers do not grow on trees.

Strange New World

2009-02-01T20:02:00.002Z

As someone with a gun license in the UK I am often annoyed by the levels of consistency by the government in this country. Guns are bad is the general view and having widespread gun access is a terrible idea seems to be the norm. I support this position to a large extent. Evidence around the world shows that increase in access to guns results in an increase in gun related deaths. No shit.

Why would anyone want to allow the public general access to something that will increase deaths? We can look at the statistics before gun's were restricted. It is important to note that the government and the majority of people in this country would claim that the rights of the individual gun owner are overridden by the good of society.

So let's look at the stats.

One set of stats shows that deaths were at the rate of 54 per 100,000 population. On top of that there were significant numbers of injuries from gun ownership which were not recorded accurately and so have no exact quotable statistics.

You have to agree that deaths at those rates is unacceptable. As society was fed up of the high loss of life we saw gun control take hold. The arms companies claimed that guns were not the cause of death and that gun owners had the right to ownership and usage of arms.

I have to agree with history. Why would government not put in place arms controls to curb the death rates.

But I have not been quite straight forward. The logic of gun control and essentially banning general usage of guns without good reason has cut gun deaths down to 0.15 per 100,000 in 2002. Success?

Well the other reason I have not been clear is that the statistic of 54 per 100,000 of population is not the death rate by guns but the current death rate by lung cancer caused by smoking. The 0.15 IS the death rate by guns (roughly current). Death rate due to smoking related lung cancer is 360 times higher than gun deaths.

So can anyone tell me why the rights of smokers are different to the rights of gun owners? To put the stats in perspective. Gun deaths in the US where they are relatively freely available is around 3.98 per 100,000.

Nobody would condone going back to widespread gun crime but perhaps it is a simple logical step to say that the rights of people to smoke are no different to the right of gun ownership. Guns kill, cigarettes kill. Isn't it about time we stopped mucking around and just ban smoking.

Monty Hall

2009-01-12T15:53:00.002Z

A friend outlined an interesting problem that shows that intuition cannot be relied upon. It is a maths problem rather than a philosophical one but I have extended the problem to an epistemological one.

The original problem (see internet for more details) goes something like this.

You are in a game show and there are three doors in front of you. One of them hides a car and the other two have $1 dollar bills behind them. The game show host asks you to pick one of the doors (hence the Monty Hall title of the problem). You pick one of the doors and at this point you have a 1 in 3 chance of getting the door with the car behind it. Monty, knowing which door holds which prize, opens up one of the doors with the $1 dollar bill behind it leaving two doors still closed, one with the car, one with the remaining dollar.

The question is, would you change your selection from the first door you picked to the now remaining other door or remain with your selection? Don't forget, you have 2 doors left closed one of which contains the car.

The answer is one which has had the mathematical world in turmoil. You should change your selection away from the one you originally picked. Why? Your intuition problem leads you, like most others, to think that there are two doors and only one with the car so the chances of you having the one with the car are 1 in 2 (or 50/50). Unfortunately you would be wrong. The odds of your original door winning are still 1/3 and so the odds of the other door being the car are actually 2 in 3 or 66.66%.

This took a lot of convincing for me but I have seen the spreadsheet and proof that this is actually the case. But that is just maths. I extended the problem for my friend to make it a philosophical one. Here's how.

You have the two doors left, one with the car and one with the dollar bill. You now know (subjecting to accepting the maths) that your best bet is to change your door choice to the other remaining door. And 66.66% of the time you would win the car.

BUT, I will now walk you out of the studio and I will take a stranger off the street and tell them nothing of what has gone on. I lead him into the studio and show him the two doors (for sake of argument I have taken away the open door so only two doors remain). One contains the car and one a dollar bill. He knows nothing of what has gone on. Monty asks him to pick a door.

Now the interesting thing is that the doors are exactly the same as they were so what are the odds of the stranger picking the car. The odds must be 50/50. There are 2 doors behind them and only one has the car.

So for one person with knowledge of the 3rd door they had a 66.66% chance of winning (proven) if they picked the remaining door but the stranger without this knowledge only has a 1/2 chance. If we ran the test with the stranger they would win 50% of the time.

It is hard to swallow as it implies (to me) that knowledge somehow alters the odds from 2/3 to 1/2 chance. The interplay of odds and knowledge and how the physical results actually match are strange. The original point I was making was that none of this is intuitive so how well can we rely upon intuition?

We can take this a step further. What are we actually saying when we calculate probability. There are two ways, IMHO, that we can look at it.

1) Probability is the odds that any given physical event will occur.
2) Probability is the odds that we will guess the right outcome of any physical event. I.e. it is an epistemological issue.

I vote the later. The Monty Hall problem I think is explained much better when we think of it as 2) and not 1).

The second reason is determinism. If you have a 6 sided die then the probability of the number scored when the dice is rolled is 1 and the probability of the dice landing on any other face is actually 0. In other words, when that dice is rolled it cannot end up on any other face than which it actually does. So given the future landing state of the dice can only ever have landed as it did the physical probability of it was certainty. It could not have been any other way.

The only probability of interest is then type 2). That we don't KNOW what that certain outcome will be so we guess. So probability is about knowledge, or lack of it, rather than to do with anything physical.

Evil

2008-10-19T17:31:00.002+01:00

The term evil is used regularly by the media and if asked, most people would consider that evil is a valid concept. But try defining evil. Its a tough one. We see a news story about a murderer or a multiple rapist and we consider them evil. But what do we mean? Let's be clear though, evil is a categorization and discussion of this term and its categorization does not diminish the acts we commonly term evil.

It would be commonly considered that Hitler was evil. I have no evidential basis for this comment but given his activities I would expect the majority to think that if there were a category of evil, then there are few that would deserve this categorization more.

The key is the definition of evil, not the word and requires us to take a look at objective and subjective (and relative) views. Lets start by looking at what could be termed evil. We could split the world into beliefs (thoughts) and actions. Let's start with actions because we can argue back to beliefs and thoughts later. Somebody performs action X and we consider that action X to be evil if..? We would not consider an act evil unless we could be sure that we knew the consequences. An act can only be evil surely if there is a detrimental outcome. But this consequentialist view is not straight forward. What if Hitler were to have ordered the death of the Jews but it had not gone though (the war had ended for example). Would that act be evil? Most would consider the answer yes. A position I would support. The intention was there even if the outcome was not intended.

So it would be fair to say that a immoral act requires motivation to carry out the deed even if the consequences do not follow through. So the question then is that in order to do any moral act one must have the right motivation (or intention). This has some unusual implications. If evil has to have immoral intentions then we must face the fact that the person has a standard normal moral set of principles. I.e. to do evil requires intention to do an immoral act whilst at the same time have a moral framework in which this act is recognized as a moral act. In other words, to do evil requires the person to have a moral framework to make a conscious decision to act outside of.

But if this is true then can we be sure that evil is the right categorization for Hitler? This would require Hitler to have a normal (typical) moral set of principles in which he recognized his acts as immoral and committed them anyway. Or is it more plausible that his moral principles are significantly different to ours and he sees his acts as not immoral (evil) within his framework. This is the objective/subjective framework.

If we take the first position (he acts outside of his moral principles knowingly) then we may find this to me more common than we think. My previous discussions about animals and Eichmann highlight this. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of killing and eating animals we would mostly agree that we would want no animals to suffer as part of the process. So we all have a moral principle which says do not harm animals. But we are happy to eat meat which is from animals which have suffered in upbringing and in many cases in the slaughter. In other words we allow to happen something which we, at the same time, hold to be immoral. Does that make us evil?

Hitler arguably had a moral framework in which he did not recognize his acts as immoral. We, on the other hand, eat animals which have been mistreated knowing that this is immoral against our own moral principles.

Red Pill Blue Pill

2008-09-24T21:23:00.004+01:00

You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up and believe...whatever you want to believe.

You take the red pill.....you stay in wonderland...and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Too many people take the blue pill. The red pill world for us is even more disturbing than the reality outside of the Matrix. Best keep taking the blue pill.

Ethics at their worst

2008-09-17T20:52:00.002+01:00

I was reading a book 'What is Good?' by A.C Grayling where he discusses at length what makes for a good life and the views of some of the greatest minds in history. A great read.

As with all such books the subject turned to the issue of the holocaust. Specifically he raises the issue of Adolf Eichmann who is well documented as stating his disgust at the events which he himself instigated and controlled.

About his visit to Chelmno where they were still gassing people in trucks he said "I did not stay to watch the whole maneuver. I couldn't stand the screams: I was too anxious..."

As for his trip to Auschwitz he said "I preferred not to watch the way they asphyxiated people... They burned the corpses on a gigantic giant iron grill.. I couldn't stand it: I was overcome from nausea".

The main thrust of the argument (although Grayling questions this he never provides an explanation) is how can someone at the same time be so disgusted and horrified by what they see and yet be responsible and do nothing about it. And Eichmann was clearly involved. In many ways his open disgust for the activities he was responsible for makes him even more loathsome.

I noted a parallel in a current book I am ready regarding. It replays the story of "Pig' by Roald Dahl. I will not relate the whole story but it was the story of a kid who did not eat meat all his life due to his aunt but when she dies he tries it and, curious, makes his way to the slaughterhouse where he is disgusted by what he sees. I will not spoil the ending.

This story in itself is not the relevant part. His disgust at the processing of a live pig into meat was. The author of the book discussing this tale spent his life moving between vegetarianism and eating meat.

What got me thinking was there are few adults now who do not understand what goes on in a slaughter house, who do not know in many cases how poorly animals are kept and of course that many of the resulting animal products are simply not required. Most people would be nauseated by the sites we see in a slaughterhouse and few would care for the cries of the animals. Few would approve of watching a pig being bled to death.

And yet today I ate meat. Yesterday I ate meat and I have no doubt tomorrow I will eat. I am not making the argument that the killing of animals is in any way parallel to the killing of animals. Simply that knowing my reaction to seeing animals killed would be similar to Eichmann's to seeing the deaths of humans and yet I still eat meat. A parallel I for one feel very uncomfortable about.