16.05.11
People often think that the most powerful people in the country are politicians.
They make the laws that rule us all. Despite their power, they are elected by us, the people and we can throw them out of office every five years. There are more than 60 million of us in this country. If most of us want something, a politician hoping to be elected will probably promise it. If the government oversteps the line, there are potentially 60 million people to scare the living bejeezus out of them by violently smashing through their police lines and then queuing politely for their turn to sit around peacefully in Fortnum and Masons.
So, perhaps it is us, the people, who are most powerful. But how would people have protested against the Iraq War if they didn't know it was happening? In the most part, we got that information from the news industry. If they hadn't reported it, or if they'd reported only the pro-war arguments and none of the anti-war arguments, then how many would have turned up to that protest?
This is the bluntest of tools the news industry has at its disposal. They have other, more subtly sharp ones, all the more effective for being less noticeable.
It would have been difficult for the media to suppress the flaws in the stated arguments for the Iraq war, because they were quite obvious and so a lot of people would have noticed them and passed them on by word of mouth or the internet.
But not all flaws in arguments are so obvious, and some things do go unreported.
Recently, the press ran several days of coverage on the
issues surrounding
equality - equal pay, equal opportunities,
and so on. Between their news pieces, editorials and comments they covered almost every aspect of the issues.
Except, in all the excitement, they somehow neglected to mention that the government was running a public consultation on exceptions to the age discrimination laws (or if they did, it wasn't very prominent - I didn't see it and I was actively looking for it). This
consultation was published on the government's
Central Office of Information website, which I'm guessing journalists must check regularly for government press releases. Or perhaps they rely on press releases via email, I don't know. There are now less than 10 days left on this consultation.
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13.05.11
I don't like Twitter. Here's why.
The 140 character limit encourages the use of URL-shortening services such as
Bitly.
The problem with such services is firstly, that you can't see what website you're being redirected to - it could be the BBC, or Goatse, or a site infested with malware and viruses. There's no way of knowing - hovering over the link tells you nothing, unlike normal links.
Secondly, the way the URL-shortening service works means that anyone who clicks a shortened link is briefly passed through the shortening services' webservers, meaning they can track everything you click. At best, they'll keep that data to themselves. A slightly worse scenario might be that they make that tracking data public. Just like Bitly does.
The worst case scenario is they use a combination of tracking data, cookies and information gathered from other sources, such as advertising, to build a profile of the people you know or follow on Twitter and what things interest you, and then sell that data to the highest bidder.
It would have taken 9 tweets to explain this simple point. That's another thing I don't like about Twitter.
Comments / Share / Permalink13.05.11
Perhaps in this internet age it would be more accurate to say, "those who fail to learn from history are doomed to misquote people and then attribute the quote to the wrong source".
Try a Google search for the bits of the quote you feel sure about and see what I mean.
Having spent a few years carefully reading and sifting the news available online, I have come to the conclusion that critical thinking is a vital skill that everyone needs. I sometimes see comments on news websites calling for it to be taught in schools. It's a long time since I was in school, so I don't know what's being taught these days, but I
was taught critical thinking skills at school - in history lessons, for example.
All the required elements were there - think about the source of the information, and what ulterior motives they might have. Look at the way information is presented - what's being pushed to the front as important, and what is being omitted? Did the source have access to all the facts? What was the social background to the source?
In maths we were taught to examine statistics and recognise the tricks used to misrepresent data. In history, we even studied Goebbels - repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. In English we saw how language can be used to persuade and beguile, though at the time I didn't even begin to suspect just how deep that particular rabbit hole went.
In general, my learning experience was a good one: I was lucky to have good teachers and the teaching methods employed in the late eighties and early nineties seemed to really suit my particular psychology. I found most lessons quite interesting, which always helps. But my point here is about what wasn't taught, and what went unsaid. All those valuable critical thinking skills I learned turned out to be useless to me, for the simple fact that no-one ever taught me (as far as I remember) that they needed to be applied to everything, all the time. Not just against history.
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10.05.11
David Braben, the programmer famous for the classic
Elite and
Elite II: Frontier games, is heading up a charitable foundation that aims to provide a £15 Linux PC the size of a memory stick, whilst providing today's schoolchildren with access to the sort of flexible computing experience that was more common in the past.
The Raspberry Pi is (according to the provisional specification) based on the ARM11 700Mhz processor. It's to be loaded with 128MB of memory, a USB2.0 connector and a composite/HDMI video output. This means it can use a TV as a display, while the USB connector allows cheap and standard accessories to be plugged in, including mice and keyboards (and much more). It will also have a SD/MMC/SDIO memory slot and a 'general purpose' interface. The operating system will be Ubuntu, and software will include Iceweasel (a re-branded version of the popular Firefox web browser), Koffice (similar to Microsoft Office) and the Python programming language. Braben says he hopes the Raspberry will be ready within the next 12 months.
128MB might sound like a very small amount of memory for a modern operating system, so after reading about Raspberry Pi I tried installing the latest version of Debian Linux (Ubuntu is based on Debian) on an old 128MB machine*. After removing some of the unneeded software components, it was actually perfectly usable, if a bit slow at times. These are only the provisional specifications, though, and I expect Raspberry Pi will strip down the software down more carefully than I did. Also, I was using KDE4 as my desktop manager (which is roughly equivalent to Vista/Windows 7 in terms of fancy graphics and polish), whilst Ubuntu's default desktop environment is probably a little lighter on the processor and memory.
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29.04.11
In addition to the usual tricks used in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), there's an aspect of the way Google ranks pages that seems to get little attention, yet if it's true then it opens a potentially serious weakness in Google's rankings, and possibly in their entire business. I suspect that this flaw, if not corrected, might forever place them at the mercy of social networks of one sort or another.
Google is the world's favourite search engine. In theory that means getting a website displayed on or near the front page could make a huge difference to the amount of traffic it receives, and that makes page ranking worth money. The internet, as they say, is serious business.
Naturally, that leads to people studying the way Google works and then adjusting their websites to fit the pattern. Thus, the SEO industry was born.
I've learned a fair bit about SEO over the years, though I don't deliberately optimise this site for rankings. I just designed it in such a way that it would have a fair chance, nothing more.
SEO is complicated, but the important parts of it are pretty well known - have good content and acquire incoming links. There's all sorts of technical bits and pieces too, but this isn't meant to be a technical article so I won't go into all that.
Supposedly, one of the ways that Google judges the quality of a webpage is by how many people do a search and then click on that website.
That seems sensible, but it opens Google's rankings to being gamed. It would be easy to make a page look more popular than it really is. Friends of a website owner could repeatedly do searches and click the link, making it rise up the rankings. Even worse, companies could recruit hundreds of people across the country or the world and have them click links for their clients. It would be very difficult for Google to figure out which clicks were genuine. Worse still, a well-designed botnet could do the same thing, with the owners of the compromised machines having no idea that their machine was quietly doing SEO on behalf of a hacker.
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18.04.11
Poor Nick Clegg.
Before the election he was perhaps the most popular man in politics - even other politicians were clambering over each other to agree with him. Or so the press would have us believe, anyway. Actually, while some newspapers were singing his praises, others were mocking him. Arguably the latter sections of the press were those that might be seen as part of the establishment, and their mockery acted as reverse-psychology support for his anti-establishment positioning. I may be over-thinking that, but probably not.
I'd guess Clegg's support came from two main groups. Firstly, political tacticians who probably wanted to see Labour removed from power, but didn't trust the Conservatives to rule by themselves and thus wanted a coalition government. The second group of supporters were probably a little less politically astute and supported him because of the policies he said he wanted to bring in.
Many of Clegg's policies were extremely populist, but perhaps rather unrealistic. The biggest clue was probably his opposition to Trident. On the face of it, it might sound like a brilliant idea - the US are our allies and they have plenty of nukes, let them take up any slack while we save money. Or, you could take the compelling view that nuclear weapons are just downright evil and wrong, and we should set a good example to the world by reducing our ability to project death across the globe in the hope that others will see the light and be nice to us.
It would be nice if the latter argument was true. If the world's dictators were sane, kind and reasonable, and democratic states were made up of voters who were well-informed and logical, then it might just work. The evidence of history and current affairs suggests this is not the case. Even if I'm wrong about this, there are probably deep-rooted political reasons why it doesn't matter one way or the other.
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12.04.11
In the recent budget, the government once again put up prices on tobacco and alcohol - just like every government always does. Rolling tobacco in particular took a heavy hit, going up about 50p on a 25g bag, or £1 on a 50g bag.
The details weren't announced in the budget speech, but were buried in the budget document. The alcohol increases weren't really mentioned either, they were also hidden away. Those changes don't take effect until October, and came about as a result of changes made in 2008.
The government is also steering towards forcing cigarette manufacturers to put their products in plain packaging, suggesting that this will somehow reduce the appeal of perhaps the most addictive substance in the world.
In my experience cigarette manufacturers, like many other companies, follow predictable patterns with their products. Every now and then, a new product will arrive which is packaged similarly to some other similar product, but is cheaper. The similar branding gives a clue to the customer that the new, cheaper brand X is similar to Brand Y, allowing customers to switch. Once hooked, the company slowly increases the price over the years that follow. Eventually the profit margin becomes so great that there is room in the market for a similarly-branded but cheaper competitor to steal their customers away, and the cycle begins again.
Quite often, the 'competition' is actually between different products made by the same company, as the tobacco industry is heavily monopolised - most products are made by either Imperial Tobacco or British American Tobacco, in much the same way that a lot of household cleaning products are made by either Unilever or Reckitt. Despite this, there is some competition.
Plain packaging may reduce this competition, by making it difficult for competing products to advertise themselves as being similar to a more expensive alternative. Customers may find themselves locked in to a particular brand, at which point the manufacturer may feel free to crank up their profit margins safe in the knowledge that their customers won't know where else to turn to get a better deal.
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08.04.11
Robert Peston muses on the latest developments in the Murdoch phone hacking scandal.
The interesting thing about this scandal is that it very much looks like a case of the stupid being caught and the more deviously clever getting away, as is so often the case.
From what I've read, it appears that (most of?) the phone 'hacks' have consisted of celebs having their mobile phone voice mail accessed by the press because they didn't bother to change the default PIN on their voice mail service.
Mobile phone providers generally provide a service whereby if you ring a mobile number and get put through to voice mail (for example by not answering the phone), then you can not only leave a message but also listen to recorded messages if you know the PIN. Not changing the default PIN is rather like leaving your front door unlocked. Yes, the mobile phone companies should do more to make customers change the default number. Yes, it's unethical and perhaps downright criminal for anyone to take advantage of someone who doesn't know what they're doing. Yes, it's foolish to not read the manual and secure your voice mail.
My reason for highlighting the stupidity of the celebs for not changing their PINs is not to ridicule them (who hasn't made a mistake of this sort, at some point?) but to point out that the simplicity of this so-called-hack means it is easy to do, and also easy to track down and catch. The unsaid reverse of this, is that there are probably much more sophisticated hacks currently undetected and unreported.
On a 'social engineering' level, it would be somewhat surprising if there wasn't some bribery or blackmail going on within the low-paid workers of major communications companies, such as Virgin or BT. As communication hubs for telephone and internet, they'd be obvious and valuable targets, and the people who work there who have access to the recordings, logs and traffic probably aren't paid enough for all of them to resist bribery, nor sufficiently vetted to resist blackmail. If that sounds far-fetched, then perhaps you didn't read the news stories quite recently about phone banking call centre staff giving up information about their clients for money in their lunch breaks, as reported in the press. I'll add a link if I can find it again.
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10.03.11
Lord Hutton of Furness' report on recommendations for the future of public sector pensions was published today.
The full text of the Hutton Report, running to 215 pages, can be found here.
As was widely predicted, Lord Hutton has recommended a
Career Average Revalued Earnings (CARE) scheme to replace the current final salary schemes.
Both
The Guardian and
The Independent report that public sector unions are threatening large scale strike action over the pensions reforms.
Lord Hutton's main recommendations are as follows (taken directly from the report):
Recommendation 1: The Government should make clear its assessment of the role of public
service pension schemes. Based on its framework of principles, the Commission believes
that the primary purpose is to ensure adequate levels of retirement income for public service
pensioners.
Recommendation 2: Pensions will continue to be an important element of remuneration. The
Commission recommends that public service employers take greater account of public service
pensions when constructing remuneration packages and designing workforce strategies. The
Government should make clear in its remits for pay review bodies that they should consider how
public service pensions affect total reward when making pay recommendations.
Recommendation 3: The Government should ensure that public service schemes, along with
a full state pension, deliver at least adequate levels of income (as defined by the Turner
Commission benchmark replacement rates) for scheme members who work full careers in
public service. Employers should seek to maximise participation in the schemes where this is
appropriate. Adequate incomes and good participation rates are particularly important below
median income levels.
Recommendation 4: The Government must honour in full the pension promises that
have been accrued by scheme members: their accrued rights. In doing so, the Commission
recommends maintaining the final salary link for past service for current members.
Recommendation 5: As soon as practical, members of the current defined benefit public
service pension schemes should be moved to the new schemes for future service, but the
Government should continue to provide a form of defined benefit pension as the core design.
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26.02.11
Council recruitment is at an all time low right now, but these tips apply to a wide range of public sector organisations and other areas that tend to be influenced by the public sector's methods, such as universities and charities. Just bear in mind that the latter examples are free to be a bit more individual in the way they work.
Of course, all the usual advice for job hunting applies, there's plenty of good tips on recruitment websites and similar: Do some research on the place you're applying to. Do try to guess what questions will be asked and plan some answers. Don't put your feet on the table during the interview. Do write your application form in blue or black ink. Don't use crayon or your own blood. That sort of thing.
Public sector recruitment follows rules and a formula that is supposed to make recruitment fair and open to anyone who has the skills to do the job, no matter where those skills were learned. For example, if you've done something as a hobby or as part of school work then in theory that's just as good as skills picked up in a proper job.
Thanks to this system, if you have the right skills and you follow the formula on the application process, you should be almost guaranteed to get an interview.
The Application Form
Forget CVs. The public sector never accepts CVs, they judge everything on how you fill in the application form. If you send a CV, they will ignore it. Most of the application form will be quite easy to understand - just follow the instructions. Most of it is simple personal details and the previous work history and education history sections are basically just in a familiar CV format anyway. The part where you really need to pay attention is the big blank boxes they leave for 'Any other information', or 'Information in support of your application', or similar. Sometimes these sections are split between a few different sections, such as 'Outside interests and hobbies relevant to the application' and 'Relevant work experience'.
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09.02.11
The government has
published a code of recommended practice for local authorities on data transparency, and has opened a consultation on the proposed measures. The consultation is open to anyone and ends on 14th March. Responses can be given by email, post or online on their forums. See the above link for details.
The government has already asked that councils provide details of all spending over £500, and many councils have already complied -
you can see the results here.
There are still a number of
councils dragging their feet, such as Nottingham City Council. This new code of practice strengthens the government's position in requiring the data from local authorities, as it is being issued as an official code of practice under Part 2 of the Local Government, Land and Planning Act.
The proposed data requirements are as follows:
- All expenditure over £500, with grants and payments under contract to the voluntary and social enterprise sector clearly itemised and listed.
- All senior council staff are to have their salaries published, along with job descriptions, responsibilities, budgets and numbers of staff. Senior staff are defined as anyone earning more than £58,200, which is the starting wage for a senior civil servant [Note: a 'senior' council worker wage is usually much lower than this, at around £40,000.] Staff can opt-out of having their names published.
- An organisational chart of the staff structure of the local authority.
- Councillor allowances and expenses.
- Copies of contracts and tenders to businesses and to the voluntary community and social enterprise sector.
- Policies, performance, audits and key indicators on the authorities fiscal and financial position.
- Data of democratic running of the local authority including the constitution, election results, committee minutes, decision-making process and records of decisions.
The proposed code of practice also states that local authorities should create an inventory of all the data they hold, and sets out a number of basic (but useful) technical requirements, such as requiring that the data be published in CSV format (Comma Separated Variable - a data format readable by a very wide range of applications, including the ever-popular MS Excel).
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29.01.11
Tony Blair's been in the news a lot recently thanks to his second appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry into the handling of the Iraq War.
There's been various news stories suggesting (again) that Blair had made up his mind to go to war long before the government 'officially' decided to go to war. He also stands accused (again) of running an almost presidential style of government, and not properly consulting his cabinet.
I've recently been reading
The Blair Years - Extracts from The Alastair Campbell Diaries, published in 2007.
What does Mr Blair's long-time spin doctor and loyal supporter have to say about it all?
Strangely, his book pretty much confirms it all, though admittedly it's somewhat open to interpretation - he certainly never explicitly says Blair made up his mind about Iraq beforehand (it would be strange if he did, all things considered), though he's fairly clear that Blair called the shots and cabinet consultation was very limited.
On the latter point, Campbell tends to look at everything through a prism of what is "professional", and presents a very black-and-white view of either working for the good of the party, staying "on-message" and toeing the line, or working against it. Cabinet members who spoke out, or spoke their mind, are regularly described in very derogatory terms, and Blair is said to have spoken in much the same way. Many of the female cabinet members in particular are derided for their lack of what Blair and Campbell see as 'professionalism', and even the popular Redcar MP Mo Mowlam is blasted, and her importance in the Northern Ireland negotiations is talked down compared to her own, more detailed description of events in her book,
Momentum.
Campbell's description of the final cabinet meeting to discuss Iraq essentially describes the cabinet being railroaded into agreeing what had already been decided.
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19.01.11
The coalition government published its Localism Bill on 13th December 2010. This legislation weighs in at 184 pages for the Bill and 247 pages for its schedules and is designed to implement many of the government's policies that have already been set out, including laying the legal foundations of the Government's "Big Society" vision. It's wide-ranging, covering all sorts of issues of interest to local government.
The Bill received its second reading on 17 January 2011, and will go on through three more stages in the House of Commons and five stages in the House of Lords (possibly being changed as it goes) before becoming law. An explanation of the process can be found
here. The full text of the Bill can be found
here.
The BBC news website has a shorter summary of the Bill
here. This summary doesn't include all the measures covered by the BBC, but it concentrates in greater depth on measures of particular interest to local government and public power and democracy.
Community Right to Challenge - Public Sector Competition
[Part 4, Chapter 3 of the Bill]. Any voluntary or community group, charity, parish council or two or more council employees are entitled to put forward an "expression of interest" to a council, indicating that they would like to run one of the council's services, or help to run a service.
The council must consider the expression of interest, with particular consideration of the possible social, economic or environmental benefits of accepting the proposal.
If the proposal is accepted, the council must then begin a procurement exercise for that service.
Additional Freedoms for Councils
Councils are to be given a "general power of competence". [Part1, Chapter 1 of the Bill]. They are to be allowed to anything they are not expressly forbidden from doing. This enables a council to do pretty much anything a person can do. In particular, councils can run a business or provide a chargeable service of any kind anywhere in the UK or abroad, for any reason. The income from a service is not allowed to exceed the costs of running the service. This does not alter the rules under part 6 of the Local Government Act 1972, part 1A of the Local Government Act 2000 or any arrangements that "authorise a person to exercise a function of a local authority."
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11.01.11
Nottinghamshire-based activist group 'Notts SOS' are holding a public meeting on Saturday 15th January 2011 to share ideas and discuss strategies for resisting local cutbacks.
Formed in September 2010, the group aims to "oppose cuts to services, job losses and cuts in benefits" and "support workers' organisations, service users [and] community groups in fighting cuts in Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire."
The group has so far managed to organise protests and attract
national media coverage.
Further details of the meeting can be found at the
Notts SOS website.
Comments / Share / Permalink08.03.10:
National Public Sector Strike - Day One200,000 civil servants walk out on strike, protesting against proposed changes to pensions and savings in redundancy and early retirement payments
21.01.10:
A Tough Year Ahead for Council Employees?Will 2010 be a harsh year for the public sector? Councils everywhere are slimming their workforce and making cutbacks in the face of a seemingly weak economy
10.01.10:
A Local Shortage of Grit?Is the grit shortage confined to a local area? Here's a look at two regional newspaper reports for comparison
02.01.10:
The State of Pay 2009A quick look at the 2009 Office of National Statistics' Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings
30.12.09:
Tory StoriesJohn Cruddas, MP creates 'Tory Stories' website.
06.11.09:
November protest at County Hall - Fair PayWorkers from Nottinghamshire County Council assembled outside County Hall in protest against the proposed changes to their terms and conditions of employment.
