SOB story

I am very cross about the media coverage of bus passes. Take this headline:

End of the road for go-anywhere bus pass


or this from the BBC web site:

Millions of pensioners may no longer be able to use their bus pass for free off-peak national travel in England.


Ever since the concession was widened last year The Times & others have treated this as some kind of freebie for affluent retirees, with the emphasis on jaunts from Lands End to John o’ Groats


In London free travel on public transport has been available to those over retirement age (Twirlies) for well over a quarter of a century. This is a valuable concession in an area where use of public transport extends much further up the socio-economic & income scales

And Greater London covers a huge area. Free travel would be much less valuable (& tedious to apply) if available only within your home borough

I have written here before (under the Economics of the bus pass label) about the complications caused by local authority boundaries outside London, which affected in a seemingly arbitrary way the use of bus passes for ordinary trips for things like shopping or medical appointments, never mind gallivanting

The only sensible, straightforward, easy to understand & apply solution to this problem seemed to be to make passes ‘go anywhere’ on all local bus services

Well before the new rules were introduced last April someone in the local bus company had worked out a way of using the pass to travel ‘free’ all the way to London

I cannot remember how many days it would have taken, but the implication was clear. Unless you were prepared to sleep in bus stations (passes are available for travel only between 9.30 am & 11 pm) or could find people to put you up overnight, it is much cheaper, simpler, more comfortable & convenient, as well as quicker, to buy a Senior Rail Card & go by train

The new system has caused a few obvious problems , though we hear most about the effects on tourist areas. I suspect the burden may fall more heavily on large urban centres. One would hope that the Transport Department is monitoring the real patterns of usage to identify where the costs really fall

The solution now proposed is to withdraw the concession for services, such as London to Brighton, or sight seeing tours, which do not seem to be exactly local, by withdrawing free passes for services on which more than half the seats are bookable

My fear is that, either through sloppy drafting, or ‘clever’ interpretation by bus companies or councils, the term ‘bookable’ may well turn out to be applicable to most bus services. What, for example, is the status of the paid for, available to all age groups, ‘go anywhere’ daily, weekly or period passes? Do they count as booked seats?

If so, we risk losing all the social & economic benefits of independent mobility for people who have no other means of transporting themselves

Links

Why do it? Because it's there

Richard Elloway becomes first pensioner to travel free from Land's to John o'Groats
Free bus travel for the over-60s: Aren't they the lucky ones

Something new every day

Ants can & do talk to each other. They have a built in washboard & plectrum thingy which they rub together to produce sound

The queens issue instructions to the workers

Some other creatures have learned to take advantage of this by imitating ant sounds to bend them to their will

Links
Large Blue's queen 'impressions' fool ant colonies

Butterfly mimics 'talk' like ants - University of Oxford

Related post
Ants & thunderstorms

Time to pay off our debts

Suppose you are a junior Treasury official charged with actually making the real arrangements to pay off our national debt

You do it by doling out £1 coins at the rate of 1 per second

If you had started at midnight on Saturday, working round the clock, you could pay off £1 million in time to go off for this year’s Easter break, starting with the ½ day privilege holiday on Maundy Thursday afternoon

£1 billion might mean delaying your retirement until Easter 2041

If you have to pay off £1 trillion, & time’s arrow goes into reverse, you could celebrate completion by going to see the new paintings at the Chauvet Cave

Link

Timeline: 32,000 years ago

Keeping an eye on children

I was trying to get more details of ContactPoint, the £224 million child protection directory that contains the names, addresses, dates of birth, GPs & schools of all 11 million people aged under 18 in England, but the web sites are, to put it mildly, very slow to load & unavailable

I was particularly interested in finding out who is responsible for providing the information in the first place, who checks that it is correct, & who is responsible for keeping the whole thing accurate & up to date. Are parents obliged to register the child? What, if anything, is the responsibility of the school or GP if a child leaves? Is there a link with birth registers?

And what about emigration?

There used to be a responsibility on patients, (which may still exist for all I know, I just no longer have a current NHS card to tell me so) to inform your doctor if you expected to be out of the country for 3 months or more. Those were the days when a GP was paid a fixed amount for each patient registered, & he would not be paid for the period you were away

Not surprisingly, many people did not think to do this, even if they were emigrating permanently. The NHSCR still picked up details of a surprising number of emigrating families however – from milkmen

Doorstep delivery was still the norm in those days; milkmen collected the vouchers which paid for a pint of milk a day for each pre-school child who had been weaned off powdered milk

Come close – let me whisper: the Government was pushing full fat milk on children

Rosemary Hignett would not approve

But the milkmen often passed on the intelligence as to why vouchers were no longer required

*****

I wrote the above on the same day, but before I had read, The Times report that work on the database had been halted because of security flaws

Most alarming, to me, of these flaws is that the ‘shielding’ of the records of vulnerable children disappears every time that the database is updated automatically from central government databases such as the one for child benefit. This can mean, for example, that original birth details of adopted children can be exposed

Automatic correction of one database by another, which is under completely separate administrative control, is the sort of thing which ought to ring alarm bells & set the red lights flashing for anyone who has the slightest experience of such systems. It is just asking for trouble, except, perhaps, when introduced slowly & carefully to allow all concerned to appreciate the kind of problem which may arise - not all of which can be foreseen, & especially not in such a sensitive area

Take the example that was reported just a day or so later, of the letter sent to the parents of a girl who had died, telling them they must improve her school attendance. Of course the record cannot be completely wiped in such circumstances – that would just lead to another set of hurtful happenings such as They just wiped out her name, it was as if she had never been – but the software was not designed to cope. As the school said, ‘We should have checked every single letter before it was sent’, but that of course would put a dent in the kind of efficiency savings such systems are supposed to deliver

My final worry about the database is: What happens when the child reaches 18?

Here is a record containing sensitive information, some of which the ‘child’ may wish to dispute, & almost certainly has the right to demand should not be accessible to anyone else, ever, without their express consent. The State cannot, I hope, claim any over-riding right to it

Link

Security flaws halt work on ContactPoint child database

Letter shock for grieving parents

We are all sinners now

Less than a decade after Emma Darwin wrote to her husband about her fears for eternity Charlotte Bronte put an alternative solution into the mouth of 10 year old Jane Eyre when she was interrogated by Mr Brocklehurst about how she proposed to avoid going to Hell:

I must keep in good health & not die

A determination which seems to have been adopted on our behalf by the NHS & the politicians who set targets for it

Sometimes it is hard not to conclude that these people believe that, rather than just its wages, death itself has become the Sin & Life its penance (to be measured out in numbers)

The Westminster School

Consider a small school – just 20 teachers, total budget £1 million a year

So each teacher earns £50,000 a year, right?

Well, right if you think that education is the business of a school, education is provided by teachers, so all that the school earns is earned by its teachers

But they need books & pens, papers & computers. A school secretary, a caretaker, a dinner lady. The buildings have to be heated, cleaned, repaired & maintained

By the time all those costs are taken care of the teachers will be lucky to get an average of £25,000 in their personal pay packet, or £20,000 after tax, National Insurance, pension ….

*****

Barristers are often said to earn high 6 or 7 figure sums, usually on the basis that someone adds up the total of the fees that have been paid for each of their cases

But barristers must pay for the rent of their chambers, the salaries of the clerks & secretaries, the computers & everything else a law office needs. How much is left for their personal pay check & do you subtract the sums they must pay for wig & gown, travel to court, maybe a stay in a hotel if the case is long & the distance away from home great, before or after it gets called personal income?

*****

Back to our school. Suppose it is in the private sector. The headmasters wife does a lot of the administrative & pastoral work & organises speech day etc. Is she entitled to her own personal pay check for this? Can the head employ his brother or his daughter as a teacher in the school?

*****

Now consider another type of ‘job’ – one which dictates which area you live in (but provides no actual accommodation) for as long as you hold the job, even though you have no contract of employment & are periodically forced to undergo what may be a very whimsical reselection process.

You are also required to work for a number of days each week in Central London, even though the journey from your home is too far, or takes up an unreasonable amount of time, for it to be done each day. So you need somewhere to stay in central London on the nights in question

It is unthinkable that people should be excluded from this job because of arbitrary rules which make it impossible for some to carry its responsibilities while making sure their family is cared for. All we can do is try to adjust the individual salary so that no one is excluded by the cost of all these requirements

We could attempt to write a set of rules which would be fair to everyone (including the tax payer) in all the circumstances which might arise, & would also be transparent & easy for everybody to understand

Well, we could, of course we could. One should always try

Who is Simon Cowell?

Prince Philip has made another gaffe – allegedly

He is accused of calling Simon Cowell ‘a sponger’ after the Royal Variety Show

A Buckingham Palace spokesman had the perfectly judged answer:

The Duke “does not know enough about Mr Cowell to make any sort of comment about him”

Together in eternity

Until I read Ruth Padel’s Darwin: A Life in Poems (which I cannot recommend too highly) I had not fully understood the effect that his wife’s Christian faith had on him

I never bought the idea that this was just the superstitious beliefs of a silly woman standing in the way of scientific progress

Darwin himself wrote about how difficult he found it to write a coherent argument, rather than just a narrative or factual account of his observations & experiences

In the context of Ruth Padel’s poems, Charles & Emma’s own words have tremendous impact


Charles, when considering the future:

Sometimes I see ahead a cottage of rusty brick
hiding in light green, & before it some white thing
like a petticoat – which drives the forms of granite clean
out of my head in the most unphilosophical manner


Charles again, soon after marriage:

………. I cannot say how happy
you make me in this one, nor how dearly I l love you


Emma, approaching her first confinement (&not long after the death in childbirth of)

I should be most unhappy if I thought
we would not belong to each other for eternity

because if Charles did not have faith he would not make it to heaven


Charles kept this letter & left it where Emma would be sure to find it when he died

….. When I am dead, know
I have kissed & cried over this many times


It says much for Darwin’s intellectual honesty that he did not consider Pascal’s wager a solution to this predicament

The twoness of two

The online magazine Plus has an interesting article, complete with animation, about the different ways of expressing risk

The basic message is that mathematically equivalent choices – 90% chance of winning v 10% chance of losing – are not perceived to be the same

I was reminded of the point Menninger made about how it seems to have been very difficult for early man to have grasped ‘the two-ness of two’- that two sheep have anything in common with two lions for example

We still seem to get a lot of our understanding about number in ways that are very attached to certain things, circumstances or processes. 9 out of 10 in primary school is better than 90%

A 90% vote for one candidate or party in an election is probably too good to be true, or at least a source of concern about the state of our politics

A contraceptive with only 90% reliability is no use at all

The number is almost irrelevant – in what sense do any of these events or experiences share 90%-ness in common?

I recently heard on the radio an interview with Margaret Calvert, the designer with Jock Kinneir of the signs needed for Britain’s new motorway system. I was particularly struck by the insight that names have a shape – a shape which is lost, particularly on someone passing at speed, if capital letters only are used on the signs

Numbers have all kinds of shapes, not just those we can see with our eyes

Related post
The verb TO BE

Pricking the List

The Court Circular for March 18th records that the Queen held a Council at which Her Majesty pricked the List of High Sheriffs for the Counties of England (other than Cornwall & those in the Duchy of Lancaster) and Wales

After the Council the Rt Hon Liam Byrne MP had a separate audience of the Queen when Her Majesty pricked the List of High Sheriffs for the Counties of the Duchy of Lancaster. (Since the Local Government Act 1972, the Duchy of Lancaster holds and exerts the right to appoint Sheriffs in the ceremonial counties of Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Lancashire & Liam Byrne is its Chancellor, as well as minister of soup)

Links

The Pricking for High Sheriffs, London, 1855

High Sheriff of Wiltshire

Queen names new High Sheriff of Beds

High Sheriff of Suffolk

Court circular

Related post
To kiss or not to kiss

Tree insomnia

Lovely to see the forsythia in bloom

The trees are still not looking in the best of health


An interesting Weather Eye by Paul Simon back in February gave an interesting explanation

Because we have not been having really cold winters the trees have not been getting enough rest. So they look like anyone who just needs a good night’s sleep

The cold snap this year should have done them a lot of good

If

The reaction to insurers bonuses and bankers pensions is getting out of hand, beginning to look a bit like a moral panic


This crisis has been a long time coming & most of us were only too happy to grab our share while the going was good – only our fair share, what we had earned & what we were worth of course

And now we feel virtuous about not buying a new car or other needless gizmos or cheap clothes, or going out for a meal, while feeling fearfully sorry for those who lose the jobs they had making all this stuff or waiting at our table

I am as happy as any one to see arrogant money men getting their come- uppance, economists having to accept that their interpretation of the fundamental assumptions about how markets work are wrong

But I almost worry more about this pack mentality, even wonder if it doesn’t suit somebody, somewhere, to have us all looking the wrong way

And just what good would it do to get rid of Geithner or Myners at this stage? Who would you put in their place? Are we so blessed with people who are just raring to get into those jobs?

Related posts
Keeping our promises
Origins of the sub prime mortgage
Mortgage owing democracy

Tin we?

A headline writer had fun yesterday in The Times Business Section


CAN WE SURVIVE THE RECESSION? YES WE CAN


The article is about how we are turning back to canned food for economy, comfort & convenience; sales of sponge puddings up by nearly 10%, rice pudding by 5%. Some of Britain’s 14 can making plants are working 24/7 to keep up with demand, helping to keep 5,000 people in jobs


I do not know what a full environmental audit would show, but cans may well be the greener option; long shelf life without the need for warming or chilling the atmosphere (though humidity needs to be controlled). And of course a stash of tins in the store cupboard at home will keep you fed when the electricity goes off


I wonder if sales of can openers have risen too?

Related post
Not ready for everything

It's not fair

The March wind doth blow and we shall have snow,
And what will poor hedgehog do then, poor thing?
She’ll rush to the barn to keep herself warm
And hide her head under the bed, poor thing.

How to fill in a crossword puzzle

These are the first & last verses from a poem by Vernon Scannell. Unfortunately I have not been able to find anywhere on the web which will provide the bits which I did not copy out when I first came across it



First adjust your spectacles & take your pen,
(A pencil will serve equally well) & pick the easiest clue:
Here you are: five letters down – “What is Man?”
Clown, Rogue, Beast, or even Saint would do.
…

The snag about these clues is the alternatives are endless.

Write in the words faintly because you may have to alter them,
And be warned. When the puzzle is solved, & like a satisfied lover
You lean back sighing & sleepy, then you will find
That the black squares hide the secrets you will never uncover

Blogging child protection

It is all very well for Ed Balls to fume & fulminate about the failings in his empire, & for Lord Laming (a good man) to say “Just do it” but it seems to me that in pinning hopes on an integrated database they are literally attempting the impossible

It is not easy, particularly with only press reports to go on, to know exactly what anyone means these days by the word ‘database’, which seems to have become an all purpose term for any set of data held on a computer, no matter what the structure or formal query procedures

It is also true that database technology has moved on a long way since I last wrapped a wet towel round my head at midnight

But going on the comments I have seen or heard, the Integrated Childrens Database does seem to rely on breaking down information into byte size pieces with a record for each child

This inevitably involves much repetition & duplication. The way to reduce this would normally be to create different records at other levels eg family, household etc

This is challenge enough – I am thinking here of the way the Census is set up to provide a once a decade snapshot of the structure of the population

But to keep track of that part of the population which is, by definition, chaotic & unstable – that is what makes me think it impossible. Child P for example was 'involved' with his mother & father, a child minder, 2 other men & several siblings, & had 60 recorded contacts with health or social service professionals

And even if it is possible, writing & using the software to reassemble it all into meaningful information to answer questions such as “Where is this child now?” or “What is the history of the new man in Mum’s life?” – just takes too much time, time in which disasters will happen

Then it occurred to me that blogging might offer a more ‘natural’ structure for social workers & others who need to keep records & keep in touch, to share information

Blogging offers automatic addition of 2 important pieces of information to each report – time & author. It also uses narrative form, much more suited to the nature of the task, the ability for others to add their comments, & offers natural keyword searches

Of course it would need to use formally structured blogs set up by the institutions involved, with for example special ‘forms’ for different aspects of a case, & an official set of labels or tags & case numbers

It should also be relatively easy for a separate grade of officer – maybe called child protection analyst – to extract the information needed for more formal, management reporting as a separate exercise

It ought to be possible to implement relatively quickly, & to adapt as it goes along as use & needs develop

And those at the top of the management tree of the Integrated Childrens database should remember the golden rule: bygones must be bygones, it is never worth throwing good money after bad

Related posts
How much time do we have?
Trying to connect you
The people of the book

Spring crunchy bits

Expensive Parmesan cheese has to be kept in secure displays in a supermarket in Bedford


British industry uses 6% less electricity than a year ago


Penguin profits rose to a recod £93 milion last year, helped by record sales of The Great Crash by JK Galbraith


Bank workers can no longer get redundancy insurance


The cost of syndicating bond issues has doubled



More men are wearing ties at work – dress down looks too unserious for serious times


Municipal car parks are producing dramatically less income for hard pressed city councils as people cut down their shopping trips


A 3rd pub in the village has become a Business Opportunity


Tolley's Tax Handbook has doubled in length since 1997


Legal & financial advisers earned £79 million (from taxpayers) from the Northern Rock debacle


Next years British International Motor Show - established 1903 - has been cancelled


The Chelsea Flower Show will have fewer showpiece gardebs [leave this misprint - Ed] this year

Tactile laments

I stopped to look at one of the culverts yesterday – very well made with stone walls lining the water course. I think it may belong to the water authority & be connected to the reservoir– I have occasionally seen a man who looks like a water bailiff or some such, patrolling it in his waders

But not for some time, & it is looking in a bit of a sorry state, not least because it got badly damaged last year when one of the big old sycamores keeled over & smashed a part of the wall

There is quite a lot of stone & other debris lying in the water, but then I noticed that one looked a bit different. I changed my angle to get a better look – it is a lump of tactile paving. Someone holds it in the same sort of contempt as I do

But where could it have come from? None of the bits laid along the main road, when all local authorities had that mad frenzy this time last year (or was it the year before) in response no doubt to some government diktat, target or bribe, was missing

Then, with sinking heart, I realised that those bits where they had been digging up the pavement last week were not, as I had fondly hoped, a sign of the coming of the fibre optic, but yet more blister stuff in any last remaining spot where someone might be crossing ‘the roadway’ – including the bit just as you get to the yard at the side of the pub which is used as a car park – for about 3 cars. And just to add to the fun, it is right outside the gate of the house next door – someone will get their teeth rattled when they put the wheelie bin out

I thought the world had gone completely mad when I saw they were even marking out a space on what seemed like a random piece of pavement, until I realised there was a matching spot directly over the road

They are obviously marking a place for a pedestrian crossing near the bus stop!

No sign yet whether it is going to be controlled by traffic lights – I would have thought lines of sight, particularly for traffic coming towards the village, would have been insufficient. But then I still have not really got used to how efficient car brakes are these days – how quickly, quietly, & skid mark free, they can come to a stop

Related posts
Crazy pavements
Cars go faster too, these days

Forecasting technology

We usually think that technological inventions come out of a blue sky to change society. We less often think that inventions are a response to pent up demand

In Library Matthew Battles says that “the appetite for books in large quantities was already whetted by the time the printing press made its appearance”

In the years just before the railways came to Britain a stage coach left Manchester for London every 15 minutes, 24/7

It was not a comfortable journey. The only protection from the elements for outside passengers came from their sturdy woollen great coats, hats or blankets

When the stage got to Topley Pike the outside passengers had to get down - & sometimes they had to help push the conveyance up the hill

Few women travelled this way

You could fill whole libraries with books & academic papers which analyse the effects of the coming of the railways; I personally have never come across one which looks at the role played by the railway in the liberation of women – but then train spotting has always been a boys' thing

When the London to Manchester railway finally arrived, shop windows in Manchester were filled with popular pictures of mournful horses: What is to become of us?

In fact, as FML Thompson pointed out in The Rise of Respectable Society, there was a three- or fourfold increase in horse-drawn traffic on Victorian roads because of the railways' success in generating new traffic, for all the feeder services bringing freight & passengers to the railway stations were horse-drawn

*****

Nay, … hast thou always worn clothes … rejoiced in them as in a warm movable House, a Body round thy Body, wherein that strange THEE of thine sat snug, defying all variations of Climate? Girt with thick double-milled kerseys; half buried under shawls and broadbrims, and overalls and mudboots, thy very fingers cased in doeskin and mittens … and, though it were in wild winter, dashed through the world, glorying in it as if thou wert its lord. In vain did the sleet beat round thy temples; it lighted only on thy impenetrable, felted or woven, case of wool

Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus

Link
At Grass by Philip Larkin

Related post

The enemy

Income or product

In his book, Butterfly Economics, Paul Ormerod dismisses as merely technical the difference between GDP & GNP

In the context of his argument this is fair enough, but I find myself wondering just how real is the difference these days

Back in the heady 1960s, the decade of independence, new countries, new economies, new development plans, the difference was far from technical

Put simply GDP (Gross Domestic Product) was the value of everything produced within a country

GNP (Gross National Product, more often called Gross National Income these days) was the total income of the people living in the country

Income from capital – rent, profits, dividends – was the main cause of any difference

In many countries the differences were not large, but generally speaking, in developing countries GNP was lower than GDP because more of their productive assets were owned by foreigners

In the UK, though the difference was shrinking rapidly, GNP was more than GDP

The definitions have not changed. I expect in these mobile days wages & salaries earned/sent abroad play a larger role but I cannot really begin to imagine where all those ginormous international financial (or credit) flows showed up in national accounts

Sadly I have not been able to find a source which makes it easy to make direct international comparisons