How the customer voice has been heard in the water sector (3)
January 25th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
The last three years have seen a fascinating experience in how to embed the consumer voice in a regulated utility – the creation of Customer Challenge Groups by the 18 water and sewerage companies in England and Wales.
I have chaired the CCG for South East Water and I was invited by “Utility Week” to review the operation of CCGs and look at what should come next. You can read my blog posting here.
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Reviews of my two weekend films: “Wild” and “Ex Machina”
January 25th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
This weekend, I managed to see two movies that have only recently been released: “Wild” [my review here] and “Ex Machina” [my review here].
At one level, these two movies are utterly different: “Wild” is a true story, set in the near past, and covers geography of over 1,000 miles of open land, “Ex Machina” is a fictional story, set in the near future, and location in one claustrophobic building.
But, at another level, there is something very similar between the two works: both centre on a woman who us seeking to gain control over her life – great performances from Reese Witherspoon in “Wild” and Alicia Vikander in “Ex Machina”. Go see ….
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How the customer voice has been heard in the water sector (2)
January 24th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
This week, I spent a day in Birmingham attending a “Utility Week” conference on customer service in the water sector. I was the last speaker in a roster of 15.
I began by explaining how the voice of the consumer in regulated industries has been institutionalised in three different ways and then set out how this had worked and could work in future in the water sector.
You can check out the slides in my presentation here.
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Why do so many more women than men believe in God and an afterlife?
January 24th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
“Professor David Voas seems wise indeed. The population studies expert has analysed responses to a survey of 9,000 British people and found a humongous gender gap in attitudes to God, religion and life after death. A chunky 54% of men say they are atheists or agnostics, while only 34% of women hold similar views. An even greater number of men – 63% – believe there is no life after death, compared to 36% of women.”
This is the opening paragraph of a piece by Deborah Orr in which she speculates on the reason why so many more women than men believe in a deity and an afterlife.
The data is clear. But is Orr’s reasoning convincing? What do you think?
Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments (0)
How the customer voice has been heard in the water sector (1)
January 23rd, 2015 by Roger Darlington
The monthly magazine “The Water Report” has produced a very comprehensive and fair assessment of the role of Customer Challenge Groups in the last three years in the price review process conducted by the regulator Ofwat which has recently concluded.
Four CCG chairs were interviewed for the feature including me as the Chair for the South East Water CCG. You can read the piece here.
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British general election (4): how a chocolate soldier has riden to the rescue of the Centre-Left
January 22nd, 2015 by Roger Darlington
“Britain stands on the edge of a cliff with the general election only 105 days away. Will we vote Tory or Ukip for Euro referendum chaos, lasting two years at least and putting thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and our long-term peace and security at risk?
Or will Labour, Liberal Democrat, Green and all progressive voters come together in the marginal seats that matter to elect a parliament for progress and reform and a Labour-led government with Ed Miliband as prime minister?”
This is a quote from Matthew Oakeshott, now an independent member of the House of Lords, who – as explained in this news item – has just announced that he is donating £600,000 to 30 Labour and 15 left of centre Liberal Democrat candidates in the forthcoming General Election.
Now, some 40 years ago, I knew Matthew Oakeshott because we both obtained Political Fellowships from the Joseph Rowntree Social Service Trust to work for Labour Party Opposition Frontbenchers – he was with Roy Jenkins and I was with Merlyn Rees – and indeed we both fought the General Election of 1974 as Labour candidates. The media at that time called us – because of the source of the funding – “chocolate soldiers”.
Always idiosyncratic, Matthew’s life went in a very different direction to mine. He became a rich investment manager and left the Labour Party at the time of the Social Democratic Alliance. I became a trade union official and am still a member of the Labour Party. As regards the forthcoming General Election, however, i guess that our aspirations are quite similar.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
Why almost half of American children live in or near poverty
January 20th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
“Fifty years ago, when Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty,” most of the poor didn’t work. They were too old or infirm, or they couldn’t find jobs. Today, most of America’s poor do work – “welfare reforms” starting in the 1990s have required them to work as a condition of receiving any benefits. But they and their families are still poor because their jobs pay so little and benefits don’t go far enough.
As a result, according to new data, almost half of US children – some 30 million – now live in or near poverty. We haven’t witnessed this extent of child poverty in half a century. Raising the minimum wage and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit are critically important to the well-being of our nation’s children.”
This is a Facebook comment from Professor Robert Reich of Berkeley University which I’m reposting on the day of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address. I hope that Obama has some ideas to tackle this situation.
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When China ruled the waves
January 19th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Monday evenings now find me on a new course at London’s City Lit college. The course of six evening lectures by Dr Kevin Manton is entitled “China: Re-emergecne Of A Superpower”. The first lecture last week was on “The Ming dynasty and changes in East Asia”.
In global terms, the most outstanding feature of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) the voyages ordered by the Emperor Yongle and led by the eunuch admiral Zheng-He. Between 1405-1433, a total of seven voyages were made with huge ships that travelled to South East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa.
You can learn more about the voyages of Zheng-He here.
Posted in History | Comments (0)
Why the modern world is bad for your brain
January 18th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
“Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. We are doing the jobs of 10 different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favourite TV shows.
Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight. They’re more powerful and do more things than the most advanced computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago. And we use them all the time, part of a 21st-century mania for cramming everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text while we’re walking across the street, catch up on email while standing in a queue – and while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously check to see what our other friends are doing. At the kitchen counter, cosy and secure in our domicile, we write our shopping lists on smartphones while we are listening to that wonderfully informative podcast on urban beekeeping.
But there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion.”
This is the opening of a fascinating article by neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin, author of *The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight In The Age Of Information Overload”.
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How do you quantify “information overload”?
January 18th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
“We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We’ve created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us. On average, we take in five times as much information every day as we did in 1986 – the equivalent of 175 newspapers. YouTube uploads 6,000 hours of new video every hour. For every hour of YouTube videos you watch, you’re already 5,999 hours behind!”
Extract from Q & A with neuroscientist Daniel J Levitin, author of *The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight In The Age Of Information Overload”.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (2)