Why we still have a serious gap in online skills
October 6th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Surely now everyone is doing everything on the Internet? Far from it, as I have explained in my latest column on IT issues.
Here, in the UK, there are 9.5 million people aged 15+ without basic online skills. That is 19% or almost one in five. They are more likely to be older, disabled and have low incomes. Some 4.5 million of them are of working age. Indeed 12 million adults do not use the Internet every day.
You can access all my IT columns here.
Posted in Internet | Comments (1)
Words of the day: homograph/homophone/homonym
October 5th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Homograph = words that are spelled alike, but have different meanings and sometimes different pronunciations e..g. stalk the noun (plant stem) and stalk the verb (pursue stealthily)
Homophone = words that are pronounced the same, but are different in meaning and possibly spelling e.g. rose (flower) and rose (past tense of rise) or to, two, too
Homonym = words spelled and pronounced alike, but different in meaning, so words which are both homographs and homophones
Clear now?!?
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Why I am WEIRD – and you probably are too
October 5th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
In the behavioural sciences, there is a group of people – who are usually the subject of most of the research in these disciplines – who are dubbed WEIRD. I guess I fall into this category and, when I spell out the acronym, you may conclude that you do too.
In this context, WEIRD stands for:
- Western – I’ve spent all my life living in Britain, a quintessentially western country, arguably one of the leaders of the so-called Western world.
- Educated – I am educated to degree level and continue to read widely and attend short courses in order to expand my knowledge.
- Industrialised – I live in an industrialised nation; indeed Britain was the first country in the world to industrialise.
- Rich – By world standards, I am unquestionably rich in the income I receive and the standard of life I can afford.
- Democratic – I live in a democratic nation and I hold strongly to democratic values.
So, what is the significance of me being in such a select category. As this article argues,”where there is robust cross-cultural research, WEIRD subjects tend to be outliers on a range of measurable traits that do vary, including visual perception, sense of fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, and a host of other basic psychological traits”.
Therefore, in world terms, I – and you too probably – am special, not in the sense of being superior but in the sense of being atypical. The importance of this conclusion is that, when looking at world events and developments, I – and I suspect you – have to remember that most people see the world differently and it’s essential that I allow for that and try to see the world through the eyes of people who are less WEIRD (the overwhelming majority numerically).
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (3)
30 years in Sudbury Hill
October 5th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
When my parents split up, I was seven and I lived with my mother (and sister and brother) in one rented location after another. So, as an adult, I’ve hated moving.
Today Vee and I celebrate living 30 years in the same house: a semi-detached place in a quiet crescent in Sudbury Hill in north-west London. Some of the neighbours are still the same but many have changed and all the children who were here when we arrived have – like our own son Richard – gone to university, got married, and started families.
Of course, we’ve done a great deal to the place over the years and Vee’s brother-in-law – a builder called Derek – has earned a great deal from us and become very well known to our neighbours.
I love the diversity of our area. In our road, our immediate neighbours include Irish, Spanish, Polish, Indian, Pakistani and Lebanese. Our postman is Nepalese, our doctor is Indian, our newsagent is Sri Lankan, our dry cleaner is Pakistani, my dentist is Iranian, my hairdresser is Greek Cypriot.
Vee would be happy to move to the coast now – but I really enjoy London.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
A review of the recent film “Transcendence”
October 4th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
I alway enjoy a good science fiction movie, but sadly “Transcendence” – in spite of starring Johnny Depp – is one one of them. See my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Understanding the difference between the deficit and the debt: the smaller one is going down but the bigger one is still rising
October 4th, 2014 by Roger Darlington
At this week’s Conservative Party Conference, the Prime Minister David Cameron told delegates and voters that the country has been “paying down its debts”. Is that true? Is it heck. At best, it was misleading; at worst, it was an outright fib.
Let me explain briefly …
The deficit is the difference in any given financial year between what the Government raises in taxes and what it spends in public programmes. The present government has reduced the deficit by around a third but, at the beginning of its term of office, it promised to eliminate the deficit entirely by now, so it is still less than half way to its target.
Now the debt is something different entirely. This is what the country owes in total, essentially as a result of past deficits. In a letter this week from the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority to the Labour Party’s Shadow Chief Secretary of the Treasury, he sets out that in June 2010 debt was £997.4 billion (equivalent to 64.0 percent of Gross Domestic Product) and in August 2014 it had risen to £1,432.3 billion (equivalent to 79.1% of GDP).
We need more truth-telling in politics.
You can find more on this issue here.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
At last, a good news story: how a million Africans will receive much better medical care
October 3rd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
It’s a 159 tonne ship that once used to be operated by the Royal Navy. It’s been kitted out in Scotland as a medical centre by BAE Systems.
It has been transported 8,585 miles by sea and land from Glasgow to Lake Victoria. The journey took 246 days.
And, over the next 20 years, it will provide high class medical care to around a million Africans who currently have little or no access to basic medical services.
You can read more here.
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (0)
What’s wrong with the British political system?
October 3rd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
“I know the vast majority of politicians are in it for the right reasons but the entire political culture is geared around Westminster elections and the positioning needed to win them.
The middle ground is where elections are won and so parties disproportionately focus on how to win votes and craft policies to appeal to the same few electors – leaving everyone else feeling irrelevant. It exposes politicians as being inauthentic; because what they feel is hidden behind what the middle ground tells them they want to hear.
To the disengaged this looks like a game. A game where negative campaigning wins. That dwells on image. That does so because political parties can’t risk setting out a vision that describes doing anything profoundly different, in case it loses the election”
This is a quote from a thoughtful blog positing by Lord (Jim) Knight, a colleague of mine at the Tinder Foundation.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
All companies need to listen to their customers
October 2nd, 2014 by Roger Darlington
For the past two and a half years, I have been the independent Chair of the Customer Challenge Group of South East Water, one of the 18 suppliers of water and sewerage services in England and Wales. Each of the companies has had such a group. Since these companies are local monopolies, they are are regulated by Ofwat which every five years approves business plans of these companies and determines the prices that they can charge for the next five years.
Essentially the role of each CCG has been to satisfy itself that the company had conducted an effective programme of customer engagement and had properly reflected the findings of that engagement in a business plan that was likely to be supported by the company’s customers. It was for then Ofwat to mount the cost challenge to companies’ business plan proposals, assessing how much they need to invest, how much they would have to pay to raise the capital for such investment, and how much they should charge their customers.
It has been a fascinating, but complicated and time-consuming, process and all CCG members have had to work much harder than they imagined when they were appointed in mid 2012. But the end result will be better services and lower prices (in real terms) in 2015-2020 than has been the case in 2010-2015.
As a CCG, we have met about once every two months and, as a CCG Chair, i have spent approximately one day a week on this exercise. We have made three formal submissions to Ofwat: the first on the company’s proposed business plan (ours ran to 108 pages), the second on the regulator’s risk-based review of that business plan (ours was 16 pages) and the third on the regulator’s Draft Determination for the company (this was 15 pages). I sent off the third and last of out submissions this morning, so I am now able to draw breath. I don’t imagine that you’ll want to read these documents but, if you do, you’ll find them here.
For the purposes of this blog, the important point is not what the CCG said so much as that we were there to say it. Of course, there is no substitute for customer engagement and research by a supplier of goods or services, but such research needs to be carefully designed and the findings carefully interpreted. Also, especially in a regulated industry, there are complicated sector-wide arrangements that individual customers cannot be expected to know but a standing customer voice can and must understand. The effective embedding of the CCG inside the company has enabled and encouraged a dialogue on behalf of customers of a detail and frequency that would not have been possible in the past.
This is why, over the last decade or so, I have worked as a consumer advocate and served on bodies like Ofcom’s Communications Consumer Panel, the DCMS Customer Expert Group, Postwatch and Consumer Focus. It is why I have enjoyed being the Chair of the Customer Challenge Group at South East Water. It is why I serve on the External Advisory Board of the mobile operator EE. I am not quite ready to retire …
Posted in Consumer matters | Comments (0)
How secure is the White House?
October 1st, 2014 by Roger Darlington
Not very if you read this story. Any US President – but especially the first black one and a man I admire so much – needs much better protection than this at the building that is his home and office.
It makes a couple of recent Hollywood action movies look a little less unlikely than first appeared. I refer to “Olympus Has Fallen” [my review here] and “White House Down”. [my review here].
I have been to the White House twice on public tours – but that was in the olden days when anyone could visit and terrorism was not the scourge it is today.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (0)