Dr Administrator
Author's posts
Dec 09 2011
Strike!
Today I am on strike.
The details of why I’m on strike are not particularly important but since I am sure you will be curious: I am on strike because the company I work for is closing the final salary pensions scheme to which I belong and moving me to a career average scheme – I anticipate losing 13% of my pension. You can see us in the news (here on the BBC, here in Motley Fool which I think gives the best detail and here in Professional Pensions – plenty of other reporting elsewhere).
I prefer to think of myself as a research scientist but my company describes me as a “manager”, and in fact one of my roles is “line manager” so I am a little unusual for a union member: I have dealt with the union from the “other side” – I appreciate the local union representatives and the contribution they make to the smooth running of the business.
For me union membership is a question of equality: equality of representation. Should I ever be in dispute with my employer I will be faced by the pointy end of an organisation containing roughly 150,000 employees. Under these circumstances I will need some support and in the UK this support comes from membership of a trade union.
I am a member of Unite, to be honest, I remain a member largely by ignoring their national pronouncements; as a Liberal Democrat I’m fairly sure they will have organised marches outside my party’s conference where they used the word “scum” to describe my colleagues.
Which raises for me the question of whether unions must be political and politically left-wing. Historically the unions founded the Labour party, and the stance of the major unions is now firmly to the left of the majority of the Labour party and therefore most likely to the left of most of the UK workforce. Companies make a fair crack at good relations with governments of any stripe. Unions, on the other hand, seem determined that the only governments they will deal with are Labour governments and that a Tory government (or a coalition containing Tories) is its sworn enemy. Surely this is not a good thing for a unionised workforce.
I grew up in rural Dorset near to the unlikely birthplace of the union movement in Tolpuddle. Somewhat entertainingly it seems Adam Smith (18th century economist and freemarket idol) was not unsympathetic to the union movement:
It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.
There is a bit more on the history of the trade union movement in the UK here.
I have form in striking, I was a lecturer at UMIST during the merging with the University of Manchester. Although we were never in dispute over the merger, during the process there was a pay dispute. At one point an e-mail came from management asking me to tell them whether or not I was on strike, rapidly followed by an e-mail from the union rep saying “Don’t tell ‘em, Pike”!
The worrying thing is the number of my colleagues who have said how “brave” I am for striking this time round.
Dec 01 2011
Case-sensitive
As a long time programmer there is a little thing I’d like to rant about: case-sensitivity.
For the uninitiated this is the thing that makes your program think that the variable called “MyVariable” is different from the variable called “myVariable” and the variable called “Myvariable”. The problem is that some computer languages have it and some computer languages don’t.
I grew up with BASIC and later FORTRAN, case-insensitive languages which do the natural thing and assume that capitalisation does not matter. Other languages (C#, Java, C, Matlab) are not so forgiving and insist that “a” and “A” refer to two completely different things. In real life this feels like a wilful act of obstinacy, the worst excesses of teenage pedantry, it is a user experience fail.
The origins of case-sensitivity lie in the origins of the language C in the early 1970s, FORTRAN doesn’t have it because when it was invented, in the dawn of computing, teletype printers did not support lowercase – there was no space on the print head. I still think of FORTRAN as a language written in ALL CAPS and so rather IMPERATIVE.
There is an argument for case-sensitivity from the point of view of compactness; mathematicians, even of my relatively lowly level will name their variables in equations with letters from the Roman and Greek alphabets, subscripts and superscripts. My father, an undergraduate mathematician, even went as far as Cyrillic alphabet. Sadly the print media, even New Scientist, do not support such typographically extravagance.
It’s even worse when your language is dynamically-typed, that’s to say it allows you to create variables willy-nilly as you write your program rather than statically-typed languages which demand you tell them explicitly of the introduction of new variables. In a statically typed language if you start with a variable called “MyVariable” and later introduce “Myvariable”, by a slip of the key, then the compiler will kick-off: complaining it has no knowledge of this interloper. A dynamically-typed language will accept this new introduction silently, giving it a default value and causing untold damage in subsequent calculations.
It’s not like case-sensitivity is used in any syntactically meaningful manner: to a computer there is no practical difference between “foo” and “Foo” – the standard placeholder function name, foo” and “Foo” to the computer are simply the label you have stuck to a box containing a thing. There are some human conventions, but they are just that – and as with any convention they are honoured as much in the breech as the observance. The compiler doesn’t care.
I must admit to a fondness of CamelCase: capitalising the initial letters of each word in a long variable name, I do it in my hashtags on twitter. In the old days of FORTRAN no such fripperies existed, not only were your variable names limited in case but also in length: you had 6 characters to work your magic.
This is to ignore the many and varied uses different uses that computer languages find for brackets: {}, (), [] and even <>.
Nov 23 2011
House of Lords register of members interests
This post is about the House of Lords register of members interests, an online resource which describes the financial and other interests of members of the UK House of Lords. This follows on from earlier posts on the attendance rates of Lords, it turns out 20% of them only turn up twice a year. I also wrote a post on the political breakdown of the House and the number of appointments to it in each year over the period since the mid-1970s. This is all of current interest since reform is in the air for the House of Lords, on which subject I made a short post.
I was curious to know the occupations of the Lords, there is no direct record of occupations but the register of members interests provides a guide. The members interests are divided into categories, described in this document and summarised below:
| Category 1 | Directorships |
| Category 2 | Remunerated employment, office, profession etc. |
| Category 3 | Public affairs advice and services to clients |
| Category 4a | Controlling shareholding |
| Category 4b | Not a controlling shareholding but exceeding £50,000 |
| Category 5 | Land and property, capital value exceeding £250,000 or income exceeding £5,000 but not main residence |
| Category 6 | Sponsorship |
| Category 7 | Overseas visits |
| Category 8 | Gifts, benefits and hospitality |
| Category 9 | Miscellaneous financial interests |
| Category 10a | Un-renumerated directorship or employment |
| Category 10b | Membership of public bodies, (hospital trusts, governing bodies etc) |
| Category 10c | Trusteeships of galleries, museums and so forth |
| Category 10d | Officer or trustee of a pressure group or union |
| Category 10e | Officer or trustee of a voluntary or not-for-profit organisation |
The values of these interests are not listed but typically the threshold value for inclusion is £500 except where stated.
The data are provided as webpages, with one page per initial letter there are no Lords whose Lord Name starts with X or Z. This is a bit awkward for carrying out analysis so I wrote a program in Python which reads the webpages using the BeautifulSoup HTML/XML parser and converts them into a single Comma Separated Value (CSV) file where each row corresponded to a single category entry for a single Lord – this is the most useful format for subsequent analysis.
The data contains entries for 828 Lords, which translates into 2821 entries in the big table. The chart below shows the number of entries for each category.
This breaks things down into more manageable chunks. I quite like the miscellaneous category 9, where people declare their spouses if they are also members of the House and Lord Edmiston who declares “Occasional income from the hiring of Member’s plane”. Those that declare no interests are split between “on leave of absence”, “no registrable interests”, “there are no interests for this peer” and “information not yet received”. The sponsorship category (6) is fairly dull, typically secretarial support from other roles.
Their Lordships are in great demand as officers and trustees of non-profits and charities, as indicated by category 10e, and as members on the boards of public bodies (category 10b).
I had hoped that category 2 would give me some feel for occupations of Lords, I was hoping to learn something of the skills distribution since it’s often claimed that the way in which they are appointed means they bring a wide range of expertise to bear. Below I show a wordle of the category 2 text.
There’s a lot of speaking and board membership going on unfortunately it’s not easy to pull occupations out of the data. I can’t help but get the impression that the breakdown of the Lords is not that dissimilar to that of the Commons, indeed many Lords are former MPs – this means lots of lawyers.
You can download the data in the form of a single file from Google Docs here. I’ve added an index column and the length of the text for each entry. Viewing as a single file in this compact format is easier than the original pages and you can do interesting things such as sort by different columns or search the entire file for keywords (professor, Tesco, BBC… etc). The Python program I wrote is here.
Nov 20 2011
On charity…
In the aftermath of Children In Need I thought I would post on charity.
What is it with charity that we now need someone to do something, i.e. sit in a bath of baked beans, to convince us to donate? Is the thinking here: “Obviously I was upset about the child with cancer, but I couldn’t help until someone sat in a bath full of baked beans”? Was charitable giving always like this?
We no longer see need in our own society, so someone has to make a performance to draw attention to it and stimulate us to give. Charity stunts are a proxy for the begging bowl on the street.
My post is also prompted by Peter Tatchell’s proposal that there should be a 20% one-off tax on wealth applied to the wealthiest 10%.
Hold on!
That means me, or at the very least close enough to make me worried. I fall pretty much on the boundary of the 10% in terms of income, and well inside in terms of wealth, based on the value of my house and I imagine on the basis of a couple of pensions pots. (see here for income and wealth distributions in the UK). Obviously I find this fairly objectionable. It’s not so much an objection to paying any amount more but being singled out whilst most people don’t pay any more.
I’m not alone, Adele (a popular singer) got herself into a degree of trouble for her comments on paying tax at a rate of 50%, this was in part because of the way she chose to express herself but in part it’s a very good point: she is seeing 50% of her (substantial) income being taken away and it doesn’t sneak out in PAYE fashion. She receives the money and then very obviously hands it over, PAYE makes the process of taxation almost invisible. You’re not paying anything like this rate, and neither am I, my rate of tax on income is approximately 27% (see this post). Her observation was she made relatively little use of the services the government provides and paid a great deal for them, so felt aggrieved. For your own private provision for full replacement you’re probably looking at spending £10,000pa on health insurance, £12,000pa schooling per child and £40,000 provision for your own pension which covers off the major areas on which government spends, and you’ll get a much better service.
The principle of progressive taxation, i.e. the wealthy paying not only more in absolute terms but more in percentage terms, is well-established (Adam Smith was an early proponent) but a focus on simply the wealthy misses out the wider point that everyone contributes something according to their income. So when times are hard it shouldn’t simply be a case of “soak the rich”.
There is an odd parallel between the Daily Mail reader and the Occupy movement, the Mail reader seems to believe that if only large scale Benefit Scroungers could be stamped out then all would be well and the Occupy movement believe that if only the 1% (or 10% if you’re Peter Tatchell) paid their “fair share” then all would be well.
The link between tax and charity is in seeing tax as wide-scale enforced charity; in the past services and support for large parts of the UK population were paid for by charity. This worked poorly because the provision would have been patchy and in many cases below what we would consider a minimum level.
When Britain created its welfare state it subsumed a lot of charitable giving, the state was saying – “you don’t need to give to charity now because we will carry out those activities once covered by charity.”
The Big Society is much derided but it is about something important: it is down to us to care and help, we don’t lose that responsibility by paying tax to the state. The problem for the individual donor is where to spend our charity pound, everybody wants to help pandas and kittens but the unemployed, not so much.
None of the above is an argument for reducing taxation or reducing the size of the state, it’s an argument that the state doesn’t care – we still all have that job.
Nov 17 2011
Book Review: The Illustrated Pepys edited by Robert Latham
In this post I review “The Illustrated Pepys”, extracts from Samuel Pepys’ diaries edited by Robert Latham and enhanced with illustrations from the period. You can download the full Pepys diaries from Project Gutenberg (here) in the earlier 1893 edition and the www.pepysdiary.com website has loads of additional information, it is working it’s way through the diary and will reach the end in May next year.
I feel somewhat ashamed for going for the “illustrated” and edited version which contains approximately one twelfth of the complete diaries, it feels like dumbing down but to be honest I struggle with 17th century English. However, I did enjoy the illustrations.
Samuel Pepys was born in 1633, his family appears to have been relatively well-connected, he attended grammar school, St Paul’s School the Magdalene college at Cambridge funded by two exhibitions and a grant from the Mercers Company (his father was a tailor). In 1649 he was present at the execution of Charles I.
Prior to the start of the diary in 1660 he had married Elisabeth de St Michel, a 15 year old Hugenot, in 1655. On 26th March 1658 he was “cut for the stone” that’s to say had a lithotomy to remove stones from his bladder, this was a painful and dangerous operation at the time. He celebrates the anniversary of this day in each year through the diary – under the circumstances I think I would too!
After university he starts work as clerk to Sir George Downing at the Exchequer and he was also a secretary to Sir Edward Montagu, a relative of his father’s who was later to become 1st Earl of Sandwich. The diary begins in 1660 when Pepys is 27 years old, on the eve of the Restoration, in which he is involved as a member of the fleet which travels to Holland to bring back Charles II as part of Montagu’s retenue. On his return he becomes Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board, this seems to have been a relatively senior, but not top, position. Later in the diary he describes giving evidence to a committee of parliament on the conduct of the navy in the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
The diaries are an interesting mishmash of the mundane and high politics. Pepys was living in interesting times, he lived in London during the coronation of Charles II, the plague and the Great Fire – all events covered in his diaries.
Pepys has regular sexual encounters with women who are not his wife, he often drops in to an argot of foreign languages (French, Spanish and latin) to describe these encounters. Late in the book his wife catches him fondling their maid, Deb Willet and the repercussions of this last for several months. Interestingly he describes a later, non-sexual meeting with Deb in his argot. The diaries were written in shorthand and were clearly not intended for general readership, he expresses a degree of remorse and guilt over his affairs, so to me it seems this use of language is to separate him from his disreputable acts.
Aside from the womanising Pepys entertained himself with music making with his wife and friends, going to plays and trips into the countryside. Servants seemed like more of the family for Pepys than I imagined, he and his wife give two of their servants who marry a substantial wedding gift for their departure, he also talks of working with labourers such as carpenters who come to his house to work.
I wrote a diary for a period between 2000 and 2005, looking back at them the similarities with Pepys diaries are striking. The little domestic details, the meetings with friends, the extended descriptions of current events, the hints of the work he is currently engaged in, the brief formulaic entries for those days when you just don’t feel like writing, his joy at new clothes and gadgets (like a carriage). I should hasten to add for the benefit of Mrs Somebeans that no sexual encounters with anyone are described in my diary!
The details of his relationship with his wife are touching and domestic, he talks of them laying long and talking, of returning to share a bed with her after she has had a cold. He also describes accidently elbowing her in the face as he wakes with a start and grumbles about her leaving her belongings in a coach, grudgingly admitting at the end of the entry that she had given the items into his care.
I come to the diaries having read Alan Cook’s biography of Edmond Halley (reviewed here), a contemporary of Pepys. Cook’s biography of Halley is very dry, you can almost feel the transition between different sets of formal records. The personality of Halley can only be imagined. The life and character come from the diaries of associates such as Samuel Pepys, Robert Hooke and John Evelyn. Looking more widely biographies of Charles and Erasmus Darwin are both given character by their extensive surviving personal letters and diaries.
“British diaries : an annotated bibliography of British diaries written between 1442 and 1942” compiled by William Matthews lists the diaries known from the period in which Pepys lived, they are sparse: a handful in each year from people in a range occupations. Pepys diaries are well-known because they are preserved, along with his large library, they cover a very active period of history in which Pepys plays a small role close to the centre of action. They are readable and cover both the professional and personal.
He finishes the diary in May 1669, fearing for his eyesight which subsequently improves. Elisabeth, his wife, dies shortly after the end of the diary; over the succeeding years he takes up more senior roles in the navy, becomes and MP and serves briefly as President of the Royal Society. He dies in 1703.
Foot notes
You can see my rather incomplete Evernotes on the diaries here, I recommend www.pepysdiary.com for more detailed exploratory with added details and explanations.
About
I've worked as a scientist for the last 30 years, at various universities, a large home and personal care company, a startup in Liverpool called The Sensible Code Company (formerly ScraperWiki Ltd), GBG and now as a consultant in data science.
I write about:
* the books I have read, typically science and history (or both), partly as a reminder to myself and partly as a review;
* science, things I have done or things I find interesting;
* technology, programming and gadgets;
politics, and current affairs;
* ...and other stuff as it takes my fancy - holidays, photographs and things I want to remember.