Level Crossing Accidents

 General  No Responses »
Oct 122009
 

On the news this morning are increased figures for those killed by acting stupid with rail level crossings. Given the level of stupidity shown in some of the videos :-

It is perhaps time to concentrate more on the effect these accidents have on the train drivers and train passengers. And those who have to scrape up what is left behind after this sort of accident.

After all those who mess around on train lines and level crossings should really be taking responsibility for their own stupidity. You do not have to be too bright to realise that taking the risk of crossing a train line when the barriers are down (or when the lights are red) is taking the risk of being hit by a train. And you don’t live through being hit by a train.

Email: Push vs. Pull

 Computing, General, iPhone  2 Responses »
Oct 102009
 

I have recently heard “push” email referred to as “gold-standard” mail by someone who should have known better. I disagree, although in many senses of the word, my own mail has been setup as “push” for many years now – far longer than “push” mail has been supported! Before kicking the idea of “push mail” being the cure for all ills into the grass, lets have a little review of what email is and the difference between “push” and “pull”.

Electronic mail is the computer version of those postcards you drop into letter boxes telling everyone (including the postman) what a great time you are having on holiday. It is not particularly private and is not necessarily very fast. We have gotten used to email normally arriving quickly – within minutes or even seconds, but that is not always the case. In common with the ordinary postal service (I am excluding special services such as recorded delivery), there is not even a guarantee of delivery – it is done on a best efforts basis.

Conventionally the majority of people “pulled” their email from their ISPs email server. When you wanted to read your email, you would start an email client (or commonly these days visit a webmail page and login) and it would pull your email into your email client. When connecting to your email server over a slow connection, the process of pulling in all the email could be quite slow.

To combat this problem, a few proprietary solutions appeared which ensured that the messages were pushed down to the device (as it happens a mobile phone) so that they were always ready when you wanted to read them. Essentially it was a trick – a neat trick, but a trick none the less that made the phone appear to be much faster at reading emails than other phones relying on the “pull” method.

Of course there’s a cost to all this pushing. The phone has to wake up every so often to allow the server(s) to push any available messages, which might not take much power but given the frequency with which it happens can have a big effect on how long your battery lasts.

And do we need the immediacy of push email (or other kinds of messages) ? Personally I think it is better to read (and respond) to messages when it is convenient to us to do so. Responding when the messages become available means being constantly interrupted.

At work I have seen those who have their machines configured to popup little messages whenever they get a message. I am amazed that people can get work done with these constant interruptions. Perhaps those who insist on push email are somewhat shallow, and have little need to concentrate on a task.

Corporate Stupidity No. 392

 General  No Responses »
Oct 092009
 

My local supermarket which is part of one of those immense corporate empires, has started doing something immensely stupid. Not exceptionally inconvenient, but just one of those irritating examples where some bright spark has come up with an idea that has not been fully thought through (or even tested properly).

What they have started doing is printing in addition to your standard till receipt, a little note about some loyalty scheme. Which means you have two silly little bits of paper to collect.

Which is hardly very environmentally friendly and probably costs them a surprising amount. Just a small amount of stupidity really – a simple poster would be just as effective and far less wasteful.

However when you get to automated tills, the receipts are dispensed automatically. The printer has a mechanism by which it drops any uncollected receipts on the floor before it prints your receipt. Except when two receipts are printed you have a window of opportunity of about a second (whilst you are fumbling with bags, and change) to collect the first. And guess which one is your real receipt ?

Yes, it is the first one printed. So everyone ends up with a note about a loyalty scheme rather than their real receipt. Kind of useful if you need to return something, or prove that you’ve just bought something to the security guard on the door!

The conspiracy theorists would come up with something about collecting the receipts to discover your shopping patterns or something. Nothing of the sort. This is just corporate stupidity!

UK vs US Spending On Healthcare Research

 General, Politics, Uncategorized  25 Responses »
Oct 042009
 

One of the things that comes up online in the debates on the whole US vs UK methods of health care, is the amount of research that takes place. One of the arguments the far right in the US makes is that the US is doing all the research on health care because places with socialist health care systems do not spend much on it.

Well it so happens that I work at a relatively minor University in the UK, and although I do not spend a great deal of time looking around at what the researchers do, I am aware that at least one research group is engaged in research in the health area (specifically looking at developing drugs). So I was curious to look into just how much medical research goes on in a country with a socialist health care system that some claim means spending practically nothing on medical research.

The first thing to bear in mind when it comes to research is that you can come up with a list of gadgets that has “US” down as the inventor, but things are rarely that simple. Often inventions are based on earlier research done by somebody else.

Secondly, whilst the UK health care system is socialistic, the pharmaceutical sector is private and quite healthy. Out of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies (listed by Wikpedia), 4 are US-based, and 6 are European based. Of the European based companies only 1.5 are UK-based (one is listed as “UK/Sweden”). One of the UK-based companies spends in the region of $6 billion per year on research and development; bettered only by one of the US-based companies (although figures for the amount spent is not available for some of the companies).

So lets’s see if we can add up the spending on medical research in the UK :-

Organisation Year(s) Spend
Medical Research Council 2008/9 £704 million
The Wellcome Trust 2008/9 “over £600 million”
BUPA UK (private health care) 2008/9 £1.5 million
Cancer Research UK 2008/9 £355 million
NIHR/PRP (NHS Research) 2008/9 £912 million
UK Pharmaceutical R&D 2008 $12 billion
AMRC members (including Cancer Research UK) 2006/7 £791 million

Whilst looking around for the figures above, I can across an interesting claim by Cancer Research UK – of the top 20 cancer treatment drugs in use around the world, 19 of them came about in whole or partly because of research funded by Cancer Research UK.

Excluding the rest of the AMRC members (for which I only have 2006/7 figures), the total here is some £2572 million in one year. This amounts to £42 per person per year. Or $67 according to today’s exchange rate. Plus added to that is the total spent by UK pharmaceutical companies which amounts to $12 billion a year – increasing our per person spend to $267. Of course we’re also not including the percentage of funding that US pharmaceutical companies make that is due to the drugs purchased by the NHS – doesn’t that also count as spending by the UK on medical research ?

The US overall apparently spends $95 billion on medical research which comes out at about $316 per person per year. Quite a bit more than the UK spends. But the US is richer, and we’re underestimating the UK spend on medical research and not counting European research at all which is partly funded by the UK.

Even if the UK does spend significantly less than the US, it certainly does spend a lot on medical research so the idea that a socialist health care system will cause spending on research to practically cease is wrong. Besides none of this number crunching tells us anything about how effective the spending is.

Alan Turing Gets An Apology At Last!

 Computing, General, History  No Responses »
Sep 112009
 

Alan Turing was a computer scientist and a homosexual at the very dawn of electronic computing, and contributed enormously to the winning of World War II by being one of those behind the code breaking efforts at Bletchley Park. When you consider his contributions to the war effort and his contributions to the new field of computer science, his sexual orientation was the least important part of him. Yet because of his sexuality, he was prosecuted, lost his security clearance (which was particularly devastating because of the lack of other places he could make his contributions), and harassed by the British security services.

Eventually he committed suicide; almost certainly because of his harassment by society that couldn’t see past his sexuality and see his vast contributions and potential.

There are those who say he shouldn’t be forgiven because he was a homosexual and that is forbidden by god. That position is contemptible and not worth commenting on.

There are those who say he shouldn’t be forgiven because he broke the law of the time. Well the law was immoral and wrong. In many ways we are obligated to break laws that are immoral.

There are those who say he shouldn’t be forgiven because there were many other men persecuted because of their sexual orientation. Perhaps 100,000 men, or even more (oddly enough homosexual women were not persecuted to quite the same extent (although I’d welcome pointers to prove me wrong … well sort of)). There is a point to that objection, but forgiving a particularly shining example of such harassment is the first step on the path of getting all those persecuted men pardoned.

And Alan Turing is a good start to that process because even those who do not like homosexuality can be brought around to believing that Alan at least deserves to be forgiven because of his immense contributions.

But most of all he should be pardoned because he didn’t really do anything wrong, and honoured because of his contributions.

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