Category: Society

Unavoidable chaos in the NHS?

A BBC headline announces that

Migration rules ‘may cause NHS chaos’

The problem is, a rule introduced in 2011 requires that foreign workers must return home after 6 years if they are not earning over £35,000. This is presented a disaster that can only be averted by the government granting an exemption to the rules.

The union says that by 2017 more than 3,300 NHS nurses could be affected. And by the end of the decade the numbers could be double that – a potential waste of nearly £40m when all the costs of recruitment are taken into account, the RCN says.

RCN general secretary Peter Carter said: “The immigration rules will cause chaos for the NHS and other care services.

“At a time when demand is increasing, the UK is perversely making it harder to employ staff from overseas.”

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the move was “totally illogical” as there is currently a “major shortage of nurses”, leading to many NHS trusts spending “tens of millions” to recruit from overseas.

Dr Carter also stressed that most nurses earn “nowhere near” £35,000, with most on salaries of between £21,000 and £28,000 a year.

I don’t mean to defend the Tory policies, which combine the Conservative view that the non-rich are inherently undesirable with the usual British political one-upmanship on bashing foreigners, but this doesn’t look to me like an inherently unsolvable problem. There is a method known for increasing the supply of labour: raise wages. If there is a “major shortage” of nurses when you pay between £21,000 and £28,000 a year, I’m willing to guess that there would be less of a shortage if they were paid between £25,000 and £32,000 a year. It probably wouldn’t solve the problem completely, in the short term, but it would bring in marginal resources — some part-time workers would work more hours, some would delay retirement, and so on — and it would pull more young people into the profession. And if they raised salaries to £35,000, that would solve their international recruitment problem. Continue reading “Unavoidable chaos in the NHS?”

Natural phenomena

Boris Johnson doesn’t like the fact that biologist Tim Hunt has been fired for pointing out the peculiar “natural phenomenon” that he happens to have stumbled upon in his brilliantly insightful way, that “girls in the lab” (his jocular, brilliant designation for what are sometimes referred to in other contexts as “women scientists”, or, more loosely, just as “scientists”) “cry when you criticise them”.

Sir Tim was a “distinguished” scientist who did not deserve to be “pilloried” for pointing out “a natural phenomenon”, he said.

I wonder if “pilloried” is the right word here. There were simply a lot of people pointing out the “natural phenomenon” that elderly male scientists have a tendency to run their mouths on topics they have little understanding of, particularly when they have won a big prize. I’m sorry if anyone was offended by that.

It reminds me of the Larry Summers affair. Like Hunt, Summers was used to being treated like a genius, and so he could pull out any scientific-sounding chestnut, and expect it to be treated like a scintillating original aperçu. Why do feminists hate standard deviations? (Summers downfall also was pushed by his habit of treating other scholars like lazy schoolchildren, who couldn’t possibly understand their own subject as well as the Great Economist. I’m sure he wouldn’t care that his abuse of statistical terminology offends statisticians.)

And like Hunt, Summers found supporters who thought his trite and ill-considered comments were uncomfortable nuggets of wisdom. It’s the oldest logical fallacy: The truth hurts, they reason, so if it hurts it must be true. At least, if it hurts other people.

Hung out to dry

Poor Nobel laureate Timothy Hunt says he feels “hung out to dry” by UCL and the European Research Council, who decided they didn’t want to be associated with a man who makes disparaging remarks when invited as a representative of the science establishment to speak to the Korean Female Scientists and Engineers. For those who missed it, his comment was

Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry….

I’m in favour of single-sex labs.

Invited later to comment after reflection on his remarks, he offered the classic non-apology: I’m sorry you were offended.

“I’m really really sorry that I caused any offence, that’s awful. I just meant to be honest, actually.”

His wife, Mary Collins, an esteemed immunologist, also at UCL, expresses shock and dismay at the university’s rapid response — pressuring him to resign forthwith from his “honorary researcher” position — and offers a defence that itself seems remarkably old-fashioned: He likes to cook. And besides

he is not sexist. I am a feminist, and I would not have put up with him if he were sexist.

In one sense I think he’s right that it is unfair, just as it is unfair that one person is hit by a cosmic ray and develops cancer, while another is spared. It’s not fair to fire someone for a single spontaneous mistake. But it’s also unfair to hire someone as an “honorary researcher” because he did some good work 25 years ago. For all I know, he’s still doing great science, or plotting out the course that science might take over the next century. But he was speaking in South Korea in a symbolic role, as a genius, and symbols don’t have the same rights that human beings do. I’ve written before about the cult of genius in science that gave us such esteemed figures as James Watson. It’s not that I don’t think that thinking hard about one topic could yield beautiful insights about apparently unrelated topics.

He just blurted out the kind of “jocularity” that was standard bonding behaviour among male scientists of his generation, and the august institutions that no longer find it useful to have his name associated with them are rushing to separate themselves, in part to forestall criticism inspired by many years of ignoring or actively fostering sexism in science. Someone who built a brilliant scientific career in the days when “girls in the lab” were expected to put up with that sort of shit might have interesting things to say about how things have changed, and how they could continue to change, including even the increased distraction of sexual liaisons between labmates — though the way he phrased it suggests that he has the distraction of falling in love even when he’s all by himself — but he may have just destructive self-aggrandisement to offer. And in the latter case, he’s not a useful symbol anymore.

Honour among spies

I’m genuinely perplexed by pretensions of morality among representatives of espionage agencies. Today various news outlets are reporting that Russia and China have gained access to the Snowden files, and so found details of western agents and methods. Now, a certain skepticism is required: No details are offered, only that “sources” “believe” this to be so. Even if this information has reached Russia and China, the US government has shown itself to be so inept at network security lately that it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that they gained access through a different route.

That doesn’t stop the grandiloquent sermonising. According to the Sunday Times,

One senior Home Office official accused Snowden of having “blood on his hands,” although Downing Street said there was “no evidence of anyone having been harmed”.

Imagine if it were discovered that Edward Snowden were actually Eduard Snowdinsky, a Russian sleeper agent whose parents had been smuggled into the US to raise an agent with US background. Now that he has successfully completed his mission and returned to the motherland, what could American officials (and their running-dog lackeys) say but “Good on you. Impressive operation.” After all, everyone does it, if they can. That’s what they say when they spy on our allies, who (they say) are only putting on a show of saying they feel the Americans betrayed their trust. Or when they spy on their own citizens, who they say are simply naive in not recognising the force majeure. They wouldn’t say he had “blood on his hands”, or any such nonsense smacking of bourgeois morality that they’ve all moved beyond when they saw the higher purpose of spying on the whole world. So, are they just putting on a show?

Perhaps more to the point, should I be more appalled by the actions of a Snowden, who revealed US secrets in an attempt to defend universal principles of democracy and human rights, and the US constitution in particular; or by the actions of the NSA, who were so busy breaking into video-game chats that they couldn’t be bothered to make appropriate efforts to defend the US against having the complete set of US government security clearances hacked? That’s information that definitely puts people at risk of harm.

Is it a coincidence that these stories are coming out at the same time?

The last unbreakable code?

I noticed a brief article in The Guardian with the captivating headline “Can Google be taught poetry?”.

By feeding poems to the robots, the researchers want to “teach the database the metaphors” that humans associate with pictures, “and see what happens,” explains Corey Pressman from Neologic Labs, who are behind the project, along with Webvisions and Arizona State University….

The hope is that, with a big enough dataset, “we’ll be delighted to see we can teach the robots metaphors, that computers can be more like us, rather than the other way around,” says Pressman. “I’d like them to meet us more halfway.”

That sounds utopian, magnificent, turning away from the harsh and narrow-minded informaticism to grand humane concerns. And yet, it reminded me of a recent article in the New Yorker “Why Jihadists Write Poetry”:

Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But this is a mistake. It is impossible to understand jihadism—its objectives, its appeal for new recruits, and its durability—without examining its culture. This culture finds expression in a number of forms, including anthems and documentary videos, but poetry is its heart. And, unlike the videos of beheadings and burnings, which are made primarily for foreign consumption, poetry provides a window onto the movement talking to itself. It is in verse that militants most clearly articulate the fantasy life of jihad.

Whatever the motives of Neologic Labs — and I’m guessing they have a pitch to investors that doesn’t rely upon the self-actualisation of smartphones, nor on the profits to be turned from improving the quality of poetry — can we doubt that sooner or later this technology is going to be applied to improving the quality of government surveillance, escaping the literal to follow human prey down into the warrens of metaphor and allusion. It will start with terrorists, but that’s not where it will stop.

Imagine, just to begin with, China equipping its internet with a cybernetic real-time censor that can’t be fooled by symbolic language or references to obscure rock lyrics, which the software will be more familiar with than any fan. Protest movements will be extinguished before people are even aware that they were ever part of a movement.

Hannah’s sweets

The following problem appeared on one of yesterday’s GCSE maths exams, leading to considerable frustration and media attention:

Hannah has 6 orange sweets and some yellow sweets.

Overall, she has n sweets.

The probability of her taking 2 orange sweets is 1/3.

Prove that: n^2-n-90=0

^ is “to the power of”

Now, I am a professional probabilist, and I wasn’t immediately sure how to do it. Why not? Well, there’s something missing: The problem doesn’t tell us what Hannah’s options are. Did she pick sweets at random from the bag? How many? Are we asked the probability that she took 2 orange sweets rather than 3 yellow, given that she actually prefers the orange?  Did she choose between taking sweets out of the bag and putting it away until after dinner?

There should have been a line that said, “She picks two sweets from the bag, at random, without replacement, with each sweet in the bag equally likely to be taken.”

According to the news reports

Hannah’s was just one of the many supposed “real life” problems that the students were required to tackle.

This is just an example of the ridiculous approach to mathematical “applications” induced by our testing culture. It’s not a “real life” maths problem. It’s a very elementary book problem, decked out with a little story that serves only to confuse the matter. You are supposed to know a standard rule for decoding the chatter. If you try to make use of any actual understanding of the situation being described you will only be misled. (Richard Feynman described this problem, when he was on a commission to examine junior high school maths textbooks in California in the 1960s. His entertaining account is the chapter “Judging Books by their Covers” in Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman.)

The annuity puzzle

Stanford biodemographer Shripad Tuljapurkar has written a very thoughtful post about the “annuity puzzle”: Why do people generally not choose to purchase annuities that would seem to protect them from a major risk: Being feeble and impoverished 30 or 40 years after retirement? His explanation, which is surely right as far as it goes, is that the shunning of annuities is a rational response to the compensating default risk from the insurance company. You have to live quite a long time to make your nut on an annuity. The “risk” — the probability of living that long — is low, and (he argues, persuasively) one could reasonably conclude that it is outweighed by the likelihood of a financial crash in the interim.

From a behavioural economics perspective, this matches closely one of the standard explanations for discounting: Future returns are drastically uncertain, so we develop the habit of preferring immediate gratification. So this falls in the category of attempts to explain seemingly irrational economic behaviour by showing that it is in fact rational when you take into account limited information or costs of acquiring or analysing information. Of course, any economic theory inevitably struggles to deal with questions of insurance and annuities, where the risk involves the life of the economic agent. The celebrated analysis of this problem by Jack Benny is still relevant.

But while this is a cogent argument for why people shouldn’t buy annuities, I’m skeptical of it as an explanation for why they don’t buy annuities. First, the annuity puzzle is a phenomenon of average people, not savvy investors. I doubt that most people think much about the risk of established financial companies defaulting. One prominent study (based on surveys conducted in 2004) found that 59% of Americans would trade half of their Social Security annuity for an actuarially fair lump sum payment. I’m pretty sure that they are not thinking that they can find a safer investment, with less risk of default, than Social Security. Continue reading “The annuity puzzle”

“Soon enough”

This picture of a British army tank having crushed an automobile that strayed into its path in a small German town has gotten quite a lot of attention.

Tank vs car

Here is the comment of the British military spokesperson:

“Our tank crews go through a very rigorous training process,” he said, reportedly adding that three members of personnel inside monitor the road “which is why they were able to stop soon enough”.

Looking at the photograph, I wonder what would have counted as not stopping “soon enough”. One can imagine similar applications of this Zieglerism. “The Titanic had very rigorous iceberg detection procedures, which is why it was able to stop soon enough.” “The Bush administration had very rigorous antiterrorism procedures, which is why they were able to defend the country adequately against Al Qaeda attacks.” (All but one! 7 1/2 years without an attack!)

Plaque assay

I was just in Paris for a few days. Walking past the Lycée Simone Weil, in the 3rd arrondissement, I noticed a plaque, such as one sees quite commonly on public institutions:

À la mémoire des jeunes filles, élèves de cet établissement, autrefois école de couture die la ville de Paris, déportées et assassinées de 1942 à 1944 parce qu’elles étaient nées juives, victimes innocentes de la barbarie nazie avec la complicité active du gouvernement de Vichy.

Plus de 11400 enfants furent déportés de France dont plus de 500 vivaient dans le 3ème art de Paris.

Ils furent exterminés dans les camps de la mort.

Les élèves du Lycée Simone Weil ne les oublieront jamais.

[To the memory of the girls, pupils of this establishment, which was then the Paris School of Dressmaking, deported and murdered from 1942 to 1944 because they were born Jewish, innocent victims of the Nazi barbarism with the active complicity of the Vichy government.

More than 11400 children were deported from France, of whom more than 500 lived in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris.

They were exterminated in the death camps.

The pupils of the Lycée Simone Weil will never forget them.]

As I read it, the formulation seemed to me strikingly perfect. The text avoids all the pitfalls that similar texts have been criticised for, whereby they seemed to either be minimising the horror, or pushing away blame, or somehow alienating the victims. The victims were “jeunes filles”, “innocent victims”, “murdered because they were born Jewish” (thus emphasising that it was a purely racist crime. They were “exterminated”, they lived right here, and then this somewhat wishful phrase at the end, usually attached to heroic martyrs, “The pupils will never forget them.” Most striking was the attribution of responsibility to “Nazi barbarism with the active complicity of the Vichy government.” They clearly were concerned to make absolutely unambiguous that they were not minimising French responsibility. Not just “complicity”, but “active complicity”. (Though it wasn’t the “French government”, but only the “Vichy government”.)

I was impressed first, then irritated. Precisely because they managed to tick every box and engrave such a perfect text on the plaque, it made it clear what a formulaic activity it is. (Perhaps the final sentence, unassailably high-minded just as it is clearly not true in any meaningful sense, also drove that point home.) It’s not that they did anything wrong, and I’m glad that they put all these plaques up. There’s just a limit to what you can achieve with a plaque, and perfecting the art of the memorial plaque in some ways undermines the spirit that it is meant to express.

Wall Street idealism

A Yale senior in computer science, Steph Rhee, describes an encounter with a Wall Street tycoon at a cozy Yalie networking event:

When I said that I was studying computer science because I want to be a software engineer and hope to start my own company one day, he said, “Why waste so many years learning how to code? Why not just pay someone else to build your idea?!”

What is hilarious is the imperiously aristocratic style of the grand financier, appalled at the notion of anyone getting their hands dirty in trade, in this case, being so crass as to actually develop the skills to make anything yourself, as opposed to taking advantage of your superior status to float your IDEAS into the room, and expect the peons to praise their brilliance and knuckle down to the real work.

I am reminded of Harlan Ellison’s celebrated reply to fans who would ask him “Where do you get your ideas from?”

“There’s this ‘idea service’ in Schenectady and every week like clockwork they send me a fresh six-pack of ideas for 25 bucks.” Every time I say that at a college lecture there’s always some schmuck who comes up to me and wants the address of the service.