Small Change

It was nice to have a cheque from those kind people at HMRC, finally returning the tax that they incorrectly grabbed from me last year, with the normal, 'demanding money with menaces' letter. This year, I hear it will be even worse with as many as a quarter of tax codes completely incorrect and yet HMRC have once again posted these out in full knowledge of the error.

A week or so ago, I listened to a spokesperson from HMRC being 'beaten-up' on the Radio 4 'Moneybox' programme. The incredulous interviewer asking: "So you knew a substantial number of tax codes were incorrect and yet you still sent these out?"

She replied something along the lines of: "Waffle Waffle, working in partnership with our 'customers', waffle waffle, new computer system, waffle, better next year, very sorry, waffle, call us and we will set it right."

"But", said the BBC man, "The Audit commission has just censured you for not answering 40% of telephone calls….."

I have some personal knowledge of this, having given up trying to respond to two threatening letters in the last four months and found the HMRC number to be either engaged or out of service. In the end, I wrote them a letter, pointing out that I was sick of receiving threats for the recovery of small amounts of money, £5.00, which I didn't owe them, when in fact they owed me considerably more, as the cheque I've just received conclusively proves.

Ironically, if you don't have an account to fight one's corner, you can't expect a refund either. As the nice but defensive HMRC lady on 'Moneybox' pointed out, "If people tell us why their tax code/assessment is wrong, we will correct it," but then of course you and I have to be capable accountants to prove the error and then, quite demonstrably, HMRC won't answer the phone.

Much like the debacle over family tax credits, which has hurt many of the poorest people in our society, the HMRC continues to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that at best, its incompetent and at worst, unfit for purpose. Speaking at a conference I chaired a couple of years ago, Professor Ian Angell of the LSE, described the organisation as a 'real example of serious and organised crime' and perhaps he has a point, because no other organisation could get away with the activities of HMRC.

In the real world of organised crime, criminal gangs on the internet have seen the opportunity gap left by HMRC and have, as I predicted several years ago, started exploiting the opportunity and the naivety of the general public. If you receive an email like the one below, ignore it, as you would have to assume that HMRC were efficient enough to be able to calculate your tax accurately and have a working system of this kind in the first place.



HM Revenue & Customs

United Kingdom

tax-refund@hmrc.gov.uk

Dear Applicant:

Please note now you can get your tax refund, after the last annual calculation of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of 314.79 GBP.

Please take few minutes to fill your form attached to this message.

The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential and as applicable; copyright in these is reserved to HM Revenue & Customs.



Sincerely,

HM Revenue & Customs

tax-refund@hmrc.gov.uk

Special Needs

I see the government has rumbled one ruse, reportedly used by schools to 'get extra funding and inflate their position in new-style rankings' and that's to label as many pupils as possible with 'Special Educational Needs'. Apparently, in some schools, as many as half of pupils are now diagnosed with learning difficulties or behavioral problems, it was revealed, just weeks after a cross-party group of MPs criticised schools for being too quick to label children with poor reading skills as dyslexic.

Given the enormous pressure placed on schools to improve their results by the government, I'm not surprised at this or in fact any other gambit being used to show an annual league table improvement and in many ways, it mirrors the pressures being applied to hospital trusts in showing constant improvement or to conceal what often appears to the man-in-the-street, to be a steady decline in overall standards which are contradicted by statistics.

The reality of the matter is that few people trust what the author Mark Twain described as: 'Lies, damn lies and statistics' and an excellent example might be the audit commission and the way its assesses councils and local authorities. Naively, I believed that a common set of metrics were used but I've since discovered otherwise and so in future I'll accept 'independent' performance figures as lying somewhere between 'Showing improvement' and 'How long is a piece of string.'

Staying with teaching a moment, I felt this month that the Conservative plans to make teaching a higher-level graduate profession might discriminate against those very good teachers I know who might not carry a first-class degree but show a wonderful control of both the class and the subject they teach. Half the struggle, these days, outside grinding paperwork, is simply class control and keeping the attention and interest of pupils, a number of which might have Special Educational Needs. My own experience is that the best teachers are not always the academically brightest but those with a vocation, incredible patience and a love of their subject. Quite honestly, given the challenging nature of teaching today, which to many educators appears to be more about making children feel good about themselves rather than teaching them, one has to be extremely committed to consider a career in the classroom. It can be extremely rewarding but like water under pressure finding the smallest crack in a dam, today's children will very quickly assess the character strength of any teacher in front of them, which is why the profession experiences high early retirement, nervous breakdowns and stree-related illness.

The issue that government, really has to address, I believe, is not education as such but the nature of the society that feeds into the education system. If like me, you find yourself in a classroom with six 'statemented' teenagers, attempting to play havoc at any opportunity, you really have to ask what the purpose of the teacher really is in such circumstances, as a professional educator or an extension of social services.

Photo Call

With the risk of a terrorist incident now raised to the level of 'Severe', I've come out from under my desk long enough to write this short blog entry, before returning to cover my windows in brown paper.

What this heightened state actually means in real terms is hard to fathom and the Home Secretary doesn't appear to be any wiser either. What he can't say of course is who might be responsible or indeed, whether 'they', whoever 'they' might be, may have returned from any recent adventure holiday break to Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia.

I'm pretty sure though, that if you went down to the bookmakers and placed a bet, call it risk profiling if you like, based on actual incidents over the last ten years, you would get pretty short odds on the suspects, leaving one to wonder why Auntie Mabel really needs to experience the indignity of airport body scanning, now she's passed the age of seventy.

So for now, we all have to treat each other with equal suspicion in what is yet another paragraph taken from George Orwell's novel, 1984, just in case….

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

I heard on the BBC news this morning that Kent Police want to use BAE systems 'drones' – rather like the 'Predator' in Afghanistan but without the impressive weaponry' – for a range of different tasks which include traffic policing. Forgetting the enormous expense for one moment, I've a personal objection to unmanned aircraft buzzing around the world's busiest airspace. Last summer I was prevented from flying a banner over one of the V-Festivals in the north of England by the police and subsequently discovered the reason, that they were testing an unmanned drone, sitting over the stage at 2000 feet, watching and photographing the crowds. While I'm sure that the intelligence these systems offers can be extremely useful, the Kingsnorth power station demonstration would be an excellent example, I worry that the system would be abused; isn't it always, and the costs would detract from the investment to police communities properly, which is what people really want rather than 'RoboCop'.

Unfortunately, with 2012 and the Olympics fast approaching, I can promise you that RoboCop and much more is what we are going to get as the authorities become increasing paranoid and security conscious in the period between now and the games. But when the Olympics are over, the security infrastructure will remain in place and like proliferating CCTV, is most unlikely to be dismantled, ever.

A Bite of the Apple

Today, I finally joined the massed ranks of Apple's iPhone users, swapping out my Blackberry 9000 for the first batch of the popular smartphones to ship out of Vodafone.

I've been patiently for a year now, as O2 users have had the device for rather a long time and have delighted in showing me how limited the Blackberry, which is powerful in its email capability, is when it comes to 100,000 iPhone 'apps'.

I mentioned that I gave my wife one of the HTC Google Android devices for Christmas and to be honest, it's much easier to install than the iPhone and given its powerful integration with the expanding Google product platform, possibly a better device. However, the iPhone has all the aviation and business apps that haven't yet appeared on the Android and from my point of view, it's apps library has some 80,000 more compelling applications available than Google's but I'm sure that will soon change.

In my view however, if you are looking for one of these super smartphones, then the Google Android is probably the best choice, unless of course, like me, you happen to be looking for specific applications or want to integrate the richer Apple multimedia experience through iTunes.

Perhaps one good thing about switching out of the Blackberry or 'Crackberry', is to wean myself away from PDA attention deficit disorder, every time the incoming email tone warbles. Now my mail is set for collection every fifteen minutes rather than in real time but I will miss the Blackberry keyboard because typing anything sensible on a touch screen phone is both tedious and long-winded!

This week, I stumbled across a book that I wrote twenty years ago, being sold on eBay and it rather surprised me to think that it still holds some residual value today. 1989 was interesting time because we were at the cusp of one the great leap forwards in computing, mid-way between Microsoft's Windows and IBM's OS/2 as both Operating Systems vied for world dominance. We all know which of these won! However, there was a huge amount of disruptive convergence happening at the same time and several of the technologies I wrote about in my book never actually saw the light of day as events overtook them. In any event, it remains an interesting time capsule and perhaps in another hundred years, some researcher will find a dusty copy and find it a useful reference in marking a point in history when the biggest and most successful names in the IT industry were quite oblivious to the sudden rise of a Microsoft which would rapidly push them into extinction or a second-rate position in the software business.

I hope the pupils from the Charles Dickens School, visiting Microsoft next week, will both enjoy and benefit from the experience. In ten years time, who can say what PCs and Smartphones will look like and my iPhone may be gathering dust in the attic along with the 'brick' I first used as a mobile phone twenty years ago!

Gesture Politics

Up to the big city today and the large amount of snow on the ground past Herne Bay towards London came as a surprise to me; as did the presence of British Transport Police on the train. Where the former was concerned this illustrated how much Thanet benefits from its micro-climate and the latter, well I've been corresponding with the Chief Constable of British Transport Police in conjunction with Thanet North MP, Roger Gale and I'm delighted to see they have a series of operations running on the trains between here and Faversham. With luck, an occasional police presence will deter the teenage element that I frequently see causing problems between Margate and Herne bay when I'm travelling.

I did notice today an initiative from Gordon Brown to put PCs into the hands of more deprived children and their families, a laudable objective. In fact, when he did this first time around at the beginning of the decade, I was still working with the present Government through the Cabinet Office and recall talking about the initiative on Sky News at the time. Subsequently, I also vaguely recall what happened to the first batch of PCs that were distributed this way. Liverpool, I seem to recollect was where the most were reportedly stolen or went missing but deprivation and loss appeared to go hand in hand, a lesson to Government at the time. While I'm sure some families benefited, overall, I think it may have been a wonderful gesture and a chronic waste of taxpayers' money.

I think, the conclusion was that if you are going to give away millions of pound technology in this way and to this particularly deprived group, then you need to take proper account of domestic and social circumstances and try and encourage the children to come to a facility or after-school club, where they can be properly taught and encouraged, rather than being left to their own devices, frequently in family circumstances which aren't conducive to the educational principle behind the gift. Simply throwing a computer and an internet connection at the problem doesn't, in my mind at least, deliver the results that Government may be seeking.
Anyway, there's a much deeper underlying problem that needs addressing here, the nature of the digital divide in the second decade of the 21 century and I'm not convinced that middle-aged politicians and policy makers are sufficiently in tune with the rapid advances in technology to grasp the social implications of failure.

Fishy Story

It's a bit quiet out there this morning. The road in from Birchington is almost empty, on account of both the A28 and the Thanet Way being closed by accidents, effectively cutting-off the island from the outside world until cleared. We appear to have escaped the worst of the snow as usual, having warmer sea temperatures on both sides and the further west you go, I hear the worse it is.

I'm trying to get to a meeting at the council offices in Margate today so rather than risk the icy roads; I plan to walk along the seafront, as it's a pleasant if rather brisk day. Neither one of my small dogs is prepared to volunteer for arctic sled work and earlier, the older one arbitrarily decide to turn around and head for home after experiencing the bitter wind chill on the beach at 8am.

Wednesday, was one more exciting day in politics with what appears to have been a failed attempt by Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, to unseat Gordon Brown from his 'Scotsman –like' grip on the premiership. By the end of the day, even young Milliband had issued a statement of support for Gordon, hammering a nail firmly in the coffin of the dynamic duo. Labour, it appears, are still convinced that the country loves Gordon and that he's the man to lead them to victory in the forthcoming election. I wonder how many readers out there would be prepared at this time to risk a fiver at the bookies, betting on a Labour election victory? I rather doubt that taxes and VAT will be going-up until after any change of government though and reportedly, the Labour Party much like the nation, will be bankrupt before that date, as political donations appear to have dried-up outside the big £million size cheques written by plutocratic loyalists like of Lord Sainsbury.

Finally, giving new meaning to the expression, 'Fiscal Prudence', the good news that the Icelandic government has agreed to repay its £billion pound banking liability in fish; setting a new gold-standard in equivalent weight of frozen Cod. The Bank of England, private investors and a number of County Councils have welcomed the gesture of goodwill and reportedly deliveries of the new currency will soon be appearing in specially prepared frozen vaults in banks around the country. With the pound now heading towards parity with the Euro, Chancellor Alasdair Darling is expected to announce Britain's own currency commitment to the new Cod-standard, on account of his predecessor having sold –off most of the country's gold when Labour first came to power.

School's Out

I'm not convinced that Schools Secretary, Ed Balls and I share the same planet. After watching his interview on BBC Breakfast this morning, I'm even more concerned that he's 'lost the plot' in a fog of well-meaning and wide-eyed socialist zeal.

To cut a very long story short, Ed, like everyone else, wants the best possible education for all our children to give them the best possible start in society and to deliver the best possible skills to the economy of tomorrow. It's a laudable aspiration shared by every politician regardless of party.

The Schools Secretary however believes that he can legislate for such success, increasing the education budget and guaranteeing parents that if their child falls behind, then one-to-one teaching will be made available. It's a little more detailed than this of course but I think you will grasp the broad picture.

Strangely enough, even his BBC interviewer appeared a little incredulous. After all, you may throw large amounts of money at the growing problem of educational failure but where are the teachers going to come from among other pressing and important questions. The answer appears to involve political magic of some form because as a politician of the first order, Ed avoided answering any of the questions directly.

What concerns me more about this interview is the implication that schools and teachers are responsible for failure and that Government can somehow legislate to bring every child up to the same standard, regardless of environment, background, social class and more. Instead, Mr Balls and the Government should be asking what social conditions are leading to chronic illiteracy and failing numeracy among well-identified social groups and communities? Children are not like Personal Computers, simply waiting to have the appropriate software installed and then to perform in an identical manner. They are not clones. Human history tells as this as does the familiar bell-shaped curve of intelligence and achievement within any group. Enshrining 'success' in law is not going to make little Johnny a model student if he's truanting from school, has a young single mother and lives on crisps and cola.

Perhaps, Ed Balls, should spend some time observing in schools and in particular classes where a high percentage of children have educational statements of one form or another. For the teacher, simply getting through the hour and remaining sane, with even the most modest learning objective achievement for the majority is a success.

Tinkering with education, the curriculum and schools in not going to solve a much broader problem in our society which has to be dealt with first. And to do this, Ed Balls and Gordon Brown and others need to accept that money is not a magic wand and that education must be as driven and supported as equally hard from the home environment as from the school.

History Reminds Us

It occurs to me that Britain's' future security won't so much be determined by what happens on the playing fields of Eton rather than the mountains of Yemen.

I was invited to the country five years ago by the UN to speak at a conference in the capital, Sana'a. I really wanted to visit as this is one part of the Arab world that I have yet to set foot in but with it being a hotbed for Islamic terrorist groups, I decided to give the British Ambassador a call for her opinion on whether it was a safe choice of destination. As she only ventured out in the company of an armoured Range Rover and a handful of Special Forces bodyguards, her answer was quite unequivocal. So I asked the UN if they were able to guarantee my personal safety and the reply was an equally unequivocal 'No', so I politely declined the invitation.

In the week that saw the release of IT consultant Peter Moore, from long captivity in Iraq as well, I'm rather glad that I didn't take-up the offer of a visit to Baghdad either. I think I learned my lesson many years ago when the DHL aircraft carrying all my belongings back from Saudi Arabia, stopped in Beirut and never took-off again; the Israeli army choosing that moment to invade the country. However, once again, I'm left with the thought that we are pursuing an unwinnable war in Afghanistan while Islamic terrorism breeds unhindered in Somalia and Yemen.

Yesterday, I saw on the news that the heroin harvest from Afghanistan has also reached new records, with the Russians politely pointing out that under their occupation of the country; it was a fraction of what it is today. The Soviets reportedly had a zero-tolerance policy on the opium poppy production which funds terrorism and crime in the country and simply 'bumped-off' the warlords engaged in the trade. In contrast, Western governments appear to be attempting to persuade the Afghans, that drug production is a very bad idea and try to buy them off instead. The Afghans, being a pragmatic people, think this is, in turn, a jolly good idea and simply keep the dollars and continue growing the opium poppies that you see our troops wading through on news reports from the green zone.

But none of this is new, as a nation we've been here before and simply forgotten the lessons of history in both Afghanistan and Iraq. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) in his "Report on Mesopotamia" for The Sunday Times (22 August 1920) wrote:

"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, and incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster."

What Lawrence wrote then echoes through the pages of history and serves as a reminder of where we find ourselves today, short of money, manpower, equipment, policy and above all, solutions to a problem that now has us by the throat and not the other way around..

Postmans' Knock

The postman had to remind me this morning that it wasn't Sunday. "It's OK," he said, "I almost forgot as well" and so thankfully, I avoided waking the family up in time for church.

After a while, the Christmas holiday starts to resemble the film, 'Groundhog Day'. There's still half a Christmas pudding left under cling film and the cream is reaching its sell-by-date and so someone has to make that final gesture of selfless courage and eat it. The two bottles of good Irish whiskey present me with a rather more difficult challenge before work starts on Monday.

The New Year is hardly hours old before all the political parties are starting their pre-election campaigns. I caught the LibDems Chris Hulme this morning taking a thinly disguised class-war swipe at David Cameron over Conservative plans for inheritance tax reform, suggesting it was a cynical ploy to pander to his rich friends and George Osborne's.

Curiously enough though, the BBC ran a programme on Radio 4, a couple of weeks ago where the balance of the taxation contribution in our economy from both rich and poor was investigated. I was quite astonished to discover the remarkable degree to which the wealthier members of our society, (anyone earning over £50,000 pa) through taxation, already subsidise the broad majority who are the net beneficiaries of welfare. The economists clearly warned that the 'Class War' epithet was a political myth and that the LibDems 'Mansion Tax' plans and more risked pushing the system beyond breaking point. Like policing, taxation is only possible through consensus and it has to be sensible, fair and pragmatic across the entire society. Skewing this to penalise the more successful, could simply drive us back to the 1970s and a position where people and businesses simply leave the country.

Regardless of political affiliation however, there's a huge gap in the public finances to be filled and simply squeezing the so-called 'rich' isn't going to achieve it. Britain is going to have to learn to live within its means and for many families, this is going to come as a terrible wake-up-call after so many years of experiencing life in one of the most generous welfare states in the world.

Meanwhile and on a  lighter topic, here's a Rory Bremner sketch that you may not have seen.

A Tale of Two Digits

Reading today's papers, one story in particular struck me as one with a deep interest in both education and technology.

Reportedly, a group of eight primary school head teachers have spent £32,000 of taxpayer's money on a three-week training course in Australia, which involved visiting 12 Australian schools. This was apparently an 'investment', or as the trip head teacher Lauren Connor said: 'We want to learn more about how they are using ICT as a delivery mechanism for the whole curriculum. "We made a short film to present to the Australian Education Department in Sydney, and we are looking forward to establishing closer links with schools down under."

To be honest, I can't really see what can be achieved from a trip of this kind 'down-under' as head teachers are pretty much locked-in to our own national curriculum and their own tight budgets. In recent months, I've been on a university course and have also been in school, observing how new technology is being integrated into today's curriculum and I've been very impressed by the efforts and dedication of the specialist teaching staff involved and by the scale of the resource now available to young people in our schools. That said, there are a number of concerns I have, reflected in my earlier blog post: 'In Another Ten Years' and in the article I wrote for the Observer newspaper at the beginning of the last decade, when I identified three, so-called 'Digital Divides': 'access to the internet; a skills gap between those who know how to benefit from the internet and those who don't; and speed of access to the internet.'

My present opinion is that the curriculum, while intensive, is arguably static; i.e. it's very much locked-in to applications as business and productivity tools; the lingua franca of fundamental computer literacy and remains slow to recognize that many students are way ahead in their use and exploration of Web 2.0 and the emerging cloudscape that is increasingly represented by Google in people's minds, rather than Microsoft. There's nothing wrong in teaching students to use MS Office and program simple Flash animations but the technology is now moving so swiftly that it begs the question as to where we should now be concentrating both our imagination and our efforts in teaching the subject.

As an example, I bought my wife a Google Android phone this Christmas and I'm deeply impressed with its seamless integration with the Google cloud of applications, its location and wireless network awareness and the free applications available on demand. Me, I'm also waiting for delivery of an Apple iPhone as well, with 10,000 or so 'Apps; of its own and my fourteen-year old daughter, with her own iPod touch, is already stretching her imagination in regard to what can be achieved with this new generation of handheld devices, the 'Cloud' and a PC.

So now we have a new kind of digital divide and one that I've observed in schools. Access to the internet may be pretty much pervasive these days but there's a huge spectrum of difference between those who are using it for different purposes in our society, from the most basic to the advanced.

As an example, many poorer homes with single-parent families may have very limited access beyond the internet, games and Microsoft's 'Word'. If several children are involved sharing one PC then the opportunity horizons may be very limited indeed. Simultaneously, government talks of bridging the skills gap and introducing new skills but conveniently ignores the fact that simply delivering a Personal Computer and a selection of approved applications in schools (approved at the beginning of the last decade) is really going to influence the rapidly moving software economy of tomorrow beyond the delivery of the fundamental computer literacy skills required to survive in the 21^st century.

What the answer is in this cash-strapped environment I can't really say and I'm looking for an opportunity to raise the subject with the Conservative's Michael Gove. However, what I do believe is important is that young people are given the opportunity to see what can be achieved in their future careers if they take an interest in technology. This month, I've drawn-down a favour from Microsoft's head of government relations and arranged a visit for students from the Charles Dickens School in Broadstairs, a sponsored specialist school, to the Microsoft campus in Reading. The company doesn't normally offer school visits but I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity for these youngsters to see what life is like on the other side of the fence, on the 'bridge' of the Starship Enterprise, so to speak and Microsoft have very kindly offered to show them and their teachers around for the day. With luck it may provide the seeds of inspiration and an exciting potential career path for at least on boy or girl from Thanet.

The Road Ahead

I can't remember a time when I read so many books over Christmas. This year, it's a consequence of having my Amazon Kindle reader and as I've written here before, the results are quite remarkable in terms of easy and immediate access to works of both fact and fiction. Not one for holidays, the Christmas break is a time when a can enjoy a a good book without the world outside intruding too much on a temporary truce from the reach of email and the telephone. I can even turn my Blackberry off!

For many of us, each decade is one of those periods in our lives that we can most easily recall. In 1970, I was in my mid-teens, in 1980, I was starting a new career and in 1990, I recall that Microsoft's Windows was starting to make its presence felt over IBM's OS/2 Operating System. That technology, still very much in its infancy, would be inconceivable to the teenagers of today, where even the lowest-end iPod Touch carries 8Gb of memory and computing is heading towards a virtualized existence in the 'The Cloud' dominated by the likes of Google and Amazon.

There's speculation this morning that unemployment may jump by another 250,000 this year to 3 million. There's also political talk of offering greater support for new skills to better empower our economy. It's a topic I've been looking at for some time now and I'm far from convinced by the rhetoric.

The fact is that the vast majority of our workers continue to be employed in traditional jobs. The new job types created by technology represent a relatively small fraction of employment and often tend not to last very long.

Even within high technology industries, the bulk of jobs are traditional jobs. Suppose you found a new technology company and it starts to grow. Who do you hire? Engineers, people to work in accounting, human resources, marketing and finance; administrative assistants and more: these are all traditional jobs. The people working at Google do not all have new-age jobs; by and large, they have the same types of jobs as people working in any technology-focused business. What needs to concern us is not just the number of new jobs created by technology, but the types of jobs or as I said in Spain this month, To suggest that technology is suddenly able to create completely new job categories capable of absorbing millions of workers being displaced from traditional jobs is hopelessly optimistic. In fact, what we are seeing is more and more job-types, such as cashiers and bank staff, being automated out of existence at the base of the work pyramid and towards its apex, automation is falling heavily on knowledge workers and in particular on highly paid workers as systems and processes become more intelligent and efficient. I see this all the time in the IT industry as more and more people I know lose their jobs as companies, driven by the effects of this last recession streamline and downsize to leverage every penny from their balance sheet.

As large numbers of workers are automated out of their jobs, the economy may eventually go into decline because each worker is also a consumer and as computers are advancing in capability they will increasingly invade the realm of the highly educated. We'll likely see evidence of this in the form of diminished opportunity and unemployment among recent graduates and also among older university-educated workers who lose jobs and are unable to find comparable positions. It's a complex picture, described by Martin Ford, in his book, 'The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future' but the evidence for this change exists all around us to see.

With Silicon-based digital computers expected to reach their physical limits in terms of increased computer power sometime after 2020, this coming decade, given the exponential doubling of computing power, is going to bring changes that most of us can't imagine, as the paradigm shift rate accelerates. It took 15 years of computing to DNA to sequence the HIV virus yet SARS was sequenced in only 31 days. For most of us the internet started after 1995 and it's taken fifteen years to become pervasive. That same kind of disruptive shift to our society can now be achieved in less than five years, given the molecular technologies that are starting to make an appearance and so the really big question and the one our economy hangs upon, is how on earth we plan for new skills and for new ideas that haven't been invented yet when as a society we have lost our agility and our competitiveness and become yet one more top-heavy, over-regulated European poltico-bureaucracy?

I wish I knew the answer!

Scattered About

Well, that's another Christmas Day, past. I've been out this morning and would personally like to express my personal 'thanks' to the occupants of the house which regularly dumps its household rubbish next to the council bin at the start of the St Mildred's Bay car park. I'm sure those responsible and I could read out the names from their Xmas present labels, will be delighted to know, that with help from the ever present and voracious seagulls, the remains of their Christmas dinner and gift wrappings, are now scattered as far down as the beach. Strangely enough, I see, even the gulls won't eat Brussel sprouts.

Further down in the recycling area, people either can't be bothered or are not strong enough to lift the cover on the skip and have dumped bags of wrapping paper and boxes next to it. Yesterday, I shoved a whole load of boxes and paper to the back which was blocking the opening. So what happens next, is when the wind picks up, all the paper will end-up decorating the putting-green and the sea front. It's a shame because up until now, the beaches and sea-front area were looking remarkably clean, with great credit to the council sweepers and this will soon change as the paper becomes sodden and scatters.

Today, I had considered changing the template on this weblog but if I do, I'll lose all the links down the sidebar and would have to type each one back in again, a rather long-winder process. Also, because I have a number of 'Blogs', such as Zentelligence, I can't easily include and move other code around on the later interface, whereas the old blogger code accepts HTML (however poor my scripting is) so I guess we're stuck with it for now.

With less than a week before the start of 2010, I need to think of a New Year's resolution. The more immediate priority is to get back into a personal fitness regime. With my travelling around this month, freezing weather and two colds, I have 'dropped' the ball and need to re-discover the willpower to get back into my regime. The problem I find, post-fifty, is dealing with the challenge of discomfort and fatigue when one re-starts and I can easily understand why people simply give-up on the gym as falling asleep in the arm chair is a far more attractive option than lifting weights in the cold.

What I would like to do is take a quick break in the New Year if the opportunity allows. I haven't had a holiday in over two years and it would be nice to go exploring again. It's a great way of losing weight as well! Places I've always wanted to visit include the oasis of Siwa in the western desert, Reigandou in Japan, the ancient city of Timbuktu and Hissarlik in Turkey, the site of ancient Troy. Maybe one day!

I did offer to take my daughter to Westwood Cross this morning but she gave me a pitying look and described the idea as 'madness.' I'm sure she's right. Has anyone else made the attempt?

Re-booting the Economy

I've embedded a conference presentation from TED.COM by Juan Enriquez that I recommend watching, as it delivers considerable insight into the problems facing the global economy and the technologies that may soon shape our future.

Although he refers to the US recession, much of what he says in terms of leverage and debt applies to our own economy, as closely linked as it is, to the uncertain fortunes of the mighty dollar and a globalised financial system.

Slightly Cloudy

After almost two weeks away, I see the battery life on my Amazon Kindle reader still shows half charge and that's after wading through Dan Simmons' novel, Ilium, and having started the sequel Olympos as well. If you can imagine, Homer's 'Iliad', Shakespeare's 'Tempest' and some advanced quantum physics, all shaken vigorously together, then you've the basis for a rather imaginative novel of both the distant past and far future. The great thing about the Kindle device is that I can also load for free, the complete Iliad, Herodotus' travels in ancient Egypt and a great deal more besides and so in a very short period, it's completely changed my reading habits.

I can see a near future where devices like this one actually have liquid crystal pages as the technology now exists. So you buy perhaps a six-page device or twelve-page device to suit your budget and the first page is wirelessly synchronized with your email, several more display word or PDF documents, another is the book you are reading and so on. Soon they will be as cheap as any other commodity device and with electronic paper cheaper than the real thing, children will carry them to school in the place of books and will have access to everything and anything mankind has ever published in their schoolbag as well as everything and anything they have ever written during their school years at their fingertips.

It was the kind of idea I was giving a talk on in Spain a week ago, with the rapid evolution of what is called virtualization or cloud computing, where technology is delivered as a utility, much like electricity, a model we are already seeing with the evolution of a number of products from Google and Amazon. Anyway, given the exponential growth in computing power, still doubling every two years, thanks to Moore's Law, Christmas in 2015 is going to have on display some quite remarkable technology in PC World and Comet that we haven't even thought of yet!

Back in the real world, I'm confronted by boxes of Christmas cards to sign and seal. One day, someone's going to come-up with a process that automates that too, I'm sure. Just supply the names and addresses and a scan of your signature(s) and season's greetings will become as magic as a Jamie Oliver Christmas. Me, I'll have to make do with inky fingers for now as my fountain pen leaks and I'm running short of stamps. Yesterday, I visited Westwood Cross on my motorcycle to buy some presents. Given the frenzied seasonal madness that now surrounds it; I plan to avoid the roads around it now until the New Year if at all possible

Climbing Away

I haven't blogged for almost a week and so I'll start this entry as my Etihad flight from Abu Dhabi, flings itself over the desert coast and climbs away towards Bahrain and London Heathrow, several hours away.

I can't praise the quality of service on this airline enough. I'm sitting in economy and yet Etihad is superior to business class in most other airlines, such as Iberia, that I flew with last week to Madrid. The digital entertainment system, all touch screen, is quite remarkable with enough to keep me busy for hours; I watched 'Ice Age 3' and 'District 9' on the way out and I plan to start today with 'Dillinger' once I settle down after typing this.

The flight attendants on this new Airbus look as if they've freshly arrived from a beauty pageant. I suspect that if they were suddenly exposed to the harsh winter light and charms of Cecil Square, they might wither away instantly; like delicate tropical flowers. On the way out to the emirates, I was chatting to the young First Officer, also neatly pressed into his uniform, who had recently joined the company from Virgin Atlantic. Apparently he had been laid off at the start of the recession and fallen straight back on his feet with a job offer from Etihad and a change of lifestyle, living in Abu Dhabi. Given the legions of airline pilots who have also lost jobs recently, he considers himself very lucky indeed.

As one might expect, the place is spotlessly clean and tidy and no sign of even a single marauding 'Pit Bull' terrier to remind me of home. I did see one discarded water bottle during my time here but the local people take considerable pride in their city and litter just doesn't seem to happen in the way we understand it; the city authorities also being very efficient in removing it. No graffiti either but then I suspect that nobody has ever tried to test the law in this respect, given that the country is not a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights and anti-social behavior is treated very seriously indeed by the courts.

For the first ecrime congress (Middle-east), I've been staying at the Armed Forces Officers Club, which is unusual in having a mosque and a sophisticated, air-conditioned shooting range next door to each other in the complex. There's also a small bank tucked in between them. I imagine that if one applied for planning consent for the same layout, in say Manchester, there might be rather more difficulty in gaining approval from the city council once they saw what was on the plans. There's also which an Olympic size swimming pool and a gym to match with a very impressive Turkish bath should one get bored.

I toddled off to the indoor range with my colleagues and was reminded of the scene in the first Terminator movie, when 'Arnie' visits the gun store and asks for a 'Gas Plasma rifle.'

"Have you shot before sir," asked the nice girl behind the reception desk.

I replied that I had and surrendered my passport and filled in the appropriate waiver. When this was done I selected what I wanted to shoot from the menu and opted for a semi-automatic SIG 226 and 50 rounds of 9mm ammunition. The SIG is a highly reliable piece of Swiss engineering and I've never had one experience a blockage. The range appeared to be used both by locals and the small groups of American advisors and it was clear that the country is spending a great deal of money on both military hardware and training, I assume because Iran is only a matter of miles away across the disputed waters that saw a racing yacht out of Bahrain impounded last month.

While Dubai's economy went rapidly down the tubes last month, it's clear from the short time I had in Abu Dhabi this week, that it's apparently unscathed by the financial turmoil that surrounds it. From the sheer size, ambition and opulence of the surroundings, it's clear that 'the winner is the one that finishes with the most toys' and I'm looking forward to a return visit in the not too distant future. It's hard not to wonder, for a fleeting moment, what some of that fabulous wealth could achieve around my own sea-front, town, Margate, here in Thanet, rather than around the cornice in Abu Dhabi.