Category: Other

Death: going live after the next election

Relax; this is not about the forthcoming zombie apocalypse.  A note from the Public Health Directorate to the Healthcare Improvement Scotland explains:

I am writing to confirm death certification implementation will continue to move forward but with a new go live date.  Given the proximity of the current planned ‘go live’ date for the new scrutiny system to the UK General Election in early May next year, we have considered it would be best to move the ‘go live’ date by a few weeks until after the Election. Therefore, following discussion with key stakeholder groups we have agreed that the new ‘go live’ date will be 13 May 2015.

I’ve done a little spadework, so to speak, to find out how going live became a live issue for people working with the dead.  This is what I’ve dug up.  I think the culprits may be American (they do things differently there).     In Arkansas, for example, the Project Schedule for Electronic Death Registration began in 2009, and had seven stages:

  • Kickoff
  • Confirmation of Requirements (Gap Analysis)
  • Design and confirmation
  • User Acceptance Testing
  • Pilot
  • Go-Live at Pilot Location
  • Statewide Roll-out

It’s understandable, perhaps, that public administrators lapse on occasion into a little jargon – it’s infectious.  They really ought to be aware, though, that in any contemporary public service, whatever they do is liable to be read by a general public, and it ought to be written with that audience in mind.

Equal opportunity for werewolves

This is a little out of my usual line, but the story in yesterday’s Independent is so fabulous that it demands to be included.  Cristina Kirchner, the President of Argentina, has adopted a Jewish man to save him from becoming a werewolf.  Juan Peron extended the protection to women, and since 2009 it has been available to Jews; this adoption comes 21 years after his parents asked for him to be included.   The tradition carries some important privileges, including an educational scholarship, and President Kirchner has used the opportunity to promote harmony in different cultures.

The Research Excellence Framework: a rigged game

The results of the rating of universities, the Research Excellence Framework, came out a little before Christmas.   Output from newer universities, and smaller units of submission, tend to suffer by comparison with the old established institutions.  There are some obvious reasons why this happens.  One is the credit given for the ‘research environment’; another is  that a larger research team can offer several people a foothold  as co-authors of joint work.  However, the disparity of treatment between the best established institutions and others go beyond that.  What seems to have happened is that the bigger the institution, and the more people submitted, the more likely it is that a higher proportion of their output will be rated as ‘world leading’.  The REF has rediscovered the principle of homeopathy; the more dilute the effort,  the stronger its impact.

There was a perceptive comment by Tiffany Jenkins in the Scotsman about some other flaws in the process – the imbalance between books and articles, the fiddle of importing prestigious outsiders, the lack of time to ascertain whether a paper will have an influence.     I’ve commented before  that the way the ratings are designed discounts much of the kind of work I’ve engaged in over the years.  I’ve been looking at a review of my work in Serbian, which outlines the way that I’ve tried after Titmuss to establish an architecture for the study of social policy.  As usual, that counts for nothing in the exercise.

The private schools think they know what’s wrong with universities

A clip in today’s i caught my attention:

“Leading independent schools are to hold lessons for university lecturers aimed at telling them how teenagers should be taught. … Too often, lecturers are stuck in the past, headteachers argue, and think they can get away with just setting essays and offering the occasional one-to-one tutorial”.

Someone’s certainly stuck in the past, but I’m not sure it’s the universities.

Adapting to climate change

I haven’t read much of the IPCC’s latest report, snappily named WGII AG5. The report itself doesn’t exist as a single document; there are instead a series of ‘final drafts’, to be consolidated over the next six months.  I have read the summary (44 pages), the rather clearer technical summary (76 pages), chapter 13 on Livelihoods and poverty (57 pages) and chapter 2 on Decision-making processes (53 pages).  Long-winded doesn’t begin to say it.  For a neat, one-page summary, try The Register.

Further note: The full document is now available as a single report here. 

Some years ago, I was critical of the Stern report, which put its emphasis on an unrealistic strategy of ‘mitigation’ or prevention of climate change.  This report, on ‘adaptation’,  seems much better; it is identifying the harms and risks that follow from what we know about climate change and considers how the effects can be responded to.   Chapter 2 is mainly verbiage – telling us, for example, that there are ethical issues, which I think we could probably have worked out, but not how the issues might be addressed.  Chapter 13 is much better, identifying poorer people as being more at risk and most vulnerable to adverse consequences.

 

Some thoughts on the TV licence

There has been a groundswell of support in the press for the proposal to decriminalise non-payment of the TV licence.  Part is based on concerns that people should not be made into criminals for not having enough money to pay their  bills, but there are other issues in the debate.  The first problem is how to fund the BBC without compromising its independence.   The second problem is how the money can be raised.  The current licence fee is, to all intents and purposes, a tax on households; but it is cumbersome and desperately unfair.  The flat rate charge penalises the poor.  There is a presumption that everyone will receive the services, and there is an aggressive system of debt collection based on that presumption, which is only partly successful.

I am going to accept two key propositions.  The first is that the BBC is a public service.  Many services it provides – not TV, which is restricted to licence payers, but radio, internet and infrastructure – are there for everyone who wants to use them; that could be true for TV, too.  It may be objected that not everyone wishes to use the service, or can; not everyone can use a park, or a road, or a school, but that is not a reason why we should not treat them as a public service.   It’s right, then, that there should be a charge to everyone.  The second proposition is that this should not be done through central government taxation,  because that would make the BBC directly accountable to central government.   Any system needs to be managed at arm’s length.

We do, however, have alternative mechanisms in place which satisfy both of these requirements,  and which would be fairer and less burdensome than the current licence system.  The Council Tax includes an element for another public service, which is water; local authorities collect water rates as agents for the water companies.    If the TV licence was bundled in to that, it would be more progressive and easier to enforce.  There’s no reason why it shouldn’t also be eligible for Council Tax Reduction, reducing the cost to people on lower incomes, but that is open to discussion.

This suggestion is an example of a general principle in benefits, taxation and social administration: the practical way to do things is often to take advantage of an existing mechanism.  It’s not an ideal solution, but nothing ever is.

 

Now available in Serbo-Croat

I went yesterday to a session in the British Library in London about the structure of the novel.  The three authors seemed to me to think of a structure as something that slowly opens like a flower, growing from the impetus of character and story.  Working in the field of non-fiction, this is quite unlike  anything I do; the structure of my books has more to do with rods and girders than fabrics and motifs.  I feel like a visitor from another planet.

When I write, I plan in some detail.  The new edition of Social Policy has four parts, and three of those have five or six chapters.  Each of the chapters has several sub-sections (typically 3-7); many of the subsections had three, four or five lower-level sub-headings, though I may have removed these after I wrote them.  That means that I might begin with a plan for about 120 different sections, typically writing 800-1200 words apiece; and I can write them in any order.

The new edition of Social Policy has now appeared in its Serbian translation, a little ahead of the English version which went to press a couple of weeks ago.  Enthusiastic speakers of Serbo-Croat will no doubt be queuing around the block.

A little more on why we can't trust the statistics in published articles

I’ve referred earlier this week to the work of Ioannidis, who argues that most published medical statistics are wrong. The British Medical Journal regularly uses its Xmas issue to publish some disconcerting, off-beat papers.  In a previous issue, they produced the findings of a randomised control trial which showed an apparently impossible result: praying for people whose outcomes were already decided several years ago seemed to work.  The message:  don’t trust randomised control trials, because they’re randomised.  This year, an article, “Like a virgin”, identifies 45 women in a sample of nearly 5,500 who claim to have had a virgin birth. The message: don’t believe everything people tell you in surveys.    If only medical journals applied the same rigour to some of their ‘serious’ results.

Two years on the blog

It’s two years since I decided to put the blog on WordPress.  Since then I’ve made about 320 entries, a little over three a week.  The blog gets about 1200 visits a month, which might sound good until you realise that my website on social policy gets more than  1200 visits a day.  My initial plan was to use the material to spark off new ideas for my written work, and I’m still hopeful it will help with that.  Looking up sources has been particularly useful in filling out my knowledge of the field.  I also owe particular thanks to those of you who’ve commented on blogs, because that’s one of the key ways that I learn  things I may have missed.

One of my teachers may have disapproved.   In Richard Crossman’s Diaries, he comments on the reaction of Brian Abel-Smith when he was invited to be editor of the New Statesman: “all that ephemeral journalism!”  Brian was hardly an academic purist: a distaste for ephemera didn’t keep him away from all that politics.   He did tell me once, in a good way, that I ought to be a politician.  I’d had loved it, but unfortunately, I suffer from three impediments: a contrary disposition, a tendency to put my foot in my mouth for the sake of a good line, and the absence of anyone who’d want to vote for me.  At least I can vent on the blog, where it does no harm.

More nonsense about our genetic destiny

Yet another paper seems to show that our educational attainment is written in our genes.   It claims that “individual differences in educational achievement are substantially due to genetic differences (heritability) and only modestly due to differences between schools and other environmental differences”.   It’s been widely reported as a claim that exam grades are down to nature, not nurture.

This is based on comparisons of the figures for identical and non-identical twins. The reason why people use twin studies is because they believe that our personal characteristics are determined genetically, and so that studies of twins will confirm this.  That is bad science.  You’re supposed to design research so that it can disprove the proposition under test, and twin studies can’t do it.  What a twin study could show, in principle, is that where monozygotic (genetically similar) twins are different, that difference cannot be genetic.  That is not, however, what any of them try to do.

Genes are not blueprints for later development; the genetic structure (genotype) has to interact with the environment (phenotype).  Your height depends on your genes, but it is not determined at birth; if you are starved you may be stunted.  (The increase in height in successive generations has to be largely environmental, because the gene pool changes only very slowly.)   If there is a genetic link between common genes and attainment, it does not necessarily mean that the level of attainment is determined by genes – it only predicts similar patterns of attainment within a given environment.    So it is not possible to show that any level of GCSE scores is down to genes – it’s all about whether people from the same family, with the same home background, with the same school (and often with the same teacher), with the same experience in early years and of the same age will achieve similar results.  Put that way, it would be surprising if the results weren’t very similar – the more so because the sample has been selected to exclude twins where one of them is disabled.

Heritability is supposed to examine the extent to which varability in the phenotype is attributable to the genotype.  As there is no direct exploration of genes or genetics in most of these studies, what they actually look at is the way that similar characteristics occur in families, and those are attributed to the underlying genetic structure.   There are lots of reasons besides genes why educational attainment might run in families – among them culture, lifestyle, language,  common experiences, and so forth.  The authors suppose that identical and non-identical twins all have similar home backgrounds, so that the differences between them must be down to the issue of whether they’re identical or not.  That however depends on the proposition  that identical twins are not treated more like each other than non-identical twins are, and that seems implausible.  For example, non-identical twins may have gender differences, and children of different genders are liable to be treated differently.

While the study attributes the differences in performance to DNA, DNA was not usually examined.  The results are supposed to be about the differences between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, but it makes no serious attempt to determine whether the twins it is studying are either.  It states instead that “Zygosity was assessed through a parent questionnaire of physical similarity, which has been shown to be over 95% accurate when compared to DNA testing.”  So what the study actually finds is that if parents think their children are really like each other, those children get more similar educational results than they do if their parents think they are different.  The authors assume that the explanation for those similarities between twins must be their DNA – and not, for example, whether parents talk to them and treat them in the same way.

Having said that, there is one finding in this paper that brought me up short, and I think it does reflect on policy.  The argument is that as the curriculum has become more standardised, less and less variation between results is attributable to the school, and more and more to ‘heritability’ – which really, in this case, means the home background and early years.  That has deep implications for educational equality.