Regular vs frequent

The recent explosion in parents being fined for their children failing to attend school has been a bugbear of mine for a while. I can see that taking a 15 year old out of school for two weeks during their final few months of study before GCSEs is not a great idea, and schools who care about exam results should put a certain amount of pressure on parents to keep their kids in school as much as possible.

Then we have this: trying to fine parents £720 for their children failing to attend school:

Before they went away, the couple were warned they each risked a £60 fine for taking their six-year-old son, Keane, and their daughters Sian, 13, and Rhiannan, 15, on the break.

Keane is six years old. Precisely what negative impact occurs from him missing six days of school? Missing out on how to spell "squirrel"? Any scheme that imposes exactly the same financial penalty for six year olds and fifteen year olds missing a school day is clearly blissfully unrelated to the impact of the behaviour in question, and is primarily intended as either a political or revenue-raising scheme. Don't try to sell this as "educational".

I went off to read the legislation quoted: section 444 of the Education Act 1996:

(1)If a child of compulsory school age who is a registered pupil at a school fails to attend regularly [my italics] at the school, his parent is guilty of an offence.

Ah, "regularly". I assume that the well-paid lawyer drafting this text meant "five days per week during school terms". Except, regularly can mean many different things:

1. Customary, usual, or normal: "the train's regular schedule."
2. Orderly, even, or symmetrical: regular teeth.
3. In conformity with a fixed procedure, principle, or discipline.
4. Well-ordered; methodical: regular habits.
5. Occurring at fixed intervals; periodic: regular payments.
6. a. Occurring with normal or healthy frequency. b. Having bowel movements or menstrual periods with normal or healthy frequency.
7. Not varying; constant.

If a child attends school every Monday, that's "regular" according to definitions 2, 3, 4, 5. Only definition 1 even arguably applies to a week out school term as opposed to a once-a-week attendance. I don't know who drew up this law, but we should find out and take back their payment. Perhaps we could give the money to this family...

A sensible policy that aimed to satisfy the tradeoff between the marginal benefits of education and the unarguable benefits of vacation and family together-time would allocate an allowance of X days to each pupil (X maybe rising in inverse proportion to the child's age) that they could take off school with parental permission; only unauthorised absence above this limit would attract fines, and such fines would decrease in earlier stages of schooling. Since the law does not behave this way, one is led to the inevitable conclusion that it does not attempt to benefit the child; rather, it is a mechanism of control for the school and education authority.

(If I were a parent of a child at state primary school, I'd be tempted to send my child to school only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday); when the inevitable letter from school arrived, I'd point out the law in question and the definition of "regular". I wonder what would happen?)

Licensing for control of a profession

I must admit to mixed emotions when reading about Labour's plans to introduce professional licensing for teachers:

Teachers would have to show they are meeting the high standards and would be required to undergo training to update their skills.
Under Hunt's plans, teachers would have their lessons assessed by other teachers in a system overseen by a new Royal College of Teaching.

Conceptually, this might be a good idea. The million dollar question, of course, is: a) who actually assesses the teachers and how they picked and b) what happens when (not it) a large number of existing teachers fail to meet the standards?

This strikes me as a classic example of a good idea in principle which will nevertheless be holed beneath the waterline by the jagged rocks of practicality. What we actually want from this project is to prevent poor teachers entering the profession, improve slacking teachers who are no longer doing a good job teaching - and there's no shortage of these - while not significantly disrupting or interfering with teachers who are doing a good job. Make no mistake, this kind of assessment scheme has a cost beyond the headline figure of paying for assessors and their organisation. The additional cost includes time taken from a teacher's regular teaching schedule to be assessed, reduced productivity in the run-up to assessment as they try to prepare for it, plus the impact of mis-rating good teachers and requiring their retraining.

Assuming that you aim to assess a teacher every 2 years, given 120 school days on which a given assessor can run assessments, you'll need at least an hour of seeing a teacher teach, and maybe another hour if you have any doubts, plus at least that time again writing up the results. Figure that each assessor can reasonably assess two teachers per day, that's 240 teachers per year. But you may need to have a couple of assessors (from different regions) to get a reasonable diversity of observation and opinion. So figure 120 teachers assessed per assessor per year, and so for every 240 teachers you need at least one assessor. Given 480K teachers in England that's 2000 assessors. Where are you going to get them from? How are you going to judge whether they are actually any good at assessing teachers?

Let's assume that you can make these assessments in some way and flag the teachers who are objectively not good enough at teaching. (In fact, in most schools you could do a straw poll of the teachers and they would quickly flag the poor teachers to you - but there's no way they'd do this in practice). How do you fix them? You can do all the retraining you like, but you have to have some way of follow-up to see if they've stuck with the improvements or have just lapsed back into their old ways. And if they do lapse back, what do you do? Can you fire them? I bet the unions would have a fit if you tried.

So what do the unions think?

Kevin Courtney, deputy general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, told the Times:  "We would need to see the details of the Labour party's proposals, but the NUT is heartened to see that Labour recognises the value of investing in teachers' skills, knowledge and confidence in a fast-changing world. If these proposals are a continuation of the Michael Gove's years of top-down judgmental prescription of how teachers teach, that would be very negative."

"Talk is cheap: show me the money". I find it interesting that neither the NUT nor ATL reps decided to touch on what would happen if a teacher failed to meet the standards even after retraining....

Honestly, if you want to fix the problem of bad teachers, you have to make it easier for the schools to send them for retraining or eventually fire them. This is not a problem you can fix centrally. Of course, this runs the risk of the less honourable headteachers or governors firing the teachers they don't like rather than the ones which aren't any good, and the children are still stuck with the bad teachers.

Backing up - a cautionary tale

Users of Seagate's Dashboard 2.0 backup tool for Windows recently discovered, to their discomfiture, that it doesn't back up the files that one would have naively expected:

Note that Seagate Dashboard does not back up certain files, including:

• The contents of the Windows directory
• The contents of the Program Files directory
• System files
• Hidden files
• Files on detachable USB drives

Thhe fourth kind of exclusion (hidden files) turns out to be rather important because a number of Windows applications mark their user data files or folders as hidden, e.g. Outlook mail data files and a number of games. Therefore if your hard drive crashes or you suffer a similar data-destroying incident, you'll come to a painful realization that the data you had assumed saved is not actually on the device you thought.

Actually, the public furore to the contrary, this shouldn't be a problem for anyone who cares about their data. If you care enough about your data to make backups, you should be periodically restoring and verifying your backups. Doing so in this case would have made it abundantly clear that Seagate Dashboard isn't saving what you require.

If you don't verify your backups, you're not actually backing up; you're simply spending money, time, resources and effort on filling data storage devices with crap.

The progress from first world problems

One of my favourite thinkers, Virginia Postrel, has a great take on how this Christmas's UPS next-day-delivery failure is actually a vital step in world progress:

Counting your blessings is always a good idea, but calling the Christmas delivery breakdown a "first world problem" points to what's wrong with that criticism. We want first world reliability, and if the public just shrugged when things went wrong we wouldn't get it.

The instinctive reaction when UPS delivers your friend's purchases 1-3 days late is to snark about "first world problems", but Postrel point out that actually this kind of demand is what drives most if not all of modern progress. In software, for example, many of the key leaps forward have been due to someone dissatisfied with the obstructions that current technology put in their way. Larry Wall was dissatisfied with shell scripting and ended up inventing the programming language Perl which glues together too many websites to count; Donald Knuth put together the TeX typesetting language because he was dissatisfied with the mathematic typesetting available to him writing The Art of Computer Programming ; Linus Torvalds created Linux because the existing Unix operating systems weren't sufficiently accessible for tinkering.

We should therefore complain when life falls short of our expectations, no matter how wonderful our current situation would be to someone from 20 years in the past or a thousand miles in the distance:

Complaining about small annoyances can be demoralizing and obnoxious, but demanding complacency is worse. The trick is to simultaneously remember how much life has improved while acknowledging how it could be better. In the new year, then, may all your worries be first world problems.

By the time Christmas 2014 rolls around, UPS will have a lower-latency method of tracking its order load versus maximum capacity, and be able to either buy up additional delivery capacity from other mail firms or start to signal to retailers that it will not be able to deliver goods next-day. This way customers will have a better delivery experience, and technological progress will have been achieved.

Gaming the system - ambulance response times

It turns out that if emergency services try to chase response times then the public can get screwed over, in a very real and non-reversibly fatal sense:

Emergency services were called at 23:15 GMT and a paramedic arrived within 15 minutes. The paramedic contacted the control room three times asking for the ambulance to arrive sooner, but it did not arrive until 01:00 GMT the next day, Mr Nelson's family said.

Presumably this was a motorcycle paramedic, who will carry some fluids though probably not blood and certainly not more than a few pints of them. The unfortunate 26 year old Mr. Nelson is described as suffering from haemorrhaging, which was almost certainly internal and hence could not be successfully treated without surgery; all the paramedic could do was buy time pending transfer of Mr. Nelson to a hospital with an on-call surgery team, so that Mr. Nelson could a) receive whole blood in volume to replace his loss and b) be opened up so that the surgery team could clamp the offending major blood vessel to stop the loss. Unfortunately it seems that the required ambulance took another 90 minutes to arrive, which was way too late.

So why did the ambulance take so long? We can reasonably assume that the paramedic made a diagnosis of internal bleeding and called in for an urgent transport, so the available ambulances must have been elsewhere:

He added: "It seems that if they meet the target for the whole of the east of England, it satisfies the government target but the danger is they focus on urban areas where they can easily hit the target and rural areas get neglected.

Bingo! Why is this? Here's one possible explanation.

Suppose you have a reasonable-sized city (e.g. Reading, Oxford) surrounded by a fairly large rural area. Your ambulance, fire and police stations are somewhere in the city. At regular times you have a small number (say 2-4) of available ambulances, waiting to respond to calls. Most of your calls will come from within the city as not only do you have most of your people there but they are in an environment more likely to cause accidents (heavy traffic, concentrated drinking etc.) Anticipating this, you station most if not all of your ambulances around the city ring road and near major junctions so that they can either head straight in to the city, head straight out to the rural towns in their sector, or drive around the ring road to access a different sector. Your hospital will be within the city so your vehicles will go "green" (available) there; you can direct them to go straight to the next call or send them to one of your vacant ring-road sectors.

Blakeney, the home of Mr. Nelson, is 80 minutes from Great Yarmouth and 50 minutes from Kings Lynn (the nearest major towns). Without wanting to second-guess Norfolk ambulance control I'd imagine that they might have had an ambulance stationing point near Cromer or Swaffham, but someone else called first and that ambulance was taken; once they received the priority call from the paramedic, the ambulance would have nearly an hour of driving just to reach Blakeney. Because the incident happened on a Thursday night they probably had fewer ambulances available than on the busier Friday or Saturday nights, and because it happened around 11pm it was during the busiest period.

If the East of England Ambulance Trust wanted to reduce the incidence of long waits for ambulances in rural towns, it would have to position more ambulances way out from its major urban centres. The problem is that this would increase response times for the bulk of incidents during busy times when the remote-stationed ambulances were required near the cities. For the sake of significantly improving response times in relatively rare scenarios (multiple incidents away from the cities) you're going to be significantly impinging on your common-or-garden city incidents.

So what's the ambulance response time target?

Immediately life threatening – An emergency response will reach 75% of these calls within eight minutes. Where onward transport is required, 95% of life-threatening calls will receive an ambulance vehicle capable of transporting the patient safely within 19 minutes of the request for transport being made.

The NHS has at least addressed tail latency here ("95% within 19 minutes") but the problem is that this is a national target. It's much easier to meet in the densely-populated southeast than the more sparsely populated areas of the country. In the latter case, an ambulance trust's best bet is to concentrate resources around towns as discussed above, since they won't have a prayer of meeting "75% within 8 minutes" otherwise. It also allows wildly increasing times for 1/20th of the patients - if you can't get an ambulance to them in 20 minutes, there's no additional penalty for taking 90 minutes to reach them despite the fact you're identified these patients as needing onwards transport.

The dominant problem here is a national service (the NHS) requiring national targets for regional services, not making any allowance for the wildly different demographic distribution across the country. There's nothing conceptually wrong with the form of the target, but they need to vary the numbers as populations become less dense. You'd expect the tail latency requirement to remain fairly constant, but the initial response time to increase as population density decreases, and you should also add a 99% latency requirement (say, 30 minutes) to reduce the long waits for needy rural patients. Your response targets may no longer fit within a soundbite, but at least they are now aimed at saving lives across the country.

Boys being boys

An opinion column at USA Today caught my eye: law prof blogger Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds noting that American public schools have a demented "zero tolerance" approach to boy games:

At South Eastern Middle School in Fawn Grove, Pa., for example, 10-year-old Johnny Jones was suspended for using an imaginary bow and arrow. That's right - - not a real bow and arrow, but an imaginary bow and arrow. A female classmate saw this infraction, tattled to a teacher, and the principal gave Jones a one-day suspension for making a "threat" in class.

It seems that even the vaguest gesture towards projectile weaponry causes public (state) school teachers and administrators to panic and threaten / punish / suspend children - nearly all boys - in the name of "zero tolerance", otherwise known as "the death of common sense and discretion".

The article was rather well timed, as only today I was buttonholed by a fellow engineer who had received an admonitory email from her son's teacher: during playtime he had made a "gun" hand shape with the traditional index finger and thumb, and pretended to fire it at his playmate's imaginary space ship. Apparently this caused the (female) teacher "serious concern" and she instructed my colleague to stop this kind of nihilistic behaviour in her son forthwith.

This young man is six years old. SIX YEARS OLD. If he wasn't indulging in this kind of play, I'd be worried. He's a perfectly pleasant, well behaved credit to his parents; and yet it seems that behaving like a regular boy without causing any harm or worry to other children makes him eligible for admonishment at best, and potential punishment if he does it again.

As Glenn Reynolds notes:

This is a serious PR problem for the American education establishment, but underlying the bad publicity is a serious substantive problem: When your kids attend schools like these, they are under the thumb of Kafkaesque bureaucrats who see no problem blotting your kid's permanent record for reasons of bureaucratic convenience or political correctness.
At some point, voluntarily putting your kid in such a situation looks a bit like parental malpractice -- especially if your kid is a boy, since boys seem to do worse in today's nearly-all-female K-12 environment.

I wish that his first assertion were true - it seems that this immensely stupid and blockheaded behaviour by school administrators is free of consequence. Since parents have to send their children to the nearest public school unless they can afford private education or have the time and ability to homeschool, what action can the parents take to even inconvenience the offending school?

I can't believe that this oppressive environment is making it any less likely that boys will perpetrate violence at school. Rather, those who previously had a play outlet for their natural male aggression will now have it bottled up. It's like pushing down on a balloon - the air you displace has to pop up again somewhere else, and if you're holding down too much of the balloon then eventually it's going to pop. Unless you start lacing school food with tranquilizers, you're not going to reduce male aggression. Actually, forget I said that - perhaps I shouldn't give ideas to these idiots.

I suspect the real reason behind this is the (illusion) of control - these teachers and administrators see behaviour which jars with their sensibilities, and can indulge themselves in controlling and "suppressing" it without any consequence. The more they do this, the more bold and far-reaching their actions will be - and if a child finally snaps and commits a crime of violence at a public school, it will be used as a reason to extend their control.

The trials and tribulations of government employees

A rather instructive NPR article tries to raise sympathies for the plight of US federal government workers in 2013:

There are reasons for federal employees to be unhappy. Thanks to sequestration, most have taken unpaid furlough days and work for agencies that are under de facto hiring freezes. This is the first year government employees have received an across-the-board pay raise since 2010 — Obama signed an executive order Monday to bump up base pay by 1 percent.

Note that it's extremely hard to fire government employees, and similarly difficult to reduce their pay and benefits. This is in marked contrast to the experience of private sector workers, who have seen a real squeeze in pay and benefits over the past five years and rising unemployment. It's also in contrast to state and local government workers, whose pension payments have grown to dominate local budgets and hence have seen their pay and/or benefits squeezed.

I can certainly understand disillusionment after a while working at certain government agencies. The EPA is one of my personal bugbears, because it's almost perfectly designed to obstruct businesses with no consideration at all for cost/benefit tradeoffs:

At EPA, for example — which saw the largest drop in employee morale among large agencies this year — the bulk of the work is devoted to supporting state environmental departments. Members of the public may or may not support its policies, but much of what EPA does is largely invisible to them.

I like that weasel "may or may not". In January this year the Supreme Court took a rather dim view of the EPA's attempt to block homeowners from even contesting their direction:

The justices said the order would be read as a strong threat from a powerful agency, not a mere warning of a potential problem. "It said this is an order," observed Justice Stephen G. Breyer. Justice Antonin Scalia said the action "shows the highhandedness of the agency."
Justice Elena Kagan said it was a "strange position" for the government to insist the property owner had no right to a hearing.

The EPA was unanimously reversed by the Supreme Court on this matter, a bipartisan measure of how demented their attitude was. If I was working for the EPA and cared at all about how the public viewed my job, this would rather sting. Oddly, the authors of this article don't mention this kind of event as a cause of government employee disillusionment.

Finally, of course, the truth comes out about why government employees don't just find another job and quit:

Federal employees enjoy decent pensions and generous health benefits — perks they may be loathe to give up, turning them into "golden handcuffs," Edwards says.
"They're there for the salaries and benefits," he says. "They're not there because the jobs make them happy."

This is not a terrible problem for a federal employee to have, considering the alternatives. Unlike a state or city employer, there's no danger of the federal government running out of money to pay the salaries and benefits of its employees any time soon. There are any number of unemployed or disposably-employed people who would love to have the problem of frozen wages, in exchange for a reasonable salary, good benefits and close to zero chance of being fired. The irony is that, to make the federal agencies better places to work, the right approach is to fire the hangers-on and under-performers - but there's no chance in hell that this is going to happen. Federal employees are stuck with Floyd Remora as long as they work there.

I'm just curious; if federal employees were allowed to vote on their agency being mandated to fire the lowest-performing 2% of employees each year, as long as they were allowed to hire people into the vacancies despite a hiring freeze, would they go for it?

Camelia Botnar in 2012

I've just spotted that the Camelia Botnar foundation accounts for 2012 have appeared on the Charities Commission website, so I thought I'd take a quick look to see how they are doing. See my notes on their 2011 accounts for the previous context.

Some of the highlights: for context, remembar that Camelia Botnar Ltd. (CBL) is the commercial arm, and Camelia Botnar Foundation (CBF) is the charity.

Trustee Natasha Malby retired in 2012, as she did from the Marcela Trust as well.

"The Foundation has forged links with a foundation in Transylvania with a view to starting a programme of skills and culture exchange visits." This matches the Marcela Trust activity donating £170K to fund "specific Community initiatives in the impoverished Zarand area of Western Transylvania". The CBF and the MT seem to be clearly aligned in their overall direction, which shouldn't surprise us given the personnel overlap.

OMC Investments randomly donated a carpet.

CBL donated £152K to CBF, nearly twice last year's figure. CBL brought in about £750K of income, similar to last year. They improved performance primarily by reducing cost of sales by nearly £100K, about 15%.

The OMC endowment fund was pretty static, value of investments was up 3%

CBF had about the same expenditures overall as last year, but income was about £200K lower, primarily due to a drop from £300K to about £0K in voluntary income.

Investment performance was much better for the year, up £1.3M as opposed to last year's £1.7M loss. The FTSE went from to 5495 to 5958 that year, so it looks like they rode the wave up reasonably well.

Net funds went up from £5.1M to £6.3M, presumably in anticipation of some spending in 2013.

Wages and salaries were pretty flat, and they had 3 fewer charitable activities staff (from 48).

The investment properties took a bit of a bath, down about 8% from the beginning of year evaluation (£9.2M). As I noted last year: "After last year's near-£3mm loss on revaluation, one wonders how well this will continue to perform..." "Not that well", apparently.

Overall a "steady as she goes" year. Looks like CBF has stabilized after last year's ramp-up on charitable activities staff. As long as their investments continue to perform, they're pretty stable. One hopes that they won't try any more property investing though.

Respecting the help

I'm reminded today of the approximate Dave Barry quote:

A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter is not a nice person. (This is very important. Pay attention. It never fails.)

We are approaching Christmas, and the Obama family is soon to head off to Hawaii. A couple of commentators noted that "Ronald Reagan spent every Christmas in D.C. so the Secret Service agents could be close to their families." and I wondered how true that actually was.

It turns out to be not 100% true but pretty close. From the Los Angeles Times in December 1988:

Twenty-eight days before they will make it their permanent address, President and Mrs. Reagan moved into their $2.5-million Bel-Air [Los Angeles] home Friday.
They are spending their first Christmas out of the White House since they moved into it on Jan. 20, 1981.

Reagan was based in California for most of his life, moving there from his Illinois birthplace at the age of 26. He would usually fly back to California shortly after Christmas, presumably because the SoCal weather in December was orders of magnitude more pleasant than in D.C., but it seems that he really did care about the Secret Service agents who protected him 24/7 (and were fully prepared to take a bullet for him.)

For the record, this isn't a particular criticism of Obama - despite Hawaii being a long way from D.C., it's a rather nice place to spend Christmas, and standing on Oahu beaches must be far preferable to the cold winds and snow of D.C. for Obama's Secret Service detail. Rather, it's a confirmation of Barry's assertion. Reagan had his flaws, Lord knows, but really cared about individual people. Apparently Bill Clinton was also congenial with his agents - Clinton's flaws are better documented than Reagan's, but even his detractors can't deny that he was genuinely interested in people. Barbara Olson, unapproved Hillary biographer, noted that at college Bill would sit down at the "black" dining table and engage its occupants in conversation despite being painfully white.

America is generally a better place to observe this behaviour than the UK, since an American table server's employment and income is much more closely tied to accepting abuse from customers. However, given the preponderance of eating out in the USA compared to the UK, the percentage of the population who have waited tables is correspondingly higher, so people are generally more sympathetic to waiting staff in remembrance of their own time running around a restaurant. In my experience, seeing people gratuitously abusing waiting or takeout staff is significantly more common in the UK - and seems to match an unusual income split where it's either the very well-off or the relatively poor who are more likely to be the abusers.

In any case, abusing or ignoring the help is a very telling mark of a person. It tells you an awful lot about their inner personality; ignore this information at your peril.

States vs territories and the unintended effects of Obamacare

For all those arguing that smart people in government can solve healthcare problems, a case for you to consider. As well as the 50 states that make up the USA, there are various territories which are overseen directly by the Federal Government but which are not themselves states; Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands ("organized" territories with a degree of self-rule) and American Samoa, Midway Islands and a bunch of small atolls and islands ("unorganized" territories). Federal government rulings apply to these territories in the same way that they do the states.

It turns out that the implications of recent Affordable Care Act were not entirely thought through with respect to these territories:

While the Affordable Care Act requires health insurers in the territories to accept all shoppers no matter how sick, it does not mandate that all territorial residents buy plans nor does it provide subsidies to make coverage more affordable--as it does in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The big win for poor people in the ACA was that they would receive subsidies to purchase the (rather expensive) health coverage that the ACA mandated they buy, and the big win for sick people was that they could not be refused insurance or be priced out of the market due to pre-existing conditions. The way the finances balanced was a mandate to purchase insurance under penalty of fines. But those subsidies aren't provided to residents of these territories, so ACA plans are extremely expensive; and the mandate does not apply in the territories. Result: most people aren't buying ACA plans because a) they are expensive and b) they don't have to. The only people buying ACA plans are the really sick people for whom even unsubsidized ACA plans are far better than their alternatives.

So the insurance companies in those territories are stuck having to accept really sick people without any ability to dilute the effect on their returns by including a large pool of healthy people:

The administration has offered technical assistance to alleviate the problem alongside potential policy work-arounds. One solution Health and Human Services has suggested is having the territories pass their own individual mandates, just as Massachusetts did back in 2006. But the regulators say that won't work either, because they don't have enough money to subsidize the purchase of insurance coverage for their citizens.

In other words: if Guam mandates purchase of insurance by Guam citizens, they'll have to pay full price for the ACA-compliant plans and they'll march on 155 Hesler Place with torches, pitchforks and lengths of rope.

It appears that no-one drafting the Affordable Care Act asked "hey, how does this affect the non-state territories?" As a result, they've made a horrific mess of healthcare in those areas. Oopsie. Next time someone proposes that the government step in to fix something, remember how badly they got this wrong.