Reasoning for Rants?

2008-05-28T10:48:00.002Z

Fallacious generalisation from the specific instance to the whole in order to create a sexist stereotype

2008-01-10T14:29:00.001Z

Goals

It is well documented that setting goals is a good first step to achieving success in whatever you want to do.

I set goals on 43 things for 3 main reasons

1) To ensure that goals are not lost
2) To keep goals at the forefront to my mind and to motivate their completion
3) To acquire volunteers to help fulfil the goals

On the 43T site there is a section on why 43 things, why not 10 or a hundred. The reasoning on there should mitigate against the feelings of guilt or failure, but only if the advice they give is followed. You should have a mixture of the serious and the frivolous. You should have some easily achievable goals, some harder ones, and a few ambitions you will not feel guilty about not achieving. The later will at least remind you about some things you feel are important. Too many goals and you will either get swamped or will lose the point. Too few and you may fill up with the big goals without room for small achievements to keep you enthused.

My goal to reform the education system has, as yet led to no concrete results but it has made me more conscious of related initiatives. This has in turn made me look to see if I can do something to encourage an initiative that I approve of to help education elsewhere (nutrition and education suggest free meals in third world schools, see elsewhere on the blog for a few more details). I like to think that it will lead to something concrete in time, but even if it does not it will have done some good.

Coming to point number 3, I did not intend this to be a reason for posting but it has been a side effect. While I was at college I saw that someone had punted from Cambridge to Ely in 1907. I was told at the time that it had not been done since. I thought this would be a fun idea, but I lost track of it over the years. Writing a list on 43 things brought it to mind, so I put it down as something for ‘one day’. This led to a friend who had built his own punt joining me in setting this up and making it happen. Setting a goal took something from a nice idea to a ‘once in a hundred years’ occurrence.

So there you have it, and my view is that setting goals is a useful way of turning thoughts into actuality.

Rufus Evison

I have not been keeping this up to date because I have been working on the Retail Media Blog for rather more of my spare time than I expected. Retail media are interesting and do seem to have ramifications in Branding, Sales and all sorts of places.

A while ago I put a goal onto 43 things about keeping my blog up to date. I have not kept this one current, but I think writing blog entries on Retail media for the Retail media Group is reasonable and counts as progress towards the stated goal.

Why? Because the purpose of the goal was not restricted to this blog, but was to get me doing more of the sort of things that blogging entails. Blogging is not an end in itself it is to cause me to do research (which as well as teaching me things hones my researching skills) and it causes me to write, so aiding my communication skills.

I currently run a few blogs, but the retail media blog has the most traffic. This is because it is useful to people and helps to define what retail media are, their advantages and disadvantages and how they are used. Oddly enough another of my goals on 43 things was to get a common understanding of what retail media means as the term was being used rather fuzzily. To this end I have been gathering info and learning a lot. Also it allows me scpe to help shape the industry.

Goals have a way of doing that. Setting a goal is the first step towards doing stuff.

Last year I had a goal to get a new and interesting job. I now have that job and am enjoying it. Unsurprisingly it is in an industry related to retail media. I do not actually work for dunnhumby Retail Media (dRM) but I sit surrounded by people who do and I work closely with the people who are deciding the direction of dRM. This provides me with some insider knowledge that will probably creep on to the blog.

Moving jobs was a big step for me, having been a serial entrepreneur for most of my working life. I had some sub goals that I needed to do on the way. If I am going to move from starting companies to working for someone else's then this must fit with my own life goals.

2007-10-08T08:58:00.000Z

Just a little post to say that as an experiment begun by Andy G I am now trying to get the term rufus Sexgod to appear on a google page. This is going to be a very half hearted attempt, but I feel it deserves a 30 second mention here.

Rufus Evison
Rufus Sexgod (Damn Andy G)

2007-10-03T15:06:00.000Z

Guard your brand as it is worth money to someone

Mainstream: Domain Names, Branding

I just read Guy Clapperton’s article Master of your own domain about keeping control of relevant domain names. This struck a chord as I had recently come across a very well known brand who did not own a prime .co.uk domain name that they clearly should have owned. I cannot name the brand, but I did get in touch with them and they now own the brand. The relevant piece of information was that there is a new service for domainers that is just being launched.

In this context a domainer is someone who had bought a large number of domain names and is sitting on them. Domainers can make money in a variety of ways. They can sell the domains at a premium; they can advertise on the domains, they can use the domains to act as advertising for related companies (e.g. make table.co.uk forward to a furniture company for a fee).

The new service effectively populates their site with relevant content. This has a whole slew of effects:

It means that the site will be better viewed by search engines and so may get more traffic.
It means that the site will be stickier so it will get more traffic.
It means that the site is actually justifiably relevant to the domain name so any companies with an interest in the domain name will have to pay more to get it as legal leverage will be lower.
It means that the site will be less cached and so will get more effective traffic.
It means that a larger variety of advertising can be put on the domain.
It means that better targeting of the domain becomes possible providing higher advertising revenues.

In the above I use the term traffic, but let’s be honest and say that what we are really talking about here is advertising revenue. The point on legal leverage translated into a compelling event which persuaded the brand owner to arrange settlement on the domain before things became harder and so more expensive.

While this service has just been launched I am also privy to another new development that has not yet been released. I am not at liberty to say what it is, but let’s just say that if you are responsible for your brand I would take note of Mr Clapperton’s suggestions and get your domain under control now rather than put it off just a little longer.

Rufus Evison

2007-09-28T15:42:00.000Z

When you sign up for a credit card there is an awful lot of small print on the back. No one reads it all (alright I do, but I am an exception). Basically you trust the bank and the local legal system that there is not going to be anything horrendously unreasonable there. There are a couple of bits people do read though. Those are the bits with tick boxes next to them. You have to read these because they are asking for a decision. You either tick or you don’t; it is a call to action. One of the things they pretty much have to ask you is whether they and their partners can send you stuff through the post.

I generally tick the “don’t send” box. This is because what they send me is generally irrelevant junk and a real waste of trees. In a way this is surprising because my bank has a huge amount of information about me. I mentioned in a previous post that I felt there were limits around what could and should be done with this. I also said I would come back to the topic. The limits are really on a couple of things:

1) Who should use it.
2) What it should be used for.

My thoughts on this are as follows...

Who Should Use It?

Firstly only people I would feel comfortable with should use this data. Second only people who I as a person who uses the card have allowed to use it should have access to the data. Third only people who I can understand might have access to the data should have access to it.

Basically I do not want any unpleasant surprises. I do not want to find that the shopkeepers in the local stores have been getting together and gossiping about me having used my credit card to ensure they mean the same person.

Clearly my credit card provider can use it to provide the credit card. Moreover, if I have said they can send me special offers from partner companies then they can use it to select the offers. I am not sure that I am comfortable with them giving data to those specific companies in order to do this, so if they want to do that then it is best if they contact me to ask me first. I do not mind if they employ people to do the work on it, providing those people are bound to confidentiality. By extension I do not mind if they use companies to do the work providing the companies are similarly bound.

What should it be used for?

Firstly it should never be used for anything that will in any way harm me. Secondly it should only be used for things that will in some way benefit me. Thirdly it should probably not be used for anything that jars with my expectations. If it is something that makes me think "They are doing what???" when I hear it then someone is a bit close to the edge and it might be better to set my expectations, gauge my reactions and maybe even ask me first.

Clearly the data can be used for providing the credit card service. If I have signed up to receive offers, then I would feel it can be used to target those offers. I also feel that it can be used to improve the offerings of the credit card company. I feel that insights from the data could be used to improve offerings from partners of the credit card company. As I do not feel that the partners should have the actual data then I guess it follows that the actual data cannot be used (except as described below) to improve the offerings of the partner companies.

The exception to that is the credit card company (or their agents) can use the data to produce the insights. So the partner company is not using the data to improve it's offering, but in some sense the data is being used, indirectly, to do just that.

Where does all this lead?

I guess the next step is to ask what happens if a single company acts as an agent for multiple parties, taking data from each of them and then providing insight to each but not passing the data back to any of them. At first glance this seems reasonable providing the information providers/insight users are partners. It is probably best if they put the fact of the partnership somewhere where I can find out if I want to look it up, but I have not thought about this enough to be sure whether that is necessary. This is therefore, probably, a good point to finish for now. More on this topic later...

Rufus Evison
JustTheRants.BlogSpot.Com

2007-09-11T07:40:00.000Z

DNA databases: sending innocent people to prison

Mainstream Privacy and Freedom

Have you ever come across the birthday party problem? The question is how many people do you need to bring together to have a better than 50% chance of two people sharing the same birthday? Clearly if two people match then their birthday parties are likely to conflict and problems may ensue. The probability of a given birthday is assumed to be even throughout the (non-leap) year (1:365). So how many people? The answer is that you only need 23 people (probability 0.5073).

Now imagine that you have a much longer year, say a billion days. What is the number required for a match? To be honest I do not know. I know the way to calculate it, but the numbers get very big very fast. Yes they then divide back down to small numbers, but calculating them is difficult.

What I do have though is a history of testing something similar. In my role as CTO of Clickstream we were dealing with unique IDs. These were created using a (pseudo) random number between +2bn and -2bn. This gives us a 'year' of 4 billion days. Not only that, but we gave each person another user ID calculated in quite a different manner as an independent check. We found that with a population of 100,000 we were getting on the order of 20-40 matches. In dna database matching a match is the equivalent of prosecuting an innocent person. Now this could have been because the numbers were not truly random, or it could have been the combinatorics as in the birthday party problem.

So why am I writing this blog and ranting? Because DNA testing is a bit like IDing.

The population is not truly random.
The probability of an individual match is (we are told) about 1:1bn
We will get false positives (though with DNA it could lead to innocents in prison)

It is important to bear in mind that the real reason that this matters is that a false positive may equal a wrongful conviction. With a much smaller sample we were seeing about 20-40 ‘wrongful convictions’. The government is now talking about creating a database that is big enough to put thousands of people in prison for no reason.

All of this is without taking into account the flaws in the way the system is run. We are assuming people do things right every time. The only time this has been audited (that I have found) the chances of a false match turned out to be 1:100 rather than 1:1bn. This was due to experimental error that we are assured cannot take place in real life, but I am not sure I trust these assurances.

A probability of 1:100 would mean that the bulk of prosecutions were actually of innocent people. If this doesn’t worry you it should, as there is no reason that you should not be one of the innocent once the drive to gather DNA every time we fly comes in. Forget about whether this is privacy intrusive, forget about whether it is moral, I wish someone would address the question of whether it works and makes sense.

2007-09-05T08:22:00.000Z

It is starting to work

SideLine Article: Web Optimisation and Promotion

I said I would start to see if I could move my blog from an audience of one. I started, as one must, but tracking site usage. I had, as expected myself as the only audience. I have since had a very little play and the audience has grown ten fold. Not a bog growth and unless they happen to be relevant people it will not be a sustained growth, but it is heartening that a tiny change with no time spent can move something from invisible to available for people to find. I am kind of busy right now, but will see if these minimal efforts can over time provide some real and sustained growth.

Rufus Evison
ReasonedRants.BlogSpot.Com

2007-09-03T15:07:00.000Z

Data: It’s all about responsible use

Mainstream Article, Privacy and Data Use

I have been involved in web monitoring practically since there has been a web to monitor. Over the years I have often heard accusations about invasion of privacy and have done my best to make sure that they are not true. While I was at Clickstream this was fairly easy as we were the leaders in privacy friendly monitoring. Really we had to be; we could gather so much data so accurately and completely that, had we not been campaigning for more stringent privacy regulations, we would have been big brother. The online world promised so much in the way of “perfect information” and despite some disappointments it was actually able to deliver if you did things right.

What is now becoming ‘the next big scare’ is that it is not just online data that can be invasive. Articles are appearing in the press about abuses of data from all directions. I hear about the big brother aspects of the supermarket giants, and I cannot help but smile. It is all so familiar. I smile for two reasons:

Data is not inherently evil. Doing bad things with data is the potential problem, and at the moment I am not seeing signs that it would be profitable for the supermarkets to turn bad.

The supermarkets are just the tip of the iceberg and the bits that are underwater are much larger.

As number two points out, it is not just the supermarkets that have masses of data, they just happen to be the most currently visible aspect. Other areas that potentially frightening amounts of data are accumulating include, but are not limited to, Banking, Telecoms, Government, Media (Broadband providers, IPTV, etc), even manufacturing gets a look-in. At this point I should emphasise that they are only *potentially* frightening. If there is sufficient interest in this topic I shall write about what the different areas are gathering and some of the implications of this in another article. For the moment it is just worth bearing in mind that all of these sectors are gathering huge amounts of data; more than that, they are turning that data into huge amounts of information.

Information is power and with great power comes great responsibility. This sounds trite and clichéd because it is, but it is also true. The power of data has been loosed upon the world and we are not going to change that without driving ourselves back into the dark ages. Think of it as a bright light shining down upon us, and work out how much shade we need and where we should be shining our torches.

One way of looking at this, which seems to make sense, is by examining explicit consent. If you are burgled you feel violated and invaded because someone has been rummaging through your private things and walking in your home without your permission. If you invite someone in to do a job for you then you feel grateful to them for taking the time and trouble. You may even pay them for the services provided. The loyalty card is the difference between an invasion and an invitation. A loyalty card is saying “here is what I want, watch what I am doing and work out how you can help me”. The same data can be gained from credit card transactions but the user does not use their card specifically so that upermarket can make them offers and improve their shopping experience. One is invitation the other is nosiness at best and at worst full blown invasion (*) The law acknowledges this and protects the consumer from this kind of direct snooping. It does allow aggregate data gathering, saying this many people do this kind of thing, but not specific snooping (on this date you were in this store doing this).

The worst argument against the way that supermarkets use the data is that they use it to sell you more things that you do not need. The best argument in favour of them is that they change their offerings, ranges and way of working to fit the customer’s needs. If a loyalty card is inviting someone in, then the store deciding to change to match it’s customers is the workman doing his job. As long as the vendors are incentivised to fulfil our best expectations then the problem of big brother is not a real and present danger.

So the next question is whether the incentives are sufficient to make it in the data holder’s interest to play nicely. I do not have a definitive answer to that. I do have some evidence, but it is not sufficient to be certain, so I can only offer advice and suggestions, not answers. It is my guesstimate that the lifetime value of a happy customer is a greater incentive than the quick profit of an over-sold customer, but I do noy yet have the figures to back this up. I am however certain that the company I am working for believes this lifetime value argument and that this is what they are providing to their customers. Looking at the retail market it is also what a lot of the experts are saying. Whether they are doing it or not retailers are at least paying lip service to the idea that customers have the power to walk away and so you need to treat them as well as you can,

An encouraging comment I came across in the retail bulletin seems to support this responsible view:

“Effective retail media solutions in the modern world are all about adding value for consumers and ensuring they receive something personally worthwhile as a trade-off for their time and attention”
(http://www.theretailbulletin.com/?tag=18064d61b6f93dab8681a460779b8429)

The quotation is from Martin Hayward Director of Consumer Strategy and Futures at Dunnhumby where I am now working; it is this attitude that lets me feel comfortable working here. As an added benefit, working here will supply me, over time, with the hard evidence to back up this view. Certainly Dunnhumby make their money out of learning how to do the right thing for consumers, so they (we) have a real incentive to show that this is worthwhile.

Rufus Evison,
ReasonedRants.blogspot.com

(*) this is misleading because it is only true in context, so I will delve deeper into what can/should be done with credit card data in a later entry.

2007-08-22T16:27:00.000Z

Be careful what you post, it could lose you your job!

Mainstream Article, Personal Online Branding

Power to the people
What you say affects how big corporations are viewed, or at least it can now. A single disgruntled employee never used to be able to make a difference, but Internet publishing combined with search technology has changed all that. Imagine you are considering buying a car. You search on the car make and safety and find the blog of an employee. They are saying that the manufacturer's safety claims are a sham and the vehicles are unsafe. This might affect your view of the cars they sell and your inclination to buy from them. It might do this even though you have no way of knowing if this person has really ever worked for them, or does in fact work for their competitor who is having real issues with sales. This does pass power to the little people in a way that any revolutionary should approve. in the same way the provision of cheap guns gave every American, no matter how frail, the power to kill any other America (now there is real equality) so Internet publishing allows anyone, no matter how poor the power to sling large volumes of mud at anyone else even the mega corporations and the super rich.

In the same way this lead to gun regulation laws this is leading to online regulation. The thing is that like concealed weapons you cannot always spot the poster. This has lead to the equivalent of the Wild West saloons that made you leave your weapons at the door. Companies these days have policies which regulate what their employees can say about them. It will not solve the problem, but it is at least as good as a sign saying to leave your weapons or we will not serve you. Clearly the terrorists who are posting do it anonymously making them harder to sue for libel (or if they are real terrorists then for the authorities to catch).

Companies also have to take into account the fact that the Internet and search is becoming a corporate research tool, so what is said online may affect their business to business sales just as much as their more retail sales. Online branding is much too large a topic for me to look at now, but this corporate research does draw our attention to the other side of the same coin. A company who is hiring will search for the candidate online to see what they can find out.

What's in a name?
It is easy to think you know what your reputation is without seeing how you look online. Recently I did a search for myself online. What I found was pretty much what I expected, with one or two notable exceptions. I show up an awful lot because of a few anagrams I posted to a friend's site. Not a problem, but it makes me look like an anagram fanatic when I have very little interest in such things. Also I am viewed as knowing a lot about the web and web analytics (no surprises there). When I searched I could not see my latest blog entry. I wondered whether Google might have lumped blogs with other sort of groups, so I did a search on groups.

I was surprised how much of my old postings were still available. I was even more surprised that in my youth I had fairly sensible opinions on most things. Still more surprising was that my name was listed against a whole slew of postings I had not made. It turns out that a quotation from me had found its way into someone's online signature. Every post they made for a while (and they were fairly prolific) included my name at the bottom. Fortunately they were not an online vandal spouting continuous invective, so it is probably not a black mark against my reputation, but it easily could have been.

The obvious question is does it really matter? Sadly the answer is yes. As http://techdirt.com/articles/20070509/103950.shtml shows it can make a real difference. Admittedly the American who brought the case to our attention was foolish to admit publicly that he had been misusing his employer’s property, but the same thing or close to it could come out of your battle with your neighbour over his/your lawnmower. Once people start throwing mud no one looks good, and you could look very bad for something that was not your fault at all. It is a sad fact that in the near future your employability for any reasonably skilled task will involve a web search and you need to understand and control what it will show.

I am thinking of putting together a series on understanding how you are viewed online and how to affect it. To this end I am going to start experimenting with my personal online branding. Suggestions are most welcome. My first experiment is that I am going to start publishing these blog articles more frequently and take a few simple steps to get them noticed. At this point I have one person who reliably looks at this blog (me). My first milestone will be when it has been viewed by at least 10 people I have never met. I have picked a low number because I have no idea how difficult or otherwise this will be. Equally I have yet to decide how I will monitor the numbers seeing it, so a small test seems the way forward.

Again, suggestions welcome.

So as to make sure that that this page shows up on a search for my name (once I persuade the search engines this blog is worth indexing) I am going to mention that I will be looking for people to do a search for "rufus evison", and I will probably start siging my posts once I have determined what sort of signature I should use.

Oh, and if you can link to this post or any of the others on here that would help, thanks,

Rufus

P.S. If you are thinking of writing a corporate blogging policy you could do worse than look at http://feedster.blogs.com/corporate/2005/03/corporate_blogg.html and follow the guidelines lower down the page.

2007-08-07T13:52:00.000Z

Commitment can make a difference.

I am currently (together with Coralie) buying a house. In order to do this we are selling 3 houses. I am also changing jobs. I start at the new company (dunnhumby) on the 13th of August. Because of this I would have liked to move houses on the weekend of the 9th, 10th, 11th (pack, move, unpack). This was possible. I was told when I suggested the dates that it was very ambitious as we were still looking for a buyer for our joint residence.

In order to allow me to commit to the date I made a suggestion to the person selling us a house. The suggestion was that he agree to rent us the house in the case that we did not complete by the 10th. The idea was that we would either pay a peppercorn rent which he would keep or a full rent with a return of monies upon completion. Sadly he (in common with Coralie were she in his position) did not want to go for it.

I could have decided that I was committed to that date and gone for it regardless. I would have been risking thousands of pounds (about three thousand in fact) as I would have had to arrange the removals and so forth with the risk that we might have to stay behind and not move.

As it was Coralie (probably wisely) was not keen on the idea. The only thing that is preventing us moving on my chosen date is that we were not committed enough to arrange the movers. They are no longer available for then and we are moving later.

Had I been committed to the date we would have moved. Had our seller trusted my commitment he might have agreed to let us rent, knowing it would not happen, and allowing us the certainty to commit.

My conclusion: Sometimes commitment is all that is required to change the way things go.

I do not like to make a commitment without a backup plan. My suggestion would have provided a backup plan, a safety net if you like, and that would have allowed me to make the leap. Without making the leap a trapeze artist cannot leave the swing. Was I wrong to want a safety net? I do not think so. Was I wrong not to make my commitment so clear that the vendor knew I was not planning on using the safety net? In a way, yes I was. Not in the sense that I made a mistake, but in the sense that I failed to make myself clear. I am not sure what I needed to do to be convincing, but I will be trying to find out, so that next time I can let go of the trapeze with confidence.

2007-07-31T14:05:00.000Z

Starting Again

I had been under the impression that my blog, long unused, had been removed during the changes in management of this site. It seems that it exists, so I am going to look at starting again. I have not managed to take the GCSE exams I had wanted to take due to a certain amount of resistance on the part of those who teach and set the exams.

While this resistance could be overcome I have been very busy with other things and have not had a strong feeling that this would actually help anything other than my ego.

If there is anyone who can arrange for me to take the exams and get a grade based on the exams alone, without the coursework which I would not do then I would happily reinstate this plan. In the meantime I am going to try to throw out a few other ideas on an irregular basis.

The first idea is that nutrition and education are both important to future success. Thus the initiative described at
http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol20no4/204-food-in-schools.html
seems a very good idea.

If we accept that providing meals at schools as an incentive to allow children to attend school is a good idea, does anyone know a student who would like to spend their summer making is happen? Clearly it is already happening in some places, but what I had in mind was a student arranging for a few British companies to sponsor a school to continue this somewhere where it is not yet taking place? I feel sure that a number of companies could be persuaded to sponsor this simply for the good PR they could do based on it. I also feel sure that with a few pointers from people who have run businesses a student could find these people. It would be good experience for the student, it would be good PR for the companies and it would be good for the students at the schools. All in all it seems a good idea. Is anyone interested in giving it a go?

Rufus Evison

2005-09-21T03:27:00.000Z

Easy Exams Update

It seems to be about time for an update. My email seems to have provoked at least a bit of discussion. Everyone who commented or responded got 5 points out of 5. these have ranged from someone teaching students history at a university to people who have never studied history and were not taught in a European country.

Points raised so far seem to be:

1) Exams may be easier through the experience gained over time.
2) A single question is not a representative sample.
3) To be fair I should also try a set of questions from the 50s for comparison.

In the case of this particular history question 1 turns out not to be relevant as most of the people getting full marks were under the impression that we were discussing a different war to the one referred to in the questions. I certainly was one of the people who made that mistake, so any knowledge I had was irrelevant and potentially misleading. 2 is quite true in the abstract, though I did choose this question as representative of what I had seen.

Number 3 seems a very good idea. I would like to try some 1950s papers, and am now looking for suggestions as to the best ways to obtain these as well as volunteers to help with exam conditions.

In a similar vein, I have compared a maths paper left over from when I studied for my O levels with one from today and the difference is clear. I have only done this on maths as I consider myself sufficiently educated in maths that this will not affect my result. In some sense, maths is the control for one end of the spectrum. The foundation paper appears to be designed to ensure that everyone can get a GCSE.

This may seem a little harsh, but I was appalled to discover that one of the questions awarded a mark for the ability to count to 10. I am serious, one question had the first part (for one mark) that you had to examine four pictures and say how many blocks they showed. Each block was illustrated by a rectangle. The highest number of blocks illustrated was 10. You also needed to be able to count to 7, 3 and 1 but if you can do ten then they must be childs play.

The 'higher' paper was a little better, and could have weeded out the lowest performers. It still did not compare in difficulty to the papers from my examinations. I have heard the suggestion that as the level drops, so more papers are required to differentiate between candidates, this being why we see so many more people with 10-12 highers. I do not really accept this. If the level is sufficiently easy all the number of highers will measure is the amount of time spent in the examination hall.

Another suggestion that has come up is that I should tackle the coursework from scratch. I will look into this. I am guessing a fair way to do it would be to allow myself 30 minutes per item. If this comes to a sufficiently small amount of time when I know how many items are required I will do it.

In summary, so far nothing has dispelled my belief that the difficulty has gone down. On the contrary, I am now becoming convinced it has fallen far enough to remove the effectiveness of the exams all together. I feel sorry for everyone who has to use this system as a yardstick to measure himself or herself.

2005-09-13T03:17:00.000Z

Quality Food!

Today I am going to talk about something close to my heart: Food. This is nearly an unashamed advertorial. The only thing stopping it being pure advert is that I have no vested interest in any of the companies I am going to mention and the first two do not even know that I exist. I am going to start with a couple of restaurants I have recently encountered, at the end I shall mention another of my favourite restaurants that I have know since it was a start up, but which is doing so well I expect it to be a chain soon. I am looking forward to seeing if Kelvin can maintain the quality levels when that happens.

First off, my qualifications to talk about quality in restaurants:

1) I eat.

2) I once spent a whole year with only one meal cooked at home, the rest were eaten out (I do not count Christmas dinner, while that was technically eaten out too, I helped cook). I have eaten in more restaurants than most people and more often, so I know a good thing when I see it.

3) I have been involved in starting several companies, so I know what is involved from the other side too.

Recently I have been particularly impressed with two restaurants. That does not just mean with the decor, though that was nice, nor with the service, though in both cases they went above and beyond the call of duty. What really impressed me though was the food. Quite different in each case, but both were filled with quality and care as well as taste and good looks.

The two places I went were NinComSoup in London (inside Old Street Tube shopping mall, near exit three) and Cotto in Cambridge (183 East Road just on the corner of the Tram Depot mews). Both of these restaurants are owned by people who care about food and staffed by the same, unlike a chain or a franchise. Having said that, both have all the good points of a chain with none of the bad. Being in a chain pretty much ensures that things like hygiene and health and safety have been covered fairly thoroughly, as is certainly the case in each of these places.

Taking Cotto first it is a stylish open place with a clean fresh atmosphere and a real culture of quality. When they ask you whether you enjoyed your food they then go straight to the person who cooked it and pass on your comments. When we arrived the waiter was sat outside going through a recipe book, and we still didn't have a moments waiting.

If you smile nicely you can get the recipe for the delicious chocolate cake or the citrus cake but believe me you will never make it better than they do. The first looks like a cake but is made like a torte, with no flour at all. What makes the place special is that the waiter knows this kind of fact and cares about it. He volunteered the details of how and why this was different from a chocolate sponge. When we commented on the nice plates he told us that they were Cedar and were dishwasher proof. The fact that they also looked lovely and fitted with the entire restaurant design was a given.

Quality is about the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, which only happens when you can visualise the whole so that nothing jars the experience. I have mentioned the waiter, but the impression of ownership and commitment he gave out made me think he must be the guy starting it up. He isn't, someone I have not met called Alice owns it, but everyone there acts as if anything related the restaurant is as important as it would be if it were their baby. All the food is made on the spot from local ingredients in a well designed kitchen. The change of use has been flawless, and anyone coming to Cambridge should go there even if only for coffee and cakes.

On the subject of coffee and cakes, when the decaffeinated filter coffee ran low, Coralie, who did not want caffeine, was brought a free half cup of strong decaf (all that could be made from what was left) and a little jug of hot water to dilute it as far as she was comfortable with.

Oddly enough, free coffee could almost link the two restaurants. Nincomsoup, or

Nin
Com
Soup

as they put it, is a completely different kind of restaurant.

It is a soup version of Starbucks, and before I ate there I had assumed it was a chain. It was the quality of the food and the attention to detail that made me suspect otherwise. The obvious care of everyone working there convinced me, and was what decided me to write this. If you want a smoothie in Starbucks, you buy an Innocent Smoothie (tm), or whatever else they are selling. Don't get me wrong, this can be a nice drink. If you want a smoothie in Nincomsoup you look through the different bags of fruit, vegetable or both and pick the one you think looks nicest and freshest. They will then liquidise it for you in the sort of liquidiser that was probably used to turn the dinosaurs into oil back in the prehistoric times before the Internet was created. The result? Probably the best fruit drink you have ever tasted.

Quality runs through the whole offering, but more than that, it is clear that the owners (Tom and Ben I understand) also care about how healthy their customers are. The food is deliberately healthy and delicious. If you want to pig out you can have a hand made chocolate brownie with an expensive proportion of nuts for a reasonably cheap price. If you actually find out what goes into it you realise that eating ten of these would be about a unhealthy as eating one of most commercial brownies. If instead you want the really healthy option you can get a flat tub of Natural (and I suspect organic, but I did not check) yoghurt with some fruit pulp over one side of it. I do not even like natural yoghurt and I found it delicious.

Beyond that, this restaurant, which has won several design awards, is also disabled friendly. Disabled friendly for a chain means it meets a few accessibility regulations. For Nincomsoup it means that staff are given deaf-awareness and sign-language training, that the staff are proactively helpful and that, of course, all the regulations are met too.

As for that free coffee, when I ordered my Americano, a different customer accidentally wandered off with it. They made me another, and him a fresh one of the type he had ordered, so that he ended up with two. It wasn't their fault he had mis-identified the coffee, but they had made it their problem and solved it so everyone was happy even before some of us had noticed there was a problem.

Finally a word about Bankside: Bankside is a huge restaurant in the centre of London, which does great food in large quantities at cheap prices. No, that is not right, it is now a set of two great restaurants doing great food at cheap prices in the expensive centre of London. In the second restaurant the elevator to allow disabled access cost more than the rest of the start-up costs put together, and nearly prevented the whole thing. So far almost no disabled people have been to the restaurant, so if you have mobility problems please go and enjoy a d*mn good meal, and help justify the cost.

I met Kelvin (the owner) shortly before he started the first of these restaurants, and he told me all about his plans. Frankly I was slightly dubious as he was talking about keeping the food cheap and the quality high. It is the sort of thing everyone wants but very few people can actually do. Kelvin managed it. He gets his house wine by the barrel so that he can save money on good wine, and it is good wine; he then passes on his savings to the customers. This is the ethic behind everything in the restaurant. He designed the seating himself, had it hand made for him and imported it, so that he could get what he needed to make the place beautiful and functional at a price that worked. Everywhere you look in either Bankside (one by the bank of the Thames the other by the Bank of England) the quality is superb and the price is cheap.

The best steak I have ever had was at Bankside and did not cost an arm and a leg. Gaucho do good steaks, Ecuador and the US do better steaks, but the best was in Bankside. I only ordered it because I smelt the steak of the person opposite me and had to have one as well. I had already eaten but could not resist. The menu at Bankside changes based on what the best food Kelvin can get is at any given time. There are currently only the two Banksides, but I am hoping the next one will be on the bank of the river Cam so I can eat there regularly.

2005-09-01T03:37:00.000Z

Easy Exams?

I have heard a lot about how GCSEs are much easier than the exams used to be when I took them. I believe it. I also believe that they were much easier when I took them than they were previously (the only data point I have for this is that I am told by someone I trust that they were much harder in the 1950s than when he took them, and we are nearly contemporaries).

This has led me to a couple of interesting questions.

1) Are they now easy enough that you do not need to do the course work?
2) Is this slippage going to mean that less innovation comes out of the UK to add to benefit all mankind (great phrase, but as I mean it I might as well be clichéd)?

I doubt I will get around to the research required to properly answer question 2 though my feeling is that it already has had an impact. Any other views I am happy to be persuaded.

More interesting is question 1 as I propose to attempt to find out the answer. I intend to enter the examinations for a set of GCSEs from the following three categories:

1) Should know. These are subjects which I have studied for an exam at some point. Maybe it was 20 years ago, but even so, if I had total recall (PK Dick reference?) I would be able to do them.

2) Have Encountered. IE Spanish. I have never studied Spanish, but I have been to South America (where in 1 week I was electrocuted, shot at, dragged behind a bus and kidnapped, but that is another story), so I have come across Spanish spoken fluently, so I am not going from nothing.

3) No knowledge. This is things like architecture, where I have lived in houses all my life, but that should not qualify me for an exam by any stretch of the imagination.

I am as yet undecided which of the following I should allow:

A) A look at the syllabus for 20 minutes.
B) A day to research the subject.
C) No preparation at all.

Comments on which would be appreciated. Also I do not know how many I should take. This will be limited by two factors, first how much it costs to take the exams, and second how much time it takes up. Due to the time constraints I will not be doing course work, so I will project the exam results as if they were also typical of the coursework, though I understand there is normally a significant drop from coursework grade to exam grade. Still it means my results will be lower, not higher, so that is fair. Does anyone know of a GCSE where you do not need to do coursework to pass? Any offers to sponsor particular exams to allow me to test more subjects?

Hey, it is not a completely objective test, but it will provide a feel, which I will write up on here, and it should be a bit of fun.

One final thought: It is not fair to the people taking these exams to make them easy. If everyone does well and no one values the exams then those who have worked hard need not have bothered. This encourages not working, and makes things harder in later life. It took me years to become the workaholic I am today simply because I managed to coast through school without going much. I spent the year before my O-Level year writing the divorce papers for my parents. My report from that year says I missed more than 2/3rds of the school days. It is filled with comments like "I have not seen much of Rufus, but it does not seem to have affected his progress". What sort of message does that give to a child? And if the exams are even easier it will be worse for the people taking them today.

How will they feel to hear on the news that the exams they are taking are not worth taking? They cannot win, whether they do well or not they will get no credit, and they are not learning what they need for further education. Even if the exams are hard enough they are not percieved as hard enough, and if as I believe they are not hard enough how is that fair to the kids who have to take them?

Since posting this I have looked at a few things to help assess the exams, and sent a typical question around by email.

So far it seems that:
A) Everyone who has so far provided a score found the question easy (many responded to me directly).
B) Many of them have reasons that this may not be a bad thing or a problem with the exams.
C) No one I sent the question to admits they studied history.
It certainly seems that for this question, as well as for others i have seen which are not so easy to send around online as I did this, no knowledge of history per se is actually necessary. The proof of course may be in the real exams later, so watch this space.

There is a suggestion that age gives perspective as well as experience, and that these make a difference. This is certainly true, though I remember parents having a hard time with some of the work, so it cannot be sufficient to make the issue completely irrelevant.

For those who have not seen the question I sent here it is:

The question:
Here is a list of five events that helped the Allies to win the war, and five effects which were the result of these events. In this exercise you have to match up the event with the effect. Type the appropriate letter in the box.

Events

1. The British navy blockaded German ports.

2. The Italians defeated the Austrians at Vittorio Veneto.

3. Tanks were improved and became more reliable.

4. The sinking of American ships by the German U-Boats.

5. The initial success of Operation Michael.

Effects

This meant that they could be used in large numbers at Amiens.
This meant there were shortages of food in Germany.
This led to America declaring war against Germany.
This led to the Allies appointing a Supreme Commander.
This meant that the Austrians signed an armistice.

This can also be found at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/gigaflat/
history/winningthewar/winningthewar_quiz.shtml
and is posted here for review purposes only.

P.S. Suggestions on other things I can do to help evaluate the GCSEs are certainly welcome.