Author: The Information Badger

The freedom to access your money and use it as you wish is being diminished…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Banking, Online Safety, Online Services, Security

UK banks blocking individuals’ accounts without explanation has garnered media interest recently, see here for example. Your money is yours as long as you can access it and have the freedom to use it for your needs and desires, but a recent experience which caused the Badger inconvenience and frustration shows that this premise continues to erode.

A builder working on the Badger’s home took an hour out to visit their bank’s nearest branch to withdraw ~£1600 cash. They returned angry and without their cash. At the branch they were interrogated about what the cash withdrawal was to be used for. The builder explained it was to pay his friend for parts from a classic car being cannibalised for spares. The parts were to be used on his own classic car being restored as a hobby in his garage. The bank refused the withdrawal citing ‘security’ and the absence of any invoice. Sharp words were exchanged, with the builder asserting that it was his money, it was none of the bank’s business what he wanted it for, and that their interrogation amounted to an invasion of his privacy. The bank was unwavering, and the builder left without his cash.

The following day a self-employed groundworker laid and connected a new drain for the Badger. The agreed price (<£1000) for the work was based on payment of their invoice using online banking within two days of the work being completed to the Badger’s satisfaction. Payment was thus straightforward and quick, wasn’t it? No. It took two hours. Because the groundworker banked with Metro Bank, the Badger’s bank’s IT systems assumed they were potentially a scammer! A text message notified the Badger to call his bank’s Payment Fraud team if he wanted the payment to proceed.

On calling, the Badger was interrogated about the payee, the payment, the work the payee had done, and much more. It felt as if the Badger wasn’t being listened to, and that the call handler’s primary focus was capturing evidence that the bank fulfilled its money laundering and funding of terrorism obligations. The lengthy call ended when the Badger was told the payment would stay blocked until he called the Payment Fraud Team again after speaking to the groundworker to confirm they existed and were the payee! To put it mildly, the Badger was livid. Twenty minutes later the Badger called the Payment Fraud Team again, went through exactly the same lengthy questioning with a different call handler, but this time he managed to get the payment unblocked.

With local bank branches a rarity in the UK, online banking the norm, and society increasingly cashless, the freedom to access and use your money as you wish is, for most people, continually being diminished. But that’s not a surprise, because history shows the banks always seem to get away with whatever they want…

Seven small, fundamental, inventions without which the modern world would not be as it is…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Innovation, Learning, Life, Technology

After doing some repairs to a flight of garden steps in the blazing sun, the Badger settled down in the shade to finish reading a book he’d purchased a few days earlier. The book, a proper hardback from a local bookshop, is Nuts & Bolts, Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (In a Big Way) written by Roma Agrawal. She worked on The Shard in London, and is a structural engineer, author, and broadcaster with a physics degree and an MBE. It’s an excellent book, an easy one to read, and one that makes you realise that a small number of fundamental inventions underpin the world as we know it today. These inventions, the Seven Small Inventions in the title, are the nail, wheel, spring, magnet, lens, string and pump. Without them, our modern world full of complex technology that ranges in scale from the tiny to the huge, would not be what it is.

While chilling out reading the book, the Badger’s nephew arrived to return a laptop he’d borrowed recently after his own broke. He’s in the middle of revising and taking exams that determine whether or not he goes to University in the autumn. With video and music from Glastonbury streaming on his smartphone, the youngster sat down and asked the Badger what the book was about. The Badger playfully answered that it was about the fundamental inventions, namely the nail, wheel, spring, magnet, lens, string and pump, without which the Glastonbury music festival and his smartphone wouldn’t exist! The disbelief on the youngster’s face was palpable, and a light-hearted discussion on the Badger’s assertion ensued.

The Badger took the initiative and mentioned that without the fundamental invention of a nail none of the festival’s structures would exist, without the magnet there’s no electric guitars or sound systems, and without the invention of a lens there would be no pictures to stream. At first his nephew was unpersuaded, but a glimmer of enlightenment soon emerged as he started to think more deeply. ‘So’, he said, ‘you’re really saying that the internet, social media, and the smartphone are not fundamental inventions because they could not have been produced without the prior engineering invention of the nail, wheel, spring, magnet, lens, string and pump?’ The Badger nodded, and said that it’s worth remembering that integrated circuits, first invented in the 1950s and now at the heart of today’s computerised world, could not have been produced without the prior existence of the Seven Small Inventions highlighted in Roma Agrawal’s book.

The youngster, a budding biological scientist, grinned. He said he now appreciated that what we see as routine in our complex tech-dominated modern world is derived from simple, fundamental, and often not very obvious engineering inventions. The Badger sensed that he may have awoken an inner latent engineer in his nephew, and that’s no bad thing…

UK Smart Meter rollout…a dog’s breakfast

Posted on by The Information Badger in Smart Meters

Way back in September 2017, an item in The Register quoted Professor Gordon Hughes, an economist at the University of Edinburgh, as saying:

‘The introduction of the smart meter is a dog’s breakfast. At best it is misconceived and an astonishingly expensive project. For those claiming it will bring major savings, I say they need to grow up’.

Well, here we are in June 2023 and the UK National Audit Office’s recent, highly readable, update summary on the rollout of smart meters points out that the likely annual savings for a typical dual-fuel household with a smart meter functioning in smart mode, will amount to around three or four cans of cheap dog food per month. This isn’t a fit return for long-suffering households, especially when, as the NAO summary points out, the Smart Meter programme is one of the largest in government by whole-life cost,  equivalent in scale to the Crossrail railway project. It appears that ’a dog’s breakfast’ is, indeed, still an apt description for the programme given the benefit to energy consumers of just a few cans of dog food a month.

The NAO highlights that the rollout timescale has been extended again, costs continue to rise, and that less than 50% of UK households have a Smart Meter actually operating in smart mode. They also point out that energy suppliers and the Department of Energy Security & Net Zero disagree on the best way to achieve the remainder of the rollout. Having read the NAO summary in its entirety, the Badger’s left with the impression that the new targets are unlikely to be delivered by 2025, and that consumers will never get any real benefit from this programme. Hold on, you might say, this programme was never really about consumers, it’s about the bigger strategic picture of creating an efficient, decarbonised, modernised, UK power system better aligned to a 21st century energy generation mix containing a high proportion of renewables. That’s a fair point, but it doesn’t change the fact that the whole thing looks like an expensive dog’s breakfast because the dynamics to date don’t support the premise that the  programme will meet any strategic objectives within the next decade.

The experience of many consumers with Smart Meters hasn’t been great, see here for example, and so mistrust of energy suppliers and ambivalence about the usefulness of the technology abounds. Regardless of ‘a big picture’, if a programme continually fails to deliver and breeds mistrust amongst consumers then it’s become a millstone. Notwithstanding this, there’s too much political, government, energy industry, and financial capital already invested for things to dramatically change. This means, of course, that tracking consumer benefits in terms of cans of dog food per month is here to stay for the foreseeable future!

Marmite, IT systems…and the NHS at 75

Posted on by The Information Badger in Health & Social Care, Information Technology, Leadership, Opinion, Public Institutions, Transformation

Two young mums and their toddlers were chatting in front of the shelves holding Marmite at the local supermarket. As the Badger politely reached between them for a jar, one mum grumbled ‘Yuk. You shouldn’t eat that stuff; it’s horrible’, and the other added tartly that ‘Supermarkets shouldn’t be allowed to sell it’. Supressing an urge to argue, the Badger saw the seriousness on their faces, took a jar, and moved on. If people think supermarkets should be barred from selling Marmite, then there’s no hope for society!

While cogitating on the way home, the Badger concluded that Marmite and the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) have something in common – the ability to divide and polarise opinions. How did the NHS come into this? Well, the seed was sown in the Badger’s brain by an early morning radio news programme during which an NHS interviewee highlighted how much time medics waste having to log on to different IT systems to treat their patients. Little seems to have changed since early 2020 when a Health Secretary said ‘It is frankly ridiculous how much time our doctors and nurses waste logging on to multiple systems. Too often outdated technology slows down and frustrates staff’. Other interviewees bemoaned NHS vacancies, waiting lists, delays to patients being discharged from hospital, and workforce strikes over pay. The seed was thus sown for the Badger to cogitate on the NHS, especially as it celebrates 75 years of existence on 5th July 2023.

Then this seed grew further when the Badger took a call from his cousin as he reached the supermarket. His cousin is recovering at home after an operation. Their NHS consultant advised that the waiting time for their operation could be six months, and so, instead of waiting in debilitating pain, they dipped into their savings and had their operation privately just two weeks later. The Badger’s brain was thus already cogitating on the NHS as he approached the Marmite shelves.

The Badger likes Marmite and the NHS, a huge, complex organisation employing over 1.3m people that has a special place in the public’s affection because we are all users and it’s free at the point of use. Unfortunately, perpetual transformations have long been strangling its vital signs and its service to patients, making it a political and ideological football and the centre of shrill media outcry. Current struggles as it approaches its 75th birthday imply that it is systemically crumbling in its current form, and something more fundamental must happen to make it fit for the rest of the 21st century. That, of course, is just the outcome of a cogitation on the way home from a supermarket with a jar of Marmite. One thing’s certain, however. Marmite and the NHS will divide opinions and generate highly charged debate for years to come…

Should ‘information’ be thought of as a poison?

Posted on by The Information Badger in Education, Information Technology, Learning, Life, Online Safety, Press & Media

A couple of weeks ago, BBC News unveiled BBC Verify, a new brand to counter disinformation and reinforce audience trust by showing how its journalists check the veracity of what’s reported. Inevitably, Verify has been frequently featured in the broadcaster’s radio and television news programmes since the announcement. Surveys (like the one here, for example) show there’s been a significant drop in trust in the UK news media over the last five years. With BBC News having suffered one of the biggest drops, it’ll be interesting to see if Verify helps to stem their downward trend.

The advent of BBC Verify, plus recent social media and online clamour surrounding a number of human tragedies, triggered childhood memories of the Badger’s father reading his newspaper at the breakfast table. He would regularly say ‘Don’t believe everything you read in newspapers, lad. Most of the information is just poison’. In today’s world we access and consume news and information in a very different way, primarily via our televisions and internet enabled laptops, tablets, and smartphones on a 24 by 7 basis. This fatherly advice, however, seems even more relevant than ever today. These days, being sceptical about the content  you consume and wondering if it contains something poisonous likely to harm you, is definitely no bad thing.

In biochemistry, a poison is a natural or synthetic substance that causes damage to living tissue and has a harmful or fatal effect on our body. The act of poisoning involves a cause (the poison), a subject (the entity being poisoned), an effect (symptoms), and a consequence (debilitation or death). Awareness that things like insect and snake bites, drugs, dodgy food, pesticides, radiation, and biological/chemical agents can poison us is good, but our awareness that ‘information’ can poison our minds and change behaviour is still too low, especially in youngsters whose lives are dominated by social media and the virtual world. It’s no surprise that evidence for harm to young people’s mental health through their use of social media continues to grow.

The Badger’s found himself wondering if there’s merit in thinking of ‘information’ as a poison giving the synergy with the act of poisoning noted above. Just like a medical drug, ‘information’ consumed in an appropriate context from a trusted source can do much good. But also like a drug, ‘information’ in high quantity glibly absorbed and accepted from anywhere can cause an individual great harm. Categorizing ‘information’ as a poison might, perhaps, simplify and embed greater understanding of its potential impact on wellbeing, especially in youngsters.

The Badger tested this musing with his teenage nephew, only to be told that age had clearly affected his mental faculties! If that’s true, then it’s down to the ‘information poison’ he’s consumed over the years and the fact that there’s no real antidote in sight…

Are optimists, pessimists, or realists the most successful leaders?

Posted on by The Information Badger in Information Technology, IT Project Management, Leadership, Leadership & Management, Project Management, Psychology, Risk

The Badger was asked many times during his career to engage with delivery and business leaders encountering serious problems delivering a contracted project to requirement, time, and budget. These requests were often initiated by the company’s Chief Executive who simply asked the Badger to ‘chat with those responsible and see if you can help’. They knew the Badger would interpret the request as ‘get stuck in and get the  problems on this contract resolved’. Being aware of the personal traits of the people you deal with, especially those in senior positions, is crucial to interpreting what they really mean when they ask you to do something!

One such ‘how can I help’ conversation with a business leader proved memorable because it spawned a hypothesis that the Badger feels has been validated over the years. Although we knew each other in passing, it was the first time we had met for any substantive conversation. After some initial chit-chat, the business leader quickly focused on describing the delivery, financial, and contractual difficulties of their project. They had, apparently, already spoken to a couple of experienced staff about helping to resolve the difficulties, but neither was, in their eyes, suited to the task. They described one as a cheery but superficial, glass-half-full optimist, and the other as a pedantic, too laid-back, glass-half-empty pessimist. The Badger remembers wondering how he would measure up!

After an hour’s discussion, the business leader asked the Badger to help resolve the project’s problems, adding that ‘you are a realist and you don’t care whether the glass is half full or half empty, only that the glass is a receptacle to be filled with as much liquid as possible’. Their comment spawned a hypothesis in the Badger’s mind, namely that the delivery and business leaders who have the most success, and also the longest careers, are realists. Engagements with many diverse business and delivery leaders over the years have tended to reinforce the hypothesis.

Being a realist means having a personality with a propensity to take measured risks and take measured decisions. It doesn’t mean never demonstrating optimism or pessimism. Those with an optimistic, glass-half-full, leaning tend to be less risk-conscious, while those with a pessimistic, glass-half-empty, leaning tend to have little appetite for risk at all! During COVID-19, for example, glass-half-full characters might have seen themselves as less at risk and taken less precautions, whereas those with a glass-half-empty outlook might never have left their house at all. Realists, on the other hand, would have taken measured risks based on knowing that the virus’s impact mainly depended on age and underlying health.

The Badger’s seen glass-half-full, and glass-half-empty leaders be successful, but it’s the realists who’ve been the most successful and had the longest careers. Is the Badger’s hypothesis sound scientifically? Don’t know, but he’ll stand by it until a proper people expert shoots it down in flames!

This item contains nothing generated by Bing Chat…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI & Robotics, Automation, Business, Ethics & Regulation, Information Technology, Life, Risk, Technology

The Badger’s been experimenting for some time with Bing Chat, an integration of the GPT model developed by OpenAI with Microsoft’s search engine. It’s been both fun and thought-provoking. The capability is impressive, which is why there’s been massive interest in the technology in the 6 months since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Many of the Badger’s interactions have made him chuckle, roll his eyes in annoyance, or better appreciate its use for good or evil, but every interaction has, in truth, reinforced why Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, calls on US lawmakers to regulate AI. This capability  has enormous scope to develop further. It’s already engaging the public and changing the way things are done, and it will continue to do so in the future. The Badger, like many, sees many pros and cons, but the primary outcome of his experimentation has been to crystalize the realisation that he must deal with how this impacts his content-producing activities like the writing of the blog you are reading now.

AI is destined to affect the activities and jobs of white-collar workers across a wide variety of industries (see here and here, for example). Indeed, the Badger can think of many functions and jobs that could be impacted by AI-centred automation in the IT industry alone. With perpetual improvement to make the profits stakeholders expect at the core of any business’s survivability, it’s inevitable that AI will speed up the drive for organisations to do more with less people, especially as employing people is expensive. Working in IT or tech industries doesn’t provide immunity from this impact, as BT’s recent announcement highlights. BT is cutting more than 10,000 jobs due to new technology and AI over the next 6 years. For employees in any organisation, therefore, this isn’t a time to stick your head in the sand; it’s a time to scan the horizon, think about how your livelihood might be impacted, and assess your options for countering the threat. All is not completely bleak, however, because AI seems unlikely to replace jobs requiring human skills such as creativity, judgement, physical dexterity and emotional intelligence. If these dominate your job, then the immediate threat is limited.

Experimenting with Bing Chat brings much of the media debate and commentary on AI to life. It’s made the Badger think seriously about intellectual property, ethics, and things like the transparency of content origination in a world where services like Bing Chat cannot be ignored. The Badger believes people deserve to know if any of the content they read online has been generated using a service like Bing Chat or Google Bard. Well, if you’ve read this far, then you can be confident that what you’ve read has been created entirely by a human being. It contains nothing generated by Bing Chat or any other similar capability.

An IT outsource in a pickle…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Information Technology, Outsource, Transformation, Transition

Bored with his smartphone’s ringtone, the Badger spent a few minutes exploring alternatives only to decide not to change for the time being! Scrolling through alternatives had thus simply been a waste of a precious commodity, namely time. Just as the Badger refocused on doing something useful, an acquaintance called. They wanted to chat informally with, as they put it, a veteran IT professional with wisdom and no axe to grind,about an IT outsourcing contract experiencing some difficulty. The Badger listened carefully to the pickle they described.

Problems started shortly after the contract was signed. Negotiations were apparently difficult due to the strong personalities and egos of the responsible business and commercial leads on both sides. Pressure to get to signature had been intense because both sides had been under enormous pressure from their executive levels. The service provider needed signature to underpin its quarterly results, and the client needed it to meet a much-publicised strategic priority. Now, some months after signature, the service provider and client business leads are perpetually arguing about what’s covered by Transition and what’s covered by Transformation, and payments. The terms and scope of Transition and Transformation are confused because they have been used interchangeably and inconsistently in the contract. The two parties are arguing about the contract wording they negotiated, and distrust and confusion reigns between client and provider staff at the delivery level. What a pickle!

The Badger simply said that if the parties at executive level want the outsource to succeed with a sustainable, long-term, mutually beneficial relationship then they needed to intervene and agree a course of action that deals with a) intransigent personalities on both sides, b) changes to contract wording, and c) the removal of any ambiguity about what constitutes Transition and Transformation. The caller sighed and simply said ‘Obvious isn’t it, but sometimes you need an outsider to tell you the obvious’.

Following the call, the Badger deliberated on the fact that he’d encountered similar scenarios more than 20 years ago when outsourcing, in one form or another, was on the rise across the IT industry. Has nothing been learnt since, especially with regard to the distinction between Transition and Transformation? Well, the process, practice, and professionalism of outsourcing has, of course, improved significantly over the last 20 years, but there’ll always be occasional problems because people are the weakest link. Egos, personal ambitions and motives, and pressure within organisations to achieve hard deadlines, can always adversely influence behaviours and lead to the erosion of professional rigour and discipline. Today there’s also another factor in play. A generation of highly experienced IT practitioners is retiring from the industry. There’s thus a heightened risk that the younger generation will make the same mistakes commonplace 20 years ago. But that’s just life…

Science and technology change lives for the better…

Posted on by The Information Badger in Life, Science & Engineering, Technology

In a phone call with the Badger last week, his cousin spoke proudly about their career in oceanographic science and engineering, and of how grateful they were for the science and technology advances of recent decades. His cousin specialised in producing and operating submersibles, and he expressed a little regret that his children had no interest in science and engineering because it was too difficult. We laughed, reminisced about science and technological advances during our lifetime, and jovially agreed that these advances underpinned everything that is good in the world. The conversation subsequently played on the Badger’s mind as he watched the coronation of King Charles III, the first coronation for 70 years, over the weekend.

Life was very different in 1953 when the last coronation took place. Rock and roll was in its infancy, music was listened to on radios or gramophones playing 78rpm discs, and only 10% of UK households had telephones. Central heating was a rarity and coal was the dominant fuel for heating homes. The rationing of petrol and sugar following World War II had just been lifted, the first commercial jet airliner service was barely a year old, and the USA announced it had a thermonuclear weapon. The only way of looking inside the human body was by X-rays, the first vaccine for polio became available, and Crick and Watson announced they had discovered the structure of DNA. In 1953 there was virtually no vandalism, swearing in public was an offence, men gave up their seats for women on buses and trains, and there was only 53 Kilobytes of high-speed random-access memory on the whole planet!

Roll forward 70 years to King Charles’ coronation and life is different due to the dramatic science and technology advances of the intervening decades. As the Badger watched the coronation events, his cousin’s words about being grateful for these advances echoed in his head, ostensibly for two reasons. The first was that advanced science and technology quietly underpinned everything associated with the coronation. The second was that his cousin sadly passed away the day before the event.

The Badger’s cousin was diagnosed with prostate cancer 14 years ago and given only months to live, but he took the opportunity to engage with a scientific research programme using experimental treatments which gave him many more years with his family, the satisfaction of knowing he was helping others, and validation of his belief that science and technology was a force for good. He felt that a good STEM education not only meant that the world was your oyster, but also that it enabled the ability to create things that change lives for the better. He wanted our younger generation to share his belief and overcome any fear that science and technology is too difficult. He was inspirational and will be sadly missed.

Bigbug, AI, and common sense…

Posted on by The Information Badger in AI & Robotics, Automation, Business, Drones, Ethics & Regulation, Leadership, Risk, Transformation

After a day of strenuous activity in the garden, the Badger settled down to watch something on the television that wasn’t full of doom and despondency. Nothing grabbed his interest as he flicked through the channels, so he scrolled Netflix for a film that wasn’t full of gory action or Marvel superheroes and came across Bigbug from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.  Netflix describes the storyline as ‘Humans have ceded most tasks to AI in 2045, even in Alice’s nostalgic home. So, when robots stage a coup, her androids protectively lock her doors.’  Intrigued, the Badger hit play and watched this off-beat, quirky, sci-fi comedy to the end. It proved to be thought provoking.

Millennial or Generation Z digital natives will easily relate to the film’s backdrop of a society in 2045 based on automation, AI, and robots, because much of the technology portrayed – AI, drones, sophisticated sensors, the Internet of Things, machine learning, driverless cars, and so on – is a progression of what exists today. Indeed, Bigbug’s 2045, only 22 years away, cannot be deemed unrealistic when digital technology has already revolutionised life in the last two decades. While watching the film, the Badger wondered why we would tolerate the development of a society where AI and robots could dominate, control, and potentially destroy the human race. The answer seemed quite simple; humans are fickle and predominantly focused on the short term and convenience.

There’s no doubt that the pandora’s box of AI-centred systems is already open, and open letters signed by people like Elon Musk, and danger warnings from Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, will not change that. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’ll never go back in. Its simple common sense, surely, that if we create systems with the potential to be more powerful than humans then we must be clear on how we retain control over them? Unfortunately, common sense seems a bit thin on the ground these days. History shows that action to constrain and control the use of new technologies normally happens retrospectively, and AI seems to be no exception as we realise that it could, to put it provocatively, become a self-inflicted, weapon of mass human destruction!

The Badger found Bigbug’s technology-centric world of 2045 unattractive, but not outlandish. No one can predict the future, but it’s a certainty that AI-centred technology is rapidly changing human life as we know it, and presenting risks for our longer-term existence. The Badger thinks that we should never allow ourselves to become subservient to any technology that can lead to the decline and eventual eradication of our species. Surely that’s only common sense and the time has come to deal with the AI elephant in the room…