COVID-19: The Coming Peak in the UK & Beyond. April 9, 2020
Posted by mwidlake in biology, COVID-19, off-topic, science.Tags: COVID-19, ethics, science
9 comments
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The UK government is now talking more in it’s daily briefings about what will come “next”, that is after we have seen the number of diagnosed cases & deaths continue to grow, plateau, and then fall. It will plateau & fall, so long as we all keep staying at home and limiting our social interactions. If we do not, we risk the virus spreading out of control again.
When Will the Peak Be?
My estimates so Do Not Trust At All
First of all, there will be two peaks. First the number of new cases a day will peak and then, about 8 days later, the number of deaths per day will peak. This is because of the average gap between being diagnosed in hospital and succumbing, for those unfortunate enough to do so.
The number of deaths a day looks to me like it will peak around April 20th, at somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 a day (see below why I think tracking deaths is more reliable than case numbers and why case numbers are a poor metric). We will know that peak is coming as, if the lock-down measures have worked as intend, their effect will result in a plateauing and then drop in new cases during next week ( April 12th-18th). We might be seeing that plateauing already. Deaths will plateau (stay steady) for maybe a longer period than cases due to the fact that the gap between diagnosis and recovery or death is variable. That period will be something like April; 20-27th
If we follow the same “curve” as Italy and Spain, the number of new cases will slowly start dropping but not as sharply as early models indicated. Deaths will also drop, about 8-10 days later. What happens then I have no idea really, it depends on how well the current social distancing measures work and if people continue to stick to them as spring progresses and people want to escape confinement.
A disproportionate number of deaths in this peak will be from our health services and critical works – people working in shops, bus drivers, refuse collectors, GP’s, teachers – because they are the most exposed. The care industry workers and lower paid people in our society will be hardest hit, which seems monumentally unfair.
The plan of pretty much all national governments so far is the same:
- Isolation of all people who are non-key workers
- Slow the spread
- Expand the respiratory Intensive Care capabilities of the health services as much as possible
- Look after as many of the wave of people already infected & becoming ill as possible
As I’ve covered in prior blogs, if the government’s measures work we are then we are left “sleeping with the tiger”. The virus is in our population, it will be slowly spreading still, and when social isolation measures relax there is a real risk of the illness and deaths exploding again because most of us are not immune. This is know by all epidemiologists studying this, it is a situation that China, Italy, Spain, and most other countries will face.
The big question is – what comes after the peak?
I’m going to cover three four things:
- Why we cannot go on “Cases” the number most often graphed and discussed. We have to go on deaths, and even then there are some confusing factors.
- Why the Infection Fatality Rate is key – and we do not know that yet
- A “test” or “vaccine” is not a black and white thing, it’s grey, and especially for a Vaccine, it is not coming soon.
- How we might manage the period between either a reliable vaccine or herd immunity. Both currently look like at least 18-24 months away.
Why Case Numbers Cannot Be Relied On.
Case Numbers do not tell you as much as you may think
Case numbers (the number of people who have been confirmed as having Covid-19) are the most commonly reported figures, many of us track if things are getting better or worse by them. But they are a very poor indicator really and they certainly cannot be used to compare between countries.
First of all, how are the diagnoses being made? Most countries are using the WHO-approved test or a very similar one, called a PCR test. I won’t go into the details here, I’ll put them in the section of the post on testing, but the test is accurate if done in a laboratory. Why in a lab? because any cross-contamination can give a false positive and if the sample or test chemicals are not kept/handled correctly, can give a false negative.
Not all countries are using just PCR tests. China made some diagnoses based only on symptoms. I’m not sure if other countries are making diagnoses from symptoms only and including them in official figures.
More significantly is who is being tested. In the UK the test was originally only being done on seriously ill patients in hospital. It is now being done on a few NHS staff and certain key people (like Boris Johnson!). In South Korea and Germany, many, many more people were tested, so there will be more cases identified. Add on to that the number of tests a country can do.
In the UK are testing rates have been very poor
In the UK we were limited to a pitifully small number of tests per day, less than 6,000 until March 17th and we only reached 10,000 test a day at the start of April. You cannot detect cases in people you have not tested.
Case numbers will also vary from country to country based on the country’s population! The UK is going to have a lot more cases than Denmark as we have over 10 times as many people.
The final confusion is that even in a single country, what counts as a day for reporting can vary and it can take time for information to be recorded. The UK sees a drop of cases against the prevailing trend on Sunday and Monday. As the cases are for the prior day and it seems like the data is not being as well processed at weekend.
Estimations of how many people really have Covid-19 at any time, as opposed to validated Case numbers, vary wildly. In the UK I doubt we are detecting even 1/3 of cases.
So, all in all, Case Rates are pretty poor as an indicator of how many people are really ill.
Infection Fatality Rate and Tracking Deaths Not Cases.
As I mentioned in my previous post last week, what we really need to know is the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). This is the percentage of infected people who die. It is not the same as the Case Fatality Rate (CFR), which is the percentage of known cases that die. As the number of known cases is such an unreliable number (see above!) then of course the CFR is going to be rubbish. This is a large part of why the CFR varies so wildly from country to country. France has a CFR of 8.7%, almost as bad as the UK at 10.4%. The US has a CFR of 2.9% (but they will catch up).
As I also covered last week, we cannot calculate the IFR until we know the number of people who have been infected. For that we need a reliable antibody test and one does not exist yet. Yes, they are being sold, but the reliability is poor. Last I knew the UK NHS had reviewed several candidates and none were reliable enough to use.
Scientist have suggested many Infection Fatality rates. I feel 0.5% is a fair estimate. It is vital we know this number with some accuracy as if we have an Infection Fatality Rate we can flip the coin and calculate the number of people who have been infected from the number of people who have died.
IFR * deaths = number immune
You can go from a graph like the example one I show (either from a model or, after the peak, from real figures) and as you have the number who died (say 20,000 to keep it simple) and the IFR of 0.5% you know that 4 million people (minus the 20,000 who died) had the disease and are now immune.
Of course, once we have a reliable antibody test we can verify the exact value for Infection Fatality Rate and the percentage of the population now immune. But we only need that information from one country and it can be used, with minor modifications for population age and capacity of the health services, to estimate how many people are immune and thus how many are still at risk from Covid-19. In my example, about 62.5 million people in the UK would still be susceptible to Covid-19. Which is why this will be far from over after this initial peak.
There is one huge caveat in respect of the IFR. If in the UK the NHS is over-run, we will have extra deaths. People who would have survived with treatment die as too many people needed treatment at the same time. This is the whole “flattening the curve” argument, we have to protect the NHS from being over-run to limit this extra, avoidable deaths. In effect the IFR is elevated due to the limitations of the health system.
Countries which do have a poor health service or other aspects of their society that block them from the health service (cultural bias, fear of crippling debt) or more likely to have an elevated IFR, as are countries that allow Covid-19 to run unchecked through their population.
There is another aspect to the IFR and measuring progress of Covid-19 via the death rate. The number of deaths is a more reliable measure. I know that sounds callous, but as we have seen, the Case Number is totally reliant on how you do your testing and there needs to be a huge testing capacity to keep up. Deaths are simpler:
- There are fewer deaths so fewer tests are needed (to confirm SARS-CoV-2 was present in the deceased, if not already tested).
- Deaths have to be recorded in a timely manner.
- Deaths are noticed. There are going to be people who are seriously ill and would be tested if they went to hospital but don’t, they get better and it is not recorded. They are “invisible”. Dead people invariably get noticed.
- A country that wants to hide the active level of Covid-19 can do so by not testing, under-testing, or not reporting honestly on the tests. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard to cover up a significant increase in the number of deaths.
I stress that is is not a perfect indicator though. There is no clear distinction made as to whether the patient dies of some other illness but SARS-CoV-2 was present; whether the patient was likely to die “soon” anyway – again due to other illnesses; patients who die outside hospitals are not counted in the UK daily figures yet. (If you follow me on Twitter you will have possibly seen me querying the figures last Monday – and people pointing out the reason!)
Reported deaths will also suffer from spikes and dips due to how the reporting is done. The UK and some other countries I checked (France, Italy, Spain) show a dip in all figures, against trend, on Sunday or Monday (or both).
There is a really nice article on all of this this by New Scientist which is itself partly based on this paper by the lancet that gives an IFR of 0.66%
There is also a whole plethora of graphs and information on ourworldindata.org/coronavirus , as well as text explaining in more detail what I have said here. It is well worth a look and you can change which countries appear on the graphs.
Test are Not Black And White
There has been a lot of talk in the UK and elsewhere (including the USA), about not doing enough testing. On the other hand their is a constant stream of media reports about quick home tests, both for if you have Covid-19 or have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and so are immune. So what is the reality?
A test is only any good if it is reliable as used. For something like a deadly pandemic, it needs to be really reliable. Let me explain why.
Let’s say a company is selling an antibody test and someone uses it, it says they are immune, and they stop self-isolating. But the test is 75% accurate. 75% sounds good, yes? No. it means 1 in 4 people who take that test and it says they are immune are not – and they have now gone out, spread the disease to their aunt Mary and she dies. Plus infecting a large number of people and keeping the whole sorry mess going.
{Update – as a friend reminded me, when you are testing for an “unlikely” event, which being immune to C-19 is right now, even a 95% accurate test will give far more false positives than real positives across the whole population – I’ll try and do another blog to explain why}.
And that is if they take the test properly – companies are most likely to give you the best, under-ideal-conditions accuracy rate as they want to sell more kits than Sproggins Pharma selling a similar kit which they claim is 73% accurate.
If you are reading this, you are probably the sort of person who will read the instructions, follow them carefully, not put the swab down on a table, not let the dog chew it. And you note the bit on reliability. Most won’t. They will do the test quickly, it says they are immune and they will believe it, especially if the quoted reliability rate is high.
Any home test that can be used by the public has to be both very reliable (less then 5% false positives) and utterly idiot-proof. I’m really concerned that countries that put money first will allow companies to sell tests that do not meet these criteria and it will make the situation a lot, lot worse. It might even result in the pandemic running out of control.
Test For Being Infected – PCR test
PCR stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction. The WHO-approved test for Covid-19 is a PCR test and has been fully described since the end of January. You can even download the details of the test and methods from the WHO page I link to.
A PCR test is a genetic test. A primer is added to the sample to be tested and that primer latches on to a very specific DNA or RNA sequence. A biochemical reaction is then used, called a Polymerase Chain Reaction, to make copies of that DNA/RNA, doubling the number in the sample. These steps are repeated 30 to 40 times to make millions of copies of DNA/RNA. With an old-style PCR test you would then need to run the processed sample through a second process to detect it, like a Southern Blot – you get a square of gel with black lines on it. The PCR test for COVID-19 should be a real-time PCR test. With this the new copies made are attached to a florescent dye so that it can be easily detected as soon as there are enough copies in the sample, say after 30 iterations not the full 40, saving time.
If the original sample contains even just a few pieces of the DNA/RNA you are testing for, you will detect it. The process takes a few hours.
The RNA of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was sequenced (read) back in January and the WHO identified sequences that were unique to the virus, and these are used to make the primers. As I understand it most countries use the WHO identified primers but the USA had some “discussions” between commercial companies over which primers they thought should be used. I won’t suggest there was an element of these commercial companies looking to make a fortune from this, i’m sure it was all about identifying an even more unique RNA sequence to target.
The test has to be done in laboratory conditions. Because the test is so sensitive any cross contamination can give a false positive. e.g the sample taken from a patient was done by someone with COVID-19 themselves or there was SARS-Cov-2 virus in the air from another nearby patient. If a swab is used to get a sample from the back of the throat, it has to be put into a sealed tube as soon as it is used.
If the sample to be tested has not been looked after properly (kept cool, not kept for too long etc) or the chemicals for running the test are similarly not kept in a laboratory environment, you may fail to detect the RNA – a false negative.
Finally, the virus RNA has to be there to be detected. A patient early in their illness may not be shedding virus at a high enough level for the swab to pick up some of it. Once a patient’s own immune system has wiped out the virus (or almost wiped it out) again the swap may not have any or enough virus in it to be detected.
Done right a PCR test is a powerful, incredibly reliable (over 99%) diagnostic tool and is used for detecting many viral diseases, including HIV, Influenza, and MERS.
How a simple yes/no infected test might work
You can probably now understand why creating a PCR test for Covid-19 that can be used at home or in the ward and gives a result in minutes is a bit of a challenge.
Some companies are trying to create a different sort of test. These depend on creating a chemical that will bind to the virus itself, probably one of the viral surface proteins. That chemical or part of it will then react with something else, a marker chemical, to give a visible change, much like a pregnancy test. You put the sample in a well or spot where the detecting chemical is. Fluid is then dragged along the strip carrying the thing to be detected (the virus in this case) and the detecting chemical. Any detecting chemical that did not bind will be left behind. When the fluid goes past the marker chemical, if there is enough detecting chemical, it will change colour. Neat!
Best I know at time of writing, no one has come up with such a test that was reliable. I’m pretty sure someone will, in a few weeks or months. It should be accurate but no where near as sensitive as a PCR test. I must stress, to actually be of use in handling Covid-19 as a nation, the rate of false positive would need to be very low. False negative, though not good for the individual, is nothing like as big a problem in containing the pandemic).
Antibody Test
An Antibody test will show if you have had Covid-19. It will not show if you currently have it, or at least not until the very late stages. This is because it is testing for the natural ability for your immune system, via antibodies, to recognise and attack the SARS-Cov-2 virus.
We desperately need an antibody test as it will allow us to identify people who have had the disease and are now immune. This is vital for 2 reasons:
- Someone who is immune does not need to be restricted by social distancing. See my prior post on why this is vital and how we might identify such people.
- We can find out how many people have had the disease and compare it to the number of people who have died of the disease and get that very useful Infection Fatality Rate.
Unfortunately, making an antibody test is not easy. Some are in trials and I think the UK government have tried some – and none have proven trustworthy.
An antibody test is simply not simple. What you need to do is design something that an antibody reacts against, so let me just describe something about antibodies. Before I go any further, I must make it very, very, very clear that of all the biological things I have touched on so far, antibody technology is something my academic background hardly touched on and most of what I know comes from popular science magazines and a few discussions with real experts last year when my work life touched that area.
Your body creates antibodies when it detects something to fight, an invader in our tissues. This is usually a viral or bacterial infection. It also includes cells that “are not our own”, which is why we reject organ transplants unless they are both “matched” to us and we take drugs to dial down our immune response. Our antibodies recognise bits of the invader, in the case of viruses that is (usually) proteins that are in the coat, the outer layer, of viruses. Usually it’s the key proteins, the ones that give them access to our cells. Our immune cells learn to recognise these proteins and attack anything with them on it.
Anyone infected with SARS-Cov-2 who survives (which is, thankfully, most of us) now have antibodies that recognise the virus. There is no guarantee that what Dave’s immune system recognises SATS-CoV-2 by is what Shanti’s immune system does. It will be a bit of the virus, but not necessarily the same bit!
So an antibody test has to include proteins or fragments of proteins that most human immune systems that recognise SARS-Cov-2 will recognise. And as that will potentially vary from person to person…. Oh dear. Thus a good antibody test probably needs to have several proteins or protein fragments in it to work. This is why it is complex.
Again, the tests will come but the first ones will almost certainly not be specific/reliable enough to really trust.
Vaccine
The bad news? Despite all the media hype and suggestions in government announcements of creating a vaccination in 18 months (maybe sooner), it is very unlikely. Sorry. It is very, very unlikely. Don’t get me wrong, I would love us to have one right now, or in a month, or even in 6 months. But unless there is a medical miracle, we won’t and by suggesting to everyone that we might, I think the powers that be are storing up a lot of anger, frustration and other issues
A vaccine needs to do something similar to the Antibody test. It needs to contain something that either is part of the virus or looks like part of it. This is usually:
- An inactivated version of the virus
- a fragment of the virus
- One of the key proteins on the virus
- Rarely, a related virus that is much less harmful (for example cowpox for smallpox vaccine).
The vaccine is administered and the person creates antibodies to it. Now, when the person is exposed to the real virus, the immune system is ready to attack it. Neat!
Influenza Vaccine is often less than 50% effective
Creating vaccines is a long process. You need to come up with something that is safe to administer, prompts our immune systems to create the antibodies, and the antibody reliably attack the virus the vaccine is for – and nothing else! (Occasionally a new vaccine is found to prompt some people’s immune system to attack other things – like the healthy, useful protein the virus actually attacks). And you have to produce a LOT of that thing if you are going to administer it to a large number of people, such as most of the UK population.
The vaccine has to work on most people as you need 60-70% of people to be immune to SAR-CoV-2 get herd immunity from Covid-19 – the higher the better. The influenza vaccine is often much less effective than 50%, especially in older people.
You are giving the vaccine to healthy people and to lots and lots of them. It has to be really, really, really safe. If it seriously harms 1 in a thousand people (which might sound reasonable at first glance, for treating something as bad as Covid-19) – well, that is almost as bad as Covid-19 itself. You would be harming hundreds of thousands of people.
With a drug you use to treat the ill, you can afford for it to be less safe – as you are only giving it to people who are ill (so a smaller number) and they have more to lose. The risk/reward balance is more likely to be positive for a drug. Even if a drug for a life-threatening illness harms 5% of people but cures 50%, it is worth (with informed consent) using it.
We have never, ever created a vaccine in 18 months before. I’m struggling to get a scientific reference as searches are swamped with talk pieces (like this one!) on why it will take a long time. However, this video by an American doctor Zubin Damnia who does social media about medical matters explains better than I can and this history of vaccines makes it clear at the top it often takes 10 years.
The bottom line is, much though I want to be wrong, the often stated aim of having a suitable vaccine in 18 months or less will need a medical miracle and a huge amount of work.
After The Peak And With No Vaccine – How Do We Cope?
After the peak, most people are still at risk from Covid-19. As I said earlier, if the Infection Fatality Rate is 0.5% then for each person who died there will be 200 people who are now immune, so if there are 20,000 deaths that is 4 million people immune. 6
If there is no vaccine then we have, I think, four options:
- Continue social isolation measures as they are to keep the virus from spreading.
- Relax isolation a little and let cases creep up but held as steady rate, but within the capacity of the NHS.
- Relax isolation quite a bit, monitor number of admissions to ICU (or something similar) and re-impose strict social isolation at the current level if things start getting worse.
- Relax isolation a lot and massively increase testing and case tracking – copying the South Korea/Singapore approach.
Option 1 to hold us all in isolation is, I think, untenable. People will stop doing it and the impact on our economy must be massive. The impact on our society will also be massive, especially if this continues into the next academic year.
I don’t think we can manage option 4 in the UK yet.
So I think we will see an attempt at option 2, relaxing some social isolation rules (such as allowing restaurants to open and small gatherings) but then option 3, tightening social isolation if numbers of new cases start to build.
Option 4 could become a reality in a few months, especially if we can get people to use mobile phone apps to track movements and aid identifying the contacts of people who become ill, but not everyone has a mobile phone and I think a good percentage of people will not agree to be tracked.
At present, without a vaccine, we will be living with some sort of social until we reach herd immunity, with at the very least 60% of us immune. How long will that take? 60% of the UK population is 40.5 million people. That equates to 202,500 deaths from Covid-19 to get there (remember, see the bit on IFR above).
This current peak of Covid-19 will last about 3 months, from the start of March to the end of May. It remains to be seen if we exceed the NHS expanded capacity. If we allow 20,000 deaths a peak with 4 million people becoming immune each peak, that’s 10 peaks, so 2.5 years.
A better option could well be to aim for a steady rate of new cases and deaths from Covid-19, say 1000 a week. At that rate herd immunity will take just over 200 weeks, 4 years. If we allow 4000 deaths a week than we could be there in a year, but our NHS would have to be handling the many, many thousands of ill patients that would entail.
Of course, in reality, our treatment of Covid-19 patients will get better over time, so fewer people will die from it, but it will still be a horrible thing to go through. And, if we DO get a vaccine sooner rather than later, many of those people will have died needlessly.
So, as you can see, we are in this for a long while.
The expanded health services, better knowledge of what social movement restrictions work, improved testing (including home testing), even my idea of cards for those immune, would all make life easier, it is not all doom and gloom. But I just wish all of what I have put here was being discussed and shared with people (preferably in a shorter form than this blog!) in a clear and constant message. I think if more people understood where we are and what is likely to to happen (or not), we will save ourselves a lot of issues weeks/months/even years down the line.
I honestly don’t know what the answer is – I don’t think anyone does. Which is why all of this talk about an “exit strategy” results in lots of hand waving and no clear plan.
As ever, if you think I’ve got something wrong, you know of a good academic source covering this, or you simply have a comment – let me know.
Friday Philosophy – Computer Magazines & Women (Not) In I.T November 29, 2019
Posted by mwidlake in ethics, Friday Philosophy, Perceptions.Tags: behaviour, ethics, perception
2 comments
I often get into discussions about Women In IT (#WIT), even more so in the last 4 or 5 years with my growing involvement in organising and being at conferences. There is no doubting that the I.T industry is generally blighted by a lack of women and other “minorities” (and I don’t like referring to women as “minorities” as there are more women in the UK than men). Ours is mostly a white, male, middle-class and (especially in the Oracle sphere) “middle aged” world.
Is this part of the problem?
I’ve never been comfortable with the ratio of men to women in the IT workplace – and I started my career in the UK National Health Service, where the ratio of men to women in technical roles seemed more like 80:20. So 20%. In all companies since, the percentage I would estimate as been 10-15% women. And I haven’t seen it changing much. And I’m afraid to say, to a certain degree, I have almost given up on trying to correct this imbalance in our current workforce. Note, current workforce.
Why? Well, like many I’ve tried for years to increase the ratio of women in technical areas or at least to increase female representation. That is, make women more visible:
- When I’ve hired new staff I’ve given female candidates an extra half point in my head – and part of me hates doing it because it’s sexist, the very thing that is the problem. But the small wrong is done to try and right a larger wrong.
- When allocating pay increases I looked out for imbalance (is Sarah doing the same role as Dave to the same level, but being paid less? Let’s fix that).
- When I have input to paper selection for conferences, “minorities” get an extra half point. But only half. They have to be good at presenting/have an interesting abstract, but it will win in a tie.
- When it comes to promotion, it is utterly on merit. I don’t care what’s in your underwear, the colour you are, what clothes you wear that are dictated by religion. If your work is deserving of promotion and I can promote, I promote. No positive or negative discrimination. I take this stance as I know people do not want to be promoted “just because” of filling a quota. Further, if it is perceived that this is happening, that groups are getting an unfair hand, it creates a bad backlash – even though the reality is white, male, middle class people have been getting that unfair hand for a long time.
But, really, it’s had little impact. The problem I keep hitting is that there are simply far fewer women in I.T. We can all try and skew things in the way that I (and many others) do or strive for more women in visible positions to act as role models, which I think is an important thing for our industry to do.
But we can’t magically create more women in I.T. Specifically, we can’t create women who have been doing the job for a long time and so are more likely to be skilled and willing to present. We can only work with what we have. One result of the skewing is a relatively small number of women are constantly asked to present and invariable sit on #WIT panels. We see the same people over and over again.
What we can do is encourage a more mixed group of young people coming into the industry. It maybe won’t help much with something like the database world, or at least the database user community, as you see few young people of any type coming in – we need to fix that as well and I applaud things like the German user group #NextGen efforts – databases do not attract young people, It’s Not Cool. But that’s a whole other topic for another day.
In discussing all this, many times, over the years the idea that we need to go back to pre-work people (that would be kids and teenagers then) and encourage everyone – irrespective of gender,sexuality, ethnicity etc etc etc – to do IT, Science, Art, domestic science, whatever they want and ignore the stereotypes of old – is pretty much agreed to be A Good Thing.
All of this is great but it left me with a question. How did we get into this mess in the first place? Why are there so few women in IT between the ages of 35 and retirement? In the early days a lot of women were in IT compared to the average number of women in scientific areas generally. When I was at school (1980’s) they introduce Computer Studies into the curriculum and there were as many girls as boys in my class. Ability was equally spread. The number of women taking IT at college was admittedly terribly low when I went, but colleges did a lot to encourage women and the numbers were rising. And then stopped. Why? What was stopping girls continuing with computers? Well, a year or two ago I read an article (I think in print as I struggled to find similar online – but if you find one let me know) about the computer press back in the 90’s. And it stuck a chord with me.
The article argued that part (not all, but maybe a big part) of the problem was the computer magazines of the time. I’ve picked on “PC Format” as it was a magazine I bought often and knew, but others were similar. PC Format seemed to me to nearly always have a sexualised image of a woman on the cover, like the one at the top of this article. This was especially true if the image was a bit “science fiction”, say a ray-traced image to promote graphics cards. The image would invariably be of a woman with a, frankly, quite striking and often physiologically unlikely figure. Inside the magazine adverts were liberally decorated with nubile women leaning forward provocatively or with striking make-up & hair and yet wearing nerd glasses. You know, the sort of look you NEVER saw in real life. This was not a style or fashion magazine, it was not an “adult” magazine, it was about mother boards, CPUs, games, programming and general tech.
The covers I found online for this article are not as bad as many I remember (and perhaps I should not be using the worst anyway), but you get the idea. And it was not just PC Format, but that particular publication seemed to style itself as more a lifestyle magazine than just Tech or just Games. Games magazines also had a fair amount of “Dungeons & Dragons” images of women wearing clothes you would freeze to death in and be totally unsuitable for a bit of sword fighting. Why all the women?
When I read the article about this sexism I remembered a letter that had been published in, probably, PC Format. That and the response utterly summed it up. The letter asked why the magazine kept using sexy images of women on the front of a computer magazine. It wasn’t very Women’s Lib (back in the 80’s in the UK, “Women’s Liberation” was the general term for promoting women as equal and not an appendage of men or that they had their place). The answer by the magazine was basically “If we put a sexy picture of a woman on the front it sells more. The more copies we sell the more money we make. We are simply giving you what you want; it’s not our problem, it’s actually yours”.
At the time I liked that letter as it said “you the public are in the wrong” and I rather liked stuff that put two fingers up at the majority and I mentally supported the magazine’s position. Looking back now, what strikes me is the abject shirking of responsibility and blatant putting profit before morality. Which I think is the biggest blight on society. Now I’m angry that the magazine just shrugged it’s shoulders and kept on.
When you added the magazines to the depictions of women in science fiction films & TV, and then once you were in the industry the use of booth babes and that nearly all women in sales & PR looked more like models than average (which still is true today) then the whole message was “women – you can be OK in IT if you are able to look like and act like this”. It’s not very inclusive.
The odd thing is, If you look further back at the old Sinclair User or Commodore User magazines, they had nothing like the same level of sexualised imagery of women on the front – they mostly had screen shots of the games in them or art work based on the games. The sexism grew through the end of the 80’s and into the 90’s I think.
So what is my point? We see less of this stuff these days, isn’t it more historical? Well, I think we need to keep an eye on history as it informs. I think it also explains (partly) the lack of mature women in I.T and that it’s almost impossible to change now. But also, it’s not so much “don’t repeat the mistakes of the past” but “what mistakes are we currently making that in 20 years will be as obvious as that old mistake”. It’s not avoiding the same mistakes but similar ones.
I’ve been talking to Abigail Giles-Haigh recently about her presenting at our (UKOUG’s) #WIT event at Techfest 2019. Abi is an expert on Artificial Intelligence and we were chatting about the dangers of training systems on historic data, as they can perpetuate historical bias. Also, any system we train now can bake in current bias. It might not even be conscious bias, it can be a bias due to an absence of training data. Some face recognition systems struggle to recognise people with dark skin tones for example. It’s not beyond reason that if we were training AI systems back in the 90’s as to what makes a computer magazine popular, it might have picked up on not just the sexualised lady images but also other aspects of an overtly male-oriented magazine, such as the type of adverts or the language used. Adjustments in light of the data would be made, sales would have gone up even further, and locked in the white-male bias. Only now it would be AI driving it and would we question the underlying, unconscious biases? I do think it’s a danger.
I think it’s going to continue to be a real struggle to encourage more non-white-male-old people into the industry, especially if we try and change the mature workforce. I’m not going to stop trying but I honestly don’t think we can make much difference to the here-and-now.
But we can work more to remove bias for the in-coming generation. And for that we need role models. From the current generation.
Friday Philosophy – Not My Cup Of Tea March 16, 2018
Posted by mwidlake in ethics, Friday Philosophy, Perceptions.Tags: behaviour, ethics, perception
3 comments
A few days ago I tweeted a copy of a “motivational poster”. I don’t normally like motivational posters but this one struck a chord with me as it was a lesson I took a long time to learn. Not everyone will be your cup of tea. Which is a very British (I think) way of saying you don’t like something or someone. “Ohh, that Mavis, she’s just not my cup of tea!”.
As I’ve got older, my thoughts on how we do or don’t get on have changed, as I describe below. I’ll say what I think now and where I came from. I think over time I’ve moved from a position of thinking we should all like each other and to not do so is a failing, to more that we won’t all like each other but it’s far more important how we deal with that.
Not everyone in this world is going to like you. No matter what you do, how reasonable you are, the number of olive branches you offer, some people are just never going to like you. That bit I learnt early at school when Nigel was leading the bullies. Each one of the bullies I could manage on their own, negotiate some peace, but not Nigel. Nigel was determined to always keep up the antagonism, no matter what I did. Over time I realised it’s just a reality: some people will not like you and sometime there is no discernible reason. And sometimes it can be a very passive dislike – no anger, no hate, just a total absence of like rather than actual dislike I guess. This was not the case with Nigel. The underlying reason he led the bullies was because if they were bullying me – they were not bullying him.
You are not going to like everyone. This is not a case of you needing to be a better person or some sort of saint, I don’t think I’ve met anyone yet who likes everyone. Some people respect everyone, have time for everyone, will try to think the best of everyone. But not like. I did not like Nigel, for good reason, but there are other people who I do not like who have never done anything bad to me. Again, it is not that I dislike them, I’m just indifferent or mildly irritated by them. For many years through my 20’s and 30’s I thought I should try and alter that – but I failed. I just don’t like some people.
It’s OK and Normal that some people you will just not get on with. I struggled with that for years. Surely, so long as someone is not psychotic or just simply a bad person, bridges can be built? When I started thinking more about teams, managing people, getting people to work together, I did learn more about how to identify the reasons for bad feeling and resolve them. I had more success at it than I thought I would. I also found that acknowledging that half the time it was my fault not theirs helped. But with some people, no it was not happening, we did not like each other. But things could usually be improved – if not bridge-building, then at least waving politely at each other from our respective sides of the river.
That led me to what I felt was the final part of being someone’s cup of tea. I like tea with sugar and milk, some people think that is disgusting and, anyway, it should be green tea. They are wrong. But it does not matter. If they want a cup of tea, green tea, I’ll make them a cup of green tea. This is a trivial example of a larger lesson:
Not getting on with someone is not a problem – so long as you don’t MAKE it a problem. If you don’t like someone or simply do not agree with someone, there is no need for you to make them “The Enemy”. If you do, well you just made an enemy and that person is likely to be obstructive to you, retaliate and generally make life less nice. And that will spill over to others around you. Oh, I’m not a saint, I try to apply this rule to myself but I don’t always pull it off.
I’m not wise enough to know all the reasons we do not all get on but I think sometimes the reasons are just not important. I might remind you of someone you really detest, I might find the way you keep singing bits of “The Smiths” an affront to good musical taste. And even if there are reasons that seem good, the less antagonistic you can keep it, the better. And I repeat, sometimes it is not active dislike, it is just an absence of like.
The context is also a factor in this. In a social situation, if you do not get on with someone it’s easiest just to avoid them. And we all do this. But you don’t need to try and make everyone else dislike them. In a work or family situation it can be harder as you have to deal with people you don’t like. I think that acknowledging that you just don’t get on and it happens, no blame either side, makes it easier to be equitable about it.
It seems to me that the people I do not get on with have a different life philosophy to me and the larger the difference, the larger the chance of dislike. I don’t like Right Wing conservatives. I don’t like selfish people. To them I am probably sanctimonious, deluded and borderline communist – which is not fair, I AM communist. In that I think our community is the most important thing about being human. But I also use humour a lot and that really annoys some people as I use it in inappropriate settings or they do not think I am taking issues seriously enough or professionally enough. And they may be right.
So, all very good and very grown-up of me so far. Now for my final point.
Some people are just not nice. We’ve all met them, the person who no one can get on with as they are so self-opinionated, bullying, harsh, self-serving. And any attempt to build bridges with them is either seen as weakness or used as a way to get you on-side before they hang you out to dry.
Is this just an extreme case of not being your cup of tea? Well, maybe, but I don’t think that.
Some people are just not worth the trouble. And some people are trouble.
It comes back to Condoning Bad Behaviour. I actually decided that some people are not nice (and probably never will be) long before I came to the conclusion about it being OK to not get on and trying to not make it a problem. At that point I wondered if that would be the whole solution, just accept that you do not get on and let it lie.
But I kept hitting up against the occasional person who, no matter how much you tried to not make it a problem, they did make it a problem. And they continued to bully, oppress, be antagonistic – and they got away with it. With these people I still try and walk away. And if I cannot? I don’t condone bad behaviour. I’ll tell them what I think and, if I can, I’ll stand against them. It is not easy though as they are like Nigel. They surround themselves with similar people or stooges they can direct. Now that is a totally different issue.
I think it’s right to try and be friends with everyone.
But you won’t be friends with everyone so strive for peace with the others.
And if peace is difficult, distance should work.
But I will not condone bad behaviour, OK?
Some people need to see me using this cup
Friday Philosophy – Criticism is Critical for Believable Endorsement March 2, 2018
Posted by mwidlake in ethics, Friday Philosophy, Perceptions.Tags: behaviour, ethics, perception
7 comments
If you had a friend who always told you that your were the best, that you had no faults, and that everything you did was great – would you trust them? I know I would not. I am fully aware that I am not perfect(*). I used to see this sometimes in relationships too, especially when I was younger. One of them would be so desperate for their boyfriend/girlfriend to like them that they would never criticise the light of their life. The relationship never lasted as it was, well, creepy and false.
Perfect In Absolutely Every Way
For your opinion of someone to be seen as honest, there has to be space for criticism. I love my wife very much, but she’s crap at loading the dishwasher. Joking aside, I believe my wife when she says she likes some aspect of my character as she will tell me about the ones she does not like. Thankfully, not at length.
In exactly the same way, for your opinion on a technology or application to be accepted as honest & worthwhile, there has to be space for criticism. I’m not saying that there has to be some criticism within any given endorsement of a product, I’m saying you need to be confident that the person would mention any faults or drawback they are aware of for you to believe that endorsement. I’m really hoping you are all agreeing with me on this!
So why do Marketing departments so often not get this? What is so fundamentally broken – OK, let’s be nice and say different – about their view of the world that any criticism is not acceptable? I just don’t understand either their belief that their product is perfect or that people will be fooled by an uncritical opinion of that product.
I can see how this would work in social media reviews like TripAdviser though. I recently did reviews of several places I had visited and a couple of companies then contacted me to ask me to remove the bits where I had said anything negative. They fundamentally wanted me to lie for them, or at least implicitly (and complicitly) give a better review by omission. I don’t take it well when I am asked to lie. In this case of social media I can see how “cleaning up” the reviews might help as most people look at the sum of all reviews and not at the reviewers.
But when you are actually a known person giving a review or endorsement, your reputation is critical to how the review is perceived.
What triggered this post was I recently discovered a friend of mine had been asked by a marketing person to remove some negative things they had said. They refused and made the point I have just made – if they were to be seen as believable when they said something else that the company produced was great, they had to be seen to be honest in criticising anything that was less-than-perfect. And let’s all be grown up about this, I’d say no software or application is perfect! However, the marketing person found this concept alien to them.
I wonder if people who work in marketing departments have difficulty maintaining long-term relationships? Based on my experience, quite a few of them are willing to ask you to lie for them and they don’t understand honesty is core to trust. Or am I just being very, very naive?
For me to trust the opinion of someone commenting on software & applications, in fact on anything really, I want to see some proof of their integrity by them being critical as well as complementary. If it is all positive, I will assume that their opinion is bought in some way or they are not particularly discerning. So Marketing People asking for negative comments to be removed? You are doing your employer a disservice. Please keep that in mind.
(*)I’m not perfect – but sometimes I’m so close it hurts. My wife got me a T-shirt with this on, so it must be true… Or she was being sarcastic?
Friday Philosophy – Robots Rising & Tech Taking Over? July 7, 2017
Posted by mwidlake in ethics, Friday Philosophy, future, Perceptions.Tags: behaviour, ethics, perception, rant
7 comments
Today I saw some cracking photographs of a lighthouse. How many of us have at some point wondered if it might be nice to be a lighthouse keeper? The solitude, the scenery, the stoic fortitude in the face of the storm – quite literally. (Thank you Brendan Tierney for the photo I’ve stolen from him).
No one lives here anymore
It’s an odd job lighthouse keeper, it holds a special place in Western culture and literature. A job to be held by those a little apart from society and yet with a dedication to the betterment of mankind. I suspect a lot of people in I.T. (and the wider community) find a resonance in that, as so many of us are a little bit apart and yet intelligent & care.
Well, you can’t be a lighthouse keeper anymore. At least, in the UK you can’t. Check out This web site about UK lighthouses and lighthouse keeping. That job, that vocation, was handed over to automated I.T. systems a few years ago, effectively handed to robots & technology. You might think you know where I am going with this, and initially you will be right, but bear with me.
I’ve been thinking a lot over the last 2 or 3 years about the increasing use of technology and robotics to do tasks that we humans have been doing. An obvious one is autonomous driving vehicles, where The I.T. smarts and sensors are leaping along incredibly fast. I am in a long-running “argument” with a friend about when fully autonomous vehicles will be a reality on public roads. He says under 5 years, I think it is more (I started saying more than 5 years to him in 2016, so, giving some leeway, I say not before December 2021 will we see fully autonomous vehicles driving from a town centre to another town centre, sharing lanes with human drivers – specific enough Neil?). But self-driving vehicles will be safer than humans “soon”, and cheaper than employing humans, so companies will swap to it. That will end a lot of employment.
I know others have pointed this out and it is not as if history isn’t almost a continuous tale of technology assisting or replacing human effort. Tolpuddle martyrs, dark satanic mills and all that. Industrialisation of farming has put a lot of farm labours out of work but we could not feed the current mass of humanity without it. People move on to new tasks.
But the difference now is not that we are handing jobs to a slightly better automated system where we still need some human control, we are removing the human element. And we are doing this in a lot of areas in a very short space of time. Factories are becoming far more automated, we order our goods online and huge conveyor robotic systems are being built to do the packing, with fewer people involved and lower long-term costs.
But it’s not just physical tasks that are being automated. Genetic algorithms, neural nets, deep data and machine learning is starting to replace tasks that have needed human interaction. Chatbots are getting smarter, to the point where they are used by companies as first-line support {often laughably poorly at present, but it is getting better – and Oracle do have an interest as was covered in Oracle Scene recently {sorry, that link might not work for long}. Expert systems have been developed that can judge simple court cases such as parking fines and beat humans at spotting pre-cancerous cells in tissue samples.
Oracle and the Bots
We now see expert computer systems breaking a lot of barriers and doing things that until now have been deemed uniquely human cerebral tasks. Computers won at playing chess 10+ years ago, they triumphed in “Go” last year and now they can win at versions of Poker where you are not sure of the data and have to read the play of your opponent – in effect second guess a human. Currently all these systems are very expensive, highly focused and specific to a task, built on huge data sets and using fine-tuned sets of algorithms, to do one task. We have nothing as generally capable as a 5 year old child or even a dog.
Only, we keep building systems that are better and better at specific tasks.
So why do I say this bothers me but not in the way you would expect? It’s because I keep seeing “thought leaders” present the same denial of these impacts on us in I.T. of the systems we as an industry are developing, platitudes that we are a special case and will be OK. Several times over the last couple of years I see some utter pillock in a suit from upper management telling a crowd of I.T. experts that we will be just fine as we are smart and we can stop doing the easy tasks and concentrate on the harder ones, use our brains more.
This is balls for two reasons. Firstly:
What about everyone who is below smart?
Most of us in I.T. are not only above average intelligence (probably IQs of 125 and upwards), we are surrounded by similar smart people. Our life partners are generally above normal intelligence, we work in teams who are above-average smart, we probably mostly socialise with generally intelligent people (as a raft of psychological studies show, we gravitate to those at a similar IQ to ourselves, irrespective of where we are on the scale). Even the end users we abuse tend to be above average intelligence. I suspect that most of us somehow don’t “get” that well over 60% of people are not only less intelligent than we are but they have few options if our society passes the jobs they can do to computers and robots. And they are not that likely to be philosophical about having no point to their lives and being poorer. They’re probably going to be very angry, very poor and pretty pissed off with smart-arses who say that “we are OK” – and there are a lot, lot more of them than us.
And that leads to the second reason it is balls.
The smart work will also be doable by Tech
As I’ve said already, we can already create technological systems that can beat us at specific cerebral tasks and there is going to be a small and smaller pool of work for highly-intelligent workers. Let’s face it, a lot of what we do now in I.T. is drudge and boring, there is not really that much smart work needed doing, even in this industry stacked by us smart people. And doing work that really needs you to be smart is tiring (well, I find it tiring!). And our work in I.T. tends to be logic-based and what are computers good at? We will just have a breathing space before our work is also more cheaply done by computers.
I’m annoyed as I think those of use who are involved in this revolution are being told a deluded lie that we will be OK if it pans out like I have just said. Those extra 25+ IQ points are not going to keep us special for very long.
So if computers can drive the taxis & lorries, manage the steel works and build the cars, derive the best drug treatment and give the perfect injection (yep, theoretically a robot already wins on that) what do we as humans do?
Only a few people can be “utterly human” – artists, poets and philosophers. And we do not need 7 billion of them anyway.
We could try and legislate against it, tax robots hard. But those who make a lot of money already run the “free market economy” and will continue to do so. If Robots and computer programs do tasks more cheaply, companies that uses robots will rise to the top of any monetary-based society, i.e. a capitalist society. What will change what has been in place for 100+ years? I can’t see the currently rich and powerful objecting to working methods that increase their wealth. Even if it means more and more poorer people.
Some argue for a basic living wage to keep us all alive – fed, warm and basic healthcare whilst machines do the work. That would give us that often cited nirvana of being free to do “what we want”. But if you have no job, what do you do? Again, for those of us with high IQ we can maybe come up with things to do. Maybe. I seem to be relatively happy being semi-retired, but I’ve done a lot of stuff and had my time of striving to achieve. And still do. But how about those who are IQ 100 and below? I suspect entertaining yourself is not as easy. I think anger, resentment and the feeling of being disenfranchised is just going to continue increasing. I think it’s why the UK is leaving Europe and why the US has an egotistical man-child as president. More and more normal people are unhappy with their lot and see no good future – so they vote for a change. ANY change. Even if it is crazy change.
I know, not a very happy Friday Philosophy. Will someone please tell me it will all be OK? And I mean OK for everyone, not just us “smart” people.
Friday Philosophy – 3rd Normal Form, 3rd Normal People November 25, 2016
Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, humour, Perceptions.Tags: behaviour, ethics, Humour, perception
4 comments
I was at a wedding a few months ago and one of the guests was wearing a pair of bear ears (I think – they might have been raccoon ears, they were not exactly anatomically correct). What made it a little unusual was that the guest was an adult and something like 2 meters tall (6’4″ in real units). So they were rather noticeable. But that was it. No tail, no strange mannerisms, just being there and chatting to people, wearing ears.
This is not the person, these are not the ears – but you get the idea
Later on in the day, at the afternoon reception, someone came up to me and said “what do you make of the person in the ears?”. Their whole tone said the rest of what they were indicating, which was they thought this was very odd and laughable. I looked at them for a few seconds and said “well, they took the ears off during the wedding service – but I guess you kept all that metal in your face?”.
The person making the comment had their hair dyed several primary colours and, as I indicated, had several studs in their face, a nose ring, a lip ring and a couple of other pieces of shiny stainless steel in strategic places. They were very much taken aback by my reply and went away.
For the first few minutes after the encounter I was really annoyed that someone who had so obviously decided to make a “statement” with how they appeared could be looking to share a laugh about another person who was doing similar – but in a different way. And in a less permanent way than the detractor had. I always get annoyed by people who seem to me to want to have their “thing” but be derisory about those who do their different “thing”.
Is this any less “odd” than the ears?
(NB stock photo again)
But thinking about it, there could be other factors at play. This be-metalled person may well be surrounded by people in their social circles where body piercing & extreme hairstyles are the norm. What we see as normal is very much influenced by what our peers think of as normal, even if the wider society we are in does not think of our clan’s actions as normal. You see this with each generation of youth (I’m thinking about 10 years) who have cohorts wearing daft things or take on mannerisms most of us regards as bizarre. Like trouser around your bum hole being held up by one hand whilst shuffling forward swaying from side to side. But in their world it is cool & normal and either not strange or being “strangely cool” to follow that trend. {With that particular fashion I could only see it being very inconvenient, limiting in movement and likely to lead to high washing machine use and constant danger of falling on your face, but ho-hum}. It also struck me that the detractor might have been looking for an opening to just talk about it as they were themselves a closet furry – though their demeanour was one of utter derision.
When I was in college there were various groups: The Goths; the small number of punks; the heavy metal crew (or crews, some groups seemed to really dislike other groups); the desperately dull & miserable “Smiths” fans; emos were just starting; and by far the largest group, the “I’m different” group. All of them striving to be individuals and yet all so very much the same. They were the ones with the face metal, wild hair, grungy clothes and extremely dismissive attitude. I often thought I was a member of the smallest, most exclusive club, the “normals”. No fashion sense {or care}, no desire for a tattoo, boring hair. Oh, I’m sorry, I was a nerd even then 🙂
The thing is, everyone is not-normal in some way. Not always as obviously as in the cases I have talked about above, where it is defined by attire, adornment or alteration. But if you spend time talking to and getting to know someone there is always something not-normal there. Almost none of us are 3rd normal form.
It took me a long, long time to realise this and be less scathing of people who do permanent physical things to themselves on a whim (I just do not understand why you would have tattoos or major body piercing where it is “for life” unless you do something almost as extreme to put things back). My saying “on a whim” is itself scathing and shows a lack of appreciation why people do such things. OK, it is not for me but that’s simply my opinion, it’s wrong of me to make a judgement call on people who make a different decision on these things. After all my utter lack of fashion sense or willingness to improve/change my looks will strike some people as very odd.
So, if someone looks different, they look different. And if it is a different you have never seen before (ie actually, honestly, really different) they could be a very interesting person to talk to. Or they could be not, you don’t know. But if you have changed any aspect of your own appearance, be it a tattoo, a chunk of iron-carbon-chromium through soft tissue, a pair of raccoon ears or just dying your hair, then they are fundamentally the same as you. And if they look normal. Well, there really are very few real “normal” people. Their not-normal is yet to be discovered. Now you have to chat to them to find it.
How much are a pair of raccoon ears? I might get a pair and a tail for the next UKOUG conference.
Gary Larson, making the complete, exact opposite to my point 🙂
Nice Social Media Profile Picture! Oh… Err… September 30, 2016
Posted by mwidlake in ethics, Friday Philosophy, humour, Perceptions.Tags: behaviour, ethics, Humour, perception
5 comments
A few (months/weeks/days/hours)* ago I saw a friend request on Facebook. I looked at their profile which indicated that they were kind-of in my technical arena and the profile picture made me think “Wow – that’s an attractive person!” and I was about to click on the accept button.
And stopped.
I only friend people on Facebook who I know. By that I mean I have either met in real life and liked or have had a LOT of contact with through social media and liked. People who, if they were delayed at Stansted airport at midnight and needed a place to sleep, I’d be happy to go pick them up and bring them home to stay in my spare room.
This person did not pass this criterion. I was going to add them to one of my social media cohorts based on a superficial, image-based reaction, based on a pretty weak “they mention Oracle and DBA in the profile” and a much stronger “that’s a nice looking lady”. Whether this is Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever – it struck me that if I am adding people based on looks then that is the wrong reason and is “appearanceist”. When I link to someone on LinkedIn it is supposed to be all about “are they in my area of I.T.” not how hot they are. But I do notice that attractive people, especially ladies, seem to get a lot more followers. That made me think about the whole tricky subject of whether we are allowed anymore to comment on someone’s looks, what is sexism, how some people get ahead by being attractive or even get held back by it.
I could now write a long, meandering, and probably pretty much worthless analysis of sexism in IT and how social interaction should be different to professional interaction. But I will keep my point brief. I’ll just state three thoughts and three brief paragraphs:
1) How often do we socially link to someone based on their physical image?
2) Is this wrong?
3) How often do we attempt to improve the physical appearance of our own online profile picture?
I am guilty of 3. I have Rosacea – a long-term reddening of the facial skin a bit like teenage acne. I don’t really like it so I use an older image of myself for my profile picture. I know that many people use a photo of themselves from when they were younger (sometimes a lot younger) or one taken by a professional photographer to show themselves in the best (and let us be frank, atypically flattering) light. i.e. a picture to make us look more handsome/attractive than we really are.
If we all accept that, especially on a professional level, we should all be judged on what we do & who we are as opposed to our physical appearance – why are we so careful of our own online physical appearance?
If we falsely manipulate our own online physical image have we any moral basis for criticising anyone who uses their good looks to gain exposure, acceptance or advantage? No matter how subtle or blatant it is.
So my premise is, if you manage your own image you have to accept others doing so and, to some extent at least, lose the right to object to anyone making judgements based simply on physical appearance. Can I now feel justified in only hiring women who I personally find attractive ? (I don’t find many men attractive, sorry guys).
I’m sure many of you feel that combing your hair, putting on nice cloths and perhaps using a touch of make-up is absolutely nothing like using a salon hair stylist, most of Max Factor’s product line and slightly revealing clothing to get a job. But where on that spectrum is OK, where isn’t and how are you making that judgement call?
A final thought. I did not link to the person who sent me the Facebook request as they were, in my opinion, attractive and I would be doing so for the wrong reasons. Was that morally strong or morally weak? In this case I would like to feel the former as I use Facebook only for established friends. If this was in, say, LinkedIn which I use totally on a professional level, if I did not link to that person as I felt I was doing so partially influenced on their looks… That’s a very interesting take on positive/negative discrimination. Especially if their image turned out to be old…
(*) I get so few Facebook friend requests that if I stated when I saw this one, the person I think is attractive might realise who she is and then I would be very British Reserved uncomfortable around her 🙂
Friday Philosophy – Be Moral or Be Sacked? October 9, 2015
Posted by mwidlake in ethics, Friday Philosophy.Tags: behaviour, ethics, private
8 comments
How far will you bend your moral stance to keep your job?
This post was prompted by a Twitter discussion over the recent VW Emissions scandal development where software engineers are being blamed. Let’s just skip over the rather trite and utterly unbelievable proposition that a couple of rogue software engineers did this “for reasons unknown” – and the fuel engineers, mechanical engineers, and direct managers did not realise “hey, our engines are more efficient than we knew was possible, never mind seen”. Plus the testers, change control, release managers, etc were all circumvented by the rogue software engineers…. It would have to be incompetence of unbelievable levels for the whole stack of management up to the top did not in some way at least know about this – and I personally am sure they condoned or even demanded the results.
What made me think was a comment by a friend that the software engineers must have at least colluded and thus are at least partially responsible – and it struck a chord in me. What constitutes collusion? and would you or I do it? I’ve been in a very similar situation…
Back in my first job I worked for one of the regions of the UK National Health Service, as a programmer. An edict came down from high. Government high. We were to make the waiting list figures look better. “We” being the NHS management initially but, as I guess they were powerless to really do much about the reality of the situation, it come down the levels until it was realised it was the data used to show how the waiting times were doing that could so easily be changed.
I was given the job of altering the Waiting List Reports in a few ways. A key one was how the date you started waiting was measured. No matter how often the hospital cancelled your appointment or sent you home not having done the procedure, the date from which you started waiting remained the same. However, if you were offered an appointment and for any reason you could not attend – ANY reason, be you ill in another way, have a responsibility you could not avoid, were only given a day’s notice – the date you were waiting was reset to the day of the refused appointment. Of course this was utterly unjust and we were told it would not really mean Mrs Smith who had been waiting 3 months would now have to wait another 3 months – “it would be handled”. But it made the figures so much better.
I refused. In the first place it was a con, in the second I doubted all the Mrs Smiths would be handled as the NHS, even back then, was in a right state.
To this day I am proud I refused.
My colleague was given the task instead – and she did it. I asked her how she could do it? We had some shared political and philosophical views. How could she do something she knew was utterly false and misleading? Her answer was simple.
“You’re lucky – you can afford to take the risk. I’ve just got married, we have a mortgage and I have …other responsibilities – I can’t afford to damage my career or get sacked. You can.”
She was right. I did not know it then but she was trying for a baby, so yeah, getting sacked would have been devastating. On the other hand, I had no dependents (no one loved me), no mortgage and I was already muttering about leaving. She had in effect been bullied into doing a task she was morally against. And she knew, if she did not do it someone else would and she would have taken the hit.
And I confess, I did not simply stand up, shout defiance and proudly walk out the room, head held high. I had a long chat with my union rep about what support I could expect if things got bad before I refused. I knew he was ready to support me.
There were repercussions. I already had a poor relationship with my manager. After I refused to do that work I had an even worse relationship with him, and now his boss disliked me quite a lot too. It was a large part of me leaving to join some no-hope database company.
So, I think there is a very large difference in colluding and being coerced.
The same argument goes up the stack too. I can imagine there were lots of people involved in the VW scandal who knew what was going on, did not like it but, “hey, it’s my job I am risking and it’s not as if I’m the one *authorising* this”.
I can’t say I’ve always held to my moral ground so strongly, I’ve done a couple of things professionally I wish now I’d also said no to. But I’ve also said no to a couple more.
{I hope the statute of limitations on mentioning governmental evils is less that 25 years…}
Friday Philosophy – The Passing of Nelson Mandela December 6, 2013
Posted by mwidlake in Friday Philosophy, off-topic, Private Life.Tags: ethics, genetics, private
1 comment so far
As this is a blog on the technical aspects of the Oracle RDBMS and management in IT, it is not really the correct place to pass comment on the passing of a political figure, let alone touch on the politics of race and discrimination.
But I don’t care, it’s my blog and I can do what I want.
I’m partly saddened by the death of Nelson Mandela even though I never met him as I think he was one of those rare things – a politician who was actually a good person who was trying to right wrongs. Thus I think humanity has lost a very good human. But he had been suffering from very poor health for a long time and maybe he would have been happy for it to come to an end. I do not know of course.
I do know that tonight’s next glass of wine will be lifted to him, even though I never met him and know less about him than really I probably should. Personally I think I agree with his politics but only in that fairly nebulous “we should all get on and act as a community” left wing type of stuff.
What I am finding interesting is watching the media output on the death of Nelson Mandela, the rounds of significant people queuing up to praise him and the footage I am seeing of people in South Africa who seem to be more celebrating his life than suffering in mourning. I’m a bit cynical about the world leaders and politicians but rather affirmed by the SA nationals saying “Let us celebrate this person”. That agrees with my philosophy on life.
Any time I check the web to see if I am being mentioned (something I do every few months, mostly just due to narcissism but also to see if anyone has mentioned me and I should say thanks) I will come across Brian Widlake, who is a journalist who got to be about the last person to interview Nelson Mandela {and one of if not the first to do so for television} before his incarceration and when Mandela made a comment that maybe peaceful methods of protest were not going to be enough. So I am constantly reminded of Nelson Mandela.
I’m actually named after a similar person, Martin Luther King. It must have been my Father’s doing as my mother, as she creeps up on senility, is showing a level of casual racism that bugs the hell out of me.
Anyway, I started by saying this is not the place to pass comment on politics and I am not really going to as I have no position of authority or knowledge to do so. But I do have a fair knowledge of genetics and biology, what with it being the subject I was trained in at University.
Racism is rather knocked into a cocked hat (from a biological perspective) when you understand genetics. We are all one species with really very, very minor differences between us all and, if you go back just a few thousand grandparents, well we all had the same “grand” mother – and at a similar point maybe one grandfather too but that is harder to track. However, as humans are all so very, very similar genetically/biologically, how come some people are so fundamentally good and some people are fundamentally not and most of us bob around in the middle somewhere? It’s a complex question and though I think I understand some of the factors, I *really* am not going there. I’ll just have another glass of wine and ponder them.
Maybe in my “retirement” I will stop being a moderately successful geek and become a really very poor philosopher.
Friday Philosophy – I Am An Exadata Expert August 10, 2012
Posted by mwidlake in Exadata, Friday Philosophy, Perceptions.Tags: ethics, exadata, knowledge, perception
5 comments
(Can I feel the angry fuming and dagger looks coming from certain quarters now?)
I am an Exadata Expert.
I must be! – I have logged onto an Exadata quarter rack and selected sysdate from Dual.
The pity is that, from some of the email threads and conversations I have had with people over the last 12 months, this is more real-world experience than some people I have heard of who are offering consultancy services. It’s also more experience than some people I have actually met, who have extolled their knowledge of Exadata – which is based solely on the presentations by Oracle sales people looking at the data sheets from 10,000 feet up and claiming it will solve world hunger.
Heck, hang the modesty – I am actually an Exadata Guru!
This must be true as I have presented on Exadata and it was a damned fine, technical presentation based on real-world experience and I have even debated, in public, the pros and cons of point releases of exadata. Touching base with reality once more, I did an intro talk “the first 5 things you need to know about Exadata” and the “debate” was asking Julian Dyke if he had considered the impact of serial direct IO on a performane issue he had seen and he had not only done so but looked into the issue far more than I – so he was able to correct me.
But joking aside – I really am a true consulting demi-god when it comes to Exadata
I have years of experience across a wide range of Exadata platforms. That would be 0.5 years and I’ve worked intensively on just one system and am in a team now with some people who are proper experts. So a range of two. Yes, tongue is still firmly in cheek.
This situation always happens with the latest-greatest from Oracle (and obviously all other popular computing technologies). People feel the need to claim knowledge they do not have. Sometimes it is to try and get consultancy sales or employment, sometimes it is because they don’t want to be seen to be behind the times and sometimes it is because they are just deluded. The deluded have seen some presentations, a few blog posts and maybe even got the book and read the first few chapters and are honeslty convinced in their own minds that they now know enough to make effective use of the technology, teach {or, more usually, preach} others and so proclaim on it. {See Dunning Kruger effect, the certainty of idiots}. I’m certainly not arguing against going to presentations, reading blogs and books and learning, just don’t make the mistake of thinking theoretical, second-hand knowledge equates to expert.
With Exadata this situation is made worse as the kit is expensive and much of what makes it unusual cannot be replicated on a laptop, so you cannot as an individual set up a test system and play with it. Real world experince is required. This is growing but is still limited. So the bullshit to real skills quotient remains very, very high.
If you are looking for help or expertise with Exadata, how do you spot the people with real knowledge from the vocal but uninformed? Who do you turn to? {NB don’t call me – I’m busy for 6 months and I really am not an expert – as yet}. If your knowledge to date is based on sales presentations and tidbits from the net which may or may not be based on a depth of experience, it is going to be hard to spot. When I was still without real world experience I had an unfair advantage in that I saw email threads between my fellow OakTable members and of course some of those guys and gals really are experts. But I think I was still hoodwinked by the odd individual on the web or presenting and, I can tell you, though this background knowledge really helped – when I DID work on my first exadata system, I soon realised I did not understand a lot about the subtulties and not-so-subtulties of using a system where massively improved IO was available under key conditions. I had to put a lot of time and effort and testing to move from informed idoit to informed, partially experienced semi-idiot.
I know this issue of the non-expert proclaiming their skills really frustrates some people who do know their stuff for real and it is of course very annoying if you take someone’s advice (or even hire them) only to find their advice to be poor. Let’s face it, is is simple lying at best and potentially criminal mis-selling.
I guess the only way is for peopel needing help to seek the help of someone who has already proven themselves to be honest about their skills or can demonstrate a real-world level experience and success. I would suggest the real experts should do that most difficult task of pointing out the mistakes of the false prophets, but it is very tricky to do without looking like a smartarse or coming over as a big head or jealous.
I’ll finish on one thing. Last year I said how I thought maybe I should do more blog posts about things I did not know much about, and be honest about it and explore the process of learning. I did actualy draft out about 3 posts on such a topic but never pushed them out as I was way too busy to complete them… That and, being candid, I really did not want to look like an idiot. After all, this Oracle lark is what puts beer in my hand, hat fabric on my wife’s millinary worktop and food in my cat’s bowl. The topic was….? Correct, Exadata. Maybe I should dust them off and put them out for you all to laugh at.
Martin Widlake's Yet Another Oracle Blog 