With those books in mind I suggested that a risk to put on the list would be “the unknown” but apparently you can’t do that.  The point is to identify specific risks and the concept of an unspecified, unexpected, unpredictable ,unlikely event of catastrophic proportions doesn’t fit in there.  It looks like we (in common with many/most companies) only accept theories from business books and not maths books.

Maybe I should have cheated and put down “inability to take account of the unpredictable” as a vulnerability…

So in the case of Virgin Media and our 10 Megabit per second (Mbps) product, we are providing 8.7 out of that, so that’s 87%. That’s nearly 90% of the actual speed we are advertising, so in our case, yes, people are getting as close to that speed as possible.

Where do I start?   You have to appreciate the attempt at sleight of hand with 8.7…  that’s 87%…  which is nearly 90%… which is nearly 100%     I would like to see him visiting the doctor to be told his temperature is 38.8, which is as good as 37 which is NEARLY 40 DEGREES! Call an ambulance!

As for the assertion that 90% is as close to 100% as possible…  has this man never heard of, say, 91%?

What he says is probably true.  You would have to be blindly optimistic to expect the full possible speed on your connection unless you were downloading files from your ISP’s own server, connecting to your modem via ethernet, not sharing your connection at all, and certain there was nothing running in the background, but that doesn’t excuse teh sloppy maths.  These days it feels like 100% is taboo: it is either “90% is as close to 100% as possible” or “I’m giving 110% effort”

What stopped me in my tracks was the realisation that I was born a mere 17 years after World War Two ended.  Why had I never realised that before?  It has always been the case.

It is sort of about maths and economics but also about philosophy and science generally.  I think that somebody recommended it to me in a comment on this site, but I can’t remember who that was.  The recommendation was probably based on my enjoyment of books like Freakonomics, Blink and The Wisdom of Crowds.  While it is similar to books like those and The Long Tail, it is a whole lot more idiosyncratic and uncompromising in some respects.Unfortunately it is not one of those books where you can easily absorb the ideas and incorporate them into your own world view: the author really wants his readers to totally accept his ideas and totally change their world view to revolve around them.  That is not something many people are prepared to do.

The tone of the book is interesting to say the least.  Taleb is not keen on most mathematicians. Or philosophers.  Or statisticians, businessmen, politicians, economists (especially Nobel winners), traders, and experts in general.  Large sections of the book reminded me of two things: one that will be familiar to quite a few people and the second will ring a bell for a much smaller population.

Remember the Christmas special of Father Ted, where Ted was awarded the Golden Cleric award for rescuing a group of priests from Ireland;s largest lingerie department?   His acceptance speech was not the traditional litany of thanks but instead was a multi-hour diatribe against people, subdivided into sections like “liars”, “frauds” and “people who have really fecked me over down the years”.    Well this book reads a bit like that in large parts. And don’t get him started on the Gaussian bell curve!

The other thing it reminds me of is the writings of Hugo Rune, when they are referred to or quoted in Robert Rankin’s books when he takes every opportunity to slag off the ‘greybeards’ and ‘charlatans’ in the scientific establishment.

At times I found that the general tone of score-settling distracted from the ideas, but at other times I found it amusing.   Above all it is thought-provoking as well as just provocative and iconoclastic.  I am going to have to take some time to think about the ideas in there.

For example, Taleb makes a very good case for not bothering to read a newspaper, how all the information you pick up actually impairs rather than improves your decision-making.  I particuarly like that as I find very little time to read the papers now and it helps me to stop feeling bad about that.

The concept of how hard it is to predict the past is especially mind-blowing as it casts doubt on the accuracy of most history books.  I also liked the whole notion of the futility of looking for causes and what he calls the narrative fallacy.

So plenty to enjoy in there, despite my dislike of several aspects – not least the author’s technique of using invented examples to ‘prove’ points.

I have another of  Taleb’s books in the waiting-to-be-read pile, but I think I will give my brain a rest by reading Necrophenia (the new Robert Rankin) and The Time Traveller’s Wife first.  I’m not sure I can take two non-fiction books in a row.

The timing of the programme was spot on, as one of the areas where chaos theory is particularly applicable is economics, and the current world economic situation is a great case study in the futility of trying to predict what markets will do, or to control them in the first place.  One of the talking heads, himself a well-respected figure in finance, said that just about anybody can make predictions about the economy when it is all going smoothly, but nobody can ever predict when it is going to change, which would be a much more valuable ability.

The trouble with chaos theory is that it is not simple and it is not intuitive. The Newtonian model of everything makes sense, is easy to understand and is very comforting: the idea is that, like Hari Seldon in Asimov’s Foundation books, you can accurately predict everything if you can record the current postition of everything accurately enough, and that makes us feel in control.   It is no surprise that a theory which states we are not in control and are unlikely to ever be in control and which cannot be easily understood or explained is not going to get accepted easily.

For our decision makers to base policy on chaos theory they would either have to really get it on a much deeper level than just knowing what ‘the butterfly effect’ means, or they would have to make a great leap of faith and place themselves in the hands of mathematicians.  The trouble with that is that you can always find another mathematician with an alternative theory.  I have to admit that even though I did pretty well in maths at school and have read the standard popular science and popular maths books on chaos I don’t really get it.  I think it is beautiful and mysterious, but I can’t claim to have absorbed it completely.

I still hold out a little hope that chaotic does not mean impossible to predict or calculate; just very, very difficult.  Difficult to the level of being practically impossible, but still theoretically possible.  OK, I know that stochastic systems can be so sensitive to initial conditions that to measure those initial conditions accurately enough you will run into Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle…  but somehow I can make myself turn a blind eye to that.

In a way I wish I had been born a lot earlier.  Life was so much simpler when Foundation was published in the 1950s and the idea of psychohistory could be thought plausible.

Still… good to see programmes about maths getting made, even if they are a bit superficial.  Makes a change from reality TV, talent shows and celebrity dancing.  It almost makes up for missing Tim Marlow’s return to TV tonight: he has defected from Five and is now on the Sky Arts channel, which I don’t get.

Some days only a couple of rabbits are to be seen, but on other days there are too many bunnies to count and I started to wonder how much space is needed to support a single rabbit because it struck me as a very small area to sustain such a large number.

Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I tried doing some rough calculations, and the results were quite surprising – at least to me.

First of all I had to measure the roundabout. I wasn’t going to do anything as dangerous as trying to cross onto it to actually measure it, and was going to try estimating it but then hit on the idea of using the Google Maps aerial photographs to measure it. According to the scale on there, the roundabout is about 150 feet across, which was the first surprise. I’m so glad I didn’t try estimating as I would never have thought it was that large – although I am assuming the scale is correct. Looking at the aerial photos the roundabout by Astral Towers has a diameter roughly 70% that of the Tushmore roundabout if I had previously had to guess I would have said the Tushmore was twice the size at least.

Next I tried to remember the maths for working out the area of the roundabout and came up with 17,671 square feet. (Is that right?) Maths can be so counter-intuitive can’t it? The bit of land enclosed by the road there seems like a tiny scrap really, but its actually 17,671 square feet (unless I cocked up with the calculator) which sounds huge.

Now to divide that area by the rabbit population, and here I really did have to guess. The most rabbits I have managed to count at one time is 18, but the buggers do move about a bit and the roundabout has trees and bushes on it so you can’t see all the open bits at once. I assumed that there had to be more than I could count and rounded it up a little to 20. The population could be even larger than that, but will not be smaller.

That gave me a figure of 884 square feet per rabbit, which is the same as an area almost 30 ft by 30ft. I started off thinking that the rabbits were crowded together in a tiny space, but actually they have the equivalent of a couple of decent-sized one-bedroom flats each.

Now I am convinced I must have gone wrong somewhere… but if I haven’t, please don’t tell any of the rapacious developers around here that you could squeeze 40+ one-bedroom flats onto a roundabout because they would probably go ahead and try it if they thought they could squeeze £6m worth of apartments onto one little roundabout. And then where would the bunnies live?

Now perhaps some clever clogs can tell me where I have gone wrong. Any scientifically-minded brothers-in-law out there who fancy showing me up?

Hint: it is in this paragraph:

So what’s causing such a change in behaviour – with hit and runs doubling in less than a decade? In London in the 1990s, hit and runs were 8% of accidents, now they’re 16% – with 25% in the borough of Hackney.

Combining, as it does, discussion on high-tech gadgets, music and mathematics, I was particularly drawn towards that article which was about how some iPod owners get suspicious of the random shuffle feature on their toys because they seem to keep playing tracks by the same artists all the time.

The trouble with random is that it is, as the name implies, random. The one thing it does not mean is 'even distribution'. Almost by definition, with any truly random distribution you will encounter clusters – most famously with incidences of cancer. Tossing a coin 10 times and getting heads every time is just as random as getting alternate heads and tails.

The rational, scientific part of me knows that perfectly well, so when I find clusters of music by the same artist or the same genre on my iRiver's random play I resist the temptation to  write to the Koreans and complain about their algorithms.  Even so, I was impressed when the iRiver played Manu Chao's song Mr Bobby and then segued straight into Patchanko Hop by Les Fils de Teuhpa – a track from a Mano Negra tribute album. Mano Negra being Manu Chao's old band.

So somehow, the iRiver followed a Manu Chao song from 2001, with an old song of his old band's from the early 90's, covered by another band 5 years ago. Brilliant. In between this, the machine also played 3 tracks from the Pet Shop Boys' Bilingual album during a sequence of not more than 20 songs. Remarkable when you consider that there are between 9,000 and 10,000 tracks to choose from on the machine's disk.

You can almost see how religions get started.  The natural inclination to associate random with evenly distributed means that if a pattern occurs it leads to suspicion of some hidden source of direction; some external influence.  Believing that Apple (or iRiver)  have written some sort of artificial intelligence which can discern your mood or select songs based on a qualitative assessment of the content or knowledge of provenance not contained in the filename or path is not really so different to attributing unusual coincidences or spectacular natural phenomenon to a supernatural cause is it?

Indeed, go onto the iRiver forums and  you will find there are periodic holy wars between those who insist the shuffle is not random and those who say it is, or that two songs by the same artists are not proof that it isn't.

It is worth mentioning something first about how the figures were derived. Something like child poverty is difficult, possibly impossible, to measure. (See The Tyranny of Numbers by David Boyle for a good book on the difficulties of measuring sociological elements) What the JRF have done is made an assumption that child poverty has a positive correlation to the level of children living in families which are in receipt of workless benefits, which seems to be quite logical and sensible.

This means that if a ward is said to have 35% of children in such familes while the national average is 21% it does not necessarily mean that 35% of children are in poverty. It could be a bit higher or a bit lower but the important point is that whatever it is it is almost certainly significantly higher than the national average.

It is quite a useful tactic – to estimate something which can’t be measured by finding something which can be measured and which has a strong chance of being related. It does not even matter whether its a direct relationship or whether both are the effect of a common cause: as long as you can be fairly sure of that relationship you can start to gather valid data.

Sorry. I made a quick detour via nerdsville there. Back to the numbers.

Although Crawley fares quite well compared to Oxford it is still not happy reading. Overall the town has levels of child poverty of 18.3% – below the national average of 21%. But of the 15 wards in Crawley 3 are higher than average with the worst being a full 10 percentage points higher than the national average – and that is the ward where I live, Broadfield South.

The full results are:

31.4% Broadfield South
28.2% Broadfield North
24.9% Bewbush
20.2% Ifield
19.9% Langley Green
18.8% West Green
18.5% Northgate
17.2% Tilgate
16.8% Southgate
14.2% Three Bridges
14.1% Gossops Green
11.5% Furnace Green
9.0% Pound Hill South
8.0% Pound Hill North
5.3% Maidenbower

As I said, this is particularly depressing for us in Broadfield but it is not telling us anything which we didn’t already know. Plenty of surveys and reports have shown the various indices of deprivation in Broadfield to be high. Indeed the results of similar previous surveys are the reason why Crawley has a Surestart centre and why it is located in Broadfield.

Surestart is unlikely to directly reduce child poverty levels in anything other than the long term, but it does offer brilliant support and assistance for those families and (lets not forget) all the other families in the area.

Before we all get carried away with the usual knee-jerk reactions about Broadfield being some sort of sink estate lets get a bit of perspective though. The total figure of 29.7% for the whole of Broadfield means that just over 70% of children are not in families which are dependent on benefits, so don’t write them off!

Conversly, much as I welcome the presence of Surestart and other initiatives here in Broadfield and appreciate that it does make sense to concentrate such efforts where there is most need we should not forget those children suffering from poverty in Maidenbower and Pound Hill.

It is well documented that those wards are amongst the richest in the country, as measured by average income of the residents, but the important thing to remember about averages is that they are, well, averages. It is bad enough to be in a family classified as poverty-stricken but how much worse to know that any potential help is less likely to reach you because you are in a ‘rich’ area?

As there are, according to the JRF data, 1550 children in poverty in Broadfield and Bewbush it does make some sense to concentrate efforts here, but spare a thought for the 325 children in poverty in Maidenbower and Pound Hill. Having wealthy neighbours doesn’t help them at all. There is no trickle-down at work there.

Interesting fact: because of the larger number of children in Maidenbower, there are actually more children in poverty there than in Furnace Green despite the percentage figure only being 5.3% compared to Furnace Green’s 11.5%.

By all means lets continue with efforts in the most seriously affected areas, but do not ignore the rest. Remember that of all the under-15s affected by child poverty in town 73% live outside Broadfield and Bewbush and nearly 10% of them live in Pound Hill and Maidenbower!

As a whole we should really be scandalised that nearly 1 in 5 children in the town are dependent on benefits and not satisfied just because that is better than the national average. The acceptable level should be zero.

In a way this is more rewarding than ploughing through an entire biography, but I’m not sure I want to read an entire book about one minor philosopher or scientist.

The chapter on Jeremy Bentham was especially fascinating. I have to confess that I had not really known anything about him, and the first thing which caught my eye was that he was one of the first utilitarians. For some reason I just assumed that JS Mill started all that off, but it was Bentham who found a phrase in a pamphlet by Joseph Priestly – “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong” – and based his life’s work on trying to acheive that.

Unfortunately Bentham seemed to be obsessed with how to measure happiness so that he could measure whether it was increased, and the theme running through the chapter is that of a person ahead of his time in many respects who really pissed off the establishment to such an extent that his ideas were not acted upon – although abroad he was lauded as a great thinker he was largely dismissed in England except by a few acolytes.

Amongst his supporters was James Mill, whose son John Stuart Mill later developed the theories of utilitarianism more and who is now much better known than Bentham.

Some of the ideas which Bentham had were truly revolutionary, when you consider the way life and society was in the late eighteenth century when he started promoting them, and many of his ideas were later incorporated into socialism.

His big idea was the panopticon – a prison built in a wheel shape so that one warder could see and supervise all the prisoners at once. His vision was to have the whole prison run as a profit-making venture with the prisoners working 14 hours a day as a literally captive labour force. From a modern perspective this might not sound like such a great idea, but the intention was for prisoners to be made honest through hard work and for the whole thing to not be a drain on the public purse. Its debatable whether the idea of hard labour as a tool of rehabilitation is valid, but at that time it was thought plausible and from that starting point Bentham came up with an idea which never got built but which occupied a large chunk of his life petitioning the government. At one point some land was bought for such a prison, but the project fell through and now the Tate Gallery stands on that land instead.

Even if Bentham’s panopticon did not get built, it did influence prison design with some pseudo-panopticons being built in Britain and abroad.

What I love about the time between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries is that someone with ideas would have ideas in several fields. We are used to ‘experts’ sticking to fairly narrow fields now, but back then it was not unusual for a scientist to make discoveries in several fields and to come up with social, political and economic theories and practical engineering solutions too. Bentham was a bit like that.

I dare say most of his ideas were intended to contribute towards the total happiness of his big idea, but they did so from a number of angles. Its a sad story because most of his ideas were not picked up by anyone, although some did resurface many years after his death. You can’t help wondering how different our society would be if some of Bentham’s ideas were put into action at the time.

He tried to interest the Treasury in currency schemes and speaking tubes, he suggested a scheme of a train of carts drawn at speed between London and Edinburgh, and he suggested to the American that they should build a canal through Panama. Another idea was that the authorities should freeze large quantities of vegetables so that fresh peas would be available at Christmas and teamed up with Roget, of thesaurus fame, to invent a ‘frigidarium’ to keep food cold, told the Bank of England how to create an unforgeable banknote.

Along the way he invented the words ‘international’, ‘codify’, and ‘maximise’ and wrote in favour of votes for women, the legalisation of homosexuality, abolition of slavery, and the separation of church and state as well as making suggestions for the reorganisation of government which were ignored at the time but later came about anyway – the creation of ministers responsible for education, the ‘preservation of the national health’, and transport. Maybe he just had too many ideas to be able to do any one of them justice? Certainly some of his more bizarre ideas must have tainted the good ones by association.

One of his more bizzare ideas was to rename the country and call it ‘Brithibernia’. This was just one manifestation of his eccentricity, along with having a cat named The Reverend Dr John Langhorn and a walking stick called Dapple, but he saved his strangest idea for after his death.

Bentham had founded the University College School, and was influential in getting UCL established. When he died he had his body preserved and kept in a cabinet at UCL. This so-called ‘auto-icon’ is still there and is still sometimes taken into meetings of the council, where he is listed as “present but not voting”. Unfortunately the head suffered from the preservation process and had to be replaced with a wax copy. The original was kept between the legs of the stuffed Bentham, until a string of student prank thefts led to it being kept under lock and key. Go to UCL today and you can still see Bentham’s body on public display!

Having a story like that told across 19 or 20 pages is just about right. A whole 300-page book about Bentham could well tend towards the dull in places, but cramming the best bits into one chapter leaves you wanting more without the disappointment of actually getting it.