Head of NHS IT acknowledges severe shortages of skilled staff

Computer Weekly announces the not particularly surprising news that attempting to resource a multi-billion IT programme when the industry has lost tens of thousands of people through redundancy tends to lead to a shortage of skills. Good news for those of us who are left as it will push salaries up. We are seeing contractor rates rising quite rapidly, and some of the not particularly inspiring candidates I interview are asking for silly money.

Soon it will be spring... 

Computers no advantage for education

As reported in the Grauniad, recently published research seems to show that computers are a hindrance to education, rather than the unmitigated benefit that many have claimed. I'm pretty good with computers, and I've tried really hard to get my children to learn to do something useful with them, albeit without a lot of success. As far as I can tell, the schools make very little effort to teach useful computer skills (I'll admit my eldest is only 13, so perhaps they will get around to it later), and no attempt to even explain the basics of how a computer or its software work. There appears to be a belief that just by having computers around, children will learn by some weird cyber-osmosis process. This research seems to kill off that belief, so perhaps now we can start asking some searching questions about how to get some value for the huge sums of money spent on computers in education.
Edit:Having just listened to a government minister saying that if we wanted to raise the quality of school meals the money would have to come from elsewhere in the education budget, I think it is pretty clear what should be done. Stop spending billions on shiny computers, and increase the 37p spent on ingredients for a school meal to some more sensible figure. Better diets have actually been shown to improve learning, as well as health, and would represent a much better educational investment.

Blogging doesn't make you a better person

The fundamental flaw.

Video games cause violence? I don't think so

Nor does Charles Cooper, who in an article for CNET News asks "If video games kill, what about the Bible?". The so called religious right, who one could easily argue are neither, tend to lead the outcry against violent video games, but their own book contains quite enough violence. Even worse, it suggests that violence is OK if it is what God wants. Since there is absolutely no objective measure of God's desires, this pretty much gives them carte blanche to commit any violent atrocities they fancy. History clearly shows that they have taken full advantage of the opportunity.

Food-related karma improvement activites

Two things you can do to increase the sum total of human happiness: Firstly, please visit http://www.thehungersite.com and click on the button. While you are there, think about supporting the advertisers, since that is what pays for the food. Once you've thought about it, give the money to charity directly, it's much more efficient.
Secondly, if you live in England, sign the petition at http://www.feedmebetter.com. Feedmebetter is a campaign to improve the quality of school meals in the UK - if you've seen Jamie Oliver's School Dinners TV programme you'll know what it is all about. For various low political reasons, we've been feeding our children on some pretty unpleasant stuff (Scrotum burgers, in Jamie's words), and it is time to do something about it.
Your karma will thank you for it.

Be careful out there

There's some pretty reasonable advice at eWeek in Ten Not-So-Simple Rules for Using the Internet. I am increasingly concerned that the bad guys are winning and that the obvious potential for good that the internet has is being nullified by their activities. I've seen several wikis and even blogs where editing has been turned off because of abusive, obscene or spamming posts. I've seen blog comments being abused to manipulate search engine results. I've had to clean up PCs for several less IT-savvy victims when the burden of malware became so great that the PC barely functioned. The very openness and accessibility that makes the web so great is also its Achilles Heel, and as is usually the case the power of a bad guy to negatively affect others is greater than the inverse case.

Education - saying the unsayable

Prince Charles got hammered when he suggested that our education systems were not delivering for the children or for society. In Peter Cochrane's Uncommon Sense: Can education be saved? on silicon.com a prominent futurologist makes a similar point. I'll restrict my comment on the issue to the observation that in my current attempts to recruit high tech workers, less than 25% of the CVs I see are from British nationals.

Strange...

How weird is that? Blogger's spellchecker doesn't recognise 'Blog'.

Keep Him In Your Heart

Nearly a week snce my last post. It isn't that I don't have anything to say, just not much time to say it. When Warren Zevon was told that he only had three months left to say his piece, his reaction was to book a studio and start recording his 14th album. VH1, the music channel, recorded the process for their (Inside)Out series and later released it on DVD. I saw the show when it was on TV before Christmas, but I only just got around to watching the DVD. I'd forgotten what a tearjerker (Inside) Out: Warren Zevon (Amazon UK list this as Warren Zevon - Keep Me In Your Heart, but they are wrong) was. It is quite casually shot, with excerpts from a wide range of Warren's music, and chronicles his dying and the making of The Wind". It is well worth seeing, even if you are in the majority and you've either never heard of Warren at all, or you've only ever heard 'Werewolves of London'. The DVD has a number of extras, as is the fashion, and some of them are worth a listen. I particularly like the footage of Bruce Springsteen recording his stuff for 'Disorder in the House'.
Stop Press: Jordan Zevon, Warren's son, has just released some footage not used in the film of Warren with Hunter S. Thompson. Read about it on the Warren Zevon Bulletin Board.

History Lessons

On the Developer Central Blog, Mike Gunderson asks "Where the heck is our institutional memory?", questioning why the software development business finds it so difficult to learn the lessons of history. As philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I've spent a large part of my working life trying to get these lessons accepted and institutionalised within the working practices of my employers. Sometimes I'm successful, but then I get assigned to a long project out of the office (or even go off and work for someone else for a while), and when I come back things have reverted. It really seems as if these are lessons that companies simply don't want to learn, and without someone constantly agitating and evangelising they gradually fade away. Why is this? I really don't know, when study after study shows that the end result can be lower costs, higher quality and a happier and more productivity workforce. Perhaps it is just that most of the best practices require management to take a slightly longer term view, and this is something that corporate culture does not encourage. Perhaps it is because it requires management to think of people as human beings, rather than resources, which is counter to the "management by Excel" methodology now employed by most large enterprises. Whatever the reason, as the body of evidence continues to build, it should become easier to persuade people to take notice. I'll cling to that hope, anyway, despite Aldous Huxley's opinion "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach"

Investment advice - avoid America

Financial Decline and fall of the American Empire is an incredible (as in 'I found it hard to believe what I was reading') analysis of present day America. The author's conclusion is that America's decadence makes it a very risky place to invest. This plays to my prejudices, so I'm tempted to agree, but I am amazed to see an opinion like this on an investment site. I'm glad to see that for the moment at least the freedom of the press still exists in the UK.

Restrict freedom to preserve liberty

Restrict freedom to preserve liberty is an well argued piece at The Register about the current UK government's illiberal instincts, about which I have written before. From the Magna Carta onwards, people have fought for the right not to be arbitrarily detained, tortured or executed by an executive. To suggest that we should give up this right because the current incumbents claim to be nice people who would only detain bad people is just barking.