Brian Clegg's Blog, page 157

I was listening to some Labour shadow minister on the radio. 'The biggest obstacle to people setting up their own businesses is lack of capital,' he said. Utter rhubarb. The biggest obstacle that prevents most people setting up their own business is that they don't really want to start their own business. Certainly not enough to put the time, effort and money in. They want someone to give them a job. And that's fine. But Labour shouldn't imagine there are millions of people who would be entrepreneurs if they only had that startup capital.

Now you may say, 'They do need some money,' and that's true. But it's often not the case that you need huge capital investment to start a business. Need a computer? - the price of 10 cigarettes a day will cover it. Need a website? - easily covered by the cost of a basic Sky subscription. Both expenditure that many people looking for jobs these days would consider part of everyday life.

To be honest, I also get more than a little narked by the way governments of all colours disregard people who just get on with it and earn a living self-employed or running their own company, without necessarily employing other people. You'd think the only good company is one that employs others. Yet there are millions of us beavering away, making money for the country, gaining exports, paying taxes, all without ever employing anyone else, or wanting to. Joining this forgotten army, starting your own business, doesn't have to depend on a huge injection of capital - this is a myth that seems to depend as much on Dragon's Den as it does good economics. There are plenty of ways to take a little ingenuity and very little cash and earn a living.

Let me stress, I'm not saying everyone who is unemployed should start their own business. It's not for everyone, and I accept that. But we would do a lot better making it more attractive in tax terms to work for yourself, even if you don't employ others, that worrying so much about startup capital.

It's Royal Society of Chemistry podcast time again. We're off to visit the compound that hair dye manfacturers delight in telling their customers isn't in a particular product. Because it's not the most beautiful of smells, reminiscent of the farmyard and animal houses at the zoo.

Yes, it's ammonia. Smelly - and yet it's a chemical that is made in vast quantities every year for fertiliser and other uses. Any idea where the name comes from? It's a back formation that links camel dung and the temple of an ancient Egyptian god. Which turns up in Chaucer. Take a listen...

I have been the victim of a really shoddy bit of identity theft. Let me explain. A few days ago in the post I received two statements from a mail order company, one for more than £500 worth of goods, the other for more than £300. I had never bought anything from them in my life.

I rang them up and it seems that someone had managed to slip through their anything but rigorous security checks. I'm really amazed that the company in question didn't have systems that could spot that this was a fradulent activity. They did a credit check on me to see if it was okay, but there were so many oddities in the application that it's bizarre nothing was flagged up. After all:
Two accounts were set up for the same address (mine) on the same dayOne was for a Ms B Clegg, the other a Mr D Clegg, so neither matched me exactly for the credit checkThe date of birth given was wrong - again something the credit check should have picked upTwo orders were place, each using up most of the credit, each going to a different delivery address, not my address. One in Middlesex one in the midlands. Not suspicious, guys?The kind of order was not typical. These were orders for lots and lots of relatively low price items like T-shirts, not for big money goodsIt wouldn't exactly take top flight artificial intelligence software to spot there was something strange. Don't get me wrong, the company was very good about it, assuring me that they would sort it all out - but they seem to be very casual about giving away around £1,000 of credit.

The one good thing that came out of this, apart from having a topic for a blog post, is that at the company's suggestion I did a check on myself with one of the credit checking agencies, something I've been meaning to do for ages, and it was fascinating, though it emphasized even more how much incorrect data the mail order company was ignoring. Also it's interesting that when we hear 'identity theft', we think 'internet' - but in fact this was good old fashioned basic personal information misuse that could have been done without a computer in sight.

The first sighting of a neutrino, only 41 years agoOh, wow. Physics is in the news. Just for once someone at CERN other than the LHC teams has made the headlines. It seems some neutrinos have been measured moving faster than light. I have seen headlines saying 'Einstein's theory shattered!' or similar. This is baloney. Here's the reality.

Neutrinos are particles produced in nuclear reactions that are almost impossible to detect. Every second about 50 trillion neutrinos pass through your body as they pour out of the Sun. They aren't exactly obvious. Neutrinos can be detected, but only indirectly as a very small percentage of them will interact with matter - what you see is that interaction, not the neutrino itself. It's telling that when a picture was taken of the Sun using neutrinos, the Sun was the other side of the the Earth at the time. Most neutrinos zip through the Earth as if it's not there.

In the CERN experiment neutrinos were sent down a 732 kilometre tunnel, and the timing was out by a matter of 0.00000006 seconds, making it seem that they went very, very slightly faster than light. This, then, is the evidence that is being presented and that has produced statements like this from the BBC:

The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.

It's really interesting, but I don't think it's earth shattering. The chances are, this is experimental error. Although the experiment has been repeated around 1500 times, it was using the same setup and assumptions. They've only got to get the length of the beam wrong by a tiny amount, for example, for the whole thing to be a mistake. And there is other evidence, comparing neutrinos and light from a cosmic source where there is no such disparity - so there is already some contradictory evidence.

However, even if it is true, the BBC's version is simply wrong. Modern physics doesn't depend on nothing exceeding light speed. We're talking about special relativity here, which is the basis of some modern physics, but light speed being a limit is a consequence of that theory, not a starting point. In fact we already have well established experiments in which particles travel faster than light speed.

This is a consequence of quantum mechanical tunnelling. One of the strange aspects of quantum physics is that particles don't have an absolute location, just a probability of being in various places. This means that particles can jump through an obstacle without passing through the space in between.

This sounds like something obscure and unusual, but it's actually how the Sun (or any other star) works. For nuclear fusion to take place, positively charged protons have to be pushed incredibly close together. So close that even the temperatures and pressures in the Sun aren't enough to get it going. The Sun only works because every second billions of particles tunnel through the barrier of the repulsion and fuse.

That same tunnelling technique has been used to send particles faster than light. All the evidence is that there is zero tunnelling time. A tunnelling particle literally doesn't travel through the space in between. So if you imagine a particle going 1 centimetre at the speed of light, tunnelling 1 centimetre instantly and going a further centimetre at the speed of light, it will have traversed the entire distance at 1.5c - one and half times the speed of light.

I'm not saying this is what is happening in the neutrino experiment, but I do imagine it is going to be something similar. Not a collapse of special relativity, just a way around it. If it's not experimental error, which still seems most likely. Special relativity has been tested so many times and has always delivered. GPS satellites have to be corrected for it, or they'd get more and more inaccurate. Particles demonstrate it in experiments every day. As far as I'm concerned, special relativity is solid as a rock.

I was, to say the least, shocked to read a piece on the Guardian website where a journalist describes being approached in a Tesco supermarket while writing down the price of  a bottle of water. The assistant manager apparently told him: 'You're not allowed to do that. It's illegal.' When the journalist was then faced with the manager, he was told 'Look, it's company policy, you're not allowed to do it.'

I found this absolutely bizarre. Clearly it's not illegal. Of course they can decide they don't want you to do something in their shop and ask you to leave if they don't like what you are doing, but you are not breaking the law. But could it really be company policy that you aren't allowed to write prices down?

I emailed Tesco, and this was their response:

Please be assured it is not company policy to stop customers, or journalists, checking or writing down prices in our stores. We have contacted the journalist in question to apologise and we're looking into this to ensure it doesn't happen again. As I'm sure you're aware, our prices are displayed on our website so are readily available for all our customers to compare with others, if they wish to do so.

While the final sentence is irrelevent (as website prices aren't necessarily reflected in stores, especially Tesco Local or Metro or whatever they call it), the Customer Service Executive who contacted me makes it clear that it is not company policy to stop people from writing down prices. This seemed likely to be the case, though it makes you wonder why the store manager didn't know company policy. And for that matter, why he thought that the company would have any objection to people writing down prices.

A not-chatbotI hear that at the Techniche Festival (whatever that is) in Guwahati, India, a chatbot finally beat the Turing test (sort of). A chatbot is a bit of software that emulates human conversation, while the Turing test is supposed to show that if an artificial intelligence can fool you into thinking your are typing to a human, then the technology has finally come of age.

In the test 30 volunteers typed conversations, half with a human, half with a chatbot. Then an audience of 1334 people (including the volunteers) voted on which was which. A total of 59% though Cleverbot was human, making the organisers (and New Scientist) claim it had passed the Turing test.

By comparison 63% of the voters thought the human participants were human. This can be a bit embarrassing for human participants who are thought to be a computer (there's rather a nice description of taking part in this process in the book The Most Human Human ).

I don't think this is really a success under the Turing test. First, they only have a 4 minute chat, which gives chatbot designers an opportunity to use short-term tactics that wouldn't work in a real extended conversation, which I envisage is what Turing had in mind. And then there's the location of the event. A key piece of information that is missing is how many of the voters had English as a first language. If, as I suspect, many of the voters did not, or spoke English with distinctly different idioms, their ability to spot which was human and which wasn't would inevitably be compromised.

See what you think. You can chat to Cleverbot yourself here.

Picture from Wikipedia

When new parents moan about the cost of having a baby – buying a push chair and a car seat and a cot and so on – I nod sagely and hide a knowing smile. 'Just wait,' I am thinking, 'until that baby is 17.'

For non-UK readers, 17 is the age at which our young are let loose on the road in cars. Even if you manage to resist the constant nagging to buy a car ('Everyone else's parents are buying them cars. Why are you too tight to buy me a car? It's not fair!'), the expense and organization involved with making this happen is phenomenal.
First there's getting a provisional licence. Then the wallet-sapping experience of driving lessons. Tests to pay for and arrange, of course (though you can now book these online – but always go to the direct.gov.uk site, there are rip-off sites that charge a fee). And did anyone mention insurance? Still, it's all worth it when they pass the test, rip up the L-plates (more expense) and you can see the smile on their faces. Well, no, it's not really worth it – but there is the consolation of not having to drive them all over the place any more. There's just the matter of forking out for petrol, servicing and, yes, even more insurance.
Still, once they get to this stage you can relax, and this is exactly what we did with the daughter who has passed her test. Until the day we got the call saying, was it okay, she just wanted to drive down to Bristol. Okay, fine. Some trepidation. But it wasn't until a little later that a horrible thought occurred to us. What if she broke down? Because we had thought we'd arranged everything, but not breakdown cover. High speed resorting to the internet and a few minutes later she had this too.
Please don't tell me if I've forgotten anything else. I really don't want to know. But excuse me next time someone tells me how much you have to sort out with a baby if I burst into hysterical laughter.

A while ago I mentioned how those who criticize people who enter the National Lottery as stupid individuals that don't understand probability miss the point, because it's a relatively low investment you can forget about, in return for quite a lot of pleasure occasionally when you do win something.

We can also use the mechanism of a lottery to explore how human beings get their gratification.

One of the UK's National Lottery games is called Thunderball. The player has to choose 5 numbers between 1 and 39, and a sixth number between 1 and 14. The maximum prize for matching all six is £500,000, while you get £3 for just matching the Thunderball.

Imagine two strategies, both costing £14. One is to play the same set of numbers each week for 14 weeks. The other is to play 14 lines on a single night, using all the numbers between 1 and 39, shuffled, to populate the first 5 (you would have to do this nearly twice), and sequential numbers from 1 to 14 as the Thunderball.

Most people, I think would prefer to have 1 go a week for 14 weeks, rather than blow it all on one week. Yet the second strategy is the better of the two in terms of being certain to win. Both strategies have the same chance of winning the jackpot. But the second strategy ensures you win a minimum of £3, and that you are guaranteed to match at at least five of your numbers. The first strategy could go through the whole 14 weeks and never have a single match. (Admittedly, it's slightly more complicated than this, as in principle with the first strategy you could win 14 times, where with the second, your maximum number of wins is likely to be 3. But the fact remains that one is a certainty and the other isn't.)

What this shows, I think, is that the primary enjoyment value of the lottery is anticipation. The first strategy gives you 14 nights when you could be a winner. ('It could be you!' as the slogan goes.) The second strategy only gives you one night. So even though the chances of winning something are better, it will tend to be less attractive.

A few years ago I wrote a couple of books on green topics (Ecologic and The Global Warming Survival Kit) -and the timing was terrible.

In the first place, after selling a storm, people suddenly stopped buying books on climate change. I think initially it was exciting and scary - but then it began to feel hopeless, and you don't want to read about hopelessness. Secondly, the financial crash and recession hit. You can protest as much as you like that our financial problems don't make climate change go away, but they certainly make it easy to ignore.

Here's the thing. I don't think we're going to do much about climate change until things get fairly dire for a sizeable chunk of the world. We're lucky in Europe that we won't get much of the really bad impacts at that stage. But a lot of people may suffer. And I also suspect that as much as possible, we are going to invent our way out of the problem, rather than go backwards and stop doing things - and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, whether green hairshirted types like it or not, despite the 'dark satanic mills', things are a lot better now for the vast majority of people than they were in the green, bucolic medieval times. Because we invented our way out of it.

Some claim this means we should give up even trying to be green. I don't agree. There's no harm in slowing things down. It gives us more time to invent our way out. But if I'm really, really honest, most of the green things I do have an ulterior motive. So, for example:
I recycle - but this means I don't run out of room in the wheelie binI don't fly - but this is because I don't like flying, and I did enough to last a lifetime when I was at BAI drive a small, low emissions car - but if I won £10 million on the lottery tomorrow, I would be off down to the Aston Martin showroom before you could say 'Jeremy Clarkson'I use low energy bulbs, have a well insulated house and all that - because I'm tight and want to save on fuel costsI walk to the shops rather than drive - to save money, because I hate faffing about in busy car parks and for my health So, please do keep being green. Keep doing good things. But maybe it's time we got a little more realistic.

One of the joys of doing occasional training in creativity is that I get to meet some great people, and one of the most remarkable I've had the pleasure of working alongside is Peter Cook. Peter combines business training and rock music (not always at the same time) - can't be bad.

He has just come out with a book on managing people (primarily from an HR perspective), taking what he describes as a punk rock approach. You've got to love it for the cover alone. Inside, he takes key areas of dealing with staff and gives them a serious working over. Often the 'punk rock' approach involves stripping out all the fancy stuff and getting back to basics, which is why the chapters are just double page spreads. Frankly a lot of this stuff is much simpler than HR professionals would have you believe - and Punk Rock People Managment is excellent at showing where the Emperor's New Clothes are in action.

The best news is that, at the moment the book is free in PDF format. I downloaded it to my iPad where it was an easy read in Apple's ebook reader. But if you don't fancy an ebook, you can also buy a solid version.

If you have to manage people, it's well worth taking a look. It's not as transformative as Ricardo Semler's Maverick , which I think is just about the best business book ever written, but there's a lot of common sense and cutting away the deadwood.

And did I mention it's free?