Monty Panesar, Hove to

Published November 22, 2009 Cricket , Rage Leave a Comment
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So let’s say what we know about Monty Panesar so far:

  1. Anybody who’s seen him bowl can see that he’s a marvellously natural bowler. He has a gift for controlling his length and enough of an innate variation in pace to deceive world-class batsmen. He doesn’t turn it much, but half a bat’s width is all you need.
  2. He has taken 126 wickets in 39 Test Matches. That’s  very good. He’s a very good bowler. Ashley Giles, until then England’s main spinner, retired at the young age of 33 within 9 months of Panesar’s debut. The writing was clearly on the wall.
  3. In 2008 England appointed Mushtaq Ahmed as spin bowling coach, to “mentor our leading spin bowlers“.
  4. Since then, Panesar’s career has gone into a steep decline. He lost his England place to Graeme Swann and at the end of the 2009 season Northamptonshire admitted he was a luxury they could no longer afford having taken only 18 first class wickets in the season.

So what’s gone wrong with this gifted cricketer? I’m afraid the clue may be No.3 above.

Panesar’s limiting factor is his lack of guile. His naivety reveals itself in his self-conscious and clumsy fielding and batting. Only with a ball in his hand does he become a creature of grace and beauty. He doesn’t have the imagination to plot the downfall of a batsman like a chess game, he lets the batsman do this himself. And most batsmen will ultimately think themselves out if they can’t score runs and they don’t know why. So his limiting factor is also one of his unique strengths.

Panesar’s lack of ego is a contributing element to this. If he gets hit for a boundary it is not revenge that is uppermost in his mind but a desire to correct the minor fault that caused the lapse. To his credit, his response is not to bowl a flat defensive ball nor a cunning trick delivery but to bowl the same ball again with his natural minor variations. This is what gets good batsmen out.

What he needs is help in understanding this. Help to retain the natural gifts over time and help to see why they are his main weapons.

What do we give him? Mushtaq Ahmed. The other sort of spinner.

Mushy is cunning. He has a wide variety of deliveries, each more perfidious than the last. He is clever and aggressive. He is so not what Monty needs. And now he will have his advice not just with England but with Sussex, Panesar’s new county and Mushtaq’s old one. Here’s the Sussex manager Mark Robinson:

We have got Mushtaq working with us a little bit, who is anything but a technical coach, to preach the love of the game and use of the imagination

And Monty loves him:

I spoke to Mushy who still thinks of Sussex as his county and he was keen to have me at Hove. He said that there was a real family feel to the club and Mike Yardy, who I have toured with, was also very persuasive.

There’s your answer. Monty needs technical help in retaining and exploiting his natural gifts. The last thing he needs is somebody to give him an imagination. Mushy’s input will be entirely towards this destructive goal and not at all with the technical thing.

I see no way back for Monty at this point.

Managing by metric

Published July 22, 2009 Management , Organizations , Rage , Relevant to my work 2 Comments
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Somebody sent me a link to a talk by Bill Gates on improving education in schools by monitoring their performance. Here is the link: Bill Gates: Better data mean better schools

“The way I see forward is to use measurement to drive quality,” Gates said.

Really? Most teachers seem to think we over-measure in this country, and that measurement leads to management-by-metric which leads to gaming the system. In other words the school is run so as to provide the best metrics at least cost regardless of the actual needs of the children.

I recently got a consultant appointment at an NHS hospital, but because there wasn’t a slot available in the next four weeks they said they’d call back with an appointment in a few days. This they did and everything is fine. But of course what happened behind the scenes is that they wouldn’t book my appointment in their official system until there was a slot available within four weeks. This allows them to keep their official waiting lists down to four weeks although my appointment was in fact nearly two months after I first called.

They must keep a separate unofficial waiting list somewhere and only transfer patients when the opportunity arises. Twice the work for them and twice the possibility of fuck-ups. And why? Somebody chose a gameable metric to manage them by.

This is OK when it’s me with a minor ailment but I don’t want this sort of culture in my children’s schools.

ps Malcolm has talked about this too: All in the game yo, all in the game

Cycling and infertility

Published June 29, 2009 Off topic , Relevant to my work , Urban cycling 7 Comments
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“According to a new study” is a phrase that should set your bullshit alarm ringing. Journalists don’t in general understand either the methodology or conclusions of published studies and instead seize on the most lurid parts of the accompanying press release. So, with that in mind, here we go:

According to a new study, cycling a lot can affect your fertility if you are a man. The latest study to suggest this is reported quite well here: Elite cyclists ‘risk infertility’.

The conclusions are sensible: “the average man cycling to work would be unlikely to suffer fertility problems because of their time in the saddle.” and “40 years ago cycling was much more common but there is no evidence men then were less fertile”. So there’s nothing to worry about, right?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. My first son was conceived with the aid of a lot of expensive medical help (IVF to be precise), the reason: poor sperm motility and morphology. My second son was conceived the regular way. The only difference between the two pregnancies was that I’d stopped cycling after the first sperm tests.

My anecdotal evidence has no scientific weight at all but I would suggest the following things may be true:

  1. 40 years ago saddles were a lot different to now. Lightweight racing saddles give you little room for manoeuvre (men, you know what I mean). A poor posture can lead to numbness and discomfort that lasts most of the day as I have found myself. If this is happening to you then consider the other long-term effects that might also be happening. Sort out your posture.
  2. A short ride over bad roads (e.g. central London) might inflict damage equivalent to many more miles over a triathlon course. I believe that a modest amount of inner-city commuting might be the equivalent of 186 miles a week of triathlon training.
  3. If your fertility is borderline anyway then it might take relatively little additional damage to make it noticeably more difficult to conceive.

The conclusions of the BBC article are sensible but do consider the personal risks to you rather than the general statistical results.

Also: none of the studies I’ve seen have ever investigated the effects of stopping cycling. From my own experience this had a positive effect on my fertility, but that’s not science. Please could somebody do a follow-up and investigate this aspect too?

Annoying journalistic habit note

How come the study talks about training amounts above and below 186 miles? Isn’t this a rather arbitrary figure to use for the study?

Yes, but of course the study was from a more enlightened country that uses OSI units for measuring distance. 186 miles is 300 kikometres. So the study drew the perfectly acceptable conclusion that around 300 kilometres a week was an amount that might contribute to infertility.

Converting this to exactly 186 miles is ridiculous for two reasons:

  1. The original figure is stated to one significant figure. The equivalent imperial distance would be, say, 200 miles a week.
  2. I am relatively aged, and I remember being taught metric units at school. Why oh why do we have to assume that people only understand our grandparents’ units?

Come on, journalists of Britain, most of us are not geriatric or imbeciles.

Keynesian News

Published May 15, 2009 Beliefs , Off topic Leave a Comment
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The rehabilitation of Keynesian economics that I mentioned here seems to be continuing. The fifth of my publicly-funded infrastructure projects now seems to be falling into place: Olympic Village to be fully funded by taxpayers. Just the Olympic Village for now, but all the developers are in poor financial shape and nobody will be surprised when the government steps in to bail out other areas of the project.

One of the other projects I mentioned was a high-speed rail link to the Midlands and beyond. Interestingly, Network Rail have announced today that they would like to electrify the existing Midland Main Line and finance it themselves. I don’t know what effect this will have on the business case for a new high-speed line – maybe the upgraded existing line will do the job?

Channel hopping

Published May 1, 2009 Beliefs , Off topic , Rage , Security Leave a Comment
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I’ve decided to separate my thoughts on the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 to another channel: This is not a riot

I think it’s OK to mix up a bit of cricket whimsy in with more technical posts about software development and social media, but religion and politics should probably be somewhere else.

For the record, I believe that the late decision to add the words “a constable” to Section 76 of the Act was a serious error. Most police officers are fair, honest and responsible. A very small minority sometimes aren’t. It is essential that members of the public can produce evidence of police misconduct on the rare occasions when it happens. The Act gives the power to any constable to prevent documentation of his actions and that is wrong.

That’s all I have to say on the subject in this place.

Quick links: This is not a riot | Counter-Terrorism Act 2008

The secret of Tesco’s massive profits

Published April 21, 2009 Organizations , Rage , Service Management , User experience Leave a Comment
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I took a reduced item to the till at my local Tesco this morning and they said it had been mispriced. They refused to sell it to me at the price on the yellow sticker even though it would have been straightforward to do so.

I told them this was an offence under the Consumer Protection Act 1987 (barrack room lawyer, me?), but all they did was take the item off me and try to destroy the evidence by defacing the price label with a pen. I considered summoning a constable or making a citizen’s arrest.

This then, is the secret of Tesco’s massive profits. Fraud[1]. The spirit of Lady Shirley lives on!

Footnote: I believe the reason for their refusal lies in Tesco’s IT systems. Doubtless the bar code on the yellow reduced sticker is linked to an actual stock item with a sell-by date. The system would alert management that an item had been reduced before its correct date and the employee responsible would feel the full weight of Sir Terry’s wrath. Fearful of this, they would rather annoy their customers.

[1] I am not a lawyer. If I was I definitely wouldn’t accuse Tesco of fraud – I’d be too scared of their libel lawyers. Good job nobody reads this.

What happens when you assault a demonstrator in 2009

Published April 16, 2009 Off topic , Rage Leave a Comment
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Quick links: This is not a riot | Counter-Terrorism Act 2008

I posted yesterday about the value of photographing (and filming) police officers as a way of encouraging them to stay within their legal operating constraints. Since no action has been taken against police officers involved in the G20 demonstrations except when they were being filmed we can conclude one of two things:

  1. No police officer acted inappropriately except the ones that were caught on film, or
  2. Police officers are rarely disciplined unless they are caught in an inappropriate act by a member of the public or a journalist

If the first is true then that in itself is a testament to the value of universal public documentation of demonstrations. I sincerely hope this is the answer, not the second option.

At 3:50 in the above video a Territorial Support Group officer uses his armoured glove to hit a woman in the face. He then hits her with his baton. Don’t watch the assault, it’s not very edifying. Instead watch the forest of cameras that appear as soon as he starts to attack the woman.

The officer has now been suspended. Who thinks this would have happened without those cameras?

Who thinks that adding “constables” to Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 was a good idea?

Quick links: This is not a riot | Counter-Terrorism Act 2008

Taking photographs of police officers

Published April 14, 2009 Beliefs , Off topic , Rage 3 Comments
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Quick links: This is not a riot | Counter-Terrorism Act 2008

A person commits an offence who—

  • elicits or attempts to elicit information about an individual who is or has been—
    • a member of Her Majesty’s forces,
    • a member of any of the intelligence services, or
    • a constable,

which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism

This is a quote from Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008. This is the law that people like Cory Doctorow and Graham Linehan are citing when they write that it is illegal to take photographs of the police here in the UK.

Their interpretation is probably correct. Almost any information could be construed as useful to a terrorist. Even easier to demonstrate that it is likely to be useful.

So what happens if you are charged under this Act?

It is a defence for a person charged with an offence under this section to prove that they had a reasonable excuse for their action.

A naive person might read this and assume that the burden of proof had been placed on them to demonstrate they had a reasonable excuse. That’s what the law says isn’t it? Well no, says Tony McNulty, The Minister for Security, Counter-Terrorism, Crime and Policing during the passing of the Act:

If the defence says, “I was doing it simply for this reason,” as in our law generally, it is for the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that that defence is not a reasonable excuse and therefore should be put aside.

and then goes on to say

In R v. K it was shown that there must be reasonable suspicion that the information was intended to be used to assist terrorism. Funnily enough, that is why that provision is in a terrorism Act. That would apply equally to new section 58A—the information must be likely to provide practical assistance to a person committing or preparing terrorism. Case law has been built up since the Act became law.

So do we trust Mr McNulty? His words are a matter of public record and they should be used by the courts as guidance in interpreting the law (It’s worth noting at this point that IANAL – I am not a lawyer).

The problem is that this clause now includes police officers, who would be responsible for making arrests under this law. If you want a definition of conflict of interest then there it is. It’s now open to police officers to arrest anybody who takes a picture of them by simply stating they believe the picture is likely to be useful to a potential terrorist. No actual terrorist needs to exist, no actual intention to use the photograph for terrorism needs to exist. Just a reasonable suspicion in the officer’s mind that the photograph could be used at any time in the future by anybody for such a purpose.

The Director of Public Prosecutions may not ultimately proceed with the case but the photographer has by now been removed from the scene he wishes to photograph just by the fact of the arrest. The prosecution is immaterial to the police officer, this law is just a tool he can use to remove photographers from anywhere he doesn’t want them to be.

Imagine an occasion where a police officer committed an act that was outside his remit. An illegal act that he didn’t want anybody to know about. An act that he was intending to commit so he removed his identification numbers and put a balaclava over his face. Of course you don’t have to imagine such an act, you can watch it here. Please do so, over and over again, while you think about the powers the police have under the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008.

So let us trust Mr McNulty. His wise words will protect us. You may go out and photograph police officers all day if you so wish, so long as you have the reasonable excuse that not doing so allows them to commit with impunity acts like the one that preceded Ian Tomlinson’s death.

The only reason the police could not use the Act effectively during the G20 demonstrations was that everybody was filming and photographing everything. This is our best defence against misuse of the Act. Photographing police officers is your right and indeed your civic duty.

Quick links: This is not a riot | Counter-Terrorism Act 2008

Mutual societies and apocalyptic events

Published March 30, 2009 Beliefs , Relevant to my work , Security Leave a Comment
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Back at the dawn of time (2006), I wrote a series of posts to record some things I believed in. These were things I believed without being able to prove they were true – naked belief.

I’m happy to say I still hold all these beliefs. Not that I cling to opinions when the facts change – I’m with Keynes on that one. But history has not demonstrated that any of these beliefs are wrong.

In fact, history has started to provide some evidence in favour of some of these beliefs.

Mutual societies

Today news emerged of the Dunfermline Building Society’s failure as a going concern. I claim this actually reinforces my belief that mutual societies should be some sort of protected species.

What went wrong seems to be the the Dunfermline stopped acting in the long-term interests of its members and started behaving as if it had shareholders. Making aggressive commercial loans and approving risky mortgages is not what a mutual society should be doing (unless it’s a mutual society of capital markets professionals).

So my belief is refined somewhat: mutual societies should be encouraged by (for example) favourable tax legislation but their activities should be constrained by some sort of covenant that members are made aware of when they join.

Apocalyptic internet event

You’re mad! was the usual reaction when I tried to persuade the pezzonovanti at my last company that there was a seismic event waiting to happen in the financial services industry.

Turns out I was right, but I’m not claiming to have predicted the sub-prime crisis. My event was to do with data security and it hasn’t happened yet. But the bots are gathering, and they are being expoited commercially in an ever more sophisticated way.

The datapocalypse is coming. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. There’s more than one black swan.

HOWTO: Fix problems with Firefox extensions

Published March 18, 2009 Rage , Relevant to my work , Technology , howto Leave a Comment

I have been having problems with a Firefox extension that disappeared whenever I upgraded either Firefox or the extension itself. My specific problem was with an extension called Firebug, but I’m betting this affects other add-ons too.

After extensive searching I eventually came up with an answer that worked for me. I’m posting it here so other people might avoid the hot tears of frustration that I cried trying to fix this.

The symptom

You choose a Firefox extension by clicking on the install link, the extension downloads and installs. You click the button to restart Firefox and the extension is simply not there. No error message, no indication why it failed. Just stubborn, passive-aggressive refusal to install. Arms folded, lips pursed, the extension just won’t do what you want. Gah.

The solution

Yes, it’s the old favourite – your virus checker. In my case all I had to do was open the AVG Anti-Virus control panel, double-click Resident Shield and unclick the “Resident Shield active” checkbox. Click on Save Changes. Then if you repeat the Firefox estension install you should find it installs OK.

Don’t forget to turn your virus checker back on afterwards.

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