Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia - on radio 4 this week, there was a report on the move amongst a group of psychiatrists to drop the word schizophrenia from the next DSM. They hope this will solve the problem of stigma associated with the word. The BBC interviewer suggested that the way to change stigma was to be more open about the condition, to spread information and enlightenment. The psychiatrist responded by saying only 7% of people in a survey wanted to be known a schizophrenic. 

The interviewer attempted to lead the doctor into a different frame, and to use reason to think through the possible consequences that follow on from action. The psychiatrist responded with marketing-type data, which implies that the patient is a customer and leads to something very like re-branding a product. 

Reported on You and Yours, Radio 4 (21 Nov 2007)

Unintended, yet not unanticipated

This snippet is from Roger Litten's presentation at the College of Psychoanalysts-UK International Conference PSYCHOANALYSIS AND STATE REGULATION, 31 March-1 April 2006



... not only does regulation not achieve what it claims to set out to achieve
but also entails consequences and effects that just happen to be the very opposite of what it claims

In other words we set out from a rationale for regulation, elaborated on the basis of a discourse of public protection, only to stumble into a system of audit and accountability that at certain points can be seen to provide no protection at all to the very people it claims to serve.

Follow the link in the title of this entry, and you will find the full text of this talk.

Evidence or reason?

Alistair Darling said of the missing discs of child benefit info "there was no evidence it had been used for fraudulent activity." In the old days, he might have said 'there is no reason to believe that ..." What is it with this word Evidence? It appears to have taken the place of truth and knocked the judge out of the picture. How can this have happened?

Quality audit - ideology responsible for the missing disc?

Those missing discs. It seems that the discs have to travel in order to fulfil requirements from a national quality audit process. In other words, it is already part of a process that has been removed from the reality of the data and the discs. The layer of bureaucracy created by the audit process creates a false world of pure signification, where grown men and women behave as if the mere following of pre-written rules is enough to judge whether something is going well or not. The removal of something real from the process can easily lead to problems. In the old days, when unions were active, there used to be something called 'work to rule', where the union members did everything according to the rule book. This strategy soon brought everything to its knees, and forced people (managers) to acknowledge that there was something beyond the formal rules. This old strategy of resistance has become the new norm of practice - and it is having a similar effect.

from:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7104115.stm

Small print and nasty surprises

You & Yours, Radio 4, 21.11.07 (podcast available from BBC website)

1.  a labyrinth of rules and practices have sprung up around train tickets. This has created a set of conditions where a traveller cannot reasonably be expected to know it all, and takes the small print on trust. Even the automatic ticket barrier at the station in this particular case was not sophisticated enough to know all the rules and let the man through and onto the train. This left it to the ticket collector on the train to be the One who had confront the traveller who happened to have broken a bit of small print rule. This confrontation of strangers had to be done in front of more strangers on a crowded train and of course, this leads to anxiety, embarrassment, and bad stuff for all the ordinary people involved.   

In this case the small print even contained a link to the legal system which empowered the ticket collector to put the man off the train and threaten him with more law. As it happened, in this particular case the traveller was a lawyer.  It was an 'innocent' (and trivial) mistake that led to his not having the return portion of the ticket about his person that day. All that fuss. All that fluster. All for what? What good can it possibly do?

Junior staff blamed for not following the rules

Looking for a scape goat.

BBC Radio 4 news today said that a govt spokesman denied that the recent merging of 2 govt departments and the huge loss of jobs (10,000) had nothing to do with the breach of security where 25m people's private inforation went missing. They blamed it on a junior member of staff who didn't follow the rules. An enquiry will follow.

Centralised data base - breach of confidentiality

Huge data bases and the large number of people who routinely need access to them to do their jobs, led to the possibility that a minion was able to download data onto 25 million people, and possibly even to sell it. This was the way the news was framed when two discs went missing in the post (information about child benefit claimants).  

Prof Ross Anderson, Cambridge University said: the govt consistently brush aside our reports which argue that large scale centralised data bases are vulnerable to unintended consequences. 

Prof Ross Anderson was also behind the campaign last year against the centralised storage of NHS records and constructed a form letter for people to send to the DoH and to their GPs. "what can patients do to ensure confidentiality of NHS records?"
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/

UK's families put on fraud alert
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7103566.stm

Audit water

The water industry was privatised and at the same time it was 'made more business like'. This was achieved by large scale computerisation and centralisation of data. In effect this stripped data away from the people who understood how it was made and what it related to, and most important, how it related to the effluent and the other natural things that make up the water industry. The experienced workforce was effectively replaced by large computerised data base that fed into the newly created call centres. There was a mass stripping away of knowledge from the people working with stuff, and a movement of data to computers, and to people who knew more or less how to operate them. In effect the link between information and the people who are responsible for keeping it real was broken.   In the news we don't find an analysis of the detail of reality, instead we find sensational accounts which presume to know the shortcomings of people involved.

Mark Milner, industrial editor
The Guardian
Thursday November 15 2007

Water industry regulator Ofwat yesterday announced plans to fine Southern Water £20.3m for misreporting and poor service. The fine is the biggest imposed by the watchdog under powers which came into effect in 2005. The previous record was a £12.5m fine slapped on Thames Water this year.

Southern, which was bought for £1.3bn last month by a consortium of infrastructure investors, said it accepted the punishment. "Southern Water fully acknowledges Ofwat's requirement to fine the company for its misreporting of customer service performance and failure to make all guaranteed standards payments," the company said in a statement.

Regina Finn, Ofwat chief executive, said: "Southern Water deliberately misreported its customer service performance to Ofwat and systematically manipulated information to conceal the company's true performance over an extended period."

As a result customers missed out on payments they were entitled to for service failures and were overcharged.

Southern Water, which serves some 2.3 million water and 4 million waste water customers, itself discovered the irregularities as it was introducing a new billing system. It reported its own findings to both Ofwat and the Serious Fraud Office.

Yesterday Ofwat acknowledged Southern Water's action and its cooperation with the investigation. However, Finn noted: "The magnitude of this fine reflects the magnitude of the offence - deliberately misleading the regulator, failure of the Southern Water board of directors to pick up the deception, the resulting poor service to customers and damage to the regulatory regime in general."

The fine will be paid by Southern Water's shareholders and cannot be passed on to customers.

Ofwat said it only had powers to impose a fine for two specific one-year periods even though the problems went back to before 2000 and Southern had received money it should not have done in the 1999 and 2004 price reviews.

It could have imposed fines of up to 10% of turnover, which would have amounted to more than £100m, but opted for a sanction of 3.5% of turnover for the deliberate misreporting and 0.1% for providing sub-standard services to customers by failing to meet guaranteed levels of service.

Southern Water said it had reduced bills this year and would do so again next year to repay the money to customers. A spokeswoman said the overcharging amounted to an average of £1.50 a year over seven years.

Les Dawson, Southern Water's chief executive, said: "I understand Ofwat's intention to fine us for what has happened in the past. Today, I would like to reassure customers that those historically entitled to guaranteed standards payments have now been paid and that we are well on course to meeting a service improvement plan agreed with the regulator."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/nov/15/southernwater?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

The scale of the fine imposed by Ofwat, which is subject to a consultation process over the next five weeks, met with general approval.

David Bland, chairman of the Consumer Council for Water Southern and Thames, said: "We believe that the level of the fine is appropriate to the circumstances. We are also pleased to note that Southern Water's shareholders will bear the entire cost of the fine, which should not fall on the customers who were badly served under the previous management.

"Because customers suffered from Southern Water's shortcomings we believe that the £20.3m fine should be used for the benefit of customers as opposed to being paid to the Treasury.

"Southern Water has accepted the fine and the Consumer Council for Water will work with them to put in place their service improvement plan as agreed with Ofwat."

Tim Wolfenden, head of home services at uSwitch.com, the independent price comparison and switching service, said: "The priority here is to ensure that consumers are fully recompensed, and Ofwat does seem to have this well in hand. The regulator has made it clear that shareholders rather than customers will be footing this bill. However, it could go one step further and prescribe what should be done with the fine - the icing on the cake would be to see this £20.3m fine invested directly into improving our worn out water systems. This would serve everybody's interests best."

Privatisation + Audit = what?

SOUTHERN WATER
OFWAT has fined Southern Water £20.3 million - their biggest ever fine - for misreporting information and providing a poor service to customers. The Serious Fraud Office dropped its fraud investigation earlier this year because of lack of evidence. This is the big news of today.

Rather than assuming that the managers were all frauds, it might be more productive to wonder how this farce has come to pass.

Non-human surveillance?

"what are you looking at?"
We have more cameras per head than any other country in the world
1 for every 14 people, that’s 1/5 th of all cameras in the world
more than 80% are such poor quality that they can’t really be useful to the humans charged with policing our society in one way or another.

This fact cropped up in the last 10 minutes of the Today programme (Radio 4, 1 November 2007) and included a fun interview with Ross Clark, author of a new book - The Road to Southend Pier: One Man's Struggle Against the Surveillance Society. He has also written a book entitled: How to Label a Goat: The Silly Rules and Regulations That Are Strangling Britain

One interesting idea that emerged in the item was a kind of creative resistance : you can write to the council and ask for your image: you have a right under the Data protection act. This might be an amusing way to draw attention to the nonsense of the camera, and to get people to think about what is going on. However, it is just as likely to end up fuelling a bigger effort to improve the surveillance by making the cameras more effective.

What unintended consequences are there of this kind and level of surveillance?