Losing prisoners

How can they lose people? An interesting question, what what wrong. My first thought was two things. Way back in 1999 someone retired whose job was to keep track and when she retired nobody noticed. The other was that it was decided to computerise everything and someone forgot to put in the data that said that a prisoner was foriegn so mught be deported!

That seemed the most likey, my experience of politicians and, by analogy, senior senior civil servants, is that thye have almost no understanding of how computer systems work. In perticular they have no idea of how computer scientists work. So if you don't tell them something explicitly they will interpret it in their own way. Thus we end up concluding that no one told them to put this information on the system

It now also emerges that 20 people who have vanished from the police national records. One of the problems is that you have to have an exact name, a perfectly reasonable assumption, one wouldn't someone haveing a police record if it was the wrong person. BUT and a big but, this assumes that the data is correct and consistently input. Take any name which is a transliteration or even just a, to British ears, hard name to pronounce and spell. What are the chances that it will get entered into the system in different ways at different times.

Why do politicains think that computerising systems will make them work perfectly, especially when there are so few civil servants who have the experience to write the brief correctly.


I return to an earlier theme, the way we recruit and train civil servants was just about OK in the 1950's but we need to rethink how we do it. When was the last reform, 1850's?

Just some thoughtful updates.

I have not written a blog for some time, too busy or not moved by anthing to write about. But I have just got back from attending a conference of the Mathematical Association, www.m-a.org.uk. It is great to met lots of teachers who are enthusiastic about teacning maths, who are doing exciting things with kids across a whole range of abilities.

The sad thing is how few teachers get to the meetings. Are they too tired at the end of term, too disillusioned or just not professional enough to want to improve their performance? It is such a fundamental subject which is crucial to explaining the physical world as well as being exciting and fun to do. How have we turned it, in Britain & USA, into a subject that students dread.

The BBC is starting new new service called "Jam" aimed at school children, a new digital service. There are lots of great web sites out there to help with real maths, a particularly good one is www.nrich.maths.org.uk, I recommend it to anyone teaching maths or just enjoying it for fun. During the conference someone asked me my favourite piece of maths, as a mathemtician for over 40 years there are too many lovely things but I thought of Euler's proof that there is no biggest prime number. Most people quote Euclid's proof, simple and easy to understand BUT Euler's proof is much harder and depends on some subtle maths. So why do I like it, because the ideas it introduced leads to wondersful results about prime numbers which are not at all obvious.

Got to go and do the hoovering now.