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Steven Auld

Listed below are comments made by Steven Auld between Wednesday, 7th May 2008 and Thursday, 6th August 2009.

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Was the Gray report quashed? 1:58pm on 06 Aug 2009 Defence procurement contracts are in danger taking so long that they are practically deprecated technology by the time they are finished. This is not in our best interests. However, if every step in the administration process will take weeks to complete (as opposed to hours) then it does serve the interests of the bureaucrats who want to keep their cushy jobs. Furthermore, holding everything back can even attract kick-backs from the contractor to speed things up.

It's not unlike the NHS where: transferring your own medical file from one practice to another will take over 13 weeks - unless you physically pick the files up and hand deliver them yourself; where a packet of Paracetamol can cost many times more than the retail equivalent of the same quality, quantity and packaging; where surgical consultants occupying "management" roles continue to resist any change in the organisational structure so they and their cronies can keep getting paid for unnecessary jobs.

And where the failed MP's from the next election can fall into better paid board and management roles with the help of their old-school pals who are happy to return the favour... hence the delay until the next election.
Weekly Bonus Question 1:01pm on 10 Jul 2009 How much has the Conservative Party's biggest sponsor paid to the Inland Revenue in tax?
know your legal onions? 6:23pm on 26 May 2009 (Sorry for the long post)

Emails have to be printed when this correspondence is to be inserted in a paper-based filing system. Not only should this include footers, it should also include comprehensive headers which will go some way to prove the authenticity, time and date and - for the instance where private information is concerned - the route the email message had taken.

Now that that caveat is out of the way, if there is no need to file an email in a paper filing system, then why on earth does anyone need to print it!??

I'll tell you why: it is owing to a combination of two factors.
1. Widespread ignorance of PC operating practices and techniques.
2. Ignorance of (or a disregard for) accessibility issues - not just for up to 10% of PC users who have a visual or mobility impairment, but for most users who's knowledge of PC operation is by rote rather than a sense of what is actually happening on their PC.

To elaborate on both these points:
1. Do you know how to use time-efficient keyboard short-cuts to scroll messages? Do you know how to increase font-size and colour preferences on your PC that would make an email more legible on your screen? Are you aware of health&safety measures that should be followed when seated at a desk staring into a VDU for long periods of time?
If you answer "no" to any of the above questions then it is likely that you needlessly print all your emails *before* reading them.

2. Technology and the design for human-computer interaction (HCI) has not caught up with the needs of most users who are not PC literate enough to discern even the "task bar" on their computer. For them, operating a PC is a series of steps which the user prefers to memorise, rather than to discern information on the screen and take appropriate decisions.

There's a simple 80:20 rule - that 80% of users will only _ever_ use 20% of the features available to them; but it seems that no two users will ever agree upon what that 20% is. The result is that HCI designers are forced to clutter up their display with catch-all solutions. For example, the interface on Outlook is a multi-panelled clutter of mouse-clickable operations that take space away from the core purpose: reading, writing and manipulating an email. Even if the message opens in a new window for which perusing is very simple, for the reasons above, many people get so scrambled by the prospect of multi-tasking on a PC they prefer to just print and close.
McCain loses it 12:27pm on 23 Oct 2008 IF the fact that GWB currently sits as President is anything to go by - we shouldn't expect intellectual capacity, fast wit, or even voter popularity to be pre-requisite criteria to contest for role as President.
The story is dead 3:07pm on 07 May 2008 To be "trustworthy" I would deem it more important that the mediator had authority in the field they reported.

Admittedly, I'm in danger of sounding like an intellectual elitist here, but I get the distinct impression that Media and Journalism as an academic field of study doesn't really warrant a great deal of analytical prowess.

Academics of Economics, Politics and the Arts who write in the media are clearly more qualified to comment on their field than the mundane who graduated in Media and Journalism. And sometimes (or "most of the time" when I read reports about issues in Science, Medicine and Engineering) I wish the journalist had a true grasp of the topic rather than just consulting with experts and dumbing it down to their level.

So, from my own personal position: in order to have any degree of "trust" in the media's reporting and commentary of events, I have to believe that there is some authority in the position of the speakers and writers who draw up the agenda and pass commentary.

Even if they run contrary up my own world view, I believe this "trust" is paramount to the mediation being a constructive and informative exercise - rather than an attempt to pander to the masses in a cynical ploy to feed the advertisers with an audience rife with dupes.

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Steven Auld