Human factors in medicine

I just watched the latest BBC Horizon programme. It was about the need for developing human factors training and practice in medicine. It drew on the civil aviation industry, and also fire fighting and Formula 1.

My wife could tell you that the need for human factors training within medicine is something that I've been banging on about for years. It's been apparent that whilst there are many very good and well-intentioned practitioners of all sorts within the NHS, there are also too many occasions when issues arise that really boil down to human factors end up having a negative clinical outcome. This is something that has been a focus of training and safety within aviation since Kegworth, and over and over again, when I hear descriptions of events that have taken place in hospitals, I can think of ways in which human factors training could have helped.

Aspects drawn from aviation in this episode included the use of checklists (although checklists themselves are an innovation, the idea of following "protocols" and procedures are already widely established within medical practice), a strong focus on situational awareness, mention of the need to understand the impact of authority gradients, and the impact of too much stress.

It's easy to add other aspects of human factors issues from aviation (now generally called CRM - crew resource management). For example, fatigue, error chains (mentioned passim without explanation) and communication. One of the major contributors to improvements in the human factors environment within aviation has been CHIRP - the Confidential Human Factors Incident Reporting Programme - which has been extended to Air Traffic Control, cabin crew, aviation engineers and also the maritime industry. Again, for years, I've been saying that if the NHS were to take human factors seriously, such a publication would greatly benefit.

Dr Kevin Fong, the presenter, makes a very good and articulate case for the development of human factors within medical practice. If Sir David Nicholson, the Chief Executive of the NHS, is keen to see substantial improvements in clinical outcomes, I'm pretty convinced that this is one of the places that he should be looking.

Francis Schaeffer on logical positivism

Logical positivism claims to lay the foundation for each step as it goes along, in a rational way. Yet in reality it puts forth no theoretical universal to validate its very first step. Positivists accept (though they present no logical reason why this should be so) that what reaches them from the "outside" may be called "data"; i.e., it has objective validity. 

This dilemma was well illustrated by a young man who had been studying logical positivism at Oxford. He was with us in Switzerland as a student ... and he said one day, "I'm confused about some of these things. ... when this data reaches you ..." 

At once I said, "How do you know, on the basis of logical positivism, that it is data?" 

He started again, and went on for another sentence or two, and then said a second time, "When this data reaches you ..." 

...I had to say, "No, you must not use the word data. It is loaded with all kinds of meaning; it assumes there is objectivity, and your system has never proved it." 

"What do I say then?" he replied. 

So I said, "Just say blip. You don't know what you mean by data, so substitute blip." 

He began one more, "When blip reaches you ..." and the discussion was over. On the basis of their form of rationalism, there is just as much logic in calling something "blip" as "data." 

Thus, in its own way, though it uses the title of positivism and operates using reason, it is just as much a leap of faith as existentialism - since it has no postulated circle within which to act which validates reason nor gives a certainty that what we think is data is indeed data. 

Michael Polanyi's (1891-1976) work showed the weakness of all forms of "positivism" and today positivism in theory is dead. However, it must be said that the materialistic, rationalistic scientists have shut their eyes to its demise and continue to build their work upon it as though it were alive and well. They are doing their materialistic science with no epistemological base. In the crucial area of knowing, they are not operating on facts but faith.

Francis Schaeffer, "The God who is there", emphasis mine.

The trouble is that there are many non-scientists who have accepted the epistemological assertions of the "materialistic, rationalistic scientists" who "have shut their eyes" the the demise of their epistemological foundation, that science is an adequate philosophical foundation for not believing in God. "Well, we know so much more than we used to know. It used to be necessary to believe in God to explain the world around us. But nowadays, we are much better informed, and belief in God is not necessary."

Science as a philosophy - "scientism", if you like - is not built on a solid foundation. For example, Richard Dawkins said: "Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." This is not a logical statement. Firstly, although Darwin provided a naturalistic and gradualistic explanation of how life might arise, this actually has no bearing on whether or not there is a god (which is, in effect, what Dawkins is claiming). Secondly, what is absent from Darwin's (and Dawkins') work is reference to an epistemological foundation. It is a justification of this which would provide the possibility to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist, rather than a description of phenomena. Questions such as: how does life differ from non-life? what is consciousness? what is communication? why do the things that matter so much to us - truth, love, beauty, justice - seem to have so little to do with the physical nature of the universe?

This isn't to say that science is bunk. On the contrary, the achievements of science in explaining the nature of the universe are immense and wonderful. Also, some scientists have made sincere attempts to answer these questions. But like the student that Schaeffer talked to, their answers are not philosophically complete.

Science is not the sole preserve of logical positivists. In fact, the foundations of modern science were laid by people with a very different philosophical framework - Christians, who believed that the foundation for belief in the objective validity of data was the existence of a deity, an external absolute reference point. Christians still do science today. It's uncommon for their books to be as successful as those of the logical positivists who haven't comprehended their mislaid foundation yet, though.

Frustration with "AirPort" on Mac

We have a wireless network, and one of the frustrations we've had with our Macbook is that, pretty much whenever it entered "sleep" mode, it would fail to reconnect properly to the network. Resetting this was taking up to half an hour a day - particularly bad since the major selling feature of Apple products is that they should "just work".

This was getting gradually worse as time went on. I'd come to the conclusion that it was something to do with IP address conflicts - switching an extra computer on would quite often trigger a period of misbehaviour. Our house now has four phones, a TV, five computers, a wireless printer, a couple of e-readers and several games consoles which drop on and off the network. The potential for IP address conflicts was getting steadily worse, and the Macbook in particular was getting more and more flaky. The problem has been known about for years, but Apple have been singularly poor at working out a fix. Something had to be done - or the Macbook was likely to experience defenestration.

A further complication, which may or may not have made the situation worse, was the addition of a wireless network extender. This had the benefit of making the internet available in the furthest reaches of the house (which is not actually that huge!), but created the complication of (apparently) having two different networks with the same SSIDs. This had various implications - it was not possible to tell whether a computer and the wireless printer were actually on the same network until data failed to make it to the printer.

It was all pretty bad. But I think we may have found a way forward.

Devices on the network are identified by a MAC address. This is a number which is six two-digit hexadecimal numbers in a row, separated by colons, and every device capable of accessing a network has a different one (I suppose). Some wireless routers have the option of "reserving" an IP address for a particular device. So I found the Macbook's MAC address, entered the configuration page for the wireless router (a Virgin Media Superhub), and asked it to reserve the IP address for that Macbook. A slight additional complication was that I had to change the name in the Macbook "Sharing" section of its System Preferences - it had a name, but until I changed it, this wasn't being made available on the network, and the wireless router needed a name to reserve the address.

In doing this, I discovered that the Superhub was somewhat more super than I'd expected. It actually has the option of running multiple wireless networks. So I then set up a second wireless network - I now have networks with the SSIDs virginmedia12345678 and extension12345678. The printer and the Macbook and most things within reach of the router use the first one. But the network extender uses the second one, and this means that most devices can ignore its behaviour altogether. So people on "that" side of the house get wireless internet, and it doesn't interfere with devices on "this" side of the house.

I'll let you know if this turns out not to resolve the issue long term, but it looks like we've found a workaround for Apple's inadequacies.

In the meantime, I've come across a new problem. The Superhub has an ongoing issue that after a while, it stops being possible to access the administration screens using the standard IP address. Like the Airport fault on Apple, this has been flagged up for years, and Virgin have apparently failed to achieve much by way of fixes. Apparently, restarting it allows access again - and fortunately we will hopefully not have to access the configuration pages on a very frequent basis. So I think I can live with this.

Ethnology

My OU course, AA100, is uncovering various interesting things.

It's possible to look at a wiki based on the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica online, here. Interestingly, an article that was included for reference in one of our course books is omitted from the online version. It's on "Negro" - and its absence can be spotted if you scroll to the end of the article on "Ethnology". Look at where it says:

 For a detailed discussion of the branches of these three main divisions of Man the reader must refer to articles under race headings, and to Negro; Negritos; Mongols; Malays; North American Indians; Australia; Africa; &C., &C.

 "Negro" could have hyperlinked to the relevant article, were it present in the wiki. But it doesn't.

This is understandable. Here are some quotes from the article on "Negro":

In certain of the characteristics mentioned ... the negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man ...

Mentally the negro is inferior to the white ... it is not fair to judge of his mental capacity by tests in mental arithmetic; skill in reckoning is necessary to the white man, and it has cultivated this faculty; but it is not necessary to the negro.

Offensive nonsense. There are parts of the article which aren't quite so offensive, but plenty that is. It's understandable that this should not be given any disk space.

However, in some ways, it's not a good thing that these shameful ideas should be omitted from the text. Not because they are or ever were true, but because it reveals something about the intellectual mindset of the time. How on earth could the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of all publications regarded as the ultimate repository of knowledge at the time, have included this sort of stuff? The answer is - can only be - that such attitudes genuinely represented an uncontroversial consensus opinion. It was derived from the naturalistic presupposition that humanity represented the end point of the evolutionary process, and "white men" represented a point closer to the end than "black men". It is (or should be!) unnecessary to say that such an understanding of Darwinistic processes has been completely discredited and is no longer given the time of day.

In the course, this ethnological perspective is contrasted to an anthropological one - but it is interesting to note that the basis on which the British Museum was established was ethnological, and assumed the cultural superiority of Britain and Western Europe, and that "more primitive" cultures were ones which were either stalled, or should be moving towards them - and the intellectual understanding was that this view was bolstered by Darwinism. The course talks about how the bronzes from Benin (here be pictures) unsettled this idea. It also talks about how "primitivism" in art, a reaction to modernism, still reinforced the idea that other non-European cultures were actually more primitive.

I've talked in other contexts about how other naturalistic assumptions turned out to be false - the idea that the universe was infinitely old ("Big Bang" was originally a dismissive term for the idea that the universe may have had a starting point); the idea that life in its lowest form was simple; the idea that there was nothing remarkable about the earth as an environment in which life could appear; and so on. To this we can add another - the idea that "white" people are superior to "black" people. Of course, naturalism has moved on, and accommodated the fact that reality didn't turn out as expected. But it's interesting the way in which beliefs based on presuppositions can so seriously misdirect people. Who knows what we might have learnt anthropologically about cultures we squashed in the imperial/colonial era had we regarded them all along as our equivalent rather than our inferior?

Now, let's reflect for a moment on our own culture. Just like the Victorians/Edwardians, we are thoroughly convinced of our own absolute rightness. Is it possible that any of our presuppositions are leading us to beliefs about the world that in thirty years time will cause people to gasp as much as that 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article makes us gasp?

Gay marriage

What will be will be. But just as with the electoral reform referendum, political entities, with the collusion of much of the press, have their own agenda which has little to do with the interests or will of the electorate.

For myself personally ... I don't believe it is the responsibility of the government to legislate definitions of words, or assume them, unless there is a consensus. If the former consensus as to what marriage actually is no longer exists, then I don't believe it is for the state to decide what the new definition should be, even if an overwhelming majority of the electorate are happy with it (and that case hasn't been made). Language is not the responsibility of the state.

I also don't believe that it is the job of a government to introduce legislation of this sort within a parliament that hasn't been anticipated in a manifesto.

Also, whilst the legislation may allow for freedom of conscience, this was the case for working on Sunday when the legislation for that was introduced. But 20 years down the line, it is pretty much assumed. It's hard to remember today just how big an issue working on Sunday was at the time. Does that matter, or doesn't it? Who can say? But the point is, regardless of the protections that are included, big social changes can follow from such "tidying up" and "making more equal" of the law. The government has said that it intends to change the law regardless of the outcome of consultation, and that's the point at which we stand now. Is that democracy? Is it wise? Does it reflect a reasoned, or reasonable, position?

I (e)published a book!

The book that I scanned last year (Short Papers on Church History, Vol. 1 by Andrew Miller) is in the process of being made available through the Kindle Direct Publishing program. It should take a day or two to make its way across the various Amazon servers, I understand, but should then be available worldwide.

The scanning of the book itself, thanks to the new scanner (an Epson Perfection V500) was actually pretty quick - and ABBYY FineReader software converted it into a single file with few glitches. What took the time was the process of effectively proof-reading the whole book. What had to be done?

• I had to try and pick up what are known as "scannoes" - the OCR equivalent of typos;
• I wanted to impose a consistent style across the whole book that would work with things like the generation of a table of contents, and how it would be presented on a Kindle;
• I wanted to make sure that all italicised text was converted properly;
• I wanted to consistently replace (for example) ' with ‘ or ’ as appropriate, and where necessary ae with æ;
• There were the odd bursts of Greek characters!

So it turned into a time-consuming process - and as I say in the foreword, I'm pretty sure that I've not done it perfectly, so I may need to re-upload at some stage.

Anyway, if you're interested, the first place that you can find a link to the book is here. I'll add the UK address once it becomes available. I am intending to charge for the book, by the way - but only about £1. 

Logic circuits

I'm really interested in what my son did in Minecraft, which he has a video of....

In effect, he made a digital display within the Minecraft digital world, in much the same way as we might have been trying to make LED segments and so on display information thirty years ago.

A propos of the debate on IT/Computer Science ...

Finally thanks are due to the British Broadcasting Corporation. Thirty years ago they commissioned the building of the BBC Microcomputer to support the BBC Computer Literacy Project. Designed for school children, the manuals for this computer started with over 500 pages devoted to computer programming (from scratch) using BBC Basic. There were less than 50 pages at the very end of the second volume on how to use the computer as a word processor. BBC BASIC was a sophisticated, structured interpretive programming language that could create coloured graphics using simple commands, allowed recursive functions (one that can call themselves) and much else. ... All the graphics in this book were produced on [a BBC computer] with just ... four standard programs.

Daniel Dorling, "The Visualization of Spatial Social Structure", Chichester:Wiley (emphasis mine)

 

I scanned a book ...

... all of it, for the first time yesterday. It's a book called "Short Papers on Church History, Vol. 1", by Andrew Miller. The preface is dated 1873, and there are about 600 pages and no illustrations.

What's the point? For some years, I've been bugged by the fact that there is a vast treasure-trove of literature represented by books that are no longer available. Other people are addressing this in a more organised manner - Project Gutenberg prepares and makes available electronic versions of out-of-copyright books. I've done some "volunteering" for them, through the PGDP (Distributed Proofreading) website - I did the post-processing of "A Scout of To-day" and "The Captive in Patagonia", and I'm hoping I've done the post-processing of a 1920s Pharmacopeia sufficiently well that this will be published soon.

The Internet Archive is also endeavouring to scan old books from libraries and wherever else they can be find, and make the scans available - this is being used as a resource of books that can be OCRed for Project Gutenberg. Google are doing similar things - however, although they are grabbing information that is out of copyright, as a corporation rather than a public concern, they are less interested in making this publicly available.

Having volunteered for PG, I have a lot of sympathy with their aims and what they are trying to do. However, I also disagree with the approach they have taken in some areas. For example, the downside of leaving their output "open" is that there's technically little to stop people grabbing the text, chopping off the PG bits, and then "publishing" it as "their" e-book. There's not loads of money to be made from this, but neither is there any effort or real risk involved. PG could avoid this by publishing their own copies directly onto Amazon (for example), charging a token fee (which could be ploughed back into the foundation) and using their space on Amazon to highlight the care taken over their transcriptions. But since it was founded on a basis of "freely available" - a laudable principle - this is a direction that they are reluctant to move in. The consequence of taking themselves out of the marketplace unfortunately does them few favours.

I also think they are excessively careful in their process of text production. The ideal is for a text to go through three stages of proofreading - and this is done VERY thoroughly, followed by two stages where formatting is put back into the text. Finally, there is post-processing - here, HTML and TXT versions are generated. All well and good - but the fact of the matter is that this is being done far more carefully than the proofreading process by which the books were originally prepared. Thus, a significant amount of time in this process is spent wondering whether or not to preserve errors and inconsistencies in the original. This is an important aspect of paleography, as a friend pointed out yesterday - but less relevant in the era of large volume printing. Timewise, the process is thus dominated by large amounts of time spent scanning for minor errors - commas transcribed as full stops; digit 1s transcribed as letter ls, and so on. This is where new PGDP volunteers start, and unfortunately, large numbers never get beyond this. Whilst this is an important part of the process, the fact that so many of the people who are sufficiently interested in the process to volunteer don't last very long is a problem. The final issue is the "voluntary sector defensiveness" - my experience in conversations with people on their forums led me to see that the people immersed in the system rapidly got prickly when I made comments about issues that I saw. I understand this - it's as irritating as anything to have newbies telling you that you're doing things wrong - but at the same time, the failure of the website to convert large numbers of enthusiastic people into long-term volunteers is a big issue.

New OCR software is much more adept at recognising texts. My scanning of the book yesterday was in part to see how ABBYY FineReader 10 coped. The answer is, pretty well. From a couple of hours scanning, I ended up with a pre-proofread text of the whole book. Typically, it generated about 5-10 queries per page - this represents a substantial checking requirement, over 600 pages - and also obviously issues with formatting. However, as a proportion of the text it's low. It leads me to think that it would be possible to produce an electronic text from a scanned book in a manageable time-frame, without having to do it the PG way. Perhaps it won't come close to the perfection of PG books - see the challenge laid down by Michael Hart regarding Carroll's "Alice" books. But it would at least help to get the texts of old, obscure books into the public arena.

Update

I've just updated my template. I don't know what effect this will have, or whether everything will work any more, or if it means I've just lost all the comments again. But I suspect the pros outweigh the cons.

The early bird

I'm still in a language place at the moment, although I'll be starting AA100 at Open University shortly, which means general foundation arts. One of the things that interests me is the process of translation - I've really enjoyed Bellos's book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything in this context, and subsequently Guy Deutscher's books "Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages" and "The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention".

In this context, I like playing with is the way in which idiomatic expressions transfer between languages. This morning, I plugged "The early bird catches the worm" into Google Translate, to see what it came up with. The French translation came up as "l'oiseau tôt attrape le ver" - very good, very accurate. I also discovered that Google Translate basically had a "slot" for the translation of "early ... catches the worm", and it is quite happy for you to plug any other noun in that place. If you want to say that an early pig, hope or friendship, they will simply be substituted. I managed to fool it by writing "abs" in place of "bird" - it then offered "au début des années abs attrape le ver" - a word it couldn't translate interrupted the "known pattern" of "early ... catches the worm".

Spanish was different. The translation immediately offered was: "Al que madruga, dios le ayuda." This is a dynamic translation - it's an idiomatic form in Spanish, which is broadly equivalent, the exact meaning of which is something like "The one who rises early, God helps." If you get Google Translate to convert the Spanish phrase into English, it also goes for the colloquialism as the translation, rather than a word for word equivalence.

This is interesting for several reasons. First, it highlights the difference between different forms of translation - what the ancient Greeks might have called metaphrase and paraphrase, or what we might distinguish today as dynamic and formal equivalence. Dynamic equivalence is designed to give the same sense to people speaking a different language - the substitution of a phrase like "The early bird..." with "Al que madruga..." gets across the sense of this being a "well known phrase or saying". The formal equivalent for the Spanish phrase is the one I gave above.

The other interesting reason is the fact that, whilst both the Spanish and English phrases broadly fulfil the same function in the language, they imply subtly different things. The sense of the English phrase is that "you are more likely to succeed if you're early" - self-improver. The sense of the Spanish phrase is "God is more likely to help you if you're early" - moral judgement. Or am I reading too much into it?

"Funnily Enough" - Sophie Neville

The thread that took me to this book is quite long and thin. I love the "Swallows and Amazons" books, which led to me discovering as a grown-up Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint's Trunk by Christina Hardyment, and also the film of "Swallows and Amazons". Then I wanted to know what the young Actors in "Swallows and Amazons" did next, and that took me to Sophie Neville's website, where I discovered that there was a book!

Neville has written about a year of her life when, after establishing herself in a career working for the BBC, she found herself suffering from Post-Viral Fatigue / M.E. It's not a book to read if you are looking for great drama, but it is full of perceptive and humorous accounts of gentle (and occasionally not-so-gentle!) domestic life observed by someone who was forced at times to be little more than an observer. Along the way, we also see her wrestling to find any effective treatment, and also trying to understand how to reconcile her Christian faith with the frustrations of her illness. There's also lots of information about otters (! - how's that for a teaser?).

If your life has been affected by M.E., or you want to understand what it's like for somebody, then this is an excellent book. But more than that, if you are interested in a picture of the regular comings and goings of a normal family, then you'll find "Funnily Enough" a delight to read.

"Swallows and Amazons"

We went to see Swallows and Amazons, the stage version, at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury this week. The Marlowe has apparently been relatively recently refurbished, and is lovely, within easy walking distance of large numbers of car parks (though without its own dedicated parking, I believe), and Canterbury itself feels like a very safe place to be in the evening - a less busy version of York.

As a book, Swallows and Amazons presents itself as being quite "realist" - it's a story of children camping on an island in a lake in the Lake District, and not a lot happens. The people on the children's literature course that I was studying (EA300) who were reading the book for the first time often found it remarkably dull - which was quite shocking to me, to whom the whole series meant a huge amount when I was growing up. So it seems quite incongruous for the play to be presented as it was. For a start, it is a musical - a format which structurally cements a relationship with fantasy (how many people do you know that burst into a lyrically relevant new song to accompany significant events?). And then it has adults acting as the children. And then, rather than trying to use props and sets to realistically portray the events, it merely symbolises them. The picture above (from here) shows the Walker children sailing the boat Swallow. Roger (the ship's boy) is holding the front of the boat; Susan holds up the sail and John holds the back of it. The water is represented by other people in blue coats holding the blue and white ribbons.

This is all ingenious, and in fact demonstrates how powerful the imagination of the audience is. And this is significant because, as we discovered when studying the book, Swallows and Amazons is all about imagination. The children's imaginative play (the Amazons, Nancy and Peggy Blacketts' self-identity as pirates; the Swallows imagination of themselves as a naval commander, a homemaker or Robinson Crusoe) is the real heart of the story. In Peter Pan, James Barrie reluctantly accepts that children have to grow out of their imaginative world if they are to grow up. In Swallows and Amazons, the effect of the children's imaginative play is actually to transform the adult world - Uncle Jim/Captain Flint's book is saved from burglars, and he recovers his soul.

The play is thoroughly engaging. I got a little teary when I realised how it was evoking the story for me, early on. Towards the end, the cast venture more into the audience, and involves them directly with the battle on the houseboat and at the end, during the closing song, models of Swallow and Amazon are passed around the audience. I don't go to the theatre enough, and I love it when I do go, but I've not seen a play which is so capable of showing children the imaginative power of theatre, and indeed the power of imagination. This deserves great praise.

Reflections on "A Week in December"

Literature

I've only read one other book by Faulks - not Birdsong, unusually, but Human Traces. That book was remarkable, as a work of historical fiction, as well as the articulation of quite complex ideas. This had elements in common with it. Faulks continues to explore the idea of the voices that humans hear in their heads, this phenomenon which sets us aside from other creatures, now in a present-day context. There were also an abundance of intertextual references. The framework of preparations for a dinner party reminded me of Mrs Dalloway, there were references that I guess were fairly deliberate to Brave New World, and I suspect (though I haven't read it) that The Bonfire of the Vanities was thrown in there as well.

Faulks writes within the book: "Culturally, it had remained impossible for a realistic British novelist to transcend Leicester or Stoke; the place names alone seemed to laugh at the idea." This is, I guess, a postmodern touch (forgive my artlessness, I'm really not fluent in literature yet). Other significant playing was with the character of the narcissistic, bitter critic, R. Tranter, obsessed with wanting to find fame and yet not celebrity by any means. But unusually for a realist book, it seems that most characters found some redemption, even including Tranter.

Banking

What literary interest can there be in finance? Why should I care about it? Does it really tell us anything important about the human condition? Of course - it shapes our world. On the basis of The Devil's Casino, and All the Devils are Here, I'd say that Faulks has done a good job of trying to comprehend and then explain what exactly happened - better than the job done in these journalistic accounts, and without breaking the narrative! He highlights the underlying moral vacuum, but where I think Faulks goes wrong is in making his character John Veals, the hugely successful fund manager, so thoroughly unsympathetic. One thing which emerges from the journalists' analysis of the events is that people are people. You can't really have sympathy for the devil - but most times, it seems, he is actually in disguise. Had the banking industry said, "We are going to invent financial instruments that will bring down the economy of the Western world and bankrupt nations," of course everybody would have been appalled. But they didn't: they just promised to look after our savings and our pensions, and provide us with money for houses and the things we wanted.

The exit of the UK from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism should have been a wake-up call - or maybe by then it was already too late. Financial organisations made a killing betting against the wealth of a nation. The "market" by now no longer bore any resemblance to the place to which a farmer would take a cow to sell. It was a ravening beast, capable of devouring anything it felt like, including whole countries. Margaret Thatcher said, "You can't buck the market," apparently a statement of her philosophy, but in truth signifying the capitulation of Western political power to a more powerful force.

Islam

It's a brave author who goes into print discussing the Muslim religion, following the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Faulks has nonetheless done so. He accepts that mainstream Islam, as a religion, provides comfort, structure and identity. But he argues that its roots, like all such religious grounded in revelation, look more like the product of psychosis than something which transcends humanity. Gabriel, the unsuccessful barrister, compares the words of the Koran with those of his schizophrenic brother's delusions.

Unlike with finance, in the context of religion, Faulks' "devils" are in disguise. The driving force for fanaticism isn't the ranting of imams, but calm, gently-spoken and apparently normal people. Hassan, the young Muslim, finds himself in a group planning an appalling atrocity with the word jihad barely mentioned.

It's a stern portrait of the religion. Christians should take little comfort, however. In this "state of the nation" novel, the fact that Faulks has nothing of significance to say about Christianity constitutes a sterner rebuke.

Mugging grannies

Now here's interesting ....

A lot of fuss has been made about the "granny tax" that the government has "imposed" in this budget. The Mirror went as far as to describe it as a mugging. (See here if you can bring yourself to visit their website.)

I certainly have issues with some aspects of the budget, but this, as it happens, is not one of them. The Financial Times has pointed out (free registration required) how relatively well-off the retired population are, certainly compared to the younger generation, and the Institute of Fiscal Studies points out that this "mugging" represents a loss of income of about one quarter of one percent in 2014. 50% of pensioners (the poor grannies that you have in mind, perhaps) don't actually pay income tax at all. The new process for increasing state pension guarantees that its value will increase at least as fast as inflation in future. And the "perfidious coalition partners", the Liberals, are seeking to secure a standard basic pension of £140 per person.

Furthermore, the way in which the government is approaching this - freezing the allowance available to pensioners whilst increasing the general allowance - can hardly be considered that painful; it's not as though extra money is being taken away. The previous Labour government froze the allowance for everybody - by this token, it could be accused of mugging the whole population. Of course, this doesn't make for quite the dramatic imagery evoked by talking about mugging grannies ....

For a more balanced perspective, see the BBC's Nick Robinson's comment here.