There’s no divorce in Bitcoin

There’s no divorce in Bitcoin

I attended a presentation hosted by the BCS, and given by Ron Ballard, based on his article in IT Now, “Blockchain: the facts and the fiction”. What he said inspired some thoughts and reminded me of others, some of which I have previously published on my blog. I wrote an article, called Learnings of Bitcoin, which was meant to be a spoof on the Borat film title and posted it on my linkedin blog, The article looks at the tight coupling of Bitcoin, and its consensus mechanism, the proof of work, together with its costs and vulnerabilities. It examines the goal of eliminating trust authorities and its questionable ability to meet the necessary roles of money as a means of exchange and a store of wealth. In the comment pushing it, I say, "This might be a bit basic for some, but you can't have a coinless immutable blockchain, at least not one based on 'proof of work'.", at which point you need to consider if there are better data storage platforms for your use case. I use more words to explore these issues below/overleaf ....

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude

I should have more sympathy, but Unite’s United Left,, have just conducted an e-ballot, to determine who should be the UL’s candidate for General Secretary when Len McClusky stands down, which will have to be in the next two years. McClusky and his close supporters prefer Howard Beckett, currently Director of Legal and Politics, and he is being opposed by Steve Turner, the Union’s most senior industrial organiser, and currently Assistant General Secretary. E-Ballots are hard to run, particularly over the internet. Beckett lost be three votes and is claiming that the ballot should be re-run; I, of course, am laughing my arse off, as so many of Beckett’s supporters and he himself, felt that over Brexit, the I and the rest of the British people should be denied a ‘final say’ by having a re-run of the referendum, 🤣 …

On Record Management

On Record Management

As part of my series on devising systems to create logs to protect an organisation and its staff against charges of criminality, I posted an article on my linkedin blog called “Doing Record Management well”. It doesn’t surprise me that there is an ISO Standard (ISO 15489) on the subject, but it does surprise me that I hadn’t heard of it until I started to research some of the articles in this series.

I have a research note on my wiki, which links to the Bank of England policy and also quotes Deutsche Bank’s policy, which is available because they post it on internet. I quote it here,

Deutsche Bank’s code of conduct, see page 25, says, among other things,

“Maintaining accurate books and records is fundamental to meeting our legal, regulatory and business requirements. You are responsible for maintaining accurate and complete records and for complying with all the controls and policies our bank has in place. You should never falsify any book, record or account that relates to the business of our bank, its customers, employees (including your own activities within our bank) or suppliers. You must never dispose of records or information that may be relevant to pending or threatened litigation or a regulatory proceeding unless you are authorised to do so by the Legal Department. You must also comply with applicable record retention policies.”

DB Code of Conduct
 …

Labour and the 4 Day Week

Labour and the 4 Day Week

This is the text of the Working Hours resolution at #Lab19, calling for a 4 day week with no loss of pay.

Composite 8 -Working Hours

Working time is a major industrial and political issue in the UK. This conference is seriously concerned that compared to other countries in Europe, we have some of the worst public and statutory holiday entitlements; full-time workers have amongst the longest hours of any country; UK workers work unpaid overtime worth billions of pounds; and with the forthcoming increase in the state pension age, we will have the longest working lives.

But this has not delivered benefits to workers: average pay is lower than before the financial crash; productivity lags significantly behind other countries; and in-work stress is at record levels. The recent report from Autonomy and the 4 Day Week Campaign outlines the health and wellbeing costs of overwork. Work-related anxiety, stress or depression accounts for half of all working days lost to ill health.

Instead of building a country that works for everyone the Tories are building a country in which you work until you drop –and with the current imbalance of power in the economy, new technology and automation risk exacerbating this by continuing to intensify work, polarise terms and conditions and replace jobs entirely.

Conference believes there is a growing consensus around reductions in working time, including support from the TUC, STUC, Labour Party frontbenchers, individual unions and 63% of the population and that reducing the standard working week, with no loss of pay, must be a central pledge in the manifesto and a key aim of a Labour government.

In particular, Conference believes this should be part of the strategy to address under-employment, build a more sustainable economy, boost productivity and ensure workers benefit from the 4th industrial revolution and leads to opportunities for parents and a decrease in gender inequality.

Conference believes Labour should support the aims of Labour for a 4 day week campaign, go beyond the pledge to introduce four new public holidays and commit in the next manifesto to set out a plan to achieve a standard four day or 32 hour gross week with no loss of pay within a decade through sectoral collective bargaining and a new ‘UK Shorter Working Time Directive.’

Mover: CWU
Seconder: Perth and Kinross CLP
 …

STV & the Labour Party

STV & the Labour Party

There’s a sudden revival of interest in STV as the LP adopts it as a means of electing the CLP reps. There are in my mind, three problems with STV for party managers and one for voters. The fact that “order” can be critical in the results is important. When combined with the degree of discipline within Party voting blocs and the propensity to bleed votes from the block, getting the quota early is of advantage to parties/slates. The problem of avoiding having large numbers of your votes trapped in the losing quota is also critically important for party/slate managers particularly if the quota is high.

The Order based nature of STV counting leads to a series of well-known problems with STV in that it is one of the easier systems to game and has a number of design features which encourage manipulative or gaming behaviour. Voting systems have properties, categorised by academic writing. STV is not monotone, participative, consistent nor does it meet the No-Betrayer criteria.

There is no strategy that can compensate for a bloc’s voters not voting for all the candidates in the slate. Even within the activist or membership layer, many are more committed to their faction than to the Party, which may lead people to desert their first choice slate for another as the individual candidates become distasteful to the voter. I am curious if we could model the effect this ‘bleed’. The speed of desertion may well be determined by the slate construction as some on the slate might be exceptionally unacceptable to the otherwise loyal electorate. We should also note that not transferring reduces the quota[1] and so is equivalent to a (part) vote for all remaining candidates and acts as de-facto vote in favour of the highest remaining contender.

Early success militates against having votes lost in the losing quota, particularly as the STV transfers surpluses before eliminating candidates.

If running a complete slate, the offer of a recommendation to support as a second choice is not worth so much.

The disadvantage to voters is that their optimal strategy may not involve voting in a straightforward way as it may be best if someone likely to pick up a lot of transfers is eliminated before the transfers occur. This is more acute in instant run-off elections and depends on whether they want a candidate to win or prefer that others lose.

I can’t see what to do about weak discipline. If we take the example of the UK where we have Labour, the Greens, the Lib Dems and the Tories, we can see how people, who’s first choice might be, say, Labour might switch to the Green list after one or two votes for what ever reason and the Greens might go in both directions to Labour or to the LibDems. The system is designed to have this effect.


[1] This is the failure to meet the Participation Effect. …

Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge Graphs

I attended a Capco/Semantic Web Company webinar, on Knowledge Graphs which provoked these thoughts, on how far we’ve come, new solutions to old problems and the social inhibitors to new technology adoption. The complexity of the data administration problem is why specialist tools have been developed and matured to the point that Gartner produce a Magic Quadrant on Meta Data Management tools, in which the Semantic Web company’s Pool Party appears as a visionary. The MQ report is currently being distributed, as is normal, by one of the “Leaders”, Informatica.

Andreas Blumaur, who was one of the speakers, repeated his suggestion, start small with committed users and that possibly the best 1st solution is a semantic search. (I thinl I’ll have another look at implementing something on my wiki.)

I have felt for a while that semantic web technology could be used to match work to resource in the cloud, with cloud entities advertising their capability using XML, it shouldnn’t be a stretch and with Azure, these systems are being defined in XML. The other application that interests me is if the XML/RDF models can be used to create a model of the person in the enterprise, maybe implemented in SQL; my current researches have not been fruitful. …

Labour’s leak, rights of privacy and the public interest

This is the first part of my three part article on the Labour leak of a management report into the activities of Labour’s Governance and Legal Unit (GLU) in its handling of anti-semitism complaints. This part looks at the act of the leak, the legal (or lack of) immunities, the rights of the employees and those of the management and the anti-corruption laws, basically the legal position outside the rules of the Party. For more, see overleaf ...

Voting Systems Theory and STV

Voting Systems Theory and STV

It is important to understand that a bunch of clever people have thought hard about voting systems; we don’t have to invent this. I remember that our management in Sun Professional Services tried to imbue us with the mantra, “Innovate, Don’t Reinvent” and others have declared that the process of innovation is standing on the shoulders of giants. Voting system qualities known as criteria have been defined. There may be some as yet undiscovered criteria, but it would be best if we debate the pro’s and con’s using an agreed categorisation and science.

One has to be brilliant to be both in a minority and right, and most of us are not that brilliant.

Wikipedia, on their article, Comparison of Electoral Systems, says this,

Attitudes towards systems are highly influenced by the systems’ impact on groups that one supports or opposes, which can make the objective comparison of electoral systems difficult. … To compare methods fairly and independently of political ideologies, voting theorists use voting method criteria, which define potentially desirable properties of voting methods mathematically.

Wikipedia – Comparison of Electoral Systems

One thing we should note is that not all criteria can be applied to all systems, the key differences are between single winner systems, and multiple winner systems and then between list based and non-list based systems.

While some consider and seek to judge instant run off elections, sometimes referred to as the Alternate Vote as a special case of STV i.e. an STV with only one winner, the fact that there is only one winner makes it a separate and quite different system. This is shown by the fact that it passes and fails different voting criteria. Also, in AV elections, there is no transfer of a surplus votes and the minority i.e. the wasted voted can be as high as 50% – 1. This is better than simple plurality systems where the losing proportion can easily be quite high majorities. It seems to me that one critical goal of democratic voting systems should be to ensure that the “wasted” or losing votes are as small as possible.

Some criteria only apply to singe winner elections, and while it’s hard to game an STV election, it is not impossible. Games can be played by candidate/parties or by voters. STV’s problems come from the fact that surpluses and eliminations occur in an order and thus transfers are impacted by this ordering.

The Wikipedia article tests STV against 7 voting systems criteria and fails it on five. Some of the criteria seem to be remarkably similar and, it seems to me, all relate to honesty and motivation in voting behaviour and how the voting system reflects this honesty. STV fails the Monotonicity Criterion as there are cases where you can support your preferred candidate by down ranking them. It fails the Consistency criterion, probably by design and I am not sure it’s all that desirable, but this is about sub-set aggregation which can’t be done in STV. It also fails the Participation criterioan, that your voice is always stronger if you vote, and “No favourite betrayal”, where you have no incentive to vote for anyone other than your favourite.

It’s certainly not perfect but we should learn from thinkers that have gone before us.  …

Fatal Weaknesses

Fatal Weaknesses

This is part II of my commentary on the Labour Leak, it looks at the missteps and failures to control the bureaucracy from 2015 to 2019 and looks at the structural faults, the need for a robust segregation of duties, how Labour has changed its rules to make expulsion of alleged antisemites or troublemaker’s easier and how McNicol’s eventual departure allowed both damage to be continued and a cover-up to become deeply embedded within the Party.