General Election 2019 - the Minor Parties' Manifestos - what I do like, what I don't like

The Minor Parties and their Manifestos

Minor party manifestos aren't going to become official government policy, but they can be a useful proving ground for some new ideas. the government can adopt some of those policies as a quid pro quo for support on other issues, or they can steal them outright and take the credit. Unless you're a party member you don't care either way, as long as they're good ideas.
In that spirit, I'm going to review some of the good ideas from the minor parties, and some of the ones that sound like good ideas but aren't.
This is just my opinion, but please tell me why if you think I'm wrong, otherwise I'll never learn.

Lib Dems:

Jo Swinson took some stick at the beginning of the campaign for trying to make out she's a challenger for PM - she isn't, but the Lib Dems could be a majority government one day. Their policies are generally pretty centrist and mainstream, but they can't think beyond local government or the next election cycle. They need to build strategies that will get them there in fifteen to twenty years, not five.

Anyway, the policies...

What I like:

• Legal, regulated selling of cannabis. It works in many parts of America and seems to have made kids less likely to smoke, it's probably ready to be tried here.
• A penny on income tax - at least they're being honest, and in isolation would help reduce the deficit.
• Reduce the wait for payments on Universal Credit from five weeks to five days. This is the number one problem that people coming to Citizens Advice had with the new regime. If they can't do this then the system isn't ready and shouldn't be rolled out until it is.

What I don't like:

Plenty. The expansion to free childcare sounds like a great idea until you realise that the current scheme is bankrupting providers. The renewables targets sound great, except they're just going to throw money at it, which means we'll end up with out-of-date tech when the market could provide the answers given time and investment in battery technology. The gig economy measures are just more state and government interference in a system that is already too complicated. The skills wallet is a gimmick, making HE loans more widely available would drive better behaviours. Gambling levies, minimum unit alcohol pricing, auditing food security, so much of their agenda is surprisingly illiberal, nanny-state meddling.

The Greens

What I like:

• Universal Basic Income. I am still undecided whether this is actually a good idea or not. It tries to solve the dilemma that a rich society like ours should never let anyone be destitute, but everyone should always be better off when they work to support themselves. It's an idea that needs to be tested.
• Voting reform. Again, this is something I'm still undecided on, but we need to talk about Proportional Representation seriously.

Brexit Party

They're not just a one-issue party any more, despite only being invented last Tuesday!

What I like:

• Voting reform, including abolishing the unelected House of Lords. As above.
• Reform business rates. This is something little understood outside local government, and does not work well. Not so keen on the online sales tax idea though.
• Reduce import tariffs. Death to mercantilism!
• Exempt small business with profits under £50,000 from Corporation tax.
• Change Planning to help housebuilding. Increasing the supply is the only way to fix the housing problems in this country, and the planning system is a big part of doing that.

What I don't like:

Reducing Immigration. I think that this one should be buried. Immigration should be what the country needs it to be. Australia wants more immigration to bring in skills it lacks, Germany wants more to rectify demographic imbalances. Sometimes Britain will want more for these and other reasons, sometimes we will want less. Arbitrary targets, either way, are stupid.

Because I Want to Know Everything!

I'm the kind of person who wants to know everything.

 

Literally, everything. Everything the greatest minds of humankind have discovered since the dawn of history. Everything we're about to discover. Everything we'll never fully understand, which the best and brightest of our species are starting to wonder about. Space. Physics. Linguistics. Sharks. Physiology. Neurology. Persuasion. Marketing.

 

Obviously, it's not possible to know everything, I know this, but I can't help how I'm made.

 

When I learn something new, something that shifts my perspective and helps me see the world differently it makes go a little giddy and want to laugh out loud. And then I want to go and share it with someone else.

 

If you're reading this, there's a good chance you feel the same. Blessedly, I've come to realise we're not alone. In fact there are millions of people out there just like us, from every continent, background and race. A great book* I finished recently has a name for us - "neophiles." We love new things. We love having our assumptions destroyed, our minds changed, and our paradigms shifted.

 

One of the earliest lessons we learn in school is that not everyone is like us. Most people are "neophobes" – they enjoy the comfort of familiarity. New ideas that challenge them are upsetting and hurtful. Fnord. They choose to live in social media echo chambers, where they are told over and over that they're right, that what they already believe is correct, only bad people think differently, and when reality intrudes and corrects them they can become distraught.

 

During my undergraduate degree, studying History at a very reputable University, I was mostly surrounded by neophobes. Students, obviously, and this was before the advent of "Generation Snowflake". They have always indulged in intellectual and political orthodoxy while believing they're rebelling against authority.

 

Educators can be just as bad. They boast about teaching students to be free thinkers and to question assumptions, but nevertheless lead them into the same old straits, probably without even realising it. I once tried to suggest to an American professor that the American War of Independence wasn't really a revolution, but rather a coup d'état.

His response was just to dismiss the idea out of hand.

 

Conversely, I met a lot of neophiles when I did my postgrad degree, most of which was distance learning. It turns out that's the mind-set that makes you willing to pay thousands of pounds and spend hundreds of hours locked in a shed reading academic articles and writing essays.

 

Of course, I have to mention the web. The internet, and more importantly, the dark web, is the Realm of Infinite Fun for a neophile. Not only can we find each other, flocking on social media after the coolest curators of esoterica, but it also gives us more primary sources to learn from than ever. One can scoff at Wikipedia, but it remains a great starting point for educating yourself in almost anything, and the rabbit hole goes pretty deep once you're on Google Scholar or in the depths of a private forum for some obscure special interest.

 

So, if you're also a neophile. Please find me on twitter @unscarred_j and tell me something cool you learned recently. It's an ill wind that blows no minds.

 

*Illuminatus! by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea

The Hundredth Man

In which I will demonstrate that almost anything can become a blog post.

"The Hundredth Man" is the title of a murder mystery novel by Jack Kerley I recently finished reading. It's not Chaucer, but it's good enough that I immediately moved onto the sequel.

The title refers to a joke made by the hero's partner:

"A guy is walking his mutt named Fido down the street when he spots a man on his hands and knees under a streetlight.
"The dog walker asks the man if he's lost something. Man says, 'Yeah, my contact lens popped out.' So the dog walker ties Fido to a phone pole and gets down on his hands and knees to help. They search up and down, back and forth, beneath that light. Fifteen minutes later the dog walker says, 'Buddy, I can't find it anywhere. Are you sure it popped out here?' The man says 'No, I lost it in the park.' 'The park? the dog walker yells. 'Then why the hell are we looking in the street?'
"The man points to the streetlamp and says, 'The light's better here'"

So, if 99 out of 100 people look in the light where it's easy to search, relying on futile hope, the hero is the hundredth man, the one who gropes about in the dark.

No prizes for guessing who's more likely to find it.

We're all guilty at some time in out professional lives of choosing a course of action because it's easy or comfortable, even if we know deep-down that it's not going to work. The modern work environment shields us from the consequences of this - we can show we were doing SOMETHING, so failure is excused.

A good consultant will tell you to your face if you're being daft, if you're wasting your time with something that won't work, and politely steer you back to what you should have done in the first place. We will help you concentrate on what will make a big difference to your business, and delegate - or ignore - what won't.

The best will even teach you to tell the difference!

Beating the appraisal blues for good

The other day an email came around my department announcing the timetable for the annual review and appraisal process. Inwardly I groaned, and a knot started to form in my stomach.
This is a process which I have tried to engage in honestly and constructively for years, with disappointing results. Some managers treat it as a tick box exercise, others as a way of enforcing their authority or bargaining down requests for a pay rise or promotion.
Some do their best to make it valuable, but they're usually stymied by their manager's goals and the budgeting process. Regardless of whether I emerge from the final meeting with a good or mediocre rating, or even a healthy bonus, I can't think of one time when what I contributed actually made a real difference.
That's why reading that email gave me the creeping dread. Then, as I was a about to file the email away, my mood suddenly lifted and was replaced by a smugness bordering on joyful. Why? Because I'm a contractor, so none of that applies to me anymore.
I've only been contracting for a few months, but I love the sense of freedom and control over my future, as well as the improved financial rewards. It had its downsides: lack of security, jumping through bureaucratic hoops to set up a limited company, business bank accounts, VAT registration, payroll service, accounting, and so on, but I accept those. Even the lack of security is a feature of the honesty of your relationship with the client - you will be retained as long as your skills are sufficiently valuable. There it's no pretence of loyalty, nor is it demanded in return.
Coming back to the annual appraisal, I realised I don't need to fill in forms to plan my professional development, and I never have. All those development plans were there to make me more valuable to my employer, not more valuable to potential future employers, and certainly not more valuable to myself. I now plan my development for the job I want to do in five years time, not the job my manager wants me to do in six months.
And I'm happier that way.

Accountex 2013

I visited Accountex 2013 on Thursday at the Excel centre in London. This is a very quick post on my impressions, please don't take this as a comprehensive review.

The centre itself is a very pleasant environment, easy to get to from Waterloo via Jubilee line then DLR. It's very similar to the NEC in Birmingham, but probably better served for food outlets.

The show was professionally put together, with a good number of exhibitors. Partially as a result, it felt a little cramped - all the stalls very close to each other. Also, the "theatres" would have benefitted from being a bit bigger, as they frequently lacked sufficient seating and were very close to each other, so sound inevitably bled through.

As far as content goes, there wasn't a huge amount there for my interests. I found it heavily skewed towards accountants in practice; there were several companies performing document digitisation and management, and firms selling accounting packages aimed at the SME market (Sage, Xero and Intuit were there, but no sign of, for example, Oracle, SAP or IBM, or the many companies that support their finance systems). It was a similar story when it comes to tax and investment advice.

By contrast, there was very little for accountants like me who work in industry. That may explain why the CIMA-sponsored "Accountants in Business" theatre seemed to be standing-room-only for every session - aside from some of the keynote sessions it was the only venue that had talks I found relevant and interesting, and apparently I wasn't alone.

The most important thing at any conference - the freebies - was also a bit disappointing. Probably due to the current depressing state of the economy. I came away with a few biros, a book of accountant jokes, some mints and a lot of brochures, but not much else.

I don't want to sound too down on it, I think I'm just not the demographic they were targeting. If I was in practice, particularly if I ran my own small-but-growing practice, it probably would have been immensely valuable and interesting.

Will I go next year? Maybe, it depends what direction it develops in. Today I'm not sure why CIMA are involved as it's really not that relevant to their membership. However, accountants in business are a significant group, and the show is relatively young, so if they turn their attention in that direction I'm sure they will do it really well.

Workflows for small research projects

I never actually got round to writing the follow-up to those old blog posts, but I decided to republish them more or less verbatim as they're good background.

Software

As far as the software goes, Zotero very quickly won. I didn't get very far at all with JabRef. Maybe that's my lack of patience, but I think Zotero is actually a more complete tool for research. I suspect if you need to be able to output in LaTeX formats you might feel differently, but for me it was more important to be able to organise my academic sources quickly and easily.

I started off using the Firefox plugin version of Zotero, but as I prefer Chrome I now use the standalone version and a linking plugin. There are binaries available on the Zotero download page for Linux, Windows and OS X. If like me you use Ubuntu (or a variant like Linux Mint), I recommend installing using this method for simplicity's sake.

There's an Android client called Zandy that works, but could do with a bit more development. I'll come back to that.

I don't know if there's an iOS app. If you know of one, please leave a link in the comments.

Once you've installed Zotero, launched it, created an account, and recorded your username and password in the Zotero sync settings (your research library will be backed up automatically), you can start identifying your academic resources.

Workflow

For short essays I use Google Scholar almost exclusively. It doesn't have everything, but it has most academic papers and books you're likely to need.

I start off with the reading list and any references from my notes on the subject and use Google to find copies online. If you register your University's library in the Google Scholar settings you will be presented with direct links. As long as you're logged in to your University account you should be able to get free access to almost anything.

I use Zotero to grab the bibliographical links to the articles (there should be an icon on the right hand side of the address bar of your browser, click it and if necessary select the article you want to grab), and save them in a folder - I will usually have a folder named for the module I'm studying, then a sub-folder for that particular essay. You can also copy the PDF version of the article to the bibliographical record, which is a good way to keep track of your sources and build your own mini research library. Sometimes you can download the PDF directly to Zotero, and it will grab the bibliographical information automagically. I found this feature varied in effectiveness depending on the source website.

In addition to the bibligraphical information downloaded automatically, I like to add a few tags to highlight themes or keywords, to remind myself why I selected that article. These tags are searchable, so as you build up your library you'll be able to go back and look for old articles relevant to a new research project.

A word of caution: don't blindly trust that Zotero will grab the right information! Sometimes the data source isn't great, and you can end up with garbled data or a different article's information. Depending how you intend to use this, it's also worth checking if you've grabbed the abstract. If not, you can copy that in manually. It's worth putting in the time up-front to ensure the library you're building is effective, accurate and complete.

If you have a physical textbook you want to refer to (you know, the really expensive one written by the course Professor and only available in hardback, and yes, you have to buy the latest edition), I find Amazon is often a better source of bibliographical data.

Google Scholar's real strength is helping you find new sources that can add a new perspective and ultimately improve the quality of your research (and hopefully get you a better grade). Type in keywords related to your subject, and see what pops up. Look up the record for one of your existing sources, and follow the "cited by" link to see how other academics have used that article and what their viewpoint might add. Has someone from a different discipline adapted the ideas in an interesting way, and what can you learn from that.

For short essays, you should be careful not to spend too long doing this, for reasons regular users of Wikipedia will already be aware of.

On the subject of Wikipedia (a great place to start your research, a terrible place to finish it), Zotero can also record bibliographical data for individual webpages, including when it was accessed and grab a snapshot of that page. This is great for referring to newspaper articles and similar.

While doing your research, you can sync Zotero to any of your computers, or just access your library through the website. This makes it easy to carry on your reading wherever you are. On the move, Zandy allows you to access those PDFs you've saved to Zotero, which works pretty well on my Nexus 7 tablet. If I want to make notes I either take my netbook with me or print them out and annotate them by hand - I can transfer the most relevant notes to Zotero when I'm back at my desk.

In a short essay you will probably refer to every one of your relatively few sources directly. The easiest way to build your reference list is to select everything in your Zotero folder, then right-click and select "Create Bibliography from Items". Select the format you want to use (I use Harvard, per my University's guidelines) and the Output Method (I either use RTF or just copy to clipboard). Generally you will probably want to produce a bibliography rather than citations. You can then just paste the results at the end of your essay - this alone will probably save you an hour or so of laborious copying and typing.

Conclusion

I've really found Zotero to be incredibly useful of the last three years, and I've now started using it for the big Project and Dissertation at the end of my MBA course. There's a few significant changes to the workflow for a larger project like that which I'll go into in my next blog post.

Research Management Software

Originally published 28th September 2011:

As I mentioned in my last post, I've recently returned from the annual September Seminar at Warwick Business School. It finished with a half day workshop on the Project and Dissertation which was very helpful in that it gave me a much better idea of how to approach this daunting exercise.

Two things in particular became obvious to me - the first is that I will need to do a helluva lot of reading.
The second is I need to track what I read and keep it organised so I can make use of it to inform my decision making and reference it properly in the write-up.

As an illustration of this one of the speakers from the weekend, a WBS MBA graduate, told us how he has built a succesful consultancy business around having a well-indexed archive of relevant research as a direct result of his P&D, so this process should be rewarding in the long-run.

However, I'm a geek and therefore what sort of software to use for this is one of my first questions (I'll get onto hardware later). A quick plea for help on Twitter pointed me towards JabRef and Zotero.

Zotero was also one that was suggested by WBS, along with EndNote and ProCite. Fortunately, I have a Human Resources Management essay to write in the next month which I can use as a trial run. I'm going to try and evaluate both Zotero and JabRef - I don't think it's practical to try and use more than two, so sorry if you cheerlead for one of the others, and there are many!

I'm going to look at ease of use in the process of gathering and assimilating relevant literature, and then in how easily I can cite references in the text. As of today I have nothing so this is tabula rasa stuff.

I'll start by Googling for suggested workflows, reading the tutorials and actually trying to use these two systems. I'll be doing so on a variety of harware and platforms - desktop, laptop, netbook, Windows XP and Linux. I'll even try using my Android smartphone if I can!

Check back here in a few days for the results.