Bollocks Mass Index

The thing that annoys me whenever you see any study talking about how obesity is on the rise or how we should all lose weight so that we won't die of cancer is that we measure obesity levels using the Body Mass Indicator (BMI).

It was pointed out that the entire 2007 England Rugby World Cup squad is obese according to BMI and yet still reports insist on using them.

If imperical evidence isn't enough to suggest it then perhaps good old fashioned maths & physics will do:

Consider two men Mr A who is 5'0" and Mr B who is 6'0".
According to BMI, Mr A can weigh just over 9 stone before he is considered overweight and Mr B can weigh just over 13 stone before he is considered overweight.
This allows a 44% increase in weight for Mr B over Mr A.

Suppose Mr A and Mr B are cuboids.
If Mr A has a width of 10" and a depth of 7" compared with respective measurements of 12" and 8.5" for Mr B then the difference in each of the individual dimensions would be roughly 20%.

However the difference in volume would be approximately 75%. So unless Mr A has almost double the density of Mr B, I would deduce that BMI is a sack of shit.

Incidentally I'm 6'5", most BMI charts don't even go up to my height and they certainly don't appreciate the increase in variance of volume as height increases.

I will admit that I'm currently overweight, probably obese too (I'm on a diet though). However it doesn't help that in order for me to reach my ideal weight I'd have to be the same weight as Greg Rusedski was when he was still competing in Wimbledon. (And he's 2" shorter than me). I have a larger build than Greg Rusedski.

The only reliable measurement of whether or not you are overweight is body fat analysis. Everything else is horseshit.

I suppose I should make a comment about all this cancer avoidance crap in the news. You can live as healthily/boringly as you want, you'll still die.

New Blog

I've decided to have a bit of a re-organisation to improve my blogging.

If I've learnt anything from working in the Civil Service, it's that nothing magically fixes things like a swift re-organisation.

As a result I now have a new blog.

I'll be using it to rant about how I'd do things differently if I ran the country (Which I do a lot of). This will therefore free this blog up for talking about things a bit more closely related to me rather than my own take on the latest crap policy to come from any given political party / focus group etc.

Hurrah

As I've said before, no decision is taken lightly at my workplace. However, one that I have been waiting on for several months has almost been made.

I'll try not to give away too much in case I'm breaching the official secrets act (I can't remember whether or not I signed it when I joined) so I'll use some pseudonyms where appropriate so that no-one will know the exact details of what I'm talking about:

For some time now we have been working with a computer system (Lets call it Athens). Now when Athens first came along it was arguably one of the best of its kind. It had many features that its competitors lacked and it was easy to use yet sophisticated enough to meet your demands.

However for a variety of reasons, Athens is no longer a viable option and so for some time now we have been pushing to move to a new system (Lets call it B~)

B~ is very similar to Athens (mainly as some of its features were lifted from it) and would require minimal retraining. It is also the industry standard (and has been for about five years). However despite all the positive reasons for going with it, the decision to do so has dragged on forever.

Even now, no definitive decision has been made. It is going to given a short trial by a select few to check it works OK (Apparently being the industry standard / market leader is not enough assurance).

But even with this not being the definitive answer, at least we're moving in the right direction now. Good job we don't do anything important though.

Just say 'no'

As I've said before I just can't seem to slag my union off enough at the moment (They work for me goddamit)

I got this latest bit of propaganda in an email at work today:

PROTECTING OUR FUTURE:
Defending jobs, pay and conditions
Service Reductions
Public service slaughter
in the South West
Rural Jobcentres closing
Tax offices threatened
Post Offices in jeopardy
•
•
•
Redundancies in DEFRA
Fire Services cut back
SW staff paid less than colleagues elsewhere ... etc

This is the kind of crap I seem to have to put up with increasingly more often. Most of the above has absolutely nothing to do with my workplace - some of it isn't even in the same union.

Wtf do fire service reductions (Caused by an inept Cornwall County Council) have to do with me? I live in Devon and work for a completely different sector. Cornish tax payers should be lobbying their council, me not turning up for work (in Devon) will achieve nothing.

Again I don't give a toss about the Post Offices either. If people want to save them so badly then they should vote with their feet. As it is they haven't so clearly the public don't want/need them.

I could write a whole new blog about Defra (I'm sure phrases like 'inept', 'long time coming' and 'only themselves to blame' would feature quite often).

Rural jobcentres? When I lived in rural areas (Shropshire & Herefordshire) I had to head to a sub-urban/urban focal point to enjoy such facilities (i.e. I popped into town). If you want to live in a rural area to 'get away from it all' then don't complain about the fact that you have to get in a car to 'get back to it all' when required.

I guess the main problem I have with my union is that it seems to think that all of the public sector is the same thing. But it isn't.
By using that train of thought that would therefore mean that all of the private sector is the same thing as well. Can you imagine everyone in your bank going on strike because your mobile phone company are dishing out redundancies?

I do have some niggling issues with my employer (Doesn't everyone?) but I feel that I'm fairly well paid (for the job I do) and enjoy good working conditions. Whatsmore if I did feel unhappy then I'd solve the problem by getting a job elsewhere as I've done before. That's the modern world.

So I would urge anyone reading this who's in PCS and doesn't want to strike to make sure they vote no in the ballot. The lower the turnout, the more it suits the militants.

PLC Bloggs

I've just been reading PC Bloggs's (hilarious) new book and reading about the bureaucracy she has to put up with on a daily basis has motivated me to say something about my experiences of public sector life... Although I can't say too much as I'm not anonymous so could get fired. I was going to dribble it with sarcasm but then I came to the unfortunate conclusion that I'm not funny.

Decision Making

In the Civil Service, no decision is taken lightly as it can have far reaching consequences. As an example of how cautious our management are, our mission statement for April 2007 - March 2008 hasn't been fully approved yet. We wouldn't have even known about it if we hadn't have had a provisional brief about it last month.

Consultancy

The opinion held by those outside of the public sector is that civil servants despise consultants and do everything they can to avoid working with them...

This is because we do.

It's not really the consultant that is the problem. It's the fact that when they are brought in to analyse a problem, they will often offer a solution that was put forward by a junior civil servant (or ten) several days/weeks/years earlier. However the consultant will be listened to because they cost in a day nearly as much as what we get in a month.

When working in IT, consultancy is often essential due to the various niche areas you uncover. Just last week I was working with a GIS* consultant who probably accelerated our project by about a month in the space of two days. Sadly we don't get to work with him very often as he's too busy doing the job he's very good at.
The problem is that increasingly more often we're getting in consultants where they aren't needed. This leads us nicely on to:

Processes

Whenever something goes wrong it is usually because of slack practices so a new process is brought in to tighten things up. Often this process will require the time of a consultant to tell us how well we're doing at adhering to it.

Processes are rigid and must be strictly adhered to. However the process itself can be changed at a moments notice via email. This is because a process control process has yet to be introduced... give it time.

Unions

I've slagged off unions before on this blog and I'll do it again. We're currently balloting for strike action so naturally I'm questioning my membership.

A union is suppose to exist to make life easier for the workers but all mine ever seems to do is make it harder. Not only do I have to give them a subscription every month but if I go on strike I lose a days pay.

The current whinge is about pay offers, redundancies and consultants/contractors. I don't agree with striking over pay on principle (you lose more than you'll ever gain) and by striking all the time we're justifying the need for more consultants/contractors.

As for the redundancy, it is ultra-vires for a union.

A union exists to make sure its members are treated fairly and legally. It has to serve the best interests of the majority of its membership. If the company is larger than it needs to be then it isn't cost effective so it endangers the jobs of ALL members. Better to lose a few jobs than all jobs.

Admittedly we're a publicly owned monopoly so we'll always be safe (This isn't necessarily a good thing) but Royal Mail are not a monopoly any more. Sadly the CWU doesn't seem to have noticed.
If they keep up their strike action they'll be throwing their customers to the (cost effictive) competition and eventually more redundancies (or possibly liquidation) will be on the cards. I used to work for Royal Mail and I never joined the CWU because I thought they were an appallingly militant bunch of lefties. Sadly the upper echelons of PCS seem to be the same.

The only reason I've kept my union membership this long is because the representation at the local level is worth having. If I have to go on strike again then I'll rethink - unless the strike coincides with my nephew's birthday as I've run out of leave for this year.

* In case you wondered, GIS is a TLA** for Graphical Information Server***

** TLA stands for Three Letter Abbreviation - without TLAs the IT industry would be staring in the face of redundancy. How else can we confuse non-IT types?

*** It basically means computerised map.